Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (76 page)

A second would go home with one of my uncles, who promised
to worship the bones every day in his own family shrine. But I knew that he would quietly take the urn down south to Ky
sh
and bury it with the other lords and ladies long since gone.

My grandfather initially wanted my mother to take the Adam’s apple back to America, but, thinking quickly, she told him that it was illegal to import human remains. She suggested that he take the Adam’s apple back to his house, and he happily packed it in his small travel bag, which he carried on his lap on our trip all the way back to Nagoya.

In the days that followed, he fussed over the small box. He brought it flowers from the garden and sweet bean cakes and fruit from the grocery store. When I lit incense in the morning, I found that the little box, bound up in red and gold silk, had been moved from its position the previous day, as if a mischievous spirit was still struggling to find its place in a new world.

“When he dies,” my mother whispered to me late at night, “I’m going to cremate him with that Adam’s apple.”

N
OW IT WAS
2012. Both of my grandparents were gone, and my mother and I had finally come to bury their bones. About a month ago, one of my uncles returned to the temple with the other half of my grandmother’s bones. He had dropped the container off with Semp
and, after a few pleasantries, headed back down to T
ky
. He had not been in touch since.

“I thought he was going to take the bones to Ky
sh
,” I said.

“I don’t know anything about that,” Semp
said.

“Nagasaki is very far,” my mother observed. “It’s not that easy for him to get to.”

“This just proves my point! This isn’t how you treat bones,” Semp
huffed. “Furthermore, I left messages for both your brothers
that we would be burying their father today, and yet no one came. I don’t understand this.”

There was little that my mother could say to me. She hadn’t been in touch with her brothers for many months. One had stopped speaking to her completely. But my mother didn’t say this. She just sat stoically and apologized.

Semp
called out for his wife Ry
ko to bring him some newspaper. When she returned, he complained that the sheets she had brought included photographs of meat cuts on sale, making the sheets inappropriate to use; he was going to pour out all the bones on to the newspaper and needed something less gory.

“Semp
,” I said. “I’m worried about Tomobiki . . .”

“Hmm?” he looked up. “I’ve been doing this for years, Marie. I know what time it is.”