by Cody Poulton
It was the last weekend in February and I was eager to leave the house, which is generally colder and a good deal darker than outside at this time of year. When I suggested to my wife that we go on an outing, she remarked it was time to pay our respects to gran at the Ōtani Mausoleum, where Gojō begins its climb over Higashiyama and down into Ōtsu. Just as we were preparing to leave, a call comes from our family doctor’s office to say the results are in from our annual general physical. Mitsuko is eager to find out, so she’s out the door in a flash. (The night before we’d watched a movie about your stereotypical mother who’d had a stroke from staying up all hours of the night to make daily obentō for her thankless adolescent daughter. It ends with her sneaking out of hospital to risk her life in making an enormous box lunch for the girl’s entire graduating class. There is, needless to say, a tearful reconciliation with the daughter.) The doctor gave me a clean bill of health, but told M her cholesterol and blood sugar were high, her blood pressure borderline, and her BMI over the acceptable limit. She blamed me for eating as much as I do, thus making her overeat, to which I replied dinner was not a competition.
We caught the train and then a practically empty bus to Ōtani. (Before Covid, it would have been packed with tourists.) Our favourite flower seller there waved happily when she saw us. How are you? We asked. “Ichibyō sokusai,” she replied, to the effect that we’re all getting older but, knock wood, she was doing well enough. Mitsuko launched into her medical report. We bought incense and flowers for gran, then a second time for the Ohara patriarch, the ex’s grandfather. My wife never fails to mention that she never met the guy, who passed away not long before she married. I suppose she feels that since the man was a power in the city during his lifetime he must still exert influence over the living from the other world. I’ve never felt so superfluous at a ritual laying flowers at the grave of my wife’s ex’s ancestor, but maybe I ought to be thanking him for the chance to live here, especially now? Whatever she may have said to the patriarch in silence, she finished her prayer saying out loud, “Yobantoite!” (Don’t come calling for me). The movie the previous night and the doctor that morning both had her a little rattled.
Rather than return down the hill to Higashi Ōji, we climbed up through the vast Toribeyama graveyard to Kiyomizu Temple. It was a weekend and the weather was good, so naturally there were quite a few visitors, but nothing like what it would be in a month or so for the cherry blossoms, and the pandemic has kept a lot of people away. They’ve recently repaired the deck, or stage, as they call it, overlooking the valley and the wood and gold fittings shone in the winter sun. Following the course round back to the Otowa falls, Mitsuko remarked on the plethora of little Jizō statues under the rafters of the stage. These, she claimed, marked the souls of every body that had fallen off the deck. Some were suicides, but many were unwanted children, she said, disposed of by courtesans and geisha. Gion is next door to Rokuhara—flesh and spirit are cheek to clerical jowl here—sex and death have always been on intimate terms, something Kyoto surely knows better than most other places. I was reminded that all this beauty has been built on the bones of the dead.
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