In obedience to Kiriko, and with her still tailing me, I headed through the entrance to Ryūseiji. Before me lay a path of white gravel without a single leaf or piece of trash on it, leading to the temple’s main hall. To the side was a narrower, winding path that skirted some shrubs. I figured it led to the priest’s residence.
Which way should I go? I looked back at Kiriko. She caught up and headed for the residence. I followed.
The entrance to the priest’s quarters was open. Beside it, a Chinese trumpet vine was heavy with flowers. My mom said my grandma hated those flowers because you see them at temples, but I thought they were pretty.
I couldn’t see anybody around, but the second I set foot inside, a priest appeared as if he’d been watching me. He wore a white vestment with what looked like a black skirt around his middle.
“You must be the young Sada boy Ms. Minakami mentioned. I’ve been waiting for you since she called. Come in, come in.”
How old was he? He could be in his forties, like my dad. Then again, if someone told me he was over sixty, I’d believe it. It’s hard to tell with a man whose head is shaved. His face was ruddy and shiny, as was his pate. No wrinkles. If it hadn’t been for his clothing, he would have looked exactly like a pro wrestler—and a villainous one, at that. His voice boomed from his large chest as if strengthened by sutra chanting.
“Kiriko, you made it,” he said.
The cat was on a mission.
I glanced at Kiriko in disgust.
“Kiriko is friends with my cat Tama,” the priest told me. “Tama’s under the weather these days due to the heat. You came for a get-well visit, didn’t you, Kiriko? Good kitty.”
The priest made a show of trying to pick up Kiriko. Just then, another cat yowled outside. Would that be Tama? Maybe the priest had told the truth. Kiriko slipped from the priest’s large hands and ran off.
Unlike Kiriko, I couldn’t make a clever escape. The priest had me in his clutches. And he kept calling me a young boy, which I hate.
I couldn’t hide the sour look on my face, but the priest showed me into a fancy reception room, anyway, and told me to sit.
“Ms. Minakami told me about your summer project. I’m impressed. Impressed.”
He had a habit of repeating the ends of his sentences. He sat at a big table as if to block my exit. The table was huge, the priest was built like a mountain, and the unreadable fancy calligraphy on a scroll in one corner was also big. I felt miniature, like a Lilliputian in Gulliver’s Travels. Like I might disappear completely.
“I hear you’re researching the old names of places in town,” the priest continued. “How did you come up with such an idea? For a growing young boy like you, this subject seems dry to me. Seems dry.”
The priest’s wife appeared from behind him to serve cold barley tea and mizu yōkan.
“I heard that the street where I live used to be called Kimyō Temple Alley,” I said. “We looked it up during multigrade activity time at school. It’s an odd name, especially since there’s no temple.”
After repeating my story, I gulped my tea.
“I see. So, you learned about this at school? It’s a funny name for sure. ‘Come back to life’ temple. Creepy too. Dead people coming back and living among us like it’s no big deal. Scary. Scary.”
The priest’s mountain-like body shuddered. He really did seem scared.
The more I watched the priest, the more I noticed that he was acting just like Ms. Minakami—talking more about the return of dead people than Kimyō Temple itself. Something was weird. I would have understood if someone told me why it was bad for the dead to return—like if they dragged the living into the world of the dead or something—but neither of them had explained. They just went on and on about how creepy it was that the dead came back and lived among us.
I could tell that the priest wanted to ask me about Akari. She was the only ghost, or the only returned-to-life person, that I had seen. But I wasn’t going to satisfy his curiosity. If Akari had come back from the dead, was that so wrong? Was she bothering someone, living with Invisible Mama and looking worried? What was so scary? It was strange, and maybe a little spooky, but I didn’t think it was creepy. Not like Ms. Minakami and this priest. I realized that I had taken Akari’s side.
“Hmm, I hadn’t thought about Kimyōji like that. Do you really think that people coming back to life is creepy?” I asked, playing dumb.
“You don’t think so? They’re ghosts. Ghosts!”
The priest dangled his hands in the air and mimicked a ghost. He was such a beefy, healthy ghost that he looked silly.
“So you think it’s possible for the dead to come back?” I asked.
The priest grew uncomfortable. “Well, it’s right there in the name—Kimyōji. Kimyōji.”
He laughed nervously.
“So there was a temple by that name?”
I opened my notebook and gripped my pen.
The priest rambled for a while about the history of the temple district, but eventually said he had never heard of Kimyōji.
By the time I left Ryūseiji, it was after three.
What am I doing? I wondered, sighing aloud.
Ms. Minakami and the priest both knew about Kimyōji but were hiding it. I could tell. They were trying to cover up Kimyō Temple’s story while getting information from me. They knew that I knew, or was hiding, something. And I was—Akari. Yet they hadn’t really learned a thing from me, or I from them. All I knew now was that they wanted me to talk about Akari. I might still talk it over with Yūsuke, but I had no plans to confide in any more adults about her.
I thought of Akari sitting alone in her empty house. I felt sorry for her, even angry for her. I couldn’t get her off my mind—even if she was a ghost.
Kiriko appeared behind me again, like a shadow. I had an uneasy feeling that the cat might figure out what I was hiding. I couldn’t trick her like I could the showy granny or the pro wrestler priest. Despite the heat, I felt a cold sweat break out as I walked home.
“I can’t believe I came all the way over here and still don’t know anything about Kimyō Temple,” I muttered. “I’m sick of this!”
I wanted Kiriko to hear me. It was absurd that I was paying so much attention to a cat.
She kept following me. All the way home. I thought she might even come inside my house. Yūsuke would be on his way over soon, and I wanted to talk with him about Akari. With Kiriko there, I wouldn’t be able to.
I squatted so I was face-to-face with the cat and summoned my courage.
“You like me, don’t you, kitty? That’s fine. You can come live at my house. It’s bigger than Ms. Minakami’s place. Run around here for a while and you might even lose some weight. I’ll warn you, though, my mom doesn’t like cats much. She might have to put a leash on you. But you can take it, right? And you can handle having only rice and miso soup to eat. My mom makes the broth from real fish, not a mix.”
The cat was huge with thick fur. Ms. Minakami clearly fed Kiriko like royalty. About the time I mentioned the diet of rice and soup, the cat turned and stalked off. Sweet relief. To think a cat could boss me around like a bully! It was so pathetic that I couldn’t even laugh.
After I got home from Ryūseiji, Yūsuke came over when cram school ended, looking like his brain was fried. We still had some time before the festival, and I pondered how to bring up Akari as Yūsuke sat on my bedroom floor, his nose stuck in a manga book.
Just then, my mom came to get me with a scary look on her face. “Kazu, what did you do!” she hissed.
“Huh?” I had no idea what she meant.
“The head of the neighborhood association and the president of the seniors’ group are here. They want to see you!”
“They do?”
“Don’t ‘they do’ me, Mister!”
Mom motioned me downstairs.
“They came to see me?”
“They did. Now hurry up!”
Mom was in the worst mood I’d s
een in days. Neither of us knew why the district elders had invaded our house.
The two old gentlemen sat formally in our tatami room. The neighborhood association head was the retired owner of Yabuya, a noodle restaurant. The president of the seniors’ group was a man I had seen around town, but I didn’t know which family he belonged to. He was completely bald in front. Both of the men wore pinched expressions, as if this visit were a huge bother. There was a fan oscillating in the room, but they both flapped their folding fans impatiently to cool themselves.
I wanted to sulk a bit myself.
“So, you’re Kazuhiro-kun?”
The head of the neighborhood association looked at me and put on a smile.
Mom yanked my arm to make me sit. “Has my son done something of concern?” she inquired. Wearing a tight expression, she looked across the low table at the men.
“Not at all. We’ve learned your son is doing some research.”
“The priest at Ryūseiji told us and thought we might be of use to Kazuhiro-kun.”
“There was a parishioners’ gathering at Ryūseiji today.”
“We’re impressed by your son’s project.”
The two men took turns talking as they sized up my mother and me.
“Ryūseiji, the temple?” Mom asked, startled. She turned to look at me.
I nodded. “I went to talk to Ms. Minakami about my summer project and she drove me to Ryūseiji to see the priest.”
“So now these gentlemen are here to see us?” Mom’s jaw dropped.
“You told me to do my project on historical names, remember? I started working on it and ended up going a few places today. I still don’t know very much.” I produced a record-breaking scowl.
“Ah—”
My mom froze briefly. Then she jumped up. “Let me bring you two some cold drinks,” she said to the guests. “I apologize. You’re taking precious time to help my son.”
She dashed to the kitchen.
“Not to worry! We just wanted to help.”
“An interest in history is something to be proud of!”
The two men called to my mother’s retreating back. Then they turned to me, as if getting down to business.
“Kazuhiro-kun, what exactly do you want to know?”
I told my story again. Third time in one day. It was beginning to annoy me.
Then the men ate edamame and chilled tofu and grew flushed from the beer my mom served, and they told me how in the late 1800s the Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines were separated in Japan, and anti-Buddhist sentiment spread, and sacred images and sutra scrolls were burned. The president of the seniors’ group was once a social studies teacher. As it turns out, neither man would end up telling me anything new about Kimyōji.
“I doubt such a temple existed.”
“Must have been a ghost temple!”
The two men laughed at the term they’d coined.
Then they said they had to be off to the festival and struggled to their feet.
“Thank you for stopping by at this busy time,” Mom said as she bowed at the front door to see them off.
As I bowed next to her, the timing of their visit struck me as odd. Today should have been a frantically hectic day for the neighborhood association, not a time to come by and offer me a history lesson. Something was up. I had a suspicion that the men had come to check on me, or to confirm something. It had to do with Akari. What I knew seemed to matter a lot to several older people in my community.
I headed for my room to talk about it with Yūsuke, but Mom stopped me. She had gone to clear the men’s dishes and came hurrying back.
“Kazu, one of the guests left his folding fan. Run after him and return it, will you?”
She thrust the fan at me.
I had no choice and jogged out the front door.
The two men were just turning out of our street.
“I can’t believe Ryūseiji called us about him, even though we’ve got the festival tonight,” grumbled the head of the neighborhood association. He slumped his shoulders.
I knew from earlier that he was hard of hearing. That must be why he spoke so loudly. I could hear every word he was saying. I hid behind a telephone pole.
“But the boy doesn’t know much, does he?”
“No, he’s just doing his schoolwork. And the project is his mom’s idea.”
“True. He didn’t want to go to Ryūseiji.”
“What I want to know is who started this. Who blabbed about Kimyōji?” The neighborhood association head clicked his tongue.
“Did he say they studied a map at school?”
“That’s right. Must’ve been Broad Bean’s doing.”
Even the old men knew my vice principal’s nickname!
“Fellow fancies himself a historian.”
“Nothing but trouble, that one. Didn’t he come from the next town over? He doesn’t know a thing about local history. He thinks he does, but he’s barely scratched the surface.”
The two men laughed, almost giggling, and hurried away.
I decided to return the fan later.
Now I knew it for certain. There was a secret, and it did involve Kimyō Temple. Ms. Minakami, the priest at Ryūseiji, and those two men were all in on it.
“Have you seen one?”
I pictured Ms. Minakami’s eyes when she asked me that question. What I had seen was Akari. What those adults all wanted to know about, was Akari.
When I got to my room, Yūsuke looked up from the manga.
“Did you have diarrhea or something, Kazu? You were gone for ages.”
Well, at least he realized I’d left the room.
I’d hoped to talk to him about Akari, but he threw his book down.
“The festival’s starting soon. Time to get going. I scored some spending money from my grandma. Fried noodles, here I come!”
He began to run down the stairs.
“Kazu, let’s go!”
Well at least my attentive friend still planned to take me along. I dashed after him.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Family Secret
The local Kannon temple sat at the center of Minami Ōdori. It took Yūsuke and me less than five minutes to walk there from my house. Inside the grounds, twenty-odd vendors had set up booths, and the tantalizing smell of stir-fry sauce filled the air.
Volunteers had put up a tent that was several times larger than the temple hall itself. Inside the tent, neighborhood elders, including the two men who had visited my home, were handing out drinks to festivalgoers.
Yūsuke and I downed our stir-fried noodles first thing, and then we ate some takoyaki. Afterward we sat down by a wading pool where people fished for water balloon yo-yos.
A human-sized red goldfish popped up between us.
“Gotcha!” It was Ami Yamagata, dressed in her festival yukata. Four or five other girls from our class surrounded us.
“How do I look?” Ami asked.
I couldn’t believe she was asking us.
“Perfect!” Yūsuke gave a thumbs-up as he checked out Ami’s red yukata and her sash, which flared like a goldfish tail.
“And wow—Inoue, Sakko, Tanabe, Yukina, yours look great too!”
The heir to the kimono throne had a gift. He talked to the girls as if he hung out with them constantly. In return, they acted giddy and flattered. Each of them wore a yellow, pink, or red yukata with an accessory, such as lace at the collar or artificial flowers in the sash. They looked more like exotic tropical fish than regular goldfish.
I whispered to him. “Are they all customers at your store?”
“Yes,” he confirmed in a low voice. “For the past two weeks, my grandma has been holding yukata seminars and selling them all these yukata, sashes, and ornaments.”
“You all look terrific!” he added loudly for good measure.
The man running the yo-yo pond narrowed his eyes in nostalgia. “Ah, the yukata are what make this the summer festival,” he murmured.
“
I’m so glad we took the trouble, aren’t you?” Ami and the other girls fluttered, but then one of them stood up and waved.
“There’s Akari!”
Akari came walking down the path that led to the temple building. She wore a white yukata with an indigo iris pattern. Compared with everyone else’s yukata, hers looked more subdued and grown-up. She wore the usual red baubles in her hair and had pulled the look together with a stiff red sash.
Her large eyes widened when she saw us, and she grinned and waved. Then she looked up to one side and smiled and chatted with someone. Ah, so Invisible Mama was next to her.
“She came with her mom!” observed Yukina, waving. “We thought for sure she’d be with Misa and her friends, so we didn’t invite her. We should have!”
Ami and the others nodded.
“Why’d you think she’d come with Misa?” I asked. My mind suddenly shifted to Akari again.
“Well, until last year she was in her class,” Ami answered. “Don’t you remember?”
Oh right, everyone else knew Akari from last year. No, wait—Yūsuke knew her from before that. Ami and the others must be the same. They not only remembered Akari from fourth grade, but they also remembered her from years ago, when we all were little. How had this happened? I looked toward Invisible Mama, whom everyone else could apparently see. Again, I saw nothing.
Then without even realizing it, I began to watch Akari as she clip-clopped along in her wooden geta.
At that moment I felt someone’s gaze. One of the men who’d come to my house was watching me from the tent. He had seen me following Akari with my eyes. Oh, no! I panicked. I had to keep them from finding out about her—about how she was the one who had returned to life. What should I do?
Akari was saying something to Invisible Mama and looking in our direction. I raised a hand to wave. I was pretty impressed with myself, considering I had only met her the day before. As Akari waved back, looking pleased, I watched the man in the tent out of the corner of my eye. He turned away. Apparently, I had managed to act just like any nervous boy greeting a girl in his class. If the man had been Kiriko, I might not have fooled him so easily.
Temple Alley Summer Page 4