kscans

Chapter 3 - Choosing the Funeral Portrait

Tsukie hurriedly stuffed her belongings into a Boston bag. She wouldn't be back for a few days. She pulled out her and her husband's mourning clothes and added them to her luggage as if in prayer.

As she was packing her daughter Mayu's pajamas into a bag, her eyes fell upon a brand-new red randoseru sitting proudly on the little girl's desk. It was the very same red randoseru her now-dying father had bought for her.

Mayu had been looking forward to elementary school, opening and closing it over and over. Her tomboyishness had gone a bit too far the other day, and she'd broken her wrist at kindergarten. Tsukie thought vaguely that she'd be in a cast for both her graduation and entrance ceremonies.

—Bandages and a red randoseru?

Tsukie froze, a powerful sense of déjà vu washing over her. Sometime, somewhere, there had been another girl in bandages, looking at a red randoseru just as eagerly, excited to start elementary school. Was it her own younger self? Or was it...?

With a fragment of memory caught in her chest, she hastily packed her things into the car. She arrived at her parents' house in Sapporo just a little after nine in the morning. The look on her mother's face as she greeted her was something Tsukie would never forget.

"How's Dad?"

Tsukie asked impatiently as she opened the passenger side door. Her mother simply gave a quiet "Yeah" and a calm smile.

In that smile, Tsukie knew her father was gone. Even seeing her smile, she didn't for a moment think he had survived. Her mother's expression was just that deep—not one of resignation or enlightenment, but the smile of a woman who had seen her lifelong partner to the very end, a smile that seemed to forgive everything.

Tsukie felt as if she'd been struck. She hadn't known that people could wear such a profound expression when sending off a loved one.

"I see," Tsukie replied curtly, then called out to her daughter, Mayu, who was fast asleep in her car seat, and got out of the car. Everything seemed too bright, and she couldn't look her mother straight in the face. She thought that smile on her mother, who was by no means a beautiful woman, was lovely. Death tests the true worth of those it confronts—both the one departing and the one left behind.

Relatives began to gather, and a low murmur filled the small house.

"He didn't have to be in such a hurry."
"That's why I told him to go easy on the drinking."
"It's a shame he never got to hold Hinako-chan's baby, isn't it?"

Each and every comment was no doubt meant to mourn her father's somewhat premature death before the age of seventy, but in the end, they all sounded like grievances against the deceased.

Glad for the excuse, Tsukie took the funeral director's request to choose a portrait for the service as an opportunity to usher her mother upstairs. Tsukie couldn't stand relatives like her aunts and uncles. Despite their relationship being so thin they only ever saw each other at weddings and funerals, they were always meddling—in her education, her job, her marriage, her children.

If she ever made the mistake of expressing an opinion that didn't align with their values, she'd be subjected to a lecture delivered with all the authority of an elder. Of course, much of it was just empty platitudes for the occasion, but it was so incredibly annoying that Tsukie always left dealing with relatives to Hinako. Hinako was a social butterfly who could skillfully play along with her aunts' and uncles' nosy small talk. That was why, at times like this, she wished Hinako would get there sooner.

It's true what they say—a name can define a person. Hinako grew into a vibrant girl brimming with life, while Tsukie grew up to be the kind of daughter who quietly shrunk in on herself, becoming smaller and smaller until she might one day just disappear.

In the closet of the six-mat room her parents used as a bedroom, old photo albums were packed in tightly. Tsukie pulled one out, its cover faded and smelling faintly of mildew, and began to turn the thick pages.

Most old albums used triangular, pocket-like stickers to hold the photos to the page, so they had to be handled with care. The adhesive on those corners, after decades, was peeling off in many places.

The high-growth period of the Showa era. A young couple built a house and planted a plum tree in the yard. Ever since, this white plum tree had watched over the family's milestones. As a child, Tsukie loved to chase the pure white petals dancing in the wind, letting the flurries shower over her. She and Hinako would gather the petals and make necklaces.

In the photo, her father stood beside the sapling, using the shovel he'd used for planting like a cane, his chest puffed out with pride in just a running shirt. Her mother, on the other side of the camera, must have been smiling happily as well. She could picture her expression perfectly.

The time captured in the sepia-toned photograph. There, etched into a scene from a day that would never return, was a small but certain happiness.

Tsukie couldn't hold back the emotion welling up inside her and gently wiped the corner of her eye with a fingertip.

"Dad's like a little kid," Tsukie said, her face a mixture of tears and laughter.

"It's written all over his face, isn't it? 'I'm the king of my castle.' You'd think he wouldn't want to be photographed in a running shirt and boots, though," her mother said lovingly. Then she added, a little troubled, "Your father was always like that at home, so the only pictures of him properly dressed in a suit are from company trips. I wonder if that's what funeral portraits are supposed to be. How bland."

"Apparently a snapshot is fine. The man from the funeral home said they can use a computer now to put him in a formal crested kimono or a suit. He even said they can add more hair."

At the mention of hair, her mother laughed softly. "Now that you mention it, he was always so worried about that, wasn't he?" she said, her gaze distant. On top of her father's dresser was a lineup of half-used hair growth tonics.

He would declare, "This one really works!" and diligently try every new product that came on the market. Watching him, Tsukie used to wonder if this, too, was a kind of masculine romanticism.

For the next hour or so, the two of them lost themselves in rambling stories as they looked at the photos. When a family member passes away, the survivors' need to talk about the deceased is likely for the sake of putting their own feelings in order.

Losing someone close to you means you have to begin the work of filling the space they occupied within you. That work might be talking with someone who shares your feelings, or it might be painting a picture or writing down memories, or perhaps it's taking up the work the deceased left unfinished. As you come to terms with it all, the seasons turn without that person, and slowly, you grow accustomed to their absence.

In the end, Tsukie took out the photo of her father from the album, the one where he had just planted the plum tree and was beaming with a look of proud accomplishment on his face. The stiff expression in his ID photo and the formal smile in the family portrait taken at a studio just didn't feel right.

That smile on her father's face at the moment he planted a commemorative tree for his long-awaited home seemed to shine, brimming with life.

"Don't you think he looks a little too young?" her mother asked, though she squinted, captivated by the photo. It was surely a picture filled with memories only the two of them understood. If so, that made it all the more fitting.

"Honestly, I think he looks most like himself in the running shirt, but for the relatives' sake, we should probably have them change it to a suit."

"I suppose you're right."

Her mother took the photo and gently drew it to her chest, as if cradling it in both hands.

Her father had been an ordinary office worker, but in his younger days, he often came home in the wee hours after entertaining clients. She remembered half-hearing him, dead drunk, come home singing happily only to be chided by her mother. At times like that, he would get the urge to dote on his daughters, shaking off their mother's attempts to stop him and coming to embrace them in their sleep, rubbing his stubbly cheek against theirs. For a child's soft skin, it was quite irritating, and when they cried "Ouch, ouch!" and tried to get away, he would breathe his alcohol-laden breath on them and say, "There, there. You love your daddy that much, do you? Let's sleep together," making a happy misunderstanding before occupying their futon and sprawling out. Once he fell asleep like that, no one could move his large frame. The girls were used to it, though, and would cleverly slip into the gaps between his unconscious arms and legs, waking up in the morning in the most ridiculous sleeping positions.

Perhaps that was his own way of having skinship with the daughters he couldn't have dinner with. Or maybe it was just the selfish whim of a drunk.

"The priest is here," came a voice as her daughter, Mayu, climbed the stairs. There were many things the bereaved family had to decide, such as funeral arrangements and a posthumous Buddhist name. Even the number of monks for the sutra chanting had to be decided in detail, and of course, the price varied with the number.

She had been surprised when the funeral director showed her a catalog of coffins, but she was even more surprised when her uncle told her that the newspaper would be calling, and to decline if they wanted to keep the obituary out of the paper. Apparently, if an obituary is published, the family is inundated with sales calls from caterers, Buddhist altar shops, and the like. What's more, some thieves even checked the dates of the wake to burgle the empty house.

But her father had held a certain social standing. Some of his old friends would only learn of his death through the obituaries. Publishing it in the paper seemed unavoidable.

Mayu reached the top of the stairs and called out again from the landing.

"Mommy, Daddy says the priest is here so you should come down!"

Her daughter Mayu, who was about to start elementary school this spring, was one of the most precocious children in her senior kindergarten class. An only child with no siblings, she apparently enjoyed playing the big sister and looking after the kids in the younger class.

"Okay! I'm coming!"

Tsukie called back to her daughter and stood up. As she did so, a single photograph slipped from an album she had picked up carelessly.

"Oh, you dropped something!"

Mayu ran over and picked up the fallen photo. She looked at it and tilted her head.

"Who's this?"

What? Tsukie thought, and peered at the photo Mayu was holding out.

In that instant, she could have sworn she heard the sound of a wind-up spring snapping in her mind.

The rhythm of the train sleeping at the bottom of her memory, the laughter of the little girls, the falling snow, and the dry melody of a music box. Like a shattered piece of glasswork reassembling as a film is run in reverse, the bittersweet, nostalgic fragments of memory traveled back in time and formed an image in her mind's eye.

Tsukie suddenly recalled the dream she'd had that morning. The two little girls on a single-car train, traveling through an endless snowy plain. The photograph showed two little girls. One was a young Tsukie. And the other was the girl who had been laughing so happily in that dream.

"Mommy? What's wrong? Mommy?"

Mayu's voice brought Tsukie back to her senses. Her mother, who had stood up and was now looking at the photo, murmured nostalgically.

"Oh... isn't that Akina-chan...? She was about your age then, Mayu..."

"Akina... chan?"

Tsukie looked at her mother, as if searching for the key to a memory she had sealed away.

"Have you forgotten? She's Saito Akina-chan, the girl who was in the same ward when Hinako was hospitalized. She was in the same grade as you, and you both got matching red randoseru. You were so excited about going to elementary school together, remember?"

The background of the photo fit with the mention of a hospital stay. The corner of a bed was visible through the open door of a hospital room. Tsukie was in her kindergarten uniform, while the other girl was wearing the uniform's cap. That girl was in pajamas, with an eyepatch over one eye and her left hand bandaged, but her expression was bright and cheerful.

"Our coats, gloves, and boots... were they all matching?"

Her mother clapped her hands together.

"Yes, that's right. You two were truly inseparable... I couldn't tell if you were coming to visit Hinako or Akina-chan. Though, Hinako was only one year old, so I suppose she wasn't much of a playmate."

"Saito... Akina-chan..."

Tsukie murmured the name as if tasting it, then looked at her mother.

"You've never talked about her before, have you? Why?"

"You're the one who stopped talking about her, weren't you?"

"What? But we were such good friends?"

"Yes. Perhaps that's exactly why."

Tsukie felt there was something significant in her mother's words as her gaze drifted into the distance. She was about to press her further, but—

"Hey! Tsukie!"

The sound of her husband calling from downstairs reminded her that the temple priest was here. Tsukie hurriedly called back, left the topic for another time, and led Mayu down the stairs.