Picking Bones from Ash (38 page)

“Kashihara.” Satomi turned to me. “It’s the name of a shrine.” Outside, the wind howled.

When my grandmother had died, Satomi had been led to believe that there was nothing for her to inherit. My mother had skipped out of Japan after the memorial service and gone off to America, as we now all knew, coming home only much later to Japan to reinvent herself. Satomi’s relationship with her stepsisters had always been strained, and in a moment of spite, Mineko hadn’t told my mother about the envelope. Somewhere in the intervening years, Mineko had relented and, according to Akira, become less bitter. “Apparently, her children are fans of your work,” he told Satomi, who laughed. Mineko had given the papers to Masayoshi for safekeeping with the hope that he would be able to turn everything over to my
mother one day. Though he’d tried repeatedly to contact my mother, her staff and attorneys never allowed him to send her anything.

Much later, Akira told me how my mother had responded to this information. Gone was the happy, toying way they had related to each other. “So, the only reason you wanted to see me was to give me these papers so you wouldn’t have to feel guilty about hanging on to them anymore,” my mother said.

“That isn’t the only reason.” Masayoshi responded. “We are family and it hasn’t been right to be apart all these years.” My mother switched off the alluring beam of her smile, almost a physical thing in its intensity. With her smile snipped clean out of the air like that, the room had instantly felt colder.

“There were plenty of ways for you to get this information to me.”

“You wouldn’t see us.”

“I don’t like cowards.” She paused. “You have always been such a headache. Ruining our nice reunion. Never able to say what you really feel. Talking in circles around the things that really matter.”

“
I’m
a headache? Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you’ve caused for me? The temple? My family?”

“This has nothing to do with your family!”

“Maybe you were just trying to get back at me when …”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself. You’re not important enough to me for me to want to hurt you!”

“I know I caused you pain …”

“Any pain you’ve caused is for yourself, Masayoshi, and this weird life you’ve created …”

“Stop yelling at me! This shouldn’t be about us anymore but about our children. Your own daughter came all the way from America to look for you and …”

“How convenient. I say something that gets too close to the truth and the little priest hides himself by acting all enlightened, as though he has no feelings of his own and only cares about other people!”

“Satomi!” he thundered, and we were all startled. This angry man roused into a passion was not the gentle, slightly absentminded person I’d come to know. “Where is the statue? And where are the bones? Where are your mother’s bones? I know you took them!”

She looked stunned for a moment at the escalation in his temper. Then
she licked her lips and smiled a small, triumphant smile. “You see. I knew you weren’t really interested in me.”

He was beside himself. “I don’t want to talk about our lives right now! I want to talk about your mother and your obligations to her!”

She waved her hand. “This is all becoming so uninteresting. I haven’t done anything wrong. My mother has been dead for a long time.” But I could see that she was nervous, for her breathing had become shallow and quick and her gaze darted around, unable to find anything on which to rest.

Masayoshi too could see that she was nervous. Seizing the moment, he began to talk rapidly and urgently. “I know what you have done,” he said. “And I am trying to help you fix it.”

A number of years ago a relatively powerful quake had struck the north of Japan, decapitating tombstones and disturbing the Handa family plot. Masayoshi had saved up money for a replacement and a few months ago before the winter season had set in, he had finally set about replacing the tombstone. To do this, he needed to temporarily remove, then rebury all the bones. In a very private moment, Masayoshi and Tomohiro had chanted together before disinterring the family remains; anytime a grave is disturbed, a priest must make the appropriate prayers. When they went to put the old urns into the new grave, which had been reinforced with concrete, they found that Satomi’s mother’s bones were missing.

It is natural, of course, for bones to disintegrate. Even after two years, an urn filled with bones is going to absorb moisture and fill up with water. When they opened the urn belonging to Akiko, however, they had been disturbed to find that it was filled with tiny stones. This could only mean one thing: Akiko’s bones had never been buried.

What had happened? They recalled a period after Akiko’s memorial service when her bones had been placed in a hidden room at the very back of the temple. The family had not buried the bones immediately because Akiko’s death had been unexpected and her family plot not yet ready to receive her. A year later, in the spring, they had buried the bones. Or so they thought.

So what had happened to the remains and where had they gone? Had there been some sort of mix-up in the bone room? Had someone perhaps inadvertently buried the wrong urn? But no. All the urns were clearly marked. Someone had intentionally taken the bones from the temple,
replaced them with a false urn containing stones, and sent the bones off somewhere else.

But who?

Grudgingly, they’d all come to agree on the same culprit.

There had been a few hours during Akiko’s funeral when my mother had been left unattended while she slept in the house, working off a hangover. No one saw Satomi leave that day. She had simply disappeared. It was possible that she had snuck into the back room to swap the bones with stones. Scandalous, offensive, but possible.

This would also be the ultimate revenge against the Horie family for hoarding Akiko’s affection. The bones had been taken somewhere only my mother knew. For Masayoshi, this was a terrible discovery. It was his job to usher souls to the next life, and my mother had committed a terrible transgression. Was she not worried that her mother, Akiko, would be unable to continue her peaceful progress to rebirth?

“You have had great sadness,” Masayoshi said. “It is because you did not properly take care of your mother when she died. And now you must tell me where the bones are so we can try to fix things.”

When he had finished speaking, my mother sat with her gaze off to the side, her body tilted and slightly limp, like a once stiff balloon gone a little soft. If I touched her, she might roll over. Her mouth flitted in and out of a small smile, searching for the appropriate reaction on which to settle. When she jerked her head up to look at all of us, her eyes cleared, irises whirling. To me she said, “I hope this has been interesting for you.” She nodded at her assistants, and then as one they all stood up, petticoats and ruffles fluttering. Then they hurried toward the entrance.

“Wait a minute!” I called out. “Are you leaving?”

“Yes,” my mother replied primly. She said something to Kumi, who helped my mother into her coat and began to fasten the large pink buttons.

“You’re just going to run off again?” I screamed at her.

She stepped off the landing with one foot and began to put on her boots. “I don’t appreciate that you and Masayoshi tricked me and made me come to this place,” she snapped.

“Tricked
you
? You were the one who insisted on meeting at that hellhole of a mountain. Anyway, he didn’t tell me what he planned to do.”

Now she had both feet on the ground and was nesting her discarded slippers together.

“So, that’s just it?” I looked back at the Handa family, watching us with solemn horror. “What am I supposed to do now?”

Satomi’s lips tensed as though she were fighting a tiny monster inside her mouth. “You should do what you want. I always have.” She paused just outside the door. “You could come back with me. You don’t have to stay here with these people.” Beside her, Kumi made ready to close the door.

“Why should I go with you?”

My mother gave a deep sigh. The black night sky framed her wiry figure, as though she were a bolt of lightning. “To find out about your grandmother. Obviously
I’m
not the ghost you saw.”

I stared at her.

“Come on,” she urged me. “We’re letting in too much cold air. And it has started to snow again.”

“Wait one minute,” I said and ran back down the hallway to the room where we had been sitting, with Akira close behind me. Inside the room, I grabbed my purse off the floor. “Why didn’t you tell me about the bones?” I asked Akira.

“They asked me not to. We weren’t even sure if you were really Satomi’s daughter. Only she would know for sure.”

I scowled at him.

“I’m sorry, Rumi. I wasn’t even speaking to my parents a few weeks ago. I was trying to do what they wanted.”

“Did that include … ?”

“I kissed you.”

“And not just once.”

He nodded, and turned his gaze down at his feet. “That was impulsive. I’ve been thinking that maybe I took advantage of a delicate situation. You didn’t come to Japan for me, after all.”

“Well, it was unexpected,” I agreed.

“After you left with your mother, I spent the night in the temple. The priests found me outside their door.”

Dazed and feverish all night, he had woken in the morning feeling more or less like himself. He’d driven back to Muryojuji temple to tell his parents that I’d been reunited with my mother. Then he’d stayed with a friend nearby, waiting for my return.

It had all been more responsibility than he was used to or than he had expected when his parents had called him and asked for his help. He’d been ambivalent about continuing that feeling of liability for someone whose emotions he didn’t know. He stretched, suddenly thrusting both arms into the air. “Honestly, the whole experience was very strange. I’ve been thinking the last few days that you are a very strange person to have taken me to such a place.”

“Strange? I’m not the one who reads cartoons.”

“On the other hand, it was also kind of … fun.” He gave me one of his half smiles. “Call me here if you need anything.” He gave me a another temple brochure. “Don’t lose it this time.”

I put the pamphlet into my purse. “Thanks,” I said.

“You should go with her.” He nodded at the door. “She’s who you came to see. Come on. I’ll get your coat.”

We spent the night in a
ryokan
while a storm raged outside, and I was grateful that the Japanese inn included a
yukata
to sleep in and free toothbrushes. In the morning, we were on the road again. Kashihara was a good three-hour drive away. We passed through hills and valleys to reach it, small towns poking their heads up through the snow. But the shrine was located to the south, in a valley where it was warmer, and where there were signs of spring. Plum trees had pushed forward a few pink blossoms. Bright yellow shoots crept out of the ice. By the time we’d reached the shrine, the snow had thinned to a crusty, icy layer.

The shrine grounds, which snaked up a hillside, were composed of a series of smaller buildings spaced around open courtyards and little intricate gardens, which we admired on our walk from the parking lot to the shrine’s main complex. Along the way, we met an elderly woman cleaning fallen and rotted apples off another part of the walkway. A sign next to the walkway displayed an apple falling off a tree and hitting an unsuspecting passerby on the head. Below this, text implored visitors to “Beware of falling apples.”

The elderly woman’s back was hunched over like the crook of a finger. No doubt she was a legacy of Japan’s many years of malnutrition during and after the war. She had few remaining teeth, and treated them as though they were a nuisance, sucking in her cheeks and pushing her lips out of the way of her teeth to speak.
“Ohaiyo gozaimasu.”
Good morning.

“We are here to see Mrs. Sakurai,” my mother explained in Japanese.

The elderly woman gestured toward a two-story structure set apart from the shrine grounds, and we followed a path that twisted around a small azalea garden to a wooden gate and then on to the front door, which slid open easily.

“Gomenkudasai,”
my mother called out. She motioned for me to follow her into the house.

“Hai!”
a bright female voice called back to us from another room. I heard a light shuffling and a few minutes later, a woman around my mother’s age and dressed in a neutral-colored dress and a faded blue apron came around the corner and fell to her knees. “Welcome.” She placed her hands on her knees and bowed low to the ground, her forehead nearly touching the wood floor.

I followed the gist of the conversation. My mother was sorry to disturb Mrs. Sakurai, who, in turn, was always pleased to have visitors. When we’d finished bowing, Mrs. Sakurai invited us to come inside. My mother and I removed our shoes and changed into slippers. Mine were made of pink terry cloth and embroidered with a small cat and the caption, “Today is happy day. Think peace and be pink with laugh.”

Mrs. Sakurai giggled, apparently embarrassed that she had forgotten to take off her apron. Her laughter was engaging, and soon my mother and I were laughing with her in an effort to assure her that we were not at all offended by her choice of dress. Mrs. Sakurai peeled off the apron, folded it, and left it on a shelf by the front door before ushering us around the corner. Outside a sliding door, we removed our slippers and then stepped onto the
tatami
mat floor.

My mother and Mrs. Sakurai wrestled politely over whether or not it was necessary to drink tea. Eventually Mrs. Sakurai won out and began to fill the teapot with fresh, loose leaves, while I struggled to sit on my knees in the same position as the other two women.

Later, my mother told me everything they talked about that afternoon. She had mentioned to Mrs. Sakurai how lovely the shrine was and asked about its age.

“Well, I’m not completely sure.” Mrs. Sakurai squinted. “Maybe three hundred years.”

“Please forgive me for asking, but has the shrine always been in your husband’s family?”