Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (37 page)

Nagaoka also told me that there were many similarities between the different forms of Buddhism. “But,” he said, “the one thing that Zen cannot tell people is where the dead go.”

Pure Land Buddhism had an easy answer: the dead went to Amida’s Western Paradise, otherwise known as the Pure Land. In paintings, the Western Paradise is bright gold and everyone is smiling and happy, and the interiors of Pure Land temples strive to re-create a miniature version of this golden splendor with lots of bright paint and a gilded altar. These temples are warm, comforting, and beautiful. There is a reason why even today, when you go to old villages in Japan, the temples located within the town proper are often Pure Land; they were intentionally constructed to be accessible to the common person. Zen temples, on the other hand, are often up on hillsides, which is the case with my family’s own Empukuji, and have a sense of being just slightly out of reach of the mundane world.

My
sh
jin ry
ri
teacher Asano, who had married a Pure Land priest, scoffed at Zen priests and their followers, who are always
urged to meditate. “Who has time to meditate every day like they do? Most people have to work.” While Zen priests in training at Eiheiji and S
jiji eat
sh
jin ry
ri
three times a day, Asano serves it only on special occasions; she considered it unrealistic to eat
sh
jin ry
ri
so often. For her, there was no point if Buddhism could not be accessible.

I had by now met several Pure Land priests, including young Tokita, who had volunteered at Kaneta’s café and who had spent so much of his time trying to help the distraught woman Maruyama. I always liked Pure Land priests because they were kind. I also liked that their temples were unapologetically beautiful; there is always something stark about Zen temples by comparison. And if there was one thing I wanted after my father had passed away, it was comfort and release from grieving. But I had learned that grief could be so persistent, it would not easily bend to cheerful reassurance, no matter how much I might want it to. In the harshness that is Japanese S
t
Zen, I wondered if there might be the seed of true wisdom.

NINE

T
HE
L
ITTLE
P
RINCESS

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
June in 2013, I arranged to participate in Kaneta’s next available Café de Monk. He was particularly pleased that I planned to bring my son, Ewan, who, at three and a half, would help to cheer up the elderly women in the temporary housing community. I would be visiting the Minamisanriku community, which, Kaneta wanted me to know, had suffered two recent tragedies. First, a woman had lost her son in Algeria; he had been working as an engineer at the Tigantourine refinery before terrorists had infiltrated the plant, killing him in addition to thirty-eight other hostages. Then, a three-year-old girl had died, just six months ago.

I
HAD BEEN
to Minamisanriku twice since the disaster. Like all badly damaged towns, Minamisanriku had been built on a flat plain that opened up to the ocean. This made it an attractive place to live if you were a fisherman. After the tsunami, when everything had been destroyed, it was easy to see how vulnerable the plain was to the sea. The area literally looked like a bomb had dropped on the town and flattened it.

The towns built on the tsunami plain in the southeast of Japan
can give you a feel for what Minamisanriku would have looked like before March 11, 2011. The city of Odawara, for example, is about forty miles southwest of T
ky
and located on the Pacific Coast. If you were to drive through Odawara in a taxi, the city would look cramped, but solid and stable, the way numerous Lego pieces clustered together can make a secure structure. There are banks, sushi restaurants, and fish shops all huddled together and on top of each other. The ocean is nowhere in sight. But you would see regularly spaced signs warning “Sea Level 1 meter,” or “Sea Level half a meter,” and “Tsunami Evacuation Route this way.” In 1923, the entire city of Odawara was destroyed by a tsunami.