Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  Then I imagined the invisible soul of my mother drinking water for the first time in over twenty years. Imagined her floating through streams filled with koi, past wooden riverboats where fishermen speared eel, out into the great harbor of Yokohama or perhaps Kobe, where unsuspecting freight ships had just been launched on trips to California. Out there in the water, she would feel purified. The salt and the water would strip off the injustice of death, and a false burial. And the essential part of her personality, that aspect of her that had arrived on the earth so many years before, would go back to the gods of Japan, waiting, just waiting for another chance to taste the earthly pleasures of love, longing for another chance to feel the heat of summer.

  We had a luncheon back at the shrine and everyone became very drunk. I was talking with Rumi about the possibility of visiting San Francisco.

  “I like the feeling of being far away,” she said to me.

  “Ah.” I smiled. “You are like one of the heroines in my stories who doesn’t want to leave her magical kingdom because it makes her feel powerful.” Then I shook my head. “François will worry. He does love you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because,” I said, “you look like a loved person. It always shows on people’s faces. The ones who discover love when they are much older always look startled. The loved ones expect it from other people.” Softly, now, I said, “Let us see how we feel in a few months, Rumi. Perhaps by then you will be interested in returning to San Francisco. At least to rescue a misplaced statue?”

  She lifted her head and met my gaze and the directness unsettled me. Still, I said, “You won’t have to go alone. And anyway, what is there to be afraid of? There aren’t many more secrets.”

  Abruptly Tomomi appeared at my side. She tugged at my sleeve, insisting that she had something important to show me. Grudgingly, I stood up and followed her outside. I was still standing in the doorway wrestling with a pesky heel when Rumi came to stand beside me. “What is it?” she asked, as Tomomi reached the foothills bordering the shrine grounds and disappeared in between two trees.

  “According to Tomomi, your grandmother used to meet her lover up there,” I nodded.

  “You mean,” Rumi laughed, “that’s where you were conceived?”

  “Shall we go look?” Akira, Masayoshi, Shinobu, and the others came out to join us.

  So we climbed, a drunken party of funeralgoers dressed in black and scaling a steeply inclined hillside. The terrain altered, now bamboo, now trees, now bamboo. Tomomi led the way, apparently convinced that she knew the proper direction to take. Occasionally I paused to catch my breath and to take in the sight of the bamboo. Tall stalks reached up almost as high as any tree. All the greenery buffered us from sound, and the slight hum of traffic from the nearby expressway faded. Soon all I heard were the sounds of the woods and of all of us crashing through the hillside.

  Suddenly Tomomi yelped. When I came beside her, I found her standing next to a large stone, shaped like a mushroom. We turned around to the front and saw that it was a carving, very old and weather-beaten, but there was no mistaking the general shape of a kannon gazing out at us, beautifully dressed and smiling at us through the surface of the rock.

  I felt the earth shake. I thought I must be drunk, but then I realized that the earth really was trembling. Everyone screamed, and I grabbed Rumi’s hand, pulling her into a nearby bamboo grove. I held onto the stalk while the earth roared. And when it was over, the only sound I heard was running water.

  Picture two equally matched sumo wrestlers leaning against each other in a ring deep below the earth’s surface, and you have an idea of the forces that have shaped Japan. The silent and insistent pushing of the earth’s Pacific and Asian plates forced the earth’s crust up through the ocean floor where it pooled, hardened, and then rose ever upward in a geological elevator until it punctured the waters of the Pacific like a breaching whale. The resulting structure, the island of Japan, isn’t completely steady, and is a frequent victim of earthquakes as the two wrestlers deep beneath the land’s surface struggle to gain advantage. It’s no wonder, then, that Japanese mythology is full of dragons and monsters wriggling beneath the skin of the earth, disrupting carefully planted rice paddies and upending the foundations of homes.

  But there is one good thing about all this geological indigestion: Japan is dotted with hot springs. It couldn’t have taken long for the first Japanese to discover the pleasures of sitting in a hot spring, and of spending time in the company of people who had recently cleaned themselves. For inspiration, they didn’t have to look much farther than the Japanese monkey, who to this day adroitly dips in and out of mountain springs whenever the air grows too cold in the winter months.

  Some of the springs are filled with sulfur and smell like boiled eggs. Others are rich with lime or magnesium, coloring the water shades of green or blue, inkpots in which a celestial hand has carefully cleaned her brushes. Some hot springs cluster together—one red, one white, one green. Each of these pools is assigned a healing property, and Japanese healers work out the permutation of how these pools can be combined to heal a variety of old-age ailments (pool one plus pool two to cure arthritis in the hands and feet, pool three and pool five for the heart, and so on).

  Naturally, there is a mythology about these hot springs. According to legend, most are the result of a beneficent kami, or god, who decided to give villagers their very own communal place to play, Nintendo not having yet been invented. Others are credited to the legendary Buddhist priest Dōgen striking his staff against a rock to start the magical flow of water. Whatever the mythical origin, many hot springs are associated with a shrine, and it’s not difficult for a Japanese person, chin-deep in green-tinted water, to imagine that he has dipped himself, tempura-like, into a marinade of the gods’ own creation.

  That afternoon, after the funeral and after the earthquake had scared us silly for a time, the plates near Kashihara shrine shifted, releasing the pent-up pressure of mineral water. We crept out of the bamboo grove and, when all seemed safe, walked over to the earth near the stone kannon, now completely wet. I knelt down and tested the water.

  “It’s warm,” I said. I left my hand under the stream, which had grown stronger over the past few minutes. “Hot,” I corrected myself. Then I looked at Mrs. Sakurai and laughed. “You’re going to have to build a bath.”

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my parents for demonstrating the deepest and truest kind of love. Through my American grandmother, I discovered books and the magic of storytelling and that one could become this thing called a “writer.” My Japanese grandmother, so whimsical and elegant, helped me look at the details of her world, and was delighted when I learned to share her secret vision. My Japanese grandfather, still alive at ninety-six, has shown me how the soul continues to become tempered and wise over time.

  Thank you to my agent, Irene Skolnick, who battled plenty of onis to find the perfect home for this book. Rose, Erin, Julie, and the staff continue to be a wonderful support. I must thank Fiona McCrae at Graywolf for superb chiseling; you helped this hunk of unfinished marble become more of what it was supposed to be. Would that all first-time novelists could be so lucky. Thank you Polly, Katie, Erin, and everyone else at Graywolf. Many thanks to the South Dakota Review, where the sixth chapter appeared in slightly different form as “True Nature.”

  Special thanks to JauntyQ and Brian, who know why, or should. Jeffrey Lependorf, I’m grateful that fate seated us next to each other on that plane. William Clark, I will always appreciate your early belief in me. Thank you to Laurence Hobgood for piano lessons over Brazilian food, and the rest of the band, old and new, for the music. Thank you to the daemon for provoking me when I needed it most; the shadow is a powerful thing. Very special thanks to Maud Newton for more than anyone will ever know. Ellis Avery and Juliet Grames assured me that all would end well. Alexi Zentner, Kaytie Lee, Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, and Vanessa Hutchinson were early readers who
insisted I should “have some f*cking confidence.”

  Thank you to everyone at Empukuji, but especially Shizuko, Sempō, and Ryōko. Also Akemi and Nobata, all the Ogawas, everyone at Tsū-Hachiman, the Kurasakis, Phil for lessons in jade and porcelain, Debbie, Nono, and Isao, and all the other Americans, Japanese, and Scots.

  To my in-laws, Ian and Sarah: when I first set foot in your lovely house, I knew that I was home. And finally, to my husband, Gordon, who taught me how to slow time down so ideas and characters have room to breathe and are able to spring to life with richness and complexity. The book lives because of your faith in me, and thus I have learned something of what it means to have faith at all.

  The Bone Room

  There was a mysterious room behind the main altar of the Buddhist temple where I stayed when I visited Japan with my mother. Visitors to the temple went in and out of the room speaking in hushed tones, and it took me several years to summon up the courage take a peek. Before that, the adults always steered me away from the room in the subtle, discouraging way that grown-ups have when they want to prevent you from doing something, but don’t want to tell you why. I was probably around twelve when I got my first look. Alone, I snuck into the temple’s main room, then slid past the immense, theater-like altar with its gold chandelier and brocade tapestries and the large Buddha seated at the very back surveying his offerings of melon and peaches. Just off to the right was a nondescript door, so artfully hidden behind the altar one might miss it altogether. Beyond this door was the strange room.

  The space inside was dark and I left the light off, afraid I’d get caught. I could see that the room was narrow, and that it followed the width of the temple’s back wall from left to right. To the left were dozens of pinwheels, children’s toys, and bottles of Yakult yogurt milk. The rest of the walls were covered with boxes, plaques, and Japanese Buddhist statuary. Serious, adult stuff. But what was with the toys? I struggled to understand what these playful, brightly colored things were doing in a place that was otherwise so somber. In the years that followed, I asked for an explanation, but no one ever gave me one. It would be up to persistence and adulthood for me to find the answer.

  My parents—and my American grandmother—were very committed to my Japanese education. Every summer my mother and I boarded the plane in San Francisco, bidding farewell to my American father, who could not speak Japanese. Once on the plane my mother refused to communicate with me in English. In those days there was no fax, no internet, and no Skype. International phone calls were expensive and reserved for emergencies. I had to rely on blue aerogramme letters to learn what was happening with my father and my parakeet, Cheerful. Once on the ground in Japan, I felt isolated, transported to another world whose rules became increasingly complex as I grew older and more was expected of me.

  We nearly always began our visits to Japan at the temple because my mother’s aunt, who ran the complex, welcomed us. My grandparents had been deeply upset by my mother’s marriage to a foreigner and we visited them only briefly and always with trepidation. At the temple in the north, tucked into a hillside and surrounded by rice paddies, I would shake off my jet lag and struggle to re-attune my ear to the Japanese language, and try to mold my body to the shape and space of Japanese life: sit on knees and not Indian style, squat over the toilet, leave shoes at the door, wear one set of slippers in wood hallways and another in the toilet, wear no slippers on tatami, sit and sleep on the floor, bathe in extremely hot water, watch everything but save the questions for later, do not gesture too broadly. Accept that people will stare.

  If I was often confused and homesick on those trips, I was also increasingly bewitched. At the festivals I wore a yukata (summer kimono) and admired fireflies and fireworks against the dark night sky. Streets were lit with paper lanterns and young men sang twangy folk tunes. The occasional wedding featured a bride dressed in bright red instead of white. Bamboo forests rattled and beckoned in the rain and cicadas sang me to sleep. Northern California is dry and gold in the summer; in Japan, the vegetation was lush and ripe. At home we were always on the verge of a water shortage; in Japan, we bathed in hot springs morning and evening to rid ourselves of sweat. In time, my mother reported that I was speaking in Japanese in my sleep. When we’d return to California, I would long for Japanese breakfasts with fish and seaweed and rice. By the time I was an adult, Japan had taken a permanent hold of my psyche.

  Now I know that the mysterious room was the bone room. The boxes were filled with ash and bone, as the Japanese don’t cremate human remains at as high a temperature as we do in the West; the bone is intentionally left behind. Sometimes grieving families don’t have enough money for a burial plot. Sometimes, as was the case with my grandmother’s remains a few years ago, the ground is too cold and frozen and the burial can’t take place immediately after the funeral. In the meantime, the bones need a place to go. The toys were offerings to the spirits of dead children and aborted fetuses. Children, in general, haven’t amassed enough karma to automatically begin the journey toward reincarnation; they need the help of a bodhisattva (an enlightened and compassionate being) to help them get started. The toys and clothes and candy were offerings, desperate gestures, bribes: the saddest and most personal acts of people deeply immersed in grief.

  The bone room, that tragic yet clinical space, gets at the heart of what Buddhism is and does in Japan, which is to oversee all aspects of the afterlife. We like to think of Buddhism in the West as being a kind of philosophy, and of course, it can be. But in practice, Buddhism in Japan gives followers a window into the afterlife and very clear guidance at the moment of death and thereafter. A temple is not really a child’s plaything, and knowing this, my mother’s aunt and my mother had tried hard to make my early visits to Japan as devoid of any reference to Buddhism as possible. We focused on festivals, castles, animated television shows, food, and travel. The philosophy, and the grieving of dead relatives and friends, were all in the future.

  Travel to Japan

  When I started writing Picking Bones from Ash, I had a fairly simple premise: what if a girl was haunted by a ghost and readers thought they knew who the ghost was, but turned out to be wrong? And what if the key to understanding what the ghost wanted hinged on understanding another culture?

  I knew that most of my characters would be women, but they would be modeled on the Japanese women I knew, and not the flimsy, suffering-but-beautiful stock characters I’d run into in so many historical novels written by Western authors. I would not write armchair-travel fiction. I thought about the lives of women in my family. My grandmother, who was born into an aristocratic family only to see its wealth and reputation vastly diminished during the early twentieth century and after the war. Despite this, she instilled a firm sense of aesthetics in her children. My mother, who was brave enough to leave her country and her parents to enthusiastically seek out a new life in the US. My aunt, who staunchly ran the temple, seeing it through some very financially troubling times, until she finally persuaded her brother’s illegitimate son to cut ties with his mother and take over. And I thought about the marriages I’d observed since childhood and the quiet way in which men and women formed alliances and relationships—even when not married to each other.

  As I thought about all these women, I began to think about the folk tales and children’s tales my mother had read to me and those animated television shows I’d been allowed to watch in Japan as a child. It occurred to me that unlike Disney cartoons, Japanese fairy tales often feature preternaturally powerful women who are not in search of a man. Growing up, my favorite story had been about the Moon Princess, found inside a fat stalk of bamboo and raised by a poor bamboo cutter and his wife. The princess is wooed by princes from the far corners of Japan and by the emperor himself, but spurns them all, eventually breaking the hearts of her would-be suitors and her adoptive parents (who promptly die) when she returns to the kingdom of the moon. No Disney fairy tale ended this way.

  What was more, most of t
hese Japanese stories developed in surprising and unexpected ways. Nature was often a powerful character, adding a quality of chaos to the universe. Evil characters were slippery, and sometimes become forces of goodness and wisdom. Structure, I realized as an adult, did not need to adhere to strict and symmetrical rules to be beautiful. My own characters thus came to life, with all the challenges, pleasures, and difficulties that come from being a girl who truly believes that the most important thing in life is, like the Moon Princess, to be talented and special.

  Finally, I wanted to begin to share with readers some of what I believe makes Japan so unique, tantalizing, and rich. For a few years, I wrote for the blog Japundit, whose mission, according to its founder, was to show the world all that was Japanese and yet was not “tea and temples.” I’ve been going to Japan for a long time—over thirty years. In my efforts to learn “how to behave correctly,” I’ve listened to what people say and find funny and like to eat and do in their spare time. The tea and the temples are of course bulwarks of Japanese culture and are fascinating, as are the objects of current Western obsessions: love hotels, Akihabara, and other marginal cultural establishments. But there is much, much more to Japan—there has to be, with a culture that is over a thousand years old—and in Picking Bones from Ash, I wanted to try to unfold some of that mystery for curious readers.

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  1) At the beginning of the book, Satomi says: “My mother always told me there is only one way a woman can be truly safe in this world. And that is to be fiercely, inarguably, and masterfully talented.” Is Satomi safe in the end? At what cost? And what about the other female characters, particularly Akiko and Rumi? What does it mean for a woman to be safe?