Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  “Wait a minute!” I called out. “Are you leaving?”

  “Yes,” my mother replied primly. She said something to Kumi, who helped my mother into her coat and began to fasten the large pink buttons.

  “You’re just going to run off again?” I screamed at her.

  She stepped off the landing with one foot and began to put on her boots. “I don’t appreciate that you and Masayoshi tricked me and made me come to this place,” she snapped.

  “Tricked you? You were the one who insisted on meeting at that hellhole of a mountain. Anyway, he didn’t tell me what he planned to do.”

  Now she had both feet on the ground and was nesting her discarded slippers together.

  “So, that’s just it?” I looked back at the Handa family, watching us with solemn horror. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  Satomi’s lips tensed as though she were fighting a tiny monster inside her mouth. “You should do what you want. I always have.” She paused just outside the door. “You could come back with me. You don’t have to stay here with these people.” Beside her, Kumi made ready to close the door.

  “Why should I go with you?”

  My mother gave a deep sigh. The black night sky framed her wiry figure, as though she were a bolt of lightning. “To find out about your grandmother. Obviously I’m not the ghost you saw.”

  I stared at her.

  “Come on,” she urged me. “We’re letting in too much cold air. And it has started to snow again.”

  “Wait one minute,” I said and ran back down the hallway to the room where we had been sitting, with Akira close behind me. Inside the room, I grabbed my purse off the floor. “Why didn’t you tell me about the bones?” I asked Akira.

  “They asked me not to. We weren’t even sure if you were really Satomi’s daughter. Only she would know for sure.”

  I scowled at him.

  “I’m sorry, Rumi. I wasn’t even speaking to my parents a few weeks ago. I was trying to do what they wanted.”

  “Did that include … ?”

  “I kissed you.”

  “And not just once.”

  He nodded, and turned his gaze down at his feet. “That was impulsive. I’ve been thinking that maybe I took advantage of a delicate situation. You didn’t come to Japan for me, after all.”

  “Well, it was unexpected,” I agreed.

  “After you left with your mother, I spent the night in the temple. The priests found me outside their door.”

  Dazed and feverish all night, he had woken in the morning feeling more or less like himself. He’d driven back to Muryojuji temple to tell his parents that I’d been reunited with my mother. Then he’d stayed with a friend nearby, waiting for my return.

  It had all been more responsibility than he was used to or than he had expected when his parents had called him and asked for his help. He’d been ambivalent about continuing that feeling of liability for someone whose emotions he didn’t know. He stretched, suddenly thrusting both arms into the air. “Honestly, the whole experience was very strange. I’ve been thinking the last few days that you are a very strange person to have taken me to such a place.”

  “Strange? I’m not the one who reads cartoons.”

  “On the other hand, it was also kind of … fun.” He gave me one of his half smiles. “Call me here if you need anything.” He gave me a another temple brochure. “Don’t lose it this time.”

  I put the pamphlet into my purse. “Thanks,” I said.

  “You should go with her.” He nodded at the door. “She’s who you came to see. Come on. I’ll get your coat.”

  We spent the night in a ryokan while a storm raged outside, and I was grateful that the Japanese inn included a yukata to sleep in and free toothbrushes. In the morning, we were on the road again. Kashihara was a good three-hour drive away. We passed through hills and valleys to reach it, small towns poking their heads up through the snow. But the shrine was located to the south, in a valley where it was warmer, and where there were signs of spring. Plum trees had pushed forward a few pink blossoms. Bright yellow shoots crept out of the ice. By the time we’d reached the shrine, the snow had thinned to a crusty, icy layer.

  The shrine grounds, which snaked up a hillside, were composed of a series of smaller buildings spaced around open courtyards and little intricate gardens, which we admired on our walk from the parking lot to the shrine’s main complex. Along the way, we met an elderly woman cleaning fallen and rotted apples off another part of the walkway. A sign next to the walkway displayed an apple falling off a tree and hitting an unsuspecting passerby on the head. Below this, text implored visitors to “Beware of falling apples.”

  The elderly woman’s back was hunched over like the crook of a finger. No doubt she was a legacy of Japan’s many years of malnutrition during and after the war. She had few remaining teeth, and treated them as though they were a nuisance, sucking in her cheeks and pushing her lips out of the way of her teeth to speak. “Ohaiyo gozaimasu.” Good morning.

  “We are here to see Mrs. Sakurai,” my mother explained in Japanese.

  The elderly woman gestured toward a two-story structure set apart from the shrine grounds, and we followed a path that twisted around a small azalea garden to a wooden gate and then on to the front door, which slid open easily.

  “Gomenkudasai,” my mother called out. She motioned for me to follow her into the house.

  “Hai!” a bright female voice called back to us from another room. I heard a light shuffling and a few minutes later, a woman around my mother’s age and dressed in a neutral-colored dress and a faded blue apron came around the corner and fell to her knees. “Welcome.” She placed her hands on her knees and bowed low to the ground, her forehead nearly touching the wood floor.

  I followed the gist of the conversation. My mother was sorry to disturb Mrs. Sakurai, who, in turn, was always pleased to have visitors. When we’d finished bowing, Mrs. Sakurai invited us to come inside. My mother and I removed our shoes and changed into slippers. Mine were made of pink terry cloth and embroidered with a small cat and the caption, “Today is happy day. Think peace and be pink with laugh.”

  Mrs. Sakurai giggled, apparently embarrassed that she had forgotten to take off her apron. Her laughter was engaging, and soon my mother and I were laughing with her in an effort to assure her that we were not at all offended by her choice of dress. Mrs. Sakurai peeled off the apron, folded it, and left it on a shelf by the front door before ushering us around the corner. Outside a sliding door, we removed our slippers and then stepped onto the tatami mat floor.

  My mother and Mrs. Sakurai wrestled politely over whether or not it was necessary to drink tea. Eventually Mrs. Sakurai won out and began to fill the teapot with fresh, loose leaves, while I struggled to sit on my knees in the same position as the other two women.

  Later, my mother told me everything they talked about that afternoon. She had mentioned to Mrs. Sakurai how lovely the shrine was and asked about its age.

  “Well, I’m not completely sure.” Mrs. Sakurai squinted. “Maybe three hundred years.”

  “Please forgive me for asking, but has the shrine always been in your husband’s family?”

  “Oh, no. My husband was originally a schoolteacher from Osaka. As for Kashihara, well, it did belong to one family. But after the war …” She bowed her head sorrowfully. “It was not a good time to be Shinto.”

  “No,” my mother agreed.

  “My husband believes that Shinto is at the core of every Japanese.” Mrs. Sakurai brightened again. “He wants little children to all know about their culture. That’s why he became a priest. We were very excited when he was given this post.”

  My mother pulled the photographs out of her bag. She wondered if Mrs. Sakurai could identify either of the two women in the photo.

  Mrs. Sakurai put on glasses to see the picture clearly. She turned it over a few times. “I think this photograph was taken on the south side of the main complex. The family used to l
ive in a small house closer to the shrine. When we took over, we bought this small house here. The girl in the photo looks familiar. I think she’s from the original family; we have found some of their belongings over the years.” Mrs. Sakurai pushed the photograph back across the table.

  My mother hesitated. And then she explained. The woman in the photo was her mother. Satomi had never known where her mother had come from. She had recently come across this photo, and now she wondered if there was anyone Mrs. Sakurai could think of who would be able to provide us with more insight.

  Mrs. Sakurai bent her head, then forced a smile as though to say she had always suspected it would come to this one day. She stood and asked us to follow her.

  We climbed up a stone path to a landing on the hill. The main building of the shrine was here, though its door was shut. A couple of townspeople stood outside and tossed money into a wooden box before praying. Mrs. Sakurai unlocked a side door and led us inside. The interior was dark, and smelled of mold. At the far end of the shrine I could see the main altar displaying the sacred mirror. It looked like the mirror my father and I had at home: a circular disk made of silver, hiding behind a curtain of bamboo the way the moon crouches behind the clouds. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting here,” Mrs. Sakurai said, gesturing to a few pillows around an old, scarred table. A few shrine maidens, wearing red-and-white robes, brought us tea, then departed.

  I heard a noise. A hesitant scuffle. Out came the elderly woman we had seen on the temple grounds when we had arrived. One eye was cloudy from a cataract and I wondered how much she could really see. But she blinked furiously at us as if to pull us into focus.

  “Why don’t you sit here, obaasan.” Mrs. Sakurai pulled the elderly woman toward a pillow.

  “I can sit by myself,” the old lady scolded. “Hello.” She smiled at me. She began to prattle. My mother told me later that the old woman, named Tomomi, had been born before Japan had decided on a standard way of speaking. Consequently she spoke with a thick regional accent and was difficult to understand.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Mrs. Sakurai shouted at the old woman. “Rumi-san is a pretty girl. Very pretty.”

  “I was also pretty,” Tomomi said.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Sakurai shouted. To us, she explained that obaasan, or Granny, had been the caretaker at Kashihara for almost seventy years, since she was a small girl. When Mrs. Sakurai and her husband had accepted the position at Kashihara, they could not just let Tomomi go. “She helps with the children sometimes. Looks after the garden.”

  “What?” Tomomi shouted.

  “I said we are very lucky that you are here to help us,” Mrs. Sakurai barked. Then, quietly, “Why don’t you give her the photo?”

  Tomomi held the picture close to her face and inspected it. Then she picked up the emma and placed it in her palm gently, as though it were the wing of a bird recently recovered from an injury. “Heh,” she intoned. She gazed at the photo again.

  “Do you recognize her?” Mrs. Sakurai shouted.

  Tomomi sat back on her heels and held the emma reverentially up to the light. I could see her pupils dilate, and knew from the focused expression on her face that she could see the object clearly. She waved her free hand back and forth as if recalling the steps of a dance.

  Mrs. Sakurai looked at us anxiously. “Obaasan has told us many stories about the shrine. In one story …”

  Tomomi interrupted. “Why, it’s Akiko! And me.”

  We all stared at her. In an old, creaking voice, Tomomi continued. “Akiko never said who it was. But when her parents found out, well, they did the only thing they could do. They cast her out, to the street. It was terrible, sending a girl out into the city at a time like that! Oh, I worried about her so much. It was even worse after the war when there was not enough food to eat.”

  “A hundred sisters,” my mother said.

  Before I could ask her what she meant, Tomomi peered into my mother’s face and said, “You’ve finally come back.”

  “Me?”

  “To take care of your mother.”

  “My mother is dead.”

  “I know that,” Tomomi snapped. “I was talking about your mother’s bones. Poor thing,” Tomomi continued. “You probably gave her some kind of depressing Buddhist funeral.”

  “I don’t have her bones.”

  “Why not?” Tomomi barked. “Didn’t you realize? She has no business being buried where she is. She’s not a Buddhist. She’s Shinto. She needs you to bury her here, at home.”

  Unlike Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines were not physically connected to a cemetery. Death, in Shinto, was considered a kind of infectious disease. If you got too close to it, you ran the risk of catching it. In the case of Kashihara, the founding family—whom I was still having difficulty accepting as my family—had bought a small plot in a cemetery belonging to a neighboring Buddhist temple.

  Tomomi, whose legs had suddenly become sturdy, led us along a concrete path that zigzagged up a hillside. It was evening, the long day still bracketed by high-flying pink clouds to the east and a pale blue sky now ripening with gold to the west. The pathway was lined with glossy black tombstones, engraved with the names of the deceased, whose shiny surfaces reflected the sky like a field of irregularly shaped mirrors. Nearly every plot was accompanied by a small flower vase in the shape of a bamboo stalk. In the distance, I saw a woman solemnly ladle water out of a bucket and over a tombstone. At one point, we reached a small patch of bamboo where a side path veered off to the left and down toward a rivulet.

  “Our cemetery is down there.” Mrs. Sakurai pointed. Then she gripped the railing and began to take the stairs one by one down toward a small shady patch of earth. I followed.

  It was darker here, the remaining sunlight obscured by the shelter of bamboo leaves. I heard water burbling below, and I was reminded, briefly, of the small brook I had crossed at Osorezan.

  We wended our way down to a rough field of what I thought were stone lanterns. Mrs. Sakurai explained to me that we were really looking at Shinto tombstones. “They are a different shape than Buddhist stones,” she explained.

  Then Tomomi led us off onto an earth trail, and we followed her. I had the grim awareness that here, beneath the earth, lay the remains of people who had once been as alive as I was now.

  “Here,” Tomomi said.

  Five stones, each a slightly different shape, nestled against a hillside. Their faces were worn from the elements, but I could still make out the original embellishments that had decorated the lanternlike tops.

  “These are old,” I said.

  “This is your family,” Tomomi said to my mother.

  Mrs. Sakurai shifted uneasily from foot to foot. “I’m sorry. My husband and I haven’t been here as much as we should have been.” She knelt down on the ground and picked a few weeds that had sprouted in between two of the smaller tombstones. She made a pile of these weeds, root side up, so they would die and not be able to reseed.

  “There’s no name,” I observed.

  “They didn’t need a name,” my mother explained.

  “Only priests can have tombstones in this shape.” Mrs. Sakurai lovingly traced the outline of one of the tombstones as if it were the face of someone dear to her. “When my husband dies, his tombstone will look like this.”

  Below us, the water of a small creek rushed enthusiastically toward a distant destination. Somewhere in the sky, a crow cawed. My eyes welled up. I couldn’t help it. Never mind that my ancestors asleep beneath these lantern-shaped stone columns were people I neither knew nor would ever know. It was as my mother had said: examining the past had complicated my view of my life, not simplified it. And yet, I was right too; my life now had a frame, and was colored with a history that stretched far, far back.

  For every thought I had ever had, every preference or burst of temperament had originated with these beings. So many stories I had never learned, those moments when my ancestors would have rolled their eyes and said, “Well.
It runs in the family.” I wished—no, I hungered—to know what those little idiosyncratic characteristics would have been. I felt as though someone had looped an invisible cord from my gut to my mother to the ground in front of us. An unseen hand jerked on the connection, and we lurched to our knees.

  I looked at my mother. I knew there was something we were supposed to be doing in this situation. But there were so many rules in this country. It would be so easy to do the wrong thing accidentally. I needed her to help me.

  Overhead Tomomi’s voice cackled, “Would you like some incense?” She reached in between us, her gnarled fist wrapped around two dark-red sticks.

  “Rumi,” my mother touched my arm. I started. She had not touched me before. “Say thank you.”

  “Thank you,” I said immediately. Then I turned to look at her. My mother was praying and so I sat back on my heels and prayed too. We sat there for a long time. The earth underneath my knees grew cool, and my legs cramped, unused to being in this position.

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER 14

  From the River to the Sea

  Satomi

  Muryojuji temple, Japan, 1992

  I had initially been amused when Rumi had come looking for me, wondering if she might provide me with the kind of entertainment I needed to soothe my restless nature. I had forgotten the impression I’d had of her when she was growing inside me, that she would be such a serious person who might not like to play games at all. Also, I had not expected that her arrival would involve my own mother. And how could Rumi, who was born in America, have been the one to see my mother’s ghost? I was the Japanese one. We Japanese are sensitive to our environment in a way that the Western mind cannot be. Our world is alive, populated by ghosts and kami, little gods who can inhabit anything from a tree to a rock to a cup. This is why we take such pains to design the perfect tape dispenser, the most charming toilet.