Tokyo Ueno Station

by Yu Miri

  It was raining.

  What we talked about on the ride, or whether we talked at all, I cannot remember.

  It was morning by the time we got to Tokyo.

  It was raining.

  At the morgue, Kōichi’s naked body was covered with a white sheet, and we were told that an autopsy was required to be carried out by the medical examiner.

  When we left the morgue, it was raining.

  Setsuko and I went to the flat where Kōichi had lived for three years and stayed there. We lay on the futon where he had died, until the morning.

  What we talked about, or whether we talked at all, I cannot remember.

  The next day when we left the apartment, it was raining.

  When we arrived at the morgue, Kōichi had been dressed in a cotton kimono and placed in a coffin. Yoko and her husband, who spent the night at a nearby inn, had apparently arranged everything with the undertaker.

  At the very bottom of the medical examiner’s report, he had marked “death from illness or natural causes,” and at the top there was his name and date of birth.

  Kōichi Mori, born 23 February 1960—the voice of that radio announcer twenty-two years ago came back to me.

  “Today at 4:15pm the Crown Princess gave birth to a son at the Imperial Hospital. Mother and child are doing well.”

  *

  We placed his remains in the room where he was born.

  With both hands I lifted the white cloth covering his face.

  I hadn’t looked at his face so carefully since he was a baby.

  Then, too, I had knelt beside him and leaned over the same way—

  He’d been autopsied, but his face was unharmed.

  I looked at his face.

  Arched eyebrows, a stubby nose, and thick lips—he looked like me.

  I had been away from home constantly since he was born, and I had seldom had the chance to walk beside him, so no one had ever had the chance to tell me that they could see a resemblance or that he looked just like me; nor were there any pictures of the two of us together, so I had never compared our faces in a photograph, either.

  Did Kōichi know that he looked like me?

  Had Setsuko ever told him?

  Yoko is the spitting image of her mother. Had she and her brother ever talked about which one took after their mother and which one took after their father?

  I had no idea what my family had talked about for the twenty-odd years I’d been away from home.

  While I’d been away, my brothers and sisters had all started their own families; my children had got through elementary, middle, and high school; Yoko had married; Kōichi had gone to Tokyo; my wife had been left alone at home with my elderly parents. And I’d had no choice but to keep working in Sendai, to pay for Kōichi’s tuition and living expenses and to put food on my family’s table.

  I had lived this way since I was twelve, and never felt dissatisfied with it before—Kōichi had died in his sleep, and he still looked like he was just sleeping. I looked carefully at his face, that face that looked just like mine, and I could not help but think that my life had been pointless after all, that I had lived this life in vain.

  Yoko cried as if her tears were being wrenched out of her.

  Setsuko pressed her hand to her mouth. The gesture suggested she was trying to keep from sobbing or shrieking, but she did not cry.

  I hadn’t cried since I’d heard about Kōichi’s death, either.

  I could not comprehend it.

  I could not accept the sudden death of my only son at the age of twenty-one as reality.

  My shock, my grief, my anger were all so great that crying felt inadequate.

  The grandfather clock chimed, telling me that yet another hour had passed, but I couldn’t make myself feel as though time was actually passing.

  My mother, who was nearly eighty years old, brought her hands together in prayer, then pulled the white cloth back over her grandson’s face. She said to me:

  “You worked so hard to send us money all these years, and now when you ought to be able to take it easy… Well, you never did have any luck, did you? Better go to bed now, the funeral’s tomorrow. Bath’s already drawn.” She stood up, tears spilling down her face.

  I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the chipped mirror, razor in hand.

  It was disorienting to see the same face, as always, looking back at me.

  Since Kōichi’s naked body had been shown to me in the morgue, I had refused to call the corpse by his name, but the body lying in that room—it was Kōichi’s body.

  That was the face of my dead son.

  Kōichi was dead.

  And he would be tomorrow, too. From now on, he would always be dead.

  I began to tremble, from somewhere deep inside, and I could not stop, I could not find a way to calm down.

  I went outside. The rain had stopped.

  The air, washed by the rain, was serene, and the waves sounded closer than usual.

  The full moon shone like a pearl in the night sky.

  The moonlight made it look as if all the houses had sunk to the bottom of a lake.

  The road stretched ahead, white.

  It was the road that led to Migitahama.

  A gust of wind and the petals from a wild cherry tree went dancing, white against the darkness, and I remembered then that the cherry trees here blossomed two or three weeks later than in Tokyo.

  The waves roared.

  I stood alone in the darkness.

  Light does not illuminate.

  It only looks for things to illuminate.

  And I had never been found by the light.

  I would always be in darkness—

  —

  I went back inside. Everyone was sleeping on the floor.

  I changed into my pajamas, which were folded on top of my futon, lay my head on the pillow, and pulled the duvet over me.

  I listened to the sounds of the house and at some point, I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes again, a faint light was filtering in through the gap in the curtains.

  “You never did have any luck, did you?” My mother’s words had sunk into my heart like rain, and I clenched my fists under my duvet, turning my back to Setsuko.

  *

  As the chief mourner, I had to visit the home of the head of the neighborhood association.

  The wind was warm and slightly stifling.

  I saw the cherry trees rustle and petals fall.

  The sky above me felt clear and endless as I walked.

  Under this cloudless blue sky, another spring day had begun.

  I’m trying, I thought.

  Set me free from trying, I thought.

  I’d been trying since I heard about Kōichi’s death.

  Until then I’d made an effort at work, but the effort I made now was to live.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to die; it was just that I was tired of trying.

  A bird that was neither a swallow nor a wood pigeon nor a falcon, a bird with a pure white breast that I had never seen before, hopped down from a branch of the cherry tree. Paying no mind to me despite the noise I made as I walked, it hopped around on the gravel like a new teacher walking back and forth in front of a blackboard with a stick of chalk in hand.

  It disappeared from the corner of my eye, and when I turned around it was no longer there.

  The cherry petals continued to fall, and I wondered if perhaps the bird was Kōichi.

  Time had slowed to a sluggish crawl. I walked faster, but each step plunged me deeper into the depths of stillness. If time could pass so slowly that its passage was imperceptible, then—is death where time stops and the self is left all alone in this space? Is death where space and the self are erased and only time continues? Where had Kōichi gone to? Had he really disa
ppeared completely?

  When I got home, the house was full of women in aprons bustling about, arranging flower wreathes and removing the sliding doors from their tracks. I heard the sound of multiple knives in the kitchen and realized that our neighbors and Setsuko’s family must’ve come over to help, knives and chopping boards in hand.

  I remembered the day that Setsuko and I were married in this house. She was twenty-one; I’d heard that she’d been married before, to a relative in Futaba, but that it hadn’t worked out and she’d come back home. Setsuko and I went to the same elementary school, and we saw each other out walking or in the park, so there was no need for a formal introduction. Before we knew it, everything was decided, and one day, I put on a black hakama with the family crest and went on foot with my family and friends to Setsuko. Her house was barely half a ri away, so by the time I brought her home only an hour had passed. She wore a white kimono. No, it wasn’t white, was it? The bride never wears white. Must’ve been black… but maybe her headdress was white…

  Just when the sweet-and-sour smell of cooking had started to waft through the house, the chief priest from Shoen-ji Temple appeared on the veranda. He expressed his sympathy, saying that he would be the one carrying out the ceremony, then walked directly in from the veranda to the altar room.

  The priest sat seiza in front of the altar, ringing the bowl-bell twice, as our relatives and the other faithful of our village also sat and clasped their hands.

  Seeing the white cloth over Kōichi’s face, the fire and smoke rising from the candles and the funereal anise flowers that without my notice had taken the usual place of the small chrysanthemums on the altar, I was gripped by a panic that froze the blood in my veins.

  “I, Ananda, heard the following from the Buddha, Shakyamuni, at one time Shakyamuni was at the Jetavana in Shravasti, as many as twelve hundred and fifty people there assembled, and they were especially eminent monks, among them the elders Shariputra, Mahamaudgalyayana, Mahakashyapa…”

  I closed my eyes and took a breath, trying to focus on the Amida Sutra, but the palpitations were so strong, I thought I might vomit, a mass of blood threatening to rise from the bottom of my throat at any moment.

  Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu… I heard my mother just next to my right ear chanting the nembutsu, and I tried to sing the hymns with the others. As breathless as if I had just run a mile, I could not make a sound come out of my mouth for several minutes. My clasped hands felt cold and stiff.

  “Without the strength of the Universal Vow

  When could we leave this earthly world?

  Thinking of the Buddha’s benevolence

  We keep our minds on Amida

  And forget the eternal pain of this world

  We wait for the Pure Land

  With the strength of the Buddha

  Let his mercy and goodness be known to the ages…”

  My father and mother, no matter how sick they were, always did their devotions each morning and evening.

  It fell to my father to tell us about the trials of our ancestors. My mother listened while she knitted or did the mending, her face always showing the deep affection she held for these stories.

  “Our family didn’t always live in Sōma,” he began. “About two hundred years ago, in 1803, in the Edo period, our ancestors suffered a hardship so bad it’d make your hair stand on end, and they came all this way here from Kaga-Etchu.

  “Kaga-Etchu’s in what we now call Toyama Prefecture, way down south, and there, in the Futsuka neighborhood of Nojiri village in Tonami district, there was a temple, Fugan-ji, whose head priest, Jokei, had four sons. Now, his second son, Korin, set up Jofuku-ji in Haramachi. His third son, Rinno, set up Shosai-ji in Sōma, and the fourth son, Hosen, opened Shofuku-ji in Futaba. That’s why those three temples are called the Pathfinder Temples.

  “Now, at the same time, Kakunen, the second son of Entai, the superior of the Seien-ji, a temple in Aso village in Tonami, came to Sōma to set up a temple in this area, the Shoen-ji in Kashima.

  “These men hoed and plowed the fields themselves, created salterns, grew rice to sell, and the money that they earned they used to bring ten families over from Kaga-Etchu every year.

  “The hometown of our ancestors, seven generations ago, was Aso village, Tonami district, Toyama Prefecture, the same place Kakunen came from.

  “Now, in those days, there was no bus or train or nothing. They walked, from Echigo to Aizu, going through Nihonmatsu and Kawamata, before crossing the Yagisawa Pass and finally arriving in Sōma. They say it took damn near sixty days.

  “Our ancestors had little more than the clothes on their backs, but thinking they’d need something to plant in this new land, they brought a green branch from a persimmon tree and stuck it in a fresh giant radish to keep it hydrated. They knew, even though persimmon trees take eight years to fruit while peach trees only take three, that persimmons’ll see you through years of famine.

  “That’s why if you look in the garden of every True Essence of the Pure Land follower you’ll find an ancient persimmon tree, and it’s why we call them lotus persimmons or Toyama persimmons around here.

  “Many of the villages around here were settled by True Essence of the Pure Land followers. Our ancestors ended up with land that nobody else wanted. All the best farming land was already taken, so they wound up settling in the salt marshes near the sea or at the foot of the mountains where beasts ran wild.

  “Sōma had a lot of temples from other sects like Shingon, Tendai, and Sōtō. People in Sōma always buried their dead, while Pure Land followers cremated them. In Sōma, when someone died, they placed six coins in the coffin to pay their passage to the next world, and dressed them in a white kimono, a walking stick, and straw sandals; but Pure Land followers like us just dress the dead in white and nothing more, because when someone dies they’re returning to the Pure Land.

  “Our people never worried whether a funeral would be on an auspicious day or an inauspicious one, because a funeral’s something to celebrate. And we don’t put a note on the house to warn people we’re in mourning, ’cause death isn’t an impurity, which is why we don’t purify ourselves with salt after a funeral, either.

  “Sōma people have little Buddhist altars at home, but Pure Land followers have grand ones, and they’re the heart of our homes.

  “Sōma people put memorial tablets on their altars, but we put the dead’s Buddhist name and death record.

  “Houses in Sōma have a Shinto kamidana, a little altar devoted to Daikoku, the god of wealth, or Kokin, the god of the kitchen. And some of them hang amulets everywhere—the front door, the living room, the stables, the kitchen, even in the damn toilet! We don’t do any of that.

  “Sōma people celebrate just about every Shinto or Buddhist holiday, but we don’t pay that kind of thing any mind. We don’t put up New Year’s decorations. And at Bon, we don’t put up special altars or light fires. How the hell is lighting a fire supposed to tell your ancestors that this is your house? You mean to tell me that someone who’s reached enlightenment and been reborn as a Buddha needs a fire to tell them where to come back to? Load of horseshit if you ask me.

  “I mean, at Bon they stab four sticks into cucumbers and eggplants and put them on their altars. The cucumber’s supposed to be a horse, to bring your ancestors back quickly, and the eggplant’s meant to be an ox, to bring them back slowly—hell, our ancestors weren’t idiots! And they’re not the kind of dead that only come home once a year anyway. No, when they die, they’re reborn as Buddhas in the Pure Land that we’ll all go back to eventually, and they watch over us three hundred sixty-five days a year, morning, noon, and night. Load of nonsense thinking they only come back during one week at Bon.

  “It was written in the service book of the True Essence of the Pure Land sect that if one repeated the name of Amida Buddha, countless other Bud
dhas would surround you and bring happiness. These would be the dead, who had returned to the Pure Land, and who would now protect us. Repeat it, over and over again: Namu Amida Butsu, be my protection both day and night.

  “The guardian deity of the Sōma clan was an avatar of the bodhisattva Myōken, revered in the temples of Sōma-Nakamura, Haramachi-Ota and Sōma-Odaka. In the old days, Pure Land followers didn’t stop working in the fields even during the Nomaoi festival at the end of July. This really pissed off the ‘natives,’ who sometimes stole their tools to keep them from working during the festival.

  “We called Sōma people ‘the natives,’ and they called us ‘Kaga people’ or ridiculed us for ‘not knowing how to worship right.’

  “Our ancestors suffered real bad, no doubt about it. Sure, the Lord of the Sōma clan gave them land and promised them if they cleared the land and cultivated it, it would be theirs, but then he wouldn’t give them the right to irrigate the land.

  “I don’t care how you cultivate land, you can’t grow rice without water. Our ancestors struggled. They tried to talk to the natives, but the natives refused to sit down with them. Well, what could they do? Our ancestors got together and built their own reservoirs and channels.

  The natives had another nickname for us. They heard our ancestors chanting Namu Amida Butsu during their devotions morning and night, and from a distance thought they were crying because they wanted to go back to Kaga. So they mocked the ‘Kaga whiners.’

  “Boy, did they suffer. But like Shinran said, ‘The nembutsu is the only path without obstacle.’ Our ancestors worked that barren land and were called names, but any pain or sorrow they felt didn’t keep them from their path. Whatever happens to me I just think about how bad they had it and I take it straight and keep on living.”

  The chime of the grandfather clock, which had been there since before I was born, rang out through the house.

  The notion that Kōichi could not hear it seemed odd to me, as I watched the movement of the brass pendulum. When the last chime had faded, the house became as silent as if it were underwater, and I could not help but think that he was listening to this silence, that Kōichi was listening.