Oh, Ears! Listen to the Sound of Sadness Trickling in the Urinal
OF ALL THE STORIES DAD told me when I was a kid sitting in his lap, the one about marrying Mom was his masterpiece. I knew he was just telling a tall tale, but he repeated it so often I assumed it was true. Maybe that was silly of me. He would always recite it to me with the faintest traces of a tune.
Long, long ago, when I wanted a wife, I put an ad in the paper.
Lo and behold, three thousand responses arrived.
One by one, the women came and lined up in front of the house.
One by one, I interviewed them.
One by one, I asked after their interests.
One by one, I moved on to the next.
Then came your mother,
Number two thousand five hundred in line.
Sometimes from my perch in his lap I’d ask, did you choose her right away? It didn’t matter how many times I’d heard the story, I still asked.
He told me, yes, I did. So I had to tell the next five hundred women I’d already made up my mind.
Then I asked, what was Mom’s reaction?
I remember all this like it was yesterday.
I THINK WHAT’S MISSING FROM Mom and Dad’s life now is faith, I said to my neighbor. We had taken a table outside a bookstore café in a shopping mall near our California home and were chatting as we sipped coffee from our paper cups. There aren’t many places where you can smoke in public in California, but outdoor coffee shops are one of them, so my neighbor was there, puffing away on her cigarette.
I’ve mentioned her before. She’s quite a bit older than me, but we’re incredibly close friends, more like family. She grew up in a Jewish household and married a Jewish man, but she has no interest in keeping kosher. She’ll eat pork, shrimp, shellfish, and even beef in cream sauce. I don’t believe in anything, she’d insist, I can’t stand the way faith shapes politics today, it’s not just that I can’t stand it, I think it’s crazy, the only things I believe in are myself and democracy and capitalism, I’m like my husband that way.
At the coffee shop, my neighbor leaned back in her chair, puzzled. Faith? Faith in what? What kind of faith?
Well, I said, slightly embarrassed. I don’t know, some kind of belief. It doesn’t matter to me what they believe in. Spiders, maybe.
Spiders? My neighbor leaned back even further.
AS I MENTIONED EARLIER, MOM hated spiders. As soon as she saw one, she’d squash it. She couldn’t help herself. Actually, it wasn’t just spiders. She’d swat flies and mosquitoes, caterpillars, cockroaches, moths, and just about any other insect unlucky enough to cross her path, but the image that’s really seared into my memory is of us sitting down as a family, having a good time, when she’d spot a spider. Every time, she’d leap up, rush around like crazy, and squash the poor thing. That’s why I’d made this suggestion to her in her bed in the hospital.
Mom, you must’ve killed too many spiders. Maybe this is the curse of the spider spirits.
Curses and spiritual merit were familiar ideas to her, so she took me seriously at first. She whispered, spiders, you say? When I get out of the hospital, I’ll have to perform some memorial rites to appease their spirits.
I had her going, but almost immediately, she came back to her senses and rejected the idea outright. Spiders . . . no way!
I knew it was a strange idea, but I was disappointed that she didn’t accept it.
World War II had left my parents feeling betrayed. Like everyone else in the country, they were thrown into nothingness. Tokyo had burned to the ground, but they put their noses to the grindstone for years and somehow managed to get by. They had nothing to believe in. Maybe nothing at all was really important to them.
We didn’t have a Buddhist altar at home. We didn’t hold Buddhist memorial services when people died, and we didn’t have a relationship with any temple. We did, however, have a small Shinto altar. Dad once told me that the spirit of someone who had died appeared to him in bed and asked him to perform some memorial rites, so that’s why he got it. Mom gave rice offerings, and Dad clapped his hands to attract the spirits’ attention. I suppose that in their own way, they felt they were paying proper respect to the various gods, buddhas, spirits, and souls floating around, but at some point, the Shinto altar disappeared too. That was probably during the period of rapid economic growth in Japan. After the Tokyo Olympics. After the streetcars disappeared and the subways were created.
No, they didn’t seem to believe in anything. Nothing at all.
When I asked Mom what happened to the Shinto altar, she gave me the usual—oh, I got rid of it. It doesn’t make sense to hold onto old things forever, you can just buy a new one if you want it.
What a completely nihilistic answer.
But strangely enough, Mom went to the Jizo temple sometimes. Why? What did she believe? What did she want out of the experience? When I think about her and the Thorn-Pulling Jizo, I run up against these same fundamental questions. Why turn to the Thorn Puller?
When I returned in the summer, I gave Mom one of the substitute amulets from the Jizo temple in Sugamo.
This was the same type of amulet I’d forgotten to give her earlier. You’ll remember I gave Oguri-san the one I’d originally bought for her. Seeing how well it worked, I bought another the next time I was in Sugamo. I’d been carrying the thing around with me ever since, determined to give it to her.
Mom thanked me and asked me to put it under her pillow. She said, this really brings back memories, I bet Sugamo has really changed.
But she didn’t seem to dwell on it. She didn’t mention grinding it up and swallowing it like the old tradition suggests.
A few days later, the amulet was gone. I asked her about it. You told me to put it under your pillow, but it’s not there. What happened?
I didn’t want it to get lost or thrown away when they changed the sheets, so I put it in that cloth purse, and your dad took it home. My wallet’s in there too.
Aren’t you supposed to carry it around with you? I asked.
No reason to go to so much trouble for little things like that. She answered as though she was talking about something she had gotten rid of forty years before.
I TOLD MY NEIGHBOR, MY parents are lonely and unhappy. That weighs heavily on me.
Mother was completely bedridden by that point. She only changed position every twenty minutes when the nurse came in.
Dad was living at the apartment with the dog. I’d call him in the mornings, Japan time, which was evening for me. He insisted he was okay. He went to Mom’s clinic around noon. If I called him in the middle of the night California time, he’d be back from the clinic and would tell me Mom was fine. He’d be eating dinner. The helpers came around four o’clock and finished making supper around four-thirty, so he ate right away. Around five, he’d tell me goodnight and hang up.
No one was with him. He talked to no one except Mom and the helpers. The few connections he had with people had ended long ago. All he had was the warmth of the dog and the samurai novels he read all day long. He read them so intensely that I began to wonder if something in the novels of Shuhei Fujisawa or Shotaro Ikenami might be serving as a substitute for religion for him, so I read them to find out, but I couldn’t find a thing. There were, however, some elements that might have led to his addiction—charismatic protagonists, delicious food, evil villains, love, and sex that exploded like distant thunder. Plus, people died. That’s always interesting.
He told me TV had become too noisy and tasteless, he couldn’t stand watching it anymore. All he watched was baseball. When the Giants lost, he got sad. Sometimes, he’d watch samurai movies. That’s how he spent his days. Always the same thing.
When there was a clap of thunder, Chunsuke jumped into his lap. He’d pet her, cooing, what’s the matter, are you frightened? Poor thing, are you frightened? So sad. She showed her belly, and he rubbed it. Even sadder.
He’d become lonely in his old age. Yes, old age is lonely.
His daughter returned once every month or two. He hadn’t forgotten that she had her own life and family—as he put it, I’d “gone and got hitched”—but he was really happy when I visited. Relieved, actually. He understood that I came every month or two without fail. When I returned to California, he would suddenly wither up and stop moving again. His primary-care doctor would comment, I see your usual problems are back. Dad answered, I can’t help it, when my daughter goes back home, all the tension that keeps me going suddenly goes away.
It took him ten minutes to stand up. He told me that he’d fallen down the previous night and couldn’t get up for two hours. I told him it didn’t do any good to tell me after the fact, he should have called me on the spot, but no matter how many times I said things like that, he’d still fall, spend two hours trying to get back up, and then complain afterward. There was nothing I could do. It was painful. Sad. Dark. What should I do? Was there something I could do? It was hard. Sad. Painful. Dark. Hard. Sad. Painful. Dark.
I went round and round in circles thinking about it. Was it just my parents or did all people get that unhappy as they grew old? One of my acquaintances had a father who was ninety-two and a mother who was ninety. They were healthy and lived on their own, and the father even drove himself places. That’s a good thing, I said, but haven’t they lost most of the people around them?
I went round and round in circles. Do they feel sad or not? Mom couldn’t move her hands or feet, couldn’t turn herself over in bed, couldn’t use the toilet on her own, couldn’t cook, couldn’t return home, couldn’t read, couldn’t see the dog or her younger sister or friends anymore.
I went round and round in circles. Was Mom unable to die, or was she trying to avoid death altogether? Not long ago when she had cardiac problems, she asked for help but was told that the doctors weren’t there at night, so she got upset and raised her voice with the nurses, saying, you call yourself a hospital?
Does life still have that much value to her?
No, it doesn’t. My neighbor’s answer was crisp and clear.
I guess all people grow unhappy when they get old.
That’s right, she said with a big nod. I’m thinking of killing myself.
I was startled.
Why? I don’t know anyone who’s as active and energetic as you. You’ve got a dinner party every five minutes, and every ten, you fly around the world to some different country.
She said, my life used to be—past tense—really active and fun, I’m happy about that, but I’ll only be happy as long as I can move freely, go wherever I want, and meet tons of new people. I can still do those things, but I don’t know what’ll happen when I can’t. All the active, creative poets, musicians, and artists I know have grown old. Last month so-and-so died, so-and-so got cancer, so-and-so started showing symptoms of Parkinson’s even though he won’t admit it, he also started showing signs of dementia, we talk about having poetry readings, but the plans don’t come together. If this continues, and my husband dies, and all the young poets leave me behind—I interrupted her to protest, that’s impossible, you’re surrounded by so many people—then I’m going to kill myself. Actually, I’ve been thinking about how I’d do it—no jumping off something tall, no gas ovens, the best way is to stick a hose into a car and fill it with carbon monoxide. Oh, getting old is so boring! Oh, hee-ROH-mee, it just gets more and more tedious. I’m in my early seventies now, the late seventies are going to be even more tedious, and the early eighties are going to be that much more tedious still.
But doesn’t this culture frown on killing yourself?
It does, she nodded.
In Japan, people sometimes do it for spiritual merit, I explained. They go out on ships and sink, set themselves on fire, stuff like that.
That’s impossible in this culture, my neighbor remarked.
They say when you do it, you’ve got to have faith.
Oh, pooh! My neighbor made a sound like a woodwind instrument. In her heart, resistance. Ridicule. Sarcasm. Hatred.
Then she added, you don’t need faith. It’s not like you’re George W. Bush or something.
We were facing west, and in Encinitas, that meant that we were facing the ocean. The tables at the coffee shop were placed so that you could see the water in the distance, beyond the roofs. My friend and I kept turning our eyes to the waves glittering silver and gold under the afternoon sun.
I WAS READING A BOOK. There was a lot I didn’t understand, so I set out on a quest. A quest for faith, that is—a quest for whatever faith means. A quest for advice on the best way to die. I was hoping I’d find something. I knew it was a long shot. I was hoping that if I could figure it out in time, I could tell my parents and share with them the best way to ease their suffering and die well. I wanted to share that with them, with everyone who lives in a void with nothing to believe in, relying only on their own slowly disappearing selves, leaving them floating in midair, waiting for the end to come.
First, I started to read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but it’s about what happens to those who are already dead, not about the dying, so I quit reading partway through. Next, I tried Essentials of Rebirth into the Pure Land, written a thousand years ago by the Japanese monk Genshin. It started with this passage:
The first of these various hells is called the Place of Filth. This hell is filled with hot dung and filth which is very bitter in taste and full of insects with hard stingers. The sinners are put into this hell and forced to eat hot dung while the worms crawl all over them, chewing and piercing their skin, gnawing their flesh and even sucking the marrow from their bones. Those who have killed deer or birds fall into this hell.
I was drawn to this passage and reread it multiple times. The prospect of falling into such a state was horrific. Being stewed in a hell of hot shit and mud seemed worse than any suffering I could imagine. But I read that as long as I didn’t kill any deer or birds, I’d avoid this horrible fate. Fortunately, I’d never done those things. I wondered if by chance I did happen to find myself on the verge of killing something, would remembering the hell of shit and mud stop me from following through? And if it did, would that mean that the seeds of faith were there, sprouting up inside me? The text continues:
As we examine our own bodies, we find muscles and veins intertwined, moist and soft skin as a covering and the nine orifices from which vile things like dung and urine are constantly flowing out. The human body is like a storehouse enclosed in a bamboo fence. As within the storehouse we find various kinds of grains, so in the body we find all sorts of vile things. Try moving one’s joints, and one will find they are truly frail without any steadiness whatsoever. The foolish wish to have sex and other things, but if one knows what I am about to say, then one will immediately be aware what will happen when one clings to such notions. Do you see? We find such vile things in the body as tears, saliva, and sweat, which are constantly flowing out of it, plus the pus and blood that fill it. The skull is full of brains, and phlegm bubbles up in the chest. Stuffed in among these things are the viscera of life—heat, fat, membranes, and the entrails, along with stinking, inflamed impurities, which are found in the same place. How we should fear the sinful body! It’s like a person who lives full of resentment, but those who are ignorant and greedy are so foolish that they take great care of their bodies, all in vain. The human body, which is composed of so many stinking, filthy things, is like a half-ruined old castle. Day and night, the stream of worldly passions beats against it. The bones form the castle walls and the blood and flesh form the mud that plasters those walls. This castle of flesh and bone, which is so deserving of our hatred, which we paint with hues of anger, greed, and foolishness, is dragged along by the flesh and blood. It leads us in wrong directions. It simmers us in a stew of pain, both inside and out. Oh, Nanda! [Here, Genshin is calling out to one of the disciples of the historical Buddha.] This is true, you must understand this. Train your mind ceaselessly, day and night, to reflect upon what I have told you. If you do not hold onto desire and wish with all your might to be freed from the confusion of this world, you will be able to pass easily through the ocean of life and death.
That’s how the first part of the text ends. I was just about to start reading the next section when I got an emergency email from one of Dad’s home helpers who had helped me many times in the past. The subject line simply read, “Hospitalization.”
I imagine that this sudden email will alarm you, but I want to let you know your father is going to be hospitalized. The decision to check him in was largely so he could undergo some tests, but he seems to be having trouble pronouncing words correctly and is having severe palpitations, so the doctor made the decision to send him to the big hospital in town. I realize this is sudden, but he’ll be in the hospital starting tomorrow. He may be there for as long as two weeks. Please don’t worry about little Chunsuke. I’m taking her to the kennel for boarding like we talked about the time before last. Do you have any plans to come back?
Plans to come back? I sighed, clicked reply, and wrote, No, I don’t.
But then I realized that I might shock her by sounding unappreciative and rude, so I changed my wording: I didn’t have any plans, but I’ll get on the earliest flight I can. Until then, please know that I greatly appreciate your help. Please extend my appreciation to the other home helper as well.
Those were the early days of e-tickets. Now you could just go to the airport counter without bringing a paper ticket. Show your ID, and they give you a boarding pass. That meant I could buy a ticket that day and board a plane the next. There was no way to get to Kumamoto without going all the way across Tokyo, from Narita International Airport all the way across Tokyo to Haneda, where I’d catch the domestic southbound flight. Fortunately, my plane was scheduled to land at Narita at four in the afternoon, so if I hurried, I could reach Haneda in time for the last flight south. However, my position as a homemaker complicated matters significantly. I needed the cheapest possible ticket, and to get a reduced rate for the domestic leg of the trip, the airlines required a paper ticket. I bought the ticket that day, went to pick it up the following day, and the day after that I crossed the International Date Line. That meant I arrived in Narita two days later and reached Kumamoto late in the evening of the fourth day after getting the email from Dad’s helper. The rental car office and the kennel were closed by the time I arrived in Kumamoto, so I’d have to go to those places on the morning of the fifth day. I was worn ragged by the time I reached my place in Kumamoto and opened the refrigerator.
Margarine, mayonnaise, and soy sauce.
A few cans of beer. A bottle of wine. Three or four little plastic cups of konnyaku jelly.
It was still summer. I had a couple of bottles of iced black tea and barley tea left. Last time I was there, I’d also bought some vegetable juice, which was still there, and in the freezer, I found a pack of frozen pasta and a few frozen slices of bread.
I woke up early the next morning, picked up my rental car, then got Chunsuke from the kennel. I took her for a walk before going to see Dad. He was in the same hospital on top of the cliff where Mom had been earlier in the summer. He seemed the same as usual, just sloppier and more covered in wrinkles. His voice was so hoarse it sounded like it was coming from far away, like a bad phone connection going in and out. Maybe that was one of his symptoms.
I promised I’d bring Chunsuke the next day.
Dad could see her, but we’d have to arrange it so he could meet us at the hospital entrance since dogs weren’t allowed in.
I asked if there was anything he needed, and he told me, things are fine, the home helper (not the one who wrote me the email, but the other one to whom I’d extended my appreciation) had taken care of everything. Dad said, there’s a place here where you can smoke, the smoking area is outside behind the vending machines, you can sit out there in a chair and smoke. Dad told me, much to my consternation, you don’t need to worry about me, but go see Mom as soon as you can, she’s no doubt worried, will you do me a favor and tell her I’ll be getting out soon? I bet Chunsuke’s sad too.
Dad said, something’s been bothering me. I can’t get to the bathroom on time, it’s like there’s no time between when I have to go and the time the pee actually comes out, I’ve already wet myself twice. I had the nurse bring me a bedpan, but these days I’m so shrunken down there that it’s hard to find, and by the time I have to go, I’m still trying to find the damn thing.
Oh no, just telling you this has made me want to pee, here it comes, here it comes!
I had no choice. I stuck my hand out. Dad couldn’t see his penis from above, but I could, so I grabbed it. It was smaller and droopier than any cock I’d ever handled. I feel bad even calling it a cock—it was a sex organ, yes, but it felt like a kid’s word might be more appropriate, wee-wee perhaps.
Long, long ago, when I wanted a wife, I put an ad in the paper.
Lo and behold, three thousand responses arrived.
One by one, the women came and lined up in front of the house.
One by one, I interviewed them.
One by one, I asked after their interests.
One by one, I moved on to the next.
Then came your mother,
Number two thousand five hundred in line.
Mom was now bedridden, unable to move her hands and legs, but back in the old days when Dad told me this story, she was still an overweight middle-aged woman with an unhappy expression eternally fixed on her face. She would glare at Dad as he told the story and grunt, dismissing his tale. What nonsense, she’d say. Dad told her, I love you. What rubbish, she responded. I saw exchanges like this all the time. I love you. When I was a kid, I took it for granted that husbands said things like this to their wives. But then, her response.
I asked, what was Mom like back when you first met? Dad answered, as pretty as Silvana Mangano. I’d never seen the actress he referred to, but he said her name often enough for it to stick in my memory. I imagined her to be some incredible, ravishing beauty with an unhappy expression like Mom’s on her face. Dad had chosen her, selecting her from among three thousand beautiful women to become his unhappy beauty, but since then he had aged. Now, his wee-wee was old, drooping, hissing, gurgling, splashing into the urinal.
When I left the hospital where Dad was, I went to the clinic where Mom was. There were some things I wanted to read to her. I didn’t bother preparing too much, I just quickly gathered all the books on top of my desk and shoved them into my bag as I left home in the States. I’d read one of them on the plane—a book of Buddhist sutras that folded out, accordion-style. I’d bought it a while back without much thought, and it sat untouched on my desk for some time. One of my friends would tease me, saying, what’s so sad that you’ve got to read stuff like that on the plane? Most people read mysteries, adventure stories, stuff like that. I told her to lay off, that’s what interests me.
It was a continuation of my search for faith. I thought that maybe the Heart Sutra might teach me something, so I got it out in the plane. At the very end of the book of sutras is a text called “Hymn to Jizo.” Surprised to find Jizo mentioned there, I was overcome with a warm rush of old memories and started to read, but before I knew it I’d broken into tears and was sobbing. Summer was over, and fewer passengers were on the transpacific flight. I had the two seats next to the window to myself. Thank goodness. I pulled a blanket over me and wept quietly. I’m not sure exactly what brought the tears on. Jizo is the protector of children, so people often pray to him when children die or when they have miscarriages or abortions. I’ve never experienced the death of a child. I was no stranger to abortions, but that didn’t really bother me. What shook me the most was probably this passage: “They spent their day in play, but when the sun began to set. . . .”
I’ve experienced sadness and the heartbreaking feeling of being alone as twilight falls. My children had experienced it too because of me. I can’t remember how many times I’d lifted into my arms one of my daughters who was exhausted from so much crying, and apologized over and over for how badly Mommy had behaved by leaving her alone. Maybe that’s why the line got to me.
All this was still on my mind as I sat by Mom’s pillow in the clinic. We started talking as if I hadn’t been away for weeks. Perhaps she hadn’t even realized that I’d been gone.
I told her that when I was on the plane, I read something and for some reason started crying. I had felt like it was describing the sadness of all the children who were ever born. I started reading the passage to her, translating it into modern Japanese as I went.
This is not a tale of this world.
This is a tale of the Riverbank of Sai, located far, far down the mountain path that leads to death.
The more you hear of this tale, the more pity you will feel.
Children in their second, third, fourth, and fifth years, children who had not yet reached the age of ten, gathered on the Riverbank of Sai and wept, I miss my father, I miss my mother, I’m so lonely, so, so lonely. Their weeping voices were different from those of this world, they reverberated with such sadness that they pierced the flesh and bones of all who heard. Those children gathered the rocks from the riverbank and built towers for transferring karma—the first layer was for their fathers, the second layer for their mothers, the third layer for their hometowns, for their brothers and sisters, for themselves—they whispered these things as they built the towers.
In this way, they spent their day in play, but when the sun began to set, a demon from hell appeared and spoke in a terrifying voice: “Say, what are you doing? The parents you’ve left in the mortal world haven’t been holding memorial services or doing good deeds, all they do is spend all day and night lamenting your deaths—‘How cruel! How sad! How unfortunate!’ Your parents’ lamenting is what will cause you so much torment in hell. Don’t blame me! It’s my job to swing my black iron rod to smash the towers you make each time you think about how sad you’ve made them.”
It was then that the bodhisattva Jizo appeared in a shimmering haze and said with pity in his voice, “Oh, weeping children, the only reason you have traveled here to the netherworld alone is because your lives were so short. The mortal world and the netherworld are so far apart, from now on, you should think of me as your parent in the netherworld, I want you to rely upon me.” And with this, he gathered the children in the hem of his monk’s robe and began to care for them. How wonderful! He had toddlers who could only grab hold of his priestly walking stick. He held the children tightly against his own flesh and soothed them, caring for them—how wonderful!
As I interpreted the text, I could see the tears well up in Mom’s eyes.
Oh, oh, she said, as if wringing out the words.
Anyone who has been a mother
Remembers deep in their bones
A thing or two about children—
The children they gave birth to
The children they didn’t give birth to
The children they raised
The children they didn’t raise
The children they lost
Shiromi too, me too, my mother too . . .
Mom’s words trailed off. And that’s when I realized, this is it. These are the emotions that were missing from Essentials of Rebirth into the Pure Land and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Emotions on display right before me. They were full of kindness, sadness, nostalgia, and gratitude too—so full of these things that they could rock your world and make you burst into tears before you knew it, they could deplete you of all your energy yet somehow leave you feeling better because of it.
As Mom tried to wipe her eyes, her paralyzed hand bobbed up and down near her nose. I was reminded of the large cauldron full of burning incense just inside the entrance to the Sugamo Jizo temple. Her hand looked like it was waving in the smoke, trying to waft it toward her to take in its blessings.