Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  “Then, whose is this?”

  She shook her head. “It’s illegal, isn’t it, to transport human remains as you have?”

  “If this is originally from Japan, then someone else once traveled with it too.”

  She nodded at me, and smiled, almost proudly. “Yes,” she said, “this is true.” Before I could ask her more questions, Kumi had returned to the room carrying a wooden box about the size of a large watermelon. She kneeled and placed the box on the table and the assistants huddled around it with my mother, who looked expectantly at me. “Open it.”

  I was tired by now of the toying way she talked to me and irritated by her gamesmanship. “Why?”

  “Please,” she wheedled, “I’d like to share something with you. Open it.”

  The box did intrigue me. I knew what it was for; I’d seen plenty growing up with François. So I crossed the room to the table and lifted the lid off the box. Inside, I found a layer of old newspaper, then a yellowed sheet of Styrofoam. And below this, a Korean melon pot. I pulled it out and set it down where it glowed, a pale, icy green against the polished cherrywood of the table.

  “Does something like this speak to you?” my mother asked.

  “Usually,” I said, and began to concentrate. The floor creaked as my mother sat back to watch me.

  I picked up the pot and looked at its base, then set it back down again and leaned forward. Then I took off its lid. The melon pot opened its mouth and began to sing. It told me how it had been created in the twelfth century as part of a wedding dowry for a wealthy princess and had barely been used. The pot had survived for over seven hundred years before it was bought by a Japanese textile merchant and taken to Japan, where it had languished in the care of connoisseurs. I turned the pot around and around and as I did so, it began to ring louder and its voice became clearer and clearer.

  It had been abandoned once, like the many things in this home, but had kept its beauty intact. There had been a time recently in its long history when it had feared for its future, but now it was back with its rightful owner. It did not like being shut away in a box, though this was how so many of its sisters spent their time protecting their value. The melon pot missed warm hands and fresh air and being admired in the sun.

  “Koryo,” I said. “It wasn’t made for export, but it ended up here anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t take it out very often.”

  “Anything else?” She smiled sweetly.

  “Most people just want to know if something is real or a copy and this is not a copy.”

  “You aren’t curious about its history?”

  I reflected on the other things the melon pot had said to me. “Where did you find it?”

  “It was part of my mother’s collection. My stepsisters sold it without telling me. It took a number of years for me to find it, and it cost me a great deal of money, but I am happy to have it back.” She picked up the pot, cradling it, then petted its skin.

  “Your mother was a collector?”

  “Porcelain. You see, our childhoods are not completely different.” She drummed the table once. “What does it feel like to hear an object speak?”

  “Most of the time it feels good to hear something clearly.”

  “Like the precise notes of a song.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It must be a powerful feeling.”

  “Sometimes. Maybe. I don’t know.” I told her then how for most of my life I’d believed that I had a special ability to hear the truth of things and yet as it turned out, I’d missed the most important truth of all, which was my father’s relationship to me and my mother’s disappearance. I went on to recount everything about the past few months: Timothy’s reappearance in our lives, the ghost and the statue that seemed to speak, and how all this had driven me to Japan.

  Then I told her another story. François and I had once discovered a beautiful painting of a geisha holding a parasol in the snow, but the silk on which it was mounted was badly damaged, and the painting rippled in places. Soon the painting would crack. It had been up for auction in the East Bay, and we’d had little competition for it because of its condition. Together we had removed the fine paper off the backing, cleaned it, then matched it to new silks from a pile of scraps François kept just for this purpose. Slowly, we had lowered the painting back on to the new mounting, and once it was in place, flat and clean, it had been a sight to behold, the chilly beauty in the frigid snow, on a search for warmth.

  “Ah,” she said. “It matters how things are framed.”

  “Yes.”

  “But this is impossible, Rumi. We can’t ever understand everything. I know Americans have this fascination with going over and over something that happened in the past, but sometimes the best thing to do is to simply create your own life. That’s what I have done.”

  “Then we are different,” I said.

  She nodded. “That is true.”

  “And you won’t help me.”

  “I didn’t say that. I only mean that you should be careful in the kind of help you expect to receive.”

  In the evening, we had another bath and then settled down to watch more of the Tsukemono yasha video series. After a little while, Kumi and Keiko brought our dinner on black lacquer trays each of which had a small hibachi burner to cook three fine slices of fish meat. My mother lit the flame beneath my burner with a match, exclaiming, “Aren’t we having a good time? When I was a little girl, I wanted nothing more than to spend time in a hot spring with my own mother and eat a nice dinner.”

  “It’s been kind of a long time since I was a little girl.”

  “It’s winter,” she observed. “Time stands still during winter. It’s easy for us to imagine that you are a little girl.” She signaled to Kumi to rewind the tape to the beginning. “I love this part.” She sighed as the opening credits rolled and then she sat back, smiling as the world she’d created flashed across the screen in shades of pink and gold.

  Not for the first time, I felt how helpless I was here. I didn’t really know where I was, couldn’t communicate with most people, couldn’t call Akira on my own because someone had removed the Muryojuji pamphlet from my purse. I was completely dependent on yet another group of strangers.

  My mother picked through the dishes, leaving the leftovers to her assistants. She insisted that I eat everything that arrived on my plates.

  “When I lived abroad, I did not eat, and I became very weak,” she said. “Don’t let that happen to you.” She looked at the television again, and fell silent for a moment. “My mother used to starve herself just so I could eat. It’s very important to me that all my girls are well fed.

  “You’re still doing things because of your mother?”

  “Of course.” She paused. “Everything she said would come to pass in my life has happened, Rumi. There were times when I thought it would be nice to be free of that influence.”

  I couldn’t imagine what that would feel like and I said as much. But if I hoped to prick her ego a little bit, I failed. “Yes, how interesting,” she mused. “Here we are. A girl without a mother and a girl with too much of a mother. Which, I wonder, would most people rather be? One inherits history. The other is free to create it herself.”

  “It must be nice to know where you are from.”

  She shrugged. “No one knows everything. It’s silly to think that we can, or should even spend our time trying.”

  After a week and a half, I began to feel like myself. I began sleeping regularly at night and became restless during the day. I went for walks from the room to the bath and back. I opened the window to blast my face with cold air. “I think,” my mother said, “that you are feeling well enough to see the rest of my home. Shall we go for a walk?”

  I was in a house, or rather a large complex, light and airy in feel, with plenty of windows and smelling of wood and paper. The hot spring and the room where I had been staying were in an outer wing, and when the snow stopped, a
s it did for half an hour the day I finally decided to inspect my surroundings, I could see that the bath was on the edge of a cliff with a view of a town and rice paddies below. A hallway connected this wing to the main house, which I began to explore with my mother, Kumi, Keiko, and Megumi following close behind.

  In the hallways I encountered more young girls dressed as French maids with little aprons and white lace caps, and they curtsied to me and giggled as I passed. Music streamed out of loudspeakers, a piano composition that sounded vaguely familiar to me, but that I couldn’t identify specifically.

  The hallway formed a square, with doors along the perimeter. Along the corridors, I saw cases of manga and anime and posters on the wall—all tributes to my mother’s universe. Here and there were pictures of her posing with Japanese dignitaries whose faces I did not recognize, but whose tense and expectant expressions telegraphed their importance. Around a corner I saw a case filled with wooden Japanese kokeshi dolls, and another that contained plastic robots frozen in salute. And beyond this, Peter Rabbit, Hello Kitty, and Snoopy. Then the toys were everywhere, on the floor, on chairs, high up on top of cases.

  I climbed a staircase to the second story, the women following closely behind. An army of stuffed teddy bears lined the stairs and I had to be careful not to knock them over as I walked. Upstairs I was greeted by the hush of girls concentrating in a pale room that would have felt completely utilitarian what with the stark lighting and silver paint had it not been for the rows of toys lining a high shelf on each of the walls. Three girls were bent over a table using paints and pens, and the room smelled of ink. When the girls saw me they smiled but did not get up to speak.

  “They are the youngest assistants,” my mother said. “They do line drawings and fill in the ink. These girls,” she gestured to the trio dressed as French maids, “hope to graduate from housework to artwork one day.”

  Back downstairs, I followed the hallway to the main entrance of the house, whose heavy double wood doors gave way to a courtyard, now covered in snow. I put on a pair of boots, abandoned by the door, and went outside. We were living behind a white wall, smooth and seamless like an egg, that circled the small estate in a neighborhood populated by tall trees. We were also on a hill and I had to stand on my toes to see the rooftops of buildings below us. With the heavy snow, it was possible to feel entirely isolated. Abruptly, a portion of the wall slid away. A car drove into the driveway, and the wall was sucked seamlessly back into place.

  “That is Shinobu,” my mother said. “Back from the store. She does all the cooking.”

  “I thought your name was Shinobu.”

  “She is the real Shinobu. We just use her name, for fun. As I said, life is more manageable if you think of it as a game. Shinobu,” she said, “is like my sister. And that makes her like your aunt.”

  Shinobu was paler than my mother, with graying hair pinned to her head like a ballerina and smiling eyes. She alone among the women dressed as an adult, in a shapeless brown dress and nylon stockings. She smiled when she saw me and her eyes smiled harder as though to squeeze out excess light buried deep within her body so her face shimmered. She bowed to me repeatedly and asked me numerous questions through my mother. She wanted to know how I was feeling, if I was well enough to eat in the dining hall this evening, and if I had liked the food so far.

  I said that I was feeling much better and wondered if I could help her. There was something likable and uncomplicated about this woman; she was more in keeping with what I had anticipated a mother would be. Shinobu laughed and, through my mother, explained that she was not used to too much assistance. But I insisted. Communicating mostly through pantomime and the few expressions I knew, I tried to help her prepare a meal while my mother hovered around the edge of the kitchen, frowning, smoking, and interrupting us every now and then. When it became clear to me that Shinobu really was accustomed to working alone, I parked myself by the sink and began to wash pots and pans. Observing this, Shinobu rattled off approving sounds that I recognized as thanks.

  In the dining room, girls were allowed to eat together based on rank; those who had been with my mother the longest, like Shinobu and Kumi, sat with us while the others were relegated to sitting elsewhere, rising to bring us tea or water as my mother needed it. My chair was initially occupied by an enormous white teddy bear. My mother expressed her irritation and the girls giggled and Keiko moved him into a corner.

  “You can sit now,” my mother said.

  “There are no men here,” I observed.

  “Men complicate everything. If one of the girls developed feelings for the man, how would we get any work done?”

  “People get work done with men around.”

  “When you were a girl growing up in San Francisco, did you hear the mothers of your classmates begin their sentences with ‘My husband thinks?’ I hear that all the time. ‘My husband thinks.’ I want to ask these women, what do you think? So many times, they don’t even know. In this house, no one ever needs to worry about what a husband thinks. That is what it means to be talented.” She took a bite of her dinner. “Isn’t the chicken good?”

  “Yes.”

  “We grow the bamboo shoots ourselves. Out there,” she waved at the garden in the inner courtyard, which was, like so much else, covered in snow. I peered through the glass to see the tips of a bamboo grove waving down at us from the shadows. “Do you like Chopin?” My mother tilted her head in the general direction of the stereo.

  “It’s nice.”

  “Rubinstein is the best.”

  I continued eating my chicken.

  “Have you ever played the piano?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to learn?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you want to do when you have fully recovered?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you do something other than identify antiques?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m sure you have other talents,” she said. “You have my blood, after all. Perhaps you just don’t know yet.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How about a piano lesson after dinner?”

  “No thank you.”

  “Aren’t you interested in discovering your talents? That’s why everyone else comes here.”

  “I’m not everyone else,” I said. “I’m your daughter.”

  I was going to be sleeping on my own, in a small private chamber located not too far from the quarters of the other girls. My mother’s room was upstairs, and I gathered from the vague way that she talked about it—“Oh, up there”—that few were allowed to see it. In my room, a futon with a pink-and-white cover lay spread out on the tatami floor, with an elephant and a lamb tucked inside the cover.

  “Rolo and Rami,” my mother said. Behind her, the assistants struggled to pronounce the r’s and the l’s.

  There was an armoire in one corner and a small couch in another, and the latter was covered with blue-glass-eyed blond dolls wearing pinafores. On top of a dresser, Japanese dolls of various heights wore kimonos in shades of red and navy blue.

  “It’s a small room,” my mother said, “but quiet.” She picked a few dolls up off the couch and held them to her lap, then sat down on the couch. With her petticoats and lace blouse she looked like a doll herself, albeit an oversized one. “Shinobu’s children were taken from her.”

  The admission startled me. “Why? When?”

  “A long time ago. She hasn’t seen them in years. When we were in college together, a man seduced her and she became his mistress. She thought he was going to keep her. It turned out he was looking for someone like her—a gifted musician—so he could produce children with talent. His wife is wealthy but not talented, you see. Their children all became bankers and he wanted some who would become artists.”

  “That’s … awful.”

  “She discovered she could cook. So she stays here and cooks for everyone and occasionally gives piano lesson
s when one of the girls is interested. Everyone, you see, does something.”

  “I’m not asking to stay here for free. I just wanted to meet you.” I picked up the little red box with the bone in it and held it on my lap. “I’m feeling a lot better now. You could just take me back to the temple.”

  This was not the response she expected. She smoothed the hair on the head of one of the dolls. Then she picked up another to hold along with the others. “What do adult mothers and daughters do in America?”

  “They talk on the phone. They have lunch and they go shopping. I think sometimes they fight.”

  My mother winced.

  “Do you have friends?” I asked.

  “Everyone here is my friend. Shinobu has always been my best friend.”

  “I mean, outside of here.”

  “Not really. Do you have friends?”

  I thought about François and Akira. “Not that many. Most people at home think that what I do is strange.”

  “Well, it is.”

  I shrugged.

  She sighed and stood up suddenly, then placed the dolls back on the couch. “I will keep thinking.”

  “About?”

  “What you can do.” She nodded. Then she wished me goodnight, reminding me that I knew where the bath was, and that someone was always awake and keeping guard in the dining room if I needed anything in the middle of the night.

  When I went to sleep, I kept the elephant and the lamb on the floor beside me. Once I woke up to see their plastic eyes gazing at me sadly. Then I went back to sleep and dreamed about a girl—or was it a woman—dressed in white and clutching two teddy bears on her lap as she sat on the couch. She gazed right at me, as though it were the most natural thing in the world that we should be looking at each other.

  “How did you get in here?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. Then she smiled and closed her eyes and seemed to sway back into the sea of toy animals and dolls and they passed through her skin. “Oh,” I said, not completely disappointed. “It’s you.”

  She smiled in salutation and then her dress and finally her face dissolved into mist. When I woke, I heard the space heater clatter to attention. The room looked completely normal and, slowly, I fell back to sleep.