Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (91 page)

He said, “You know our system of temples is dying in Japan.”

“It is?”

He scoffed and shot me an irritated, admonishing look. “Don’t be silly. It’s
fated
. This system of passing on temples from father to son can’t go on. Everyone is leaving the countryside. The situation is going to collapse. But there will be some who remain. Some of us who truly believe in Zen.”

“What is the point of zazen?” I asked.

This question seemed to delight him. He looked down to the side, his head at an angle and his mouth in a tight ball. Now his face glowed with animation, and little of the false modesty that he had employed earlier. “We live,” he began, “in a world created by language.” He ran off the names of French philosophers, whom he assumed I had read. He spoke about the world of commerce, and how so much of our lives were shaped by language, and by talk and how we could in fact convince ourselves of reality just by speech alone. Here I stopped him and asked for a concrete example.

“How does a child learn what a table is? We tell him: This here is a table. You may not climb on a table. You may not go under the table. You may eat off a table or put things on a table. Of course, you should only eat off of certain tables.” To sit zazen, he said, was to sit outside this world in which everything was formed by talk. Zazen meditation forced us into self-consciousness.

“That’s Buddhism.”

“Well, that’s what
I
think. As an outsider.”

“As Darth Vader.”

“Yes!” He laughed for the first time, his lips rising up into a full-fledged gummy smile, and I caught a glimpse of what he might have been like as a child, or perhaps what he was like when he was home and unguarded. But just as quickly, he pulled his expression back into a solemn and watchful resting position.

Since the tsunami, Minami had met with countless survivors, each of whom had a story to tell. For these people, mourning the dead—the loss of a beloved—was a pain so acute, it had the power to create an alternate reality. Because so many people had died at once in Japan, the disaster had created tremendous anxiety, a sense of “I might be next,” which was not easy to quell. But for Minami, Buddhism offered a true balm.

“How?” I asked.

“The point of Buddhism,” he said, “is that it is natural to live with wounds. Everyone has wounds and will be wounded. This can be shocking at first, but in fact it is completely normal. That’s basically it.” And so it was with grieving, he said. Intense grieving was recognition of this wound, and it always took a person some time to grow accustomed to it.

Minami had suffered from intense asthma as a child, and the attacks had made him ponder illness and death from an early age. Only Buddhism, he said, had offered any kind of answer to suffering. He repeatedly insisted to me that if he ever found another philosophy that could address the troubles of human existence, he would happily embrace it. But up until now, only Buddhism seemed to come close to truly being what he thought people needed.

He made it very clear that Buddhism was different from Christianity, which stressed the idea of original sin. That it was natural to live with suffering was, he said, an entirely different concept than original sin, which implied that there was something not quite right with human beings. On the contrary, he said. Things were right and things were wrong, but this dichotomy didn’t get at the heart of the human experience. To live with pain was entirely normal. Once a person accepted this, he or she could get on with life. “But just so you know, Buddhism is
not
humanism. They are not the same thing.”

Our conversation went on for about an hour. Speaking with Minami stretched the limits of my Japanese, but like all kind teachers, when Minami sensed I could not understand a vocabulary word, he provided it for me in English. Our conversation ranged across many subjects: how he saw young people in Japan now refer to themselves as “characters” and not as “personalities,” and how they were obsessed with raising the monetary value of their “characters.”

I’d heard echoes of this concern from other people, and there
were stories in the news about young people taking pictures of themselves in humorous positions and then posting the photos online to try to impress and amuse their friends and strangers. In an incident that is hard for a Westerner to understand, but which makes sense in Japan, a young man had arranged to have a picture taken of him lying inside of the ice-cream freezer in his father’s convenience store after hours. He had meant just to amuse his friends by posting it on Facebook, but the photo went viral, and there was outrage. It was inappropriate for the young man to put his body inside of a freezer containing food. It was dirty. People panicked; the store practiced poor hygiene. Remember in Eiheiji and S
jiji I was told never to touch the wooden platform that monks used as a table. Japanese are, in general, fastidious about being clean. The outrage against the freezer boy was so strong that the franchise from whom his father operated the store revoked its permit. The family had been forced to close down the business. “And for what?” my Japanese friends had said to me. “He was trying to perform. He was trying to appear like an interesting
character
.” And this, I assumed, was what Minami meant: people in Japan were less and less interested in the essential truths about their natures, but instead were concerned too much with their external appearance and the worth of their personas.

Language was not the only thing that worried Minami. Money bothered him too. He did not like the iniquity that money had created, and he was not a fan of capitalism. He was very dubious about the efficacy of counselors and therapists to console the grieving; this was a monetary transaction, and any time anyone took money in exchange for “help,” one ought to be suspicious. Better to come to Mount Doom, where a person could grieve the dead. “Mind you,” he said, “I believe in the dead. They are very different from ghosts. This is not a place for ghost watching. This is a place for grief.”

Our talk came to an end. Minami walked me outside to the
grounds of Mount Doom. The banners and special flags, which had been erected for the fall festival, had come down, and one of the
itako
had also abandoned her tent. Only a few people remained in line to speak with the remaining blind medium. The sun was setting, its round orb positioned perfectly on the very center of the peak of a distant mountain. The Japanese refer to this phenomenon as a “diamond,” because it looks as though a mountain is holding the jewel. All around us, the pinwheels continued to chatter in the wind, and the numerous statues of the Jiz
maintained their stances of stoic vigilance.

I asked Minami what he thought of Mount Doom on his first visit.

“It is a strange place,” he said. “But it is an important place. I think its power lies in the fact that there is nothing here. Nothing lives. And that means people can bring anything they want or need into Mount Doom. And we can accept it.”

We parted company shortly afterward, and I stopped to look inside the gift shop just outside the temple grounds. There I found Minami’s book written in Japanese, and whose title roughly translated to “Osorezan: Where the Dead Exist.” I ran back to the temple one more time to ask the priest to sign the book for me, and then I truly left Mount Doom and went back down to the valley.

M
Y SON HAD
been out with the Mountain Woman all day picking mushrooms. She was going to cook them for dinner for us. I hugged him and asked if he wanted to come to the café for a bite of cake while I warmed up my feet in a wooden tub filled with water from the valley’s hot spring. He readily agreed. The café was abuzz with activity. The young girls wanted to know about my meeting with Minami and what we had talked about. Then, as with my encounter
with the blind medium, I balked, because I was not sure how to sum up our conversation.

Later that evening, one of the girls from the café and the Mountain Woman came to our room at the inn, where my mother, my son, and I were eating dinner, which was largely composed of foraged mushrooms and chestnuts. The two guests regaled us with ghost stories of Mount Doom. In the old days, they said, before the hotel had been erected, it was possible to stay on Mount Doom and wake up in the middle of the night and find that a ghost was in your bed with you. The new hotel had completely ruined the otherworldly quality of Mount Doom, though people who had
reikan
, or “spirit vision,” could still see ghosts.

The Mountain Woman told us the story of her brother, who had been a sickly baby, not expected to live. “We have a saying,” she said. “When someone dies, the family makes
mochi
, or rice cakes. So, when someone is very sick, we say they are so sick the family is already preparing rice cakes. That’s how it was with my brother.” He survived, but as an adult he had been plagued by ghosts. A biologist, he had a job researching the waters of Lake Usori, where a rare species of fish lived because they were able to tolerate the high levels of sulfur. He frequently came home with stories of how he encountered a little old lady who was lost on the shores of the lake.

“Where is the
hond
?” the lady would ask, and he would point the direction in which she ought to walk. “I’m so tired. Would you take me?”

Exasperated, the biologist would take the lady’s hand, but she would stumble and ask to be carried. And so he would help her onto his back, and she would grow heavier and heavier until he was no longer able to stand. Then he tried to release her, only to find that she had completely disappeared and that he had been conversing with a ghost. His problems improved recently, after his father died and took away the curse of sight with him.

“That is how Osorezan used to be,” the Mountain Woman said confidently. “Full of ghosts. But not anymore.”

From here, the women went on to tell more and more ghost stories, each one more creepy than the last, until our room was filled with shrieking laughter.

S
UCH STORIES WOULD
have filled Minami with disapproval. In his conversation with me, he had made a distinction between the dead and ghosts. Very late at night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, I cracked open Minami’s book and began to read. There was a familiar retreading of many of the subjects we had talked about that afternoon when I had been granted my audience. Then he began to write about the grounds of Osorezan itself.

He made note of the small rocks on which the grieving write to the dead. On one was a note from a mother to her son: “I want to hear your voice again.” On another, a mother wrote to her child, “I will come and see you again.” This, Minami wrote, was the essence of Osorezan. It was not a place to come in search of ghosts and ghouls, but to connect with the dead at the deepest level. In another section, he wrote of the phenomenon of grown men coming to the shores of Lake Usori and crying out to the mountains on the opposite side: “Mother! Mother!” By crying out like this, the men hoped to summon their mothers’ spirits. Grown men in general do not cry like this, Minami noted. And yet, on Mount Doom, when one man saw another crying out like this, he would join in, and the faces of both strangers would be covered in tears.