To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (25 page)

Osen objected to having the funeral fall on the inauspicious
tomobiki,
"pulling-your-friend day," so the ceremony was delayed for twenty-four hours. Thus, in spite of the gloomy atmosphere, the house had more people in it than usual. The six-year-old Kakichi was scolded for beating his toy war-drum. He silently came over to Chiyoko to ask if his little sister would ever return. Laughing, Sunaga teased him, "We plan to take Kakichi to the crematory tomorrow too and burn him with Yoiko-san!" The boy's big eyes bulged out even more as he replied, "I don't like that plan!"

Sakiko begged her mother to be taken to the funeral. And the eight-year-old Shigeko said, "Me too!"

Osen, as if reminded just then by her children's request, called Matsumoto from the room where he was talking with the Taguchis and asked, "It's not the custom, but will you be going to the crematory tomorrow with the others?"

"I intend to. You ought to go too."

"Yes, I've decided to. What should the children wear?"

"Haori
with the family crest will do."

"But the patterns are too bright.. . ."

"They can put on
hakama
over them, and it should be all right. And sailor suits will be enough for the boys. You'll be in a mourning kimono with the family crest, I suppose. Do you have a black obi?"

"Yes, I have one."

"Chiyoko, you wear a mourning kimono too if you have one, and accompany the coffin."

Having given these instructions, Matsumoto went back to his guests. Chiyoko rose to offer more incense. On the coffin was a pretty garland she had not noticed before. "When did it arrive?" she asked her sister, who was there beside her.

"Just a few minutes ago," Momoyoko explained in an undertone. "Auntie ordered it especially made up of red flowers as well as white ones because she thought that only white flowers would be too lonely for a child."

The sisters continued to sit there side by side. Several minutes later Chiyoko whispered into her sister's ear, "Momoyo-san, did you see Yoiko's face?"

"Yes," Momoyoko nodded.

"When?"

"You know I did when we put her in the coffin. Why?"

Chiyoko had forgotten. What she had been thinking was that if her sister had said she had not seen it, they could have reopened the coffin.

"Oh don't do that! I'd be afraid to," Momoyoko said, shaking her head.

At night a priest engaged for the wake came to recite the sutras. As Chiyoko listened nearby, she heard her uncle arguing with him on such esoteric subjects as the Sutra Trilogy and Japanese translations of Buddhist hymns. The names of the saints Shinran and Rennyo often cropped up in their talk. But a little after ten Matsumoto placed some cakes and alms before the priest. "It would be all right if you left now, as we've had enough prayers for tonight," he said.

Once the priest had gone, Osen asked her husband why he had dismissed the man so soon.

"He'll be better off if he gets to bed early. Besides, Yoiko doesn't like hearing sutras either," Matsumoto replied nonchalantly.

Chiyoko and Momoyoko exchanged smiling glances.

The next day the small coffin moved quietly under a clear, windless sky. People on the street gazed after it as if it were something wondrous to behold, for instead of the usual white paper lanterns and plain wooden bier, which Matsumoto said he disliked, he had the coffin placed on a wheeled hearse. Whenever the black curtain hanging around it swung, one caught glimpses of the garland decorating the small coffin covered with its white figured satin. Children playing here and there ran up to peep in with curious eyes. Some pedestrians removed their hats when they passed the vehicle.

At the temple the sutra-chanting and incense-burning were carried on as ceremony demanded. Oddly enough, no tears appeared in Chiyoko's eyes as she sat in the wide area of the main part of the temple. When she looked at her uncle and aunt, she found neither of their faces perceptibly downcast. She could hardly suppress a laugh when she saw Shigeko's mistake during the incense-burning : the girl, instead of taking a pinch of incense powder and letting it fall into the incense burner, pinched some ashes in the burner and dropped these into the incense receptacle.

When the ceremony was over, Matsumoto and Sunaga accompanied the coffin to the crematory with a few of the others. Chiyoko returned to Yarai with the rest of the relatives. In the rickshaw she thought that the painful sorrow she had felt during the past two days seemed to her to contain in it more of the pure and beautiful than the less anguished mood she was now in, and she experienced rather a longing for that acute grief undergone then.

Four persons went to gather Yoiko's ashes: Osen, Sunaga, Chiyoko, and the maid Kiyo, the one who had actually looked after the infant. The crematory was only a few hundred yards from the Kashiwagi train station, but since they had not realized this, they had hired rickshaws all the way from Yarai. It had thus required considerably more time to get there than it would have if they had taken the train.

It was Chiyoko's first experience at a crematory. The suburban sights, which she had not seen for a long while, provided her with the kind of pleasure that one has in being reminded of something long forgotten. Green wheat fields came into view as did radish gardens and forests of evergreen in which were mingled various reds, yellows, and browns. From time to time Sunaga looked back from his rickshaw, which was running ahead of Chiyoko's, to inform her they were passing such sights as Ana-Hachiman Shrine or the Suwa Woods. As the rickshaws went down a gentle shadowy slope, he pointed out a tall, lean pagoda standing amidst a clump of high cedars. Carved characters noted that the pagoda had been erected for the repose of Saint Kobo's soul on his one thousand fiftieth anniversary. Down the slope at the foot of a bridge was a tea stall, behind which was an artesian well surrounded by a thick growth of bamboo, all lending picturesqueness to the country lane. Small leaves of various colors fell occasionally from the nearly bare branches of tall trees. Spinning rapidly round and round in the air, they offered a vivid impression to Chiyoko's eyes; that they did not fall to the ground at once but remained whirling in the air for a long while was also a novel sight for her.

The crematory, its front facing south, stood on sunny, level ground, so when the rickshaws were drawn through the gate, the light beamed down on Chiyoko more brightly than she expected. When Osen gave her family name at the reception window, which looked like a counter at a post office, the man sitting there asked if she had the furnace key with her. She looked puzzled and began groping for it in her kimono bosom and the folds of her old sash.

"Now I've done it! I've left the key on the cabinet in the living room and . . ."

"You didn't bring it with you? How awful! You'd better ask Ichi-san to go back and get it. We still have plenty of time."

Sunaga, who had been listening apathetically behind them said, "If it's the key you're worried about, I have it." He took from his kimono sleeve the cold, heavy object and handed it to his aunt.

When Osen went back to the counter with the key, Chiyoko rebuked Sunaga. "You're really nasty, Ichi-san! If you had the key on you, why didn't you take it out sooner and hand it over? Aunt Osen is so upset about Yoiko, you know, so it's quite natural she'd be forgetful."

Sunaga merely stood there smiling.

"A callous person like you shouldn't have come at all on an occasion of this sort. Yoiko is dead, yet you haven't shed a single tear for her."

"It's not that I'm callous. I've never had a child, so I don't know much about the affection between parents and kids."

"What! How can you say such a thoughtless thing right in front of Aunt Osen? And what about my own feelings? When on earth did I ever have a child?"

"Whether you've had one or not, I wouldn't know. But you're a woman, Chiyo-chan, so in all probability you've got a more tender heart than a man has."

As soon as she finished her business at the office, Osen, pretending that she had not heard their bickering, walked over toward the waiting room. She sat down and beckoned to Chiyoko, who had remained standing and who now came and sat beside her. Sunaga also followed Chiyoko into the room and sat opposite them on what looked like the kind of bench people use for cooling off on a summer evening. He called Kiyo and made room for her.

While they waited drinking tea, a few people arrived to gather the ashes of their deceased relatives. The first of these was a rustic-looking woman who spoke little, apparently out of consideration for the clothing Osen and Chiyoko were wearing. Next came a father and son who both had their kimono hems tucked up into their waistbands. In a lively voice one asked for an urn, bought the cheapest for sixteen sen, and then went off. The third party consisted of a girl in a violet
hakama
leading a blind person—whether a man or woman it was difficult to tell—whose hair was disheveled and who was wearing a stiff sash. Having ascertained that they had enough time, the blind person took a cigarette from a kimono sleeve and began smoking. As soon as Sunaga saw the blind person's face, he abruptly rose and went outside and for a long time failed to return. When a clerk came to inform Osen that it was time for the ash-gathering, Chiyoko went to the rear of the building to call Sunaga.

After she passed through the back part of the building, where lined on both sides were dismal-looking furnaces of ordinary grade, each with a brass plate on which the name of the cremated was written, she came out into a spacious yard in one corner of which she noticed a huge pile of pine for firewood. The yard was surrounded by a luxuriant growth of thick-stemmed bamboo. The view to the north—a series of high undulating hills beyond a wheat field below the bamboo grove—was especially clear and bright. Standing at the end of this open yard, Sunaga was looking out in a kind of abstracted gaze at the panorama.

"Ichi-san, they say it's ready."

Hearing Chiyoko's voice, Sunaga returned without a word, but then said, "That bamboo grove over there is quite fine. Somehow it seems, doesn't it, that the plants have grown this vigorously because they've been fertilized by the remains of the dead. The bamboo shoots they harvest here must taste excellent."

"How horrible!" Chiyoko said over her shoulder, hurrying past the lower-grade furnaces again.

Since the furnace in which Yoiko was cremated was among those of the first grade, a violet curtain hung over its folding doors. On a table in front of those doors was the garland of flowers brought the previous day, lying quietly, slightly withered. To Chiyoko, these seemed a memento of the heat that had burned Yoiko's flesh the previous evening. She suddenly felt as though she were suffocating.

Three fire-tenders appeared. The oldest requested the dead child's family to break the seal, but Sunaga replied that it would be all right if the man himself did it. Obediently, he tore the sealing paper and drew off the latch with a clang. The black iron doors opened on both sides, and at the dim farther end of the cavity something gray and round was visible, something black and white, all in an amorphous mass. The cremator said they would have it out shortly and, attaching two rails, put what looked like two iron rings at the ends of the coffin rack. Then, with a sudden rattle, out under the very noses of the four bystanders came the shapeless mass of what remained of the burned corpse. Chiyoko recognized in the remains Yoiko's skull, all puffed out and round, just as it had been in life with its resemblance to a ricecake offering. She immediately bit down hard on her handkerchief. The cremators left the skull and cheekbones and a few of the other larger bones on the rack, saying they would sift the rest neatly and bring them soon.

Each of the four gatherers had a pair of chopsticks, one of wood, the other of bamboo, and all picked up whatever white bones each thought fit to place into the white urn. And they wept as if invited to by each other's tears, all except Sunaga, who, pale-faced, neither spoke nor sniffled. The cremator asked if they wanted any of the teeth set apart from the other bones and deftly picked a few from the jaws, which he had begun to crush. Seeing this action, Sunaga said almost to himself, "Handled this way, it no longer resembles anything human. It's like picking small pebbles out of sand." Tears fell from the maid's eyes to the concrete floor. Osen and Chiyoko laid their chopsticks aside, their handkerchiefs pressed to their faces.