Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (88 page)

Then the
itako
opened her eyes and looked at me. Her face was
expressionless, but it was clear now that our session was about to end. “I don’t foresee any major illnesses. Nothing seems to be terribly wrong, though you need to make sure you take care of yourself. You worry too much.” She began to sing the spirit of my father away. “I will try to come and see you in your dreams, but it is getting harder and harder for me to do so. Just do me a favor and talk about me every now and then. I like it when you remember me.” This last line made me tear up. I rarely talk about my father. I miss him too much.

Then the session was over, and I paid the medium my three thousand yen, or about thirty dollars; this is the fixed rate for all
itako
readings.

A
S SOON AS
I got out of the tent, a small group of women came running up to me. “Did she get it? Was she accurate?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Then, honestly, “I think I don’t have sufficient Japanese to explain what just happened.”

Immediately after the reading, my logical, scientific brain insisted that I had simply received one of six possible variations for all possible
itako
readings. I knew from Dr. Carmen Blacker’s book that the
itako
had different messages for their subjects depending on how the deceased had passed away. The Mountain Woman had told me this too. She had said that while there were mediums who could “see,” it was not logical that an
itako
could service over one hundred people in a day and allow that many dead spirits to inhabit her body. Of course, most of the people who went to see an
itako
were simply hearing a script.

A second part of me was chastising myself for not having been better prepared. What was I doing asking the dead spirit of my father about my job and about my living situation? Why didn’t I explain how difficult it had been since my father had died, and that
I wished I had been at the hospital that night, in the place of my mother, to converse in fluent English with the doctors who provided him with substandard care?

Yet a third part of me, perhaps the most important part, was quickly silencing these other voices. This part of me didn’t have a voice yet; it just had a feeling. And the feeling was this: I felt very much like I was eight years old, and I had woken up my father from a nap to tell him something that seemed very important—the sprinkler system appeared to be out of rotation, for example—that ultimately was
not
important and certainly not worth waking someone up for.

That was the feeling I had now, striding across the stone walkway to get away from the women asking me, “Was the medium right?” Why on earth had I taken the time to wake my father up from the dead?

I
DAWDLED AROUND
the temple information booth. It was warm in there, and I wanted to give my body a chance to relax after standing in the cold for three hours. After a little bit, I saw the Engineer outside, walking slowly toward the second great gate. I rushed out to meet him.

“Hello!” I said.

“Hello!”

We walked along the stone path together. The wind was still very strong, and the pinwheels were screaming, though in their chattering I thought they sounded a bit like manic laughter.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, and then immediately launched into a blow-by-blow account. “She successfully conjured up my father, and I was able to ask him something that has bothered me for years.” Here he paused. “My parents divorced when I was very young, and I barely
knew my father. When I applied for college, I had to get my
koseki
, the family registry.” This is the standard practice in Japan, and in dramas and novels it is often the pivotal moment in which the hero discovers some long-suppressed truth about his or her family. In the case of Semp
, for example, he had no idea that his mother was his mother and not his sister until he applied to college and took a look at his
koseki
. It was also from his
koseki
that Semp
learned the name of his biological father. As for the Engineer, he looked at his family’s
koseki
and discovered that his father had been dead a long time.

The Engineer continued. “No matter what we did—and my younger brother researched it—we couldn’t find out where he died or how he died or if anyone was with him. And this bothered me.”

As we talked, I was moved by the Engineer’s simple desire to know if his father had died peacefully or not. There was no angry talk about how “he wasn’t there for me,” as I might hear from my Western friends who wrestled with their fathers’ abandonment. The Engineer hadn’t seen his mother or his other siblings in nearly twenty years, but he had worried very much about his father’s spirit. Once he had been transferred to T
hoku to work on the restoration of the northeast of Japan, he had been waiting for the day when he might finally put his questions to rest via a personal consultation with an
itako
.

“And he said that it was like going to sleep. It was an abrupt illness—nothing really foreseen. He went to sleep, and then he died.”

“How do you feel?”

“Oh, I feel incredibly relieved. Although, she did say that I ought to lose some weight. And she sort of laughed when she said this.”

“The medium laughed?”

“Well, presumably it was my father in the medium’s body. But since she was laughing . . . I also.” Here he began to apologize that he had not meant to overhear my own session, but that he could not
help but notice that I had asked about my work. This had prompted him to ask about his work too, which he would not have done otherwise.

“Oh, you listened!”

“I’m very sorry,” he bowed.

I told him I didn’t mind because I had been very worried about understanding the medium in the first place, and he admitted that part of his reason for eavesdropping was to help me later in the event that I needed his assistance.

He asked if I felt better for having had a chance to hear that my father did not mean to die so early, that his intended fate was to stick around longer. The kind gesture touched me. I said that I did feel some relief. As we talked about the session, the Engineer and I came across inconsistencies in the
itako
’s words. For example, “the
itako
told you not to hurry while writing, but surely she knows that all writers have deadlines.” But then the Engineer suggested that such words of comfort might have been the kind of thing that my father
would
have said to me were he alive.

When we parted, I asked the Engineer to keep in touch with me. I could see getting a beer with him some day and talking about our “wild experience at Mount Doom.” He promised to write to me. Then I hurried back home to the Mountain Woman and the inn because I knew my son was waiting for me there. I checked my watch before getting in the car. It was just before noon, just as the Engineer had predicted.

All the way down the mountain, that slightly mollified feeling I had—the impression of having disturbed my father from a nap—continued to grow. I felt the childish regret of having displeased an elder.

Then a voice inside my head said, You don’t really need your father anymore. You miss him, but you are actually okay now.

The voice said this a few times. And in my entire body, I realized
it was true. I remembered learning to ride a bike. When I glanced back to see that my father was not actually behind me holding me steady as I did a loop around the driveway, he laughed gleefully. “See? You don’t need me!”

Back down in the valley, I found my son sitting beside an enormous dustpan-shaped basket filled with chestnuts. There had been a big storm the night before, he explained to me, which meant that many new chestnuts had fallen off the trees. He and the Mountain Woman had gone chestnut hunting as soon as I left because otherwise other villagers would show up and gather all the nuts, and there would not be any left. He sat like a king in front of his big pile, while the Mountain Woman chuckled that she had no idea what to do with so many nuts. Perhaps, she said, she would give some away.

T
HAT EVENING
I slept very soundly. When I woke up, I knew that I had seen my father in a dream, but I couldn’t remember any of the specifics. I remembered that he had seemed slightly annoyed, but lovingly so. I had tried to hold on to him, to recall where he had been and what he had been doing, but the details of the dream left me immediately when I opened my eyes.

SEVENTEEN

D
ARTH
V
ADER

O
N THE LAST DAY
of the Autumn Festival on Mount Doom, I drove my rental car one more time up the winding road that connected the Mountain Woman’s spa to the underworld. The ferocious wind from the day before had unleashed a torrent of yellow leaves to the road. I drove carefully; the leaves were slick. There was little traffic. That morning at breakfast when I had spoken to the other guests, most said they were going home. The long weekend was coming to a close, and everyone needed to head back to the major cities.

The staff at B
daiji—Mount Doom’s temple—had been expecting me. They urged me on to the main hall, where I could participate in a memorial service. I took off my shoes and walked the long wooden hallway connecting the visitors’ entrance to the
hond
. I relished the familiar feeling of stepping into a temple that I had already encountered, and which I loved for its hidden treasures and solemn purpose.