Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (72 page)

This is much more difficult than it sounds, and it is dangerous, as so many of these ancient Japanese traditions seem to be. I can’t imagine a festival of this nature passing a fire inspection in the United States—lawsuits would abound—but in Japan, a much less litigious society, tradition rules.

If all goes well, the boat stays upright and burns from the top down until nothing but the skeletal remains are left when the boat reaches the end of its journey, which is when it has crossed under a bridge and is just about to hit the rapids. Then it is hauled off to the side and thoroughly doused by firemen. By this point, however, another burning boat is making its way down the river, while a foreman frantically shouts orders: “Left! Pull! Pull! Pull!”

While this happens, others take turns reading out letters they have written to their loved ones who died that year. The readers are amplified via a sound system that projects voices on both sides of the river. People have died in car accidents, of cancer, by drowning. Most of the time, the person reading the letter wants to reassure the dead person that things will be okay, and that the soul of the dead should feel free to continue on in the great journey to rebirth. The readers are of both genders and all ages. And contrary to the stereotype of Japanese people, the letters are highly emotional. It is impossible for a listener not to be in a state of tears and at the same time not to be anxious about the burning boats and the men pulling them down the river. The story that most affected me, the year I attended, was from a twelve-year-old boy whose mother had died that spring. “I will take care of my younger brother,” he explained. “I
do not want you to worry. I want your soul to be able to keep going. I will study hard, and I will not cause Daddy any problems. Please continue on.” Hearing all these stories, I was reminded that on any given day someone is dying and someone is grieving.

It was dark when the letter reading and the burning of the boats came to an end. Once again, volunteers set hundreds of tiny lanterns into the water. These lanterns also bore the names of the souls of the dead and represented the departure of the ancestors from the land of the living. Once again, the little lanterns clustered together, following the movement of the water, bobbing and turning in the currents.

F
ROM
M
ATSUSHIMA
, I traveled to Ugo, a small town in Akita Prefecture located amid fields of buckwheat, from which are made some of the finest, freshest soba noodles I have ever eaten. I came to Ugo because I had read about its famous Nishimonai Obon dance, in which the spirits of the dead danced alongside the living. I was supposed to distinguish the dead because their faces were covered with black masks. Other dancers wore a large straw hat called an
amagasa
, which curved around the face like an enormous sunbonnet, also obscuring their features. These dancers often wore a
yukata
—a summer kimono—which they had made themselves out of old pieces of fabric in a patchwork style called
hanui
.

The Nishimonai Bon Odori dances did not rotate in a circle but instead traveled the length of a city street, moving along the slightly curved road from one end to the other, before the dancers turned and worked their way back in a loop. To my ear the music had the same twangy, pentatonic quality that characterizes most Japanese folk music. But there was a twist. At Nishimonai the
songs were sung in Aomori dialect, which can be difficult for outsiders to understand. Nevertheless, a few phrases sounded familiar; the songs were a tribute to farmers and peasants and were often bawdy and earthy, a contrast to the solemn, hypnotic dancing.

The Nishimonai dancers were townspeople who met once a month to practice their moves. They were of all ages and both genders, and despite the masks and the heavy hats, you could occasionally make out a family dancing together. You could also tell in some instances who was aging and perhaps arthritic, and who was less certain of the moves.

As the dancing continued on deep into the night, it became impossible to discern when the looping line of dancers repeated. Some of the dancers occasionally took a break. It was hot—easily still 90 degrees and very humid—and the dancers, in all their fabric and with their hoods and hats, were in danger of overheating. Every now and then a figure—usually a woman—would come by, and she would have such a silky clarity to her dancing, and her robe would be so carefully and beautifully handmade, it was clear that she prided herself on her accomplishments. Most of the time, though, the movements were in synch, the outfits coordinated, and I couldn’t tell one dancer from another. Then I had the same feeling that I had had at Eiheiji, when all the monks chanted and moved together and when the little
t
r
nagashi
lanterns had clung to each other as they had been tossed around by the ocean or the river current. People are not actually alone. Whether they are alive or dead, they are not alone.

M
Y MOTHER AND
I had plans to take a train from K
riyama to Iwaki, but due to one of T
hoku’s late-summer storms, the power was out and a signal on the tracks was malfunctioning. Also, streetlights in most towns were down, if they had been on at all. Trains were delayed, and travelers were being advised to take the bus.

In addition, a major portion of the J
ban Line train was still out of
commission due to the earthquake and the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Reactor; a section of the J
ban train tracks goes right through the exclusion zone. By the time we reached K
riyama, my mother had been on the phone with Semp
apologizing for our impending late arrival. Today was the day we planned to bury my grandfather’s bones. It was August 19, and Obon had ended the day before (even though the peak of Obon is celebrated on the sixteenth, the official dates include a few more days for people to travel home and for stragglers to send off the souls of the departed). I had put off burying my grandfather’s bones in order to take in as many other Obon-related activities as possible. I felt a little guilty about this because I assumed the proper thing to do would have been to get my grandfather into the ground before his Niibon, his first Obon after dying.

“You need to get here before sunset,” Semp
instructed. “At sunset, the day becomes Tomobiki.”