Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (93 page)

“Mommy . . .”

“Go back to sleep. We will talk about it in the morning.” As afraid as I was of the man, I did not want her to scold me further. Gradually, my body relaxed, and that thing I was afraid of—giving in to the helplessness of sleep—took over.

In the morning, I wasted no time asking all the adults to call the police. My mother refused, and my grandmother looked confused. She wanted to help, but my mother cut me off when I tried to bring up the subject of the man at the window.

“We are not calling the police,” my mother said firmly.

“But there was a man . . .”

“Stop it.”

“If there was a man . . . ,” began my grandmother.

“We are not calling anyone.” My mother was growing more and more irritated. So was my grandfather. He wondered what I was going on and on about and why my mother could not control me. Now my mother and grandfather were irritated with each other, and my mother, reader of her father’s shifting moods, was trying to steer us all in a direction where her father’s temper would not explode. We never did call the police. I told my mother I would sleep with my grandmother. The next time we went to Japan, my grandparents arranged two futons so my mother and I could sleep in the main part of the house and avoid the “haunted” room completely. From then on, we slept side by side in futons, Japanese family style, which made me feel safe. And for many years, I did not go into her childhood bedroom at all.

They have always insisted it was a dream. All of it. At no point, my mother insists to this day, did she ever wake up. I had imagined everything. But even now as an adult, I know the difference between a bad dream and reality, and the power of the man in the window has never left me. I realize how improbable and strange this sounds, and here I have to assure you that I’m a rational person, with a deep and abiding respect for science.

The impact of these strange experiences from childhood has never left me, and I have always wondered what I should make of them, and if they contain some hidden meaning. In time, I have been able to work out part of an explanation, for fear of what we do not know and cannot understand is highly potent, and can be far more compelling than any scholarly treatise on the exact chemical components of fear, grief, or guilt. And fear speaks to us most strongly when it arrives in the form of inexplicable but personal visions.

The old Japanese believed it was important to take care of chopsticks,
lest they come back to haunt you. As my mother explained to me, this did not mean that a chopstick literally had any power. But a careless person who routinely did not take care of his possessions did have the ability to harm his environment and others who depended on him. If I indulged the man at the window I saw in childhood, I would be afraid of Japan and what I perceived as its weirdness and the strangeness of the people to whom I was related. And we would all remain afraid of each other unless I made an effort to understand them, and give them a chance to understand me. Like old Shozoku no Baba the old hag, the man at the window might very well have two faces too, and it was up to me to find a view of his face other than the one he had offered to me through the open window.

When my son was born, the man at the window was never very far from my mind. I wondered what my son would see in Japan that I might miss, and if he too would find it to be a strange place, or if he would naturally flit between countries and cultures. I hoped it would be the latter.

O
NE
M
AY
, I took my husband and my son, now three and a half, to visit T
no, land of the fabled
T
no Monogatari
, or
The Legends of Ton
, a collection of folktales. The town, though friendly, also had a subdued quality to it, like almost all of T
hoku; it isn’t just the tsunami zones that have struggled since the disaster. Though the recovery crews and NGOs had left T
no, tourists still hadn’t returned in their place. My family and I were thus an oddity—authentic tourists, and
gaijin
at that.

The second night at dinner, a young Japanese man sat next to us in the dining room of the inn where we were staying. More a boy than a man, he was tall, if slight, with long thin arms and fingers that danced as he talked. While he ate, he watched my son running
from one end of the facility to the other, chattering in Japanese. The young man’s eyes widened when my son insisted on three helpings of miso soup from an iron pot, which was suspended from the ceiling by a giant hook over a low-burning fire in a sand pit in the middle of the floor. Then my son disappeared into a hallway again, and we could hear him engaging the staff in a conversation.

“I wonder,” the young man said in Japanese, his deep baritone voice at odds with his still immature appearance, “if your son has seen the
zashiki warashi
?”

“The what?”

“The
y
sei
.” When it was clear I didn’t understand either of these Japanese words, he said in English, “Fairy.”

Well, here was something new. “Fairy? Like Tinkerbell?”

“Yes,” the young man continued excitedly. “This inn is very famous for its
zashiki warashi
.” He looked at my son, now back in the dining room, with an eager, almost envious intensity. “The
zashiki warashi
likes young children.”

“How do you know?”

“Searching for fairies is a hobby of mine,” the man continued blithely in the happy, trusting way of the youthful. And then again, with great intensity, “Your son is so active, I thought he might have seen something.”

The conversation left me puzzled. The inn felt old, but not
that
old, and I associated anything supernatural with age. The family members running the facility were pleasant, though slightly distant; I didn’t think they were the type to harbor secrets. Still, before going to sleep that night, I read my son a children’s picture-book version of the
T
no Monogatari
, translating for my husband so he could follow along too. I skipped the sad story about the dead horse hanging from a tree, and went on to read about a magical house for the gods. And then I read about the
zashiki warashi
.

“Have you seen the
zashiki warashi
?” I asked my son.

His expression was blank.

“The
y
sei
,” I explained. Then, in English: “The fairy.”