“Of course,” I told him. “Don’t be foolish. Both of us can’t fall behind in our work.”
He smiled faintly. “Let me at least accompany you to the station,” he insisted as he went to pick up another of my satchels and my small furoshiki.
Once outside Ariyoshi’s gate, we piled into a rickshaw and made our way to the station.
“Will you inform the administration that I had a personal affair to attend to?” I asked him as we rode through the bustling streets.
“Of course, my dear friend,” he assured me. “I will speak to our professors the first thing tomorrow.”
He looked at me with great affection that afternoon. I know he found my father’s death difficult to grasp, as he knew that the relationship between my father and me had been strained. Still, he tried to be comforting and had the decency to approach the subject delicately.
“I’ve never experienced a death in the family, Kiyoki, but I suppose there is little I can say to help you at this time.”
I looked at him and tried to smile.
“But the fact that your father sent you that mask,” he said, pointing to my furoshiki, “must mean something.”
“It is too late,” I said, looking away from him and into the direction of the approaching station. “I didn’t return early enough to reconcile with him. I’m sure he died angry with me.”
“You mustn’t feel guilty, my friend,” he tried to assure me. “You are not to blame.”
I looked at him and tried again to smile faintly. He knew my story, yet how could he know the intensity of my pain? For so many years I had struggled to understand my father. He had left me with our relationship remaining a puzzle still waiting to be solved.
So much was my fault, and I would be foolish and self-deluding to deny it. My mother had died because of me, and perhaps my father’s grief at my latest decision had caused his early demise. Just as my father had felt responsible for his parents’ death, I now felt responsible for my own.
“Let me get your ticket while you go wait on the platform,” he begged of me. I did not want to be among the crowds, so I agreed only after insisting that I pay my own passage.
The train rolled into the station, the locomotive expelled its wind tunnel of steam, and Noboru handed me the ticket.
“Take care of yourself, dear friend, and I will see you when you return,” he shouted over the noise. He gave me a small push to encourage me to board.
I found a seat next to the glass, so that I could see him as the train pulled out of the station. I arranged my carrying case underneath the seat, placed the furoshiki with my father’s mask and my o-bento close to my side, and tried to maintain a brave front as I waved good-bye to him. It seems, as I look back on it now, that I had taken greater pains to appease my worried friend than I had with my own tragic father.
* * *
The journey home went quickly. I slept deeply, and when I awakened, I thought briefly that perhaps my father’s death had only been a dream.
The slowing of the train’s engines had stirred me. I sat up in my seat and removed the condensation from the interior window with a sweep of my sleeve. Outside, the locomotive was just beginning to pass into the valley. The mountains that surrounded Kyoto were covered in snow, and the pine trees were heavy with frost. I had not realized how much I missed the landscape of my youth.
The train began its descent into the station and the other passengers and I began to assemble our bags. There would be no one to greet me on the platform and, once again, I was struck with an aching sense of loneliness and regret.
I discovered an abundance of rickshaws and drivers waiting outside the station gates and thus had not the least bit of trouble finding someone to take me home to Daigo.
Once inside the rickshaw, I was immediately struck by the crispness of the air. It was a remarkable contrast to the foul smells of Tokyo. The delectable scent of sweet potato roasting was familiar and comforting. I turned my head from side to side as we rushed through the streets and small markets and reveled at the sight of the tiled roofs covered with drifts of snow.
“Where in Daigo are you going, exactly?” the rickshaw driver called back through panted breaths. Steam seemed to be rising from his back and billowing from his mouth.
“Before Sanpo-in, the second left after the grave of the poet Ono-no Komachi.”
“Near the mountain?” he asked as he climbed the first of many steep hills.
“Exactly,” I answered, impressed. And at the mere mention of the mountain, I found myself anxious to get back home.
* * *
As we approached Daigo, I could see my house in the distance. The carved pigeons perched on our roof gables were encased in ice and the thatched roof sagged from the weight of the snow. Smoke was noticeably missing from the chimney, a sure sign that no life stirred within. As we finally pulled up to the door, it struck me with great force, that he—my father, my last living link with my family—had truly gone.
I paid the rickshaw driver and made my way to the house. The gate had been left unlatched, and the garden had become an overgrown mass of dried tumbleweed covered in ice. Father never had much interest in gardening, I thought to myself, and nearly smiled, remembering how it was I, the only child, who took on the responsibility of the familial chores.
I pushed open the door and entered the genkan. The dirt floor had recently been swept clean, and a pair of Father’s slippers rested neatly at the door.
I set down my satchels and clutched my arms to keep warm. I knew that I had to start a fire in the braziers and warm the kotatsu, for evening would come early.
Around me, things appeared superficially the same as when I left. The lower tatami rooms had been kept just as I remembered; the kitchen still smelled of rice gruel and vinegar. But how cold it was! I went to the barrel by the stove, shoveled some charcoal, and refilled the braziers. Once I lit the braziers, the whole house crackled and warmed in the glow of their bright red light.
Where was Father? I thought to myself as I turned around in a small circle, the bottom of my kimono swelling like a small bell. Where now did he lie?
* * *
I discovered my father’s body in the tatami room where our family altar remained. But the room had changed. It no longer glowed crimson from the warm halo of the hibachis. It no longer smelled of incense. It had been transformed.
The cold greeted me first. An icy gust blew my sleeves backward as I slid open the first interior doors. Inside, I could see clear into the garden. The thin shoji that led to the engawa had been thrust open, and Father lay in the center of the tatami, perfectly preserved. Frost had encased his limbs in a shiny glaze of crystal. Icicles hung from the house’s outside beams.
He lay there like a column, his kimono draping his stiffened form. His bluish pallor, his sharp, ax-cut chin. Like a warrior from a glaciered land, he slept oblivious to the cold. I stood there, frightened and weak. The prodigal son whose guilt and pride mingled so deep that he stood paralyzed, unable to bow down to his knees.
I must be honest when I tell you that part of me wanted to rush up and kneel by Father’s side and beg for forgiveness. And part of me wanted to scream so loud that the heat of my breath would melt him back from death. But in the end, I did neither. Only when the priest arrived the following morning would I have enough courage to go to him. Then I would finally be able to gaze upon his masklike face and hold him tightly to my side.
* * *
That night I slept in my father’s old room for the first time since I was five. The room was on the second floor, adjacent to his studio. I entered cautiously, as I felt his presence hovering over me from behind.
Immediately I found myself looking for things that were familiar, hoping they might comfort me in my loneliness, hoping they might give me some inner peace. The mirror and low table where he dressed himself each day still remained, as di
d his futon, which was still stretched out on the tatami floor. I opened the inner closet and removed my childhood futon and unrolled it next to his. Where was Mother’s wedding coverlet? I wondered as I shivered for a blanket.
I walked downstairs to the old tansu chest in the hall and discovered it there. The coverlet lay carefully folded, most probably by Grandmother after Mother’s death. Beside it were the few mementos of my mother’s brief life: a box of her combs, her wedding kimono, and her tsuno-kakushi, the ceremonial horn hider she wore at her wedding. How it must have pained Grandmother occasionally to come across these precious articles. They appeared still and lifeless in the old chest, but I imagined how they must have appeared to Grandmother, who had seen Mother wear them.
How Father too must have felt to know they were there. Those tokens of his wife. His beloved. How empty they must have felt in his hands when he brought them close to his face to inhale their faint fragrance when he closed his eyes and envisioned her dressed in splendor on their wedding day.
I shook the wedding coverlet loose and inhaled its stale perfume. The wooden chest had left it smelling like the forest. How heavy the silk was! I thought as I dragged it upstairs. And that evening I slept wrapped in the memory of both my parents. Warm in a way I had never felt, even though I had lived here for years. That night I slept under the blanket of silken cranes. Cocooned in red silk and protected by white birds, I dreamed that I was loved by them both.
* * *
The clean-shaven head of the priest appeared at the gate of our empty house the following day. He was silent as I slid open the outer shoji, his gaze firmly rooted to the ground.
Clad in white robes, fastened by a silk-corded girdle and overlaid by a black jacket, a kesa hanging over his left shoulder and around his waist, wearing a straw hat and straw sandals, the priest had arrived to offer the Buddhist rites to my father.
He followed me through the narrow halls of our home, the lantern illuminating the rice-paper walls. The heat of our breath formed clouds around our faces. I heard the shuffle of the priest’s sandals echoing behind me; I heard his prayer beads rattling between his pious hands.
The lantern glowed like a warm orange ball of fire, and I held it far from my body as we scurried to the ice-cold tatami room where my father’s remains lay.
The morning light of the garden had illuminated the room that I had gazed into briefly the night before, but now I could see Father all the more clearly. It had been nearly six months since I left for Tokyo, yet now he seemed wholly unlike the man I left that day at the threshold. He seemed almost regal, stretched out on the wooden platform. As if finally there was no longer any pain.
The priest and I hovered over the silver-haired head of my father, his eyelids smooth in sleep; his skin, now an even deeper shade of blue, betrayed a thin fan of wrinkles, its surface spotted with tiny brown moons. Once again I was reminded of the brittle bark of a century-old cherry tree.
Stroking a bell and withdrawing a long silver razor, the priest commenced the Buddhist Rites of the Dead.
The razor slid over Father’s scalp, the wisps of hair falling languidly over his ears and onto the straw-mat floor. White curls, like blond strips of cypress.
I shuddered. Outside, the leaves in the garden tumbled in the night air, their dried surfaces rising like floating paper cranes temporarily suspended by the wind.
The priest continued to recite the scriptures and punctuate his long chants with the stroking of his bell until the moon filled the room with its great white light.
“We must now wash the body,” he said as he finally set down his bell. The priest revealed his long, slender arms from the billows of his generous white robe, and reached over the corpse of my father.
“We will clean each of his limbs,” he whispered quietly before excusing himself to our kitchen. When he returned, he carried with him a bowl of steaming water and a broad swatch of cloth.
Following the priest’s instructions, I assisted in the washing of my father’s shrunken body. Lifting each of his limbs reminded me of the weightlessness that one finds among dying trees. His gray, ashen skin fell away from his bones like the papery parchment of silver birch bark.
I can still envision myself taking the cotton cloth and cleaning between each of his once skilled fingers, respectfully paying close attention to his hands. I washed his palms as carefully as I would have an expiring emperor. I smoothed the cloth over the flesh of each palm. There was the initial resistance of death. But in the end, he surrendered himself to my care. And I accepted my duty as his only son. It was a moment that could have existed only with one of us gone. I wished so hard that he would open his eyes and see that I had come home to be beside him. But his eyes remained forever closed and his body stiff as stone. Yet in the end my hands finally rested over his. Mine pink and flushed, his the palest shade of blue.
The hands of the mask carver were entwined, if only briefly, finally, with those of his son.
* * *
That night I held my father for the first and last time. I cradled his tiny shaved head in the basket of my arms, and grazed my cheek over his. After the priest maneuvered the cotton shroud over his shrunken form, I released my father into the simple wooden coffin whose only adornment was the faintly carved insignia of our ancient family crest. It was a scene that I knew had occurred within the walls of this room several times before. And I imagined it was a scene that Father had done too many times for his liking. Beginning with the day he buried his master Tamashii in the forest. But this evening was the first to which I bore witness. And I did it alone.
I remained there with Father until the morning. I listened as the priest continued to drone the Scriptures, and I watched over my father as his coffin lay illuminated by the light of several small white candles. The incense floated through the room, and for the first time in my memory, the scent of cypress no longer clung to Father’s hands.
I wondered where his soul now mingled and with whom. And I hoped that he was finally returned to the company of his parents, his master, and his beloved wife, my mother, and that their eternity would be spent together in a place without sadness or pain.
But for now I was the one who was left alone in this lonely world of guilt and sorrow. I would need to prepare myself for the approaching burial. The guests would soon arrive, the actors secretly whispering that it was I who had caused my father’s—their revered mask carver’s—sad and untimely death.
THIRTY
They arrived in their kimonos, having memorized the proper masks of mourning. They followed me as I led the march behind the litter carrying my father to the cemetery. The priest continued to recite the Scriptures as the rest of us walked silently through the streets of Daigo.
Behind me, a stream of actors, wearing the traditional white mourning kimonos of the theater, trailed me like a long train of pale satin. Their faces, revealed to the autumn sunlight, shone like faces for the first time unmasked. Their jowls fell forward freely, like aging Buddhas, their eyelids weighed like the thick hoods of forest toads. The sounds of their sandals echoed my own. Slow and heavy. And the funeral procession moved on.
Iwasaki led the actors in their final walk of respect for my father. From behind, I heard his soft moans. His red ankles were swollen underneath the hem of his robe, his knees barely able to support his aging form.
Upon arrival at the gates of the temple, the body was taken by the novices of the temple and prepared for cremation. One hour later my father was returned to me, and I dutifully returned him to the earth.
When I laid down the ceremonial urn next to Father’s inscribed tablet, I knelt beside the grave of both my parents. And there, with the rock dust coarse and painful under my knees, I withdrew the shard of plum wood from my sash and buried it beside Father. Deep in the brown-gray earth. His lifelong pain finally to perish. To be carried by either of us no more.
* * *
; When I stood up, I turned to my mother’s grave and wiped her tablet clean with my handkerchief. My grandparents’ tablets stood neatly behind. And it occurred to me that my entire family lay here within my gaze, their Buddhist names articulated in broad strokes of calligraphy, their wooden grave markers shaded by a sweeping branch of a pine.
They had all left me behind. I stood there alone, wondering who would eventually stand beside my grave and bury me in a tall bronze urn. Who would wipe my tablet clean?
I was now the sole bearer of the Yamamoto name. There was no one left to guide me, as Grandmother had done, and no one to feel I had left behind, as I had with Father. In one breath, I could extend my arms and declare, “I am free!” and, in another, I could fall to my knees and see what remained of my family, a stretch of graves shaded by the long green needles of a pine.
The only thing that comforted me at that moment was that Father was finally returned to the side of his beloved. Where he could sleep for an eternity beside her. Where a man who lived his life more spirit than man could finally be released.
And with a heavy heart and a deep sense of loneliness, I left our family grave site, where my entire family would now rest for an eternity. Where they would forever sleep at the base of a bending pine.
* * *
The actors and their wives followed me home. It was the custom for me to invite them inside, as they had come to pay their respects to my father by offering money or food in his honor. Many came and knelt with their Buddhist prayer beads, silently praying for Father’s safe journey to the next world. Each actor who arrived seemed more ancient than the next. I knelt in the center of the most central tatami room and received their offerings with strained politeness and a few formal replies.
After several hours of sitting, I rose to offer some of the guests a pot of tea. There, within the confines of our modest kitchen, I received their many artfully phrased insults. Their faces could not disguise their obvious disdain for me.
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