Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (92 page)

I
N OUR CONVERSATION,
Minami stressed the importance of time, and how a person must adjust to a loss—or the wound, as he put it. I found this to be true. It was now five years since my father
passed away, and I found that I had adjusted to his death. I was not the same person I was even a year ago, visiting so many Obon services and asking for help to feel less sad.

When I traveled around Japan on the tour of Obon ceremonies, I repeatedly asked my ancestors to “make me feel more happy than sad.” In a way, that was what had happened, but with one very important difference. It was not that my sadness had shrunk so much, or that my happiness had grown; instead, I now saw my own sadness in the context of everyone else’s grief. I am, after all, just one person on a planet of millions, all of whom, if they have not already, will also suffer the same intense feelings of shock and loss that I have, and many of whom will do so in far more traumatic settings. My little lantern of grief was but one in a sea of other lanterns.

I couldn’t help but think about Minami’s observation that as a Westerner, I would always want to know why I was doing something. I would never be willing to just go through an experience and then learn the lesson at the end. That would feel too passive. Grieving, I thought, was a perfect example of just such an experience. I had been angry to be so sad so much of the time, unable to trust that in time I would recover and adapt to the lessons of grief.

EIGHTEEN

M
ESSAGE FROM THE
O
THER
W
ORLD

W
INTER COMES, AND
M
OUNT
Doom closes. It snows, and the residents of Yokote make igloos for the water god, hoping he will return in the spring, which he does; the ice thaws, the cherry blossoms bloom, and then it is spring again.

Spring is my favorite season, and I’m sure this is partly because of my parents. In California, where I grew up, spring comes early. My parents were expert gardeners and took advantage of its early arrival, planning flower beds and the vegetable garden months in advance so something would nearly always be blooming. According to my mother, the backyard had once been nothing but a mess of tall weeds, because the former owner had liked to sunbathe privately in the nude. Beyond the fortress of poison oak and acacia, my father envisioned a miniature paradise. There would be a vegetable garden to the west. Daddy lined this garden with white walls on two sides to generate even more heat, so we could have sweet corn in the summer, strawberries in the spring, and carrots and lettuce year-round. Before breakfast, I picked whatever fruit was ripe that day, and before dinner, the season’s vegetables.

To the east, we had an orchard, a never-ending laboratory where my parents experimented with pears, apples, plums, and peaches. When storms broke the branches of the trees, my father tenderly
bandaged the severed limbs together with duct tape. It was a yearly joy for me to look out of my bedroom window and watch and wait for the first plum to ripen. For years after I left home, my mother selected plums from the garden, placed them in egg cartons, and shipped them to me via second-day air.

Daddy was forever creating a better way to do everything, and his inventions absorbed his time and interest. He pruned pine and maple trees into bonsai for the front garden. He reshaped all the birdfeeders to keep out aggressive jays and opportunistic pigeons so my mother could enjoy songbirds in the morning during breakfast. He strung a low-level shock wire around the fishpond and waterfall (also his design) and attached it to a timer. Every so often, we’d wake up in the middle of the night and hear a raccoon scream. But in the morning, all the fish were safe.

Our days were filled with worries over which plants were coming up and whether the fuchsias and roses would survive the winter. If the weatherman forecasted a deep freeze, my father and I wrapped his old, wool army blanket around the Meyer lemon tree. In the spring, my mother made miraculous, heady meringue pies. We ate soba on the patio while the hummingbirds fought angrily over the sugar-water feeders. We fed our leftover noodles to the fish in the pond.

A cynical mind—an adult mind—would look at this arrangement and realize it required spare time and enough money. Since my father did not have a conventional job, and since our income came mostly from the family wheat farm in Nebraska, keeping the garden and the grounds depended on frugality. When my mother fell ill and we became her caretakers, we drew inward, guarding our paradise with increased thrift and caution. Our lifestyle bred in us a certain disagreeable pride. We did not admire
people who hired gardeners and called plumbers at the first sign of a blocked sewage pipe. We drove our cars until they died, and did not think much of people who needed a BMW or Mercedes-Benz. We were irritated when neighbors could not appreciate the gift of a paper bag filled with zucchini from our overly generous garden. If there was something I wanted—a prom dress, pizza for dinner, a dollhouse—we always tried to make it ourselves.

P
EOPLE OFTEN MAKE
the mistake of assuming that my American family must have been unhappy that my father married a Japanese woman. Actually, it was the other way around. My American grandmother, usually so equitable, was absolutely and prejudicially for my parents’ union, and thrilled that she had a half-Japanese granddaughter. Grammy believed in the beauty of the world and cultures different from her own. In the letters that she wrote during the early years of my parents’ marriage, when they lived with her, my grandmother gushed to my Japanese grandparents about how accomplished my mother is, how quickly she learned to bake pies and sew aprons and make pot roast. The gushing continued after I was born, with my grandmother ecstatic that I was being raised with two languages. Years later, I learned that Grammy had paid for my trips to Japan, which couldn’t have happened any other way. I also learned that my grandmother had played favorites: she hadn’t paid for her other grandchildren to take trips anywhere. “Teach Marie about Japan,” she instructed my mother, in no small part because learning about Japan in childhood was something my grandmother would have liked to have done. “Teach Marie what is beautiful about Japan. Teach her as much as possible while she’s young.”

My mother took this instruction seriously. I was two and a half when we took off for the first of our adventures together. As soon as we were on the plane, my mother firmly held me to a “Japanese-only” rule that she wouldn’t relinquish until we were back home. As a child, the language rule felt akin to a magic spell; now we
were going to go through the tortuous hazing of flying for hours, switching planes in Alaska, watching the motionless sun—all things that felt against nature’s intentions. At the end of the voyage, I’d have to be a slightly different version of myself, one who didn’t swing her legs when sitting on a chair, and who ate with her elbows tucked in. She continued the trips, even when she was in poor health and in constant pain, as she was after she recovered from viral meningitis, and then later, after she developed stage-four rheumatoid arthritis.

But her determination—the magic spell cast over me from the travel—had a reward. My grandmother wanted to make sure that I would grow up understanding the things that “make Japan beautiful.” My mother shared this idealism and always timed our trips to coincide with Japan’s most brilliant and festive
matsuri
, when women dressed up in gauzy
yukata
, and playful music teased the streets. The country felt open, magical, and beguiling. Family members welcomed us with an intense and sincere warmth; Japanese hospitality at its best knows no rival. On each trip, I’d wait for the special night when I would go to sleep and wake up knowing that I had dreamed in Japanese.

“You talked in your sleep last night,” my mother would say.

“And?”

“You said something in Japanese.”

Then I would know that the spell was complete and that my insides now matched the outside world. I could see like a Japanese person. My grandmother’s simple request—to see another kind of beauty—had an unintended consequence.

M
Y STORMY
J
APANESE
grandfather was very hard on my mother. He was afraid of what would happen to his only daughter—and to me, a child of mixed race. At one point, my grandfather had
disowned my mother. One of my mother’s brothers had done the same, and my mother had been deeply hurt.

I only found out about these things later in life; the adults tried to hide the tensions from me when I was a child. But if I paid attention to the background, then I could feel something lingering, the way you can see ripples in the water long after a large vessel has churned past.

One night when we were visiting my grandparents in Japan, I woke up. It was summer and very hot, but the room was reasonably cool because we’d left the window open and it was raining outside.

My mother’s breaths were deep and even; she was asleep. Most of the time when I woke up in the middle of the night, she would wake up too; I think it is this way for mothers and children everywhere, as I have discovered since having my son. But that night, my mother did not wake up, and I felt painfully alone.

Summer storms in Japan are often tempestuous, and old houses, such as my grandparents’ house, rattle terribly in the wind. As I lay awake, every shingle and every nail struggled in the storm. The house seemed to tense and push back against the wind. The tension made me feel increasingly afraid.

There was just enough space in my mother’s childhood room for the two of us: she was on the floor in a futon, and I was on a cot, which had been presented to me as a positive. When we traveled, I was always desperate for anything familiar, and the bed, everyone thought, would make me more comfortable because it would seem American. I would have preferred a futon. Then my mother and I would have been side by side.

I could see out the open window just beyond the foot of my bed. Bamboo lurched in the wind. The leaves looked like hands tapping the screen. I wanted the noises and the wind to stop. I tried to go back to sleep. This is what my mother would tell me to do if I woke her up. But I couldn’t sleep. Then just for a moment, the storm
breathed more quietly and the leaves stopped tapping the window, as though the volume outside had been turned down. I heard a crack. Over the years, my grandmother had discarded empty clamshells on the ground outside after we’d eaten the meat in our miso soup; she said the shells made great fertilizer. Something was now crossing the shells, and I could hear the shells breaking. A man stepped into view.

He was dirty and was smiling unkindly. I had never seen him before but felt sure he was not Japanese. I did not know where he had come from. I felt that he could read my thoughts and knew my fears and found them amusing. He was here to have fun. We were to be his playmates. This was something about cruelty that I learned early. Mean people often think they are being funny.

“Mom,” I said.

Her voice, when she spoke to him, was tired and irritated. “What are you doing?”

He said, “I want to come in.”

“Well, we’re sleeping.” Matter of fact.

My heart began to beat very fast and very loud. I wanted to escape, but I had the sense that if I got up, the man would not hesitate to come into our room. We were only separated by a thin wire screen. I was also confused. My mother continued to talk to the man, as though he were someone with whom we could reason. I did not think we should be doing this. I thought we should probably scream and run away. But I also did not want to disappoint her by questioning her authority.

“Does this change anything?” He pulled out a gun.

“Now that,” said my mother, “is ridiculous. And where did you get that anyway? We are trying to sleep. It is raining outside, and you should not be outside and you should go away.”

He waved the gun around. This, again, would be a good time to leave, but I was too terrified to move.

At last, he said, “Okay. I’ll go away. But I want you to know that I will be back.”

While he was speaking, he was looking at my mother. But now he smiled at me, as though he wanted me to know that I was a part of this drama whether I wanted to be or not. It was an awful feeling to make contact with him and to know that he saw me. His eyes really saw me—into me—and he smiled and pointed the gun. He pretended to pull the trigger, and the gun barrel glowed. Then he pointed the gun at my mother and pretended to pull the trigger. And then he was gone. Once again the leaves were battering the window, and the sound of rain rose up all around the house.

It took some time for my body to warm up, and for me to work out of my near catatonic state. I heard my mother breathing deeply again and knew she was asleep.

“Mommy?”

She was doubly irritated this time. “What is it?”

“Mommy, what about that man?”

“He’s gone.”

“Shouldn’t we tell someone?”

“You’ll be tired if you don’t sleep. You need to sleep.” My parents were always telling me to get enough sleep.