Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (63 page)

“Hello! Hello!” the Mountain Woman called out cheerfully. I looked around in the entryway. There was the usual collection of Buddhist temple house paraphernalia: a framed print of the Buddha, numerous umbrellas waiting for a rainy day, slippers for use inside the house. There was a narrow hallway that sloped up at an angle and led into the
hond
. The window sills of this hallway were decorated with little bamboo toys: dragonflies that balanced on branches.

We heard the sound of metal and then the lumbering of someone pushing a walker. A moment later, an elderly woman rounded the corner. She startled me. She was extremely tall and big. I was reminded of the toy in
Toy Story
, the movie, in which a decapitated doll’s head is attached to the metal chassis of a toy car. The woman had that quality of half human and half machine. She scuttled forward like a mechanical crab and eyed us suspiciously.

“Maybe we are disturbing her,” I whispered to the Mountain Woman.

“Hello! I am here with a guest who is staying at my inn,” the Mountain Woman announced. “She is interested in the true experience of Osorezan, and I have told her a bit about your temple. Would you kindly show it to her, please?”

The Crab Lady looked out at us through her one good eye. She was up high on the landing of her house, and we were down below with the shoes. “He is not here,” she finally said.

“Where is he?” the Mountain Woman pressed.

The Crab Lady inhaled and squinted and seemed to think. “Up at the greenhouse.” She looked at my son, hiding behind my legs and peering out at her. “Beware of the dog.” Then she turned away and retreated to the living quarters of her home.

“Maybe we are disturbing . . . ,” I began again.

The Mountain Woman strode off across the parking lot and across the street, while ordering me to keep my son far away from the dog, who was chained to a pole. I did as she said, following her as she made a wide berth around the dog to the door of a large rectangular greenhouse. She yanked open the door, and immediately the greenhouse exhaled, sending out a strong, hot breath of manure and freshly trimmed stems. There was a tangle of orange, red, and white orchids inside; the flowers had been indulged and allowed to grow however they chose, so they clutched each other like incestuous siblings. There were little potted roses and ferns. I stared at the exotic richness. Even the Mountain Woman paused to take in the unexpected site of the disordered, tropical splendor. Then she gathered herself together again.

A man sat in the front corner of the greenhouse. He wore dusty clothing and a pair of long green rubber boots. He hadn’t shaved that day, and the hair on his head was about an inch long, a thick carpet of stubble that made him look like a Monchichi, the Japanese
toy from the 1980s. This was how I often saw my father when he was alive—tromping around in his beloved flower garden, sweating and dusty and smelling of dirt. But this man—with his unattended head of hair—could not possibly be a Buddhist priest, as no vigilant priest would allow his personal grooming to deteriorate to such a degree.

“Hello!” the Mountain Woman began her spiel again. She explained who I was, and why I was here, while the dog barked outside.

“Okay,” the man said gruffly. He pulled off one of his boots and placed his foot inside a sneaker. Then he began to tug on the other boot. “Go back. And I’ll meet you there.”

The Mountain Woman nodded and turned crisply. “Come on, then.”

I followed her back to the temple, making sure that my son and I again skirted the dog. Now the Crab Lady was waiting for us in the entrance. She was not able to hand us any slippers, but she motioned for us to help ourselves. I wondered, fleetingly, just how old she was. She seemed ancient—in her nineties. Most Japanese people who are that old are not particularly tall, and yet even with the walker she had formidable height. I helped my son up onto the landing. By now the priest had returned from his greenhouse and gruffly gestured us to come into his temple.

“You’re on your own now!” the Mountain Woman waved to me. She and my mother drove off to go buy some seaweed, for the Mountain Woman knew a place that made it fresh and sold it cheaply. My son and I followed the Fuzzy-Headed Priest into his temple. As we walked up the landing, Ewan paused to admire one of the dragonfly toys, and the Fuzzy-Headed Priest picked it up and put it in my son’s hands. “Take it,” he said delightedly.

The inside of his temple was quite small, and the gold on the
decorations very bright and new. I asked the priest how old his temple was.

Gone was the disgruntled gardener, and in his place now was a man who was delighted to tell his story. He had a bit of mischief on his face, and though I liked this about him, it made me nervous.

“Come here,” he said. “Come onto the altar and stand right here.” He gestured to a spot just in front of the closed box. “Come on, come on,” he said gently, waving us up onto the landing. I held my son’s hand.

The priest disappeared, but I could still hear him talking to us. “Are you there? You are facing the box, yes? Please look at the box. Make sure you are looking. Okay. One. Two. Three.”

The doors of the box swung open. The figure seated in the box thrust forward. It was the terrifying, skeletal face of the old hag: Shozoku no Baba. My son let go of my hand and immediately ran away.

“Do you see it?” the priest asked gleefully.

“Yes. It’s very . . .”

“Isn’t she terrifying?”

“Yes,” I said, turning around, searching for my son. “I’m sorry but my son . . .”

“I want you to walk to the side and look at Baba from the side.”

I could hear my son moving around somewhere within the temple. He’d run off so suddenly, I hadn’t seen in which direction he had gone.

“Are you looking?” asked the priest.

I stepped to the right. “Yes,” I said.

“Good.” He came around the corner, very pleased with himself. “Were you scared?”

“Well, yes . . .”

“Isn’t she ugly?”

“Very ugly,” I agreed.

“But look at her from the side. Look.” His mood had changed now and become somehow gentle. “Isn’t her expression different from the side?”

In fact, it was. The old hag was a statue made of wood, and rigged on a platform so she could jump out, like a jack-in-the-box. From the front, the old hag was terrifying—all tongue and teeth and skull. She looked, I thought, like the Crab Lady back in the hallway navigating with her metal walker. But from the side, the hag’s expression took on a look of sadness, fatigue, and pity. She looked almost grandmotherly.

The old priest told me that once upon a time, pilgrims crossed the red bridge at Osorezan and then met face-to-face with a statue of the old hag. But then Osorezan became quite commercialized, and the main goal of the priests who ran it was to make money. The true faithful, he said, came here, to his temple, because it was right here that the river started. This was where the souls of the dead began their walk, and true pilgrims knew this and came to pay their respects. The business of death, he explained, was just as shocking as the old hag looked. But from the side, I could see that she was also sad too, and that she had pity for the poor souls over whose fate she ruled.

In all my years of visiting Japanese temples, I’d never seen an old hag enshrined as the main entity, and I told him so. “That’s right!” he said happily. “I’m very rare.” He went on. Shozoku no Baba was neither Buddhist nor Shint
. She had presided over the underworld for a very long time, long before either religion had been formally established in Japan.

The name of his temple was Ubaji, or “Old Lady Temple.” The Fuzzy-Headed Priest was born into a priestly family, but as the second son he wasn’t able to take on his father’s temple. Ubaji became available when he was a young man, and his mother urged him to
take the opportunity. He spent years, he said, begging for money to rebuild Ubaji’s structure piece by piece. I had heard this story before—it is the story not only of Empukuji but also of the temple in Nara owned by Maruko, the Zen priest I had met at Eiheiji. The Fuzzy-Headed Priest had only thirty households to support his temple when he got started, and so he had to scrape together the money to build the structure we had in front of us today. Rebuilding the temple cost him roughly one hundred million yen, or around one million dollars.

He was delighted to show me all the details of his accomplishment. His temple, he explained, was part of the Pure Land sect of Buddhism. This was why his head was not closely shaved; Pure Land priests are not fastidious about their hair, as are Zen Buddhists or Shingon Buddhists. His temple was part of a bureaucracy headed by a temple called J
j
ji, to which the Tokugawa shogunate had been a member. As a result, any temple under J
j
ji was allowed to place the Tokugawa crest on its doors, as he had done.