A Tale for the Time Being (51 page)

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.

Gone, gone,

Gone beyond . . .

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 wonder what’s in that box,” Dad said.

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?”

“Sure,” Dad said.

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.

“What’s that?” Dad asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It wasn’t here before.”

“Open it.”

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.

“I can’t read it.”

Dad held out his hand. “Let me see.”

I passed him the booklet.

“It’s in French,” Dad said. “Interesting . . .”

I was surprised. I didn’t expect him to know anything about French.

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.”

“So how did it get here?” I asked.

Dad shook his head. “Maybe she had it all along?”

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.”

“Mm,” Dad said. “You’re probably right. It’s a secret diary.”

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.

“Nao-chan?”

“What.”

I knew my tone of voice was rude, but I didn’t care.

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!”

I shrugged. I mean, sure, it sounded good, but how could I trust him?

“
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.

“Did you say something?”

I shook my head.

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.

1.

The little cemetery in Whaletown wasn’t very far from their home, but Ruth didn’t get around to visiting as often as she should. She had planted a small dogwood
tree next to her parents’ grave, but that first summer they’d had a drought, and she’d forgotten to water it, so although the little tree had survived, it had lost some limbs and
its pleasing symmetry. She felt bad about this.

“Sorry, Mom,” she said, using a whisk broom to brush the winter’s accumulation of dust and dead leaves from the small granite plaque that bore her mother’s name.
“I’m not very good at this.”

Of course, her mother didn’t answer, but Ruth knew she wouldn’t have cared. Masako never had much use for ritual, never remembered birthdays or celebrated anniversaries, and
generally thought occasions of this sort were just a bother. And Ruth generally agreed, but after reading Nao’s account of old Jiko’s funeral, she found herself wishing she’d done
more to commemorate her mother’s passing.

Her death had been a low-key affair. In the last years of her life, she had developed mandibular cancer, but by then, even without the complications posed by Alzheimer’s, she was too old
and frail to survive the surgery, which would have required removing half of her jawbone. Her oncologist recommended palliative radiation, which wouldn’t cure the cancer, but might alleviate
her suffering. And it did. The tumor receded and the lesion healed, but by then she needed more care than Ruth and Oliver could provide on the island, so they moved her to a nursing home in
Victoria, where she spent the last two years of her life. When the tumor came back, they tried another round of radiation, but this time her mother had neither the strength nor the will to recover,
and she fell into a coma.