A Tale for the Time Being (30 page)

But it never happened. He never let go, and then slowly his pumping lost its power and the arc of the swing grew smaller and more uneven, until he was barely moving at all, and the toes of his
plastic sandals were just dragging backward and forward, tracing small aimless circles in the dust under the swing. He stood up and walked to the safety wall and looked over, and then he took one
last drag from his cigarette and flicked it into the river. He stood there for a long time, staring into the oily water. I was afraid he was going to climb over then and jump. I wanted to run out
from my hiding place and stop him.

“But you didn’t,” Jiko said.

“No. I was going to, but then he turned away from the water and started walking again.”

“Did you follow?”

“Yes. He walked home. I waited outside the door of our apartment until I thought it was safe and then let myself back in with my key. I don’t think he heard me. He was snoring by
then.”

Old Jiko nodded. “He was a good sleeper as a boy.”

“So don’t you think he should come back and stay here with us?” I asked. “I think it would do him a lot of good, don’t you? You should have seen his face when we
were walking up the steps to the temple. He looked really happy.”

“He always liked it here,” Jiko said.

“So he should come back, right?”

“Maa, soo kashira,”
¹²²
she said, which is one of those Japanese answers that mean absolutely nothing.

2.

By August, it was hotter than you can imagine, and in the afternoon, when Jiko and Muji were teaching flower arrangement or sutra singing to the neighborhood ladies and I was
supposed to be doing my summer homework, I would drag myself out onto the engawa
¹²³
that overlooked the pond and sit there and zone out. I liked to
lean up against the thick wooden beam with my headphones on, and my legs sprawled out in front of me, watching the dragonflies flit around the lotus pads in the tiny pond, and listening to Japanese
pop covers of French chansons that I was into even back then before I knew about
À la recherche du temps perdu
. Jiko didn’t like it when I sprawled, and when she caught me
doing it she told me so. She said it wasn’t good manners to sit with my legs spread wide open for all the world to see, especially when I wasn’t wearing any panties, and generally I
agreed with her, but it was so hot! I just couldn’t stand the feeling of the skin on the insides of my legs touching, and the old wood of the engawa was smooth and cool, and nobody was
watching. Even Chibi the cat, who normally loved hot laps, stayed away. He was passed out on a cool mossy rock underneath some ferns. Mostly the air was dead still, but sometimes the tiniest
breezes blew up the side of the mountain and entered the temple gates and found their way into the garden, where they ruffled the surface of the water and tickled up between my legs, making me
shiver. Sometimes I think that the spirits of the ancestors live in the breezes, and you can feel them swishing around.

It was coming up to Obon, and spirits were cruising about like travelers arriving at the airport with their suitcases, looking for a place to check in. Obon was their summer vacation, too, when
they could come back from the land of the dead to visit us here, in the land of the so-called living. The hot air felt pregnant with ghosts, which is a funny thing for me to say, since I’ve
never been pregnant, but I’ve seen women on the train who are about to pop, and I imagine it must feel like this. They heave themselves around, belly first, and if someone is nice enough to
give them a seat, they plop down, and then they just sit there with their legs open, rubbing their bellies and fanning their sweaty red faces, which is just how August feels, as Obon approaches,
like the whole round world is pregnant with ghosts, and at any moment the dead will burst through the invisible membrane that separates them from us.

When I wasn’t sitting on the veranda, zoning out, I was following Jiko around the temple, carrying stuff for her and bugging her with questions about our ancestors.

“How about Grandma Ema? Is she coming? Did I ever meet her? I’d like to meet her. How about Great-Aunt Sugako and Great-Uncle Haruki? I’d like to meet them, too. Do you think
they might want to meet me?”

I was excited because even though none of my dead relatives had ever bothered to show up for Obon before, at least to my knowledge, I had a feeling that this year would be different. First of
all, I was an ikisudama now, and as a living ghost, I figured the dead ghosts would feel more comfortable with me. And I figured, too, that they would be more likely to come here to Jiko’s
temple, where everyone was expecting them and knew how to treat them properly, than to Sunnyvale, say, where the neighbors would simply freak and treat them like tacky Halloween spooks. It’s
like a birthday party. If you have parents like Kayla’s who are really awesome event planners and take everybody bowling or rock climbing, then it’s great to be the birthday girl, but
if you have parents like mine who are pretty clueless, then birthdays suck, and really you’d rather be a thousand miles away than stuck there at your boring little party with your American
friends who keep sighing and rolling their eyes at each other and then going all gushy and fake whenever your mom walks into the room with another plate of sushi. And you pretend you’re
having a good time, too, smiling like a crazy person, but you know it’s a sales job, and you’re only doing it to make your parents happy, and because it’s good for their
self-esteem. Anyway, all I’m trying to say is that if you were a ghost, which party would you rather go to?

Jiko and Muji are awesome party planners, and we spent every Buddhist nanosecond preparing the altars and arranging the flowers and dusting and deep cleaning even the tiniest corners and cracks
of the temple so it would be spotless for the spirits and ancestors. We also made different kinds of special food to offer them, because they get hungry after their long journey back, and if you
don’t feed them, they might get angry. Food is a big part of Obon. In Japan, there are thousands of different spirits and ghosts and goblins and monsters who can do tatari and attack you, so
just to be on the safe side we were going to kick things off with a big osegaki
¹²⁴
ceremony, with lots of guests, as well as priests and nuns from a
nearby temple who were coming to help us feed the hungry ghosts.

Muji told me the story behind this, about how back in the old days, Lord Buddha had this one disciple named Mokuren, who got really upset when he happened to see his mother hanging upside down
like a side of beef in the Hell Realm of the hungry ghosts. He asked Lord Buddha how to rescue her, and Lord Buddha told him to make special offerings of food, which seemed to do the trick, and
which just goes to show that kids have to look after their parents’ well-being, even when their parents are dead and hanging upside down from meat hooks in hell. Old Mokuren was a pretty
amazing dude, with lots of
supapawa!
like being able to walk through walls, and read people’s minds, and talk to the dead. I would like to walk through walls and read people’s
minds and talk to the dead. That would be cool. I’m just a beginner, but as you know, I think it’s important to have concrete goals in life, and walking through a wall seems doable,
don’t you think?

Anyway, finally we had everything ready, and the night before the first guests arrived, Jiko and Muji and I took a bath together so we would be clean and extra spiffy, and I got to shave both
their heads with the razor. Jiko and Muji are superstrict about personal hygiene, and they never let their hair grow for more than five days, which is about an eighth of an inch, and sometimes they
let me help. I liked doing it. I liked the way the stiff little stubbles came off in front of the blade, leaving the skin all nice and smooth and shiny. Muji’s stubbles were tiny and black,
like dead ants falling off a clean white page, but old Jiko’s stubbles were bright and sparkling silver, like glitter or fairy dust.

There’s a prayer for shaving heads, too, that goes like this:

That night I was so excited, thinking about the arrival of the ghosts, I stayed up until Muji finally made me go to bed, but as soon as she and Jiko were asleep, I sneaked out again. I
don’t know what I expected. I walked through the garden and went to sit on the top step of the temple, under the gate, to wait. The stone step felt cold and damp through my pajamas, and all I
could hear was the sound of the frogs and the night insects, singing.

Some people think that the night is sad because it is dark and reminds them of death, but I don’t agree with that point of view at all. Personally I like the night, especially at the
temple, when Muji turns off all the lights and only the moon and the stars and the fireflies are left, or when it’s cloudy and the world is so black you can’t even see your hand in
front of you.

Everything seemed to grow blacker as I sat there, except for the fireflies whose tiny pulsing lights drew arcs through the dark summer air. On off . . . on off . . . on off . . . on
off. The longer I stared, the dizzier I got, until I felt as if the world was tipping and pitching me forward down the mountainside into the long throat of the night. I put my hand down to touch
the step to steady myself, but instead of the cold stone, I felt something prickly that moved like electricity under my hand. I screeched and pulled away, but of course it was only Chibi, who had
come out to greet the ghosts with me. He froze like a cartoon cat with his green eyes as round as glowing coins, but when I laughed and petted his electric fur, he pressed up against my knee and
pushed his head into my hand.

“Baka ne, Chibi-chan!”
¹²⁵
I said, my heart still pounding. Even though I could barely make out his shape, it felt good to have him
there.

A gust of wind rattled the bamboo, and it felt like spirits moving. What would a ghost look like, anyway? Would it even look human? Would it be big and fat like a daikon monster? Would it have a
tremendously long nose like a red-faced tengu?
¹²⁶
Would it be green like a goblin or disguised like a fox, or would it be more like a headless
man-sized lump of decaying human flesh, with massive slabs of fat for arms and legs and a hideous smell? These ones are called nuppeppo. Muji told me about them. They hang around old abandoned
temples and graveyards and they enjoy long, aimless walks after dark. Maybe my dad was turning into a nuppeppo. And there are other ghosts who look like dead human men with bad haircuts, whose
bloodshot eyeballs pop from their sockets, and whose skin peels off their bones like lichen. They are dressed in cheap polyester business suits, and they hang from trees in the Suicide Forest,
slowly turning. These are the ghosts that scare me the most because they look a little like my dad, and just when I was starting to freak myself out, I felt something settle beside me. I turned,
and there he was. Dad was sitting there next to me on the stone step, and even though his eyes weren’t popping and he wasn’t dressed in his business suit, still I knew that he was dead,
that he had killed himself at last, and this was his ghost, coming to let me know.

“Dad?” I tried to whisper, but my mouth was so dry that no sound came out.

He stared off into the darkness.

“Dad, is that you?” My voice still wouldn’t make any sound, so my words were only thoughts in my head. No wonder he couldn’t hear me. He stared off into the darkness. I
took a deep breath, cleared my throat, tried again.

“Otosan,” I said, speaking in Japanese this time. The word escaped through my lips like a tiny bubble. My dad’s ghost turned his head slightly, and I noticed now that he seemed
really young, and he was wearing a uniform of some kind, with a cap on his head. It looked like a school uniform, only a different color. He still didn’t say anything. It occurred to me that
maybe with ghosts you have to be superpolite, even if they are your parents, otherwise you’ll offend them, so I tried again in my most formal and polite schoolgirl voice.

“Yasutani Haruki-sama de gozaimasu ka?”
¹²⁷

He heard this time, and slowly turned to look at me, and when he spoke, his voice was so soft I could barely hear him over the wind.

“Who are you?” he asked.

He didn’t recognize me. I couldn’t believe it! My dad was dead and he had already forgotten all about me. My throat clenched and my nose started to itch, the way it does when I am
trying not to cry. I took another deep breath.

“I am Yasutani Naoko,” I announced, trying to sound bold and self-confident. “I am very pleased to see you.”

“Ah,” he said. “The pleasure is mine.” His words were thin and blue, curling like the smoke from the burning tip of an incense stick.

Something was wrong. I didn’t want to be rude and stare, but I couldn’t help it. He looked like a young version of my dad, only a couple of years older than me, but he sounded
different, and the clothes were all wrong, too. And that’s when I figured it out: if this ghost who had answered to my father’s name wasn’t my father, then he must be my
father’s uncle, the suicide bomber, Yasutani Haruki #1.

“Have we met before?” he seemed to be asking.

“I don’t believe so,” I replied. “I believe I am your great-niece. I believe I am the daughter of your nephew, Yasutani Haruki Number Two, who was named for
you.”

The ghost nodded. “Is that so?” he said. “I wasn’t aware that I had a nephew, never mind a great-niece. How quickly time flies . . .”

We both got silent then. Actually, I didn’t have a choice, because I’d run out of polite phrases. I’m not very good at the real formal Japanese because I grew up in Sunnyvale,
and the ghost of Haruki #1 didn’t seem all that chatty, either. He seemed kind of moody and withdrawn, which made sense given what Jiko had told me about him liking French philosophy and
poetry. I wished I’d paid more attention when my dad was reading to me about the Existentialists, because then maybe I could have said something intelligent to him, but the only French poetry
I knew was the refrain to a song by Monique Serf called “Jinsei no Itami,”
¹²⁸
which maybe wasn’t the best choice to sing to a dead
person.