by Kyoko Mori
“I’m glad it cleared up.” She turns back to face me. The sky is silver, full of hazy light. My eyes hurt when I look up.
Kneeling down, we begin to unwrap the flowers from layers and layers of newspaper.
“I hope they gave us something bright and pretty like I asked,” Kazumi says. “Aunt Takako was still young and pretty, not like most of the people remembered here.” She waves her hand vaguely around her, indicating the various family stones. For a fleeting moment, I picture my mother sitting among the gray figures of old men and women. She is still beautiful at forty-one, dressed in a dark purple kimono with patterns of maple leaves. In ten years, Kazumi and I will be older than she ever was. Under the newspaper, my fingers uncover purple and pink petals. Kazumi is already taking out her flowers, holding them carefully the way we used to pick up the dolls people gave us when we were young—we lifted them gently out of the boxes so that their ruffled dresses and long hair would not get crumpled and tangled up.
The two bunches are identical. Each has one long spray of purple orchid, a few tiger lilies, pink poker flowers, asters, purple statice, snapdragons, and sprigs of cedar. We put them in the basins.
“Do you remember her spirit-name?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Look.” She points to the names carved on the side. Our grandmother, Kiku, her son Tsuyoshi who died in Hiroshima, and my mother, Takako, are remembered on the same stone by their names in this life, the dates of their birth and death, and the nine-character names given to their spirits after their souls completed the forty-nine-day journey into paradise. I read Takako’s spirit-name and remember what it means: “the sister who walked the path of reverence and mercy.”
From her purse, Kazumi takes out some matches and incense sticks wrapped in plastic.
“This is just like before,” I say. “You’re prepared. You know exactly what to do. My mother can see I’m still following your example as she wanted me to.”
Kazumi strikes the match and holds it to the handful of incense she has unwrapped. Small flames go up on the ends like sparklers we used to light on summer nights. She waits for the flames to go out, leaving the orange glow at each tip. White smoke starts to rise as she places the incense in the small bowl under the carved names.
“You visit first.” She gets up and steps away. “Stay as long as you want to.”
I move sideways till I am kneeling directly in front of the grave. Kazumi is standing by the wall, but I can’t see her because the stone is in the way. The silver gray sky stretches over the rows of graves. There is nobody in the cemetery except the two of us and the dead.
I close my eyes and put my hands, palms together, in front of my face. Even with my eyes closed, I can feel the hazy gray light around me. A few cars drive by on the other side of the high wall. I think of my mother, this time in one of the dresses she liked best, a white cotton A-line with blue flowers she had embroidered. She must have been in her late thirties when she sewed that dress—only a few years older than Kazumi and I. It seems strange for us to have grown so old.
How can I talk to you? I think. Are you really here?
The cemetery is absolutely quiet now. I want to talk to her, even though it’s possible that no part of her lingers, even here.
Wherever you are, I love you always. No one can take your place. Remember me wherever you are.
I don’t tell her, Rest in peace. How can she rest in peace as though I were a long ago dream she has forgotten? She wouldn’t want that. I don’t want that. So I keep saying, Remember me. I never will forget you. Be with me.
After what seems like a long time, I open my eyes on the purple orchid, its petals flying from the long stem like a leap of faith. The incense keeps rising in wispy white columns. Getting up, I feel dazed by the hazy light.
Kazumi puts her hand on my arm when I reach the wall where she is waiting. “Are you okay?”
I nod. She goes to kneel before the stone. Even from here, I can smell the incense and the cedar sprigs, their crisp fragrances mixing with the damp smell of moss. I imagine Kazumi and Akiko walking through this cemetery excusing themselves as through a crowd at a train station.
Before long, Kazumi comes walking toward me. Her face is wet with tears. I put my arms around her.
“I want you to be happy,” she says, hugging me back. “Be happy for her.”
I press my cheek against her shoulder.
“She should have lived to see us,” I say. “She promised your mother. I miss her.”
“I know.”
We stand holding each other, both of us crying. Her shoulders shake. My tears are making a dark spot on her blouse. We walk back to the stone and kneel down together.
Look at us, I think to my mother. We will always miss you.
When we stand up, our knees are black. Kazumi hands me some tissue from her purse as we start walking through the crowded cemetery to the mountain of jizos. We stop for a while. Many of the jizos have been given handsewn or knitted red bibs to wear around their necks. Someone has hung a garland of origami birds around one jizo’s hands folded in prayer. Looking back toward the cemetery, I notice the fresh flowers in front of several stones. There’s a toy windmill stuck among some freesias in front of one grave. I try to take comfort in the flowers, the origami birds, the windmill, all the colors that dot the gray landscape like points of interest on a map. I want to believe that the soul’s journey does not end in a pure, empty place. The path to enlightenment should be marked with reminders of joy from this life. The warmth of knitted bibs, the flight of cranes, and the beauty of flowers should be touchstones on our journey, not distractions to be renounced through endless meditation; then our final freedom would come not from forgetting but from remembering.
Kazumi and I proceed to the gate, where she stops and looks back toward me. “Are you all right?” she asks.
Nodding, I catch up with her so we are side by side as we lift our feet over the stone slab and walk into the city traffic. It’s late afternoon. People are driving home from work or walking to the arcade with baskets on their arms. I put my hand on Kazumi’s shoulder. My fingers connect the red dots on her blouse.
We walk on through the arcade, past grocery stores and bakeries. In the coming week inside the temple walls, our two identical bouquets will wither slowly where we used to play hide-and-seek. In our memory of that cemetery, I will always be seven years old, stomping on the stones, intent on shattering them, while Kazumi watches, forever trying to save me from trouble. In the end, it seems more a comfort than a source of grief to know that the past stays the same, that we are never completely free from it. Some part of us will always remain trapped in the past even as we walk side by side away from its pain into a summer afternoon with people coming home, preparing dinner. Kazumi is turning her face sideways toward me. She wants to know that I am all right, that the visit to the cemetery has not upset me too much. She smiles uncertainly. I shrug. Then I give her a big smile. Still smiling, I slide my hand off her shoulder and reach out for hers. For a few seconds, we swing our hands together; then we let go.
The Mansion of Broken Dishes
On the old express train, which took three hours from Kobe to Himeji with several stops, my mother, brother, and I ate sandwiches while comparing the shades of green outside the window: the dark green of the mountain ridge to the north, the gold tints mixed into the bamboo groves, the bright squares of paddies. The scenery has not changed much, but it whips past me in double time. The new express train stops only once, at Akashi, in front of the planetarium we visited on Sundays; there the large clock on the observation tower still points to Japanese Standard Time. “Every watch or clock in Japan has to agree with that one,” my mother used to say, flicking her wrist to see if hers did.
I am alone on the train because my aunt Keiko couldn’t meet me in Kobe as planned. She called me at seven and said, “I have to do something at my shrine first. I’ll be at Grandmother’s house in the afternoon. Don’t w
ait for me. She’s anxious to see you.”
As we approach Himeji, the countryside disappears and is replaced by factories and residential areas. The train begins to slow down. An announcement reminds us that this is our final stop, that we should be careful not to forget our luggage. I get off, cross the street to the bus terminal, and stand in line behind the sign for Yamasaki, the closest town to my grandmother’s village. Ten minutes later, the bus rolls in, still painted orange on a cream-colored background. I remember to choose a seat near the front to avoid getting motion sickness. The bus is only half full.
For the first twenty minutes, the bus keeps stopping and starting in the heavy downtown traffic. The drive is anything but smooth. My brother and I used to feel queasy here. As the traffic thins, we pass the Himeji Castle and then an old samurai mansion with a sign in front that says sara yashiki, “Mansion of the Plates.”
My mother told us the ghost story that made this mansion famous. Okiku, a maidservant here in feudal times, broke one of her master’s twenty heirloom plates and was beheaded by him. Rather than giving her a proper burial, he threw her body into a well. From then on, her ghost crawled up from the well on rainy nights. Amid the gusts of wind and rain, her master heard her counting the plates and weeping because no matter how many times she counted, one was always missing. This story didn’t make sense to me. Okiku’s punishment reminded me of having to stay after school to make up some work I didn’t do right—like memorizing the multiplication table or converting fractions into decimals. “Your story is unfair,” I told my mother. “Poor Okiku had to count the plates even after she was dead. Her master only had to listen. I thought he was the villain. He should have had to do the counting every night.” My mother laughed and said, “This was supposed to be a ghost story, not a joke.”
Passing the samurai mansion this time, I think of what Keiko said—my mother should have broken some dishes, cried, and begged my father to spend more time with her, to love her. I wonder how many marriages are saved by such outbursts, held together by broken dishes. As the bus drives on, I imagine a huge empty house filled with shards of china, porcelain, stoneware. The image makes me sad for my mother, for Keiko, for all the women doomed to years of loneliness in their own houses.
Outside the city, the bus gets on the highway that cuts through the mountains. For a few minutes at a time, we pass through tunnels under orange lights that turn everything gray. Between the tunnels, we stop at small villages with terraced plots of rice and tea on hillsides. A few people get on or off, all of them old men and women in gray smocks and loose black pants that farmers wear. My grandparents dressed just like them when they worked outside.
The bus continues on through villages whose names I still remember. The countryside, I am sure, has not changed much since my mother was a young girl growing up in Kobe. Every summer she visited her grandparents at the same house where I am now going to see my grandmother. My mother never lived in that house—she and Shiro stayed on in Kobe during the war when her family moved there—but she considered my grandparents’ village to be her home: sato, “the place one comes from.” When she talked of our summer visits there, the word she used was kaeru, “return,” rather than iku, “go.”
Looking outside at the lush paddies and the mountains behind them, I think of how her life might have been had my grandparents not lost the land they inherited from my great-grandfather. My mother had been planning to go to college as soon as the war was over, to become a nurse or a pharmacist. After they lost the land, though, her parents had no money even for their daily expenses, let alone for her tuition, so my mother went to work at Kawasaki, where she eventually met my father. If her parents had been rich, she would have worked at a hospital as a nurse or pharmacist and married someone else. Even if she had wound up with a man like my father, she could have left her marriage without stigma.
Couples in my parents’ generation seldom divorced. In the rare cases when they did, the woman left their home, and the children stayed with the man, who would marry again. The divorce was assumed to be the woman’s fault. The man was “sending her away” or “sending her back to her parents” to replace her with a better wife for himself, a better mother for his children. If my mother had chosen to leave her marriage, she would have lost my brother and me; she would have become a burden to her parents.
But if my mother’s parents had been landowners, her divorce would have been different. Wealth removes social stigma. Wealthy women, when divorced, can return to their parents with their children and live in prosperity. If that had been the case with my mother, my father would have been considered “not good enough for her.” “She doesn’t need him,” people would have said. “She has her own family. They’re rich. Her children are well provided for.”
In reality, my mother could not return permanently to her home, her sato, except by having her ashes buried there, her name carved among members of her own family rather than my father’s. She asked for that burial arrangement because she was divorcing my father by her death and returning to the land of her family. But during her life, my mother had preferred the city to the countryside. Though she looked forward to her summer returns, she was happy, at the end of August, to go back to the city, to our convenient life. Life in the countryside reminded her mostly of her parents’ poverty. She used to try and get my grandmother to wear brighter colors and more cheerful styles of clothing. “I don’t want you to look like a poor old woman from the countryside” was how she always put it. She could no more return to her sato than I could return to Japan to live.
But the countryside I’m passing now would have meant something different to my mother if her parents had been able to keep their land. Then they would have been able to dress and eat well, to visit the city for pleasure. They wouldn’t have been poor, helpless, forced to pursue an occupation they weren’t prepared for. If my mother, my brother, and I had come back to live with them under those circumstances, we would have taken this bus to visit Himeji and Kobe, to go to museums and concerts, to go shopping, to visit friends. I might have gone away to college and then returned to marry near home. My life, as well as my mother’s, would have been totally different.
* * *
After an hour on the highway, the bus enters the town of Yamasaki and stops in front of a small terminal building. The dozen people left on board all get off. From inside the building, I call my uncle Yasuo’s wholesale grocery store, which is on the other side of town. His wife, Sayo, answers.
“Hi, Aunt Sayo. I’m in Yamasaki. Aunt Keiko is coming later, so I’m alone.”
“I’ll come pick you up in my car,” she says. “I’ll drive you to your grandmother’s house.”
“Are you sure? I can take the bus. I remember which one.”
“Don’t be silly. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Sooner than I expect, she pulls up to the terminal in her small green Toyota and walks over to where I am standing.
“Welcome back,” she says, taking my backpack and putting it in her trunk. “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too.” We sit in the car, and Sayo starts the engine.
“Your uncle wanted to come, too, but some customers showed up before we could close the store. He was disappointed. We haven’t seen you since your grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary. How long ago was that?”
“Seventeen years.”
Sayo shakes her head. “It’s a very long time. Your uncle and I are old now.”
“Well, you look the same,” I tell her.
She laughs. “You don’t have to flatter me.”
“I’m not flattering. How are Akira and Toru?” I inquire after my cousins.
“Akira finished college this year. He lives in Osaka now. He wants to join the Self Defense Army.”
“Really?”
“He has to get in shape first. Toru is still in college in Kyushu. He has another year. I’m sorry they weren’t home. Your uncle wanted them to see you. He holds you
up as an example to them.”
“Me?”
“Don’t be so modest. All your cousins know how smart you are. Your grandfather was always telling them.”
We are driving on a country road between two small villages. The land my great-grandfather owned extended to these villages. He was one of the wealthiest landlords in our prefecture.
“I’m sorry,” Sayo says. “You must miss your grandfather.”
I nod. “It will be strange to visit their house and not see him.”
On the right side of the road, I can see the river where I learned to swim; on the left, rice paddies extend all the way up to the foot of the mountains.
“How is Grandmother these days?”
“Her health is very good for her age. Her mind is clear, too.” Sayo pauses and then adds, “She never forgets anything.”
Soon we are in my grandmother’s village, past the elementary school where my grandfather taught during the day before going home to work his land—though by the time I knew him, he was over fifty-five, the compulsory retirement age for public servants in Japan. He and my grandmother lived on his pension, the little they made from rice-farming, and the money my mother and her brothers sent them. The house is a few blocks down the road from the school. Sayo drives her car into the front yard and parks between the persimmon tree and where the hen house used to be. My grandmother must have given up her hens; there is no hen house.
Getting out of the car, I see that swallows are still making a nest over the front door. When I was young, I used to leave the door open on purpose so they would come flying into the house and swoop over the pots and pans in the kitchen. My grandmother, Keiko, Sayo, and Shiro’s wife, Michiyo, covered their heads with their hands and screamed while my mother grabbed the broom, opened the back door, and chased the birds out.
* * *
My grandmother, Fuku, is in the front room with the TV on. She is sitting on the floor at a low table.
