Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  “My father wonders if you can possibly understand what he is talking about,” Akira said.

  More than you know, I thought. Out loud, I said, “You worry that my mother is like a living ghost, wandering around, needing an anchor.”

  When he heard my answer, Masayoshi broke from his controlled look of gravity and seriousness. For a moment, wonder crossed his face. He began to nod. “Yes,” he said. “The world of the living can be like that of the dead. It is tragic when we lose ourselves in grief.”

  “My mother is grieving?”

  “She needs her family,” Akira repeated.

  After dinner, Masayoshi and Tomohiro announced that they would need to retire to a back office to prepare for tomorrow’s work. Akira said to me, “Let me show you something.”

  He led me to a small room adjacent to the greeting room. He snapped on a light, and I saw an ornate gold and black cabinet sitting in a corner. When he opened the doors, I realized that it wasn’t a cabinet at all, but a shrine. It was tall, perhaps four feet high, and as I peered inside, I almost had the feeling that I was glimpsing another world in which entwined gold lotuses and apsaras flew together in circles. The shrine had a series of levels that rose, like stairs, toward a final stage in the back on which was seated a small Buddha with his eyes calmly half-closed and his hands raised in a benevolent gesture of blessing. Higher up inside the shrine, decorating the walls just below the ceiling, were photographs. All were large black-and-white portraits of men and women.

  “This is your family,” Akira said. “There is your grandmother, Akiko. And my grandmother, Yuri.”

  There they were, my Japanese family, gazing down somberly at me. I had the feeling that they were staring at me across a great distance of time, that they had always known everything about me, the totality of what I had done. For a moment, I felt that all my actions had led me now to this place where I might see traces of my smile, my eyes, my high cheekbones.

  “Akira,” I said, “please tell me what is going on. I know that you know more than you are telling me.”

  He smiled slightly. “It’s difficult to be a traveler. When I lived in Australia, I had the same experience. I couldn’t always understand what was happening. Come on.” He pulled my shoulder playfully. “Let me show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

  My luggage was already sitting in a room down the hall. In the middle of the tatami floor, Yoko was preparing my futon. Akira knelt down to help her spread a comforter over the mattress, and the two of them smiled at each other, sliding into an easy intimacy, the first display of open affection I’d seen since arriving here.

  When they finished setting up the bedding, Yoko let me know that I was to ask her if I needed anything else and the two of them left. But just before he’d exited the room completely, Akira put his head back in between the sliding doors.

  “I’ll go with you. I’ll tell them that you need a translator.”

  “You?”

  “Well, it’s partly for selfish reasons,” he shrugged. “I’d like to meet her.”

  He had tracked Satomi in the news. He’d loved her anime and manga as a young boy and still read her creations religiously. He even, he whispered to me, had a small side business in Tokyo selling manga to the French and a few Americans who couldn’t seem to get enough of the stuff. Daily, his apartment received faxed orders for special issues, which he then sent overseas. It had been comforting to think that one of his family had become famous and lived a larger life than he did. It had given him a kind of hope that it would be possible to escape an ordinary life. If Satomi aka Shinobu could do it, then why not him?

  “I always thought it was interesting,” Akira continued, his voice growing even more gentle, “that she wrote these stories about a young girl visiting a foreign world, or trapped in a strange place.”

  “She was writing about herself,” I fumed.

  “That’s what I used to think about Satomi.” Akira nodded. “Then I began to wonder if she was writing about someone else.” He paused. “I think she was writing about you. In her mind you were trapped all the way on the other side of the world. She’s been imagining the adventures you’ve been having.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The Edge of the World

  I stayed with the Handa family for the next two days and waited for the storms to pass, and for roads leading further north to be cleared. My dreams were cluttered and I slept fitfully in these unfamiliar surroundings. Sometimes I woke up convinced that someone had been watching me, and once I caught the tail end of a silk robe leaving the room.

  In the daytime, I sat in the ima, or living area, in what I learned was called a kotatsu, a low table with a recessed and heated area underneath. From here, I watched tapes of my mother’s anime. One strange story, titled “Tomobiki,” was about a girl named Naho who unwittingly had the ability to unlock parallel worlds. One day she accidentally discovered that an abandoned building on the outskirts of her family town was once a crematorium. She ventured too close to it and was sucked in by a restless fire spirit, who asked her to help him with some unfinished business on earth.

  While I watched Naho’s descent into the mercurial world of the fire god, the rest of the family floated around me. Yoko was often cooking. When they weren’t working, Masayoshi read the paper and Tomohiro watched television or played video games. The only person I really talked to was Akira, who came to the temple for a couple of hours a day, apparently just to see me, since he rarely interacted with anyone else. Yet try as I might to extract information from him, he would not reveal much more about my mother and her family than he already had.

  On the third morning, it stopped snowing and the bullet trains and the major expressways reopened. The temperature warmed by a few degrees, and several icicles fell from the eaves. Clouds parted. I felt as though we had been living inside a very cold teapot whose lid had finally been lifted. In came light and new air and the reality that there was a world beyond the one in which I was living now. More importantly, my mother had agreed to see me.

  Akira and I were to take a trip north. Because our destination was impossible to reach by train, we would drive. I left my things at the temple, taking only my purse, in which I placed the box with the bone, and a coat I borrowed from Akira. Yoko packed us a lunch box and blankets and several large plastic bottles of tea. “For you,” she said to me. “I don’t want you to get too hungry.”

  Masayoshi saw us to the car. “Please bring her back,” he said and bowed.

  We drove for several hours, the road growing increasingly narrow and serpentine. I saw the Sea of Japan in all its wild and gray glory, so different from the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the island. Here the houses were windswept till they tilted, the landscape harsh as though unjustly scoured by a rough celestial hand. I remembered Ms. Shizuka’s warning about the north of Japan. How different was this scenery from the polished city of Tokyo.

  It was a long drive, and after half an hour of uncomfortable silence we began to talk. I told Akira most everything that had led up to the discovery that my mother was alive, leaving out the visitation from the ghost.

  He was a good listener, asking a question every now and then or empathizing with me when he sensed that I’d reached a particularly distressing part of the story. When I was done, I asked him to tell me about his trip to Australia.

  “Oh that,” he laughed. “It was because of a girl. She was an exchange student my senior year in high school.”

  After graduating, Akira had left his priest-training course at university, fled to Australia, supported himself by bartending, and learned to surf on the weekends. Ultimately, as he put it, things hadn’t “worked out” with the girl, and I gathered from the sober way he said this that he still regretted the heartbreak. In his absence, his parents had considered him a lost cause, formally disowned him, and groomed Tomohiro to be the next priest. According to Akira, Tomohiro had been all too happy to comply, apparently under the impression that life as a priest would
one day make him wealthy and able to afford unlimited electronic gadgets and games.

  “My father wouldn’t talk to me when I came back from Australia. When he learned you were coming, he realized he would need someone who spoke English. They called me in Tokyo five nights ago.”

  “I’m glad you came,” I said.

  “It’s tough for my mother.” He paused. “They fought a lot over me. They have different attitudes toward life.”

  From the town of Mutsu, Akira began to drive along an even narrower road spotted with perilous patches of ice. I began to smell something strange. It was a faint scent at first, reminding me of boiled eggs. As we drove on, the smell grew stronger and my stomach became queasy.

  In the distance I could see a tall mountain, shaped like a cone, with a red skirt of clouds.

  “Where are we going, Akira?” My voice sounded very small.

  “Osorezan.” He nodded at the mountain.

  It was an inactive volcano and said to be, among other things, the gateway to hell, the entrance to the underworld, the place where little children’s souls were trapped, unable to cross to the other side because they hadn’t accumulated enough karma to be completely worthy of rebirth. Families came here to pray for the journey of the souls of the dead. And once a year, typically during the summer, there was a festival in which blind mediums (or witches, as Akira called them) could be paid a fee to communicate with the dead.

  Osorezan was connected to a temple, which was generally closed from October to April. My mother had made a yearly trip here for over a decade. Akira didn’t know why, exactly. He suspected that she’d been given special treatment because of her fame. Osorezan was also the kind of place, given her work, from which she would likely find inspiration.

  Masayoshi hadn’t actually spoken to my mother on the phone to make these plans. He’d talked with her lawyer, who had relayed the somewhat cryptic message that if I wanted to meet her, I should go to Osorezan, pass through the temple, and explore the mountain foothills. Masayoshi and his family had not been sure that this was such a good idea. It was a strange place to meet someone, but the lawyer had been adamant that these were my mother’s wishes. I was to come alone, but Akira had insisted on going with me as far as he could.

  So it was that we parked outside the temple Bodaiji. Almost immediately I was struck by how much stronger the stench was outside the car. Akira explained that I was mostly smelling sulfur. There were pools of boiling minerals all over the place, and I should take care to stay on well-marked pathways to avoid falling into any of these cracks. If I felt myself getting sick, I should return to the truck and we would go back to Muryojuji temple.

  It was just afternoon, but the sun was already past its peak in the sky. Akira and I began to walk across the temple grounds, which spread out over a courtyard covered in ice and snow. Above this, the gray slate tiles of the actual temple formed a roof that flexed like wings. The place was also bleached by the sun, so the entire structure seemed to fade into the snow and the gray sky. Snow and ice had accumulated on the eaves, icicles aiming their teeth at the ground. I heard a soft sound, almost like wind chimes, then realized it was the deceptively gentle sound of ice and steel and slate all groaning from the cold and wind. Aside from this, the only other sound I heard was the voices of crows. Every now and then when I looked up, one of their black bodies was held in sharp relief against the white world around me.

  “There’s no one here,” I said to Akira.

  “It’s a temple. There has to be someone here to look after things.”

  Before us stood six statues made of stone. They were all Jizo, the Buddhist deity responsible for helping the souls of children, travelers, and even miscarried or aborted fetuses. They smiled at me in spite of the cold, each seated in a slightly different position, holding instruments, and some arranging their hands in various meditative poses.

  We passed through the temple grounds to a path leading from the temple to a lake. Before me was the eeriest, most unsettling and yet strangely beautiful place I had ever seen.

  Everything was covered with snow, except for the mineral pools. They had spit up their innards and stained the snow myriad bright colors—yellow, bronze, and cobalt blue—as though a childish hand had laid waste to the environment, dumping brilliant colors on the pristine earth. The hot liquid had melted the snow in some places to reveal a world beneath all the ice. Here were pyramids made from small stones. There was a bright-yellow Pikachu poking out of pile of curry-colored snow. Two Transformers sat side by side, encased in ice. In the distance, a field of pinwheels whirred in the wind, their pink shapes blurring into the white-gray sky.

  We climbed to the top of a hill and turned around to take a view of the snow-covered temple below us. Up ahead I could see a lake, the water struggling to lap the shore under its burden of snow and ice. I was freezing.

  “Where do we go?” I asked Akira.

  “I don’t know.”

  So we continued walking. Mostly we were silent, comforted by each other’s presence. But occasionally we spoke.

  “I like your parents,” I said. “It’s not like they ever lied to you or anything.”

  “You don’t have to go back,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Is there something you are in a hurry to go back to?”

  I pondered this. “Not exactly.”

  We walked on.

  Presently Akira gestured at the burbling, stained landscape. “Just so you know, this looks weird to me too.”

  “Everything has been strange so far,” I said. “But this might be the strangest.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. No Japanese person would look at this and think it’s normal. You have to be careful when you travel. People can trick you into thinking that something is ordinary when it’s not.”

  The shore of the lake was lined with strange, snowy figures shaped like small pyramids. I stopped to brush the ice off one. It took me a few minutes, but what I found moved me. Someone had arranged numerous small stones around a bottle filled with flowers.

  “It’s supposed to be a pagoda,” Akira said. “The spirits of dead children are stuck here, unable to cross the river to be reborn.” This was because they hadn’t accumulated enough karma in their short lifetimes to repay their parents for the love they received while they were alive. As penance, they built these small stone pagodas. Unfortunately, a demon was always lurking around the grounds of Osorezan and was willing to break apart the pagoda.

  “I guess that makes me a demon,” I said.

  “Foreign devil,” he agreed.

  We weren’t too sure where else to go in this lunar landscape. Every now and then I thought I saw someone. Akira would see the same figure and we’d hurry after it. But whenever Akira and I grew close to the shape, we realized that we had merely seen yet another statue of Jizo or a pagoda. Once or twice I’d been certain that the figure we had spotted had been moving.

  “Look,” Akira said solemnly. The clouds had parted overhead. For a moment, the sky was a bloody orange as the sun started her descent to the west, over China. “We have to go back,” he said.

  “Don’t you have any other instructions?”

  “No.”

  I looked out over the strange land, now turning scarlet. “Who does she think she is? Asking us to come to such a strange place and then not even showing up?” I squatted. My feet were tired and, though I knew the ground was wet, I sat down on the snow. Then my fatigue gave way to anger. “This isn’t funny!” I screamed. “Do you hear me? If you are out there listening, this isn’t funny!”

  Akira sat down next to me. “Rumi, even if we don’t find your mother, at least you’ve met us. We are your family too, you know.”

  “What the hell is the matter with my parents?” My eyes and nose were watering and I tried to wipe the moisture away with my gloved hands. “Why am I the one out here looking for her, when she’s the one who left me? What did I do? Are you afraid?” I screamed at th
e snow. “Because I’m not. I’m right here!”

  “Here,” Akira handed me a handkerchief. “Girls are supposed to carry these.”

  “Then why are you carrying one?” I asked, as I wiped my eyes.

  “Well, boys carry them too.” He grinned. “You really are a foreign devil.”

  “It’s not me who’s the devil!” I shouted back at him.

  “That’s more like it. You’re much cuter when you are angry.” He took hold of my hand.

  I didn’t stop him. I felt like an observer, a third person looking at two other people’s hands. Akira removed my glove and put it in his hand. Then he took off one of his gloves. He turned my hand over, massaging the palm, then worked his way up to the inside of my wrist. He stroked my skin and tapped my tendons lightly, and the sensation made me shiver. “Are you okay now?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  It wasn’t too much later that we kissed.

  It wasn’t what I expected. The earth didn’t open up and swallow me whole. I felt instead as though I regained my balance after slipping. One second I had been standing on one side of the road and the next I had simply shifted over to the other side to find similar scenery.

  But then he reached inside my sleeve and stroked my arm, just above my elbow. I felt the contact in my stomach, felt it travel down between my legs. He stroked both arms and then I ran my finger across his right arm. I wanted to be even closer to him. I understood the meaning of a deep kiss after that, a feeling of being suspended in the nadir of a dive in a lake. Silence, danger, peace cushioning all sides of my body. When I came up for a break, the air was filled with the chatter of crows, the throb of the ocean, all running together in a warped burble as though my ears were filled with water.

  We began the rocky climb back to the temple. It was hard going. We’d taken a circuitous route, and despite Akira’s insistence that we should stay on clearly marked paths, we’d strayed off course and now with the fading light would have to carefully climb our way back to make sure neither of us fell into a pool of boiling minerals.