Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  I felt pressure in the air, and when I looked up, I saw that the clouds had slid back over the horizon. In the distance, over the water, were dark vertical streaks. It was going to snow. “Akira,” I said.

  How careless we had been! We had the little white heat packs, but no flashlight. “We need to hurry,” he urged.

  It was then that we saw a glowing point in the distance. Once or twice I nearly fell, but always Akira held my hand firmly. And there before us was a house made of ice, the floor neatly covered with straw. A hand emerged from inside and beckoned.

  “I think,” Akira said slowly, his face unusually pale, “we are supposed to go inside.”

  We removed our shoes and climbed into the ice house, whose floor was covered with tatami. The inside was surprisingly warm. Akira and I sat down at a small table made from a wooden tree trunk roughly hewn in half. Two women, one young and the other old, were sitting by a small stove on which the girl heated mochi and a pot filled with liquid. She ladled the hot drink into cups for us both. The hot liquid brought me back to my senses a little.

  The other woman was speaking. She kept her eyes closed most of the time, but every now and then would tilt her head back and I could see the whitish-blue of her irises. Her body was covered with a thick blue-and-white traditional garment so stuffed with insulation that she looked puffed up like some kind of doll. One hand held a dark rosary. The young girl handed us each a piece of mochi.

  It was the first thing I’d eaten in a number of hours.

  “She says there’s a bridge near here,” Akira said to me solemnly. “It crosses the river Sano, which is like your river Styx.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “The bridge is made of mist.”

  “Mist?”

  He shook his head. “It seems to be some kind of test. The bridge will either fade, or you will see it as something solid.”

  “What’s on the other side?”

  Akira shook his head. “These mediums. You know they are trained to be vague.”

  The medium had fallen silent, letting her head fall against her chest. She appeared to be asleep. The young girl held out her hand, offering to fill my cup with more hot sake, and I drank another round.

  “I have to stay here, Rumi. I’m sorry. That’s what the woman told me. You have to go alone. Of course, if you don’t want to …”

  “Let me get this straight.” I smiled, trying to find the humor in my predicament. “I am supposed to look for a hypothetical misty bridge that crosses a river of death.”

  “Yes.” Akira gave me an indulgent smile. “I know it sounds crazy. On the other hand, you didn’t come all this way just to go home.”

  The young girl who had been serving us read the cues in my movements. She stood up in one deft motion and picked up a lantern I hadn’t noticed sitting in the corner. Then she went to the front of the ice house and stepped off the straw floor and into a pair of enormous boots made from straw. She hovered around the entrance, waiting for me. I put the cup down on the little table and put on my shoes.

  It was snowing only lightly outside, flakes falling against my eyes, the icy cold snapping me awake. The young girl moved sturdily ahead of me, quite clearly more accustomed to the snow than I—I was now half falling and half running to keep up with her. Wherever she was going, the snow was much deeper in this part of the landscape.

  Then she stopped and handed the lantern to me. With a blank expression, she pointed off in the distance and nodded that I should keep walking. Behind her, I could see the little igloo glowing in the dark, lit up from the inside. I thought of Akira sitting in there with the old woman.

  I felt a powerful surge in my head, blood rushing from the drink and from the sulfur. As I set out, the lantern seemed to glow like a ball of fire in my hand. I held it out, passing by Jizos who nodded and bowed and hummed at me. I passed strange creatures dressed in bibs and pink hats who cooed like little children, and even stranger creatures growling and sniffing at the earth. On I went in the direction I’d been sent.

  I heard the sound of running water. I was on the edge of a riverbank. Below my feet, the earth dropped away. There was a mound of coins here, sticking up out of the snow and colored black from years of exposure. Wind brushed through the air and I saw the wet black flow of water running and reflecting a beam of moonlight.

  I looked up. The clouds had parted, though only for a moment. I saw more clouds approaching the moon, preparing to shut it out of sight. I looked back down at the water, mist dancing across its edges. And then I saw the bridge.

  It was scarlet and seemed so eerily out of place here, so bright it almost glowed in the dark. I went to its edge and watched as mist peeled off its beams. My first step made a resounding thump. I was standing on something solid. And so I walked slowly across the structure. Around me snowflakes had swollen, practically blooming like fat cherry petals. I couldn’t resist stopping to stick out my tongue. Sulfurous fumes blended into the snow, and at last I was tasting the terrible chemical smell that had followed me since I’d arrived.

  And then I saw her. Standing off to the side, under the protection of a gigantic parasol, mittened hands clasping its handle. I looked into her face. My heart thundered.

  She lifted her delicate face toward mine. “Rumi,” she said simply.

  CHAPTER 13

  Disintegration

  In photos, my mother takes great pains not to smile. Occasionally there is a candid shot where her lips are parted and you see her teeth, which are strong and white and beautifully shaped, like little pearls. None of the pictures gives you a sense of what could happen when she smiled, because when she did, you immediately had the urge to smile back at her. She would hold you there, until she had had enough, and she would lower her eyes or perhaps shift her attention somewhere else, then back to you, and her eyes would look into you, trying to see how you would react in that moment, while you were left trying to get her to smile at you again.

  That night, when she smiled at me, I felt the strength of her charisma. My lungs filled with air, then collapsed. I heard blood whir through the veins in my head, felt juices churn through my stomach. The entire world seemed to concentrate for a moment inside my body, a frail host for the emotions that were possible.

  I remember what happened afterward in bits and pieces. I know that I fell and that a group of women picked me up and that we made our way through the snow. I could not get warm and was angry when gentle but insistent hands began peeling off my clothes. Then, a moment of calm. I came to in a cloud of steam. My hands and feet tingled, shaking off the last of the icy cold. I saw a smile through the haze. I was sitting in a bath with my mother and two other women. For a moment, I thought I saw another ghostly face in the fog. I exhaled, my breath chasing the vapor, and the face disappeared. I inhaled and was relieved to smell something other than the foul stench of Osorezan. My breath echoed. I looked up and guessed that I was in some kind of room, but it was difficult to tell how large it was because of the steam.

  “You see,” my mother was saying to me, “you’ve visited the gate of hell, but you have survived. Now you are here!” Then she giggled and I wondered what amused her so, if it was some expression on my face, or the entire afternoon, which she had observed in secret.

  For nearly three days I was sick and delirious. Mostly I stayed in a room covered with tatami mats and enclosed by sliding doors. When I was awake, I lay in a futon, staring out of a window, while the women tended me. Outside, the sky alternated between shades of white and gray. It was difficult to tell time. The snow fell hypnotically, and I often passed out while I was watching the flakes. I barely spoke. The only food I ate was a light broth, which I sipped out of a lacquer bowl. I got up solely to use the toilet or, at the insistence of the women, to be bathed.

  After a few days I was still weak, but able to sit upright for longer and longer stretches of time. Then I was able to bathe myself and the women showed me how to wash myself properly before crossing the cobble
stone floor to the bath, which they informed me was actually a hot spring. I became curious about my surroundings.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “My home,” my mother said.

  “Where is that?”

  “Tochigi. Not so far from Osorezan. I’ll show you on a map when you are feeling better.”

  I learned the names of her assistants: Kumi, Keiko, and Megumi. In their presence I felt awkward and foreign and clumsy. Megumi cut my hair and made me sit still while Kumi applied various creams and compresses to my face. Keiko bleached, tweezed, and shaved me. Kumi and Megumi shaped my nails into ovals and painted on a design till my nails were a silvery blue with raised white snowflakes. Keiko threw out my old clothes and the three of them dressed and redressed me according to my mother’s whims. One day I wore all white lace. Another day I wore bright red. They made me model my clothes and clapped when I turned around in the center of the room.

  “I look like I’m twelve,” I protested.

  “There is no happier time in a girl’s life than when she is twelve,” my mother said. She herself was wearing a white lace skirt with a pair of tiered pantaloons and a pink sweater with a Peter Pan collar. She was seated on a square zabuton pillow, her back ramrod straight, while she puffed on a cigarette. “After twelve, all our troubles begin. It is a kind of freedom to return to that age.”

  When I asked after Akira, she merely smiled and narrowed her eyes and said that he was safe, and that I would see him eventually. “He’s just a boy. And not terribly interesting from the look of it.”

  “He was nice to me.”

  “They’re all nice at that age. At first.” Behind her, out of the window, I could see snow falling against the backdrop of an old, thick forest. I was reminded of those cartoons where a character is lulled into submission by a swinging pendulum. I blinked rapidly to try to force myself awake. I stood up.

  “Would you come with me to Muryojuji temple?”

  She put her cigarette to her lips and spent a moment inhaling and exhaling. “You aren’t well. Of course you’ll recover—a doctor came to see you while you were unconscious—but it’s not a good idea for you to travel now.”

  “They made me promise to bring you.”

  She smiled. “That’s Masayoshi. Making someone else promise to do something that he’s too afraid to do.”

  I suddenly felt faint and Kumi and Keiko moved to catch me before I toppled over.

  “As I said, you aren’t well.” My mother looked at me directly. “You inhaled too much gas at Osorezan.”

  I took a sip of water. “The ice house and that blind woman. Were they some kind of game?”

  Thus far, my mother had been sparing in her gestures, as though she moved only when there was a clear reason to do so. Now she began to fidget with the collar of her sweater. “I try sometimes to look at life as a game. It’s much less painful that way. You figured out I was alive even when your father lied to you. You’re winning the game.” She shook her head. “I thought it might be fun to provide you with an adventure. Like one of the heroines in my stories.”

  “Except I’m not a character,” I said.

  She brightened. “But travel always does imply adventure. I should know!”

  “I didn’t ask to play a game with you.”

  She stopped tugging at her sweater. She drew herself up then, stoically jutting her chin into the air. Her voice sounded oddly formal. “I did not mean for you to become sick, Rumi. I thought that Americans had a stronger constitution. We will all see that you are well cared for, and that you recover.”

  I watched videos. I watched them while I ate, before I slept, and after every bath. Often my mother watched with me. A couple of days after I had received my makeover from the assistants, my mother slipped a videotape into a player just beneath the television. “My first series,” she said. “The Falberique Forest. I found a version with subtitles.”

  This was her earliest manga, which had been turned into a cartoon, or anime. The main character was a girl named Rose who had grown up orphaned and was adopted by a mysterious man who lived in the town of Falberique. Rose was drawn with a characteristic halo of long blond hair and large, star-spangled eyes. Her true love was a man named Nathaniel, who rode a white horse, and who was also much older than poor Rose, and thus given to alternately treating her as though she were a child (Episode IV, in which Nathaniel gives Rose a puppy) and treating her as though she were older than she really was (scandalous Episode VII, in which Nathaniel gives Rose a velvet dress, then takes her on a horseback ride through a rainstorm, which destroys the dress and leaves her half-naked).

  When the tape ended, I turned to my mother to see if she would insert the next one. “That’s all, I’m afraid.” She smiled.

  “But that can only be half the story.”

  “I know. I sold the rights after that. You wouldn’t like what happens next. The new writer killed off Nathaniel and gave Rose a new boyfriend.”

  “Why did you sell off the rights to the story?”

  “I was tired of it,” she said. “And I thought it was time for my fans to move on. They were getting spoiled.” She stuck a new tape into the machine, a different series altogether. “Everyone said I would fail because I had hurt my fans. But I knew I wouldn’t. This anime was even more successful.”

  We watched this new story and the assistants joined us, focusing with rapt attention on the screen. In the next video, Tsukemono yasha, an older woman eked out a living in a small kitchen shop on the Old Edo Road where she made and sold pickles imbued with special powers. She worked with the assistance of a beautiful but mute girl named Sasha. A young boy, Tajiro, discovered one day that the purple pickles, when he ate them with an apple, could make him momentarily appear to be a young man, and he became determined to learn the secrets of the shop, particularly when, in his adult form, he was able to get the attention of the lovely Sasha.

  So we passed the afternoon, silent before the television, lounging in the bath, eating, and occasionally conversing. Sometimes I wondered to myself what I was doing here, in the company of these strange and playful women. But I was very tired and had little energy to protest my circumstances too much. When I slept, I heard the gentle twish twish of snow on the roof, and the sound followed me to sleep and into my dreams where creatures arose from a white landscape and spoke to me in hushed and icy tones.

  “What happened with you and my father?” I asked.

  She expertly blew a narrow stream of smoke into the air and smiled as it dissolved. “You know, in Japan, when a couple divorces, it’s not uncommon for the child to be told that one of her parents has died. We don’t have your complicated shared custody system.”

  “You weren’t in Japan.”

  “I ended up in Japan, didn’t I?”

  “Come on.”

  “Look, he loved me more than I loved him. It’s not fair how that happens sometimes. I wrote to you a few times, from Japan. But he always returned the letters unopened. That’s how angry he was. Eventually I gave up.”

  “You sent letters?”

  “Especially in the first few years.”

  “You could have come back. Tried to see me.”

  She considered this. “It’s true. And then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either. I did think about it.” She sighed. “When you are far away from people, when you are in a foreign country, it can be easy to feel that you have a completely different life. That the old one didn’t exist and that people are just frozen as you left them.”

  “I didn’t exist.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. How do you feel now about François, now that you are here?”

  “I’m angry.”

  “Does he know where you are?”

  “I left a note saying that I was coming to Japan to find out what happened to you.”

  “And have you imagined what has happened to him since then? He’s probably trying to find yo
u. He’s probably worried, Rumi. And he has no idea that you found me alive.”

  “Let him worry for a while, then,” I said.

  “You see? You think he’s the same old François, at home, still reading your letter. I’m sure many things have happened while you have been gone.”

  I did not want to think about this. I did not want to feel sorry for my father.

  “I wonder,” she said, “how did you find me?”

  “I can … hear objects. They speak to me. They led me to you.”

  Now she grinned. “I have never heard of such a talent. How does it work, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. It just started happening to me one day. François was trying to teach me how to be an antique dealer and then I started hearing what objects had to say about their age.”

  She mulled this over, then turned and barked out an order to Kumi, who nodded and backed out of the room.

  I continued, “I started seeing things. A ghost—I thought it was you, and that you were dead.”

  “Not much of a talent, considering you turned out to be wrong.”

  I got up from the zabuton pillow on which I had been sitting, then went over to the small bag I had carried with me to Osorezan. I pulled out the little red box with the bone and set it on the floor in front of her. “I found this.”

  She eyed the box for a time, then inhaled sharply so the air whistled through her nose. “Where?”

  “It was inside a statue of a kannon. My father had hidden it in the floorboards of the house in San Francisco. There’s a bone inside.”

  “You should put that away and put it back where you found it,” she said ominously. “Such a thing should not be out in public.”

  “At first, I thought the bone belonged to you.”

  She tapped her throat. “Mine is right here.”