Picking Bones from Ash (33 page)

Yoko began to clear the plates and though I rose to help her, all three men motioned that I should stay seated. Cheerfully, almost too cheerfully it seemed to me, she bustled in and out of the room, carrying boxes and cups, then wiping down the table with a damp cloth and finally reappearing with a plate of sliced apples for dessert. All the while, Masayoshi chewed a toothpick and gazed off in the distance. Tomohiro exhaled and fidgeted while Akira sat patiently, waiting for instruction.

When Yoko finally sat down again, Akira said, “My father says that we should never underestimate the bond between people. Especially a parent and a child.”

“And you just … want to see her because …”

“Because we are her family and we miss her,” Akira said.

I looked at the four of them sitting there, waiting to see how I would respond. It seemed like a harmless request. But there was also tension, a neediness in the air and I sensed more to the story. Why, if my mother was alive, would she have avoided her own family for so long?

When he saw my hesitation, Masayoshi began to speak. He sat back on his heels and let his low, musical voice unwind in the room, and after a moment, Akira began to translate.

It was like this, Masayoshi explained. His job as a priest was to usher people on to the next life and he always spent a good deal of time during funerals commanding spirits to leave the bodies of the deceased behind. The most upsetting part of any funeral—for a priest—involved the repetition of the syllable
shin
, which means “heart,” and which was used to console the newly departed soul that it was not truly alone, but still needed to depart on its journey.

Problems arose when a soul didn’t leave for the north and hook up to the great karmic wheel, which, after completing its rotation in one hundred years, spewed out a newly born soul. A soul who didn’t agree to this reprocessing became a ghost, a being who stayed behind to try to finish up something left undone in the previous life or who was too shocked and angered by his newly deceased status to accept it. Most of the time ghosts lingered by the site of an auto accident, on old battlefields, or in hospitals. For a long time Masayoshi had had a working relationship with several construction companies, which had called on him whenever they planned a new apartment building or shopping complex. This was especially true during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Japan had been busy growing.

At the construction site Masayoshi would wave his horsehair whip and chant
sutras
to any lingering souls. He often saw faces of men in disbelief as their spirits, now released, wound up through the smoke of the incense to the sky. It was exhausting work, but he did it. How could a man who had become a priest not take this kind of work seriously? There was so much suffering in the world.

The work was always problematic. The construction crews were always in a hurry. They hated to wait for the hours it took for Masayoshi to make sure that every last tortured soul had been drained from the landscape. Foremen always wanted to pay him extra money for a rush job, as though a large fee could guarantee that ghosts wouldn’t return to haunt the halls of an apartment building or weaken the foundation of a new hospital. It
didn’t work that way, Masayoshi tried to explain. You couldn’t just pay off a bunch of ghosts. Money didn’t mean that much to them. What they required was some attention and some respect. The concerns of the dead were always elemental, not material.

There had come a day, perhaps ten years ago, when Masayoshi had been performing his rites with particular intensity. He grew dizzy and closed his eyes once to try to regain his balance. Then he looked down to stabilize himself and saw something unusual about his feet. His priestly white socks looked strangely misshapen, as though stretched. He had blinked, to clear his eyes of tears. Then he saw that his feet really were distorted. Whitish-gray smoke leaked from his toes. His body was melting. Across the field, a long trail of white steam stretched along the grass. It looked like a contrail from an airplane. His body was losing its essence.

Masayoshi had concentrated as hard as he could to finish the chanting and on his way home in the car, he’d broken into a fever. By the time he’d reached the house, he had turned the heat on in the car and was still shivering violently. He had a fever of 103 for three days before his body had returned to normal. When he woke up, he found his wife sitting next to him with deep and sorrowful eyes, and he realized that ushering ghosts out of the soil affected his family too. The next time a construction company called, offering to pay him a million
yen
, he turned down the opportunity. People continued to come by and ask him to pray for their sick children, but he turned them down too.

People could do desperate things, Masayoshi explained. Just this week someone had begged Masayoshi to pray for the recovery of a young girl. Her father and her mother were willing to pay the equivalent of ten thousand dollars. Masayoshi had said “No thank you” to the money, though he had been willing to pray for free. If they wanted to pay him later, when and if the girl recovered, that would be fine. He had prayed and prayed and chanted and blown incense up to the ceiling. When the little girl, who had been hovering so close to the edge of death, woke up in the hospital with clear eyes and the doctor declared her recovery a miracle, the mother and father had paid Masayoshi the equivalent of a hundred dollars.

“My father wonders if you can possibly understand what he is talking about,” Akira said.

More than you know
, I thought. Out loud, I said, “You worry that my mother is like a living ghost, wandering around, needing an anchor.”

When he heard my answer, Masayoshi broke from his controlled look of gravity and seriousness. For a moment, wonder crossed his face. He began to nod. “Yes,” he said. “The world of the living can be like that of the dead. It is tragic when we lose ourselves in grief.”

“My mother is grieving?”

“She needs her family,” Akira repeated.

After dinner, Masayoshi and Tomohiro announced that they would need to retire to a back office to prepare for tomorrow’s work. Akira said to me, “Let me show you something.”

He led me to a small room adjacent to the greeting room. He snapped on a light, and I saw an ornate gold and black cabinet sitting in a corner. When he opened the doors, I realized that it wasn’t a cabinet at all, but a shrine. It was tall, perhaps four feet high, and as I peered inside, I almost had the feeling that I was glimpsing another world in which entwined gold lotuses and
apsaras
flew together in circles. The shrine had a series of levels that rose, like stairs, toward a final stage in the back on which was seated a small Buddha with his eyes calmly half-closed and his hands raised in a benevolent gesture of blessing. Higher up inside the shrine, decorating the walls just below the ceiling, were photographs. All were large black-and-white portraits of men and women.

“This is your family,” Akira said. “There is your grandmother, Akiko. And my grandmother, Yuri.”

There they were, my Japanese family, gazing down somberly at me. I had the feeling that they were staring at me across a great distance of time, that they had always known everything about me, the totality of what I had done. For a moment, I felt that all my actions had led me now to this place where I might see traces of my smile, my eyes, my high cheekbones.

“Akira,” I said, “please tell me what is going on. I know that you know more than you are telling me.”

He smiled slightly. “It’s difficult to be a traveler. When I lived in Australia, I had the same experience. I couldn’t always understand what was happening. Come on.” He pulled my shoulder playfully. “Let me show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

My luggage was already sitting in a room down the hall. In the middle of the
tatami
floor, Yoko was preparing my
futon
. Akira knelt down to help her spread a comforter over the mattress, and the two of them smiled
at each other, sliding into an easy intimacy, the first display of open affection I’d seen since arriving here.

When they finished setting up the bedding, Yoko let me know that I was to ask her if I needed anything else and the two of them left. But just before he’d exited the room completely, Akira put his head back in between the sliding doors.

“I’ll go with you. I’ll tell them that you need a translator.”

“You?”

“Well, it’s partly for selfish reasons,” he shrugged. “I’d like to meet her.”

He had tracked Satomi in the news. He’d loved her
anime
and
manga
as a young boy and still read her creations religiously. He even, he whispered to me, had a small side business in Tokyo selling
manga
to the French and a few Americans who couldn’t seem to get enough of the stuff. Daily, his apartment received faxed orders for special issues, which he then sent overseas. It had been comforting to think that one of his family had become famous and lived a larger life than he did. It had given him a kind of hope that it would be possible to escape an ordinary life. If Satomi aka Shinobu could do it, then why not him?

“I always thought it was interesting,” Akira continued, his voice growing even more gentle, “that she wrote these stories about a young girl visiting a foreign world, or trapped in a strange place.”

“She was writing about
herself
,” I fumed.

“That’s what I used to think about Satomi.” Akira nodded. “Then I began to wonder if she was writing about someone else.” He paused. “I think she was writing about you. In her mind you were trapped all the way on the other side of the world. She’s been imagining the adventures you’ve been having.”

I stayed with the Handa family for the next two days and waited for the storms to pass, and for roads leading further north to be cleared. My dreams were cluttered and I slept fitfully in these unfamiliar surroundings. Sometimes I woke up convinced that someone had been watching me, and once I caught the tail end of a silk robe leaving the room.

In the daytime, I sat in the
ima
, or living area, in what I learned was called a
kotatsu
, a low table with a recessed and heated area underneath. From here, I watched tapes of my mother’s
anime
. One strange story, titled “Tomobiki,” was about a girl named Naho who unwittingly had the ability to unlock parallel worlds. One day she accidentally discovered that an abandoned building on the outskirts of her family town was once a crematorium. She ventured too close to it and was sucked in by a restless fire spirit, who asked her to help him with some unfinished business on earth.

While I watched Naho’s descent into the mercurial world of the fire god, the rest of the family floated around me. Yoko was often cooking. When they weren’t working, Masayoshi read the paper and Tomohiro watched television or played video games. The only person I really talked to was Akira, who came to the temple for a couple of hours a day, apparently just to see me, since he rarely interacted with anyone else. Yet try as I might to extract information from him, he would not reveal much more about my mother and her family than he already had.

On the third morning, it stopped snowing and the bullet trains and the major expressways reopened. The temperature warmed by a few degrees,
and several icicles fell from the eaves. Clouds parted. I felt as though we had been living inside a very cold teapot whose lid had finally been lifted. In came light and new air and the reality that there was a world beyond the one in which I was living now. More importantly, my mother had agreed to see me.

Akira and I were to take a trip north. Because our destination was impossible to reach by train, we would drive. I left my things at the temple, taking only my purse, in which I placed the box with the bone, and a coat I borrowed from Akira. Yoko packed us a lunch box and blankets and several large plastic bottles of tea. “For you,” she said to me. “I don’t want you to get too hungry.”

Masayoshi saw us to the car. “Please bring her back,” he said and bowed.

We drove for several hours, the road growing increasingly narrow and serpentine. I saw the Sea of Japan in all its wild and gray glory, so different from the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the island. Here the houses were windswept till they tilted, the landscape harsh as though unjustly scoured by a rough celestial hand. I remembered Ms. Shizuka’s warning about the north of Japan. How different was this scenery from the polished city of Tokyo.

It was a long drive, and after half an hour of uncomfortable silence we began to talk. I told Akira most everything that had led up to the discovery that my mother was alive, leaving out the visitation from the ghost.

He was a good listener, asking a question every now and then or empathizing with me when he sensed that I’d reached a particularly distressing part of the story. When I was done, I asked him to tell me about his trip to Australia.

“Oh that,” he laughed. “It was because of a girl. She was an exchange student my senior year in high school.”

After graduating, Akira had left his priest-training course at university, fled to Australia, supported himself by bartending, and learned to surf on the weekends. Ultimately, as he put it, things hadn’t “worked out” with the girl, and I gathered from the sober way he said this that he still regretted the heartbreak. In his absence, his parents had considered him a lost cause, formally disowned him, and groomed Tomohiro to be the next priest. According to Akira, Tomohiro had been all too happy to comply, apparently under the impression that life as a priest would one day make him wealthy and able to afford unlimited electronic gadgets and games.

“My father wouldn’t talk to me when I came back from Australia. When he learned you were coming, he realized he would need someone who spoke English. They called me in Tokyo five nights ago.”

“I’m glad you came,” I said.

“It’s tough for my mother.” He paused. “They fought a lot over me. They have different attitudes toward life.”