Picking Bones from Ash (34 page)

From the town of Mutsu, Akira began to drive along an even narrower road spotted with perilous patches of ice. I began to smell something strange. It was a faint scent at first, reminding me of boiled eggs. As we drove on, the smell grew stronger and my stomach became queasy.

In the distance I could see a tall mountain, shaped like a cone, with a red skirt of clouds.

“Where are we going, Akira?” My voice sounded very small.

“Osorezan.” He nodded at the mountain.

It was an inactive volcano and said to be, among other things, the gateway to hell, the entrance to the underworld, the place where little children’s souls were trapped, unable to cross to the other side because they hadn’t accumulated enough
karma
to be completely worthy of rebirth. Families came here to pray for the journey of the souls of the dead. And once a year, typically during the summer, there was a festival in which blind mediums (or witches, as Akira called them) could be paid a fee to communicate with the dead.

Osorezan was connected to a temple, which was generally closed from October to April. My mother had made a yearly trip here for over a decade. Akira didn’t know why, exactly. He suspected that she’d been given special treatment because of her fame. Osorezan was also the kind of place, given her work, from which she would likely find inspiration.

Masayoshi hadn’t actually spoken to my mother on the phone to make these plans. He’d talked with her lawyer, who had relayed the somewhat cryptic message that if I wanted to meet her, I should go to Osorezan, pass through the temple, and explore the mountain foothills. Masayoshi and his family had not been sure that this was such a good idea. It was a strange place to meet someone, but the lawyer had been adamant that these were my mother’s wishes. I was to come alone, but Akira had insisted on going with me as far as he could.

So it was that we parked outside the temple Bodaiji. Almost immediately I was struck by how much stronger the stench was outside the car. Akira explained that I was mostly smelling sulfur. There were pools of
boiling minerals all over the place, and I should take care to stay on well-marked pathways to avoid falling into any of these cracks. If I felt myself getting sick, I should return to the truck and we would go back to Muryojuji temple.

It was just afternoon, but the sun was already past its peak in the sky. Akira and I began to walk across the temple grounds, which spread out over a courtyard covered in ice and snow. Above this, the gray slate tiles of the actual temple formed a roof that flexed like wings. The place was also bleached by the sun, so the entire structure seemed to fade into the snow and the gray sky. Snow and ice had accumulated on the eaves, icicles aiming their teeth at the ground. I heard a soft sound, almost like wind chimes, then realized it was the deceptively gentle sound of ice and steel and slate all groaning from the cold and wind. Aside from this, the only other sound I heard was the voices of crows. Every now and then when I looked up, one of their black bodies was held in sharp relief against the white world around me.

“There’s no one here,” I said to Akira.

“It’s a temple. There has to be someone here to look after things.”

Before us stood six statues made of stone. They were all Jizo, the Buddhist deity responsible for helping the souls of children, travelers, and even miscarried or aborted fetuses. They smiled at me in spite of the cold, each seated in a slightly different position, holding instruments, and some arranging their hands in various meditative poses.

We passed through the temple grounds to a path leading from the temple to a lake. Before me was the eeriest, most unsettling and yet strangely beautiful place I had ever seen.

Everything was covered with snow, except for the mineral pools. They had spit up their innards and stained the snow myriad bright colors—yellow, bronze, and cobalt blue—as though a childish hand had laid waste to the environment, dumping brilliant colors on the pristine earth. The hot liquid had melted the snow in some places to reveal a world beneath all the ice. Here were pyramids made from small stones. There was a bright-yellow Pikachu poking out of pile of curry-colored snow. Two Transformers sat side by side, encased in ice. In the distance, a field of pinwheels whirred in the wind, their pink shapes blurring into the white-gray sky.

We climbed to the top of a hill and turned around to take a view of the snow-covered temple below us. Up ahead I could see a lake, the
water struggling to lap the shore under its burden of snow and ice. I was freezing.

“Where do we go?” I asked Akira.

“I don’t know.”

So we continued walking. Mostly we were silent, comforted by each other’s presence. But occasionally we spoke.

“I like your parents,” I said. “It’s not like they ever lied to you or anything.”

“You don’t have to go back,” he said.

“What?”

“Is there something you are in a hurry to go back to?”

I pondered this. “Not exactly.”

We walked on.

Presently Akira gestured at the burbling, stained landscape. “Just so you know, this looks weird to me too.”

“Everything has been strange so far,” I said. “But this might be the strangest.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. No Japanese person would look at this and think it’s normal. You have to be careful when you travel. People can trick you into thinking that something is ordinary when it’s not.”

The shore of the lake was lined with strange, snowy figures shaped like small pyramids. I stopped to brush the ice off one. It took me a few minutes, but what I found moved me. Someone had arranged numerous small stones around a bottle filled with flowers.

“It’s supposed to be a pagoda,” Akira said. “The spirits of dead children are stuck here, unable to cross the river to be reborn.” This was because they hadn’t accumulated enough
karma
in their short lifetimes to repay their parents for the love they received while they were alive. As penance, they built these small stone pagodas. Unfortunately, a demon was always lurking around the grounds of Osorezan and was willing to break apart the pagoda.

“I guess that makes me a demon,” I said.

“Foreign devil,” he agreed.

We weren’t too sure where else to go in this lunar landscape. Every now and then I thought I saw someone. Akira would see the same figure and we’d hurry after it. But whenever Akira and I grew close to the shape, we realized that we had merely seen yet another statue of Jizo or a pagoda.
Once or twice I’d been certain that the figure we had spotted had been moving.

“Look,” Akira said solemnly. The clouds had parted overhead. For a moment, the sky was a bloody orange as the sun started her descent to the west, over China. “We have to go back,” he said.

“Don’t you have any other instructions?”

“No.”

I looked out over the strange land, now turning scarlet. “Who does she think she is? Asking us to come to such a strange place and then not even showing up?” I squatted. My feet were tired and, though I knew the ground was wet, I sat down on the snow. Then my fatigue gave way to anger. “This isn’t funny!” I screamed. “Do you hear me? If you are out there listening, this isn’t funny!”

Akira sat down next to me. “Rumi, even if we don’t find your mother, at least you’ve met us. We are your family too, you know.”

“What the hell is the matter with my parents?” My eyes and nose were watering and I tried to wipe the moisture away with my gloved hands. “Why am I the one out here looking for
her
, when she’s the one who left
me
? What did
I
do? Are you
afraid
?” I screamed at the snow. “Because I’m not. I’m
right here
!”

“Here,” Akira handed me a handkerchief. “Girls are supposed to carry these.”

“Then why are you carrying one?” I asked, as I wiped my eyes.

“Well, boys carry them too.” He grinned. “You really are a foreign devil.”

“It’s not me who’s the devil!” I shouted back at him.

“That’s more like it. You’re much cuter when you are angry.” He took hold of my hand.

I didn’t stop him. I felt like an observer, a third person looking at two other people’s hands. Akira removed my glove and put it in his hand. Then he took off one of his gloves. He turned my hand over, massaging the palm, then worked his way up to the inside of my wrist. He stroked my skin and tapped my tendons lightly, and the sensation made me shiver. “Are you okay now?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

It wasn’t too much later that we kissed.

It wasn’t what I expected. The earth didn’t open up and swallow me whole. I felt instead as though I regained my balance after slipping. One second
I had been standing on one side of the road and the next I had simply shifted over to the other side to find similar scenery.

But then he reached inside my sleeve and stroked my arm, just above my elbow. I felt the contact in my stomach, felt it travel down between my legs. He stroked both arms and then I ran my finger across his right arm. I wanted to be even closer to him. I understood the meaning of a deep kiss after that, a feeling of being suspended in the nadir of a dive in a lake. Silence, danger, peace cushioning all sides of my body. When I came up for a break, the air was filled with the chatter of crows, the throb of the ocean, all running together in a warped burble as though my ears were filled with water.

We began the rocky climb back to the temple. It was hard going. We’d taken a circuitous route, and despite Akira’s insistence that we should stay on clearly marked paths, we’d strayed off course and now with the fading light would have to carefully climb our way back to make sure neither of us fell into a pool of boiling minerals.

I felt pressure in the air, and when I looked up, I saw that the clouds had slid back over the horizon. In the distance, over the water, were dark vertical streaks. It was going to snow. “Akira,” I said.

How careless we had been! We had the little white heat packs, but no flashlight. “We need to hurry,” he urged.

It was then that we saw a glowing point in the distance. Once or twice I nearly fell, but always Akira held my hand firmly. And there before us was a house made of ice, the floor neatly covered with straw. A hand emerged from inside and beckoned.

“I think,” Akira said slowly, his face unusually pale, “we are supposed to go inside.”

We removed our shoes and climbed into the ice house, whose floor was covered with
tatami
. The inside was surprisingly warm. Akira and I sat down at a small table made from a wooden tree trunk roughly hewn in half. Two women, one young and the other old, were sitting by a small stove on which the girl heated
mochi
and a pot filled with liquid. She ladled the hot drink into cups for us both. The hot liquid brought me back to my senses a little.

The other woman was speaking. She kept her eyes closed most of the time, but every now and then would tilt her head back and I could see the
whitish-blue of her irises. Her body was covered with a thick blue-and-white traditional garment so stuffed with insulation that she looked puffed up like some kind of doll. One hand held a dark rosary. The young girl handed us each a piece of
mochi
.

It was the first thing I’d eaten in a number of hours.

“She says there’s a bridge near here,” Akira said to me solemnly. “It crosses the river Sano, which is like your river Styx.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“The bridge is made of mist.”

“Mist?”

He shook his head. “It seems to be some kind of test. The bridge will either fade, or you will see it as something solid.”

“What’s on the other side?”

Akira shook his head. “These mediums. You know they are trained to be vague.”

The medium had fallen silent, letting her head fall against her chest. She appeared to be asleep. The young girl held out her hand, offering to fill my cup with more hot
sake
, and I drank another round.

“I have to stay here, Rumi. I’m sorry. That’s what the woman told me. You have to go alone. Of course, if you don’t want to …”

“Let me get this straight.” I smiled, trying to find the humor in my predicament. “I am supposed to look for a hypothetical misty bridge that crosses a river of death.”

“Yes.” Akira gave me an indulgent smile. “I know it sounds crazy. On the other hand, you didn’t come all this way just to go home.”

The young girl who had been serving us read the cues in my movements. She stood up in one deft motion and picked up a lantern I hadn’t noticed sitting in the corner. Then she went to the front of the ice house and stepped off the straw floor and into a pair of enormous boots made from straw. She hovered around the entrance, waiting for me. I put the cup down on the little table and put on my shoes.

It was snowing only lightly outside, flakes falling against my eyes, the icy cold snapping me awake. The young girl moved sturdily ahead of me, quite clearly more accustomed to the snow than I—I was now half falling and half running to keep up with her. Wherever she was going, the snow was much deeper in this part of the landscape.

Then she stopped and handed the lantern to me. With a blank expression,
she pointed off in the distance and nodded that I should keep walking. Behind her, I could see the little igloo glowing in the dark, lit up from the inside. I thought of Akira sitting in there with the old woman.

I felt a powerful surge in my head, blood rushing from the drink and from the sulfur. As I set out, the lantern seemed to glow like a ball of fire in my hand. I held it out, passing by Jizos who nodded and bowed and hummed at me. I passed strange creatures dressed in bibs and pink hats who cooed like little children, and even stranger creatures growling and sniffing at the earth. On I went in the direction I’d been sent.

I heard the sound of running water. I was on the edge of a riverbank. Below my feet, the earth dropped away. There was a mound of coins here, sticking up out of the snow and colored black from years of exposure. Wind brushed through the air and I saw the wet black flow of water running and reflecting a beam of moonlight.