Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  I helped Shinobu with the housework in the morning, and separated the laundry, and helped her to cut vegetables. She was precise in everything that she did, and I felt clumsy by comparison. I could not cut the carrots into uniform pieces and she laughed when she saw my oddly shaped pellets in the glass bowl. I did not know how to slice a green onion finely enough. But still, we tried to work together. Later, she took me into the study, which was connected to the dining room, and seated me at the piano. She lifted the cover, placed a book on the stand, and pointed to the keys. “She,” she said.

  “She,” I said.

  She shook her head. “A, B, She.”

  “C,” I said.

  She nodded and pointed to a figure on the book. “She.”

  “That’s C,” I said.

  She struck a white key beside C and said, “D.” Then she pointed to a spot on the notebook again. Taking my unwieldy hands, she tried to guide me through a scale. My fingers felt fat. I imagined toddlers taking their first steps, or the one time I’d tried to climb a ladder onto the roof. “No,” I said to Shinobu. “I don’t think so.”

  Shinobu nodded with encouragement. “She. D.” I tried to send my graceless fingers up and down the piano. And I really did try. Shinobu was a good sport, laughing at my mistakes and patiently trying to fix my fingers as I wobbled through a version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

  Finally, I’d had enough of playing the piano, and though I was glad to see Shinobu smiling, I wanted to give my fingers a rest. “Shinobu,” I said to get her attention. Then I pointed at her. “You have children. Babies.” I cradled an imaginary child in my arms.

  She grew sad then and nodded and held up two fingers as her eyes moistened.

  “Satomi?” I asked. “Does she have any other children?” I pointed to myself and held up one finger. “Just one?”

  It took her a moment to understand but then she nodded. “One,” she said, her voice hesitant in trying to speak my language. Then she pointed at me.

  “Just me.”

  Shinobu placed her hand on her heart. “Satomi,” she said, patting her heart a few times. Then she put her two fists together and separated them, as though to break an invisible object in the air. “Mother.”

  “What happened?”

  Between the two of us we did not have enough vocabulary to flesh out the story, but I understood the gist of what Shinobu had wanted to tell me. Between my mother and her mother, something had been broken. Then Shinobu pointed at me and put her hands together again. “You want me to fix something? Or the fact that I’m here means I’ve fixed something?” Shinobu laughed and shook her head regretfully and the two of us sat quietly for a time, and I was sorry that our language abilities made it almost impossible to discuss these difficult things that pained us both.

  At dinner, I asked Satomi, “What happened to your mother?”

  It took a moment for her to answer. “She became sick and she died.”

  “How long ago?”

  “This isn’t dinner conversation.” She smiled at me with her full, glamorous smile, the one that was supposed to keep me pinned in place, unable to press her further.

  “Well, do you know where she was from? I mean, do you have brothers and sisters? Do I have more family I can see?”

  “No.”

  “No, there isn’t any more family for me to meet, or no you don’t know where she was from?”

  My mother set her chopsticks down on the table and took a deep breath. She lit a cigarette and began to inhale and exhale fiercely. One by one, everyone around us stopped eating. I hated this feeling, that one person’s mood was responsible for everyone else’s, and I tried to fight her influence and to keep chewing and swallowing. Finally, she said, “I don’t know anything about her family, or where she was from.”

  “Have you ever tried to find out?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I accept the life that I have here, Rumi.”

  “Wouldn’t it be good to find out?”

  “Why?”

  “So … you would know?”

  She smashed the cigarette in the ashtray. Her face became blank. It was the strangest thing. It was as though a curtain had simply closed across her heart and her face would no longer betray any emotion at all. I’d noticed versions of this behavior during my stay in Japan: how the professor had acted with propriety on our drive to Muryojuji as though he hadn’t teased me with the demon festival, and how Akira had retreated into a neutral pose in front of his family. It was a kind of disappearing act and I found it frustrating and almost alarming

  “Satomi … ?”

  “Please enjoy the rest of your food,” she said with exaggerated decorum as she stood up from the table. “I have work to do.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, but my mother had already disappeared from the room.

  I turned to Shinobu, who had watched all this with an increasingly sorrowful expression. She, too, stood up from the table and retreated from the room in the direction Satomi had gone. The other girls would not meet my eyes. One by one, they ceased eating and left, and finally I, too, finished my dinner and made a hasty retreat to my room.

  At breakfast the next morning, Satomi said to me, “I know you want to return to Muryojuji, Rumi. If you’d like, we can arrange for you to go today.”

  “Today?”

  “You are feeling better, aren’t you? And you’ve been asking to return.”

  So, this was to be my idea.

  She went on to explain, somewhat stiffly, that I was always welcome for visits, but there was now a great deal of work for everyone to do and if I was not going to be able to help her in some way, then it was best for everyone that I return to the temple. She spoke in vague terms, something about how nice it had been to meet me and that she was happy I was healthy. I only half listened.

  Then I went to the room where I had been sleeping and changed into the clothes I’d worn on Osorezan, now cleaned and pressed. When I came back to the dining room, I found my mother, Shinobu, and a few of the assistants waiting. Shinobu was arguing about something with my mother, and Kumi and Keiko were hesitantly chiming in, clearly torn between the two women.

  “Shinobu thinks I should take the day and go with you.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t see how traveling together would change things between us. “It’s up to you. I mean, I know Masayoshi wants to see you. But I know you’re busy.”

  My mother exhaled roughly. “He could come here if he wanted to see me so badly.” Shinobu began to insist on something again and Satomi rattled off a response. I stood and listened, feeling uncomfortable, until my mother again sighed harshly. “It’s true. I should thank him in person. I suppose we can use the driving time to do some work.” Then she walked briskly out of the room, calling back to us over her shoulder that she needed to get her coat.

  My mother, Kumi, Keiko, Megumi, and I all left together in a small minivan, painted pink and white and made to look like a cat, with the headlights as eyes and special attachments to the side mirrors to look like ears. Kumi took the wheel, wearing white gloves and a little black conductor’s cap, while Shinobu waved good-bye to us, smiling and nodding, I thought, with particular intensity to me. The minivan was outfitted with a video screen, and as we drove to Muryojuji temple, my mother played tapes of her favorite cartoons for me, commenting on the characters and the settings and how her travels had inspired both. Now that I was in the thrall of her world again, her mood improved considerably. If she had really intended to do any real work on that trip, I never saw her lift a pencil.

  It was a long drive, perhaps four hours, and it became clear to me that my mother did not at all live “near Osorezan” as she had told me the first day I’d woken up in her house recovering from the gas. We stopped just once at a rest area to use the toilet and to buy some tea, and then we were on our way again. Eventually, Kumi turned off the expressway and began to take a series of increasingly narrow roads. I
started to recognize my surroundings.

  Muryojuji temple came into view as it had before, with the two priests standing on the cliff watching our van approach. We parked and climbed out of the van, stretched our legs, and bowed in greeting. Later, we drank tea and made small talk. Masayoshi sat like a man in his palace, while his twitchy Tomohiro eyed us all, ready to protect his father if need be. Satomi, the assistants, and I crammed all together on the other end, and Akira was by himself. I looked to him for some hint that he would acknowledge what had happened to us on the mountain, but he had retreated to a characteristic aloofness, nodding at me only once.

  Masayoshi seemed almost amused to see my mother, as though she were a child entertaining him with her antics. For the first time since I’d met him, he shed his somber, grave demeanor to smile broadly. He interrupted her every now and then as she spoke, and then she would chastise him and he would blush.

  I felt as though the two of them were bound together by invisible thread and between them was suspended a precious object. Pull one string too tightly and I imagined that the treasure would shatter. It had grown windy outside, and gusts of air battered the windows and ceiling. Meanwhile, Satomi and Masayoshi continued their game, maintaining a delicate balance, pulling against each other so hard over the course of the next hour, they seemed to have lifted one another into a room of their own, while around them, the wind seemed to whirl like a cyclone.

  About an hour after we had arrived, Tomohiro went out of the room, returning with an envelope, which he handed to my mother. The tense atmosphere in the room took a turn. My mother became aware of the rest of us seated around her. Glancing at us all first, she briskly undid the clasp and pulled out two photographs. Her fingers trembled slightly while Masayoshi spoke to her. Then Akira said something to her in Japanese and, after a moment, she slid the pictures across the table to me.

  “Your grandmother,” Satomi said to me curtly. The invisible thread binding her to Masayoshi began to fray.

  I saw a young woman standing outside a building with a sloped roof. She was very small and very serious, yet with a little bit of mischief playing in her eyes and at the corners of her mouth.

  The other picture was a similar portrait of my grandmother taken by the same building, but at a slightly different angle. In this photo my grandmother was not posing alone. Another young woman stood next to her with a cautious, almost suspicious expression on her face.

  “We don’t know who that is,” Akira explained, suddenly sitting beside me. “We think it’s your grandmother’s servant.”

  The rest of the envelope contained documents, papers, and a small piece of wood, flat and five-sided, not like a pentagon but like a square house with a triangular roof on top. Traces of paint and writing clung to the surface. Akira explained to me that this was an old emma, or Shinto charm. Shrines made these tablets and sold them to the public, and most came with a little picture of the zodiac animal corresponding to the year in which it was painted. This emma had a monkey. Most of the time people wrote wishes or hopes on the emma, then left it at a designated place at the shrine where it would be blessed and burned, the smoke delivering the prayers to the gods. In this case, though, my grandmother had kept the emma, along with these two photos and the other documents my mother was looking at now.

  “Kashihara.” Satomi turned to me. “It’s the name of a shrine.” Outside, the wind howled.

  When my grandmother had died, Satomi had been led to believe that there was nothing for her to inherit. My mother had skipped out of Japan after the memorial service and gone off to America, as we now all knew, coming home only much later to Japan to reinvent herself. Satomi’s relationship with her stepsisters had always been strained, and in a moment of spite, Mineko hadn’t told my mother about the envelope. Somewhere in the intervening years, Mineko had relented and, according to Akira, become less bitter. “Apparently, her children are fans of your work,” he told Satomi, who laughed. Mineko had given the papers to Masayoshi for safekeeping with the hope that he would be able to turn everything over to my mother one day. Though he’d tried repeatedly to contact my mother, her staff and attorneys never allowed him to send her anything.

  Much later, Akira told me how my mother had responded to this information. Gone was the happy, toying way they had related to each other. “So, the only reason you wanted to see me was to give me these papers so you wouldn’t have to feel guilty about hanging on to them anymore,” my mother said.

  “That isn’t the only reason.” Masayoshi responded. “We are family and it hasn’t been right to be apart all these years.” My mother switched off the alluring beam of her smile, almost a physical thing in its intensity. With her smile snipped clean out of the air like that, the room had instantly felt colder.

  “There were plenty of ways for you to get this information to me.”

  “You wouldn’t see us.”

  “I don’t like cowards.” She paused. “You have always been such a headache. Ruining our nice reunion. Never able to say what you really feel. Talking in circles around the things that really matter.”

  “I’m a headache? Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you’ve caused for me? The temple? My family?”

  “This has nothing to do with your family!”

  “Maybe you were just trying to get back at me when …”

  “Oh, don’t flatter yourself. You’re not important enough to me for me to want to hurt you!”

  “I know I caused you pain …”

  “Any pain you’ve caused is for yourself, Masayoshi, and this weird life you’ve created …”

  “Stop yelling at me! This shouldn’t be about us anymore but about our children. Your own daughter came all the way from America to look for you and …”

  “How convenient. I say something that gets too close to the truth and the little priest hides himself by acting all enlightened, as though he has no feelings of his own and only cares about other people!”

  “Satomi!” he thundered, and we were all startled. This angry man roused into a passion was not the gentle, slightly absentminded person I’d come to know. “Where is the statue? And where are the bones? Where are your mother’s bones? I know you took them!”

  She looked stunned for a moment at the escalation in his temper. Then she licked her lips and smiled a small, triumphant smile. “You see. I knew you weren’t really interested in me.”

  He was beside himself. “I don’t want to talk about our lives right now! I want to talk about your mother and your obligations to her!”

  She waved her hand. “This is all becoming so uninteresting. I haven’t done anything wrong. My mother has been dead for a long time.” But I could see that she was nervous, for her breathing had become shallow and quick and her gaze darted around, unable to find anything on which to rest.

  Masayoshi too could see that she was nervous. Seizing the moment, he began to talk rapidly and urgently. “I know what you have done,” he said. “And I am trying to help you fix it.”

  A number of years ago a relatively powerful quake had struck the north of Japan, decapitating tombstones and disturbing the Handa family plot. Masayoshi had saved up money for a replacement and a few months ago before the winter season had set in, he had finally set about replacing the tombstone. To do this, he needed to temporarily remove, then rebury all the bones. In a very private moment, Masayoshi and Tomohiro had chanted together before disinterring the family remains; anytime a grave is disturbed, a priest must make the appropriate prayers. When they went to put the old urns into the new grave, which had been reinforced with concrete, they found that Satomi’s mother’s bones were missing.

  It is natural, of course, for bones to disintegrate. Even after two years, an urn filled with bones is going to absorb moisture and fill up with water. When they opened the urn belonging to Akiko, however, they had been disturbed to find that it was filled with tiny stones. This could only mean one thing: Akiko’s bones had never been buried.

  What had
happened? They recalled a period after Akiko’s memorial service when her bones had been placed in a hidden room at the very back of the temple. The family had not buried the bones immediately because Akiko’s death had been unexpected and her family plot not yet ready to receive her. A year later, in the spring, they had buried the bones. Or so they thought.

  So what had happened to the remains and where had they gone? Had there been some sort of mix-up in the bone room? Had someone perhaps inadvertently buried the wrong urn? But no. All the urns were clearly marked. Someone had intentionally taken the bones from the temple, replaced them with a false urn containing stones, and sent the bones off somewhere else.

  But who?

  Grudgingly, they’d all come to agree on the same culprit.

  There had been a few hours during Akiko’s funeral when my mother had been left unattended while she slept in the house, working off a hangover. No one saw Satomi leave that day. She had simply disappeared. It was possible that she had snuck into the back room to swap the bones with stones. Scandalous, offensive, but possible.

  This would also be the ultimate revenge against the Horie family for hoarding Akiko’s affection. The bones had been taken somewhere only my mother knew. For Masayoshi, this was a terrible discovery. It was his job to usher souls to the next life, and my mother had committed a terrible transgression. Was she not worried that her mother, Akiko, would be unable to continue her peaceful progress to rebirth?

  “You have had great sadness,” Masayoshi said. “It is because you did not properly take care of your mother when she died. And now you must tell me where the bones are so we can try to fix things.”

  When he had finished speaking, my mother sat with her gaze off to the side, her body tilted and slightly limp, like a once stiff balloon gone a little soft. If I touched her, she might roll over. Her mouth flitted in and out of a small smile, searching for the appropriate reaction on which to settle. When she jerked her head up to look at all of us, her eyes cleared, irises whirling. To me she said, “I hope this has been interesting for you.” She nodded at her assistants, and then as one they all stood up, petticoats and ruffles fluttering. Then they hurried toward the entrance.