the baby Jizo,” Sarah said impulsively. “I didn’t get a chance last time, it was summer and there were tourists all over the place…”
“Baby Jizo, where? What are you talking about?”
Sarah felt a catch of surprise, for the baby Jizo had been important to her mother. She wondered if she had just made some sort of blunder.
But it was too late now. “Mama used to come here all the time,” she explained. “I’ll show you. See, you go over this fence…” She quickly straddled the low iron tourist railing, looking back and laughing at her grandmother’s shocked expression. “Quick!” she said. “There’s nobody around. Quick!”
Mrs. Kobayashi’s face darkened with disapproval, but curiosity made her follow. Holding down her skirt with one hand, she cautiously straddled the low fence, lifting one wool-stockinged leg after the other. They slipped between the trees, squeezed through an opening in a wall of shrubbery, and there it was: a small clearing with twenty or so crumbling statues of tiny smiling bodhisattvas. They had been rescued after the war from remote country roads up in the Kyoto hills.
Mrs. Kobayashi stood in the clearing and gazed about her with a look of dawning dismay. “You realize, don’t you,” she said finally, “these aren’t ordinary Jizo. They’re markers for real-life babies that died in bad circumstances.”
Sarah knew. In past centuries, illegitimate babies had been drowned. Orphans had starved during famines. There was even an ancient tradition of putting twins to death if they were born of opposite sexes. Some of the stone markers—so old and weathered they looked like lumps of rock—had two figures etched side by side. None of these children had had a proper burial. Since there was no family to chant sutras and push the children safely into the next world, little Jizo were created in their memory. The sadder the circumstances, it was said, the sweeter the smile a stoneworker would carve. The Jizo would stand on roadsides and protect travelers from harm.
“When Mama was sad or upset as a girl, and even when she was in college,” Sarah told her grandmother, “she’d come and sit here. She made up stories about who they were and what their families were like.”
To her dismay, her grandmother gave a little shudder.
“When she brought me here,” Sarah continued, “she’d say a prayer for them, and she made me say a prayer too.” She had a flash of memory: standing here next to her mother, eyes closed and palms pressed together. For a moment she could almost smell the sun-warmed stone and hear the comforting rattle of summer leaves overhead.
“If I’d known about this when she was a girl, I would have forbidden it,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “These souls are lost and hungry, like stray dogs. If they sense a susceptible spirit, they latch on, poor things. And they drag down the living.”
It was hard to know how to respond. Mrs. Kobayashi was a practical woman with progressive views. But every so often, like now, Sarah was reminded that they came from different generations and different cultures.
“You must think I’m silly,” said her grandmother.
“No,” said Sarah. “I think it was a different time. A much scarier time.” The crumbling stones, with their aura of tragedy, did look rather sinister in the still gloom of November.
“I told her to stay away from these sorts of things.” Mrs. Kobayashi sounded hurt. “I made her promise.”
“Well,” said Sarah helplessly, “I guess it turned out all right in the end.”
“Soh. I suppose it did.”
chapter 42
Later that afternoon, someone tapped on the kitchen door. It was Mrs. Ichiyoshi, who lived four houses away.
Sarah hadn’t seen the old woman in years. She never came outdoors anymore. Once she had been a common sight, hovering over a vendor’s pushcart or sweeping the doorstep of her visitor gate. When Sarah and her cousins were small, she would give them green-tea candies from her apron pocket. They accepted politely but unenthusiastically; green tea was an old person’s flavor.
Mrs. Ichiyoshi bowed and stepped into the cement vestibule. Waving aside Mrs. Kobayashi’s invitation to come up, she perched informally on the raised ledge of the tatami floor, not bothering to take off her shoes: the classic posture of a neighborhood gossip.
“And who might this be?” She looked curiously at Sarah, who had knelt down beside her grandmother on the tatami matting. Mrs. Ichiyoshi had a deep, masculine voice.
“This,” Mrs. Kobayashi told her, “is Yoko’s girl, all grown up.”
“Aaa, Yo-chan, of course…” The old woman’s face brightened with fond recognition.