Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  Bishamonten, guardian of the north, shifted his weight onto one foot and his robes flared in a C shape following the curve of his hips. He hoisted a spear up with his left arm, and grimaced, daring the elements to attack. Over and over again he repeated this bit of drama. And though the howling wind pressed against the northern corner of the temple, pushing up against the sacred space with icy, ill-willed intentions, Bishamonten slew them all, over and over, so the peaceful meditators in the middle would maintain their serenity.

  Guanyin, goddess of mercy, had a cool, clean expression, as though I were standing on the bottom of a pool of water and she had broken the surface to gaze down at me. She held a little jar in her left hand, and her long white robes dripped about her ankles. Yakushi Nyorai, Buddha of healing, held out a little container of medicine for me to sample.

  The statues seemed intertwined like the gears of a spiritual machine designed to churn out wisdom. At the very center of this arrangement was a large wooden box, perhaps twelve feet high, with doors that would unfold like a cabinet. This was the box I had seen in the pamphlet that Ms. Shizuka had given to me in Tokyo. Akira explained that it was the temple’s central treasure, and only on view one day of the year.

  The two men opened three smaller rectangular containers, each about three feet high. Masayoshi pulled a flashlight from his pocket and aimed the beam at the contents. All three were kannons. The middle box was from the Kamakura era and had the clean, dramatic lines of that period that I have always loved. This kannon tilted her hips, and though she only had two arms, her crown was adorned with twelve extra heads. The final box held a very early kannon. She had that childishly archaic expression that makes people mistakenly think that ancient people were afraid of far milder terrors than we are today.

  Masayoshi stood in front of a fourth crate, similar in size to the others, whose doors remained closed.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “It used to hold a kannon,” Akira replied. “But it disappeared a long time ago.”

  I thought of the kannon now in the Stillness Center in San Francisco with Timothy Snowden. “I’ve always loved kannon, ever since I was a kid.”

  “You know about kannon?” Masayoshi asked, through Akira.

  “Well, yes,” I explained, nervously. “My father’s an art dealer. So am I.”

  “You buy and sell statues? Who is interested in such a thing?”

  “Wealthy people. Or just people who appreciate art. Buddhism is becoming more popular in the United States.”

  I studied the men. Masayoshi and Tomohiro were dressed in priestly robes and so at first glance seemed to be of a kind. But now that my eyes had adjusted to them a bit, I saw that they were quite different. Where Masayoshi was grave and elegant, Tomohiro moved like a fighter, taking little jabs at the air. He tugged at his robes with an accusatory sharpness, as though they were being disobedient when they slipped. Akira’s hands, for all his relaxed elegance, also danced when he talked.

  “Akira,” I said, “are you and Tomohiro brothers?”

  The question hung in the air and the men all looked at each other. Finally Masayoshi spoke quietly and Akira translated. “Yes. Masayoshi is our father. Our mother, Yoko, is inside the house.”

  “That makes you my family too, doesn’t it?” I asked.

  The men were talking to each other again and Akira interrupted me. “Let us go inside and drink some tea to warm up.” With that, the strange chorus of men swept through the temple toward the exit. And I, the foreigner, once again had no choice but to follow.

  Back in the house, Masayoshi Handa’s wife, Yoko, presented me with hot green tea and a tray of sweets. It was cold, she said, using Akira as a translator, and it was important that I eat enough sweets to keep me warm. She floated around the four of us like a small, generous spirit, doling out refreshments, every now and then interrupting our conversation with some point she considered salient. Did I eat red beans in America? Perhaps I’d like a piece of sponge cake instead? Would coffee be more to my liking? She rarely entertained foreigners, she said, blushing, and she was worried that I would go hungry. Finally she left the room and the men and I resumed our business.

  “We understand,” Akira said to me after we’d gotten the pleasantries out of the way, “that you are looking for your mother.”

  At last. I pulled an envelope out of my purse and slid it across the table.

  “I’m trying to find out what happened to her. How she died. If she has any family.”

  Masayoshi and Tomohiro looked at my birth certificate and several photos that I had received from Timothy before I had left. They turned these over and over, speaking softly and rapidly in Japanese, and I wished, not for the first time, that I could understand what was being said. While Masayoshi held one of the photos up to the light, Tomohiro muttered under his breath, and Masayoshi murmured over and over again. “Hmm. Hmm.”

  “We would like to know,” Akira finally said to me, “how you got these photos.”

  “From a friend of my mother’s. I guess they knew each other in Europe.” I paused. “He’s a Buddhist priest too.”

  The men were impassive. “The picture of the statue?”

  I hesitated. “I took that myself,” I said. “See.” I isolated another photo. “The name of your temple is stamped on the foot of this kannon.”

  “But how did you find the statue?”

  “My father recently sold it. He said he originally got it from my mother.”

  “Hmm,” the men murmured.

  “There’s also this.” I pulled out the small red box that had been hidden inside the kannon at the Stillness Center. “There’s a bone inside.”

  The men exchanged glances as though each held a piece to a puzzle and together they might create a complete picture.

  Akira said, “People sometimes come here and claim to be her friend or her relative. Of course, no one has come here with photos like this before.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The woman in your photo is Shinobu Kaneshiro.”

  “I’m still not following.”

  Akira said, “She is a mangaka. She draws anime and manga.”

  “Manga?”

  “Japanese cartoons.” Now he slid his own photo across the table for me to examine. I saw a woman wearing what looked like a fat pink skirt that must have been supported by a hoopskirt or petticoat of some kind, and a short fur coat. She was also wearing bright pink rain boots, and a hat with a wide brim, like a sunbonnet, which was tied under her chin with a piece of white lace. Something had amused her, for she had pulled her hands out of her pockets and was in midclap, the white gloves flashing like little fireflies in the dusky light. “She’s very successful. Famous. You must understand that when someone comes here, they mostly ask for money. Or sometimes they want a special favor.”

  “Wait. You said she is very successful.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I thought …” I glanced over at the red box with the piece of bone. “Isn’t that her in there?”

  The men blinked. Tomohiro coughed a smile into his hand. Finally all three men began to laugh. And though the change in mood was a relief from the strained and secretive manner in which they had been treating me, I was also annoyed. “What’s so funny?” I asked. “Do you know it’s illegal to carry human remains on an airplane like I did? I mean, what if I was caught?”

  “What makes you think this is your mother?”

  “Because …” How to explain my reasoning? A ghost had spoken to me and I had assumed it was my mother asking me to unlock the secrets of her past. “Who else could it be?”

  “Where did you find this bag?”

  “It was inside the statue in that photo.”

  After a moment, during which the men regained their composure and conferred with each other, Akira finally said, “That’s not her.” Then he said the words I needed to hear. “Your mother, Satomi, is alive, Rumi. She goes by the name Shinobu now, but we still cal
l her Satomi.”

  The air in the room swelled, crested, and broke like a heavy tide. I had to wait for a few moments to breathe again. When I spoke, my voice was very small. “François said that she died. When I was very young.”

  “No,” Akira said. “She is here in Japan.” He continued speaking and I tried to listen, but my mind was busy trying to adapt to the new reality that my mother was still alive. “We have never had someone come from America before, although I have heard that she is starting to become well known even over there,” Akira was saying.

  Masayoshi was holding up my birth certificate and Tomohiro was inspecting my passport.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t understand what’s going on. Could you … would someone please explain this to me? Because up until a few days ago, I had a completely different life. It wasn’t a life with any demons or snow festivals or a mother, even.”

  “What would you like to know?” Akira asked me.

  “Everything!” I was exasperated. “Are we family? Are you my family? Why did my mother leave me? Why did …” Tears pooled in my eyes. “Why did my father lie to me and tell me that she was dead?”

  Akira gave me a sympathetic look. “Parents do strange things, sometimes,” he murmured, “even when they think they are protecting us.”

  At that moment, Yoko burst back into the room and asked something related to refreshment. Masayoshi and Tomohiro scarcely acknowledged her, just grunting and shrugging as she spoke. Only Akira smiled and bowed his head gently. I felt awkward, wanting to answer her questions—and needing translation to do so—but I also felt that I should behave like everyone else.

  Finally, Akira looked at me and asked, “Would you care to stay for dinner? You could stay the night here afterward. It is getting dark outside.”

  Another night in a strange place, I thought. “Thank you,” I said. “I don’t really have anywhere else to go.”

  Yoko ordered sushi, which arrived in a series of stacked black lacquer boxes via a delivery van. Tomohiro plied us all with beer, and Akira translated, keeping the conversation light. I only half listened, trying instead to digest what had happened. There was so much information to absorb. My father, a liar. My mother, alive. These strangers, supposedly in possession of the key to it all.

  “What do you want to do?” Akira finally asked.

  “I want to see her.”

  “Don’t you find it strange that after so many years she has not contacted you? Does that not worry you a little bit?”

  To be honest, I had not even thought of this fact. The news that my mother had not died was still so fresh in my mind that I was motivated only by a desire to see her. “She must have had her reasons,” I finally said. I thought about the ghost and the strange little statue back in San Francisco. “It’s difficult to explain, exactly, but for the past couple of months I’ve had this feeling that something is not quite right in my life. I’ve been having … bad dreams. I think I’m supposed to find my mother. I think she can help me.”

  “She might not want to,” Akira said.

  “I still want to try. I still want the truth.”

  There was a lull in the conversation, and after a pause Yoko began to ask me questions about America. She wanted to know about San Francisco and if I often saw movie stars, and Akira rolled his eyes and told her that she had confused Los Angeles with San Francisco. Yoko laughed and Tomohiro shook his head. Though I felt tension between them all, I also recognized the dynamics of a family. They were loyal to each other. Protective, even. I wished I could understand the private conversations they shared.

  Presently, Akira said, “We can take you to her.” He raised his hand when he saw me tighten with excitement. “There is one condition.”

  “Anything,” I said, assuming that I would have to pay for more attorneys, or part with the photos and my birth certificate for the time being.

  “My father needs you to convince her to come see him.”

  I blinked.

  “She won’t see us,” Akira said. “She rarely sees anyone.”

  “Why?”

  Again there was a lag in information while the men discussed matters.

  “Satomi,” Akira said, “I mean, your mother, has become strange. She’s very successful, but she has chosen to cut herself off from her family. It isn’t just you that she’s abandoned. She has abandoned us, too.”

  “Then how do you know how to find her?”

  “We know her attorney. And we know that she comes to the north every year during the snow festivals because she gets her inspiration from classic Japanese traditions. At least, that’s what she says in her interviews.”

  Yoko began to clear the plates and though I rose to help her, all three men motioned that I should stay seated. Cheerfully, almost too cheerfully it seemed to me, she bustled in and out of the room, carrying boxes and cups, then wiping down the table with a damp cloth and finally reappearing with a plate of sliced apples for dessert. All the while, Masayoshi chewed a toothpick and gazed off in the distance. Tomohiro exhaled and fidgeted while Akira sat patiently, waiting for instruction.

  When Yoko finally sat down again, Akira said, “My father says that we should never underestimate the bond between people. Especially a parent and a child.”

  “And you just … want to see her because …”

  “Because we are her family and we miss her,” Akira said.

  I looked at the four of them sitting there, waiting to see how I would respond. It seemed like a harmless request. But there was also tension, a neediness in the air and I sensed more to the story. Why, if my mother was alive, would she have avoided her own family for so long?

  When he saw my hesitation, Masayoshi began to speak. He sat back on his heels and let his low, musical voice unwind in the room, and after a moment, Akira began to translate.

  It was like this, Masayoshi explained. His job as a priest was to usher people on to the next life and he always spent a good deal of time during funerals commanding spirits to leave the bodies of the deceased behind. The most upsetting part of any funeral—for a priest—involved the repetition of the syllable shin, which means “heart,” and which was used to console the newly departed soul that it was not truly alone, but still needed to depart on its journey.

  Problems arose when a soul didn’t leave for the north and hook up to the great karmic wheel, which, after completing its rotation in one hundred years, spewed out a newly born soul. A soul who didn’t agree to this reprocessing became a ghost, a being who stayed behind to try to finish up something left undone in the previous life or who was too shocked and angered by his newly deceased status to accept it. Most of the time ghosts lingered by the site of an auto accident, on old battlefields, or in hospitals. For a long time Masayoshi had had a working relationship with several construction companies, which had called on him whenever they planned a new apartment building or shopping complex. This was especially true during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Japan had been busy growing.

  At the construction site Masayoshi would wave his horsehair whip and chant sutras to any lingering souls. He often saw faces of men in disbelief as their spirits, now released, wound up through the smoke of the incense to the sky. It was exhausting work, but he did it. How could a man who had become a priest not take this kind of work seriously? There was so much suffering in the world.

  The work was always problematic. The construction crews were always in a hurry. They hated to wait for the hours it took for Masayoshi to make sure that every last tortured soul had been drained from the landscape. Foremen always wanted to pay him extra money for a rush job, as though a large fee could guarantee that ghosts wouldn’t return to haunt the halls of an apartment building or weaken the foundation of a new hospital. It didn’t work that way, Masayoshi tried to explain. You couldn’t just pay off a bunch of ghosts. Money didn’t mean that much to them. What they required was some attention and some respect. The concerns of the dead were always elemental, not materi
al.

  There had come a day, perhaps ten years ago, when Masayoshi had been performing his rites with particular intensity. He grew dizzy and closed his eyes once to try to regain his balance. Then he looked down to stabilize himself and saw something unusual about his feet. His priestly white socks looked strangely misshapen, as though stretched. He had blinked, to clear his eyes of tears. Then he saw that his feet really were distorted. Whitish-gray smoke leaked from his toes. His body was melting. Across the field, a long trail of white steam stretched along the grass. It looked like a contrail from an airplane. His body was losing its essence.

  Masayoshi had concentrated as hard as he could to finish the chanting and on his way home in the car, he’d broken into a fever. By the time he’d reached the house, he had turned the heat on in the car and was still shivering violently. He had a fever of 103 for three days before his body had returned to normal. When he woke up, he found his wife sitting next to him with deep and sorrowful eyes, and he realized that ushering ghosts out of the soil affected his family too. The next time a construction company called, offering to pay him a million yen, he turned down the opportunity. People continued to come by and ask him to pray for their sick children, but he turned them down too.

  People could do desperate things, Masayoshi explained. Just this week someone had begged Masayoshi to pray for the recovery of a young girl. Her father and her mother were willing to pay the equivalent of ten thousand dollars. Masayoshi had said “No thank you” to the money, though he had been willing to pray for free. If they wanted to pay him later, when and if the girl recovered, that would be fine. He had prayed and prayed and chanted and blown incense up to the ceiling. When the little girl, who had been hovering so close to the edge of death, woke up in the hospital with clear eyes and the doctor declared her recovery a miracle, the mother and father had paid Masayoshi the equivalent of a hundred dollars.