Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  Like a mirage, a soft glow blossomed in the distance. The glow separated into four little balls of light. Were they headlights, perhaps? The beams didn’t move very quickly. In fact, they didn’t move as evenly spaced objects at all. I became entranced. We all did. You could hear it in the way we matched our footsteps, as though someone were dangling the proverbial pendulum before our eyes and lulling us to sleep.

  I tried to fight the sensation. If in fact it was some kind of mirage, if the snow and stress had addled my mind, then I would need to call on all my conscious faculties to see through this illusion. But we continued to move toward the lights, and they toward us, and I started to believe they were real.

  Now the road became easier to cross. It had been freshly plowed, and without even speaking to each other, we let go of the rope, the mother rolling the shirts and socks into a ball, which she shoved into her bag. Soon we were walking in our own separate spaces.

  The mother became excited. She started chattering at a pitch that was much higher than her regular speaking voice. I smelled something—smoke. The mother called out urgently to the professor and he replied in a burst of syllables.

  All at once the lights were upon us. There were four of them. Then they weren’t lights at all, but torches held aloft by four of the ugliest, most frightening creatures I had ever seen. Two had red faces, the other two were blue, and all had oversized heads, as large as my abdomen. Their hair was long and matted and coiled, and their bodies were covered with straw. Prickly, angled teeth studded their mouths. Their eyes, which I could now see clearly, were sharply angled into a V. I began to scream. One of the demons began to chase me with his torch.

  Chaos. The mother was running after both the demon and me, while the professor stood in place shouting. The three remaining demons roared and shook their torches. I had to stop to catch my breath and as I did so, I saw something strange. The mother was taking photographs. I heard an odd, garbled sound and it took me a full minute to understand that the others in my party were now laughing.

  Everyone was laughing at me. Even the devils were laughing.

  The demon who had come after me stopped running, his chest heaving up and down, and he planted his torch in the snow at an angle. With one paw, he tugged at his face, and it came off. Beneath his blue skin was another head, a human head. I’d been chased by a man wearing a mask.

  I shouted at them all, at the party of bus riders, at the demon who had chased me, at the snow, and at the missing bus driver.

  “So this,” I screamed, “is an example of your unusual sense of humor?”

  The professor mimed my outrage. He pulled off his gloves and used his fingers to stretch his mouth into a shape mirroring my indignation. Everyone laughed. Then he did it again, this time posing for a photo. Everyone continued laughing. I didn’t find this indignity funny at all. One moment I’d been in an accident, then mesmerized by a stark landscape, and now this inconsiderate practical joke. I started back to the bus. Who the hell knew where these people were going anyway?

  The student ran after me, wheedling in a high-pitched, rat-a-tat voice. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that he was carrying a bottle of something. “Dōzo. Dōzo,” he kept repeating.

  I stopped and took a look. It was a bottle of beer. I took a tentative sip, half-afraid it wouldn’t be beer at all, but another practical joke. But the liquid tasted so good, I downed half of it in seconds.

  Through hand gestures, everyone encouraged me to come back to the fold. Two of the demons handed their torches over to the college student and the professor respectively; the professor made the demon wait while he urinated in the snow. One of the red-faced demons reached into his baggy, ratty robes and pulled out a small cup of what I later learned was a prepacked cup of sake. The party started to descend the hill and I lingered behind, still insulted. But the student urged me to follow and, really, I had no other option, so follow I did, keeping a small distance lest there be any more surprises.

  At the bottom of the hill the road widened into an avenue. The streets were lined with rows and rows of red paper lanterns, orbs of pulsing light. As we climbed stone stairs, the mother and daughter excitedly exclaimed to each other, and the demons, now back in character, growled and tossed their heads. We passed a one-story wooden structure where two women sat, dressed like creatures from another time in white kimono tops and red skirts, their long hair tied in back with garlands of purple flowers. They called out to us and held out small cups of tea, which everyone, including me, accepted.

  Soon I could hear the faint beating of drums, and the mother and the daughter began to clap their hands in time to the rhythm. The sound inspired the demons, who waved around their torches with vigor, sending sparks into the air.

  Now we were joined by other families, by mothers and fathers carrying their kids, and other demons who, upon seeing the children, tried to pick them up and take them away from their parents. The children cried when this happened, but the mothers and fathers just laughed and laughed—then whipped out cameras to take photos.

  Up and up we climbed, every now and then pausing on a landing to admire a stone statue of a dog or a lion, or a row of small igloos that had been carved out of the snow and lit with candles. Finally the steps ended and gave way to a wide landing. Two women, each carrying a tray of roasted rice cakes, greeted us. A large bonfire roared and singed the air with sparks. Several dozen demons lunged from foot to foot around the fire in a dizzying, primal dance. Behind the bonfire was a large shrine and on its steps, half a dozen men dressed in nothing but loincloths and bandannas pounded out a rhythm on drums the size of horses.

  I couldn’t believe that this was where my fellow travelers had intended to end up. And yet there were the mother and the daughter dancing with a demon. Beside them, an elderly woman scolded another demon, smacking him on the shoulder. The professor and the student had found more cups of sake and were drinking them together and nodding to each other in the agreeable manner of men engaged in conversation that has been enlightened by drink. I stood off to the side and wondered what I was supposed to do next. My eyes began to tear.

  All of a sudden, the professor was back in front of me with two little girls. They were close in age, perhaps three or four years old, and flushed with excitement and exhaustion from having trudged through the snow in heavy red coats and pink boots. When they were just a few feet away, the professor kneeled down and pushed them toward me in the universal language of an adult urging a child to say hello. I squatted down and smiled. As the girls neared me, their chubby, innocent faces melted in horror. First the older one screamed, then the younger began to cry, and both turned to bury their faces in the professor’s legs. When I looked at him, intending to apologize, I saw that he was laughing again.

  “Debiru!” He pointed at me, his face red with drink. He repeated this word a few more times before I understood what he was trying to say. I was a devil.

  Now an older woman came to his side, along with a younger couple. There was also a furtive and embarrassed-looking policeman.

  “My family,” the professor declared. Then he turned to the policeman and the two of them conferred in Japanese, punctuating the conversation with little bows.

  The little girls again turned and stared at me with blatant curiosity. I gathered that it was primarily for the entertainment of the children that the professor was now instructing me that I would pass the night at his home. The hotels were sold out, he continued, and it was too late to call the family in Akita I’d been hoping to meet. Surely they would long since have given up expecting me to arrive by bullet train.

  “You cannot sleep in snow,” he declared, which was true enough.

  Now many people were staring at me—the sole gaijin who had inadvertently crashed a demon festival. Should something happen to me—if I were murdered, my paranoid mind thought—dozens of people would remember having seen the strange half-Japanese-looking girl speaking to the professor and the little girls. And so, resign
ed to be a demon among demons for the evening, I tightened my grip on my bag and followed the strange family back down the stony steps to the parking lot.

  Eventually I pieced together what had happened that evening. The bus had slipped and stalled not too far from the center of Shishigane town, and the other riders had known that we wouldn’t have too far to go. The professor was on his way to meet his family at Shishigane’s demon matsuri, or festival. He had originally planned to take the bullet train to Akita, then backtrack to Shishigane.

  Rain or shine, snow or avalanche, the people of Shishigane had put the festival together for over five hundred years. Contemporary inhabitants were not about to let a small thing like heavy snow and a blocked bullet train passage stall their efforts. Knowing this, the professor had been quite determined to get to the bonfire in time.

  The demon matsuri was one of the many snow festivals that take place in the north of Japan during the cold season. Each town in northern Tōhoku had a unique festival that paid tribute to the harsh winter months. Shishigane started its festivities earliest in the sequence. In the meantime, all across the north, little villages were planning to display ice sculptures, build igloos, and hold shrine dances. Adults told children stories about the powerful river god, now sleeping beneath a blanket of snow, and how, come springtime, he’d wake up and his rivers would replenish the land the way veins ignite a body with blood. It was this water, which originated in the mountains of the north, that was famous for giving the rice and the sake a clean and pure flavor that the more sophisticated south could never match.

  The snow festivals were a manifestation of Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion, which flowered long before Buddhism arrived from China in the sixth century. Shinto involved numerous gods, called kami, who could appear anywhere, though objects in nature were the most likely candidates; the Japanese landscape was full of numinous rocks, trees, and caves. If a tree seemed to have a particularly beneficent shape to it, a god was probably residing inside. If a rock in the ocean resembled a turtle, it too must house a god. Because of this somewhat unpredictable nature, it was difficult to come up with a complete list of all the known gods in Shinto; they were numerous and sometimes unruly.

  At the very top of the disorganized pantheon was the sun goddess, Amaterasu, from whom all mortals were said to be descended. In the most famous story of all in Shinto lore, Amaterasu had taken a page from Demeter’s book and hidden in a cave after a quarrel with her brother, the wind kami Susano-ō. The world was soon plunged into darkness after her disappearance, and evil spirits gained the upper hand over the land.

  The lesser kami tried in vain to convince Amaterasu to return to the world, finally resorting to her vanity to lure her out. First, roosters crowed loudly outside the cave, urging on the dawn of a new day. Then the lesser kami covered a large tree with brilliant cloths and jewels and positioned a mirror opposite the mouth of the cave. Uzume, the earthy goddess of mirth, began to dance. She wasn’t a particularly attractive goddess, certainly nowhere near as beautiful as Amaterasu, but her good spirits were infectious and the other gods could not help but laugh alongside her. The raucous merriment roused Amaterasu’s curiosity, and she crept toward the entrance of the cave.

  Amaterasu peeked out and caught her own reflection in the mirror. Astounded, and probably a little bit jealous, the goddess rushed out of the cave to confront her rival. Tajikara-wa, god of strength, caught her, and the other kami strung a rice rope across the mouth of the cave so Amaterasu could not hide again. Light returned to the world.

  CHAPTER 11

  A Forest of Statues

  “What will you do at Muryojuji temple?” the professor asked me politely at breakfast the next morning.

  We were eating rice, soup, fish, and pickles.

  I smiled. “I’m going to see the statues.” When he didn’t know the word statue, I struck a pose. “Buddha,” I said.

  Evidently this impressed him. Not many tourists, and certainly very few foreigners, made the trek across the north of Japan to see the statues at Muryojuji temple. Most people just went to Nara and Kyoto, if they didn’t sequester themselves in Tokyo.

  By noon, the professor and I were on the road for what he promised would be a long drive. It had started snowing again, and the roads were still bad. Often I dozed off, only to wake up when the car skidded. I thought back to the evening before and how much the professor had annoyed me.

  My first impression of Muryojuji temple came at dusk. We’d been driving along a narrow mountain road just wide enough for two cars. The professor hunched over the steering wheel and peered out of the dusty windshield at the gray road, unruly hair licking at the air like flames while his mouth stayed fixed in a hard frown. The sun was pressed in between the horizon and a layer of heavy cloud, so the light was thin and sharp. Silver trees and bamboo branches huddled over the road, while stubbled rice paddies gleamed with a slick coat of ice and snow. Above us, I could see a foothill on which stood a large building. The professor turned the car off the main road and began to climb toward this structure, driving slowly to keep from slipping. The base of the road was lined by rice paddies, but as we climbed, the grounds gave way to tombstones.

  Overhead, I saw two figures standing at the entryway of a car park. They were men, one older, one younger, both bald and wearing robes of neutral-colored silk. They were gazing down at us, lips closed, hands resting together in a relaxed clasp. A breeze rushed down the hillside and caught the end of one of their over-robes, which leapt and spread open in the wind. We rounded another corner and I lost sight of them. Now I saw a marvelous wooden gate, flanked on either side by tall wooden statues of the warrior gods. I knew their names from my studies: Ah and Un, so called because their lips were permanently mouthing these exclamations.

  The two men were waiting to meet us once we reached the top of the hill, but now there was also a third person. He was very tall and young, maybe around my age, and was just strolling into the parking area as we pulled up. He was wearing elaborate cold-weather gear: a pair of skinny black jeans tucked into a pair of pointy white boots, a slick black jacket left open with a fur-lined hood hanging down his back, and a heavy black sweater with a maze of cables that crept up to his throat like vines hugging a thin but sturdy tree. His long, layered hair framed his beautiful, almost feminine features and hung down over his eyes so that he had to tilt his head a little to actually see me. When he saw me staring at him, he started, then gave me a half smile and turned his gaze away.

  The oldest man spoke to the professor in Japanese. He introduced himself to me as Masayoshi Handa, and I bowed to him. The other man in robes was introduced to me as Tomohiro Handa.

  “Hello,” said the young man in the sweater and the white boots. “Welcome to Muryojuji temple. We are very sorry about your travel problems yesterday.” His voice was stilted, almost British, but not quite. I couldn’t quite place the accent.

  “Oh. Thank you. Who are you?”

  He glanced at Masayoshi Handa, then said, “My name is Akira.”

  “I’m Rumi,” I said.

  Akira nodded at the two priests, and so I addressed them this time, thanking them for the welcome and apologizing for being so late. In a quiet, even voice, Akira translated my words. My voice sounded oddly twangy and bright against his delicate tone. Then Akira picked up my luggage and nodded toward the house. “Please come inside,” he said. Behind me, the professor was resisting an offer of refreshments and climbed back into his car for the long drive home.

  I exchanged my shoes for a pair of slippers and the young man known as Akira carried my luggage up two steps and set it down in the entrance to the house.

  The age of the building showed in the hallway. Though attempts had been made to modernize it—here and there, a lightbulb covered with a brand-new dust-free paper lantern hung from the ceiling—it was long and narrow, a place built for smaller bodies than mine. It was also excruciatingly cold.

  “Where did you learn English?” I asked.


  “In Australia,” he answered, in a monotone, as though it were perfectly natural for him to know my language. “Here is the bathroom.” When I didn’t move, he said, “Don’t you need to go to the bathroom? Women usually do after a long car drive.”

  When I came back out, Akira was waiting for me.

  “This way,” he gestured to another hallway and then a door.

  “Who are you?” I whispered as I followed him. “Are you related to the family here?”

  Akira ignored my question. “We thought you might like to see the temple while there is still sunlight,” he said as we joined the other two men waiting in the hallway.

  The four of us made our way through the building, out a door, and across a wooden ramp connecting the house to a side entrance to the temple. The ramp was covered but otherwise exposed to the elements, and the wind and the snow blew in my face, so I was momentarily blinded. Akira took my elbow and hurried me across. Once we reached the other side, he held out two small white packets about the size of portable tissue packs. When Akira saw that I did not know what to do, he shook the little bags vigorously and handed them to me. They were warm to the touch.

  “Like this.” He showed me the bottom of his foot where a white packet clung to his sock. “Muryojuji temple is very cold in winter,” he said to me gently as he knelt down and put one packet on each of my feet. “You must be careful.”

  Masayoshi pushed open a door and flipped a switch on the inside wall.

  Statues three times the size of a man sat on golden lotuses in full bloom. Others stomped on the backs of demons writhing in pain. The altar was a forest of statues, wise faces deep in meditation while they slept. Now roused from rest by our presence, they seemed to come to life. They blinked, parted their lips, and hummed. I heard a low rumbling sound, almost like feedback from a speaker. There were phrases, murmured softly, as though all the objects in the room were practicing meditation. A snatch of prayer here and there, a syllable flying past me, like a bat winging its way through a cave. They were sounds I’d never experienced before.