Picking Bones from Ash (15 page)

I decided to play it cool. “I have to be quick. This is expensive, you know.”

“You’ve had the letter for at least two weeks.”

My heart was suddenly possessed by an allegro tempo. I took a deep breath to calm my blood, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. “Letter?”

“Look, she died a month ago. We couldn’t wait for you. We had to have the funeral. If you come back now you can make the forty-nine-day memorial.”

“
You
could have called!” I was shouting.

“No one here speaks French. And anyway, what took you so long to read your mail?”

I remembered the postcard I’d found from my mother on the floor of my room.
I’ve had a cold
.

I told Chieko I would be there the following day.

“That fast?” Now she sounded nervous.

“Don’t worry if you haven’t managed to clean up the house, Chieko. Housekeeping never was your strength.” I said this just to be mean. Chieko had always been a model housekeeper.

“I didn’t mean …”

“Yes, that
fast
,” I hissed. “The modern world is a very
fast
and
complicated
place, but I doubt that someone like you would understand.” I slammed down the phone.

Rice paddies bled into bamboo forests, and the jangle of the railway crossing alarm swelled and faded with the same Doppler effect that blurred the notes of honking cars. The familiar landscape rushed by. I saw the same faces on the train from Tokyo to Hachinohe that I’d seen since I was a college student, and I took on the same poised posture I’d always assumed on the way home: the talented girl just visiting the countryside for a mandatory reason after a spell in the sophisticated city where she belonged. I knew that my mother would not be there in the house waiting for me. But surely everything else would be the same. The countryside never changed. I, with all my experiences, was the only person to be different this year than last.

I had asked Timothy to wait for me at the hotel while I went home. I didn’t want to include him in my family problems. I certainly would not be in a frame of mind to help him adjust to what would surely be a culturally confusing situation for him.

I understood what Chieko had told me on the phone; my mother was dead and I would never see her again. But I was anxious and in a hurry, as though by arriving there as soon as possible, I might see my mother one more time, or might hear her tell me she was sorry not to have had time alone together. Just the two of us. It was illogical. The funeral and cremation had passed, but I rushed through every part of my journey as much as I could.

I took a cab from the station to the house. No one came to the door to greet me. When I turned on the light, I saw that the entrance was stuffed full of aging flower bouquets, and a few new ones that had come in the past few days. I touched a card. “From the Hachinohe Golf Club,” it read. In the middle of the bouquets, seated on the ledge was the reproachful portrait of my mother. It wasn’t a photograph I recognized. It looked like it had been
blown up from a smaller picture, perhaps from a group portrait, for it was blurry, as though she were peering out at me through a fog.

I put on a pair of slippers. “
Tadaima!
I’m home.”

I passed through several curtains of beads to the front room. The television was on, and I turned it off because no one was watching. I went into my room and reached for the light-switch cord dangling from the ceiling. When the light snapped on, it took me a moment to get my bearings.

Most of the room was covered with white sheets. On one side, where I normally unfolded my
futon
, someone had stacked a series of boxes, two deep and three high. I lifted the cover of one and found that it contained toilet paper. My closets were filled with clothes I didn’t recognize, but from the dark, dour look of their tailoring, I guessed the skirts and blouses belonged to Chieko. Only my glass case of dolls remained untouched, though it appeared to me that two or three were missing. I set my luggage down and retreated back into the main wing of the house to look for something to eat.

The refrigerator was empty. The family, I guessed, had gone out to a restaurant to eat and left the door unlocked in case I showed up. I opened the freezer. My mother had always cooked too much and put leftovers away in here.

I found a plastic container with a strip of paper taped on it. “Seasoned rice,” it said. My mother would have made it in the fall. It was now April. Suddenly I didn’t care if the rice would be bad, or how old it was. It was something she had touched and I tore open the container and dumped the contents into a pan, then added a little water so it wouldn’t burn while I heated it on the stove.

I ate the entire containerful. I didn’t want Mineko or anyone else to eat the rice. If they’d ignored it all these weeks, then they couldn’t have appreciated how good it was in the first place. I thought about the previous fall and how my mother would have bought the
ginkgo
nuts and the mushrooms from the market herself, and eyed her collection of spoons as she measured out the seasoning. But I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t about to get myself into such an emotional predicament.

Instead, I wondered how it would be best for Mineko to find me. Probably she expected me to wander around in my room, angry that I had been displaced. I thought about this for a few minutes and then decided to enjoy the
kakenagashi
, the natural hot spring water in the bathtub.

An hour later, when I finally heard the door squeal open and heard the high-pitched voices of Mineko’s spoiled children, I had grown prunish and red from sitting in the water for so long. But the steam had the effect of hiding how swollen my eyes had become from crying.

“There you are,” she said, standing in the doorway of the bathroom.

“Didn’t it occur to you to knock?” I asked.

“It’s my house.” She shrugged.

“Nice house,” I said.

“We’re leaving early in the morning for Akita for the memorial. So, if you don’t mind, I need to let the children take their baths so they can go to bed.”

“Why Akita?”

“That’s where Masayoshi and his wife have their temple.” She just barely emphasized the word
wife
.

“Of course. About my room,” I began.

“Yes?”

“Are you expecting me to sleep there?”

“There isn’t anywhere else for you to sleep, is there?” She smiled faintly. “I’m sure you’ll manage. You’re good at managing. You learned to very early in life.”

Masayoshi had done very well for himself. He was that somewhat rare thing among the Buddhist priests, a handsome, educated man who could have gone to join the successful ranks of Japan’s salarymen, but wanted instead to oversee the journey of the souls of the deceased to the afterlife. It wasn’t surprising that he had been such a desirable marriage candidate among the many temple families whose boys were turning away from the chosen family profession, or even worse, had borne only girls.

Masayoshi had been promised all kinds of things: a nice house in Yokohama if he chose a two-hundred-year-old temple in need of a new roof, a Mercedes if he moved to Kyūshū, a spare room for his mother if he went to Hiroshima. All that time I’d been in school, Masayoshi had been entertaining marriage requests. I thought to myself that I was lucky to have been away from my stepsisters, oblivious to the gossip that surrounded Masayoshi’s daily maneuvers. I could just imagine how Mineko and Chieko would have gone over and over each of the offers, declaring how rich Masayoshi was going to be, what with his management skills and
a temple already so well endowed with cash. It would have driven me insane to listen to such banal conversation.

In the end, he’d chosen a temple just a few hours from Akita. It was located in the mountains, on the other side of Japan’s northern tip, in a place so rustic and remote I burst out laughing at first when Mineko told me how far we would have to go for the memorial service. The Masayoshi I knew, the one who had loved jazz and museums and English handkerchiefs, never would have elected to live somewhere so provincial, but Mineko scolded me and told me that Masayoshi had liked the family he had married into and that the temple had an intriguing past, something about a noble who had been sent to live there in exile during the Edo period, and who had quietly put together a
hondo
filled with very old sculptures. It was a beautiful place, and many historical records mentioned it;
shoguns
and emperors had taken refuge there during the wars, and the Japan Rail company was always encouraging visitors to go to see the treasures, but because it was so far out of the way, only the most die-hard art lovers and pilgrims ever went.

“Masayoshi wouldn’t want some place like they have in Nara or Kyoto,” Mineko sniffed. “He doesn’t want to have a tourist attraction.”

“What’s the point of having all those sculptures,” I said, “if no one comes to see them?”

“People go to see them,” Mineko replied. “But only people who are willing to make the effort. People who
care
.”

We had to take a zigzag path of trains to reach the temple. This was before the days when someone finally got smart and put in a bullet train that would go from Morioka to Akita and make the trip across the mountains easier. Instead, we had to go via a series of little one-track routes, pausing in a station to let another train pass on a specially built “overtaking lane” before continuing on. Then we stood out in the cold to pick up a different train that would lumber off in a new direction. The process repeated itself. We bought terrible
bento
lunches, so unlike the delicious food my mother had prepared for our trips, and ate them inside the train cars in silence.

There wasn’t much to look at, either. Just mountains tiered with trees and bamboo and above that, clouds in a moody sky. So we went from station to station—my stepsisters, their husbands and children, Mr. Horie, and I—sitting on the velveteen seats, not speaking, and watching the landscape pass. How much more rugged and jade-colored was Tōhoku than
France. Chieko was carrying my mother’s remains in a purple
furoshiki
, a square piece of cloth she’d wrapped snug around the box, the corners sticking up like little rabbit ears.

I had missed my mother’s cremation and so had not been present when Mineko, Chieko, and the rest of their family had stood around her still-hot remains to remove her bones from the ash. They would have used chopsticks to do this, carefully culling only the most essential parts of her body and placing them in an urn, which was then set inside a box.

It was out of the question that I would carry the box. From the moment I had arrived home, it had been made clear to me that I was a poor excuse for a daughter. I’d arrived too late to sit with my mother as she lay dying, though, they liked to tell me, she had asked over and over again if I had been called. Each time the front door had slid open and she had heard the sound of someone climbing onto the landing and putting on a pair of slippers, she’d asked if it was me. Worse, she sometimes woke up just as someone was walking away and she’d called out, wondering if I’d come home while she was sleeping, and that because she’d been so preoccupied by a dream that she’d missed me.

When they told me this—repeatedly—I was enraged, but only on the inside. Anger burned like a fever in my chest and my eyelids seared my pupils. On the outside, though, I would not let them see how I felt, would not cede to them that kind of control.

Chieko came and sat next to me on the train, the box of bones neatly between her hands. “There is something we must discuss,” she said to me. She rocked back and forth with the train movements and the box rocked with her. I could not take my eyes off it.

“Yes?”

“There is not enough money for you to continue living in France.”

I could hear the
goton-
goton
of the train as it passed over the tracks. My heart matched the rhythm of the sound, and then my pulse increased until we were out of sync. Modern music, I thought to myself.

“Satomi?” she said. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“I know this seems unfair …,” she began.

“I said I heard you.”

“Your mother didn’t know she was going to die. Things happened quickly.”

I said this next part very carefully. “Standard inheritance laws say that money is to be divided equally among the surviving children.”

“There are debts,” she replied curtly. “The golf club membership. Money she forwarded to you in France. We have a lot to pay.”

“Let me guess. There is just enough money left over from the debts for you, your sister, and your father to keep the house.”

“Something like that.”

“Her porcelain collection?”

“We’ve already sold it to a dealer in Tokyo.”

I was shocked. After all these years, I had never once touched the Korean melon pot.

“You had no right. Those were
our
things.”

“She was
our
mother,” Chieko countered. She pursed her lips. “No matter what you may think of me, I wouldn’t deliberately cut you out of your mother’s will.”

“You mean, your husband mishandled the family business when he took it over after your father’s stroke. And now there is no money for me. It’s all just been an accident.”

I could feel her seething. “It’s true that we’ve had a difficult year. And my husband isn’t as talented a fisherman as my father was.”

We both looked over at Mr. Horie. He was drooling and Chieko was wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.

“My room in the house …,” I began.

She shrugged. “You can always visit, I suppose. Though Mineko will be moving in with her family and there won’t be much room anymore. If you want my advice, I think you should consider getting married. That’s what my sister and I did. And look at us. We have our own families.
We
don’t have to struggle with this question of where to go.”

Masayoshi was waiting for us at the train station when we finally arrived. He had two cabs lined up to take us to a small
ryokan
where we would spend the evening before going to the memorial service in the morning. The few times I started to catch his eye he looked away, and I felt myself veer from disappointment to anger. How polite we were all being at this forty-ninth-day memorial. I had been so restrained since going home. Now, seeing his face, and remembering our days together, I felt as though my body were being suddenly flushed with emotion, as when you wake
up from a particularly magical dream to find yourself returned to the real world. I was being pulled back into being Japanese, and I didn’t want to resume my role. I found myself missing France and the emotional outbursts that would not at all be out of place there.