Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (74 page)

My mother found this request egotistical and was disgusted with her brothers for indulging it. My mother also hated deceiving her father, who knew nothing of the secret pact. Before my grandfather’s actual funeral, I was of the opinion that if an elaborate subterfuge was required to send my grandmother back home, then so be it.

In 2005, my mother and I flew to Japan for my grandmother’s funeral. We didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the last instance in which my mother, her brothers, and her father would all be together. The night before the ceremony, which would take place at the temple, the family ate dinner together at Empukuji.

As we ate, my mother redirected her frustration about my grandmother’s bones to express her dissatisfaction with the post-funeral-lunch-meal seating chart because it placed her sister-in-law in a comparatively senior position. At this, my uncle moaned that beer was in order, and my clean-living grandfather roared that if we did not learn to behave correctly in this world, he would come back as a ghost to torture us all.

The men shifted uncomfortably in their
zabuton
-pillow seats. Then Daisuke wandered down to gobble his dinner in a hasty silence, before parking himself in front of the television to debate Prime Minister Koizumi, who was on the evening news.

The meal ended with no satisfying conclusion. One by one the men drifted off to smoke or, in my uncle’s case, to sneak a case
of beer out of the refrigerator from the temple’s adjoining meeting hall. Eventually, I was alone with Takahagi. In this precious hour of privacy, we talked about his secret girlfriend and my then-secret boyfriend. Finally, I told him that I was interested in seeing the crematorium where my grandmother was cremated. Takahagi asked me why.

“I missed it,” I said. “I was in America when she was cremated.”

“But you’re here for the funeral.”

“I guess I’m still curious.”

“What does your mother say?”

I shrug. “She’s too busy.”

“We don’t really talk about crematoriums in Japan.” Takahagi gave me a tolerant smile.

“I know,” I said.

I recounted a conversation I had had a few days before arriving at the temple. I was on the Chita Peninsula, which is south of the city of Nagoya. This is where my mother was born, and like the century-old houses that dot the landscape, where she was able to escape the bombings that decimated so many of Japan’s cities during the war. We visited an
onsen
, or hot-spring spa, with one of my mother’s childhood friends. They were two of a kind, a pair of sylphlike creatures chattering about grade school memories and the healing properties of vinegar, while I with my pink skin and muscular frame was quite obviously not purely Japanese.

When my mother left the
onsen
for a moment to try the sauna, my mother’s friend, who had heard of my desire to visit a crematorium, turned to me and murmured, “There are many things you can’t understand about Japan. You aren’t going to be able to understand what your mother has gone through, for example. You must let people like me take care of her. You can take care of your mother in America.”

I felt side-swiped. It isn’t true, what they tell you about Japanese
people being habitually vague. Once you speak the language, as I do, a whole world of strong emotion and color will open up to you.

“She was my grandmother too,” I finally said.

“Look. Don’t be hard on yourself. We don’t expect you to understand us.” She turned her back to me and paddled out of the water to join my mother.

This was something one heard in Japan from time to time: those of us who weren’t fully Japanese couldn’t fully understand what it felt like to eat Japanese food, or to relate to other Japanese people during a
matsuri
or Obon. It is a judgment I have resisted. I had always been the bridge between the two worlds my mother occupied. It’s a responsibility I have taken seriously, perhaps even more seriously than my father. After all, I’m the one who speaks both languages, who knows how to take off my shoes at the entrance to a house without falling over, how to sense the amount of personal space around me on a crowded train, how to be moved by a
hototogisu
singing in the twilight. If there is something new about Japan to grasp, I have the reflexive impulse to try to do so.

And the fact was, because I spoke Japanese but remained something of an outsider, I generally ended up hearing the things that were considered taboo. A family friend confided that he might be bisexual, then broke down and confessed he was actually gay. When I was twelve, my grandmother once showed me a photo of a handsome young man and told me that he was her “true love.” It was not a photo of my grandfather. With geographical and not to mention cultural distance, secrets appeared to lose their power.

Here is what Takahagi told me about crematoriums.

Cremation was once reserved for nobles but was now mandatory in most of Japan and is also only one part of the expensive funeral process. In 2003 the average funeral in Japan cost $14,000, a significant portion of which went to the priest; this accounted for the Mercedes-Benz that Takahagi’s father drove for a half a year until
complaints from his parishioners made him give it up for a Toyota. (Later I learned that in 2002, the average cost for a funeral in the United States was $6,500.)

Cremation generally took about an hour, with an extra thirty minutes or so tacked on to give the remains time to cool down. The ovens reached a peak heat of 500 to 600 degrees Celsius, which was substantially lower than temperatures used in the Western process. This was because in Japan it was important to preserve some bone. There would be no sterile handing off of a small urn, as was the case with my father when he was cremated in the United States.

While the flesh dissolved, unseen attendants kept watch. Some monitored the security of the building via a set of cleverly hidden cameras in case an indecisive family member returned to the oven unaccompanied to try to rescue the body. After about an hour, an attendant would go to a hidden chamber behind the ovens and look through a tiny fireproof window to see just how much remained of the cremated corpse, and to make adjustments as necessary.

“There’s a window?” I asked.

“There has to be,” Takahagi nodded. “What if there is a mistake when the family goes to pull out the bones?”

“The
family
retrieves the body?”

“You can’t let strangers do something so personal.”

This had never occurred to me.

“Look. I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking you for a visit to the crematorium,” said my cousin.

“I understand,” I said.

I
N THE MORNING,
I found my way to the local crematorium on my own. It was a stark, one-story building concealed inside a coil of bamboo and trees in a remote part of town that is only accessible by
automobile. A brooding copper brow of a roof hung down low over a dark marble entrance.

Automated doors slid open, and an attendant, wearing what looked like a conductor’s uniform, complete with cap and gloves, glided out of the entry. I gave him my spiel. I was here from America, and I wanted to know more about the inner workings of a crematorium, as I had missed my grandmother’s cremation. He nodded, as if this were a perfectly reasonable request, then advised me to wait. There was a mourning party scheduled to arrive in five minutes, and he had to prepare.

I watched him wheel a specially designed handcart out to the sloped sidewalk. The cart was a marvel of engineering with hydraulic lifts and an automated conveyor belt. When the hearse, with its gold-and-black headdress, elaborately carved like a temple roof, arrived, the attendant bowed and easily extracted the coffin from the back.

It was quiet inside the marble hallway. Two rows of indoor streetlamps shone a luminous pathway on the floor. A priest and the party of mourners followed as the attendant gravely steered the coffin through this solemn space. The women were wearing black kimonos made of silk so heavy it seemed to ooze like ink in the atmospheric light. I watched as high doors opened up at the far end of the hall and swallowed up the mourning party. It was quiet once they were gone, save for the faint sound of a chanting priest and a ringing bell.

I retired to a small cafeteria with a view of a rock garden, before wandering off for a little bit of exploration. In the distance I could hear the murmur of other guests who had rented out a special waiting room with tatami mats and
zabuton
pillows. They were cloistered together, perhaps eating a specially designed funeral
bent
, so designated because it would contain nary a speck of meat—only
fish, rice, and vegetables. In another wing, someone was cremating a pet dog. At the extreme end of the facility, a funeral service was taking place in a room temporarily dressed up to look like a Buddhist temple of the S
t
sect. This reminded me of the Japanese weddings I had attended, which were often held in large hotels with generic rooms that could be decorated to look like a Shint
shrine on one day or a Catholic chapel the next.

The only time I actually interacted with anyone other than the attendant was when I met a woman in a black kimono purchasing a can of hot coffee from a vending machine. I commented on this when the glove and cap–clad attendant came to get me from the waiting room. He beamed and proudly declared that the crematorium had been carefully designed to function as a series of systems. There were multiple pathways, he said brightly, which enabled him to direct all parties through the same ritualized experience while avoiding undesirable traffic jams. Then he checked his watch. He had fifteen minutes to give me a tour.

In the second room—a sort of intermediary chamber—was a shrine laden with numerous bouquets of yellow and white chrysanthemums and a portrait of the man who had just been sent to the crematorium. He was perhaps in his sixties, smiling and healthy—a father, husband, and grandfather to everyone who brushed past me in the main hall. He loved cigarettes, baseball, and golf books, all of which had been placed on the altar. It occurred to me that I had crashed a funeral, and I started to feel guilty that my egotistical curiosity had led me to invade what is surely the most intimate and private of spaces.