Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  In front of the box was an even smaller stair-step altar. My mother’s bones were sitting here, divided into two discreet containers. There was one rectangular container, the size of an ice cream tub, wrapped in purple cloth, and a tiny red box beside this that contained her Adam’s apple. Masayoshi must have arranged these earlier in the day when I’d been out for my walk.

  “There’s more,” François said. “Come on.” He made a small motion with his head, the way Westerners do, that I knew by now meant I was to follow him. He went around to a door, which opened up to a room behind the altar. The room was filled with statues, with objects and paintings. The children followed close behind.

  I circled around each object. Nothing was locked in a glass case. As full of treasures as Masayoshi’s temple was, it was also just a little northern temple meant to serve locals. Nothing that art scholars visited all that regularly. Nothing here had been cataloged. And yet even I, with my mother’s training in antiques and basic education that consisted of trips to the Tokyo National Museum with Masayoshi, knew that I was looking at a room full of priceless objects.

  François continued on into yet another antechamber, but I hesitated. This new room smelled like the old prewar houses of Kuma-ume, the town my mother and I had lived in before moving to Hachinohe. The ceiling was low, even for me, and I gathered that the room had been built for a time when people were even shorter than they were today. It didn’t feel like a room for the public, but something that only priests would enter.

  “I think I will go back,” I said.

  “Wait.” François faded into one of the darker corners of the room. “This is the best part.”

  He was standing in the shadows, surrounded by strange objects. I peered into the room. The walls were lined with shelves, each four levels high and shaped like a cubbyhole. Inside each slot was a box wrapped in cloth. Many were white, and some were wrapped in brocade.

  “This is not a place for visitors,” I said.

  He ignored me. “I find it beautiful myself that the Japanese take such good care of their ancestors’ bones. Much better than the out-of-sight-out-of-mind nonsense in the West.”

  He was looking at a cubbyhole with a small statue inside. I looked and saw a carving of kannon with numerous arms all reaching out to aid lost souls. I touched one of her hands.

  “We bury our bones,” I said, even though I was looking at plenty of evidence to the contrary.

  “According to the roshi I work with,” François said, “that doesn’t always happen. At least not right away. Maybe there’s been a frost and it’s inconvenient to bury the bones. Or maybe someone doesn’t have the money to bury remains.”

  “Then the bones come to stay in here?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t like standing in this room with so many bones rattling in their urns. I wondered whose had been forgotten, and who was too poor to be buried in the earth. And I certainly didn’t like that this gaijin I hardly knew had brought me here and was now telling me things about my own culture.

  “I’m going back out. The memorial will start soon.”

  “Is it time already?” he asked, following me back out. I wondered what he had seen in me to make him think that I would be interested in looking into the heart of this temple where things that were intended to be unseen lay hidden.

  I remember the memorial as a bloom of incense, a flock of priests in cobalt-blue-and-saffron silk robes, and unrepentant tears. Up until Masayoshi’s first recitation of the sutras, during which the guest priests pounded skull-shaped drums and rang brass chimes, we had all been sitting quietly on the floor, the men with their legs crossed and the women on their knees, and my mother’s small box of bones perched up high beneath the golden Buddha’s gaze. When Masayoshi began to chant, it struck us all that she was really dead. There is such a thing in life as a final parting. This is the sadness, I thought, that strikes all people. All around the world as we age, we realize with greater clarity that we will one day part from each other, and from the things we love the most. Children are unhinged from parents, never to be children again.

  First Mineko choked on a tear. Then she deftly pulled a handkerchief out of her purse and began to mop her face. I saw her husband crying too, though he sat stolidly while water poured down his face. The tears spread, as though we were all linked together by an aqueduct for a deluge of water that only sprang when grief called it forth. The children moved me the most. They sensed the sadness in the room the way you might feel the pressure of a typhoon as it begins to descend on a town in the late summer. They wept wildly, half-afraid at how the adults in their lives had been transformed into flailing, undependable creatures and conscious that they too would one day die.

  Over and over Masayoshi shouted at evil spirits, warning them to stay away from my mother’s newly born soul. He cried in kiai, shouting nonsensical but frightening syllables so loudly that even I was startled. Sometimes he attacked the first part of the word, letting it trail off at the end. Other times he started softly, then raised his voice half a pitch. I had never before nor have I since heard this sound so many times in a row. I know that he was doing this to fix in our minds that my mother had truly gone—and to let her soul know she was dead and it was time for her to leave all of us—and that this is the custom. But the needless repetition felt like a torture to me. Every time he cried out, I thought back over the past few years of my life, pictures fluttering into my mind’s eye like the slats of a fan, each with a different image, closing slowly. There were our early years together, my stubbornness at the piano, her endless faith in my special qualities, the time I had spent wandering around Europe, and even now in Japan while she had been dying.

  I hadn’t expected Masayoshi to call us up to say a few words to my mother’s bones. Mineko pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket. It was a speech she’d prepared. But I, as the flesh and blood daughter, was asked to speak immediately after Mr. Horie, who, since his stroke, could only mumble a few words. Everyone looked at me to see what I would do.

  I held onto Masayoshi’s arm as he escorted me from the floor to the altar. He had not touched me in a long time. Alone, I stood in front of the altar and stared at my mother’s bones. On either side of the altar was a priest, both waiting for me to speak. I caught sight of François, off to the side, and he nodded at me.

  What should I say? What one final speech would I make to my mother?

  I cleared my throat. Parted my lips.

  Then I thought about the fact that we would have a memorial for her on Ohigan, the two times of the year when the boundaries between the spirit world and the living would be thin enough to permit her return. She’d return every year during Obon. And then there would be the memorials to commemorate her death. Each time, I’d have the chance to say another speech to her. Would Mineko and her family be with us each time?

  I began to grow hot. I turned my head, looking for Masayoshi. He stepped forward and took my hand. “You can say whatever you are feeling.”

  “Masayoshi …,” I began.

  “Just anything.”

  But I didn’t then nor do I now ever want to share all that I was feeling with the people in that room. I know that there are some who grow weak with grief, and who believe that mourning has the power to dissolve all the divisions we feel in daily life. I could feel what everyone wanted from me. They wanted a display of regret that I hadn’t been there when she’d died. As sorry as I was about that, I could feel something else from them, a desire that I express something greater than grief. They wanted an acknowledgment that they were right and I was wrong, and this I could not give them.

  I don’t know in what way they felt they were actually superior to me, as I hadn’t really done anything so terrible, nothing beyond that incident all those years ago when I’d broken Mineko’s arm. Wasn’t she the one who always persisted in reviving this past incarnation of me to my face, as if always to remind me of who I had been when I was thirteen? People always say th
at it is best at funerals and memorials to remember the people who have died as you want to remember them. What I wanted was to remember the years long ago before my mother had gotten married to Mr. Horie and invited all these other people into our lives.

  I made up my mind then and there what I would do. I looked up at her bones and said, quickly, “Mother. Thank you.” Then I sat back down, this time without Masayoshi’s help in navigating the temple.

  I felt much better having done things this way. The sick feeling I’d had was gone. The world around me didn’t quiver as though I were underwater. I felt clear and confident now that I knew what would happen.

  The rest of the family was very, very quiet. I looked at Chieko, expecting her to speak next. It was her turn to speak, after all. She and Mineko were staring at me, their mouths open like koi searching for nonexistent food on a pond’s surface. I nodded in the direction of the altar to urge one of them to get up and start speaking. After a few tense minutes, Chieko finally rose up from her seat and began to read from a letter she had prepared.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” François said to me at the after-memorial lunch, which, as had the dinner the previous night, contained no meat. “I didn’t know what to say when my mother died either.”

  “I had things to say.” Why was he trying to make excuses for me? It wasn’t as if I needed some sort of justification for the way I had chosen to act during the memorial. “Just not in front of everyone.”

  He had taken it upon himself to sit next to me, apparently unaware that there was a proper order in which we should all sit. Technically, as the closest living blood relative to my mother, I should have been sitting at the end of the table, next to Masayoshi, who was seated at the head. But I had been placed in a subservient position to Mineko and Chieko. Perhaps they had done this to keep me away from Masayoshi. Or maybe they had done this to try to assert themselves as her true daughters. Whatever the case, I was annoyed, and so when I saw the priests lurking around waiting to take their place at the table, I ignored them and made it clear that François was not going to move, thereby displacing one of Mineko’s children to the other end of the table. I could tell that everyone was perturbed, but no one dared say anything. This is the kind of effect a foreigner can have on a group of Japanese.

  That day, I met Masayoshi’s wife. I was disappointed that she was pretty. When she came to serve me a cup of sake, she murmured under her breath how pleased she was to meet me. She lifted her face after bowing, and in it I saw no jealousy, only a concern that I would like her and treat her with courtesy. I suddenly felt years older and more sophisticated than she would ever be. I shot a glace at Masayoshi, who was pretending not to watch our exchange.

  I bowed back to her. “What a pleasure,” I said with as much sincerity as I could muster, “to finally meet you too. This is a lovely temple. I’m very impressed.”

  “Oh!” She blushed. “I’m just a country person and this is a country temple.”

  “Everyone knows that what you have here isn’t the usual country temple.” I smiled back at her. She was a simpleton. No threat to me. It would be fun to befriend her. Mineko and Chieko would not expect this.

  She bowed her head and blushed a deeper shade of pink.

  “Anyway,” I confided, “I live in Paris now, but you know, I grew up in the rice paddies of Japan. So, really, I’m just a country person too.”

  Her eyes smiled and she glanced around the room at my adopted sisters, a look of sheer happiness on her face, and they looked back with disappointment.

  Then she moved on down the table, serving the other guests.

  “What was that all about?” François asked me.

  “She’s the wife of the head priest.”

  “Yes, I gathered. But there was something …”

  “Just a friendly conversation,” I replied. “Wouldn’t you like a drink?”

  “At a memorial?”

  “Didn’t anyone tell you that we Japanese like to get drunk even on serious occasions? We are not puritans.” I smiled meaningfully.

  “That’s true,” he said quietly. “I’ve learned that you are not.”

  I stood up and went into the kitchen and got out another sake cup for François. I brought this back to him and filled it. Safe in the cocoon of cavorting with a foreigner, I toasted the safe journey of my mother’s soul to nirvana.

  Later, when François had excused himself and left to call a taxi, I went to the bathroom. I could hear women whispering outside while they waited for their turn at the toilet. Someone declared: “It must be all that time abroad.”

  “She hasn’t been gone that long,” Mineko hissed back. “She’s always been strange.”

  When I came out of the bathroom, I avoided meeting their eyes. I knew that what they wanted was for me to cry. Instead, I lifted up my head and strode outside.

  I decided to go out for a walk. I went in the direction opposite to the one I had taken earlier in the day, humming to myself. The stone path ended on a cliff overlooking the valley floor and I stood there looking at the rice paddies. Below, some farmers were planting seedlings by hand. The women wore sunbonnets with wide brims that covered their faces like oversized rose petals. The oldest among them were hunched at the back, even when they attempted to stand up straight.

  One person could change this afternoon: Masayoshi. He could come and speak to me. He could tell me that he’d made a mistake and that he never should have listened to my mother. He would offer to help me now. He would not just leave me to my stepsisters.

  But he did not come and my longing to speak with him turned into great disappointment at his cowardice.

  The farmers had finished planting rice in the paddies and were now sitting on the bank sharing a thermos. I envied them, for it had to be much better to be down there than up here on the hillside with a house full of grieving people.

  I thought of my room in Hachinohe. The boxes against the wall. My toys, now fingered by Mineko’s children.

  It occurred to me that I was as alone as I would ever be.

  What was going to happen to me? Wasn’t I too old to be an orphan?

  “Hello,” said a voice.

  It wasn’t Masayoshi, but a child.

  “Hello,” I said. When he didn’t say anything more, I asked, “How old are you?”

  He flexed his palm, then, looking sheepish, folded down his thumb so only four fingers remained in the air.

  “And who are you?” I asked.

  “I live here,” he answered frankly.

  “Here?”

  “My father’s the priest.”

  “Oh.” I nodded.

  The child was watching me with tremendous curiosity. He had unusually round eyes, and as he searched my face his pupils seemed to dilate and I felt drawn in by them. “Are you a child or an adult?” he asked me, quite seriously.

  “What?”

  “You seem like an adult. But you seem like a child too.”

  “Did your father put you up to this?”

  “You aren’t sitting inside doing boring grown-up talk.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You look like you’ve been out playing.”

  “I have. I have.”

  “Only children play.”

  I knelt down till I was facing him at eye level. “What is your name?”

  “Akira.”

  “Akira-kun.” Little Akira. “Tell me, Akira. Is there a way that I can become a child again? I mean, completely a child?”

  He furrowed his brow. He pursed his lips. I thought to myself that I loved this little boy. How like and unlike his father he was! How different from Mineko and Chieko’s brats. “You have to pray,” he said.

  “Pray?”

  “Every day. Like I do. At the hotokesama.”

  “I don’t have a family altar.”

  “Everyone has a hotokesama,” he said.

  “Well, but I don’t.”

  “Didn’t your father buy one for your house?”

/>   “No,” I said. “You see, I don’t have a father. I was actually …” I hesitated. “I was born inside a big piece of bamboo. My mother found me there. I don’t have a father.”

  “Well, that’s what’s wrong.” He nodded as though he had easily uncovered the source of all my woes. “If you had a father, he would have made sure your house had a hotokesama.” He looked at me kindly. “You can use ours while you are here.”

  He led me by the hand to the house. Under his protection, we passed by Chieko and Mineko, who watched with no small awe that a child had been able to tame the temperamental Satomi into submission.

  The shrine was typical. It sat in a specially designed recessed area of the house. It was shaped like a large black cabinet whose doors were left open during the day but closed at night. Inside, gilded steps representing levels of paradise rose to the top where the Buddha sat, one hand raised, palm flat against the air: “Have no fear.”

  Akira dragged a zabuton pillow across the floor. His movements reminded me of his efficient mother, someone who knew instinctively how to care for guests and make them feel at home. Just as quickly he reminded me of his father, with the careful, concentrating way he lit a candle, then took a slim stick of incense from a vase and handed it to me. I lit the incense and waved it around until the flame had subsided to just a glow at the very tip of the stick. Then I placed it in the ash. Akira picked up a little mallet and rang the bowl-shaped gong inside the altar. While the sound carried in waves throughout the shrine, I closed my eyes and tried to organize my scrambled thoughts into a prayer.

  A few minutes later, I took the zabuton to a corner of the room and put my head on it. Very quickly I fell into a dreamless sleep. When I woke up an hour and a half later, I felt clear-minded. The house was empty: Akira had gone and the guests were somewhere else on the temple grounds. I put my shoes on by the entrance to the house and crept along to the temple.