Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (10 page)

Often referred to as Japan’s
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
,
The Legends of T
no
, compiled in 1912 by the amateur folklorist Yanagita Kunio, is a strange and eerie collection of folk stories. Most of the tales are set in and around the town of T
no, which is located about 277 miles northeast of T
ky
and twenty miles from the coastal city of Kamaishi. Endo wanted me to read tale number 79, which takes place on the T
hoku coast and is the only tale to reference a tsunami.

In the story, a man is living in temporary housing with his child after his wife and his other child perished in a tsunami. One summer night, the man goes out to the bathroom—the toilet was in a separate location from the main house. As he walks along a path, he sees a figure out by the water and realizes it is his wife. Then he sees that his wife is walking with another man.

Before the tsunami, his wife had been rumored to be in love with this other man, though she did not marry him. “What’s the matter with you?” the man cries out to his wife. “Don’t you miss
your children?” At this, the wife cries too, and begins to slowly walk away. The man follows her for a while, until she disappears into the mist with her ghostly partner. After this, the man becomes sick for a long time. The story ends here, somewhat inconclusively to Western tastes, as is the case with many of the legends of T
no.

Endo told me that when he first read this story, he thought that it was about regret, and how people leave many things undone and unsaid when they die, and that the burden of such grief—for the living and the dead—is quite possibly the greatest torture any person will ever undergo. But then, as we discussed the story, we decided that it was really about how the man had let go and come to accept that the wife was gone, though the process had made him ill for a while. The distance between losing someone and accepting that they are gone is of course the very essence of grieving, and in this simple ghost story, we both saw a blueprint for how grief in Japan might work itself out.

Traditional Japanese believe that the soul has a path to take, though the journey may be full of pitfalls and dangers. In many instances, this journey includes physical places one can visit in Japan, as is the case with Mount Osore, whose name means “Mount Fear” or “Mount Doom. Mount Osore is an extinguished volcano far in the north, where the dead are said to pause before leaving the world completely. But the Japanese don’t believe this journey is a clear-cut, one-way street. The souls of the dead come home during the Buddhist festival Obon, and then it is important to prepare their graves and to honor them before helping them find their way back to the other world. Sometimes the dead can’t move on because we won’t let them, and this stymied progress brings madness to the living.

Across Japan, the tsunami has unleashed a whole flock of fledgling monsters as thousands of people are reported to be suffering from post-traumatic stress, severe depression, and other related mental-health issues. There are numerous reports of ghosts. Some
of these apparitions are welcome, as survivors rejoice in seeing their loved ones again, and some are not welcome, because, like the man in the folktale from T
no, citizens of T
hoku have become ill.

It may seem odd to a Westerner to learn that T
hoku is awash with ghosts; we associate ghosts with superstition, and Japan has the image of being a highly modernized country. But the soul of Japan is still very much connected to her twelve-hundred-year-old history, and within that belief system, ghosts are a powerful and meaningful presence. The Japanese Buddhist priest Kaneta Tai
once said to me that it should not be a surprise that the tsunami has released so many ghosts in Japan. “So many people died at one time. It is natural that people are still in shock.”

Japan is often criticized for her failure to adopt Western-style mental-health care. But I’m wary that everything modern is always the best medicine for an individual if it isn’t also connected to a person’s culture. In my travels to Japan since the March 11, 2011, disaster, I have been moved by how many of Japan’s spiritual workers are adapting the Japan of the old for the Japan of today. I have also been greatly inspired by the many people I have met who are tracing the old spiritual paths in Japan laid down by ancient pilgrims, in an effort to heal their personal hurts. To me, these actions reveal a part of what it is that is “special” about Japan, and signal that within this terrible disaster is a chance for the Japanese to rediscover what makes their culture unique. Perhaps all of us can benefit from such wisdom.