Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  Masayoshi had done very well for himself. He was that somewhat rare thing among the Buddhist priests, a handsome, educated man who could have gone to join the successful ranks of Japan’s salarymen, but wanted instead to oversee the journey of the souls of the deceased to the afterlife. It wasn’t surprising that he had been such a desirable marriage candidate among the many temple families whose boys were turning away from the chosen family profession, or even worse, had borne only girls.

  Masayoshi had been promised all kinds of things: a nice house in Yokohama if he chose a two-hundred-year-old temple in need of a new roof, a Mercedes if he moved to Kyūshū, a spare room for his mother if he went to Hiroshima. All that time I’d been in school, Masayoshi had been entertaining marriage requests. I thought to myself that I was lucky to have been away from my stepsisters, oblivious to the gossip that surrounded Masayoshi’s daily maneuvers. I could just imagine how Mineko and Chieko would have gone over and over each of the offers, declaring how rich Masayoshi was going to be, what with his management skills and a temple already so well endowed with cash. It would have driven me insane to listen to such banal conversation.

  In the end, he’d chosen a temple just a few hours from Akita. It was located in the mountains, on the other side of Japan’s northern tip, in a place so rustic and remote I burst out laughing at first when Mineko told me how far we would have to go for the memorial service. The Masayoshi I knew, the one who had loved jazz and museums and English handkerchiefs, never would have elected to live somewhere so provincial, but Mineko scolded me and told me that Masayoshi had liked the family he had married into and that the temple had an intriguing past, something about a noble who had been sent to live there in exile during the Edo period, and who had quietly put together a hondo filled with very old sculptures. It was a beautiful place, and many historical records mentioned it; shoguns and emperors had taken refuge there during the wars, and the Japan Rail company was always encouraging visitors to go to see the treasures, but because it was so far out of the way, only the most die-hard art lovers and pilgrims ever went.

  “Masayoshi wouldn’t want some place like they have in Nara or Kyoto,” Mineko sniffed. “He doesn’t want to have a tourist attraction.”

  “What’s the point of having all those sculptures,” I said, “if no one comes to see them?”

  “People go to see them,” Mineko replied. “But only people who are willing to make the effort. People who care.”

  We had to take a zigzag path of trains to reach the temple. This was before the days when someone finally got smart and put in a bullet train that would go from Morioka to Akita and make the trip across the mountains easier. Instead, we had to go via a series of little one-track routes, pausing in a station to let another train pass on a specially built “overtaking lane” before continuing on. Then we stood out in the cold to pick up a different train that would lumber off in a new direction. The process repeated itself. We bought terrible bento lunches, so unlike the delicious food my mother had prepared for our trips, and ate them inside the train cars in silence.

  There wasn’t much to look at, either. Just mountains tiered with trees and bamboo and above that, clouds in a moody sky. So we went from station to station—my stepsisters, their husbands and children, Mr. Horie, and I—sitting on the velveteen seats, not speaking, and watching the landscape pass. How much more rugged and jade-colored was Tōhoku than France. Chieko was carrying my mother’s remains in a purple furoshiki, a square piece of cloth she’d wrapped snug around the box, the corners sticking up like little rabbit ears.

  I had missed my mother’s cremation and so had not been present when Mineko, Chieko, and the rest of their family had stood around her still-hot remains to remove her bones from the ash. They would have used chopsticks to do this, carefully culling only the most essential parts of her body and placing them in an urn, which was then set inside a box.

  It was out of the question that I would carry the box. From the moment I had arrived home, it had been made clear to me that I was a poor excuse for a daughter. I’d arrived too late to sit with my mother as she lay dying, though, they liked to tell me, she had asked over and over again if I had been called. Each time the front door had slid open and she had heard the sound of someone climbing onto the landing and putting on a pair of slippers, she’d asked if it was me. Worse, she sometimes woke up just as someone was walking away and she’d called out, wondering if I’d come home while she was sleeping, and that because she’d been so preoccupied by a dream that she’d missed me.

  When they told me this—repeatedly—I was enraged, but only on the inside. Anger burned like a fever in my chest and my eyelids seared my pupils. On the outside, though, I would not let them see how I felt, would not cede to them that kind of control.

  Chieko came and sat next to me on the train, the box of bones neatly between her hands. “There is something we must discuss,” she said to me. She rocked back and forth with the train movements and the box rocked with her. I could not take my eyes off it.

  “Yes?”

  “There is not enough money for you to continue living in France.”

  I could hear the goton-goton of the train as it passed over the tracks. My heart matched the rhythm of the sound, and then my pulse increased until we were out of sync. Modern music, I thought to myself.

  “Satomi?” she said. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know this seems unfair …,” she began.

  “I said I heard you.”

  “Your mother didn’t know she was going to die. Things happened quickly.”

  I said this next part very carefully. “Standard inheritance laws say that money is to be divided equally among the surviving children.”

  “There are debts,” she replied curtly. “The golf club membership. Money she forwarded to you in France. We have a lot to pay.”

  “Let me guess. There is just enough money left over from the debts for you, your sister, and your father to keep the house.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Her porcelain collection?”

  “We’ve already sold it to a dealer in Tokyo.”

  I was shocked. After all these years, I had never once touched the Korean melon pot.

  “You had no right. Those were our things.”

  “She was our mother,” Chieko countered. She pursed her lips. “No matter what you may think of me, I wouldn’t deliberately cut you out of your mother’s will.”

  “You mean, your husband mishandled the family business when he took it over after your father’s stroke. And now there is no money for me. It’s all just been an accident.”

  I could feel her seething. “It’s true that we’ve had a difficult year. And my husband isn’t as talented a fisherman as my father was.”

  We both looked over at Mr. Horie. He was drooling and Chieko was wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.

  “My room in the house …,” I began.

  She shrugged. “You can always visit, I suppose. Though Mineko will be moving in with her family and there won’t be much room anymore. If you want my advice, I think you should consider getting married. That’s what my sister and I did. And look at us. We have our own families. We don’t have to struggle with this question of where to go.”

  Masayoshi was waiting for us at the train station when we finally arrived. He had two cabs lined up to take us to a small ryokan where we would spend the evening before going to the memorial service in the morning. The few times I started to catch his eye he looked away, and I felt myself veer from disappointment to anger. How polite we were all being at this forty-ninth-day memorial. I had been so restrained since going home. Now, seeing his face, and remembering our days together, I felt as though my body were being suddenly flushed with emotion, as when you wake up from a particularly magical dream to find yourself returned to the real world. I was being pulled back into being Japanese, and I didn’t want to resume my role. I found myself missing France and th
e emotional outbursts that would not at all be out of place there.

  I have been in love since I met you, I wanted to say to Masayoshi. I would bet anything that you haven’t felt any love at all since you got married.

  The ryokan was located on a hillside and the hostess promised us that we would have a view of the ocean. I was to share a room with the women. Mineko had originally arranged that she and her husband and their children would occupy one room and Chieko’s family another. My unexpected arrival had uprooted these plans.

  “We’re going to have to sleep separately from our husbands,” she huffed.

  “I can just stay in my own room,” I offered.

  “Can you afford it?” Mineko smiled. “I thought not.”

  That night we all piled into the main dining room, wearing our yukatas, pajama-style kimonos, as though we were just out on a family trip to the spa and had come out of the water newly revived from the inn’s mineral baths. The decor was meant to suggest old-fashioned northern Japan, with a big hearth in the middle of the floor where the cooks would occasionally prepare a boiling pot of food. Near the entrance sat a thick wood sled that would have been used during the Meiji era in the middle of a snowstorm.

  A large cod had been filleted into sashimi, its skeleton and head preserved and pinned so it appeared to be twisting out of a bed of seaweed and scallops and shrimp. There was no meat, of course, because we were here for a memorial. A part of me was relieved not to be confronted with the pungent food smells of France, and another part of me thought how provincial this all was, as though by eschewing meat we were going to negate the fact that my mother was dead.

  Masayoshi stayed with us while we ate, sitting on the opposite side of the long table where we had congregated. He pretended not to notice as Mineko’s and Chieko’s husbands first turned salmon-colored then scarlet from numerous glasses of beer. A waitress murmured sympathetically to Chieko that she, too, had recently lost her mother and that it was the kind of event for which there was no preparation. Chieko cooed back her thanks.

  At this I rose up from the table and announced my intention to retire to bed. Everyone stopped talking for a moment. You are in Japan, I heard a disembodied voice say. You must continue to sit here until everyone else has finished eating and then you must follow them, like a lowly caste member in a royal procession.

  No way, I retorted. I’ve lived in France, traveled to Holland, eaten raw meat, and visited a château. I don’t have to sit here. Japan may still be here, I said to myself, but that doesn’t mean that I am completely in Japan, or that I will necessarily stay here forever.

  I left the table and stopped in the hotel hallway to use the green plastic public phone to call Timothy and let him know where I was and that I intended to return to Tokyo soon. Then I went to the room. When Mineko and Chieko came back hours later, I pretended to be asleep, and when one of them inadvertently stumbled over my feet, I groaned, as though deeply disturbed.

  I had a fitful night. I dreamed of my mother, who was not dead. She was ill, but waiting for me to come home to see her, which I did. In the years to come, I would dream this often and, as I did that morning, I would wake to disappointment and a new day without her.

  We traveled by two taxis to the temple, Chieko holding my mother’s bones on her lap the way I’d seen Grace Kelly hold on to her handbag in a movie. She looked both serious and coy, and she thanked the taxi driver for his sympathy.

  The memorial service would not take place for an hour, and we were expected to wait in an adjoining meeting hall where we would eat another meatless lunch after the service ended. It had grown unexpectedly hot and I was melting in my hand-me-down black wool skirt. The memorial hall had a kitchen with a small refrigerator and I helped myself to a Fanta to cool down. Then I went for a walk. At first I could hear the footsteps of some of the children following me, so I darted in between trees, tombstones, and boulders trying to lose them. I wasn’t prepared to be indulgent of Mineko’s offspring. Not today.

  I ventured further and further into the temple grounds, my mood temporarily lifted by how beautiful everything was. Over the centuries, the gardeners had clearly kept the original lines of the garden. I loved how the moss-covered rocks, dripping with condensation, formed a natural path through the bamboo.

  I remembered visiting the woods so many years ago, and how I had found bamboo shoots for my mother. The memory brought a tear to my eye and my vision blurred. When it cleared again, I saw a strange figure standing in the bamboo grove.

  It was a gaijin, a white man.

  He was standing beside a small waterfall. Alongside this were old stone carvings of what I guessed were Buddhist deities. I didn’t look closely. I was too startled by the man’s presence. He was wearing Buddhist robes, but because he was so tall the robes didn’t cover his ankles, and his wrists stuck out from the sleeves. He looked as out of place as a husband wearing his wife’s apron in the kitchen.

  “Oh. Hello!” he said in English. Then he began the labored process of trying to speak in Japanese. When my ears could not take any more—I had the same tight-throat feeling I get when I hear a soprano sing off-key—I put him out of his misery.

  “Maybe my English is better.”

  “You speak English?”

  “And French,” I sighed.

  “Why? I mean, how?”

  “I wanted to.”

  “It’s that simple?”

  “Of course!”

  “I suppose it is. Your accent’s a bit thick. But I can understand you.”

  I began to walk around in the grotto, pretending to examine the stone carvings. They were simple, one of Fudō Myō and another of what looked like a Shinto god. Both had been beaten by the rain, so only the suggestion of carved lines appeared, as though they’d just been pressed out of the stone. The effect was eerie, but I wasn’t about to let some Westerner think I was nervous.

  “Aren’t you a little bit curious?” he asked.

  “Curious?”

  “About what I’m doing here. Usually you Japanese girls squeal or want to take my picture.”

  “I am more interested in the stone sculpture.”

  “Oh. Oh yes. Well, that’s why I’m here too.”

  “Who told you about stone sculpture?”

  “Yamagata-sensei. The priest. I’m studying with him.”

  “You are a priest?”

  “Actually, I’m an anthropologist. Or studying to be one. Came to Japan to do research. Yamagata-sensei roped me into this outfit. I think he finds it amusing. He’s here at the temple for a memorial. I came to watch and participate. Some girls lost their mother.” He looked at my black skirt and blouse. “Oh. I’m sorry.” He gave a quick bow, which made me laugh. He was so tall, he looked like an ostrich dipping its head to counteract the effort that went into picking up one foot.

  The man’s name was François and he said he was from England.

  “François is a French name,” I said.

  “Be that as it may, I am English.”

  “But you must speak French,” I insisted. “I speak French better than English. Could we …”

  “I’m English,” he repeated, and not in an altogether friendly tone.

  He had a camera and snapped some photos of the stone sculptures to add to his file on Japanese art. Then we went back down to the temple together.

  “Have you seen the interior? The sculptures?” he asked.

  I told him that I hadn’t.

  “I spent a week photographing Nara and Kyoto. But there are many more sculptures all over Japan that are just as impressive. Take Muryojuji temple, for example. It’s breathtaking.”

  I went back down to the temple with my new gaijin friend. The children had exhausted themselves looking for me behind trees and had retired underneath the temple, which was built on stilts that left a good two feet or so under its belly where a small person could hide or play in the dirt. One by one the children came out and marveled at the giant blond-haired man. Actually, Fr
ançois wasn’t blond at all. I know this now, having spent enough time in Europe and America. But a few days in Japan were enough to readjust my eyes, and because his hair looked so light in comparison to everyone else’s, he looked blond to me.

  The children parted before us, like fronds of grass in a field making way for the wind.

  “Aren’t they charming? I adore the little people in this country.” François sighed, reaching out to pat their heads as though they were delicate flower buds.

  Mineko, with a mother’s sixth sense, came out of the memorial hall wearing her husband’s shoes. She hadn’t taken the time to wrestle with her ugly pumps. Her mouth twisted into an expression of unabashed horror. Like a shadow, Chieko appeared beside her and mirrored this expression of shock. I was pleased. With François there, I had the feeling that I wasn’t quite in Japan, but somewhere else where I wouldn’t be expected to follow all the little rules and the niceties.

  I invited François into the memorial hall for a drink. He said he didn’t trust himself to drink beer, though he enjoyed it, and so I gave him an orange Fanta and tried to interest him in talking to the children. I offered to translate. They were curious, as children are, and I indulged their questions while Mineko fidgeted in the background.

  François wanted to look at the temple with me so I asked the children if they wanted to come, and though Mineko told them not to go, we all went in together.

  It was a large structure, rectangular in shape, with a high roof whose hips plunged down at a precarious angle before its eaves gently fanned out like the tail of a phoenix. The front doors of the hondo, or main hall, slid open with some difficulty, as both the door panels and the grooves on which they rested were made of wood and had grown temperamental with age. When we stepped inside, the children grew hushed, immediately in awe of what they saw.

  The hall was covered with enough tatami mats to hold a crowd of several hundred, and a dozen stacks of square-shaped zabuton pillows. From the high ceiling hung a golden chandelier dripping with lotuses and wheels, and around this on the rafters were painted celestial beings playing various musical instruments. At the very back of the room was the altar, which was set up like a small theater with various statues posed in stances of protection or meditation on a black lacquer stage. Buddhas held up their hands to ward off fear. Fudō Myō brandished his sword and scowled at illusion. A Guanyin lovingly cradled a lotus flower. And in the very center was a large crate, perhaps two meters high, which I gathered would contain a very big Buddha that, for reasons I did not know, was not on display today.