O-bon

THe haunt PROJECT IS PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WRITERS SA, AND IS SUPPORTED BY ARTS SOUTH AUSTRALIA.

fiction by Katherine Tamiko Arguile

The first time I felt it, I was standing on my balcony looking out over the river with a glass of whisky in my hand. It was a rupture, sudden and shocking. I couldn’t make any sense of it.

It was the third Friday in July. The sun had set hours before, and I’d wrapped myself against the cold in my mother’s old hand-crocheted shawl. A storm had swept the sky clean, and a fingernail moon hung suspended in the cut-crystal night: those exact words came to mind, rolling around in my head until I erased them with the thought that it was a poetic cliché. But the river below glistened black as an oil slick, the lights of the port dancing across its surface as if in mockery of what had always been. The arrogance of the new, I thought. This river has flowed without pause for aeons through this place. Yertabulti, the place of the sleeping, of the dead.

I knocked back the last of the whisky and leaned against the balcony railings, wondering whether to go inside to pour another shot from the bottle of Hibiki in the kitchen and get back to the manuscript I'd been wrestling with for too long. I needed distraction after that phone call with Sachiko.

Talking to my sister feels like tiptoeing through a field of landmines these days. We haven’t seen each other for almost three years. That old adage absence makes the heart grow fonder doesn’t apply to us; we need physical proximity to feel that sisterly bond, especially after she married Takeshi. I'm always the one that makes the effort to call, and whenever she picks up she sounds surprised, as if she’d forgotten she had a sister. Hey, remember me? I’d quip. We’re related.

It’s all right for you, she snapped back, more than once. You don’t have kids, you have no idea what busy means, she says, as if she’d been forced to have all three of them, as if I sat on my backside all day doing nothing instead of juggling lectures and marking essays and writing research grant applications and keeping my agent happy despite a lack of meaningful progress on my book. As if my sister had forgotten I’d been pregnant once, back before my husband left me for a more fertile woman.

Sometimes I’d remind her of this, knowing how bad it would make her feel. She’d grow defensive, then cry and say she was sorry, that she was exhausted from being up with the baby all night and dealing all day with the twins who were behaving like little shits, that Takeshi never helps with anything and her mother-in-law criticises everything she does. Then I’d feel guilty for manipulating her into feeling bad.

Our mother was surfacing from her long depression and enjoying life again when the aneurysm felled her. Sachiko and I clung to each another in that Tokyo hospital as if we were each other's life rafts. Without Sachiko I would have drowned.

The first crack in our relationship came from how differently we grieved; I couldn't bear to stay in a place that reminded me so much of our mother, while my sister wrapped the city and the company of friends, cousins and aunts around her like a security blanket. We started sorting through our mother’s things, trying to decide who would keep what, but after two days it became too hard and I flew back to London a week after the funeral, taking nothing except my mother’s shawl.

Sachiko stayed on in our mother’s apartment for as long as her visa allowed. When it expired, she came back to London until she could renew her visa and return to Tokyo, and went back and forth like this for a year or two. Whenever she was in London we went out to clubs we used to go to in the old days, getting wasted together as if we were still in our twenties. We had a good time. Strange how we could have happy moments even while we were still so sad, though there was a whiff of desperation to our partying.

It's bloody outrageous, Sachiko shouted at me one night over the pumping bass beats at the Velvet Underground. Why the hell should we need a tourist visa to be allowed to stay in our own damn country? Our mother-land?

If our father had been Japanese and our mother British, our family might have got away with registering us to his kōseki despite us being mixed race. But a British father doesn’t have a kōseki, and if you're not registered, you end up a mukosekisha: a non-citizen, even if you were born and raised in Japan and have Japanese blood. That's the way things were back then.

It didn’t bother me as much as it did Sachiko. Maybe it was because she'd emerged from our mother’s womb looking like she belonged in Japan, while I did not. You’d see people’s brains whirring when they first met us and we introduced ourselves as sisters. A friend confessed that for years he’d thought Sachiko was adopted. He had no idea I was half-Japanese because I’d never mentioned it until we got to know each other better.

After she met Takeshi, Sachiko stopped coming to London. It made it easier for me to move to Australia. Academic tenure was a rare find these days and I leapt at the opportunity. London had become another place that reminded me too much of what I’d lost, and it was time to move on.

✷

I was tangled in these thoughts the night it happened. There was no warning. It felt like a bowling ball cannoning into my solar plexus while a powerful vacuum sucked my guts out at the same time. It didn't hurt, but I knew it was real because I gasped and crumpled to the floor, dropping my whisky glass. It exploded into a million sparkling pieces, a Milky Way spilling across the black balcony tiles.

I curled into foetal position, winded, synapses scrambling to make sense of what had just happened. I lay there a long time, taking shallow breaths, until I felt the chill of the tiles seep through my clothes and into my bones. I hauled myself onto my hands and knees, and once I had my bearings I steadied myself against the balcony railings and stood up. Far below, the dark waters of Yertabulti flowed ever onwards.

✷

Our worst argument came when Sachiko called from Tokyo to say that, since she was marrying Takeshi, she'd take up Japanese citizenship. It’s what he and her future in-laws wanted. Sachiko renouncing her British and Australian passports so she could have a Japanese one felt like a betrayal; we'd be segregated from each other forever. When she said I should just marry a Japanese man I was outraged, reminding her it was sheer chance that bestowed her with a face that allowed her to belong there, while mine forever labelled me an outsider. Get over yourself and lighten the fuck up, she said, and that kicked off the first of the ever-increasing number of fights we kept having over the phone.

✷

As I stepped back into the apartment I noticed an odd sensation remained in my body, as if its centre had hollowed out and left behind a bag of skin, its slackened boundary a shadow bulging and swelling behind me like a spent parachute. Not your common-or-garden shadow, not a mere play of light against the pass-for-white body the people of this red-dust country see me inhabiting, but something material, measurable. It felt gelatinous, like the jellyfish that puff their skirts along the river of the dead.

I rubbed my belly under my sweater, my icy hands making its skin shiver up with goose bumps. I was so disoriented by what had just happened that I half-expected a hole to have opened up there. The skin felt sweaty and a touch too fleshy for my liking, but otherwise my torso was as solid as ever. I poured myself a generous measure of whisky and gulped it down, poured another and took the glass and the bottle over to the sofa where I'd been working on my manuscript earlier, before that hideous phone conversation with Sachiko.

I ignored the cursor blinking on the half-finished manuscript and opened my browser. Maybe the cataclysm had been a sign of some neurological condition. I struggled to find the right search terms: feeling of sudden internal rupture, sensation of punch in gut, dragging feeling in torso, feeling of hollow body. I ruled out stroke, brain tumour, multiple sclerosis, depression. Well, maybe I was a little depressed, but who wasn't these days, locked down and held hostage to a pandemic? I didn’t mind being alone. I certainly didn't feel depressed enough to cause such a bizarre sensation.

Nothing enlightening came up, so I tried feeling of body part missing, and WebMD came up with:

People with Cotard's syndrome (also called walking corpse syndrome or Cotard's delusion) believe that parts of their body are missing, or that they are dying, dead, or don't exist. Cotard's syndrome is rare, with about 200 known cases worldwide.

✷

I wasn't that special. I noted it down in case it came in useful for a story some time, and poured myself another glass.

✷

I'd phoned Sachiko that afternoon because it was O-bon. Until the pandemic closed borders I'd returned to Tokyo every July to be with Sachiko and our family for the festival, even after our mother died. We loved that time of year when we were kids. The whole family would head to the temple to tend to the family grave, to rinse the city dust off the granite grave marker and offer flowers, incense and food. We’d put our hands together and whisper our mantras.

The adults spoke about the recent dead as if they were still alive. Look, Ryōji, do you see how the children have grown? Naomi, tell Obāchan how well you did in your school exams this year. We were encouraged to speak to the dead as if they were still amongst the living.

Afterwards, we’d feast in a private zashiki room at the restaurant our uncle always booked for O-bon. We’d eat, Sachiko and I playing and running around the tatami with our cousins between mouthfuls until someone told us to calm down. The next evening we’d head to the temple in our yukata, bright obi sashes and wooden geta to choose something to eat from the endless yatai food stalls in its lantern-lit grounds, the air hazy and fragrant with smoke rising from yakitori or sweet shoyu-glazed corn roasting over charcoal braziers. We'd be given pocket money to buy masks of our favourite anime characters, and try our luck at the fairground games.

The next night, we’d circle around the yagura to dance the familiar bon-odori steps with everyone in our neighbourhood, waving our arms and clapping in all the right places. It was one of the few times I felt I belonged, though that stopped once I hit puberty and became a gawky, brown-haired alien. I noticed how people from outside our neighbourhood stared.

Bonfires at the start of O-bon help the spirits of the dead find their way home to the people they love in the living world. In the years after her death, I had moments where I’d allow myself to believe that our mother came home to us too, along with our dead grandparents, uncles and ancestors. I found comfort in the O-bon family outing to the ancestral grave where her ashes were interred, the family feast and the company of my cousins and their children. But I stopped joining in with the others for the bon-odori dances. I’d watch Sachiko go around the yagura as she’d always done. After a few days of dancing and feasting, bonfires were set alight again so the spirits could find their way back to the realms of the dead.

✷

That afternoon, I'd asked Sachiko what was happening to the festival this year.

The bon-odori is cancelled, Sachiko said. No yatai at the temple, no stalls or games. It’s miserable and the kids are so disappointed. But we did go with the whole family to Seikyōji to tend to the graves.

Seikyōji? What about Chōshōji? Didn't you go with the family?

Of course not.

It was that of course that did it.

So you didn’t bother going. That’s nice.

It’s not my family any more, Naomi. I’m a Sekihara now. Come on, you know the rules.

Fuck the rules, I said, which unleashed an argument that escalated further than we’d ever gone before. We said terrible things to one another, and the phone call ended with Sachiko hanging up on me.

✷

I woke next morning on the sofa with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. My laptop had died in the night. I got up to find my charger, tiny pickaxes stabbing at my temples in time with each heartbeat. I plugged in my laptop, swilled out my whisky glass and filled it with water and swallowed a couple of Panadol. I couldn’t face the manuscript, but forced myself to contemplate breakfast, putting two slices of bread into the toaster, although the last thing I felt like doing was eating.

I was taken aback by the intensity of my reaction to Sachiko not going to our family grave for O-bon. Once the anger had burned away it left behind a profound feeling of emptiness and desolation. I knew the rest of our family would have gone to the ancestral grave to pay their respects. The reality was that our mother was dead, gone forever, but I’d clung to the magical thinking that kept me from plunging into the abyss that yawed open whenever I thought how she didn’t exist anymore. It wasn’t just that it was a comfort for me and for Sachiko to think of O-bon as a time when we might be in the unseen company of our mother. It was the feeling that our mother might see we were still there for her, that we hadn’t abandoned her like our father had done.

If I lit a bonfire here, if I thought of my mother, would her spirit come to find me? Would she choose to go to Tokyo over coming here to see me? Would she come here, to this land that never belonged to us? Would she be wondering where Sachiko was, where I was? How would she travel here? Over the ocean?

Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. Once you’re dead, that’s it. I slathered my toast with butter and jam and stepped out onto the balcony with my plate. Fresh air might restore my sanity.

A line of burning gold on the horizon announced the rising sun, and I watched the sky catch alight as I ate. It was going to be one of those glorious, bright winter days. But the sun’s rays started to make me nauseous, and eating wasn’t filling up that hollow feeling in my body, which was growing more intense. The paracetamol hadn’t kicked in yet, and my head was still pounding. I leaned over the railings to gaze down at the river. It was still dark, still flowing.

✷

ね〜

ね〜ちゃん

I jumped. A child’s voice from very close by. There wasn’t anyone on the quayside below. It might have come from one of the apartments above me, but as far as I knew I didn’t have any Japanese neighbours. Who was this, calling me big sister? The voice seemed to have come from inside my body. I was pierced with a flash of terror. What in all hell was this?

ね〜

Ne~chan, nani shitenno?

Don’t, I said, as if whatever it was could hear me. I spoke it like a spell. Please don’t.

ね〜ちゃん

It whimpered, as if tears were coming. I blocked my ears, but the voice was still there, even louder than before. It was coming from inside me.

やめて, I said. Please stop. Just stop it.

Maybe I was having some kind of breakdown. My stomach spasmed and I leaned out over the railings, thinking I was going to vomit. I retched but nothing came out. Still the voice went on.

ね〜ちゃん. Big sister. What are you doing?

I began to cry. I hadn’t cried since our mother died, and before that, only when I had to give birth to my stillborn son. I didn’t even cry when my husband left me afterwards. I was not someone who cried. I was solid, steady.

I grasped at my belly and my sweater bunched inwards. There was a real hole there. I pushed at the hollow with my fingers and I grew limp with horror. It felt as if something was emerging from it, but my mind stopped there. I didn’t want to know. The light of the sun had been pressing in, but now my vision began to fizz and grow dark. I couldn’t stop crying, thought I might faint. Something was terribly wrong. I wanted to phone Sachiko, but after yesterday’s fight I knew that lifeline was gone.

I went back indoors, took a couple of sleeping pills and went to bed. When I woke later that afternoon, disoriented in the half-light, my headache was gone, and I was hungry. I went to the kitchen to make myself something to eat. After I finish eating, I thought, I might walk to the beach on the other side of the peninsula, where the waters of Yertabulti flow into the ocean. Maybe I could light a bonfire there on the sand. Nobody would be there, in the dark, in the cold. Maybe I could invoke my mother’s spirit with it.

✷

I stand at the shoreline, waiting for darkness so I can begin. I pull my mother’s shawl tight around my nakedness to blunt the cut-glass chill. I drop my head back and gaze up at the stars. They prick holes through the ink-deepening velvet above me.

My head spins with the vastness of it all, distracting me from the frozen ache of my toes burrowed in wet sand. Behind me, set back from the incoming tide, the black outline of the mound of flammable detritus I've gathered from the dunes rustles in protest with each sigh of icy wind.

The last trace of light has disappeared from the sky and it is time. I close my eyes and breathe salt air into my lungs. The wind is blowing free and unchallenged along this straight, sparse stretch of coastline; I slide my mother’s shawl off my shoulders for a moment to allow my goose-bumped skin to meet it. Global air, I say aloud. Whenever the wind blows from the northeast I imagine those same oxygen molecules breathed in and transmuted by the trees and the foxes and the birds and people of the lands where my body was built in my mother's womb.

✷

ね〜

ね〜ちゃん

There it is again, that voice. But I don’t feel the terror I’d felt that morning. I reach down to touch my naked belly, the flesh cold like meat on a butcher’s slab. The hole is still there. It’s real; I can put my fingers inside it. I feel a sensation rising inside me, of something emerging and then, there she is, climbing out of my belly to flop onto the sand, like the baby seals I’ve seen emerging from their mothers in nature documentaries. The child lies curled in the sand, her long, dark brown hair covering her face, and she’s weeping, but still I feel no fear. From the size of her body, she looks as if she’s about eight or nine years old. She won’t stop sobbing. I want to reach out to her, ask her why she’s crying, but I stand in the cold wind, the edge of the waves licking at my toes, and wait.

ね〜ちゃん, she cries. Big sister. What are you doing?

I don’t know, I say.

Why did you leave me on my own? You abandoned me.

I don’t even know who you are, I say.

She stops crying and scrubs at her face with her hands. She stands and turns to me. I stare back at myself, the eight-year-old face I know from old photos. The child looks at me, face red from crying, snot running from her nose. She closes her eyes and looks as if she might fall. I step forward to catch her and she holds on tight, gripping her arms around me as if she were drowning.

だいじょうぶよ, I say, and hold her. It’s okay. I’m here.

✷

I wrap my mother’s shawl around us and stand this way on the sand, listening to the waves shushing in the dark. We sway together in the wind. I don’t feel the cold any more. I stroke her hair. Shall we light the fire? I ask, and I feel her nod.

She won’t let go of me, so we waddle back to the pile of driftwood and dead leaves, a four-legged chimera. I reach for the matches in the pocket of my jeans crumpled in the sand. Odd how I can’t feel the cold, yet my fingers are stiff with it. I struggle to strike the match, drop it, take another. It blazes bright for a second before blowing out in the wind. I strike another, and again, it goes out. I crouch down, me and my child self, using our bodies to protect the next flame from the wind but it, too, blows out. It’s no use, I say. We can’t make a fire so our mother can find us. I feel like crying.

She won’t come to us here anyway, says the child. It’s not her land to return to. She can’t come here.

Fat tears roll down my cheeks, and now it’s her turn to comfort me, reaching up with icy fingers to wipe them away.

We can go to meet her, though, she says, if we wade into the ocean. We’ll find her in the waves. She takes my hand and leads me to the shoreline. いっしょに行こう, おね〜ちゃん。Let’s go together. Our mother will be waiting for us.

I follow her into the water. Deeper and deeper we go, the waves pushing against us, but we stay upright. I still don’t feel the cold. When the waves reach my belly, I feel my child-self clamber back inside. I wade further in, the water reaching my neck. Further up the coast, in the distance, the lights of the new port twinkles over the estuary mouth where the waters of Yertabulti flow to join the ocean, but here, the waves are dark, beating out their eternal rhythm. I let go of my mother’s shawl and watch it drift away. The waves are covering my mouth now, and I open it and breathe in salt water. I walk further in until the waves close over the top of my head, and I stand in the dark, waiting for my mother to come and find me.

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Born and raised in Tokyo, Katherine Tamiko Arguile is an author and arts journalist of Japanese and Anglo-British descent. Her debut novel, The Things She Owned, was shortlisted for the 2021 MUD Literary Prize. Meshi: A Personal History of Japanese Food was released in 2022 and is her first work of nonfiction.