Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (95 page)

A few days later I would learn that a man foraging for wild vegetables in the mountains of Aizu had been killed by a bear. The family searching for him had also been attacked.

M
Y HUSBAND HAD
not seen any of the devastation from the tsunami and the earthquake, so while my son napped in my lap, our new taxi driver drove to
tsuchi and Kamaishi, past rows and rows of temporary housing, where stooped men and women were slowly taking down their laundry as the sun was fading. The driver stopped to purchase four bouquets—one for each of us—which we placed on the foundation of a home that had been washed away. “It takes thirty years,” the taxi driver explained, “for ghosts to subside. It’s important to treat them with dignity.” In the days immediately following March 11, the taxi driver ferried more than sixty journalists
out to disaster sites. He brought flowers each time. It disappointed him, he said, to meet writers from
saka and T
ky
who refused to take flowers themselves. They were Japanese, he said, and should have known better.

Back at the inn, the taxi driver came out of the car with us. He knew the owners and wanted to say hello. I also chatted with the staff, and my son immediately began to run through the hallways. Meanwhile, my husband went for a run through T
no’s town center and out into the rice fields. He wanted to loosen himself up to shake free the image of the half-digested coastline. When he returned, he took a bath.

That night at dinner, there was a new face among the staff—a woman wearing an allergy mask. She was speaking to a group of men at the table next to us, and they, half drunk, were offering up bits of philosophy concerning illness and the importance of taking care during the weeks when winter slowly morphed into spring. Transition times were tricky, they said. From the way the woman lingered over the guests while politely but authoritatively issuing orders to the staff, I decided she must be the current Okamisan, or the mistress of the house. When Okamisan made her way over to us, and we exchanged pleasantries, I told her how much we had loved eating the freshly picked
sansai
and fish from the
irori
, the open hearth in the middle of the floor.

There was kindness in her eyes. And yet I again felt the presence of a quiet, unasked-for burden on her shoulders—just as I had all over T
hoku. She and her family had much, much more than did the evacuees living in those tiny houses all across Japan. But still she, like everyone else, had suffered.

My son ran by, carrying two toy cars. And then, somewhat abruptly, Okamisan said to me, “You know, we have a
zashiki warashi
.”

I smiled. “A guest told me yesterday at dinner. He said that children
are good at seeing the
zashiki warashi
, so I asked my son about it.”

“And?”

“Well,” I stopped. My son’s answer had been so nonsensical. “Honestly, I think he didn’t really understand my question. He said
: on
san
is working.”

I was still laughing apologetically when I saw Okamisan’s face turn white. She turned to look at another woman, now also quite pale. For a brief moment, I was afraid I had done something offensive.

Okamisan turned back to me. “You know,” she said slowly, “this is exactly what we said about the
zashiki warashi
in the old days. We said that she was working.”

Silence.

Okamisan continued. “When I was very young—when I was still a young wife—sometimes I had to take tea up to the room for one of our guests. I would start up the stairs, and realize I hadn’t turned on the stairway light. And then the light would go on.”

“All by itself?”

“Yes. And sometimes a guest would call from a room and say that they needed an extra set of sheets. And I would go up with the sheets, only to find that they had been delivered, but no one could remember the face of the girl who had brought them. It’s been a long time since we had a child as a guest. Especially a foreigner. I would assume she’s happy to have him to play with.”

“The
zashiki warashi
is a girl?”

“That’s what guests say. I’ve never seen her. I am not supposed to. If I or any of the household see her, it means she is getting ready to leave, and our business is going to fall apart. Also, if you came here expecting to see her, then you wouldn’t have. She only comes out when people don’t know she exists.”

One room over, I could hear my son shrieking with laughter as he corralled one of the male staff into playing with him yet again.

L
ATER
, I
RELAYED
this conversation to my husband, thinking that in his logical, European way, he might find it intriguing or amusing. To be honest, after the events of the day, the whole story about the
zashiki warashi
had spooked me, but midway through my eager retelling, it was my husband’s turn to pale.

“The hair just stood up on the back of my neck!” he declared, using a common British expression of surprise. “Today, after I came back from my run, I had a bath. And you know, there are two rooms in the bathroom—the actual bath and the changing room.”

I nodded.

“I was in the bath, when I suddenly realized I hadn’t turned on the light in the changing room. This meant that another guest might not realize that the bath was occupied. So I started to get out of the bath to turn on the light, when it suddenly turned on. I thought that maybe I had forgotten to lock the door, and that someone else had entered the changing room, not realizing that the bath was already occupied. I assumed that person had turned on the light. So I stuck my head out of the bathing room, and said, ‘
Sumimasen
.’ But no one was there.”

Our rational minds immediately began to tackle this new mystery. “Was the door locked?” I asked.

“Yes. I checked. Maybe there is a motion-sensitive sensor that turned on the light?”

“Or a switch outside. Maybe someone saw you were in the bath, and turned the light on for you.”

We went downstairs. There was no sensor. There was no light switch outside the bath.

T
IME IS A
confounding thing. When we are in misery, we want it to end immediately. But this is not always possible. I thought about T
no’s
five hundred
rakan
, still up on the hillside, still appeasing the spirits of the dead hundreds of years later. Even today, during Obon, townspeople take offerings of food for these spirits. I thought about the T
no taxi driver and his gifts of flowers.
It takes thirty years for the spirits of the dead to be put to rest.
But one should also assume that good spirits—like the
zashiki warashi
—are acting on our behalf, even if they are invisible.