Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (6 page)

My mother and I visited Aunt Shizuko as often as we visited my grandparents, and I have vivid memories of arriving in the town of Iwaki, then called Taira, at dusk, after a several-hour train ride from the airport in T
ky
. From Taira, we always hired a taxi to get to the temple. I loved taking taxis in Japan because they were a luxury in which we otherwise rarely indulged. Taxis in T
hoku were as they were everywhere in Japan: a model of Western-inspired modernity and comfort, with air-conditioning, white lace-covered seats, and a driver wearing white gloves and a hat. The lace on the seat was usually covered by a tightly fitted plastic sheet that stuck to the back of my sweaty legs.

“Do you know the temple Empukuji?” my mother would ask the
driver once he had stopped complaining about the amount of luggage we had to put in the trunk; Taira had few international visitors in those days.

When the driver answered, his dialect and accent were so heavy, my mother winced. Here the façade of the uber-modern taxi driver fell away. We were in T
hoku, the wild northeast, where not everyone had learned to speak in the standard dialect. “That place up in the hills run by that woman who is all alone with no heirs?”

“That woman is my aunt.”

“All her brothers died in the war. What’s she gonna do living up there all alone? Remarkable woman, they say. Reading sutras every morning and ringing the bells and everything after her dad died. Myself—I’d get depressed.”

Primly: “Could you take us there, please?”

“I guess it’ll be cooler up there than it is down here. That’s for sure. Hey—where did you say you were from?”

The taxi pulled out from the station parking lot, and the driver openly stared at my foreign face in his rearview mirror. I turned my head away and looked out the window, craning my neck to be the first to catch sight of Empukuji perched on a hillside in the narrow and verdant valley. Aunt Shizuko would be outside, high up on the hill, wearing an apron and welcoming us with wide, enthusiastic waves.

The car turned and began to navigate a narrow road through a stretch of rice paddies flanked by fat-leafed clover patches. In the morning, my mother and I would sit here and make a crown of flowers. The road forked, and the right side led up to a landing next to a house, where Aunt Shizuko was waiting. The left side of the fork led to a car park. From here, a set of steep stairs threaded through a series of gates, which in turn were flanked by cherry trees that capped the walk with pink froth in the spring. At the top of the stairs was the temple, the slope of its eaves flexed like hands pressed
together in prayer. To the left was another building set up for pilgrims, meetings, and meals. Higher above was a cemetery, which nestled against the edge of a bamboo forest, home to tangled vegetation, badgers, and bears.

In those days, the valley was nearly empty, except for the rice-growing farmers who made up most of Empukuji’s congregation. The size of a Buddhist temple is determined by the number of households, or
danka
, it oversees. In those days, our family temple oversaw only fifty households, which is a very small number; to survive, most temples must have an average of two to three hundred. It is common to hear temple families literally say, “If you do not have at least two hundred
danka
, you cannot eat.”

At Empukuji, all the buildings—house, temple, meeting rooms—were connected by ramps, making it possible to travel from the house to the altar without first going outside; this was a handy shortcut for a priest who needed to meet waiting guests, or more importantly, for the wife who needed to bring in some tea or treats when acting as a hostess. But here there was no priest and no wife. There was only Aunt Shizuko, stoically protecting her family’s legacy and providing for her fifty households.

Up here on the hill, one had the feeling of calm. Aunt Shizuko spoke the language of nature and the garden. If I had too many mosquito bites, she knew how to make a salve to ease the itching. In the spring, she collected bamboo shoots and other wild vegetables to eat for dinner. Like my grandfather, she knew the names of birds just by their voices, and she knew when the season was changing because the
hototogisu
, known to us in English as the lesser cuckoo, would start to sing in the trees outside after managing the flight from Taiwan. Before he died, my grandfather taught me to listen for the
hototogisu
. He said that when I heard it singing at the temple, it would mean that he was with me, that he had ridden the bird’s back from Taiwan to Japan when it migrated in May.

In the one air-conditioned room, with the black-and-gold family altar behind us, we sat and ate chilled slices of watermelon while the hot sun passed overhead. At dusk, if the season was right,
jangara
—musicians who play flat, metal chimes and
taiko
drums—would gather around the temple to rehearse for a midsummer festival when the spirits of the dead would return to visit their families. Aunt Shizuko brought out some
katori senko
, spiral-shaped incense that was particularly potent against mosquitoes. While the smoke unfurled, I sat on the tatami-mat floor, my feet dangling over the edge of the opened wood-and-rice-paper sliding door, while the men kicked up dust outside. At night we slept in a fine mesh net to hide away from mosquitoes. In the morning, my mother might take me to nearby S
ma for the horse
matsuri
, or festival, or to
arai beach to cool down.

When I was ten years old, my mother and I arrived to the temple to find that Aunt Shizuko had company. She had adopted a young man named Semp
and designated him as her heir. Now, when we took the taxi from Taira station, there were two figures waiting for us on the hill. Now, when I woke up early in the morning to the sound of the temple drum, it was Semp
’s deep, baritone voice singing the sutra while the quiet audience of the temple sculptures watched and listened.

I
T TOOK ME
until July in 2011, when travel restrictions had eased, and a portion of the J
ban Line had been restored, to make it to the temple for the first time after the disaster. As soon as I stepped out of the taxi onto the temple grounds, the
hototogisu
began to sing in the cherry trees overlooking the temple. I imagined the spirit of my grandfather on the back of his favorite bird. But the moment was bittersweet. The temple grounds had been transformed. The flower garden in front of the main house was gone, and in its place, large, eerie
sunflowers turned up their shaggy-maned yellow faces to the sun, in unblinking poses.