Without thinking, I cut across the road, hopping over the metal divider at its center. I paused at the stone steps before me, then surrendered and walked up to the graves within.
Immediately the sounds of the street below grew detached, distant, the meaningless echoes of urban voices whose urgent notes reached but held no sway over the parklike necropolis within. From where I stood, the cemetery seemed to have no end. It stretched out before me, a city in its own right, its myriad markers windowless tenements in miniature, laid out in still symmetry, long boulevards of the dead.
I moved deeper into the comforting gloom, along a stone walkway covered in cherry blossoms that lay like tenebrous snow in the glow of lamplights to either side. Just days earlier, these same blossoms had been celebrated by living Tokyoites, who came here in their drunken thousands to see reflected in the blossom’s brief and vital beauty the inherent pathos of their own lives. But now the blossoms were fallen, the revelers departed, even the garbage disgorged by their parties efficiently removed and discarded, and the area was once again given over only to the dead.
I thought of how Midori had once articulated the idea of mono no aware, a sensibility that, although frequently obscured during cherry blossom viewing by the cacophony of drunken doggerel and generator-powered television sets, remains steadfast in one of the two cultures from which I come. She had called it “the sadness of being human.” A wise, accepting sadness, she had said. I admired her for the depths of character such a description indicated. For me, sad has always been a synonym for bitter, and I suspect this will always be so.
I walked on, my footfalls melancholy, respectful of the thick silence around me. Unlike the surrounding city, Aoyama Bochi is changeless, and I had no difficulty finding what drew me despite the decades that had passed since I had last come here.
The marker was stark and simple, distinguished only by a brief declaration that Fujiwara Shuichi had lived from 1912 to 1960 and that all that remained of him was interred here. Fujiwara Shuichi, my father, killed in the street riots that rocked Tokyo one awful summer while I was a boy.
I stood before the grave and maintained a long bow, my palms pressed together before my face in the Buddhist attitude of respect for the dead. My mother would have wanted me to say a prayer, crossing myself at its conclusion, and had this been her grave, I would have done so. But such a western ritual would have been an insult to my father in his life, and why would I do something to offend him now?
I smiled. It was hard to avoid that kind of thinking. My father was dead.
Still, I offered no prayer.
I waited a moment, then lowered myself, cross-legged, to the earth. Some of the graves were adorned with flowers, in various stages of freshness and decay. As though the dead could smell the bouquets.
A breeze sighed among the markers. I put my forehead in my palms and stared at the ground before me.
People have rituals for communing with the dead, rituals that depend more on the idiosyncrasies of the individual than on the influence of culture. Some visit gravesites. Some talk to portraits, or mantelpiece urns. Some go to spots favored by the deceased during life, or mouth silent prayers in houses of worship, or have trees planted in memory in some far-off land.
The common denominator, of course, is a sense beyond logic that the dead are aware of all this, that they can hear the prayers and witness the deeds and feel the ongoing love and longing. People seem to find that sense comforting.
I don’t believe any of it. I’ve never seen a soul depart from a body. I’ve never been haunted by a ghost, angry or loving. I’ve never been rewarded or punished or touched by some traveler from the undiscovered country. I know as well as I know anything that the dead are simply dead.
I sat silently for several minutes, resisting the urge to speak, knowing it was stupid. There was nothing left of my father. Even if there were, it was ridiculous to believe that it would be here, hovering around ashes and dust, jostling for position among the souls of the hundreds of thousands of others buried in this place.
People lay the flowers and say the prayers, they believe these things, because doing so avoids the discomfort of acknowledging that the person you loved is gone. It’s easier to believe that maybe the person can still see and hear and care.
I looked at my father’s marker. It was young by the standards of the cemetery, just over four decades, but already it was darkened by pollution. Moss grew thin and insensate up its left side. Without thinking, I reached out and ran my fingers over the raised lettering of my father’s name.
“Hisashiburi, papa,” I whispered, addressing him like the young boy I had been when he had died. It’s been a long time, papa.
Forgive me father. It has been thirty years since my last confession.
Stop that shit.
“I’m sorry I don’t come to visit you more often,” I said in Japanese, my voice low. “Or even think of you. There are so many things I keep at a distance because they’re painful. Your memory is one of those things. The first of them, in fact.”
I paused for a moment and considered the silence around me. “But you’re not listening, anyway.”
I looked around. “This is stupid,” I said. “You’re dead. You’re not here.”
Then I dropped my head into my hands again. “I wish I could make her understand,” I said. “I wish you could help me.”
Damn, she’d been hard on me. Called me a whore.
Maybe it wasn’t unfair. After all, killing is the ultimate expression of hatred and fear, as sex is the ultimate expression of love and desire. And, as with sex, killing a stranger who has otherwise provoked no emotion is inherently unnatural. I suppose you could say that a man who kills a stranger is not unlike a woman who has sex under analogous circumstances. That a man who is paid to kill is like a woman who is paid to fuck. Certainly the man is subject to the same reluctance, the same numbing, the same regrets. The same damage to the soul.
“But goddamn it,” I mused aloud, “is it moral to kill someone you don’t even know, a grunt probably just like yourself, just because the government says you can? Or you drop a bomb from thirty thousand feet to kill the bad guys, you bury women and children under the rubble of their own homes in the process, but you’re not bothered because you didn’t actually have to see the damage, that’s moral? I don’t hide behind mortar range, or behind the cartoon image in the thermal scope of a sniper’s rifle, or behind the medals they give you afterward to reassure you that the slaughter was just. All that shit is an illusion, a soporific fed to killers to anesthetize them after they’ve killed. What I do is no worse than what goes on all over the world, what has always gone on. The difference is that I’m honest about it.”
I was quiet for a while, thinking.
“And how about a little slack?” I said. “Her old man was set to check out from lung cancer anyway, in a lot more pain than what I caused him. Whatever happened to ‘no harm, no foul’? I mean, I practically did him a favor. Hell, in some cultures what I did wouldn’t be looked at as much more than euthanasia. She almost ought to thank me for it.”
Things had been okay for me in Osaka, reasonably okay. Looking back, I felt like it had all been falling apart since Tatsu had showed up.
I thought about taking him out. There were a dozen reasons why I didn’t want to. The problem was, he was beginning to act like he knew I didn’t want to, and that wasn’t good.
I needed to get back to Osaka, finish my preparations as quickly as I could, and go. Tatsu could handle himself. Harry was hopeless. Midori knew what she’d come here to learn. Naomi was sweet, but she’d served her purpose.
I stood. My legs had stiffened on the cool ground and I massaged some blood back into them. I bowed to my father’s grave, then stood looking at it for a long time.