Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (85 page)

A great effort had been made to clean her father’s body and to cover the scratches, but she could still see how he had been injured during his time in the great waves. He had been carefully wrapped in white cloth, as was the custom. And on his chest, there was a single white flower. It was the same flower that Sut
had seen in her shoe at the bath. The experience was overwhelming, and she cried.

Much later, she would realize that the incident with the flower at the bath had happened exactly a week after the earthquake. According to Buddhist tradition, it takes exactly seven days for the soul to travel from its body to its next destination. That day was also March 18, the start of the spring equinox Ohigan, when the curtain separating the mortal and spirit realms is said to thin, making it an ideal time to see the spirits of beloved ancestors.

It was impossible to miss the meaning in the strange incident of the white flower, and Sut
wrote of her experiences in a prize-winning short story that was published by a prestigious Japanese literary journal.

When I met with Sut
nearly two years after the tsunami, she was moving on with her life; she and her fiancé planned to be married and she hoped that they would return to Kesennuma to raise a family. Her fiancé, too, had lost family members: a two-and-a-half-year-old niece and a grandmother.

Sut
had an aura of elegance and graciousness that is unusual in one so young. She was the kind of person for whom you wanted to put on your best behavior. At the same time, she emanated tremendous sadness. As someone nearly twice her age, I found myself yearning to help her. Now that I am middle-aged and a mother, I want people who are younger than I am to be happy, to be living their lives to the fullest, and to be unassailed by grief or circumstance.

We spoke about what the white flower might mean. She remained mystified by the experience, as though she could not quite believe what had happened. Even now she continues to search for an explanation for how the flower ended up in her shoe. But even if she were to learn where it came from, she said, that would not explain how it had been the exact same species as the flower on her father’s body in the casket, a type of flower she had never seen before or since.

We both spoke of how love is an invisible thing, impossible to see even if someone is still alive. I wanted very much to believe that the flower was a final act of love and hope. The love we have for people, after all, never truly goes away, even if they leave us in
owakare
, the great parting.

SIXTEEN

T
HE
B
LIND
M
EDIUM

B
UT WHAT IF, DESPITE
the lanterns, the yearly return of the spirits, and all the incense and temples and equinoxes, you are still heartbroken? What if you remain in the grip of grief’s madness? Who can help you if the one thing you really want is to talk to the person you have lost, just one more time?

As I traveled throughout T
hoku and spoke with people about the tsunami and their losses, I kept running into stories about the
itako
, the blind mediums who gather on Mount Doom twice a year, and who for a small fee can channel the souls of the dead. Often the stories went like this: There was a man who had lost his wife in the tsunami and whose body had not been found. He missed her so much, he finally turned to an
itako
to help him communicate with her spirit, and though the itako had been unable to locate the remains, she had helped him feel more at peace.

Endo Shigeru, the director of the documentary in which I participated, kept running into stories about the
itako
too, during his location scouting and prefilming research. But the
itako
were elusive. Endo had wanted to arrange for me to meet one. The
itako
were said to be very busy in T
hoku, due to the number of people who died, and were moving around, like itinerant priests. Endo followed the stories, going from town to town, asking where the
itako
had been and where they were heading. He reached Kesennuma, where someone told him that the most recent
itako
to visit had been in her eighties, and had died.

Yet another person told him that the
itako
were not really dying out, but that they now “hid” their profession. In T
hoku towns, where residents were traditional and old-fashioned, the owner of the corner grocery store might well be an
itako
. But you would not know this if you weren’t from her town, and even if you asked her to conjure up the spirit of someone whom you missed, she would deny being able to do such a thing.

I had long been fascinated by the
itako
, ever since I had first learned about them in a college religion class. And as I traveled around T
hoku, it became clear to me that no real examination of grief in Japan would be complete without trying to meet an
itako
in person. Since I wasn’t able to find an
itako
on my own, I decided to go to Mount Doom in October, where I knew the last remaining
itako
would convene during the Mount Doom Autumn Festival.

I
N 1975, WHEN
historian Carmen Blacker wrote
The Catalpa Bow
, a look at Japan’s shamanistic heritage, there were twenty
itako
at the yearly festivals on Mount Doom. Even then, Dr. Blacker was fairly certain that the tradition would die out, another casualty to progress.