Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (80 page)

We arrived at dusk and waited in a Zen garden full of angular rocks and roundly sculpted shrubbery sitting on a bed of white gravel. The sun set, and we were invited into the temple. After we
took off our shoes, we wended our way through a series of wooden hallways and suddenly found ourselves in a moon-viewing room.

The rectangular room was perhaps fifteen tatami mats in all, comfortable enough for a group of twenty, and smelled of wood and straw. The light was a heavy amber. The outside wall, made up of sliding doors, had been completely removed to afford us a view of the interior garden. The air outside was warm, and the autumn insects sang in an orchestrated chorus.

The old priest of the temple had been waiting for us, and as two kimono-clad women slowly and silently passed around a tray of rice cakes, the priest told us how during the Momoyama period—the medieval period during which this temple was built—aristocrats had sat here, as we did now, luxuriating in the last remainders of summer and contemplating the sadness and fullness of the moon.

He held three lacquer objects, each of which dated from the sixteenth century, and passed them around to all of us. They would have been used by the widow of Hideyoshi, the great general and unifier of Japan who had also been an aesthete. We were all sitting on low chairs, which formed an L shape along the perimeter of the room. One by one we reverentially passed around a spoon, a tea caddy, and a bowl. I have always loved Japanese lacquer. One of my early connections to my father’s love of art history was medieval lacquer, with its sprinkling of gold and its many layers of lacquer painted on wood, giving the effect that the object is in fact a mirror of an infinite sea.

The priest held up a simple painting in black ink on paper. It was a circle. An “O.” “I’m very fond of this painting,” he said. “On a day like today, when we are gathered to look at the moon, I think to myself that this painting is the moon. But then, on other days, I think it is a symbol of emptiness, of nothingness, which you know is at the heart of Zen.” Unfortunately, he continued, it was cloudy tonight, making it difficult for us to see the moon. As a group, we
leaned our bodies toward the open wall, craning our necks, and the floor beneath us creaked. There were only clouds, and we all swayed back into our seats and the floor sighed.

One of the kimono-clad women passed out bean cakes. She stood before each of us and bowed, and in turn we bowed back. Then we each used a long pair of chopsticks to select one cake for ourselves. The skin of each sweet was made of rice, pounded until it had become glutinous and translucent so the gold bean paste in the middle glowed through; it was a miniature moon. I ate my cake slowly, then accepted a round bowl of frothy green
matcha
tea. The sugar and the caffeine together gave me a jolt, and I felt awake and refreshed.

Later, we went for a walk through the grounds of the temple, crossing the old Dragon Bridge, so called because its back was arched and its roof shingled, and in the near dark it looked like the scaly back of a dragon. We followed a stone path up to Spirit Hall, where Hideyoshi’s wife is entombed. The hexagonal building is famous for its liberal use of gold dust on black lacquer depicting flowers and musical instruments. There was a breeze up there, and the air was much cooler. It felt as if we were floating on a gleaming, golden island of light above a sea of darkness.

We went through the dark again, down the other side of the hill, then plunged into a thicket of fat old bamboo, lit up so the grove glowed, as though it contained the source of some otherworldly, emerald power. The wind was singing in the tops of the bamboo branches, and Isao and I stopped and stared at the leaves rustling overhead. The clouds parted, and then the moon popped into view, looking down on us like an eye. The effect was like flying, as though for a time I could feel that we were standing on a planet that was hastily rotating through the heavens.

“Look!” someone shouted. “Finally! The moon!”

“The moon! The moon!” voices shouted all around me.

I thought about the story of Kaguyahime, the Moon Princess, one of Japan’s most beloved folktales. In this story, an old and poor bamboo cutter came upon a glowing stalk of bamboo. He cut it open and found a baby girl inside. Because he and his wife were childless, he took the baby home, and they rejoiced in their good fortune at becoming parents at such an advanced age. Thereafter, whenever the old man cut down a stalk of bamboo, he found a nugget of gold inside, and soon he and his family became wealthy.

Years passed, and the little baby became a beautiful and accomplished young woman. Her fame spread, and before long she had a bevy of important suitors who asked for her hand in marriage. She gave each man a task to perform to win the right to marry her, but each man failed. One died while climbing a ladder to try to reach a cowrie shell born from a pair of swallows. One man sailed out to recover a jewel from a dragon’s neck, but he gave up after encountering severe storms. The Moon Princess had also sent three other men to retrieve the following: the Buddha’s own begging bowl, a jeweled branch from the floating island of Horai, and a robe made from the fur of the legendary Fire Rat. Each man tried to present the princess with fakes, though, and was harshly rebuffed.

Years passed, and the old bamboo cutter and his wife began to age and to weaken. Their beautiful daughter continued to care for them, but the old couple became alarmed by a change in her behavior. When the Moon Princess looked out the window at the full moon, she sobbed uncontrollably and could not be consoled. Nor did she explain her sadness. Finally, at the end of summer, she told her adoptive parents the truth of her origins. She was descended from the Moon People and had come down to the earth only to care for this elderly couple. During the next full moon, she would be called back to her people.

The bamboo cutter went to great lengths to keep his daughter from leaving. He enlisted the help of the emperor and his army; by now the emperor was in love with the Moon Princess too. But it was to no avail, for during the next full moon, a retinue of celestial beings came down from the sky and placed a cloak of feathers around the Moon Princess’s neck. Instantly, she forgot her sorrow and ascended up to the moon. Soon after, the old bamboo cutter and his wife died. The emperor wrote a note to tell the princess of his own sadness, and burned it from the top of Mount Fuji, hoping that the smoke might reach the moon and carry his message of grief. For many years, Mount Fuji continued to burble and emit fumes, and it was said that this smoke was a remainder of the broken-hearted emperor’s futile efforts to reach his lost princess.

I
T WAS
O
CTOBER
of 2013, and my mother, my son, and I were driving out to a temple called Kaiz
ji at the invitation of Kaneta, the priest who runs Café du Monk. I knew very little about the ceremony that was going to take place at this temple, except that it involved his son, who had been at Eiheiji for two years, and that it would commemorate the deaths of fifty people who died in the tsunami.

The temple belonged to Kaneta’s second cousin, who was stepping into the role of
j
shoku
, or the new head priest; his father, wheelchair-bound, was retiring. Next year, my own family members would be enacting the same ceremony when Semp
, now settled on a successor, handed over Empukuji to Daisuke. Because such ceremonies were conducted only once a generation, they were like a coronation in which a king hands his kingdom to a young prince.

The drive out to Kaiz
ji was spectacular. The rice paddies were ready for harvest: they were not gold, but a greenish yellow, a powerful neon color that stood out in strong contrast to the surrounding
environment, whose greenery was fading day by day. The landscape was dotted with
higanbana
, an eerie red lily that blooms around the autumn equinox, or Ohigan.

My friend Isao once told me a story about collecting a bouquet of
higanbana
to take home to his grandmother. She was upset at the gift, explaining that because the
higanbana
bloomed during Ohigan, the flowers were associated with the earth opening up to let the dead pass through. The flowers, while beautiful, were unfit for decoration. He never again collected a single red lily.

When the low sun bore down on the vegetation, though, the scarlet blossoms and the ripe, bright rice fields made the landscape glow, as though everything was covered in stained glass. Along our way, farmers harvested the rice with small industrial combines. After the rice is cut, in some parts of T
hoku, the farmers will then hang the rice in a row on a wooden fence. In other places, they stack the rice into sheafs that look much like the drying bales of wheat in Van Gogh’s paintings. In yet other parts of T
hoku, farmers make spiral stacks.