Funerals (葬式/soushiki)

I was at the university when Susumu died. S, Y’s brother, called me. I got on my bike and was down at the hospital within twenty minutes. When I arrived, Y was crying and caressing the calm old man. He was ninety-six but when she said, “Suteki na otoko”[“You’re a handsome man/素敵な男],”… otoko mai” [“a fine-looking figure of a man”], it seemed to be no more than the truth. “Mimi ga ooki shi, hana ga takai…”(”Such big ears… such a high nose”) --both positive attributes for Japanese people, suggesting respectively good luck and good looks.

He looked at peace, relieved after that awfully prolonged last day or so, when only a mechanically pumping machine had been keeping the breath in him. He looked himself once again.

I wished I’d been able to see my own father like that. He had died a few months before, and by the time I’d made it back to New Zealand, he’d been made up by the undertaker so that he looked like an actor playing a Renaissance pope rather than the gardener and chess-player we wanted to remember.

I’d thought then, that there was perhaps no help for it, that the makeup might have been necessary to hide some ghastly physiological changes. But Susumu was to remain just as calm and as completely “normal” during the next couple of days without any makeup whatsoever.

He was taken home from the hospital that afternoon and placed in the zashiki, the tatami floored front room where an impromptu altar had been erected behind the coffin.

The tsuya [通夜/wake] was the next day, not at home as would be in the country, but at the funeral parlour. The main ceremony, open to everybody, was in a big hall, but there was a light meal in a kind of private room within the building. There was food (vegetarian as always at a Japanese funeral), and drink, but no-one got gloriously drunk, they way they do in Ozu movies, or they way they had at the wake for Yuki, the partner of our Italian friend Rosanna, who had had a fatal stroke not long after leaving his Yakuza gang.

The funeral directors had come to the house on the afternoon that Susumu had died. The extended family were all there, cousins from Aso and the one surviving brother. The family seemed obliged to go for the most expensive options in the glossy catalogue of funereal possibilities. On such a day no-one wanted to appear such a cheapskate as to suggest that money should be a consideration when choosing the kind of hearse, or the concentration of gold leaf on the coffin. So Susumu had a two, rather than a one-priest funeral. That was still one less than the number of Zen priests at the funeral of the father of Y’s sister-in-law. K’s father had been a seventh generation Aso doctor, while Susumu was a largely self-educated country headmaster. I’m sure he was satisfied with two.

Between his death and cremation, Susumu was never left alone for more than a moment or two. Like most Japanese, Y’s family accept that the soul remains in the body until cremation and that, even after death, the soul needs company.

The Buddhist funeral service lasted about fifty minutes and consisted of Buddhist sutras, delivered in a rhythmic chant, to the accompaniment of percussive gongs. It was completely unintelligible to the congregation, and there were not even the bilingual prayer books which used to make the meaning of the Latin mass accessible to Catholics. Those Japanese people I have asked have said they are grateful not to be able to follow the words of the sutra, as not understanding allows their thoughts to wander freely.

After the prayers, several of the mourners gave speeches.

T, as chounan [長男/eldest son], spoke for the immediate family. He read a long, autobiographical poem which Susumu had written some years before. It had a narrative swing to it and a pronounced rhythm. It seemed to come from way back in time, to be a Japanese equivalent of Arnold’s “The Scholar Gypsy” or Brian Merriman’s Gaelic poem, “The Midnight Court” [“Cuirt an Mheadhon Oidhche” ].

In the poem Susumu told of his sorrow at the death of four of his seven children, of his delight in the surviving three. He wrote that he felt that the three living children were like the three legs of a tripod which, although weak alone, could support a huge pot when combined.

K, the only grandson, spoke of the loving care he had always had from Susumu. (When he was a child, Susumu would carry him off to bed each night, after he’d fallen asleep in front of the T.V.)

An eighty-year-old former pupil stood in front of Susumu’s photo and, speaking directly to his teacher, thanked him, as he’d done so many times, for giving him the start which had helped him to go on to become a teacher himself, and then an educational entrepreneur, the owner of a chain of kindergartens and tertiary colleges.

After the funeral, the immediate family accompanied Susumu to the modern municipal crematorium, miles out of town. The atmosphere there was rather like a large and sombre air terminal. Everyone was dressed in black, each group huddled around the photo of the beloved deceased. The airport analogy was rather grossly underlined by a large electronic notice board which announced names, room numbers, and “departure times”.

There was a final farewell before the furnace doors closed on the coffin, and then a forty minute wait. We were called back to greet the trolley bearing Susumu’s remains which had been wheeled out of the furnace.

The family gathered around, and each took turns at picking up small bits of chalky bone with long metal chopsticks and placing them carefully into a small ceramic urn. I had heard of this from my friend Alan, the veteran of a number of family funerals, but was surprised at how natural it all seemed.

Now Susumu really had gone, and he would be given a new name to match his new status as a hotoke-sama [仏様/Buddha]. Now the elaborate cycle of remembrance dictated by Buddhist practice could begin. For the next fifty years there would be periodic services and family gatherings in memory of the old man, just as there was for Y’s mother, and for her four brothers.

Susumu’s room at the corner of the house looked darker than it had ever been when we arrived home. We threw salt over our shoulders as we came into the house so that we would not be dragged off too quickly to join Susumu in the other world, where, we imagined, he was comparing notes with my own father.