Chasing Spirits and Shadows

1.

I’ve always believed in spirits. It’s hard not to, when you hear them whistling through the trees and trickling down clay roof tiles. They live in the smell of outdated calendars, in the sounds of pebbles skipping on the river, and in the unreachable tips of centuries-old cedar. When I listen closely in the shadow of the hibernating volcano, I feel them pacing beneath my toes. When I close my eyes, I hear them calling my name.

My history precedes me. It begins here, in Minami Oguni, at the end of Milk Road, whose asphalt skims the butter-smooth grass that ripples in the crisp wind of Mount Aso. Nestled by an ancient caldera, Minami Oguni is a town of hot springs, earthquakes, and Shinto-Buddhist myths. 

In 1974, my mama is born here, the first daughter of the Ino Family and named Megumi: blessing. Their house is across from the town’s only junior high and next door to a small shrine of Tenjin-sama, deity of scholarship and natural disasters. 

The shrine is on a same-sized lot as the house, and it’s covered in gravel. In the center is a roofed kagura stage and behind it a sanctuary that enshrines Sugawara no Michizane, the kami, or god, of learning. Japanese wisteria blankets a wood-framed deck and the shrine’s torii gate marks a portal from the mundane to the sacred. My mama’s grandma told her, and mine told me, that if you throw the pebbles from the ground at the torii and they land atop, it’s good luck.

My mama often played hide-and-seek at the shrine next door, giggling as she tiptoed around the gravel, as if to avoid disturbing the spirits of kami stowed within its walls. She grew with these spirits and with the hallowed rice paddies, ephemeral cicadas, and rocky hills dotted with the deep viridescence of Japanese cedar. 

Time is still in Minami Oguni. Every summer my mama returns—first as a university student, then as a newly-wed, and finally, as a mother—and nothing has changed except the new wrinkles on her father’s face carved into his skin. 

Every time I visit, too, the entire house feels like a time capsule of sorts. My list of findings is long and obscure: 500 yen notes that went obsolete in the ’80s, a newspaper from 1896 during the Meiji Era, my grandpa’s high school transcript, my sticker book from 2009, my mama’s diary from her pregnancy, a box full of cassette tapes, and so on.

Here, present and past are blurred: my grandparents coexist with these trinkets of yesterday and with the spirits of the dead.

Right across from the main entrance of the house at the end of the Japanese garden, there is a formal zashiki, or guest room, whose floor is lined end-to-end with tatami mats hand-woven with rush grass. On one end is a kami-dana, or a miniature Shinto altar, at the top of the wall. On the other end is an ornate butsu-dan, or a Buddhist altar, enshrining Amida, the Buddha of Limitless Light. Framed photographs of my dead relatives smile down from above.

I was mighty afraid of this room when I was a child. Even now, I’ll admit that I scurry a little faster when I walk by at night. When I sleep here, even in the murky darkness, I feel their dead eyes looking down on me, quietly sifting through my thoughts. 

Here, time is so still and solid, if you reached for it from your futon, you could probably feel it woven in the tatami.

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2. 

In Japanese folklore, kami-kakushi is the hide-and-seek of the gods. It is to become lost in nature, to be kidnapped by the spirits of kami. It is to be spirited away.

My twentieth summer and my fourth in Tokyo, my mom and I visited Meiji Jingu, a Shinto shrine on seventy hectares of forest in the Shibuya ward. The shrine was originally built in 1920 after the death of Emperor Meiji and his Empress Shoken. It was destroyed in the Bombing of Tokyo during World War II but was restored in 1958.

The shrine is a vacuum. No sound penetrates its confines. It’s a ten minute drive away from the busiest crosswalk on Earth and the colorful and buzzing Harajuku, but not a honk of the megapolis can be heard in the forest.

“I’m scared,” I say to my mom, who laughingly agrees. “There’s definitely spirits here.”

The path through the forest leading to the shrine is so silent you can hear the kamis running through trees, rippling the leaves. When I walk through the torii gate to the main sanctuary area, I am transported from a mortal realm to the Spirit World.

I feel like Chihiro from Ghibli’s Spirited Away when she crosses the red bridge to the bathhouse. In the scene, she holds her breath as she navigates through a swarm of spirits so they won’t smell her human presence.

I, too, hold my breath, though I can’t see the spirits that are undoubtedly here. At the main sanctuary, I grab the thick rope to ring the bell, clap twice, and bow.

In that moment, I decide that I’ll pray for my grandpa, who looks twelve years older than the last time I returned to Japan, three years ago.

At the gift shop, I buy an omamori, or amulet, for him to stay healthy. I’m scared of death and gods, but there is comfort in trusting something I can’t touch.

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3.

I can still recite the words to Psalm 23. They are printed on the tip of my tongue, just as they are in the leather-bound Bibles in the nooks of the pews. I can still hear the verses echoing through the chapel at Rice Temple Baptist, the red carpet not quite dense enough to drown my high-pitched voice. 

When Ms. Ann speaks of God’s presence in the valley of the shadow of death, I imagine hills of bright green grass just like that of Mount Aso, a view I left across the Pacific Ocean two days before Christmas. My r’s still don’t curl as nicely as the blue-eyed boy’s next to me, but at least I can play the piano better.

I attend Wednesday evening Bible classes, and I don’t really understand how Noah fit giraffes and hippos in his boat or how Jesus cut a loaf of bread into 5,000 pieces, but I stay for the prizes I get for memorizing verses. I know Romans 3:23 and John 3:16 before I know the Pledge of Allegiance and the Texas State Pledge.

Ms. Ann teaches me piano, God, handbells, and the recorder. I’ve learned to play Amazing Grace, Hot Cross Buns, and Ode to Joy so well on the recorder that Ms. Sour, the music teacher at my school, gives me a gold string to tie at its end.

In two months, Ms. Servous promotes me from the ESL to the regular spelling tests. It’s not too late after that that I start wishing my eyes were less slanted and my name less Japanese.

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“Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can’t remember.” — Zeniba, in Spirited Away

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4. 

At the end of June, my mama buys a cam-corder. She complains to me, “your papa didn’t want to pay $800 to get old tapes digitized”; and so, I’m entrusted with the task of bringing these memories to life.

There are over 50 video cassettes neatly lined in an old gift box. We found these tapes on the second floor of my grandparents’ house last summer, and my mom brought them with us to Texas.

The tapes are labeled in my mama’s handwriting, dating from my parents’ wedding in 2001 to our last year in Japan, 2010. Birth of Mizuki, one reads. Another: New Years in Minami Oguni.

I pick one out that says Mischievous Mizuki and place it carefully into the cam-corder. In the tiny foldable screen, a video of me and my brother circa 2006 starts playing.

My mama and I spend hours and hours watching these videos. Her voice is the same, but everything about me and my brother has changed. It’s bittersweet to see my grandpa, who’s now unable to walk, playing catch with my brother.

It feels weird to see my life before America. There’s sadness and guilt to know this same two-year-old, five-year-old, and seven-year-old will, for many years, learn to wish her mama wasn’t who she was, and that she was not born Japanese but American.

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5. 

There is fear in goodbyes. At the end of every visit to Japan, I don’t know when I will next be back. I shake my grandpa’s fragile hand firmly, feeling his weakened veins within my palms. I hug my grandma, unable to fully articulate the farewell I fear will be the last.

Before we leave every time, my grandpa voices his first and only request: that we pay respect to the spirits and to our ancestors. I enter the zashiki, and sit down at the Buddhist altar that I subconsciously avoided my entire time there. I hammer the singing bowl that chimes its piercing hum through the house, and bring my palms together.

At the shrine next door, I clap twice, bow, and ring its bell. I don’t know the kami inside, but it gives me peace to know that it will always be there, no matter how long my return takes.

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“I remember you falling into my river, and I remember your pink little shoe.” — Haku, in Spirited Away

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6.

There is something that unsettles me about Hayao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away. Maybe it’s the feeling of being stuck in another world, unable to return. Maybe it reminds me too much of the photos of my ancestors above the altar or the unspoken feeling that the spirits of kami are always observing me every time I return to Minami Oguni.

Thirteen years since my move to America, little proof remains of my life in Japan. It exists in the film I digitized this summer and in the locket that hangs in my grandparent’s bedroom. It exists in my memory and in recollections of summers I spent in their house under the close watch of my ancestors. It exists in my conversations and in my mother tongue that’s started to slip and fade. 

After every visit back to Japan, I’m left with a strong urge to write. This too, will someday remind me of my time there.

Author Bio: Mizuki Kai is a junior concentrating in Business-Economics and English Nonfiction.