by Lucy Taylor
Now Obon.
Already I can see fires burning—candles flickering in windows and on porches, bonfires tended by bare-armed, sweaty men on open lawns and along the riverbanks. People stand in their open doorways, silent reception committees for the spectral guests. Fireworks explode on every corner, and squealing, giggling children wave glowing pinwheels in the darkening air.
The heat is stifling, suffocating, full of smoke from the fires and the fireworks. Sweat pours down my face and puddles between my breasts. There is no heat in the world like the heat of a Japanese August. It clings to the skin like a hot, damp rag and pastes the hair to the scalp. In such a swelter, all movements seem to require extra effort. In this world supposedly aswarm with ghosts, it feels as though everything is underwater, that I wade along the path as much as walk.
When I reach the wooden house, known as a minka that I once shared with my husband, I see a pair of men’s brown Gucci loafers outside the door and know that Katsuro-san, Hiroshi-san’s son, has come to honor his father and the other ancestors. I leave my sandals beside his shoes—only the dead wear shoes indoors—and put on a pair of slippers before I slide back the door and go inside.
Even in the smaller towns, a traditional house like this, with tatami mats on the floors and shoji screens dividing the rooms, with bedding that is rolled and stored in a cupboard during the day and unrolled at night, and a hearth for making fires in the winter, is a rarity. In the older minkas the roof is thatched, but ours is tile, the ends of the tiles decorated with images of deities thought to provide protection. The butsudan, or spirit cabinet, with its intricately carved lotus leaves and sutras, occupies a grand alcove in the largest of the rooms. It is the first thing one sees upon entering the house.
This butsudan, handed down through Hiroshi-san’s family through generations, is a massive, imposing cabinet made of cherry and cedar wood, hived with a multitude of alcoves and cabinets and cubicles in which to store the dishes, incense, candles, and writing implements which are part of the daily rituals. A gold Buddha rests at the top, presiding over the many shelves and a desk that folds out for copying Buddhist texts.
I call out to Katsuro-san, but apparently he doesn’t hear me over the raucous babble of a game show blaring from the TV set in the back of the house. I find this annoying, but not as much so as the fact that Katsuro-san has lit the candles on the butsudan, then left them unattended, a dangerous practice on a sultry evening with a hot breeze coming through the windows.
But then, where money or pleasure’s not concerned, Katsuro-san isn’t one for details. After Hiroshi-san died, Katsuro-san spent less time grieving than he did visiting banks, exploring the possibility of land deeds, overseas funds, secret stock portfolios. In his younger days, as an importer of antiques and art, Hiroshi-san had reputedly amassed a fortune, not all of it honestly made. Some of his associates were art smugglers and forgers, a few were members of the feared yakuza, Japanese organized crime. Then, after his first wife died, Hiroshi-san apparently woke up to the brevity and fragility of life. He renounced his criminal connections, left Tokyo for this small town in eastern Kyushu, and became a fervent meditator and student of the sutras. After a few cups of sake, he often boasted of a fortune hidden away, but in reality, he lived a life of almost obsessive frugality, deeming even the most minor luxury a reckless extravagance.
Katsuro-san remains convinced a secret fortune exists, if only it could be found, but so far, nothing has turned up. In Hiroshi-san’s will, I was left the house and a meager stipend of cash, and Katsuro-san, whose profligacy with money was a constant source of embarrassment and outrage to his father, got even less.
Not enough for either of us to live comfortably.
Certainly not enough to leave Japan.
As I’m frowning at the candles on the butsudan, I notice something else—Katsuro-san has placed fresh flowers on the bottom shelf and, next to that, an exquisite porcelain bowl filled with dark red liquid. I dip a finger into it and touch it to my lips. In the overheated room, cold travels up my spine like an unwelcome kiss.
“Carolyn-san?”
I look up to see Katsuro-san watching me from the doorway. He’s taller than most Japanese, with regal cheekbones and a thin mouth that always looks ready to leave teeth marks in something. I walk across the room, and we bow to each other formally, me dipping a bit lower as is customary with women.
“Good-evening, Katsuro-san.”
“Good evening, Carolyn-san.”
The smallest of smiles, like the flick of a whip, crosses Katsuro-san’s mouth. Then we are in each other’s arms, kissing, grabbing each other like starving people finding food, his hands tangled in my hair, inside my blouse, my fingers working at the button of his trousers.
Suddenly he pushes me away. “No, we can’t. Not at Obon. It’s disrespectful.”
Such things have seldom concerned Katsuro-san before. His very wantonness has always been the greatest source of his appeal.
With the spell of our reunion broken, my irritation returns quickly. “Why did you light the candles if you were going to watch TV? And what the hell was the idea of putting this on the altar?”
I show him the bowl of thick, red liquid.
He shrugs. “Red bean soup. So what?”
“I haven’t prepared red bean soup since Hiroshi-san died. Did you think it was clever to offer it for Obon?”
“I didn’t put it there.”
“Then how—?”
“Maybe one of the relatives or neighbors stopped by while you were out.”
He takes the small dish, lifts it to his mouth, and drains it. “There. All gone. What is it, Carolyn-san? Are you afraid of bean soup now? It wasn’t bean soup that killed my father. He choked to death on mocha. It was an accident. You know that.”
Do I? Is he testing me? I try to read his expression, but inscrutable is not an adjective applied to the Japanese for nothing.
“It’s Obon,” he continues, “and you feel guilty, so your mind is playing tricks. It’s understandable. But what happened between us didn’t really begin until after father died. It isn’t like we were sneaking off to Love Hotels behind his back.”
No, we sneak off to Love Hotels now—in Beppu, a larger city up the coast. It would not look good before the neighbors if Katsuro-san spent too much time here, and the three Meiji brothers, who live across the street and raise silkworms, are ever at their windows. So Katsuro-san comes and goes with utmost discretion, often living in a tiny apartment he keeps in an adjacent town.
“Blow out the candles before you go to bed,” I tell him sourly as I leave the room.
“Fine,” he says. “And by the way, I didn’t light them.”
««—»»
We sleep in separate rooms that night, or try to sleep at least. The fireworks explode till well past midnight, the teiko drums pound like punishing blows. I’m wet all over, furious at Katsuro-san yet, at the same time, longing to pull him against me, inside me.
He lied about the candles and the red bean soup—or did he? Was it intended as a joke? If so, it was a cruel one.
No, it wasn’t red bean soup that killed Hiroshi-san, but the sticky rice cakes, called mocha, that were in the bean soup. It’s a traditional New Year’s dish, mochi and red bean soup, eaten for good luck. Ironically, it sometimes brings death rather than good fortune. When baked, the mochi becomes extremely sticky and almost impossible to chew. Every year, several elderly people suffocate when the mochi they are eating gets stuck in their windpipes, but every year those seeking good luck ignore the danger.
At two a.m., unable to sleep, I get up from the futon. My intention is to go to Katsuro-san’s room, crawl into his futon, and make him forget the ancestors. Then I realize he must have had the same idea, because he’s standing in the doorway, holding a candle, watching me.
Except it isn’t Katsuro-san.
Hiroshi-san regards me with a stricken stare. The candle flame illuminates the shifting shadows from which his
face emerges. His mouth gapes and he gasps for air. His voice is the painful sound of a dull knife scraping bone. “Hell,” he rasps, “I am in hell.”
Then he lifts the candle to his lips and drinks the flame. The fire blazes behind his eyes, giving his wizened face a fierce, demonic countenance. He reaches out for me. I scream, and he is gone.
««—»»
The next day members of Hiroshi-san’s extended family come to visit and pay their respects before the butsudan. I tend the candles and the incense, make sure the food is ample and the sake flows, as aunties and uncles and cousins make their obligatory appearance, bowing deeply before they begin their prayers, engaging Katsuro-san in endless conversation of which I am made no part. Hiroshi-san’s family, especially Katsuro-san, resent the fact that in all these years, I’ve been unable to learn anything beyond the simplest Japanese. They do not appreciate how difficult their language is, how unnatural the construction of their sentences, as though they set out to build a house but did it upside down, the roof being laid down first, followed by the stories in reverse order, then the floor and finally, the basement. They don’t understand that reading the characters, the katakana, hirogana, and kanji, is like trying to follow a backwards road map drawn by a blind man and held up to a mirror.
“What did you talk about?” I ask Katsuro-san when the last one finally slips on their shoes and takes their leave.
He gives me the small, sardonic grin of a man who takes for granted his own superiority in all matters. “If you’d only study your Japanese, you wouldn’t have to ask.”
Ignoring the barb, I press on. “Last night,” I begin tentatively, “I dreamed I saw Hiroshi-san. He was eating fire. He said he was in hell.”
“A dream, that’s all,” replies Katsuro-san. “Remember the tradition I told you about, of how Obon began? You were thinking of it, that’s all.”
The legend goes that one of Buddha’s foremost disciples learned his mother had been reborn in hell and couldn’t eat, because anything she brought to her mouth would turn to fire. To save her, he was advised to offer food to the monks following their mid-August retreat. The mother was saved, and thus Obon began.
I nod, but remain unconvinced. I may be just a gaijin, but I know what I saw. “We should have left here before Obon. This house is worth a little money, and you have some savings.”
The muscles of Katsuro-san’s jaw clench like a fist. “Not until I find where father put the money he always bragged about.”
He makes a karate-chopping motion with his hand for emphasis. I know we’ll talk no more about it.
While Katsuro-san goes to make the obligatory Obon visit to the cemetery, I put fresh flowers on the butsudan and light more incense and candles. The cup of sake on the top shelf looks appealing. To hell with thirsty ancestors—I gulp it down.
A quiver ascends my spine as the strong drink slides down my throat. I feel a wave of dizziness and reach a hand out for the cushion to steady myself. In this stifling room, where despite the breeze, the heat has gathered and intensified throughout the day, the pillow is as cold as if it had just come from a freezer.
I watch as the pale smoke from the incense and the candles trails upward and intertwines, grey yin and dark blue yang, a mating of disparate energies. Hiroshi-san’s contorted face stares out from within the smoke like a face peering in through smudged glass. He’s smoke himself at first and then he isn’t, now shreds of flesh, now thread-thin curls of smoke. The candle flame licks through his phantom flesh like a second, searing tongue.
I blink and flinch away, convinced that I’m hallucinating, but when I dare to look again, the apparition is still there. He shudders, undulating like an image reflected in a pool of water where someone has tossed a stone.
“My wife…forever.” I can feel that scraping-bone voice as it rattles its way up my spine. “Mine.”
“What do you want, Hiroshi-san?”
“My wife…your duty to the dead.”
Duty to the dead? What does that mean? Where I come from, in America, we do not venerate the ancestors. They are the foreshadowing of what we, too, shall be—we do not want to look. We bury them and then move on, to other cities, other states, sometimes to other countries. The past dies and it is gone. Erased from time. Forgotten.
Not here, though. Not in Japan and certainly not at Obon.
The living here are ever captive to the dead.
Hiroshi-san’s grey, evanescent hands wave toward the butsudan.
“Clean it,” he groans. “Honor the butsudan…you honor me. You free me from this hell.”
“Hiroshi-san—”
He opens his gaping, flame-filled mouth: “Wife…do…what I say.”
In the overheated room, a deep chill descends. Suddenly I am shivering violently, and the small meal I had for breakfast lurches toward my throat.
I fetch water, polish, and cleaning rags and set to work. The butsudan already gleams, but now I clean it more thoroughly, running the cleaning rag up into every nook and hidey-hole, exploring the junctures where the boards are fitted together, removing the tiniest speck of dust from the creases of the Buddha’s robe.
The butsudan has a roof on top, in the manner of a Buddhist temple. Gold paint outlines the ornate filigrees and arabesques that, generations ago, some unknown craftsman carved into the handsome wood. I polish and dust the outer shelves, then reach inside to get at the very back.
I can’t see the characters carved into the wooden panel on the inner seam of the butsudan’s roof, but I feel them there and trace them with my fingers. At first I think it’s just more decoration, but the location is in a place where no one would ever see it, unless, like me, they made a pretzel of their spine to get at it with a dust rag. There are two characters carved into the wood and, below that, a thin ridge where two boards meet unevenly. I fetch a mirror and hold a candle in an attempt to see the characters, but they are too far back, too tiny. I fetch a paper and a pencil with thick, soft lead and, leaning so far back I feel like a contortionist, I make a rubbing of the characters.
Katsuro-san is just returning from the cemetery. Although I want to run to him at once to ask the meaning of what I’ve found, I realize there is something else I must do first. Besides, I am afraid to know the truth, afraid of what I may learn.
Later that evening, when I hand him the rubbing, he frowns and studies it.
“What’s this?”
“It was carved under the roof of the butsudan. What does it mean?”
He shakes his head as though profoundly saddened by my Western ignorance. “If you only would learn Japanese, you could read these yourself.”
“Are you going to tell me what it means or not?”
“It’s nothing,” he says. “Just the signature of the artist who carved the butsudan, that’s all.”
“But in such an odd place?”
“That’s all it is. Really, Carolyn-san, what did you expect?”
What did I expect indeed? The disappointment and hurt takes my breath away, as though I’ve been kicked in the chest. Despite his sarcasm and subtle disdain for me as his father’s gaijin’s wife, I wanted Katsuro-san since the first time I saw him, since the first time his hand accidentally brushed my hip as we passed in a hallway, the first time he held my gaze a moment longer than is proper. With Hiroshi-san dead, I’ve dreamed of leaving here with him and starting a new life far from Japan, far from a language I can’t understand and the endless veneration of centuries’ worth of ancestors.
For a moment I am silent, absorbing what Katsuro-san has said, listening to the distant throbbing of the drums. I smile as warmly as I can and take his hand. “The Bon Odori is starting. We should take part.”
He looks bemused. “I thought you didn’t like these foreign dances.”
“At least we’ll be outside in the fresh air. Change into your yukata. Come on.”
While Katsuro-san is changing, I put more food upon the altar, remove the wilted flowers, and light fresh candles and
incense, as Hiroshi-san has told me to do. I feel certain that his ghost observes me and is pleased, that in some way I cannot understand, it is my destiny to honor his spirit in this fashion.
On any other night, the sight of Hiroshi-san’s son and myself walking together might raise eyebrows, but at Obon it is only fitting that families reunite, both the living and the dead. At any rate, we are soon lost in the streams of people heading toward the Buddhist temple beside the river. The priest has climbed up into the bell tower and begun to strike the bell, the oldest in the Prefecture of Fukuoka. We walk past bonfires ablaze and children holding folded pieces of colored paper, playing a game that involves using paper spoons to try to scoop goldfish from a tub before the paper gets wet and rips. In the sticky heat of evening, almost everyone has changed into brightly colored yukatas with bold geometric designs.
Fireworks explode. Dogs howl and yap. The beating of the taiko drums is frantic, pounding.
Katsuro-san and I push our way into the dance, where dozens of people are already whirling madly, four concentric circles revolving one around the other, the brilliantly colored yukatas blowing and billowing like a giant kaleidoscope being twirled.
The Bon Odori dances vary from town to town, but all depict some local theme or story. Hand gestures mime activities like digging or cutting rice, or the gentle flowing of rivers. As more people join in, the circle expands, then doubles back on itself like a snake eating its own tail, the dancers moving around a central platform festooned with crepe paper. The air is dense and musky with sweat and incense and the smoke from the bonfires. Long past the point of exhaustion, we still keep up the hypnotic, trance-inducing pace. The ghosts returned for Obon celebrate among us—their spectral bodies pulse in rhythm with the drumming. They are with us, the land of the dead superimposed over the land of the living, caught up in an endless unseen mating dance of sweaty mortal flesh and the wraith vestiges of the departed.
The faster and harder we dance, the more clearly I can see them. Like a shimmering mist, they mass along the road between the bonfires, avid for the memory of a time when they were as we are now, possessed of mortal flesh and human lust and joy and greed.