Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (73 page)

Tomobiki is a “friend pulling day,” and it is the wrong day to bury someone’s bones. On Tomobiki days, priests at Buddhist temples can perform wakes, or memorial services, but never an actual burial, lest the participants find themselves “friend pulled” into the same condition as the deceased. Tomobiki is a vestige of Japan’s old calendar system, and if you buy a calendar in Japan, you’ll find that it is clearly marked to indicate which days are Tomobiki and which are
sensh
(good luck before noon but bad luck after), which are
senbu
(the opposite of
sensh
), and which are
taian
(good luck all day and the best day to get married).

S
EMP
CAME TO
greet us with a stern look on his face. “This is not how you are supposed to bury someone. This priest is not happy.”

I started apologizing. “I know Obon ended yesterday. I know we should have buried him before Obon ended.”

He stopped walking. “That’s not a problem.” A smile flickered across his face, as though I had said something particularly funny. Then he kept walking and said, in his scholarly and stern voice, “It is true that the official Obon ends on August 18. But then there is another Obon. The Jiz
bon.”

“What is that?”

“For anyone who got left behind. For people who forgot to do their sending off on time. And for children.”

Ah, Japan. Land of exceptions when you least expect them. And there was that nice Jiz
again, looking after stragglers like me.

We followed Semp
into the
hond
, and he asked us to sit while he went and got several bags containing both my grandparents’ remains. When he returned, he sat down and started to lecture us. He talked for a long time, which made me nervous because I thought the whole reason we had hurried to get there was to avoid burying the bones during sunset. The sun was already quite low in the sky, and we hadn’t even started the actual ceremony. As I understood it, the formal burial would happen only after we had finished offering incense in the
hond
and Semp
had recited the appropriate sutras. After that, we would have to climb up to the cemetery and open up the grave site. I had no idea how long all of this would take.

But Semp
wanted to talk. He wanted us to know that we hadn’t handled matters correctly since my grandmother died six years ago: my grandmother had never been buried, but worse, the bones had been split into three containers and were only just now being reunited.

M
Y GRANDFATHER’S BURIAL—
like anyone’s burial—is the end of his story. It is also the end of my grandmother’s story, and potentially the end to a long family drama. I say “potentially” because one never knows if there is another chapter to a story.

My grandmother was born to an aristocratic family that slowly
lost its fortune during Japan’s wrenching transformation to modernity. Her relationship with my grandfather was stormy, though I’ve read enough of their love letters to know how passionate they were for each other. But the pressure of the postwar years, the poverty, and my grandfather’s temper were hard on my grandmother, and before she died, she asked that her remains be returned to her aristocratic, natal plot on the island of Ky
sh
. She wanted to be with her servants and her parents.