Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (78 page)

“Over the years, as new people have moved to Iwaki, they would come to this temple and ask me if I had a statue of their favorite deity. And most of the time, Marie, I didn’t. So I decided, when I rebuilt this temple, that I would include all the statues of the Buddhas and bodhisattvas that people most wanted to see.”

All this talking had taken up more time. “Shouldn’t we . . .”

“One more thing,” Semp
said. “There are two kinds of burials. There is the personal kind, in which you have to come every year for Ohigan and Obon and all the memorials. Then there is the kind where I included your grandfather’s name in a list of people I read sutras to every day, and for each memorial. That way you don’t have to come from America for every special date.”

I started to protest that I wanted to come for my grandfather’s memorial services, but Semp
cut me off. “You live very far away,” he observed. “It will be harder and harder for you to come. I don’t want you to worry.”

At last he stood up and put on his special priest’s hat. Then he began to light the candles. My cousin Daisuke stepped out from a side room where he had apparently been waiting, and sat down at the drum. The ceremony was about to start.

I was still mulling over Semp
’s words. I am often slow to apprehend what people are telling me in Japanese. Sometimes it can take me months to interpret what actually happened in an exchange. Because of this, I’m constantly concerned that I have been rude.

It was only months later that I understood what he had been trying to communicate about the “two types of funerals.” After the March 11 disaster, Semp
received call after call from his parishioners, many of whom had evacuated. Some were not even sure they were going to return to Iwaki. Over and over again, they asked him the same thing: “Please take care of my ancestors.” And always he promised them that he would.

If you believe—even just the tiniest bit—that your ancestors have the most power to protect you from hungry ghosts, from the demons of winter, from the great catfish
namazu, then you will want to do your best to protect them back. This was Semp
’s most important job; he had to look after the ancestors so they could look out for the living.

And he would do this no matter what happened. Semp
, as I wrote earlier, was adopted by my Great-Aunt Shizuko at the age of twenty-seven. To become a priest, he gave up his career in the law and agreed to cut off ties with his former life—including his mother. Such an act may sound harsh to modern ears, but tradition demands this kind of complete commitment. For years I couldn’t understand why or how he could have done this. But one afternoon, when I was visiting, he told me quite casually that his biological father was Jitsuo, my grandfather’s brother, who had opposed corporal punishment at school in Taiwan. Semp
hadn’t really been “adopted”; he had come to the temple to claim his birthright.

Much later, I asked him how he could have spent so many years away from his mother, and why he had become a priest. He thought about this for a minute, and then gave me this answer: “I thought that if I worked hard, I could make Empukuji a success. And that I could ensure it would survive for another hundred years or so. I thought I could do a good job for everyone.”

W
E CARRIED THE
bones up the hill to the cemetery, climbing almost to the very top to the family plot. There are actually two plots—on the right side of the path are the graves of past priests, reaching back five hundred years, their status made clear by the exclamation-shaped tombstones that mark their graves. In most cases, we have no idea what their names are, but we try to pay our respects when we can since they are the many links in a long chain that has kept the temple and these grounds intact for so long.

To the left are the burial spots of the people I do know—my great-aunt, my great-uncles, and very soon my grandparents. Some day Semp
will be buried there too, and if he ever figures out which of his sons will inherit the temple, that son will be here also, along with his children and their children. At one point my mother whispered
that she planned to make arrangements for her ashes to be buried at the site, so I would have a reason to come to the temple every year. “That way,” she said, “they cannot stop you from visiting.” This observation sounded clever on her part, but also ominous. Would someone stop me from visiting?

Semp
’s moodiness had disappeared, and he was now in his element. He and Daisuke moved aside the metal vases on top of the cemetery plot and then dislodged the heavy marble slab covering the interior of the tomb. Inside was red earth. I didn’t notice until that moment that there were also bags of red dirt sitting nearby. Semp
explained that he used a special kind of dirt for his tombs. He placed the bones inside and sprinkled some dirt on top. And then, he put in two white flowers.