Picking Bones from Ash (39 page)

“Oh, no. My husband was originally a schoolteacher from Osaka. As for Kashihara, well, it did belong to one family. But after the war …” She bowed her head sorrowfully. “It was not a good time to be Shinto.”

“No,” my mother agreed.

“My husband believes that Shinto is at the core of every Japanese.” Mrs. Sakurai brightened again. “He wants little children to all know about their culture. That’s why he became a priest. We were very excited when he was given this post.”

My mother pulled the photographs out of her bag. She wondered if Mrs. Sakurai could identify either of the two women in the photo.

Mrs. Sakurai put on glasses to see the picture clearly. She turned it over a few times. “I think this photograph was taken on the south side of the main complex. The family used to live in a small house closer to the shrine. When we took over, we bought this small house here. The girl in the photo looks familiar. I think she’s from the original family; we have found some of their belongings over the years.” Mrs. Sakurai pushed the photograph back across the table.

My mother hesitated. And then she explained. The woman in the photo was her mother. Satomi had never known where her mother had come from. She had recently come across this photo, and now she wondered if there was anyone Mrs. Sakurai could think of who would be able to provide us with more insight.

Mrs. Sakurai bent her head, then forced a smile as though to say she had always suspected it would come to this one day. She stood and asked us to follow her.

We climbed up a stone path to a landing on the hill. The main building of the shrine was here, though its door was shut. A couple of townspeople stood outside and tossed money into a wooden box before praying. Mrs. Sakurai unlocked a side door and led us inside. The interior was dark, and smelled of mold. At the far end of the shrine I could see the main altar displaying the sacred mirror. It looked like the mirror my father and I had at home: a circular disk made of silver, hiding behind a curtain of bamboo the way the moon crouches behind the clouds. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting here,” Mrs. Sakurai said, gesturing to a few pillows around an old, scarred table. A few shrine maidens, wearing red-and-white robes, brought us tea, then departed.

I heard a noise. A hesitant scuffle. Out came the elderly woman we had seen on the temple grounds when we had arrived. One eye was cloudy from a cataract and I wondered how much she could really see. But she blinked furiously at us as if to pull us into focus.

“Why don’t you sit here,
obaasan
.” Mrs. Sakurai pulled the elderly woman toward a pillow.

“I can sit by myself,” the old lady scolded. “Hello.” She smiled at me. She began to prattle. My mother told me later that the old woman, named Tomomi, had been born before Japan had decided on a standard way of speaking. Consequently she spoke with a thick regional accent and was difficult to understand.

“Yes, that’s right,” Mrs. Sakurai shouted at the old woman. “Rumi-san is a pretty girl. Very pretty.”

“I was also pretty,” Tomomi said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Sakurai shouted. To us, she explained that
obaasan
, or Granny, had been the caretaker at Kashihara for almost seventy years, since she was a small girl. When Mrs. Sakurai and her husband had accepted the position at Kashihara, they could not just let Tomomi go. “She helps with the children sometimes. Looks after the garden.”

“What?” Tomomi shouted.

“I said we are very lucky that you are here to help us,” Mrs. Sakurai barked. Then, quietly, “Why don’t you give her the photo?”

Tomomi held the picture close to her face and inspected it. Then she picked up the
emma
and placed it in her palm gently, as though it were the wing of a bird recently recovered from an injury.
“Heh,”
she intoned. She gazed at the photo again.

“Do you recognize her?” Mrs. Sakurai shouted.

Tomomi sat back on her heels and held the
emma
reverentially up to the light. I could see her pupils dilate, and knew from the focused expression on her face that she could see the object clearly. She waved her free hand back and forth as if recalling the steps of a dance.

Mrs. Sakurai looked at us anxiously. “
Obaasan
has told us many stories about the shrine. In one story …”

Tomomi interrupted. “Why, it’s Akiko! And me.”

We all stared at her. In an old, creaking voice, Tomomi continued. “Akiko never said who it was. But when her parents found out, well, they did the only thing they could do. They cast her out, to the street. It was terrible,
sending a girl out into the city at a time like that! Oh, I worried about her so much. It was even worse after the war when there was not enough food to eat.”

“A hundred sisters,” my mother said.

Before I could ask her what she meant, Tomomi peered into my mother’s face and said, “You’ve finally come back.”

“Me?”

“To take care of your mother.”

“My mother is dead.”

“I know that,” Tomomi snapped. “I was talking about your mother’s bones. Poor thing,” Tomomi continued. “You probably gave her some kind of depressing Buddhist funeral.”

“I don’t have her bones.”

“Why not?” Tomomi barked. “Didn’t you realize? She has no business being buried where she is. She’s not a Buddhist. She’s Shinto. She needs you to bury her here, at home.”

Unlike Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines were not physically connected to a cemetery. Death, in Shinto, was considered a kind of infectious disease. If you got too close to it, you ran the risk of catching it. In the case of Kashihara, the founding family—whom I was still having difficulty accepting as my family—had bought a small plot in a cemetery belonging to a neighboring Buddhist temple.

Tomomi, whose legs had suddenly become sturdy, led us along a concrete path that zigzagged up a hillside. It was evening, the long day still bracketed by high-flying pink clouds to the east and a pale blue sky now ripening with gold to the west. The pathway was lined with glossy black tombstones, engraved with the names of the deceased, whose shiny surfaces reflected the sky like a field of irregularly shaped mirrors. Nearly every plot was accompanied by a small flower vase in the shape of a bamboo stalk. In the distance, I saw a woman solemnly ladle water out of a bucket and over a tombstone. At one point, we reached a small patch of bamboo where a side path veered off to the left and down toward a rivulet.

“Our cemetery is down there.” Mrs. Sakurai pointed. Then she gripped the railing and began to take the stairs one by one down toward a small shady patch of earth. I followed.

It was darker here, the remaining sunlight obscured by the shelter of
bamboo leaves. I heard water burbling below, and I was reminded, briefly, of the small brook I had crossed at Osorezan.

We wended our way down to a rough field of what I thought were stone lanterns. Mrs. Sakurai explained to me that we were really looking at Shinto tombstones. “They are a different shape than Buddhist stones,” she explained.

Then Tomomi led us off onto an earth trail, and we followed her. I had the grim awareness that here, beneath the earth, lay the remains of people who had once been as alive as I was now.

“Here,” Tomomi said.

Five stones, each a slightly different shape, nestled against a hillside. Their faces were worn from the elements, but I could still make out the original embellishments that had decorated the lanternlike tops.

“These are old,” I said.

“This is your family,” Tomomi said to my mother.

Mrs. Sakurai shifted uneasily from foot to foot. “I’m sorry. My husband and I haven’t been here as much as we should have been.” She knelt down on the ground and picked a few weeds that had sprouted in between two of the smaller tombstones. She made a pile of these weeds, root side up, so they would die and not be able to reseed.

“There’s no name,” I observed.

“They didn’t need a name,” my mother explained.

“Only priests can have tombstones in this shape.” Mrs. Sakurai lovingly traced the outline of one of the tombstones as if it were the face of someone dear to her. “When my husband dies, his tombstone will look like this.”

Below us, the water of a small creek rushed enthusiastically toward a distant destination. Somewhere in the sky, a crow cawed. My eyes welled up. I couldn’t help it. Never mind that my ancestors asleep beneath these lantern-shaped stone columns were people I neither knew nor would ever know. It was as my mother had said: examining the past had complicated my view of my life, not simplified it. And yet, I was right too; my life now had a frame, and was colored with a history that stretched far, far back.

For every thought I had ever had, every preference or burst of temperament had originated with these beings. So many stories I had never learned, those moments when my ancestors would have rolled their eyes and said, “Well. It runs in the family.” I wished—no, I hungered—to know
what those little idiosyncratic characteristics would have been. I felt as though someone had looped an invisible cord from my gut to my mother to the ground in front of us. An unseen hand jerked on the connection, and we lurched to our knees.

I looked at my mother. I knew there was something we were supposed to be doing in this situation. But there were so many rules in this country. It would be so easy to do the wrong thing accidentally. I needed her to help me.

Overhead Tomomi’s voice cackled, “Would you like some incense?” She reached in between us, her gnarled fist wrapped around two dark-red sticks.

“Rumi,” my mother touched my arm. I started. She had not touched me before. “Say thank you.”

“Thank you,” I said immediately. Then I turned to look at her. My mother was praying and so I sat back on my heels and prayed too. We sat there for a long time. The earth underneath my knees grew cool, and my legs cramped, unused to being in this position.

Satomi

Muryojuji temple, Japan, 1992

I had initially been amused when Rumi had come looking for me, wondering if she might provide me with the kind of entertainment I needed to soothe my restless nature. I had forgotten the impression I’d had of her when she was growing inside me, that she would be such a serious person who might not like to play games at all. Also, I had not expected that her arrival would involve my own mother. And how could Rumi, who was born in America, have been the one to see my mother’s ghost? I was the Japanese one. We Japanese are sensitive to our environment in a way that the Western mind cannot be. Our world is alive, populated by ghosts and
kami
, little gods who can inhabit anything from a tree to a rock to a cup. This is why we take such pains to design the perfect tape dispenser, the most charming toilet.

Then again, I suppose it was typical of my mother’s stubborn and slippery nature to find an indirect means to get her point across to me. I thought to myself how predictable it was that she would still be trying, after all this time, to have the upper hand in my affairs.

“I’m glad you decided to be sensible and come back,” Masayoshi said. “So. For the last time. Where did you put the bones?” We were sitting in the front room of his house, sipping tea.

“Oh,” I shrugged. “Inside a statue.”

“A
statue
?”

“Most large statues of the Buddha have a space for relics,” I said. “They are always trying to tell us that the Buddha’s rib is in Burma, or that his tooth is in Sri Lanka.”

“Which Buddha, Satomi?” Masayoshi asked, spacing out his words as he fought his rising anger.

I reminded Masayoshi that after my mother died, Chieko and Mineko had essentially cut me out of my mother’s will and taken all her treasures without consulting me. Bit by bit, I said, I’d been replaced by
them
, and I was not about to let my life’s path become completely decided by two girls who were too scared to ever leave Hachinohe.

“I put most of the bones inside the main statue in your temple. The one you keep closed with a padlock,” I said.

Then I sat back to watch the drama unfold, as everyone around me came to terms with what I had done.

Masayoshi was not willing to unlock the Buddha case just to get my mother’s bones. He said it was bad enough that I’d violated the rules once already by opening the box on the wrong day of the year. Even though I tried to apologize, Masayoshi insisted we would have to wait until April 8 to unfasten the case. This was the historical Buddha’s birthday, and the one day of the year when the cabinet could be unlatched, allowing the Buddha to gaze out at the world. Locals would no doubt come and take a look, and there might even be a few tourists, middle-aged women or couples on holiday interested in taking a peek at the work of a master. Until then, Masayoshi said, we were all going to have to wait.

“Well, I’m not going to wait. I’m going back to Tochigi,” I said.

“You do what you want,” Masayoshi said. “But the offer stands for you to stay here with us. I think it is important. When parents and children can accept each other—no matter what that means—their relationships with everyone else will change.”

Masayoshi went on to say that April really wasn’t that far away. It was almost the end of February now, and then we’d just have to go through March. He had many duties to perform until then, including Ohigan, the twice-yearly ritual that fell on the equinoxes during which the souls of the dead returned to visit the living.

Rumi would remain at the temple and Akira would continue visiting her. And if I stayed, I could also spend some time with Rumi, which he thought I should consider since Rumi had come from so far away to find me. Plus, he added, a little nervously, we could spend time with each other. Almost as an afterthought, we agreed that one of us ought to contact François to let him know that Rumi was all right.

Rumi called her father the next day. I watched her through a small hole poked in the rice paper that otherwise covered the
shoji
door. Masayoshi had one of those old Showa-era phones in the hallway. It was a made of dull pink plastic, and the handle looked oversized even in Rumi’s American-sized fist. It was cold out in the hallway and she was pacing back and forth while she talked on the phone, explaining her situation. Abruptly, she turned and looked straight at me and I backed away from the
shoji
door, startled to have been so easily found out. “Satomi,” she called out after she had hung up. “He wants to talk to you next time.” Then she hurried off in the direction of the temple.