Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (64 page)

There were many more eccentric touches. He asked me to look up at the ceiling. Did I see three mice scampering across the rafters? I did. After a moment, when the mice did not move, I asked if, perhaps, the mice were sculptures. “In fifty years, my mice will be designated National Treasures,” he said confidently, for the mice had been carved by a master carpenter in Ky
t
. One mouse was climbing a rafter; another was hanging on in the middle with a bit of food in its mouth. The third mouse was on its way down a supporting beam. These were, he said, all part of a haiku. At any point in life, man was like one of these mice: on his way up, hanging on for dear life, or on his way down. It was important to remember that even if one were in descent, one would, in all likelihood, also go back up again. He also had two paintings of peacocks, which had been done by another master artist in Ky
t
. They were portraits of his now-deceased peacocks, his pets, and were related to the stuffed
peacock in the Mountain Woman’s inn. Later, when the Mountain Woman returned to pick me up, she and the Fuzzy-Headed Priest reminisced about their deceased peacock friends.

My son returned to the main hall again, and the old priest thoughtfully closed the door to the old hag’s box. He beckoned us to follow him around to the back of the altar. There was an antechamber filled with dolls. Each was about a foot high, dressed up as either a bride or a groom, and displayed in a glass box. In some instances, a bride and a groom were in one case together. Scattered around the dolls were photos of young men and women, in the bloom of youth. Very often, the priest explained to me, when young people died, they had not yet married, and this caused their parents tremendous worry. To assuage their worry, family members would come here with a picture of the deceased, and ask that the priest perform a wedding ceremony between the spirit of the dead person and a spirit of the opposite sex. The ceremony cost a fee, and the dolls would then live here in the back room for five years.

Behind this room was yet another chamber, this one filled with little altars, each of which contained the remains of the deceased. In this room, the priest explained to me, no one used candles or burned incense, for fear of fire. He had electronic candles in place, so a person could visit, switch on a candle and pray, and then leave without any fear of fire burning down the temple.

By the time we emerged from the temple, the Mountain Woman and my mother had returned to the temple with a box of seaweed. “How are you doing?” my mother called out to me. The Crab Lady had worked her way up to the temple too. She had a large bag of candy for my son, and she shyly held this out with one hand. It was a very large bag—the size you would buy to feed a neighborhood of children at Halloween—and my son lunged for it. The Crab Lady was not scary after all. The bamboo dragonfly was set aside and forgotten.

A
T DINNER THAT
evening, there was a tremendous commotion in the kitchen. The staff at the
ryokan
could not believe that Ewan and I had been to Ubaji, the old hag temple, and that we had lived to tell the tale. Stories were legion about that priest and his old mother, and how difficult and downright rude they were to people who paid them a visit.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s his mother?”

There followed a heated discussion as to whether or not the Crab Lady was the wife or the mother. The matter undecided, the staff bombarded us with new questions. Had my son and I really stood on the altar? Had the priest really opened the doors to the statue just for us?

I said that all this was true. The Mountain Woman was triumphant. She crowed that it was she who had taken us to the temple. As she proudly recounted her part in our adventure, I could see what a tomboy she must have been, the young girl who had ran away from school to climb mountains to hunt for mushrooms, and who had sided with her father when her parents fought. She was thrilled to be able to tell the local staff the story of the old priest’s kindness and, more to the point, of how the Crab Lady had fallen for my son’s charms and handed him a bag of candy.

“But they weren’t so bad,” I said. “I mean, I was a little uncomfortable at first. But he took a lot of time to explain everything to us.”

The man serving us dinner shook his head. “I don’t know what you did, but you were very lucky to get that tour.”

The Fuzzy-Headed Priest was a strange man, they all agreed. Very eccentric. The parishioners hardly knew what to do with him. It was true that he had taken what was once a very small and unimportant temple and turned it into something quite fine. But the
locals often worried about what he was doing with their money. Apparently they knew he went to Burma and to other places around the world, helping to build schools and to teach literacy. Such kindness didn’t square with his gruffness. Then there was all the work he had done on behalf of the tsunami victims. Everyone knew that he had gone and volunteered, but for some reason he liked to pretend that he had not done anything at all. He was, they said, exactly like Baba, the old hag. He had one face from the front and another from the side.

F
OR MONTHS
I could not shake the image of terrifying old Baba, the hag who keeps the souls of lost children stuck on the side of a river, and who takes away the clothes and the skin of the newly dead, and the sad and kind Baba whom I had seen when I looked at her from the side. Superimposed on this was the Fuzzy-Headed Priest and his Crab Lady mother. Or wife.

I knew why Baba had such a frightening face. I really hated feeling lost in the abyss of grief, and I often hated the person that I was, this person who was so unhappy all the time, and who had to rein in what she said lest she let other people see how unhappy she was.

Not long after my father died, my husband said to me, “Grief is a form of love, isn’t it? And isn’t love a form of madness?”

I guessed that the side of Baba’s face represented a form of love. But it didn’t make sense to me that a being who tortured little children could have anything to do with love.

Many months later, I started to think about her a little differently. She, whose job it was to terrify and to torment, knew exactly how horrible her actions were, and a part of her grieved to have to do this to us. But her job was also necessary and unstoppable. For months I had been looking to return my life to the way it had been before my father and my grandparents died. And when I couldn’t do
that, when I couldn’t bring them out of the underworld, I had felt the touch of madness.

Old Baba had been trying to tell me that it would be impossible to heal my wound by resurrecting anyone who was dead. If I insisted on trying to do this unfeasible thing, then the world would only be reflected back to me as it appeared in old Baba’s most obvious expression—with fury and scorn. Indeed, this was how my surroundings had appeared to me for a long time. But if I went about things another way, if I could in fact accept that my world had forever changed, then I could see grief as it was depicted from the side of Baba’s face—with sadness, but with compassion for others. Having once seen the face of deep grief, though, I did not think it was possible to go back to a point in life when I didn’t know old Baba existed at all.

T
HE STORY OF
the Fuzzy-Headed Priest has a coda. I went back to visit him with my son a few months later, when it was autumn. I didn’t phone in advance, but just stopped by with some coffee, for I have found that it is as Furuie told me on K
yasan: all priests love coffee. Ewan seemed not to remember the statue of the old hag on the temple altar. When we pulled into the temple driveway, he merely looked at me and said with excitement, “Mommy! It’s the temple with the mice!”

The Fuzzy-Headed Priest and the Crab Lady were relaxing in the front room; her health had improved greatly since I last saw her, and in the absence of pain, she had grown youthful, and it became clear to me that she was not old enough to be the priest’s mother. We sat and had tea, while the wife played a traditional game with my son, which involved whacking a stack of colorful wooden disks with a mallet, specifically trying to knock one disk from the stack while keeping the others in a column. The topmost disk in the stack
had been painted with the face of Daruma, one of Zen Buddhism’s most enlightened teachers.

We chatted a bit, and at one point in the conversation, I asked the Fuzzy-Headed Priest where he was from. At this, both he and his wife raised their eyebrows. There was a long pause.

Finally, the wife said, “My husband is from a town that has become very famous in the news. It’s a town that no longer exists.”

“Well, it exists,” he said. “But it’s having a rough time these days. I am from Rikuzentakata, a town almost completely obliterated by the March 11, 2011, disaster.” When news crews arrived, they were unable to find any residents in the town and feared that everyone had died.

The Fuzzy-Headed Priest’s older brother had been given the family temple in Rikuzentakata. The older brother had had a son, who had married and had two daughters. The tsunami killed the brother, the brother’s son, and one granddaughter. Only the daughter-in-law and one of the granddaughters survived. Once every three months, the Fuzzy-Headed Priest made the four-hour journey to Rikuzentakata to perform memorial services for the many dead
danka
associated with his family. Despite being the second son, he had, in a strange twist of fate, become the head priest after all.