A Tale for the Time Being

Her fingers were like thin, dry sticks, but hot. I thought I felt her squeeze my hand with her hot fingers. I couldn’t make any words come out of my mouth, because I was trying not to cry. What was there to say? She knew I loved her. Sometimes you don’t need words to say what’s in your heart.

But she had something she wanted to tell us. I think she’d been waiting. She raised her arms and struggled to sit up. I tried to help her, but her body was just bones in a skin bag, and I was afraid to hurt her.

But old Jiko insisted. She wanted to sit in seiza,¹⁵³ so they had to lift her by the armpits onto her knees, and I honestly thought her arms would fall off or the effort would kill her. You could see how hard it was, but finally they got her balanced and upright. Muji straightened her collar. Old Jiko sat there for a while with her eyes closed, recovering, and then she raised her hand. Muji knew. She had a brush and ink standing ready on a small table, and she moved them over to Jiko’s futon and placed them carefully in front of her.

In case you don’t know, it’s an old tradition among Zen masters to write a final poem on their deathbeds, so this whole business wasn’t as strange as it sounds, but it kind of freaked me out because one minute I swear she was about to take her last breath, and the next minute she’s sitting up in bed with a brush in her hand.

She kept her eyes closed while Muji got everything ready, placing a clean white sheet of rice paper on the desk in front of her and then carefully grinding the ink against the inkstone. When she was done, she replaced the ink stick in its holder and bowed.

And then Jiko opened her eyes. She dipped her brush in the thick black ink, pressing and tapping it lightly against the inkstone like she had all the time in the world, which she did, because time slowed down to give her the moments she needed. In honor of her great effort and her supernatural ability to slow time, we all sat up straighter—me and my dad, kneeling in front of her, and Muji off to one side—and the room grew very still, except for the pressing and tapping. Then, when the point of her brush was just right, Jiko took a deep breath and held it over the white paper. Her hand was motionless. A drop of black ink began to swell at the brush’s tip, but before it fell, the brush swooped like a black bird cutting across a pale grey sky, and a moment later, five dark, bold slashes lay wetly across the page.

Five strokes. Sei. Ikiru. To live.

Still holding the brush, she looked at me and my dad.

“For now,” she said to both of us. “For the time being.”

A lot of Zen masters like to die sitting up in zazen, but old Jiko lay down. It’s no big deal. It doesn’t mean that she wasn’t a true Zen master. You can be a true Zen master and still lie down. The Buddha himself died lying down, and all that sitting-up business is just a big macho add-on. The way old Jiko died was perfectly fine. She put the brush carefully back onto the holder and then she keeled very slowly over onto her right side, just like old Shaka-sama. Her knees were still all folded up from seiza and she didn’t even bother to stretch them out. When her head touched the ground, she just put her hand under her cheek to cradle it and closed her eyes like she was getting ready to take a nap. She looked really comfortable. She took a long, rattling breath, and then another, and then the whole world exhaled with her. And then she stopped. Just like that. We waited, but nothing else happened. She was all gone.

Muji knelt down next to her and wet her lips with matsugo-no-mizu,¹⁵⁵ and then she made raihai bows in front of her, and me and my dad made some, too. Then they rolled her tiny body over onto her back and straightened out her knees, and Muji lit incense and put a white cloth over her face. She had already prepared the altar with fresh candles and incense and flowers, and now she went off to tell all the people who were waiting outside.

I just sat there, trying to understand what had happened. I couldn’t believe old Jiko was really dead, and I kept wanting to peek underneath the white cloth. I was worried that she might be suffocating under there, but the cloth wasn’t moving or anything, so I knew she wasn’t breathing. The thin trickle of incense rose from the burning tip into the rafters, but nothing else moved.

Time was still acting slow and strange, and I couldn’t tell if minutes or hours or days were passing. I could hear different things going on in other parts of the temple. The tatami mats were disappearing from the room. Eventually some men brought in a big wooden tub. Muji filled it with sakasamizu, starting with the cold water,¹⁵⁶ because when a person dies, you have to do everything upside down and backward. When the tub was filled, she carefully undressed old Jiko’s body and then asked me if I wanted to help wash her. I could see my dad was worried about me, and he said I didn’t need to, but I told him of course I would. I mean, after all the baths Jiko and I had taken together and all the times I’d scrubbed her back, I knew how to do it, right? It was like I’d been practicing for this. I knew exactly how hard to rub, and it didn’t feel strange just because now she was dead. It felt pretty normal.

Afterward, Muji and I dressed her in a special pure white kimono that Muji had sewn for her without making any knots in the sewing thread so old Jiko would not be tied to this world. We crossed her kimono right over left, which is backward from the way a living person wears it, and we laid her out so that her head faced north instead of south. Muji put a little knife on her chest to help cut her remaining ties to the world. Old Jiko lay like this for the whole next day, while the danka and other priests came to bow to her and pay their last respects. Then they put her in the coffin.

I thought I knew something about Japanese funerals because of the one my classmates had for me, but Jiko’s funeral wasn’t anything like mine. It was very grand, and held in the main shrine room, and there were tons of people there from all over, and priests and nuns from the main temple headquarters. My mom finally showed up, all proper and dressed in black. She brought a black suit for my dad to wear, and a clean school uniform for me. The priests and nuns chanted lots of sutras, and everybody took turns going up and offering incense at the altar. I got to go up second, right after my dad, which made me feel nervous and important. After all the guests got a chance to offer incense and bow, we had to say goodbye to old Jiko before they nailed the coffin shut. We put flowers in with her and stuff that she might find useful in the afterlife, like her sutra books and slippers and reading glasses and the six coins she will need to get across the River of Three Crossings on Mount Fear. When no one was looking, I slipped some Melty Kisses into her hand, too. Zen masters don’t usually take chocolates with them to the Pure Land, since they’re supposed to be so unattached to things of this world, but I knew how much old Jiko loved her chocolates, and I figured it wouldn’t matter. When I touched her fingers, they were stiff and icy cold. She’d already changed so much since she died. The day before, when we were washing her, it felt like she was still there in her body, but now this body was empty. A sack. A skin bag. A cold thing. No Jiko at all.

They closed the coffin and nailed it shut with a stone, and the whole time, the priests and nuns were chanting. Memories, like little waves, licked the edges of my mind. I remembered back to my own funeral, and Ugawa Sensei’s sad voice and the words he was chanting. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. It made sense to me now, because one moment old Jiko was form and the next moment she wasn’t. Then I remembered the karaoke party we had, when Jiko sang the “Impossible Dream” song. Somehow, I connected that song to her vow to save all beings, and as I watched her lying there, I felt sad for her because she had failed, and the world was still filled with creeps and hentai. But then something else occurred to me, that maybe her failure didn’t matter, because at least she’d been true to her impossible dream until the very end. I wondered if her heart was feeling peaceful and calm as she was laid to her rest, or if she was still worrying about stuff. I wondered if she was worrying about me. It’s selfish, but I kind of hoped she was. I mean, it’s one thing to fail to save all beings, but at least she could have waited for me. Her own great-granddaughter. But she hadn’t. She’d just gone ahead and gotten on the elevator anyway.

We took her body off the mountain in a fancy hearse and down to the crematorium near the bigger temple in town. The nuns and priests did some more chanting as they put old Jiko’s coffin on the metal tray and then they slid her into the oven like a pizza. The oven doors shut, and suddenly I worried about the Melty Kisses melting all over her pure white kimono, but it was too late to do anything about it. We went outside to wait, and I could see the smoke rising into a cloudless blue sky. My dad came out and stood with me and held my hand, and I didn’t mind. We didn’t talk or anything. When it was done, we went back and they slid out the tray. There was no sign of the chocolate. All that was left of her was a tiny broken skeleton of warm white bones. She was so tiny I couldn’t believe it.

The crematorium man took a little hammer and broke up the bigger bones, and then we all stood around the tray with wooden chopsticks, which we used to pick up the pieces. You do this with a partner, and each pair picks up a bone together and puts it in the funeral urn. You start with the feet bones and move up to the head, because you don’t want her to be upside down for the rest of eternity. Me and my dad were one team, and we were both really careful, and as we did it, Muji explained what each bone was. Oh, that is her ankle. That is her thigh. That is her elbow. Oh, look, there’s her nodobotoke!

Everyone was superhappy because finding the nodobotoke is a good sign. Muji said it’s the most important bone, the one we call an Adam’s apple in English, but in Japanese it’s called the Throat Buddha, because it’s triangular and looks a little bit like the shape of a person sitting zazen. If you can find the Throat Buddha, then the dead person will enter nirvana and return to the ocean of eternal tranquillity. The Throat Buddha is the last bone that goes in, and you put it on the very top, and then they close the urn.

We didn’t need the big hearse for the ride back because now Jiko was so small she could sit on my lap, which is where I held her all the way back up the mountain. When we got home, we went into Jiko’s room and put her urn and her picture on the family altar, next to Haruki #1’s.

Muji went and got Jiko’s

from the main shrine room. Somebody had already brought it to be mounted on a scroll during the wake, and now Muji hung it by the family altar, next to old Jiko’s funeral portrait. The reporters had made a big deal about her final word, going around asking all the muckety-muck priests from the temple headquarters for their profound interpretations and explanations. Nobody could agree. Some of them said it was the start of a poem that she hadn’t been able to finish. Others said no, that it was a complete statement which showed she was still clinging to life, so that even after a hundred and four years, her understanding was still imperfect. And others disagreed, claiming that writing life at the moment of death meant that she understood that life and death were one, and so she was fully enlightened and freed from duality. But the fact is, nobody understood what she really meant except me and my dad, and we weren’t saying.

My mom went to help Muji and the other danka ladies clean up in the kitchen, and then suddenly it was just me and Dad, sitting there in front of the family altar, alone for the first time since he’d found me at the bus stop. It was really quiet. Until that moment, everything had been so crazy, with all the nuns and priests and danka and services and chanting, and reporters asking questions, but now it was just me and my dad and all the words that were unspoken, drifting around like ghosts between us. And the one big word that Jiko had written was the scariest ghost of all.

It was a little awkward. From the kitchen I could hear the murmur of faraway voices and the sound of food being prepared and insects buzzing around the garden. It was spring and getting warm again.

I think he was just trying to make polite conversation, but he was pointing to the shelf on the altar, where the box containing Haruki #1’s remains-that-were-not-truly-remains sat, and I was so relieved he’d asked something I actually knew the answer to that I ended up telling him the whole story. Of course he knew most of it already, but I didn’t care. I was proud because it was a good story, and Jiko had told it to me, and now I could tell it to him and chase the unspoken word ghosts away. So I told him all about how Haruki #1 got drafted, and the pageant in the rain, and about all the training and punishment and bullying he had to endure, but despite all these hardships, how he bravely completed his suicide mission, flying his plane into the enemy target. And because he was a military hero, completing his mission and fulfilling his duty, the military authorities sent Jiko the not-quite-empty box of remains.

“There was nothing left of him,” I explained, “so they just stuck a piece of paper inside that says ikotsu. Do you want to see?”

I went to the altar and brought down the box. I took off the lid and looked inside, expecting to see the single slip of paper. But something else was there instead. A small packet. I reached in and pulled it out.

It was wrapped in an old piece of greasy waxed paper, stained with mildew and eaten by insects. When I turned it over, bits fell off. I brushed away the dust.

So I did. I peeled off the oily outside paper, taking care not to tear it. Inside was a thin booklet folded into quarters. I opened it to the first page. It was covered with words, written in a faded blue ink, that traveled from left to right across the page. Not up and down like Japanese. Like English, only I couldn’t understand.

Dad leaned forward, turning the brittle pages with care. “I think it might be Uncle Haruki’s,” he said. “Jiko Obaachama said something about a diary once. She said Haruki always kept a diary. She figured it must have gotten lost.”

That didn’t seem right to me. “No way,” I said. “She would have told us.”

“He wrote the dates, see?” Dad said. “1944. 1945. He must have been serving in the navy at the time. I wonder why he wrote in French.”

I knew the answer to that one, too. “It was safe,” I explained. “If the bullies found it, they wouldn’t have been able to read it.”

I felt pleased. “Uncle Haruki was really smart,” I said. “He could speak French and German and English, too.” I don’t know why I was bragging, like it was me who could do all these things.

He looked up at me. “Shall we take this home with us? Aren’t you curious to know what it says?”

Of course I was! I felt happy because I really wanted to know what Uncle Haruki had written in his secret French diary, but also because it had been so long since my dad and I had a project we could do together. I looked at him, kneeling by the altar, peering at the pages, trying to make out the French. He looked like my nerdy old studious dad, happily lost in another world. But then the image of him leaving the house with his shopping bag full of briquettes popped into my mind, and my heart flipped and sank. We were already in the middle of an unfinished project. Our last project. Our suicide project.

He must have sensed me watching him, because he looked up, and I turned away quickly so he wouldn’t see me trying not to cry. I had this sad vision just then of me and my dad, side by side in our dusty urns on the family altar, with nobody left to take care of our remains. It wouldn’t be long.

He waited until he knew I was really listening, and then he spoke softly. “It’s like Grandma Jiko wrote, Nao-chan. We must do our best!”

“Ikiru shika nai!” he said, half to himself, and then he looked up and repeated it, urgently, in English this time, as if to make absolutely sure I understood. “We must live, Naoko! We have no choice. We must soldier on!”

I nodded, barely daring to breath as the fish in my stomach thrashed its tremendous tail and twisted up into the air. Then, with a great splash, it reentered the water and swam away. Slowly, the water settled.

Ikiru shika nai. My fish would live, and so would me and Dad, just like my old Jiko wrote.

My dad went back to reading. Chibi-chan was mewing from the veranda, so I got up to let him in. When I slid back the sliding door, he shot through the opening and between my ankles like he was being chased by ghost dogs from hell. The hair on his spine was standing straight up. A strong warm breeze followed him in from the garden, rattling the paper doors in their frames. It sounded just like Jiko’s chuckle. Dad looked up from the pages of his uncle’s diary.

Mom left the next day because she had to get back to work, but me and Dad stuck around to help Muji get old Jiko’s stuff in order. Not that she had much stuff. She owned almost nothing, except for some of Haruki #1’s old philosophy books, which Dad said he’d take. The only thing Jiko really cared about was the fate of Jigenji, but the little temple didn’t belong to her. It belonged to the main headquarters, and they were still hoping to sell it to a developer, but luckily, the real estate market had crashed on account of the bubble economy bursting, and moving all the graves was going to be expensive, so they decided to wait. This meant Muji would get to stay, at least temporarily, and we could keep the family altar there, too. Muji promised to take care of it as though it were her own, which it more or less was, in my opinion, because she was like an auntie, and I promised her I would come back to the temple in the summers and also every year in March to help with old Jiko’s memorial services. It was a good arrangement, at least for the time being.