Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (87 page)

The person I was most interested in happened to be standing behind me. He seemed to be about my age, or perhaps a few years younger; it can often be difficult to guess ages in Japan. He wore
jeans and a sweatshirt with a hood, and all the women worried that he might catch a chill. He had a beard, and his hair was unkempt, but he had an easygoing manner. He reminded me of a Dr Pepper–guzzling computer engineer I might meet standing patiently in the checkout line at Fry’s Electronics in Silicon Valley.

“So what do you think?” I asked. “Three hours total?”

“I’ve been timing her. She gives each person an average of twenty minutes. And judging by the people in line . . . some people are here together . . . some are alone . . .” I could see him recalculating. “I think we will be done before lunch.”

“Twenty minutes!” I said. “I was thinking that standing in line like this is sort of like waiting for a ride at Disneyland. Except there the ride is only five minutes. Twenty minutes is definitely better than five.”

“Oh. Oh.” He nodded earnestly. “Well. I guess perhaps there’s . . . well this is cheaper than Disneyland too, if you factor in the cost of the tickets.” I could see him calculating the cost differential and then deciding against sharing this information. Then he looked at me, and I could see that he didn’t seem quite sure how to proceed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Typical American. When we are nervous, we try to say something funny. I ought to know better, but I still do this.”

He laughed with relief. “Typical Japanese. When we are nervous, we take things too seriously.” From then on, we conversed easily.

He was originally from Ky
sh
, Japan’s largest southern island, and he was an engineer. He had been hired by the Japanese government to help plan the new roads in T
hoku, and had been living in the northeast for the past year or so, working three weeks straight, then taking one day off. Most days, he argued with the locals. He wanted the new roads to be high to keep cars safe from future tsunami waves, but the locals wanted easy access to the ocean. The
locals often thought that since a major tsunami struck only once every six hundred years, Japan, and certainly T
hoku, would be safe for centuries. But he, as an engineer, knew that “once every six hundred years” did not mean “in six hundred years.” “It could very well mean tomorrow!” he said passionately.

The Engineer had long wanted to come to Mount Doom. He had finally been given three days off to coincide with the national holiday. He had immediately hired a car and headed for the Shimokita Peninsula.

I couldn’t help but wonder why an engineer, which is to say, a man of science, wanted to stand in line to see a medium.

“Have you always wanted to see an
itako
?” I asked.

“Yes. Since I first heard about them. And then when I got transferred to T
hoku, I was hoping for this chance.”

“Do you think they are accurate?”

“Hahaha!” he laughed. “Oh, I don’t know. We Japanese. We believe. And we don’t believe. Half and half.”

“But you still wanted to come,” I said.

“Very much!” he replied cheerfully.

Around eleven o’clock, a group of priests started chanting from inside one of Mount Doom’s temple halls. They were hitting a drum and reading sutras. About fifteen minutes later, we could hear their wooden shoes clicking on the pavement, and a group of priests in mustard and purple robes walked down the walkway and into the warmth of the information center. I thought to myself that there were so many more men at Mount Doom than there were women. And one day the place would be completely in the possession of male priests because the female shamans would finally be gone.

As the line grew shorter, and my turn was imminent, I became nervous. I told the Engineer that I was worried I wouldn’t understand the medium. The research I had done indicated that the women spoke in Aomori dialect, and not standard Japanese. I suddenly
realized I had forgotten my Japanese grandfather’s date of death; I would need to provide it to the medium. I pulled out my cell phone to call my mother, before I remembered that there was neither Internet access nor cell phone reception on Mount Doom. I thought about making up a date but then decided that I would always wonder forever after if I might have had a different reading had I provided accurate information. My father’s date of death is ingrained on my memory. I wondered how it would work for a Japanese medium trained in Aomori Prefecture to summon up the spirit of my American father. I knew that
he
would not have minded. I asked the Engineer what he thought.

“Well, I would assume that dead people all go to the same place,” he said. “Although maybe the way we can communicate with them depends on culture. I say go with your father’s date.” That settled it.

I listened to the tail end of the session in front of me. The
itako
, now channeling the spirit of a deceased person, advised that next year the father in the family needed to be careful of a possible traffic accident. It would not be fatal if it happened, but it was best that it did not happen. Then she sang the spirit away and the family departed from the tent.

I took off my shoes and knelt down inside the tent, keeping my hat on until I was completely seated, in an effort to conceal for as long as possible that I was not Japanese.

The medium was magnificent sitting on her pillows. With her white pantaloons splashed all around her, she looked like an archaic figure from the medieval period. In her hands, she held a long rosary made up of wooden beads. Now that I was in her tent, I could see other objects on the rosary: polished bone and a bird’s foot. And then, in front of her, I saw a rectangular basket with a few objects. I later read that these objects were considered to be her most important tools, and that she would put her rosary there when she was not using it. Among the other items in the basket were a
rolled-up scroll, something wrapped in embroidered cloth, and a box of cookies labeled “Marie.”

The
itako
cleared her throat. “What is the relationship between you and the person who has died?”

“My father.”

“When did he die?”

“June 8.”

“What did he die of?”

This was complicated. There was the actual cause of death listed on his death certificate, then there were all the factors that had led up to a very bad emergency-room visit and actual death, which should not have happened in the way that it did. But I said, “Illness. Unexpected.”

She nodded and began to sing.

I couldn’t make out all of what she was saying at this point. I thought I heard her asking for the spirit of the person who had been turned into a Buddha on June 8 to please descend. She rubbed her long rosary loudly as she did this. I hadn’t paid her any money yet, and I kept wondering what would happen if she decided that my father’s spirit wasn’t willing to descend. But then she started to talk.

“Well, you’ve come a long way. I can’t believe you’ve come all this way to find me. I’m rather humbled by that. I’m so sorry I went the way that I did. I really wanted to stick around longer and to spend more time with you. There have been so many occasions when I wanted to give you some more advice. It does make me feel good to see you getting along so well with the rest of the family, though. And you know, I try to come and see you in your dreams, but lately that’s become much harder. You’ll notice I don’t show up in your dreams so much.”

Hadn’t he, though? And then just as quickly, I told myself to be reasonable. It was true that after my father died, I had seen him repeatedly in my dreams. It was almost always the same dream or
variations on the same dream. I went into the room where he had slept toward the end of his life and found him sitting in the red armchair we had bought together at Macy’s. Sometimes he was reading a book. I would explain to him that he was dead, and he would look disappointed and sheepishly apologize. I always woke up gasping for air because I didn’t really want him to be dead.

But after about a year of this, the dreams started to fade, and I didn’t have to tell him he was dead quite as often. A part of me wondered if there was any truth to the superstition that the dead who don’t mean to die are shocked to find themselves in this condition. This is what Kaneta was always telling everyone in his cafés: “You have to let them go! They have to move on!”

Although, there was the time when I had pneumonia, two years after he died. I was in Japan and had plans to go to the blind-medium festival on Mount Doom. I woke up in my hotel room in Sendai, shaking because of yet another of the nightly earthquakes that rattled the area for at least a year after the disaster. I discovered that I had a fever and a cough. I remembered I’d seen my father in a dream that night, and that he’d told me I needed to see a doctor. I ignored the advice, figuring that a day of medication and rest was all I needed. But the cough would not go away, so I flew back home, where I was told I had pneumonia and was put on strong antibiotics.

“Do you have any questions for me?” the medium asked.

I was unprepared for this. Unlike everyone else in line, I hadn’t really come to Mount Doom with a specific question for my father. I racked my brain for something to say, then sputtered out two questions. I told the
itako
I was worried about writing this book. The
itako
’s response was guarded. She thought I should not be in a hurry to get my work done. When I asked her about a possible move to the West Coast, she answered my question with a question: wasn’t where I lived now a good location?