Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (56 page)

I stood there for a while, looking at these three holes in the rock: a window straight through to the main beach, a cave that bore deep into the headland but had no exit, and another cave that was the only safe exit, though uncomfortable. I felt like I was in one of those fairy tales where you had three choices and only one would be correct.

Around the world, folk stories featuring the underworld often make the point that humans should not go to the afterlife until it is truly their turn. In the Greek myth “Orpheus and Eurydice,” the musician Orpheus goes to Hades to rescue his dead wife. He is allowed to do so with the caveat that he cannot look at his wife until the couple is aboveground. Orpheus, however, succumbs to
curiosity and turns to look at Eurydice before she makes it out of the underworld, and she immediately dies a second time.

My feelings about “Orpheus and Eurydice” changed after I saw the Paris Opera Ballet perform the Pina Bausch version. I’d been grieving the loss of my grandparents and my father and nursing the worst of my depression for a good four years. Toward the end of the ballet, Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice. She dies as soon as he sees her, and he dies soon after. It suddenly occurred to me that the point of the story was not so much that the underworld was to be avoided, as it was that you should not look at grief for too long.

So here I was, at Sai no Kawara, on the other side of the land of the living, trying to figure out how to go back. I often felt in those days that to be stuck in grief was to feel kidnapped against one’s will and forced to go to some foreign country, all the while just longing to go back home.

But maybe it was wrong to look at this place as being quite so menacing. Maybe the point was not that too much grief was dangerous, but that like these different grottos, I was supposed to remember that life and death were connected, that those people I loved were gone but still retained a connection to me. My world was connected to theirs. Was this the point of Sai no Kawara?

I turned around and went back through the first cave, through the moist air and out to the parked van. The crew continued filming the cave from various angles. When they returned a few minutes later, they were troubled. The camera had not worked consistently. The film had flickered. The sound had gone on and off. The men quickly assured me that such things happened from time to time, but the problems had clearly added to everyone’s unease about having gone into Sai no Kawara for the purposes of filming it for TV. Without saying anything out loud, all of us—educated people in our thirties and forties—felt that we had been trespassers.

T
HE NEXT STOP
on the itinerary was Empukuji in Iwaki. In the finished documentary, Semp
and I have an earnest conversation about Buddhism, the tsunami, and the temple, but a truly interesting portion of our trip never made it to film.

After Endo stopped interviewing me on camera, Usui and Adachi took some location shoots. Semp
had long since retired to the house. Endo then took me aside. Might now be an opportune time to talk to Semp
? I agreed that now was indeed a good time to discuss problematic ghosts and auras attaching themselves to us, and we threaded our way through the house to find Semp
lying on his side on the tatami floor of the living room and watching television. I said, “Endo has something to talk to you about.”

Endo explained that while he himself was not afraid of ghosts, and did not even particularly believe in them, he was concerned about his friend, the film editor who from childhood had been plagued by extrasensory perception. Semp
listened, and soon a half smile flitted across his face. He sat up and said he understood the problem. He had encountered it before. Sometimes people just had the ability to see spirits, and it was always a nuisance. There was little anyone could do unless a priest was able to help, or an ancestor intervened and removed the “special sight.” Mostly, this kind of thing was best treated by a Buddhist priest.

In the past, Semp
had been hired to remove illness-triggering evil spirits or to clear construction sites of lingering ghosts. This difficult work exhausted him. Most of the time he was successful in clearing ghosts or removing evil spirits, but sometimes, he said, there was nothing he could do. Sometimes people died.

One day Semp
was chanting and communicating with an evil spirit who had possessed the body of a young girl. He looked down
and saw his feet turning to smoke. He was dissolving. He was giving so much of himself to the removal of the spirit that this contact was taking its toll on his own health. He drove home and was in bed for days with a high fever. After that, he promised his wife he would perform no more exorcisms.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Were you . . . did you do this kind of thing before you became a priest?”

“Oh no,” Semp
said. “Nothing like this had ever happened to me.” He had been a prosecutor before becoming a priest and had lived fully in the world of the law and reason. It was just the nature of his job as a priest that over time, after attending so many funerals and listening to people talk about their problems, he found himself seeing things that he did not know existed. “Anyway, the easiest thing for me to do would be to teach you how to do an exorcism yourself. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” Endo nodded, immediately pulling out a notebook. I pulled mine out too.

There followed perhaps fifteen minutes during which Semp
tried to remember how to do an exorcism. It had been a long time, and he wasn’t sure he had all the hand gestures and the syllables. “Let me see.
On basara on
.” He snapped three times, making a zigzag from right to left. “No wait. Maybe it was the other way.” He made the zigzag again, this time from left to right. “No, I’m not sure.”