There were roughly fifteen Kobayashi gravestones, rising up haphazardly from the sea of vegetation. The oldest markers-small and moss-stained and porous-stood farther up the hill, their engravings long since rained away. They were so old the wooden tablets in the metal braces had rotted away and no one knew who the individuals had been. Nonetheless, they were family. Mrs. Nishimura, the most able-bodied adult, climbed up toward them, picking her way carefully among the damp foliage. She had brought a bag of bean cakes in her purse, and she placed one at each gravestone. Soon the faint smell of incense came drifting down to the others.
“Is this one of ours?” Mrs. Nishimura occasionally called down to Mrs. Kobayashi, for these family plots had no clear dividing lines.
When she came down to join the others, Mr. Kobayashi was kneeling down before the biggest and newest of the gravestones. Gripping a small garden trowel in one hand, he struggled to wedge it under the flat stone slab lying in front of the gravestone.
“Can you do it, Father-san?” said Mrs. Kobayashi worriedly. “Is it safe for your back?”
“May I help, sir?” asked Mr. Nishimura, starting to step forward.
“I’m fine,” the old man replied, a little brusque at these affronts to his masculinity.
“Of course he’s fine,” Mrs. Asaki told the others. “Let the man do his work.”
He lifted one end of the stone slab. With both hands, he dragged it to the side. And there it was-a small, granite-lined space that had lain undisturbed these fifty years. Lined up in one corner were three small porcelain urns bearing old-fashioned designs of their time. Mrs. Asaki’s mother was on the far left, then her father, then her brother Shohei.
Everyone was silent: the children, for whom burial was a new experience; Mrs. Nishimura, beholding her biological father’s urn for the first time; the older generation, whose memories stretched far back in time.
Mrs. Asaki was transported to when she had first stood here as a child, peering down into this small space. It was as if nothing of consequence had changed in the interim; she had come back full circle to this green-filtered light, this same sharp pyoo-pyoo of woodland birds. It was like blinking once, then finding three urns instead of one.
“Hai,” said Mr. Kobayashi, still in kneeling position, and reached out his hand for the box. His wife gripped it one last time, then handed it over.
It stuck in the opening. Mr. Kobayashi turned the box sideways, but it stuck again. No one spoke, no one breathed-but after a firm push it went in, no worse for wear except for a long scratch down the side.
Mrs. Kobayashi gave an audible gasp of relief. Everyone else, just as relieved, began laughing weakly.
“It sure was big,” Sarah said after the stone slab was back in place.
“It took up the space of ten people,” Yashiko said wonderingly.
Momoko wanted to know if they would need a new gravestone after this.
“I shouldn’t think so. There’s space for one more, at least,” said Mrs. Kobayashi.
“Well,” cackled Mrs. Asaki happily, “if that wasn’t just like Yo-chan, all the way to the end!”
On this note, the burial was over.
They ate their lunch a few meters from the gravestone, on blankets spread under a cherry tree. They were famished. Mrs. Nishimura had brought a simple snack of rice balls to tide them over until they reached a restaurant in the city. A modern woman in her own way, she had bought them at a convenience store. They were huge, containing as much rice as four normal rice balls, and triangular in the Tokyo style. They were individually wrapped in an ingenious system of plastic wrapping. One tab broke apart the outer wrapping; another tab removed an inner plastic sheet that separated the crisp, dry sheet of seaweed from the moist rice.
“Which filling would you all like?” Mrs. Nishimura said. “Umeboshi? Or salmon with mayonnaise?”
“It’s amazing,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, “what they can do nowadays!” She still molded her husband’s rice balls by hand when he went off with his friends for a morning of golf.
“Here, I’ll show you how it works,” Mrs. Asaki told the couple. She was proud of her familiarity with modern techniques. “First you pull this,” she told them, demonstrating.
But nothing happened.
“Areh?” She turned over the rice ball in confusion.
“Let me do it, Granny,” said Momoko. She snatched it out of the old woman’s hands and deftly pulled the correct tabs.
“Ara maa,” cried Mrs. Kobayashi, “how clever!”
Mrs. Asaki sat quietly. She was suddenly very, very tired.
Mr. Kobayashi took a hearty bite. “Not bad!” he said, surprised.
“Not bad at all,” agreed his wife. “The rice tastes quite fresh. Soft and chewy, and salted just right.”
“Oh, it’s fresh all right,” Mrs. Nishimura assured her. “They make them fresh every morning.”
They placed one of the rice balls on the Kobayashi gravestone, in between the fresh flower bouquets. Considering the occupants, umeboshi seemed the proper choice. Salmon and mayonnaise was too new; that combination had become popular only in the last decade.
“Well,” Mr. Kobayashi remarked as everyone sat eating hungrily and drinking cold tea from a thermos, “It’s too late for the cherry viewing, but it’s still very nice.”
“Yes, isn’t it lovely?” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Yo-chan loved eating here. She used to say it gave her quite an appetite.”
chapter 31
The homebound train was almost empty, so they had their pick of seats. Mrs. Asaki and Mrs. Kobayashi settled into the “silver” section. Everyone else took ordinary seats farther back.
The two women were silent as the scenery slid past. Their airy cheer fell away. Today’s events, casual as they were, had taken a toll that was only now beginning to make itself felt.
Mrs. Asaki was remembering an incident when she had been a young wife, raking leaves in the garden. A scrawny alley cat was stalking its way across the top of the fence and she had stopped to watch it. The cat, too, came to a wary halt. Ueno cats, which had survived for generations by stealing fish out of open-air kitchens, were alert to mistreatment by irate housewives.
Resting both hands on the rake handle, she gazed into its slit-pupiled eyes. The cat stared back, unblinking.
She had pretended it was a creature of prey, a big cat from Africa. She imagined herself shrinking down in size, becoming more and more at its mercy, until the experiment began to feel real. Suddenly she was afraid. Quickly, roughly, she shooed it away with her rake.
That experience had stayed with her. Maybe she recognized in it some germ of prophecy, the way one does with powerful dreams. She now thought of the exasperated way Momoko had snatched the rice ball out of her hand. Once she would have thought nothing of reprimanding the child, but more and more she regarded her with a kind of fear that was new. This momentum would continue, she knew. It would soon extend to Yashiko, to her own daughter, to her son-in-law…
On the seat beside her, Mrs. Kobayashi was absently stroking the folded silk furoshiki on her lap. Earlier that day it had been wrapped around her daughter’s boxed remains.
“I looked at Sarah-chan’s thumb,” Mrs. Asaki told her, although in truth she had forgotten all about it until now. “And I do see what you mean.”
Mrs. Kobayashi nodded. “Yes,” she said simply.
Mrs. Asaki felt a wistful envy for those two, for the closeness and promise still lying in wait for them. How did her sister-in-law manage to go through life never at a loss for a close, passionate relationship to sustain her?