Temple Alley Summer

by Sachiko Kashiwaba

  I wiped away cold sweat.

  “Kazu-kun, do you like Akari?” Ami said next to me, poking me in the ribs. “You never paid attention to her before, but your eyes are glued to her today.”

  “Akari? Umm, I don’t think so.”

  I shook my head. Ami shrugged, unconvinced.

  But that was a good idea. If I acted as though I liked Akari, I might be able to fool the nosy neighbors.

  As I fished for water balloon yo-yos with Yūsuke and Ami and her friends, all I could think about was why I was the only one with no memory of Akari, and why I alone could never see her mom. I kept coming back to what Ms. Minakami had asked me, “Have you seen one?” It must be because I had seen Akari come out of my house wearing her funeral kimono. If Akari had come back to life, was my house the place where the dead returned? Was my house Kimyō Temple?

  The neighborhood elders knew something I didn’t. I wanted to ask someone about it, but not them. Asking Akari herself would be fastest: “Hey, are you a ghost?” But I had seen her sitting cross-legged in that empty house, looking anxious. There was no way I could ask her something so insulting. I felt bad for her. I was the only one who had seen the other side of her. I wanted to be her ally.

  Wait a minute! Did that mean that I liked her, just as Ami had said?

  If I couldn’t ask Akari, then who else could I talk to? Should I investigate somehow? I remembered how the old men had laughed at Broad Bean, saying he was only scratching the surface—a wannabe historian. Broad Bean wasn’t born here. They had mentioned that. Did here mean Kimyō Temple Alley? No, because the neighborhood association leader’s noodle shop was not on my street. Those men must have meant that only someone born in Minami Ōdori would know about Kimyō Temple. Ms. Minakami knew about it. My grandfather, who was her age, would have known about it. If only my grandpa were alive, I could have asked him.

  Then it hit me.

  Akari had come back through my house. If my house was Kimyō Temple, that would be a huge deal. My grandpa would surely have told my father about something that important. Grandpa died after a severe cold turned into pneumonia, but his mind was sharp until the end. To help my father and the rest of us who would survive him, he apparently gave instructions about who would inherit our land and our house, and what would happen with money, and even who we should invite to the funeral. Would a grandpa like that have died without passing on a huge secret about our house? That was the part I didn’t get.

  My father had learned nothing about Kimyō Temple from Grandpa. He had told me I should ask Ms. Minakami. But—

  “Uncle Junichi!” I jumped to my feet.

  “Kazu, you’re not leaving already, are you?”

  With Yūsuke shouting crossly at my back, I took off at a run.

  Uncle Junichi might have been the one my grandpa had told, instead of my father. My sister and I always call Junichi our uncle, and Junichi calls our father “older brother.” He called my grandfather “Grandpa” like all of us. But my dad and Uncle Junichi are actually cousins. Uncle Junichi is the son of my grandpa’s older brother. His parents passed away when he was in high school, so my grandpa raised him as his own. The reason my house is oddly large is because they connected it to Uncle Junichi’s house.

  I remember Uncle Junichi saying once that he felt like a freeloader, lodging at our place for nothing. But my father answered him, “Nonsense. You’re head of the family.”

  As the son of my grandpa’s elder brother, Junichi is the true heir to the Sada name.

  My grandpa and the other old people put a lot of stock in things like heads of household and successors. If there were a secret in our family, my grandpa probably told Uncle Junichi, the next head of our family.

  When I got home, I went straight to Uncle Junichi’s room and switched on his computer. Before he left for China, he gave us his email address and said that we should email him if we needed anything, because email would be the fastest and most reliable way to get in touch.

  Did Grandpa tell you anything about Kimyō Temple? I wrote to him.

  His reply came sooner than I expected, at about ten that night.

  Ask me how I’m doing first, would you?

  I could tell he wasn’t happy with my lack of manners. But his message went on. I wanted to yell, “BINGO!”

  I’ve heard of Kimyō Temple. Apparently, there’s a kind of folk religion where people pass a Buddhist statuette from one family to another. The followers might have a temple structure someplace, but they mainly make offerings to the statuette. For centuries, Japanese have worshiped at both Buddhist and Shinto altars. They seem untroubled about holding many faiths.

  Anyway, a shared statuette would circulate among believers, going to a different household every year. Our street is where a number of households that shared the same statuette came together. Hence the name Kimyō Temple Alley. During the Meiji Period (1868–1912), religions were reorganized, and the temples in our city moved to the temple district, but Kimyō Temple with its circulating statuette—and no temple building—remained as it was.

  The idea with the statuette was that if you prayed to it, someone could come back from the dead. I doubt that everyone believed that, even the most devout. At any rate, during Meiji, the families in Kimyō Temple Alley began to drift away, and the statuette was supposedly burned during an anti-Buddhist movement. Other temples looked down on Kimyō Temple as a renegade congregation, which is why many details were kept private. The only people who know about it now are people from our street and Minami Ōdori—no more than a few people, your grandpa said.

  Actually, the statuette that supposedly burned was hidden in our house. During the time my own grandpa was alive, they were actively still hiding it. But when my dad was alive, eventually they decided to put the statuette back on the household altar. They must have figured that no one remained who really remembered Kimyō Temple. Grandpa told me to care for it. I thought this whole story sounded a bit like the hidden Christians (the Japanese Christians who worshipped in secret in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).

  Why do you want to know?

  I wrote back to Uncle Junichi:

  Do people really come back to life?

  His reply arrived almost instantly.

  I asked your grandpa the same thing. He told me it was probably just legend, but he relayed one story he had heard from elders during childhood. It must have been from the Meiji Period. These elders would have heard it from people in town. Someone had pointed at a person walking down the street and said to his companion, ‘He looks exactly like your older brother.’ His companion replied, ‘My brother died ten years ago in the war!’ But then he looked at the person and agreed, ‘He really does look like my brother before he went to war. I wonder if he came back through Kimyō Temple.’ The other man said, ‘Perhaps your mother prayed to the statuette.’ The two of them watched the mysterious person for a while, and then as they left, the man whose brother had died said, ‘I’m going to tell Mom that my brother came back. She’ll be so happy.’ The war the brother had fought in was the Boshin War (1868–9), according to Grandpa. This was a long time ago.

  Anyway, that much your grandpa had heard—and he knew that there were people who believed praying at Kimyō Temple would bring someone back to life. Because of that, our ancestors couldn’t bring themselves to destroy the statuette. Instead, they took care of it. Grandpa told me I should do the same.

  I wrote back:

  Uncle Junichi, do you believe in it?

  My uncle responded:

  I believe it’s natural to want people we’ve lost to come back to life, especially if they died unexpectedly in wars or accidents. Or even if they died after living a long, full life. I suppose it would have comforted people to pray to the Kimyō Temple statuette and then, if they saw someone who resembled the dead, they could reassure themselves that their prayer had been heard and the person had returned. It was apparently that simple: pray, and the person would return. The pe
rson who died also had to want to come back. But they would not come back to their own family; they would come back to an unrelated family.

  That’s the part I find a little hard to believe: you could see anyone who looked like the deceased, and the person who prayed could still think, ‘Ah, he came back. What a miracle, thanks to Kimyō Temple.’

  I thought about praying to have my father and mother come back, you know. Not because I had complaints about Grandpa and Grandma … it was just lonely to lose my folks. But if I had prayed, they would not have come back to my home. The belief was that they would come back as other people, in other families, so I decided not to go through with it.

  I replied to Uncle Junichi with a question:

  So, all people had to do was pray to the statuette?

  Uncle Junichi answered.

  Apparently so. And according to the stories, the souls who came back looked and lived exactly like normal people. But if someone witnessed them coming back through the temple, that person would know their story. If that person kept quiet, they were fine. But if someone confronted them and said, “You are a child of Kimyō Temple,” their new life would end. The whole thing seems a bit too simple to me, but anyway.

  After Grandpa and me, you will be the next keeper of Kimyō Temple, Kazu. You asked what I thought, so I’ll tell you: I think that if a soul comes back to life, we should let him or her live. Your grandpa said the same thing. The Sada ancestors thought so too, which is why they hid the statuette and cared for it. Grandpa told me to do the same. I told him I would. Is that what you wanted to know?

  Now I wasn’t sure what to do at all. Should I tell Uncle Junichi about Akari? I was feeling a little better already, just knowing that I had not gone totally crazy. That is, if I believed what Uncle Junichi’s email said.

  It’s an unusual name for a neighborhood, so I thought I might use it for my summer project, I typed. That was all I said.

  It’s a family secret. You’d better not, Uncle Junichi replied.

  OK, I won’t. I’ll grow tomatoes again, I answered. But if you remember anything else about Kimyō Temple, will you email me? G’night!

  I wanted to go to sleep.

  Hold on. Is that all you’ve got say to your uncle after months of silence?

  After that, I had to read about all his latest news: Authentic Chinese food doesn’t always taste like you expect. The food they get near the archaeological dig is average. Alas, there’s no one to date. (Poor Uncle Junichi, he’s past thirty but still nowhere close to finding a partner.) As I read through his message and sympathized, I had plenty to think about in a corner of my mind.

  After saying goodbye to Uncle Junichi, I had the feeling there was something in his emails that I should have picked up on, but I couldn’t figure out what. I reread our conversation, and finally, I hit upon what I had missed.

  If my family’s house was Kimyō Temple, someone from Akari’s former family must have come to pray at our altar. Uncle Junichi had said it was as simple as praying to the statuette. Who could have come and prayed? After Grandpa died, a lot of people who couldn’t attend the funeral stopped by to pay their respects at our altar. No one had come over in a while—but there must have been someone. And whoever it was must have come while I was at school.

  I went into the living room, where I found Mom and Dad dozing off in front of the TV. Whenever this happens and I point out that they’re sleeping, they insist that no, they’re awake and watching the show. Whatever.

  Mom forced herself to sit up. “Kazu, I thought you were in bed already. Summer vacation starts tomorrow. Why not get some rest?” She scrunched her eyebrows.

  “Has someone prayed at our altar recently?” I asked her.

  “What are you talking about? I offer fresh water and rice every morning and pray to our ancestors. Now you, on the other hand, after all you owe your grandpa and grandma—”

  I was in for a sermon.

  “No, no, not one of us. Someone not in our family, I mean,” I interrupted.

  “Oh, you mean have we had a guest?”

  “Yes. Someone who prayed at the altar.”

  “Yes, actually, there was. When would that have been … four or five days ago, I guess. Someone who had been out of town and didn’t realize your grandpa had died.”

  “Who was it?”

  “It was a lady who lives in the Midorigaoka area. She worked with your grandpa at City Hall. Her last name was Andō, I think.”

  “How old was she?”

  “About seventy.”

  Akari’s mother? Or Akari’s grandmother? She didn’t have the same last name as Akari, but Uncle Junichi did say that the person came back to a different family.

  “Where in Midorigaoka?” I wanted to know. “Do you have an address?”

  “Kazu. I don’t want the head of the neighborhood association coming over here again. What are you planning, exactly?”

  “You were the one who told me to research old place names for summer homework!” I reminded her. “But, if you want me to grow tomatoes again, I can go and buy seedlings. I’ll just need some money.”

  Mom complained about me doing tomatoes again, and then told me that the house was near the Midorigaoka public swimming pool. She even remembered that Mrs. Andō’s first name was Katsura.

  “You know where Et-chan lives,” she said, mentioning a relative of ours. “When I talked with Ms. Andō, I realized she must live in the same direction as Et-chan. Block number one.”

  I know that area. It has some houses people built before Midorigaoka developed a new residential subdivision. Et-chan told us that the land prices were low before, so buyers could afford houses with big yards. I knew the place—I could get there easily! I decided to meet this person named Katsura Andō. I would discover her connection to Akari.

  Tomorrow, I would explain everything to Yūsuke and take him with me to investigate.

  On the first day of summer vacation, Mom made me wake up at six a.m. to go do “radio exercises.” It’s a two-minute program that airs on the radio every day.

  All the old people from our neighborhood were gathered at a parking lot by the shops. A bunch of grade schoolers were there too, stifling yawns and sporting really bad bedhead. Yūsuke must have slept in. We were maybe a thirty-second walk from his house, but he didn’t show up. Akari, on the other hand, had combed her hair nicely and put in the red baubles, and she looked happy. I wanted to crack a joke about how a ghost would never look that nice in the morning.

  Akari and the old people exercised cheerfully. The rest of us moved like zombies. There was still no sign of Yūsuke.

  I stopped on my way home and talked to Yūsuke’s dad, who was cleaning up in front of the shop. “Yūsuke’s in bed with a stomachache,” he told me. “He ate too much at the festival last night. Did you get sick too, Kazu?” He gave me a worried look.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t believe that Yūsuke had let me down at a time like this. I trotted out my champion scowl.

  At ten o’clock that morning, I rang the doorbell at the Andō residence in Midorigaoka.

  I was proud of how resourceful I’d been. I had managed to come here without Yūsuke. I had ridden to Midorigaoka on my bike and found Et-chan’s house, and as I turned the corner, I had found the Andō place.

  “My name is Kazuhiro Sada. I am the grandson of Genji Sada,” I introduced myself. “I hope to interview people who knew my grandfather for my summer homework. Would you be willing to share some of your memories?”

  I was imposing on Mrs. Andō, but summer homework had created a valuable opportunity.

  Mrs. Katsura Andō was wearing a modest dress and wore her silver hair in a perm. She looked like an older woman that you might see anywhere.

  She looked at me with some surprise, but she soon invited me in.

  She showed me to a combined living room and altar room that faced a wide, enclosed porch. I could see a yard full of trees outside.

  “I went down to Tokyo to spend th
e New Year’s holiday with my son,” Mrs. Andō told me. “I fell and injured myself and had to stay in the hospital. It took much longer than I expected to heal, and it was June by the time I came back. I did not hear of Mr. Sada’s death until recently, and I felt terribly rude for not having paid my respects. I went to light some incense at your place right away. Mr. Sada was my supervisor at work, until he retired, and his generosity helped me immensely.”

  Mrs. Andō seemed to be repeating information she had shared with my mother.

  “Was my grandfather scary to work for?” I asked. Grandpa had been a silent type, so I wondered if his colleagues liked him very much.

  “He was a man of few words. Nonetheless, Mr. Sada had a big heart—”

  Mrs. Andō glanced at her family’s altar. I looked at it too.

  Aaa—! I almost gasped aloud.

  Two photos stood on the altar. One of them showed a young man, and the other showed Akari. She even had the same red baubles in her hair.

  Mrs. Andō saw me looking at the photos and added, “That was my daughter. She was in the hospital for a very long time. She died when she was ten, almost forty years ago.”

  So Akari was not her granddaughter. Akari was Mrs. Andō’s daughter, who had died four decades before.

  “When I visited Mr. Sada’s house and prayed at your altar, Kazu, I was also thinking about Saori, that was my daughter’s name. Since Saori was hospitalized a lot, I often had to miss work or leave early. It was hard to ask permission from my superiors, but Mr. Sada understood. My husband had died young, so I had to support my family. I truly appreciated Mr. Sada’s kindness. Every Christmas, he would even give me toys and cute stuffed animals to give to Saori. He gave me presents for her older brother too; your grandfather must have realized he would feel left out if only Saori were getting gifts. Mr. Sada told me that his wife enjoyed picking out lovely things for a girl, because they only had boys in the house.”

  Mrs. Andō smiled and looked at a row of faded stuffed animals, which were lined up in front of a bookshelf on the enclosed porch. I guessed she must not have been able to throw her daughter’s things away, even after all these years.