Picking Bones from Ash (2 page)

We children were told that the woods were filled with
oni
, or demons, and that many of these monsters liked to kidnap and devour children. Some
oni
specialized in preying upon little boys. Some preferred girls. Many were indiscriminate. Every now and then a child who had once gone to school with a playful smile upon her face simply disappeared, dragged off, it was said, by the demons in the woods, and then we were all advised to avoid the woods for a good few weeks.

Although I wasn’t immune to the potential terrors of the woods, I thought of nature as being my friend and believed that it would always protect me. I had names for the sparrows who ate
osenbei
crumbs from my window. In early spring, when the
yabutsubaki
wild camellias bloomed, I made necklaces from their flowers and little whistles with their dark brown seeds. When the other children chased me home from school, I could hide in the tall weeds while they ran past. In our hungriest days, my mother and I caught crickets and minnows by the river for dinner.

And then one day, when I was around ten years old, I carried a long stick into the forest and imagined myself to be a female
ninja
. I had recently learned from my mother’s customer Mr. Nobata that the women in Japan were as capable of mastering those dark arts as the men. I had decided to approach the heart of the forest and find the fat stalk of bamboo from which I had been born. Perhaps there might be an altar there to mark the spot, or maybe the moon goddess’s father would be waiting for me with a bag of treats. I was often hungry in those days, and I dreamed up elaborate scenarios in which the prize at the end would be plentiful food.

I ventured deeper into the woods than ever. Even the barking dogs and roaring trucks, the noises of the town that carried the farthest, grew dim. Soon all I heard was the playful rustle of bamboo leaves toying with each other. I thought I must be the first and only person to feel the breath of nature like this on her neck.

It was difficult terrain, for the bamboo stalks leaned against each other, inadvertently forming little huts that I had to break apart. I became aware of how much sound I created. A small deer picking her way delicately across
a patch of fallen leaves could move more quietly, despite having four legs. Birds fluttered in between branches and I marveled at the reflexes that allowed them to dart so skillfully. I resolved to be noiseless.
Ninja
, it was said, could move through the woods without detection.

Suddenly I was overcome with cold, as though the woods had been invaded by fog. But the air was still clear, and high above the sun was shining. I began to feel an icy pressure upon my neck, and when I reached up to touch the space behind my head, I felt clammy tendrils intertwine with my fingers. I recoiled and, reluctantly, the cold let go of my hand, then gripped my wrist. The hand was attached to an even larger mass and I could feel its bulk using me as an anchor as it tugged its body through the trees. No sword of bamboo could protect me now.

I’d climbed a good way up the hill into the woods and it would take me some time, not to mention a great deal of noise, to retreat back to civilization. So I did the only sensible thing to do in these circumstances. I shook myself free of the moisture and crouched down low behind a particularly thick patch of bamboo. Cold air sailed overhead. My heart and brain frantically signaled each other.
Be afraid
, said one.
I’m panicking
, said the other.
Give this body as much blood and adrenaline as she can stand
, said the one.
I’m pumping as fast as I can
, came the reply.

There I sat, muscles taut, instincts at the ready, when in front of me, perhaps just ten meters away, I saw a figure. As it came closer, I realized that it was an old woman with a woven basket strapped to her back. She was tiny, even smaller than my mother, with coarse hair pinned to her head in a small knot. She wore faded bluish-gray clothing, the kind of thing worn by rice paddy workers, and her feet were bound by fat swathes of cloth that looked impossible to remove. I wondered if she slept with her shoes on.

She pulled what looked like a fat knife from the inside of her garment. The air inside my lungs screamed for release. I tensed, poised to flee. But then she did the oddest thing. She bent down and cleared a patch of bamboo leaves with her free hand. She sniffed at the dirt, like the deer I had seen perhaps not fifteen minutes before. With a deft movement, she cut at the earth, and when she stood up a moment later, I saw that she was holding a fat bamboo shoot. The knife was actually a spade. I smelled an aromatic scent and saw a few more triangular shoots, with their leafy, golden-brown covering, sticking out of her woven basket.

The old woman knelt back down and brushed leaves off the ground. The ground yielded a few more shoots. She stood, and adjusted the straps on her back, for the basket hung more heavily now. She took one tentative step, then another, and, bracing herself, continued on through the forest. I watched her until she rounded a clump of bamboo, and then she and the cold air were gone.

I forgot all about my quest to find the life-generating bamboo grove at the heart of the forest. Now food took precedence. Bamboo has a shallow but elaborate network of roots that cling to each other fiercely, like lovers. My mother had often told me how, during an earthquake, she’d once taken shelter in a grove. “The ground opened up and swallowed five men running through a rice paddy. But the roots I was standing on held firm,” she said.

I examined the ground where the bamboo shoot lady had stood. She’d covered the disturbed earth with fallen leaves so there was little evidence that she’d passed through. No trace at all, in fact, save for the lingering scent of bamboo in the air. I pawed at the earth and uncovered a few smaller shoots she’d left behind. Perhaps she’d intended to return when they had grown larger, but I wasn’t about to give her the chance.

I squatted most inelegantly to the ground and began to dig, to hack, to claw at the shoots, an effort that would have been much easier had I had a spade. Instead, I had to improvise with small rocks and with my fingers. At last the shoot was free. I repeated the process a few times until my pockets were stuffed, and then I flew down the hillside like a foreign aircraft descending on the town below, not at all concerned with who might hear me coming. I had the image of my mother’s face before me; she would be beaming when I bombed her with bamboo shoots.

She was pleased. Very pleased. First she immersed the shoots in water with a little rice bran. This she cooked till the shoots were tender. Then she turned off the heat and left the pot overnight. The next day I helped her peel. How exciting it was to see the beautiful, blond flesh of bamboo appear. “When you care for something,” she said to me, “it becomes beautiful. You see?”

She made three dishes. She cooked the bottom part of the shoots with chicken meat and served this to her customers at the
izakaya
. With the tips, the most delicate part of the shoots, she made a
sunomono
salad, with seaweed and
miso
. The middle part of the bamboo shoots she added to
our daily rice pot, sprinkling in some
ginkgo
nuts I’d harvested the previous fall.

“I’ve gone to look for shoots at the edge of the woods,” she said. “But everyone else gets there before I do. It’s all this work I do. It doesn’t leave me much free time.”

“You have to go deep into the woods,” I said. “
Very
deep.”

She gave me a strange look. “What were you doing there? Who did you go with?”

“I went alone!” I protested. “I was looking for the bamboo where the moon princess was born.”

She smiled then, and I could almost hear her thinking to herself that I was still just a little girl after all. “You must be careful. There are many strange people in the woods. Not to mention
oni
s.”

“I saw an old woman. She was carrying a basket on her back and picking shoots.” I described how the woman had been dressed.

“Must have been your imagination.” She smiled kindly. “No elderly woman would go tromping around in there on her own. And how would she get up into the hillside?”

“But I
saw
her.”

“I haven’t heard of people collecting bamboo shoots and wearing the outfit you describe since I was a little girl. And if there was a woman collecting that many shoots, surely she’d be trying to sell them in town.”

“Maybe she is selling them now and you just don’t know about it.”

“I’d know about it if there were such a thing as an old woman selling delicacies that have been scarce ever since this stupid war ended.” A black mood overcame her then and my mind’s eye darkened with hers.

“Maybe it was a ghost,” I said. “Or a god.”

She liked this idea. “A god showed you the way to give us some food for dinner? That’s a much better explanation. And much more likely too.”

“Or maybe,” I whispered with reverence, “the moon princess sent the bamboo shoot lady to me.”

“We must,” she whispered in kind, “thank the moon people for this generosity.”

“It’s a sign.”

We looked out of the window and up at the sky at the same time. There was the deep, blue-black night filled with hundreds of silver knowing eyes and a moon as round as an
omanju
. I was happy in the fantasy of the
moon people and pleased that my mother had so enjoyed my gift. But the moment didn’t last long. My mother began to breathe quickly, and I could feel her eyes darting around as though searching the room for the answer to an unarticulated question. My attention fell down from the sky and back into the room with the one lightbulb fixed inside a paper lantern filling the kitchen with a weak yellow glow. My mother put down her chopsticks. Though I hadn’t been prompted to do so, I put mine down as well. She took my fingers in her hands and examined them. “You have to be careful. You have a competition next week and you can’t win if you hurt your fingers by digging up bamboo shoots.”

“My hands are fine.”

She pushed my hands away as though she had just borrowed them and was now returning them to me. “You have to remember that you aren’t like everybody else. You are a very unique person.”

“I am?”

“I’ve told you that many times,” she said loftily. “I’ve met many, many people. Before you were born, when life was different, I used to know many people who are famous now. And you are smarter and even more talented than they are. Remember that.” She nodded.

I remembered and I believed her.

I won the piano competition easily, and another one the following weekend in which I was awarded a photo album, which was very often the grand prize in those days. Due to labor laws, children weren’t allowed to earn money, even from a contest. It was nearly always the same two dozen or so students and their parents from several neighboring towns who crowded together in an auditorium to slog through Mozart and Beethoven. By now I had half a dozen photo albums, which my mother stocked with pictures, my essays, and pressed wildflowers.

The weekend after I harvested bamboo shoots, I wore a pair of wool mittens my mother had knitted for me to keep my fingers warm. When it was my turn to play, I strode up to the piano, made eye contact with the judges, and bowed, counting to five as my mother had taught me. Two counts to go down, one to linger, and then two to come back up. My fingers slid easily through the first movement of the Mozart Sonata in A Minor, Köchel 310, despite the difficult left-hand passages. My picture appeared in the local paper the next day, with Tomoko’s face just barely cropped out
of one side, and my mother’s face on the other. I still have the clipping. At the time, I felt very regal and important, every inch the heir to the throne of the moon people.

Tomoko had made it her mission to come to almost all my competitions. After I performed, she always came to the edge of the stage and solemnly handed me a bouquet of
nogiku
wild chrysanthemums in autumn and freesias in the spring. We bowed to each other in imitation of seventeenth century French courtiers we’d read about in history class. Thus I was able to prolong my time on stage by a good thirty seconds or so.

Flowers were something of a luxury in those days. Our town, Kuma-ume, was located along the Mogami River, just one of a series of small towns lost in northern Japan, barely subsisting after the war. But Tomoko’s family owned a small chain of laundries in several neighboring towns, all the way to Yamadera, and was relatively well off. The family indulged their only daughter’s childhood whim to be my champion, though they themselves were less inclined to cheer for me or to pose in my photos.

I had grown accustomed to winning, and my teacher, an elderly man named Mr. Kisahara who had sported a mustache since the Taisho era and studied music in Tokyo, was used to being the teacher of a prizewinning student. We knew most of the other music students in the area, and had cataloged their foibles. I also understood, from having spent time watching my mother in the bar, the valuable power of gossip. If I caught wind that Mariko, the goody-goody, was going to try to play Debussy in the next contest, Mr. Kisahara and I determined that I would play Ravel. If I learned that Satoshi, the technician, was going to play a Bach fugue, I played the same piece and vowed to be better.

So it was perhaps a bit surprising that my mother conspired to enter me in a new contest that would take place the following fall in the city of Akita, a good five hours away. This was the Tōhoku regional competition and included students from all the northern prefectures, including my own.

“Satomi has a false sense of her abilities,” my mother said sternly to my teacher. “She needs a good competition to wake her up.”

“We don’t know the competitors,” Mr. Kisahara retorted. “What should she play?”

“True competition,” she replied coolly, “implies risk. Satomi needs to learn this.”

We settled on two pieces. I chose Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” (because it was about the moon). To complement this, my mother insisted I tackle the Beethoven
Moonlight
Sonata.