Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (75 page)

In a third chamber, the steel jaws of twelve small ovens were clamped shut. Because the crematorium regularly processed more than one body at a time, heat-resistant digital screens above each oven bore the name of the temporary occupant so there would be no
confusion. The casket was slid inside under the somber gaze of the mourners, and the head of the family was charged with locking the door and pocketing the key, the only one, he was told, that could open this particular oven. Before the mourners left the stark room, they heard the breath of gas and the snarl of fire as the body, casket, and flowers became consumed. Later, my mother told me that she wished she hadn’t heard this sound, that she could have left her mother behind, before the flames during the cremation had ignited.

There was only one thing that modern engineering could not dispense with, and that was the smell. After visiting the crematorium, I wouldn’t eat meat for several weeks.

When the staff had determined that the cremation had finished, the attendant went to get the head of the family. After my grandmother’s cremation, my grandfather, as the lead representative of our family, was led away from the waiting room to open up the oven with his special key. When my mother and uncle joined him a few minutes later, they found him standing in yet another room, warming his hands over my grandmother’s bones, which lay stretched out on a steel table. This, the attendant told me, was not so unusual; there were some who even ate some of the bones of the deceased, or requested a cup of water to make a kind of tea.

My grandfather and my uncle together started the intimate process of picking out bones, each using a pair of unusually long chopsticks. They began with the feet first so my grandmother would not be upside down in her rectangular urn, which was about as large as an ice-cream tub. This is the only time that two people in Japan will hold anything together via chopsticks, hence the reason why Japanese people jump if they both inadvertently reach down to pick up the same morsel of food from a plate.

An attendant in the background identified each bone. “Here is the second joint of the big toe.” “Here is a fragment of the femur.”
At the top of the skeleton were pieces of my grandmother’s skull, jaw, and the all-important hyoid bone from the Adam’s apple, which would rest in a separate urn.

In the end, so many of my grandmother’s bones survived the cremation that we were given a third urn.

“She must have been someone young,” the bone-identifier remarked. “There’s so much left over.”

“She was ninety-seven,” my mother replied.

The bone expert beamed. “Then you’ve inherited strong bones.”

My grandfather, too, was delighted that we had three urns. For him this was an unexpected abundance of riches. “
Three
,” he repeatedly bragged to everyone. “We had to have
three
urns.” It was the first thing he said that gave me some insight into his feelings for my grandmother.

T
HE DAY OF
my grandmother’s funeral, Takahagi wanted to show me the robes he had selected to wear. Most young priests wear relatively bright colors. Daisuke had already donned the standard bright-yellow and cobalt-blue robes that befit a priest under the age of thirty. But the ever-fashionable Takahagi was no ordinary young man. This morning he had chosen a sable-colored robe with a dark-gray overgarment. The sable silk had an iridescent quality to it, sometimes appearing silver, sometimes copper.

“Nice, isn’t it?” he held the robes up in the sunlight.

“Did you special order that?” I asked.

“There’s a guy in T
ky
who makes them for me.”

After Takahagi got dressed, he showed me all of the things he could do with the overgarment. If you have seen any samurai movies, you know there is always a scene before battle where a kimono-wearing warrior must tie up his sleeves with a rope in order to effectively wield a sword. Takahagi had mastered all of the moves
with his priestly robes, which, like a kimono, have billowing and potentially troublesome sleeves. He performed his fashion origami for me, putting the overgarment over his head and tying it behind his back so his arms were free to move unencumbered. Then he unwound the garment and slipped his arm out of a hidden hole, and his arms were free again.

“I’m nervous,” he finally confided. “I’ve never done a funeral for family members before.”

“Did Takahagi tell you about the Sony funeral?” Daisuke called out, as he played a round of golf on the PlayStation’s video-game rendition of Pebble Beach.

“No,” I said.

Takahagi grinned. “It was when I was studying to be a priest in T
ky
. My teacher got a call that someone had died, and he asked me to go with him to chant sutras. It turned out that we went to the [Sony chairman] Morita house.”

“What was it like?” I asked.

Daisuke shook his head in disgust. “He didn’t even look around.”

“I remember that the windows were very big,” Takahagi offered. “But then when we went into the main room, I saw the family members, and so many of them were crying. I had to act like a priest.”

In the main temple, my grandfather was carefully placing the three urns of bones in front of the Buddha on the large altar. The floor of the temple was covered with tatami, and once upon a time, we would all have been expected to sit on the floor with our feet neatly tucked beneath our thighs. Because this was a tricky position for many elderly people to assume for long stretches of time, Takahagi and his father had prepared several rows of folding stools.

During the funeral, Takahagi, in his elegant robes, chanted and played a small gong, while his father ecstatically shouted to my grandmother’s soul that she was dead and must leave us. I loved the chanting. The priests—Takahagi, his brother Daisuke, and their
father Semp
—all listened carefully to each other, making sure to space out each breath so there was never a break in the sound. My mother sang an operatic aria. I recited an original poem. Then it was my grandfather’s turn. He pulled a slip of yellow paper out of his pocket and began to address my grandmother’s bones.

He thanked her for taking away his heart murmur when she died. He was feeling much better now. He was sorry that he had to leave her body alone in the house when he went out to dinner, but it really wasn’t necessary for her ghost to have locked the doors and windows, making it difficult for him to reenter. He knew that she would like to stay and continue to watch over her children, but it was time for her to leave, and anyway, everyone had attended a prestigious university. Then he began to cry. The air grew thick, as though the molecules themselves were stunned by emotion.

The weeping was contagious, and soon I was afloat in grief. My grandfather—that hard, hard man—loved my grandmother deeply. It occurred to me now that some of the frustration he demonstrated all his life must have come from the suspicion, if not the actual knowledge, of the photograph of the other man in her purse.

Late in the afternoon, after the funeral and the meal with the troublesome seating arrangement had ended, and the guests had gone home, the family sat wilted around a table in the kitchen. I noticed that my grandfather was missing. Takahagi, who had changed back into his casual-priest clothing, and I set out to look for him.

“I think I know where he is,” Takahagi murmured.

We found my grandfather alone, perched on a rock by the family burial plot, which was etched high up on top of a hill. It was a gorgeous evening. We were ringed by bamboo and pine trees, and above this the sky was turning pink.

“You know you are really poor,” my grandfather said, “when you have absolutely no one at home waiting for you.”

“I think,” I said, “that I hear a
hototogi
s
u
singing.” The
hototogisu
is known as the lesser cuckoo in the West. It was a particular favorite of my grandfather’s.

My grandfather tilted his head. “Did you know that the
hototogisu
migrates here from Taiwan?”

Lately my grandfather had been telling my mother that his happiest years were in Taiwan. He went to a university there and stayed on for a time teaching English, before marriage and the war brought him back to Japan. He even said to me that my love of Japan was something like his love of Taiwan, which I took to mean that he had finally reconciled my half-breed existence in his very traditional family.

“When I die,” he said, “I am going to ride a
hototogisu
back and forth from Japan to Taiwan. When I’m dead, I don’t want to ever have to ride an airplane again.”

“You won’t have to,” Takahagi smiled gently.

“Remember that,” my grandfather instructed, “when you come here and you hear a
hototogisu
singing. That’ll mean I’ve come back to see you.”

That night, as my mother and I lay in our futons, drained from the day, I whispered to her that it would be cruel
not
to let my grandfather have his wife’s bones.

“That,” she said, “is what I’ve been trying to tell your uncles all along.”

I
T WAS MY
grandmother’s unexpectedly strong bones and her third urn that solved our burial woes.

The largest urn would stay at the temple, where it would sit under Semp
’s watchful eye until my grandfather was ready to actually bury it in the temple cemetery.