Temple Alley Summer

by Sachiko Kashiwaba

  “Would Dad know if there was a temple here once?”

  “Not sure. Why don’t you ask him?” Mom answered absently.

  It took forever for my dad to come home that day. He got in after nine, when I had just finished bathing, and his face was red from drinking. I thought his work must have run long, but he said he’d gone to a gathering of volunteers preparing for the summer festival. Like I said, our district’s been around a long time. Ties between neighbors go back far, so it’s hard to shirk these obligations.

  “Did you know our street used to be called Kimyō Temple Alley?” I asked him.

  Dad paused a moment, then shook his head. “No, I didn’t. Why do you ask? Is this your summer homework or something?”

  Mom perked up and leaned forward.

  “Say! That’s a good idea. Those summer projects where you grow tomatoes and keep journals with pictures of shoots and wilted stems must drive even your teacher crazy. How about doing your project on the history of neighborhood names this year? Interview people who know the old names! How does that sound? Dad could help you find neighbors who remember the old days.”

  This was no request; it was a command. Dad’s face grew serious.

  “Let’s see, people who might remember the old names. If your grandpa were here, he would know … guess we need someone else his age. Mr. Suzuki next door is a good ten years younger and only moved here when he bought his place, so he wouldn’t be of help. Other people I can think of have already moved away. Families who’ve been on this street for years … we might be the only ones.”

  Dad frowned at the discolored ceiling, then remembered.

  “Wait! Ms. Minakami might know something. She’s the aunt of Ms. Satō, who lives kitty-corner from us. I remember about twenty years ago, when the first apartments were built, she said owning a house was a pain and passed hers to Ms. Satō. Then she moved into the newly built Minami Heights.”

  Dad clapped his hands together.

  “Right, that was just about twenty years ago. Ms. Minakami is about two years older than your grandpa. She decided to get an apartment sometime in her sixties.” He nodded as memories of his younger years came flooding back.

  “Well, apartment living is certainly easier: no snow to shovel, only one lock to check, and no grass to mow—unlike here,” Mom pointed out.

  “Yes, dear, I’ll mow on Sunday,” Dad replied. “But with Ms. Minakami it was more about being trendy, I think. That’s why she moved.”

  Dad added that Ms. Minakami was a flashy dresser.

  “Let’s see, if she was two years older than Grandpa, would she be eighty-two now?” Mom asked.

  “That’s right,” Dad answered. “I saw her not too long ago. She came to City Hall to complain about the garbage.”

  Did I mention my dad works at City Hall? So did my grandpa.

  Dad said that Ms. Minakami was a character and used to keep her light on till all hours when she lived close by. He thumbed through the phone book and called her.

  Next thing I knew, I was scheduled to meet Ms. Minakami the next afternoon at one to discuss my summer project, theme: The History of Neighborhood Names.

  “Isn’t this great, Kazu? Summer homework will be a breeze this year!” Mom said, looking pleased.

  Mom’s usually the one who really does the work on my summer project, so I understood her enthusiasm. But I wished we had stuck with tomatoes.

  The closing assembly at school the next day was long, hot, and tedious, like always. When it finished, everyone looked bored and restless. Only Akari sparkled. She looked completely unlike the anxious girl who had sat in a house with nothing inside it the day before. I almost wanted to tease her and ask what was so fascinating about the principal’s speech on how we should all work to avoid traffic accidents.

  But when I left school later, all I could think about was summer vacation. I was one hundred percent thrilled.

  I strapped on my art set, sketch board, gym bag, and indoor shoe bag and headed home with Yūsuke.

  “Have you decided on your summer project yet?” I asked him.

  I wanted him to collaborate with me on my project. It would be much easier to go and interview people with him along. I also wanted to talk to him about Akari. But Yūsuke had only one thing on his mind: lunch.

  “Why worry about our summer projects right now? I’m starving! Hey, everyone at my place is busy today. I get to buy lunch at the convenience store.”

  Yūsuke grinned in bliss.

  At Yūsuke’s kimono store, where the staff and his grandparents work, it’s common to see his mom or his grandma boil two sinks’ worth of noodles at a time, or cook curry in a pot three times the size of ours. They’ve served me meals lots of times. But today they had their hands full with a yukata promotion for the Kannon summer festival. So, for a change, Yūsuke was allowed to buy his own lunch. As for me, a store-bought lunch is neither rare nor exciting.

  “Should I get some instant fried noodles?” Yūsuke asked me. “I haven’t had those for ages! Man, my stomach is growling!”

  Yūsuke started to list all the TV commercials he’d seen for convenience store food.

  Meanwhile, Akari was walking along right in front of us, her red baubles bobbing up and down. There was no way I could ask Yūsuke about her now.

  “Come over to my place after you eat lunch,” I said. I would just have to talk to him at home.

  “Didn’t I tell you I have cram school today?”

  I saw Yūsuke’s face turn gloomy. Oh yeah, he had told me that the day before.

  “I’ll come after,” he promised. “Might be four or four thirty. Then we can go to the festival.”

  Yūsuke walked off, muttering that they would probably serve fried noodles at the festival, so he would buy something else for lunch.

  I wound up wolfing down some of Mom’s famous grilled rice balls and going to meet Ms. Sato Minakami at one all by myself.

  Ms. Minakami lived in Minami Heights apartment 902 and said she was eighty-two, no, eighty-three years old. But her back was ramrod straight and she stood a good four inches taller than me. Neither thin nor fat, she seemed the picture of health.

  Her apartment had a pink, white, and gold striped sofa and frilly curtains, Western style. The iced tea she served in fancy glasses on her marble table clashed with the senbei rice crackers she arranged in a basket.

  I opened my notebook so I would look the part.

  Ms. Minakami’s hair was dyed brown and set in a trendier style than my mother’s. She had pale skin, bright red lipstick, and hardly any wrinkles. Her mascara made her look large-eyed and, well, cute. She wore a lace-trimmed summer dress that actually tied in the back with a ribbon. I would laugh if my mom wore that, but it didn’t look too bad on Ms. Minakami. She even smoked. She was a character, that was for sure, but as I sat facing her, I saw that everything about her sort of fit together.

  “So you’re Gen-chan’s grandson?” she said. “That was too bad about Gen-chan. I went to the funeral, you know. This past March, wasn’t it? It was cold. My circle of acquaintances keeps shrinking and shrinking these days … but I get to make new young friends just like you. Living a long life is worth it!”

  Ms. Minakami flashed a grin.

  Gen-chan was my grandpa; his name was Genji Sada.

  Ms. Minakami crunched her hard senbei loudly. It looked like she would live for a while yet.

  “I wonder why they called that street Kimyō Temple Alley?” she said, not saying whether she knew the answer. She looked at me as if trying to make out why I wanted to know.

  “It seems strange, since there’s no temple close by,” I replied.

  “True, it does seem odd. So that’s how you came up with your project?”

  Ms. Minakami looked at me curiously. I got a bad feeling. If she didn’t know how the street got its name, I wished she would just say so and be done with it.

  “It’s kind of creepy, isn’t it?” she said. “Kimyōji, ‘return-to-life’ temp
le. It makes me think of those people in movies, um …”

  She waved her right hand as though reaching for the word.

  I supplied the word my mom had used. “Zombies.”

  “Zombies! Right.” Ms. Minakami nodded. “Zombies are scary. Have you seen one?”

  Suddenly, the look in her eyes was scarier than any walking dead.

  “The ones in movies are obvious zombies,” she went on. “They’ve got those ripped-up clothes and big, dark circles under their eyes. You can almost smell that they’re dead. But there are other zombies who look exactly like you and me. Zombies who look like regular people.”

  I was surprised. “There are?”

  We seemed to be drifting off topic.

  “Sure! Some zombies live right alongside ordinary people,” Ms. Minakami said. “They’ve got some nerve. To think a dead person could live next door to you, eating ramen like it’s normal. How awful!”

  Ms. Minakami shivered.

  I wanted to tell her she could say what she liked, but zombies are not real. Thinking about them made me feel funny.

  “Have you seen one?” she asked again.

  I swallowed. “Have I seen a zombie?”

  She nodded, looking serious.

  She had totally forgotten my school project. I hadn’t come here to talk about horror movies. I sighed softly.

  “They go around just like you and me,” Ms. Minakami went on. “But there are people who can spot them. People who know the undead when they see them. What did you call them again? Zombies. There are people who can see through that ghost skin of theirs!”

  Ms. Minakami raised her face suddenly, acting dramatic.

  She seemed to be saying that I could see through the skin of ghosts. And suddenly I started to make a connection. But what did Ms. Minakami want from me?

  As if reading my thoughts, she narrowed her eyes.

  “Have you seen one, Kazu? There are people who see them the moment they come back to the world. Is that what’s happened?”

  Her voice was light, but her eyes were intense.

  It hit me that she was asking about Akari. I did not say yes. I held back. There was no way I would admit such a big secret to Ms. Minakami. I didn’t like her. I had just figured that out.

  “Where do they come back from?” I asked casually. I even tilted my head.

  Zombies, dead people, ghosts—all of them come back to life in temples, according to legend or something. But my house was no temple.

  “Well, my boy, good question. They must come back from heaven, right? That’s how it was in a movie I saw long ago.”

  Ms. Minakami dodged my question. I knew it was a dodge.

  I felt confused. I frowned in frustration, but I still got nothing out of her.

  “I’m sorry, Kazu. You came all this way but I couldn’t help you. Wait a minute, though. Your question is about a temple, so maybe someone at a temple could help you!”

  Ms. Minakami clapped her hands together. She was acting dramatic again, but I ignored that.

  “Hmm,” I said, nodding vaguely. “I’ll give that a try.”

  Before I could say anything else, Ms. Minakami had taken out her cell phone.

  “This is Sato Minakami. Thank you for the other day … Yes, yes. No, today I’m here with a young man who wants to know about Kimyōji. I couldn’t help him. He’s Mr. Sada’s grandson. Yes, Mr. Sada.”

  Ms. Minakami sneaked glances at me as she talked. When she finished, she collapsed her flip phone with one hand.

  “You’re in luck. The priest at Ryūseiji says he can talk to you. Do you know how to get to the temple district? It’s easy enough to get there from here.”

  Ms. Minakami told me to wait a moment, while she wrote the telephone number of Ryūseiji and drew a basic map on a piece of paper.

  “Will the priest at Ryūseiji know about Kimyōji?” I asked.

  “They’re both temples. He’ll certainly know more than I do.”

  Ms. Minakami pushed the paper at me.

  “Uh, thanks.”

  I felt that what she was doing was less a kindness than an interference, but I accepted the paper. I had no choice, because she even folded my fingers around it.

  I unfolded the paper and looked at it. Temple district. I sighed. The temple district was three or four bus stops from Ms. Minakami’s house. Too close to pay the fare, so I’d have to walk. In this heat. And at two, the hottest time of day, I would melt on the asphalt.

  “Why don’t you take a taxi?” Ms. Minakami offered, as if reading my mind.

  She forcefully opened a white chest of drawers trimmed with gold and took out her wallet. Some glass figurines and framed pictures on top of the chest rattled. She seemed determined to get me to this temple.

  “No, thank you. I can get there on foot.”

  I knew better than to accept her money. I could already hear my mom scolding me for taking cash from someone I barely knew.

  I jumped to my feet.

  I headed down Ms. Minakami’s front hallway and felt relief as I stepped into my sneakers by her front door. Her apartment was cramped. I wondered how many rooms it had. Ms. Minakami lived alone, but there were families of four living in places the same size as hers. I liked my house, I realized, even if I had to walk miles to the toilet.

  I learned then that Ms. Minakami did not live alone. As if to announce my mistake, a cat yowled.

  “Nyaaa!”

  I turned around to see a black cat the size of a small dog. Ms. Minakami picked it up with effort.

  That was her cat? I’d seen it before. It walked around our neighborhood like it owned the place. Like it was the local cat boss.

  “Kiriko, this is Kazuhiro-kun. He’s going to Ryūseiji now.”

  Kiriko. She had pretty impressive whiskers for a lady cat. I said nothing.

  She yowled a second time, showing me the red insides of her mouth. I felt scolded for not responding.

  Kiriko glared at me with her blue eyes. I said goodbye—to Kiriko or to Ms. Minakami, I wasn’t sure—and made a beeline for the elevator.

  I walked through the Minami Heights lobby to the drive outside and finally felt better. Ms. Minakami was one strange old lady. Most people mellow as they get older, but her edges had sharpened with time. I looked back at the ninth floor. It was the top floor. Idiot mistake.

  Ms. Minakami was leaning way over her balcony railing, watching me. I felt her eyes bore into me.

  “Go to Ryūseiji!” she ordered with a wave.

  Her voice reached me all the way down on the ground. Without thinking, I nodded.

  I sighed as I trudged through Minami Ōdori. It was hot. It would take me less than twenty minutes to walk to the temple, but the whole thing was starting to seem like a chore. I didn’t have to go right away. I didn’t want to go alone. I could go later with Yūsuke.

  My feet turned toward my house in Kimyō Temple Alley.

  “NYAA!”

  Kiriko. The cat sat at the entrance to my street, blocking my way. When had she run past me? It was as if she had magically appeared and was scolding me, saying, Hey, where do you think you’re going?

  I was starting to drive myself crazy. How could I possibly know what a cat was saying? Pathetic. Even more pathetic was that I was afraid of Kiriko!

  “My mistake,” I said. I actually said that.

  Then I made an about-face.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Strange Old People

  I headed for the temple district.

  Without turning around. I knew that Kiriko was still behind me, tailing me at a distance of several yards. I could feel her blue eyes on my back.

  A car pulled up beside me and stopped. It was a fancy red car, kind of a brick red but brighter, and American: flashy and huge. Yūsuke would have recited its make and model on the spot, but I just thought it was big.

  A window lowered to reveal Ms. Minakami inside. She wore sunglasses.

  “I remembered an errand I have to do. I’ll take you to
Ryūseiji, Kazu-kun,” she said, and then added, “Well, Kiriko! Fancy meeting you here. You hop in, too.”

  I realized later that Ms. Minakami probably doubted that Kiriko’s tactics would be enough to get me to Ryūseiji. At the time, though, it was hot, and I was tired of dealing with Kiriko, so I got in.

  The cat and I sat beside each other on the cream leather back seat. Ms. Minakami had filled her apartment with frilly stuff, but the interior of her car was sleek. The only decoration was an amulet from a shrine in our neighborhood, which dangled from the rearview mirror. My family has one of those, too. The amulet looked odd in the American car.

  “This automobile is called a Mercury. It looks like a hungry bear, doesn’t it? They say that all drivers should give up their licenses at seventy, but people don’t understand that the older you get, the more you rely on a car. Try waiting for a late bus in this heat for ten minutes. I would dry to a crisp!”

  Ms. Minakami’s big bear crept through the tadpole-like Japanese cars and got me to Ryūseiji in less than five minutes.

  “Thank you,” I said. When I bowed, who should appear at my feet but Kiriko.

  “She seems to like you,” Ms. Minakami said. “No need to worry, she’s never been lost. She’ll make it home. See you later.”

  I didn’t know if she meant she’d be seeing me later, or Kiriko. See you, Kitty, and keep a close eye on Kazu-kun! That could have been her meaning.

  After that, the bear of a car bounded off like it had spotted its prey. Wow, it both creeps and pounces, I thought. I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped.

  “Nya—aa!”

  Kiriko meowed at my feet as if to say, Get moving.

  I couldn’t ignore the animal, so I began to walk.