Picking Bones from Ash (40 page)

I thought back to the years that had passed since I’d left Rumi alone in San Francisco. At first I had been deeply relieved not to have to worry about her every need. There had been the adventure of going back to Japan and climbing out of my obscure little position as an art student to become the
mangaka
I am today. I was very busy during all that time, as my mother had promised me a talented person always was.

The stories and pictures I’d created had come out of me almost in a rage. I suppose this was natural since I’d been holding back my talents for the years in San Francisco after my mother had died. The success had felt wonderful and I could not shake the feeling that my mother was watching from somewhere, approving as I lived out her wishes. It had felt right, as critics and fans one by one lauded my work. It was as though I’d resumed the story of my life as it was meant to be, before I’d been sidetracked.

Of course, there had been a few moments here and there when I’d thought about Rumi. After a few years, when I was earning some money and I was no longer so tired or sad all the time, I had thought to myself that I might have had the energy to care for her after all. Occasionally Shinobu had encouraged me to try to find my daughter, but I’d always shrugged off her prodding. Wasn’t she confusing her predicament with mine?

“No,” she’d always told me. She wasn’t confused at all. I was simply afraid.

I told her that this was impossible.
I
was never scared of anything. Anyway, I am quite good at putting things in their place and not indulging in too much reflection, a skill I learned once I came to accept that my mother intended to stay married to Mr. Horie. Likewise, in time, I had convinced myself that my daughter was better off without me.

When Rumi first arrived, I thought she might want to join me like all the other girls. Shinobu tried to explain to me that things were probably not going to work out this way. She said that Rumi could be my future, but in a very different way from Kumi and Keiko. It was intriguing, this idea that my child could give me a sense of what was to come, so unlike the one I imagined in my head when I was writing stories. I still didn’t understand how Rumi was unable to see the benefit of what I had to offer; life can be cruel to a girl of limited talent. But Shinobu has been right about things before.

I went to look for Rumi in the
hondo
. It was very cold because Masayoshi couldn’t afford to heat the entire structure. I handed her my handkerchief. “The woods were my friends when I was small. I always had my privacy there.”

She dabbed her eyes and stared at the statues and I looked at them too, wondering how she saw them and how they appeared to her Western eyes. Then I remembered. Because of François, she had grown up with similar objects and the altar would be familiar to her. It might even be comforting. The idea startled me a little bit, that someone so foreign could have something in common with me.

Presently she told me about her conversation with her father. François had tried to insist on flying to Japan, but she had told him that she was not ready to see him. Even just speaking to him, she said, made her feel a bit ill.

“When he told me you were dead,” she said, “he was talking about himself. You were dead to him and he wanted me to feel about you the same way that he did. It never occurred to him that maybe I would want to see you anyway.”

“He has always had too much longing for things. And he never understood how to use his own talents to get what he wanted. It’s a weakness in people.”

She thought about this for a while, and I watched the surface of her face shift, just as clouds lighten and darken a landscape, altering its mood. She had and has no
shirankao
, no
I don’t know
face. Finally, she said, “He told me about the
kannon
. He said you were the one who originally stole it.” She turned to look at me. “
You
could get it back. Buy it from Snowden-roshi.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s probably what Snowden-roshi planned all along. He gave me back my daughter, and now he wants my money,” I growled.

“He might just give it to you,” she said.

I thought about this. I wondered if I could charm Timothy again, now that so many years had passed. Rumi could come with me, though I would have to find something suitable for her to wear. It might even be fun to appeal to Timothy’s so-called Buddha nature, and test just how enlightened he really was. I settled back on my heels and looked up at the altar, imagining and dreaming. It could even be as it had been with my mother so many years ago, I presenting my younger, more attractive self—Rumi—to the world, the two of us making our way through life and forcing it to pause in its frenetic activity to make a path just for the two of us.

Throughout March, the men of Muryojuji were often occupied with funerals and exorcisms. Still, Masayoshi was able to make time for us; he and I spent a few hours a day recounting tales of our earlier lives to Rumi so she gradually became familiar with the cast of characters of her family in Japan. She, in turn, told us about her childhood with François. When Masayoshi worked, I sat in the main room sketching, or went to the
ryokan
where I was staying to call my assistants with instructions; they ferried clothing and supplies back and forth as I needed them.

Yoko was constantly busy. She made and returned phone calls, arranged her husband’s and her son’s calendars, organized meals and banquets, kept a flower arrangement in the entry, cleaned the family altar, did the laundry. Around all of this, she had to find the time to shop and prepare the family’s meals and baths.

During the day, she listened to the gossip of unexpected guests, pouring them tea, bringing them treats, and accepting gifts, which piled up in a spare room. She had an endless supply of tissues and fruit boxes, which she sorted and ordered so we would eat things before they spoiled. Some
things she arranged to donate to charity or to send to friends, always making sure that the giver wouldn’t find out that the gift hadn’t been consumed at the temple.

Observing Yoko, I wondered if I could possibly have adjusted to so much work had Masayoshi and I ever married. How different was this relationship from the one Masayoshi and I had had! The two of them were always working. From the outside, it seemed much like the relationship François had tried to have with me in San Francisco, where we dedicated ourselves to his business. I wondered if it was as my mother had said, that my talents could not have flourished with him.

By the end of March, the temple had become even busier. Masayoshi, Tomohiro, Yoko, and Rumi pitched in to clean up the house. Groundskeepers came to organize the garden, clearing out fallen leaves and branches and encouraging the few optimistic plum blossoms, which had started to sprout some buds, to bloom. The tension in the scenery moved me and I felt deeply nostalgic. This, after all, was the landscape of my childhood.

Around the twenty-first of March, people began to come to the temple in even larger numbers. Yoko booked back-to-back time slots for the Ohigan memorial services. Day after day, Masayoshi and Tomohiro trekked out to the graveyard to give prayers and light incense.

On the eighth of April, Masayoshi unveiled the statue. It was the first clear blue sky at Muryojuji temple since I’d arrived. The last of the snow was melting so feverishly, you could hear it. The courtyard and the garden were filled with the sound of water dripping and ice cracking.

Masayoshi had told us that we would all need to gather at the temple very early that morning to open the box. He wanted to retrieve my mother’s bones before any of the tourists came. So, at five o’clock in the morning, I dressed in every bit of warm clothing that I had and entered the temple. We were all there: Masayoshi, Tomohiro, Yoko, Akira, Rumi, my assistants, and Shinobu, who had arrived the day before. I had thought there would be some ceremony about opening the box, but instead things were very matter-of-fact. Tomohiro undid the padlock, and he and Akira struggled with the knots on the rope. Then, very carefully, they opened the box, one door at a time.

Light poured out from the interior of the box and we had to cover our eyes. When my eyes adjusted, I could see a man dressed in gold, holding a box of medicine.

“He’s beautiful,” Rumi said. She told me later what she had seen: a man moving just slightly, undulating, like a wisp of grass caught in a tide. His nimbus radiated light, the beams reaching out into the farthest reaches of the temple, merging with the rays of sun, which were only now starting to steal in between the cracks of the windows and the doors.

When we’d all adjusted to this bright, brilliant shape, Masayoshi asked me to help him remove the panel from the back of the statue to get at the relics. To do this, both of us had to slide in around the side of the statue; the box was that big. We were covered from view, only our feet sticking out from either side of the statue, while our torsos and hands were occupied with the panel. I looked at Masayoshi’s handsome face and thought to myself how it would only be in moments like this that we would now ever have any privacy. He turned and looked at me too, and I saw his eyes soften. “Do you remember how to open the panel?” he asked.

It took some time. I fiddled with the wood behind the Buddha’s head and eventually heard the groan of wood giving way. I let Masayoshi reach inside the statue’s brain and retrieve the parcel with one hand. For a moment, I could see through the Buddha’s glass eyes to the little group gathered at his feet. Then we closed the panel and came out to rejoin our little family. Masayoshi held out a white cloth bag. At last, the bones.

It was a busy day. Tourists came from across Japan to see the statue. Most were older enthusiasts who had decided to spend their retired years visiting some of Japan’s beautiful but less popular and lesser-known treasures. Masayoshi even relaxed some of his rules and allowed a few amateur photographers to take pictures, as long as they didn’t use a flash.

I spent most of the day in a corner, drawing some sketches. The assistants and Shinobu went for walks. I drew Rumi and Akira like little birds nestled on a branch. François was an old rangy horse peering over the fence of his grazing ground. Timothy a proud old cat. I amused myself by making Masayoshi look like an old badger on a pilgrimage.

Toward the end of the day, I saw Masayoshi heading for a stroll. I stood up immediately and went to accompany him.

He was quiet for a long time while we climbed up to the highest point in the cemetery. Here the wind whipped through the bamboo around us and birds of prey surveyed the valley floor. Finally Masayoshi said, “Your mother told me that I’d never be able to make you happy. And I decided that she was probably right.”

“I was always happy with you,” I protested.

“Look at my life, Satomi. Could you have done everything that Yoko does? Working all day like she does and raising two children?”

“Has this life made you happy? I mean, really and truly?” I asked.

“I can’t imagine my life without Akira and Tomohiro.”

“But beyond that? You have no regrets?” When he did not answer, I said, “Anyway, all this time has passed and here we are again.”

“Unless you disappear.”

I shrugged. “I’m going to get the
kannon
back for you.”

“That would be helpful,” he said. “It would be much easier to be friends if you did that.” After a moment, he added, “Yoko will accept you if I do. I just ask that you are nice to her.”

Below, so absorbed in each other that they did not notice us, Rumi and Akira were walking hand in hand and talking together. “If I were going to put Rumi in a story, what kind of tale would it be? A girl who reaches out to find her mother. It’s like Demeter and Persephone, except in reverse. Such a girl, I think, must be very brave.”

“What happens when she finds the mother?” Masayoshi asked.

“Well, the mother isn’t what she hoped. That would make the story boring.”

“Maybe at some point the mother would at least be a little bit grateful or happy that the daughter showed up,” Masayoshi suggested.

I shrugged. “Probably.”

“They might,” Masayoshi continued, retrieving the now soggy handkerchief, “become friends.”

“Friendship,” I laughed ruefully. “I used to think that was such a weak emotion. Not as powerful as love.”

“You can love your friends too. In fact you should.”

He looked at me, and I saw his hand twitch. For a moment, I thought he was going to reach up and touch my face. Then he turned to look out at the valley, and after a while, I did the same, and the two of us were silent.

A few days later, we were back at Kashihara shrine. The Sakurais had insisted on overseeing the funeral.

While the outside of the shrine was painted a vibrant scarlet, the inside was quite plain, just a
tatami
floor and an altar barely visible behind a curtain. At the far end of the room, a little table supported a bowl filled
with water and a display of green branches with slick oval leaves. Behind this was the urn filled with my mother’s bones. Mr. Sakurai stood just off to the side and came to greet us as we entered, smiling and dignified, putting us all into a relaxed mood.

We sat on a row of small chairs. After a few minutes, Mr. Sakurai gestured to me, and I stood up and walked gingerly over to the little table. Then I picked up a green branch that had a white piece of paper tied around it, placed this gently on the altar, and bowed. I raised my hands and clapped twice. I bowed low and walked back to my seat.

One by one we all stood up and went through the same motions. I could tell that Rumi was nervous when her turn came. When she returned to her seat after a final bow, I leaned over and whispered into her ear, “That was better than most Japanese people.”

We buried all the bones together, including the Adam’s apple in the red box. Now that spring had come, the nearby river all but roared as it raced by the cemetery grounds.

“Your grandmother’s soul needs to travel to the ocean,” I explained to Rumi. “All this time she hasn’t been near any water. She was caught.”