Picking Bones from Ash (30 page)

“Maybe you have some questions,” she said.

“Will anyone speak English?”

“They said they would arrange for an interpreter.”

“And if I go see this Handa family, I’ll find out what happened to my mother?”

She swallowed. “I am afraid that I do not know. I only …”

“I know, I know.” I sighed. “You only know that they want to see me.”

She smiled, a momentary look of indulgence crossing her face. “You are a
gaijin
. A foreigner. You have a kind of pass in our country. People will, how do you say, cut you some slack?”

“I can get away with asking more questions than you can.”

Ms. Shizuka’s face relaxed into an intimate, confiding expression. “Aomori Prefecture, where you are going, is a strange place. They have an unusual sense of humor. Many things happen there that do not happen in Tokyo.”

“What do you mean?”

“People have been kidnapped by the North Koreans. The Russians used to steal women. That is why all demons in the north have large noses. And there are also many more ghosts in Aomori Prefecture than in Tokyo.” She said this with complete sincerity. “It is a shame you must travel there.”

“I’ll be careful.” I tried not to laugh.

“Your train leaves in one hour. We must get going.” Then she smiled, as though pleased by her ability to use another English idiom correctly.

The bullet train, that marvel of Japanese postwar engineering, awoke the child in me. For a time, I forgot that I was nervous and that I’d never been far from San Francisco, let alone out of the United States. I walked the full length of the train, end to end, and examinied the toilets, the vending machines, the speedometer. The conductor and attendants echoed the formal dress of the Tokyo hotel clerk, Ms. Shizuka, and the
bento
-box seller from the train station. All had worn navy blue and white, and bowed to me each time I passed. What an
organized
country, I thought.

The landscape fluttered between city and country. Clouds gathered on the horizon, and the sky grew gray, then white. Moisture slapped the windows. The rice paddies, covered by aged stubble close to Tokyo, grew a coat of frost. I spotted cars traveling in the opposite direction with mounds of snow on their roofs, a harbinger of the territory we would enter.

Each time we raced into a particularly long tunnel I felt pressure in my ears, as the tense air struggled to make space for the train. As we emerged, the landscape seemed to grow darker.

Two hours into the trip, the bullet train made an uncharacteristic hiccup. A young man in a business suit reading a comic book jerked up his head. Older ladies whispered in the hushed sounds of the worried. After a few minutes, a voice came over the loudspeaker, but I couldn’t understand a thing it said. An English voice assured me that we would soon reach Morioka station, and that passengers should change here to go to Akita. But the fidgety manners of my fellow travelers told me that they knew more than the robotic woman. Or perhaps it was the paranoia of a jet-lagged mind and my unwillingness to trust the pre-prepared bilingual signs around the country. In any case, I gathered my bags and disembarked.

It had been snowing in Tōhoku for almost two months straight, a record snowfall, declared the English newspaper that I had picked up at Morioka station. What Ms. Shizuka had not known and my cursory glance at CNN had not told me that morning was that a bullet train had derailed while attempting to cross to Akita. The tracks had been closed, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at points north.

I had phoned Ms. Shizuka from Morioka station, but she hadn’t answered. It was too early in the morning to call the United States, and anyway, what would Timothy tell me to do? I thought of calling Muryojuji temple but, to be honest, I was nervous about reaching someone who spoke only Japanese. I had learned very quickly how unusual it was to have met someone as proficient in English as Ms. Shizuka.

I decided to play my
gaijin
pass to get to Akita. I found a man in uniform and through hand gestures and broken Japanese explained my predicament. He sent me to another man in a uniform, who passed me on to yet another man, and so on until I found myself boarding a bus with four strangers. The white-gloved driver snapped his hand, waving to some other suited worker, and we pushed off.

Not long after leaving the outskirts of Morioka, the bus began to climb up a fairly steep mountain. I couldn’t see much out of the window, but felt the bus tilt and heard the wheels stolidly churn through gravel and snow. The passengers were mostly quiet. One was a boy around my age, in a cheap, well-pressed suit with a pair of loafers, clutching a briefcase perched on his knees. Behind him was an older man with a horsey, toothy mouth, round spectacles, and shaggy, unruly hair. The pockets in his overcoat had been
mended a number of times, and the heels of his shoes were worn down. I guessed he was an academic. He had come prepared for this voyage, carrying a case of beer, which he methodically consumed a sip at a time, every now and then smacking his lips. Two women sat together: a petite older lady with deft hand gestures, a youthful smile, and a short bob, and a young woman I assumed to be her daughter, all shadows and frowns, a person accustomed to expecting life’s catastrophes.

The road became windier and steeper, and the engine growled as it contended with the incline and curves of the mountain. I felt the bus nudge around a corner, like a cat prying open a door with its nose. I looked out of the window. An oncoming car lit the side of the road for a precious few seconds. Snowflakes the size of dandelions bloomed in the air, their heavy bodies hurtling over the edge of a precarious cliff just off to the left.

Beside me, the student gasped and hunched over his briefcase, breathing deeply. One of the tires slipped against the ice, and the daughter seated ahead of me gripped the side of her seat.

I told myself that if I concentrated, if I followed absolutely every turn of the road, the bus would arrive safely. But when we rounded the next corner, the bus lurched and slid backward again. The two women in front shrieked. The bus began to spin, the large metallic body whining like an animal downed by a powerful predator. Headlights flashed against the white curtain of snow, and my brain collected snippets of information. I saw trees. Now rock. Now ice. We teetered one way, then back again in the opposite direction, and I pictured the bus toppling down the ravine. The bus gave a great groan and we screamed, sliding, careening to the front door as the driver shouted something unintelligible. I had my cheek pressed against the young student, and the professor had his hands against my back. And then, abruptly, all was still. Eerily quiet. Blood raced from my heart to my toes and back. The air in my lungs was thin. I might as well have been on Everest. Synapses misfired like faulty fuses. Snap. Snap. Then, slowly, the machinery of my body regained control of itself and I strained to look out of the window to see where we were.

The bus driver was screaming that we should take our seats. And we did. After all, we were still on the road. Though the driver tried a few times to urge the bus forward, the wheels whirred in place and refused to move. Between the professor and the driver there was an angry exchange, and then the driver stood up and put on his coat, opened the door, and went
outside. Almost instantly, a gust of cold air penetrated the cabin, before the professor pulled the handle and wrenched shut the glass door.

The passengers entertained themselves with the habits of the nervously bored. The daughter breathed on the window, then wiped away the condensation. The college student snapped the handle of his bag back and forth in a rhythmic fashion until the professor told him to stop. The professor conducted a disgruntled monologue, then, putting on his coat, stamped outside. When he came back, the cold had sobered him and he barked out a few short sentences that were followed by a lengthy discussion among the passengers. I sat there, helpless. No robotic voice came to my rescue. No bilingual signs told me which way to go.

The professor turned to me. He seemed perturbed, as though it were either my fault that we were in this predicament, or that I, with my limited language abilities, might as well have been suffering from a mental disorder. “Bus driver. Gone.” The latter word was emphasized with a wave of both arms, as though the bus driver had struck out in a game of baseball.

“Gone.” I mimicked his exaggerated hand movements. I couldn’t help it.

The professor continued barking in short phrases. He had found the bus driver’s tracks in the snow and was quite certain that the driver either had gone off to find some help, or had abandoned us. The latter was far more likely, given that the bus driver hadn’t told us where he was going. In any case, there was a town nearby. We were going to walk there.

Were they nuts? “
Walk?
Wait a minute!” I protested.

“No waiting,” the professor retorted.

The mother turned to me and began to chatter happily in Japanese. She held out two tangerines and a pack of rice crackers. “What are you so happy about?” I asked her. Of course she didn’t understand me, but continued yammering away. Then she handed me two plastic bags.

“Snow!” the professor barked again, by way of explanation.

I was to tie the plastic bags around my shoes to keep them dry.

We pared our luggage down to one easily carried bag each, and filed off the bus.

How cold I was that day, the coldest I ever remember being in my life. The mother led us, shining a flashlight on the ground. We followed her, holding on to a rope we’d fashioned by tying together various articles of clothing. Each step was a challenge, for the snow was thick in some places
and icy in others. Soon we developed a rhythm, a comfortable pace at which the person in front could secure a safe footing before moving on to find another. Then the person behind would occupy the vacated footprint. I don’t know how long we went on like this. It seemed like hours, but then I had no sense of our geography and where we were going.

In the beginning, the mother did most of the talking, adding a cheery
“desu ne”
at the end of each of her sentences, to which the professor responded with a few guttural syllables. Gradually the professor’s talk began to take over the group. I realized how clever the mother had been. She had engaged in the old female art of winning over a man by getting him to talk about himself. And so as we walked, his baritone came over us all and though I could not understand him, I imagined him informing us of the university where he taught, the books he had written, the cities he had visited, and the home he longed to see at this very moment.

Once we passed a streetlamp marking a long driveway flanked by a sign with the word
hotel
in roman lettering. There was a brief discussion here as to whether or not we should turn off, but in the end the mother and the professor insisted we continue on.

Eventually the snow stopped falling, and the clouds parted. Moonlight hit the white earth and the air took on a silver quality. Now I could see the outline of trees, the shadow of forests on the snow-covered ground. Sometimes I looked ahead and saw the figures trudging before me and I felt as though I were watching a negative of a film unfold in slow motion: white earth, black sky, blue trees. It was eerily beautiful and foreign.

Like a mirage, a soft glow blossomed in the distance. The glow separated into four little balls of light. Were they headlights, perhaps? The beams didn’t move very quickly. In fact, they didn’t move as evenly spaced objects at all. I became entranced. We all did. You could hear it in the way we matched our footsteps, as though someone were dangling the proverbial pendulum before our eyes and lulling us to sleep.

I tried to fight the sensation. If in fact it was some kind of mirage, if the snow and stress had addled my mind, then I would need to call on all my conscious faculties to see through this illusion. But we continued to move toward the lights, and they toward us, and I started to believe they were real.

Now the road became easier to cross. It had been freshly plowed, and
without even speaking to each other, we let go of the rope, the mother rolling the shirts and socks into a ball, which she shoved into her bag. Soon we were walking in our own separate spaces.

The mother became excited. She started chattering at a pitch that was much higher than her regular speaking voice. I smelled something—smoke. The mother called out urgently to the professor and he replied in a burst of syllables.

All at once the lights were upon us. There were four of them. Then they weren’t lights at all, but torches held aloft by four of the ugliest, most frightening creatures I had ever seen. Two had red faces, the other two were blue, and all had oversized heads, as large as my abdomen. Their hair was long and matted and coiled, and their bodies were covered with straw. Prickly, angled teeth studded their mouths. Their eyes, which I could now see clearly, were sharply angled into a V. I began to scream. One of the demons began to chase me with his torch.

Chaos. The mother was running after both the demon and me, while the professor stood in place shouting. The three remaining demons roared and shook their torches. I had to stop to catch my breath and as I did so, I saw something strange. The mother was taking photographs. I heard an odd, garbled sound and it took me a full minute to understand that the others in my party were now laughing.

Everyone was laughing at me. Even the devils were laughing.

The demon who had come after me stopped running, his chest heaving up and down, and he planted his torch in the snow at an angle. With one paw, he tugged at his face, and it came off. Beneath his blue skin was another head, a human head. I’d been chased by a man wearing a mask.

I shouted at them all, at the party of bus riders, at the demon who had chased me, at the snow, and at the missing bus driver.

“So this,” I screamed, “is an example of your
unusual
sense of humor?”

The professor mimed my outrage. He pulled off his gloves and used his fingers to stretch his mouth into a shape mirroring my indignation. Everyone laughed. Then he did it again, this time posing for a photo. Everyone continued laughing. I didn’t find this indignity funny at all. One moment I’d been in an accident, then mesmerized by a stark landscape, and now this inconsiderate practical joke. I started back to the bus. Who the hell knew where these people were going anyway?