Our mission was simple: pick up Grandmother and get her to the graveyard. The kind of grunt work forever farmed out to the youngest.
“Remember, if she asks, don’t give her any money. Just say no. Okay? She’s going to take everything you have if you don’t.”
“Well, how am I supposed to say no? It’s my first time meeting your Grandmother and my Japanese isn’t great. I’m going to sound like an asshole if I say no.”
“Tell her you just have sen yen. Give it to her if she keep bother you.” Miki’s subjects often failed to agree with her verbs, and I never corrected her. It was a fire in a frozen cabin, cozy, comforting.
Grandmother’s front door was the old sliding type. Thin columns of opaque plastic separated by thick lines of cheap wood, weather-beaten to dry brown. Miki had to shake the handle and shimmy the panel to get it to slide and when it finally did it shot through the trenches frictionless and banged against the wall. We both jumped at the sound.
Grandmother didn’t seem to care. She sat perched on the edge of the hardwood floor, still as an apparition, head down, hair a nest of thin cotton balls taped together. Her shoes were already on. The simple slip-on kind. No laces. Bone white. Her dark gray cotton slacks flared out at the shins revealing the thinnest legs I had ever seen. Bone and skin like watery milk under scratchy glass. Nothing else on the plain stone below her feet. The rest of the room that pale yellow of old Japan. Dark. Behind her were two identical furuma doors with chipped and faded cranes standing in tall grass.
Is that you Akiko?
It’s Miki, Grandmother. Long time no see. I watched Miki and followed her movements, clasping my hands behind my back and bowing.
This is my husband, Gary.
It’s very nice to meet you, my esteemed Grandmother. I bowed as deep as my Western back allowed. I could barely bend to touch my shins, forget the toes.
Grandmother remained seated. You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?
Yes, I’m a foreigner. You can call me Gaari.
Geri? Your name is Geri? She looked up for the first time. One eye a cataract cloud, the other hardly visible. Her mouth opened wide, looking ready to hold a melon slice, revealing one long tooth, old as time, poking out under her upper lip. Heavy air heaved out of her gut and a true cackle filled the hall. I was used to people laughing at my name, but I had never turned an old lady into a witch.
Miki tried to explain over the loud and gasping squawks. No, not ‘geri’ like diarrhea, but gaari. Gaa-ri.
She waved an I-don’t give-a-crow’s-ass hand around and creaked up to her feet, winding down but still giggling. I hurried to her side, steadying her wobbly frame.
She noticed.
Oh. You’re very handsome.
Thank you, Grandmother.
You are lucky to have a handsome husband Akiko. Both of mine were bald.
I was in the back seat when Miki stopped before a flower shop. She yelled in Grandmother’s ear that we had arrived. Miki reached across for the passenger door handle, pushed it open a bit and started to get out from her side. Grandmother shot a quick hand to cover Miki’s own. No. You stay. Your voice hurts my ears. Let Diarrhea bring me in. I couldn’t tell if she was mispronouncing my name on purpose or not.
“Can you handle this, Gary? She wants to go with you.”
“Yeah, I think so.” I didn’t think so.
“Don’t forget what I said about the money.”
“I know, I won’t. I just hope I don’t drop her on her ass.”
Stop speaking English foreigner. Let’s go.
We returned to the car and I buckled Grandmother in the front. Taking up two seats in the back next to me lay an enormous bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums and white lilies of all sizes blooming out around thin green stems and leaves, wrapped delicately in crinkling clear paper.
“What the hell is that? I told you to give her 1000 yen.”
“I thought I did.”
“Who was on the bill? Was it nerdy guy with nice hair?”
“Um, no. It was a grandpa in a kimono. And he looked disappointed in me.”
“Ugh. That’s 10,000 yen, it’s like 100 dollars.”
“How am I supposed to know? All this shit looks like Monopoly money to me.”
Grandmother smiled, crisp bills poking through her wrinkled knuckles. Miki, take me to the supermarket.
We pulled up late to the graveyard. Haruto, Miki’s brother-in-law, hurried to help Grandmother out of the car. Hello Grandmother. Let me help.
Get away. Diarrhea can do it.
He sniggered and returned up the paved incline where his wife, Akiko, and Mother waited. They stood next to rows of hanging plastic ladles and buckets made to look like wood. A sky blue box bloomed with thick bristled brushes next to a spigot fastened over a wide stone basin. They kept their hands busy, checking the goods in their plastic bags, whispering through smiles as I eased all seventy-nine pounds of Grandmother out of the car, into the wheelchair, and followed up the slope.
Grandmother made sure I didn’t forget our plastic bag, twice the size of the rest. I hung it from her wheelchair handle and pushed. One skeletal hand soon reached over her shoulder, jerked around until she found my own. The touch so icy I could feel the skin around my toes crawl colder, even under an August sun.
You are strong foreigner, aren’t you?
No me not strong. You itchy.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Miki asked in English. She had snuck up behind me after parking the car.
“She said I was strong and I just wanted to say that she is light.”
“karui. Not kaui. You said she’s itchy.”
We entered a cemetery of gray. The walkway fog gray. The gravestones pewter. Plain gray granite rocks raked over every tomb. The names and dates engraved in the stone pillars edged so deep they turned black. Everything foreign. The Buddhist swastika, one of the few symbols to resonate. Miki’s family grave had a cross. Very rare.
We came to pay respects to the resting relatives: my wife’s great-grandmother, her great-grandfather, her grandfather, her father, her great-aunt Setsuko, and two of the family dogs. If you moved the heavy stone slab before the family headstone you would find dusty urns, each occupying the same amount of space, filled with chalky remains. Remembered loved ones. We would all be placed under that slab. So much rock. So much gray. The thought made me queasy. I had always wanted to be buried. I liked the graveyard off the Long Island Expressway, five minutes before the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. Nice view. Lots of grass. Crowded. I liked the idea of my corpse rubbing shoulders with strangers six feet under while we rotted into the earth and returned as a blade of grass, or a shrub, or a tree, or something. A piece of me living on in nature somehow. It felt right.
Or, more importantly, like it wasn’t the end. At the very least I’d be able to have a conversation. An American corpse in Japan is doomed to bow, apologize, and grin like an idiot for eternity.
The path to the family stone was too narrow for Grandmother’s wheelchair. Akiko offered to stay behind with her.
The foreigner can carry me.
Is that a good idea? Akiko can stay here with you.
Quiet little Mari. Let’s go Diarrhea.
My wife shrugged, “Have fun.” She moved to Mother and offered a soft and steady elbow to lead her through the uneven path. Akiko followed close, chirping about the weather.
I hadn’t had a ton of experience carrying 93-year-old Japanese women, so I thought about the logistics. Every part of her looked like it was ready to crumble.
Okay, Grandmother, you is ready?
I settled my hands firm but light under her armpits and lifted. Outstretched arms. She flew, looking like a prune with eyes and hair. I dipped my right arm behind her kneecaps and scooped her in close, one ear tight against my chest, smelling like cheap soap and day-old diapers.
Don’t forget the bag foreigner.
At the grave, Mother steadied herself on Haruto, moving the heavy ladle over the top of the stone and spilling it out and over the family pillar. The gray darkened as wide veins of water sluiced to the floor. Miki whipped open an empty plastic bag and plucked up the remains of their last visit: dried-up dead flowers, a sun-bleached can of beer, the nubs of used incense. Carved into the headstone rested two metal vases with mouths like hungry wilting lilies. Miki dug into both and pinched out a few scraps of faded flower.
Miki, can you lay these out? Mother reached out and handed her another white plastic bag from the floor. Once she knew what was inside, Miki glanced my way and frowned before taking out the flowers Mother had brought.
Everyone knew what was coming.
Miki had warned them.
Just like you Daughter Mari, Grandmother crowed. You call those flowers? They’re weeds. And you bought cheap Chinese beer. No wonder your husband died early.
Akiko brushed down the monument, pretending not to hear, scrubbing around the base, soapy suds waxing, waning, and disappearing. Miki reluctantly pushed the flowers Mother had bought back in the bag and placed Grandmother’s in the two vases. Standing triumphant. Miki pinched and spaced out the color until it was just so. Haruto counted out the incense, ensuring there was one for each. He checked the small cup of sand and cleared away leftover bits of ash before digging them in. Six pale gray birthday candles standing stiff and waiting to be lit.
I’m sorry Mother. Next time, I will buy better ones.
Ha, no, you won’t. You never change Daughter Mari. Foreigner, put me down.
I wondered how. Chest thumping. Anxious thoughts turned the wide world into a narrow self. Don’t break Grandmother.
I bent down until her feet were square on the floor and kept two hands on her shoulders, like trying to keep a cheap toy on its feet. Grandmother shooed me away. Closed her eyes. Bent her head. Clapped twice, surprisingly loud. Took a deep breath. Exhaled the humid air. Opened her eyes and squatted, her tailbone a hair’s-breadth away from the floor, more flexible than an American toddler. I had wondered why they still had squatter toilets in public restrooms and now I knew. It looked like she could sleep in that position.
It’s hot today, isn’t it?
Yes, hot, and you still wear that ugly blue sweater Daughter Mari. It has holes in it. Dress properly when you come to the family grave.
You look like you’re in good health Grandmother,” Akiko shouted, impersonating a giddy-nervous teenager.
Grandmother made a sound. I thought it might be a laugh. It came from the gut. Involuntary. She was still squatting, staring blankly at the tomb. If I were in such good health, I wouldn’t need the foreigner to carry me. My lower back aches. I can’t eat anything but miso soup and rice.”
Akiko gasped as if the following idea had just come to her. Grandmother. It’s hard living by yourself, isn’t it? Such a big house, and alone. We worry about you. I know it would make Mother happy to take care of you.
Nothing would make her happier. Mother was a nurse at heart and had cared for incontinent kin for decades. There was almost always someone dying in Miki’s childhood home. Memories of her mother humming and hurrying around the kitchen. Setting and filling dishes on a metal tray and bringing it to the spare room for the doomed. Miki remembers Great Grandmother most, a bit more life in her than the others. She would beeline to her room after school, park at the foot of the bed, and do her homework, uniform still on, plaid skirt, comically large white ribbon with a navy blue blazer two sizes too big. Child legs shaking, working on her math while Great Grandmother sat up and helped. Mother came in and out with little necessary things: a cup of tea, a freshly shaved pencil, a kanji dictionary. Still smiling, serving. When there was a lull in dying kin, Mother started taking in homestay students. Every six months a new foreigner would come to stay. Same room. Same tray. Same dishes. Same smile. And now it was Grandmother’s turn, or, so Mother thought.
No, Grandmother growled. I have money. If I have to go somewhere, I will go to a home. I don’t want to have to look at your ugly face every day, Daughter Mari.
Nothing filled the silence. Birds. Crickets. Wind. They were on break.
Why did you have to put that stupid cross on our grave? You’re the only Christian, Daughter Mari.
You are right. When Jiro died...
Shut up. I want to go home. Let’s finish.
Haruto lit the first incense and handed it to Grandmother. I held the small ceramic cup, filled with shallow gray sand. Grandmother pressed her burning offering in. Wispy sandalwood smoke spiraled. It was a smell I had never encountered before coming to Japan. The fragrance of Buddhist temples. Grandmother clapped twice and bowed again. Her dry lips cracked a whispered prayer.
Haruto handed each our own tiny bright ember. Mother. Akiko. Me. Miki. He kept the last for himself. I watched and followed their lead. A necessary habit in this country. So much of life here is unspoken. They don’t notice it. They just do it.
We bowed for the last time and readied to leave. Grandmother was much easier to pick up from the squat. She felt damp. The heat had sapped out anxious thoughts and replaced them with a desire for water and shade. Haruto whipped a hand towel out of his pocket and dabbed around his neck.
Hot, isn’t it? A chorus of yes-hot repeated like pings in a pachinko parlor.
I picked my way through the narrow path, the wheelchair twenty steps ahead, when Miki called out, “Gary!” I swung around and Grandmother’s bone-white sneaker whacked against another tomb.
“Oh shit. I’m so sorry.”
Damn it Diarrhea.
The rest hurried over. All concerned. Behind, at the family grave, thin clouds still spiraling and vanishing. Flowers like colorful arms, hands up. A tall gold can of Suntory Premium Malt standing at attention. The other tombs must be jealous, I thought, a strange thought at the time since a toothless Japanese woman was still in my arms, cursing me out.
Are you okay, Grandmother? Haruto was the first one over.
He pinched her ankle slightly, and she belted out in pain. Snarling, she bopped him on the head with a closed fist. I thought it might break her hand. Don’t touch it, asshole. Damn it. Just get me in my chair.
After some back and forth, the family surrendered; Grandmother wouldn’t go to the hospital. She wanted to go home. She wanted to be left alone. And she didn’t care about the lunch Mother had prepared.
I kept apologizing. That twisting sensation through the gut returned. I wanted to be a pile of dust under 吉田家族. Ashamed. Miki and I helped Grandmother into the front seat as the rest of the family looked on. I turned to them, flat hands pressed against the hips, and bowed as deep as I could, I am so sorry.
Don’t worry, Haruto said. “She broke her hip a few years back and is still alive. She is Terminator.”
He was wrong. She would die, and I would be the one to kill her.
March 7, 2024
Windshield wipers stuttered through the cold rain. They should have been replaced months ago. The parking space in front of Mother’s could barely fit a golf cart. Miki cursed under her breath and squinted at the rearview mirror, hands moving one over the other, turning the worn leather wheel. I turned with the wheel and found the back of our minivan empty. A vacant baby seat on the left. A booster on the right. Flecks and chunks of old food squatting around juice stains pooled into dark, imperfect circles. It looked foreign. I couldn’t remember ever seeing those seats unoccupied. Our first date night in years.
The outside lights were on, carving holes through the early dark, spotlighting flowerpots of all sizes, some as wide as a bathtub. Others were hanging from thick and rusted window guards, shallow pots with lazy vines resting out the sides, like limbs from a hot bath. The house would look haunted without all that green. The facade the color of hard sand dollar shells, thin cracks spidering all about, thick cracks leading to peeling paint, revealing spongy yellow insulation that couldn’t ward off a summer breeze.
The door was open, as expected. Inside, to the left, sat the familiar scratchy plastic shopping basket, the writing 業務スーパ chipping off the side. It carried three crinkled liter bottles of faucet water, unlabeled and filled, a small black tote bag with various medication, a vacuum-sealed plastic sack of rice, a crank flashlight you could run forever with a tireless hand, various sizes of packaged batteries, and a case of matchboxes. Next to it stood a porcelain brazier I had always thought was an empty flower pot.
Mother was a prepper, and not the kind that had watched too many movies. Born in 1941, she remembered bombs dropping and famine spreading. Wandering around the cramped dirt paths of old Kyoto in rags, begging American GIs for food in the only English she knew, “Give me chocolate.” From war to natural disasters. Typhoons so strong she thought the roof would fly off. The earthquake that nearly shook the house out of the ground. Mother knew how bad things could get. When we scoffed she paid it no mind, keeping one eye on everything breaking because it can, and will.
We’re home. Sandalwood smoke, that familiar temple scent, hit warmer these days. I kicked my shoes off and arranged them neatly against the step, toes pointed toward the door. It took longer for Miki to take her heels off, the ones she wore when we first met. I had to rummage them out of a closet where they had been forgotten by all, except me.
I called out louder, We are home.
Strange. The usual Welcome home response didn’t follow. I stepped up off the genkan, two hands on the sushi tray we brought for dinner, and peeked into the glorified closet known for the past two years as Grandmother’s room. Two supplicants knelt in the middle of the space like penitent monks. Eyes closed and mouthing words to a wooden box the size of an American dollhouse. The family shrine was a thick walnut wooden cove with delicate swinging doors. There were two steps inside. On the top step was a cross draped in rosary beads, which I knew Grandmother didn’t appreciate. Most homes in Japan would have an image of Buddha. Grandmother held her own prayer beads, rolling them back and forth in her devoted hands. If you asked them who they prayed to, I doubt they’d say God. It was to the names running down small wooden pillars on the middle step, their late husbands, their names written in italicized brush strokes, the kind of script feudal monks in Kyoto would paint on stiff sand-colored scrolls.
吉
田
二
郎
森
肇
Smoke spiraled from thin gray sticks staked in shallow cups on the bottom of the shrine. A rectangular picture of Miki’s father to the right and, to the left, Grandmother’s second husband. Time’s first stab at color pictures. Matte-finished. Faded and yellowing. The type of pictures you hold and instinctively push your fingers apart, hoping for a zoom that never comes. They always stand at a distance now. Features blending and fading into each other, but not yet. Their images held in the mind's eye of the two worshipers on their knees, rubbing shoulders, together.
Miki pressed a finger to her lips and motioned me to the living room. We passed the bathroom to the left. I thought about grabbing a towel to dry off, opened the door, and faced the toilet room, three feet long and two feet wide. I had forgotten. In Japan, toilets and baths are in separate rooms. I shrugged it off and followed Miki into the main room of the house, a kitchen, dining, and living room rolled into one.
“Cold, cold, fucking cold,” she exclaimed while slinking off to the living room side and sliding under the table covered with a heated blanket. Kotatsu. She switched it on and used her chin to point at the table where I should lay the sushi, refusing to bring her hands out from under the warming blanket. The plastic top of the tray popped and the sound coaxed out hunger. Strange. McDonald’s used to have the same effect. The stench of freshly fried and salted potato once excited my stomach. Now sushi.
What the hell happened to me?
I slid in next to Miki and pecked around her tender neck. Bringing a hand under the kotatsu I searched for the end of her skirt and slipped in and pressed into her warm thigh.
“Stop it. Fucking cold.”
I nibbled around her ear and whispered, “So when I die, are you going to have a shrine like that for me?”
“Ha, no. Those things are expensive.”
“What the hell. Why not?”
You talk too much. “Anyway, you don’t die yet. You can’t die. The kids and I still need you to make money.”
“Well, I need to get something in return for all this hard work.” The legs slack a bit, less tension in the arms and I creep up, getting warmer.
Heh. Heh. Hehhhh. That sound. Behind us. By the door. It was Grandmother, lying on the floor, propped up on a dead shoulder, facing us, somehow smiling through all that loose skin, showcasing her one long brown tooth. She had dragged herself from the bedroom like a legless soldier. The sound we had heard was a stubborn laugh oozing from her tired gut.
Hey Diarrhea. Looks like you have a lot of energy.
Grandmother, what are you doing? You know you can’t walk, Miki exclaimed.
The foreigner stinks like butter. I could smell him when he walked in. But I wanted to look at his small face.
I crouched beside her and asked Miki, “Should I pick her up?” I hadn’t seen her this close since we first met. One eye still cloudy, hair short, sparse, and gray. Pale freckles ran up and down her chalky scalp. Skin like pounded putty. It was hard to imagine a person under all that embodied time.
You’re still not bald. Good. She turned to Miki. You got old, but he still wants you. You are lucky. Enjoy it. I miss handsome men.
We heard Mother call out from down the hall, jogging, Sorry, Grandmother. I slept. What are you doing here? You can’t walk.
I know Daughter Mari. If I could walk, I wouldn’t be lying here. You fell asleep again you lazy oaf.
I’m sorry. Let me bring you back.
No, I want to use the bathroom.
Little Miki, help me with Grandmother. Sorry, Garri. We need a minute. Please sit.
Mother’s neck slacked and forehead nodded down towards the table before jerking back up. Her eyelids nearly puffed her eyes out of existence. All I could make out were tiny black slits.
Mother, why don’t you lay down? I can take care of Grandmother if she needs something.
No, little Miki. She will go to bed soon. Did you pick up the good tuna?
Yes, it’s here, Miki said, motioning to the fatter pale pink strips blanketing packed cubes of vinegared rice.
Mother laid out the uncooked flesh on a separate plate, positioned one chopstick in each hand, pinned down the meat and stretched. This is Grandmother’s favorite. It will make her happy. Thank you, Gaari. You are so kind.
No, me not, but you are welcome Mother. You want a mouse?
Miki nearly choked on her salmon. She covered her chewing mouth with an open palm and gnawed, “Nemui is you look tired. Nezumi is mouse.”
Mother didn’t seem to notice, eyes trained on the dissection, whispering difficult as her head kept nodding to the table before flattening out against it. At the first snore Miki said, “Gary, do me favor? Get me some of Mom’s plum wine.”
We clinked glasses and sipped. Cold. Sweet. I wrapped a confident arm around her shoulder and whispered, “We getting drunk tonight?”
“Just a little. You know we still have to be with kids later.”
I knew. We still had three hours, plenty of time for a detour to a love hotel on the way to the restaurant. I figured I could persuade her to stay for an hour before going out to eat. I tilted her glass up and the liquor came down quicker than she had expected. She coughed, giggled, and rested her head on my shoulder. We soon drained both glasses and exchanged a once familiar smile. “I’m going to wake Mom up. Do you think she’s going to be okay?”
Yes! “Yeah, she’ll be fine. I always feel great after a little nap. Let me just go to the bathroom and then we can go.” The wine had worked quickly on both of us. The love hotel was looking like a sure thing.
I tiptoed back down the hall toward the toilet room and the wood cried out under each step. Even the walls trembled. “I’m not that fat,” I said to the house while swinging the bathroom door open and when I did our noses nearly touched. Grandmother. Eyes closed. Lips parted. Snoring. How the hell was she eye level with me? I peeked down. One bony claw for a foot latched onto one side of the toilet seat, another on the other, toenails two months too long curled under the lid and holding, perched on the toilet like an emaciated hawk nesting.
This all registered in a blink and in the next I panicked, “Oh sorry.” And her eyes darted open as the bathroom door swung shut and a sharp, Diarrhea, came out before the door slammed home and then a horrible series of thuds, cracks, and crashes. The cracks were the worst, like a tree breaking in the wind only more personal, a crack so personal it makes your jaw clamp and face tighten. I thought I might be sick. The house was shaking now, voices calling, Mother yelling out, Miki hurrying over, “What happened?”
They opened the door and I turned away. I couldn’t look. Miki exclaimed, “Oh god,” before turning and retching, the wine splashing out all over the floor. It was the first time I had seen her vomit. Later, when I worked up the courage to ask her what she saw, she said she didn’t want to talk about it, except for one thing, the thing that would forever stay with her, the right leg, bent back horribly, like a chicken wing, and her tongue, bent out the same way, in the same direction, a matching set.
I tried to explain. Blubbering out words. Actions taken, impossibly loud. And my mind recognized how useless words were and turned everything off. Speech. Muscle. Memory. Gone. A fog hangs over the incident now, probably for the best. The mind erases what the consciousness can’t handle.
The last thing I remember was the siren, growing louder.
March 9, 2024
For the next three days I learned a new word the hard way. Shouganai. It can’t be helped.
“It was an accident.”
Shouganai.
"I am so sorry Mother.”
Shouganai.
“I want to die.”
Shouganai.
We all wore the same blank expression in the days leading up to the funeral. I didn’t mark a furrowed brow or a twitching lip or a narrow gaze. A company of dead-eyed specters, readying the room towards the back of Mother’s house for the funeral. Akiko asked me to move the heavy furniture and mop up the floor. Her husband, Haruto, asked me to pick up extra chairs at his office. Mother asked me to help her move the pots and plants and sweep up the garden floor for our guests. Miki asked me to get the flowers. It was the same shop we had gone to when I first met Grandmother.
Two days after the accident, a hearse arrived at dusk. Bundled up against the cold, we watched four men in black suits and matching haircuts shoulder the casket, casting consuming shadows over the house as they brought her to the back. They placed Grandmother down on the table we had arranged, bowed and exited, tight-lipped and solemn. We all were. Haruto opened the thin double door of the casket revealing Grandmother’s head and shoulders, looking peaceful, no sign of the abrupt end she had faced. Mother turned and sobbed, the first trace of emotion any of us had shown.
Garri, tomorrow, stay next to me. I looked at Miki and she nodded, a silent agreement that she would tend to the kids.
Yes, Mother. Of course.
About 15 guests sat sardine-like as family members stood around the edges of the packed room that once doubled as Mother’s hair salon. The men wore the same black suit, the women the same black dress. I led Mother to the front and she insisted I stay next to her, two hands still wrapped around my bicep. She continued to cry quietly. Flowers surrounded the casket. Towering tripods of white and yellow orchids on the sides, one carrying a torso-sized dull gold frame with Grandmother’s portrait. Back straight. Chin up. Stern. It was her. Smaller bouquets of roses, lilies, and chrysanthemums strewn on the tabletop.
Mother had invited the local priest, a Filipino who didn’t speak a word of Japanese and never bothered to try. Grandmother would have preferred a singing monk with a chiming bell, but she had no say. The living keep the memory of the dead as they please. The priest conducted the eulogy to the non-believers. Speaking in bible English, it might as well have been Latin to French peasants; only peasants would have at least believed in the Word. Not this crowd. He said the prayer of the faithful to the faithless, the penitential act to those who did not know what it meant to repent, and prayed to a god they did not care to worship. I whispered broken translations in Mother’s ear with some stock phrases I had learned beforehand like pray, heaven, and peace. I heard one message, the rest of the room something else.
The puzzled guests paid their last respects and moved to the main room where a tower of sushi trays, stacked like pizza boxes, waited. Hushed conversations carried between savory bites. Mother asked me to take up the two-liter glass bottle of sake and follow her to fill the cup of each guest. Tradition. Each extended their right hand, left hand steadying the opposite elbow as I filled their shallow cup. I poured methodically, two hands on the bottle, head down, back straight, knees and shins and ankles flattened out under resting thighs, samurai-like. My feet soon cramped. My knees ached. I hadn’t been trained to sit on the floor for long stretches. I soon sputtered from one awkward position to the next, legs jerking about. Tight hips. Rusty knees. It was hard to focus. Grimacing does help speed along conversations though.
Soon only the family remained and we transported the casket to the crematorium. A twenty-minute jaunt through snaking mountain roads I had never seen to an unremarkable three-story building, office-looking, surrounded by trees. The blue sky choked on the slate smog lingering above it. Not a building within a kilometer in any direction. Bad luck to be so close to the dead.
The security guard opened the front glass doors and locked them in place. We pushed through another set of doors on the far end of the room and entered a hall with walls like packed beach sand trapped under a glossy coat. Three doorways carved into the wall at the far end and one was open. Fiery air forced our eyelids down and tight. We settled the casket on the thick clay slab before the open furnace and stepped back. Another man entered unseen and stood next to the casket, dressed like us all, inky suit and tie, distinguished by his white gloves and name badge: 東川. He spoke softly, but the breadth of the space turned whispers into proclamations. He gave instructions in vocabulary too advanced for me to make out, but the rest of the family started to move to the casket.
And then it started.
Plastic bags rustled behind as nieces and cousins took out the funeral flowers and broke them apart. Cracking stems and scraping steps echoed through the hall. Everything loud and dull. We kept the flowers and petals and pushed the broken stems back into the bags. Our guide popped off the front cover of the casket. Grandmother from head to toe. We held out hollow hands and set the broken flower heads over the still body. Her gray pantsuit overwhelmed with color. Bright flowers bloomed at her feet and moved up her thighs and chest. More flowers. White and yellow. The body bursting with lilies and chrysanthemums. Growing denser. Hushed cries turn to wails. Stuffed noses sucked for air as the body became a garden. Peaceful countenance framed in flowers, blooming brilliantly, for the last time. The hall grew dense in voiced grief as the dead body now a rich cornucopia, full of so much life that it hurt. We stepped away and the cover returned and the wailing crescendoed as Grandmother moved into the flames and the door was shut and we found someone to hold and for me, it was her.
I’m so sorry Mother.
Shouganai Garri.
We waited in a wide lounge with another grieving family. Mother clutched Grandmother’s portrait as we tried to pass the time. After an hour, we were invited into an empty room, everything blank. The walls a textured white, the floor tiled fog gray. Deep silence, again. Our sleeves scraped against our jackets. I never knew such small movements could reverberate so deep. Our steps followed the black tape on the floor, forking at the door and forming a rigid circle around the room. There were about ten of us. All immediate family attended except Miki, who couldn’t stomach this part of the ceremony. Kotsuage.
The security guard wheeled in a stuttering mortuary tray that creaked and stopped in the middle of the black tape. Silence. A plain white sheet covered a human-shaped landscape. The guard exited and we turned to our white-gloved guide, 東川. We stood much closer now and I noticed his enormous eyes, uncomfortably circular and wall-eyed, with the left staring at an unknown future. Bushy eyebrows and nose hairs that curled out and back on the rims of his nostrils like octopus tentacles readying to escape. Nothing else about him was funny. He moved in silent precision, resting a metal shelf above Grandmother’s remains, followed by a simple hollow wooden box with the longest pair of chopsticks I had ever seen, one light green, the other light wood.
東川 gripped the sheet delicately and removed it in slow folds, starting at the head and working his way down, revealing shades of a smoke-colored carcass, held together by habit, somewhere between bone and ash. The flowers were gone. It could have been anyone. He spoke in a pleasant hiss that carried easily. Beginning at the feet, he pointed at the toes, ankles, knees, and hips. He stopped around the hips and pointed out the bit of silver poking out from under the gray, the place where Grandmother had had a hip replaced. The joints around the legs were important. That is where we would start to pick up Grandmother’s bones and transfer them into the wooden box with the mismatched chopsticks. But it wasn’t time for that yet. Haruto leaned forward, eyes wide and curious, as our guide continued to point out the bones we would have to pick: a piece of the rib cage, a finger, an elbow, a shoulder. He lingered around the most important bit, a horse-shaped bone in the throat, the hyoid bone. Now, who would like to start at the toes?
Silence so deep it felt loud. Maybe I should be the one to start. Perhaps this is what they are waiting for. I raised my hand. Yes, me please. Laughter tore through the room. It startled me, honestly. It was the first time I had heard anyone laugh in three days.
“Garri, no,” Haruto exclaimed in a forceful tone fit for commanding a dog to sit. It took a moment to catch his laughing breath before continuing. Mother goes first. It’s always the eldest.
Oh, I’m sorry Mother.
That’s okay, she said, smiling. You go ahead. We will all go next.
Cheeks flushed, I begrudgingly positioned myself at the end of the metal table and stood next to the guide, one eye on the corpse and the other on me as he pointed to the left big toe and hissed, Here. It took a moment to position the thick chopsticks between my fingers and arch my elbow up at a convenient angle. When the tip met the charred flesh the sound disturbed the silence and then I pinched at where the toe met the foot and it snapped like an airy rice cracker. I held tight, chopsticks trembling, taking in a deep breath and then swinging right to put the toe in the box but moving too fast. I bumped into 東川 and the pinching sticks slipped and Grandmother’s dead toe careened to the floor and burst into ash. Akiko gasped so loud I shuttered, “Oh shit.” My eyes met the right eye of 東川 while his mouth turned into an o-shaped tunnel.
Haruto exclaimed, Garri, don’t worry. She has nine more. Everyone laughed but I felt defeated and turned to give the chopsticks back to our guide and tucked my chin and clenched my jaw to fight my quivering lip. Tears came. What the fuck is wrong with me? Fucking idiot. You are so fucking stupid. I pressed my hands to my face, hoping to swallow myself into any place but here and before I could break out of the room, foreign objects shouldered into me. Bodies. I peeked out and a mass of legs and hands and torsos were moshing into me and guiding me back to the table with the corpse, all repeating the same phrase.
Ganbatte. You can do it.
Ganbatte.
Ganbatte.
Ganbatte.
I had no choice. I had to do it. And finally did.
Haruto switched to English, “Diarrhea, good job.”
Mother shrieked, Ah, Grandmother always called you that. She was funny, eh?
When Mother took up the ankle with two missing toes, the entire foot buckled and fragmented into chunks of bony ash. Oh, I’m sorry.
Don’t worry, Mother, she doesn’t need it. The grim scene turned into comic gold for Haruto. Even I smiled eventually. Severity overwhelmed by absurdity. Haruto went for the hip and pulled at the metal part instead, wincing as he tried to lift, Grandmother, you are heavy! The nieces and nephews pulled off pieces from the waist up and stopped around the shoulder. Hana, one of the nieces, fumbled a rib bone, sought my sympathetic eyes, and declared, Garri, this is difficult, isn’t it?
The urn was nearly full. 東川 squinted into the box and arranged the remains just so. In the end, the bone fragments should resemble a supplicant praying on their knees. Only the throat and the skull were left, reserved for Mother. She plucked out the hyoid bone without issue, but the skull was harder. Our guide licked his palm and pressed down stray strands of combover hair before making a fist and miming a punching down motion. The butt end of the chopsticks faced the skull. Mother clenched her fist and politely struck the dome like a stubborn egg. Once. Twice. The shell would not crack. Mother always had a hard head, eh? Before we could catch our laughing breath, Mother punched down with more force than I had ever seen her use and let out an emphatic hiya that penetrated so deep that her fist broke through.
東川 produced a handkerchief and told her to keep it. Sorry, I have to wipe Grandmother off me, she giggled as the ash smudged and stained the cloth. A rounded chunk of skull was placed like a cherry on top of a sundae, a sundae of human bones. Mother took the closed box and we followed her out of the room. Before we could recapture austerity, Haruto grabbed me by the shoulder and spoke loud enough for all to hear, Garri, when I die, I want you to take my bones first.
Yes, me too, please, said Mother, and then Akiko, and then Hana, and then the rest of the aunts, uncles, and cousins. Each raising their hand and doing their best impersonation of a foreigner cutting the line when it came time to collect a dead relative’s remains. It’s a running joke I expect to hear at every family get-together.
Back at the house, Mother asked me to hold the picture frame as she lit an incense and placed it in the family shrine. The smoke rose soft as she took down the wooden pillar with Grandmother’s late husband's name and replaced it with a new one.
節
子
山
口
She clapped twice. Loud. Bowed and pointed up to the space above the doorway and asked me to hang Grandmother’s portrait up next to the rest of the ancestors. Somehow, I had never seen these portraits before. Always hidden from the view I was afforded. Nearly a dozen large figures under fading gold frames, relatives I will never know. One distinguished by his horn-rimmed glasses, another by her easy smile. She is the only one smiling. Most are thin-lipped and elderly. The portraits seem to go in chronological order, from right to left, images giving way to names on crumbling pieces of paper under glass. Impossible to read. Mother knew their names. Perhaps Miki would too. They would remain forever foreign to me, but not Grandmother, the newest ghost/god, worthy of devotion.