My wife Miko hadn’t spoken to her family for twenty years when she got the call. I felt like a kid with my ear to the keyhole, listening to in-laws I’d never met chatter away in Japanese. Two hours later, my wife stepped out of the office and said the four words I dread most in any language:
“We need to talk.”
Miko never told me why she left Japan. In fact, it was the only rule she ever insisted on in our relationship: her family was an off-limits topic–
But I can’t say I wasn’t curious. Questions about my wife’s past had built up over the years like dust in hard-to-reach places, but that night at our kitchen table, the answers were more than I’d bargained for.
“My two sisters, two brothers and I were born in a town called Saruo, in Hyogo. It’s a few houses stretched out along a river between green hills. The population’s been decreasing in every census since about 1930. It was a cozy place to be a child…but a hard place to be an adult.” Miko had opened a beer while she talked; she downed half of it in one gulp. “Ugh. My father used to drink like that. Chug half, sip the rest. He was a drunk, a layabout, and a wife-beater–just like his father was. They’re both dead now, though.”
“I’m sorry–” I began. Miko just laughed.
“I guess I’m hitting you with a lot, aren’t I? But for me, it feels like all this happened in another life. What matters isn’t that my father is dead. What matters is how he died. That’s why I’m here. You remember those brothers and sisters I told you about? Not a single one of them lives in Japan. Hina and her two kids are in Brazil. Yui and her wife are in Germany. My brothers Hiroyuki and Kiyoshi run a delivery business in Taiwan together. They could be in Saruo in just a few hours, but they never visit.”
“Well, I mean…why?” the question was out of my mouth before I could stop myself.
“I’m getting to that. Like I said, my father and grandfather weren’t good for much except piling up bottles for recycling. I guess it hurt all of us, but it hurt my great-grandfather, Takumi, the most. He’d spent his life working vegetable and rice patches along the river. He’d lived through the war, and he wanted to be sure that no matter how poor we were, the family wouldn’t starve like so many others did back then. But as soon as they were old enough, both his son and grandson left his life’s work to rot.” Miko paused.
“I only have one memory of great-grandpa Takumi. It’s late afternoon, and I’m bringing over a basket of food. Great-grandpa Takumi can’t take care of the farmhouse by himself, but he’s too stubborn to leave. Without the children or their things it feels like there’s nothing in the whole place except the sound of his ragged breaths echoing through the empty rooms. With each breath he keeps repeating these words. They sound like nonsense, until I realize that they’re the names of his fields. The ground that he dug our family’s food from, year after year…when I finally tiptoe up the stairs, I’m scared to approach him. Up close, great-grandpa Takumi looks like the mummies in my school textbook. His skin is like old rice paper…Its like I can see his skull. I try to set the basket down quietly and get out of there, but as soon as I reach the futon, his bony hand shoots out from under it and grabs my ankle. Great-grandpa Takumi looks dead already, but his grip is like iron, and he hisses in this old-style Japanese I can barely understand: ‘who-is-caring for-our-land?!’”
Miko shuddered, finished her beer and opened another.
“It was after great-grandpa Takumi died that strange things started happening around his son, my grandfather Senjuro. He started calling our house, shouting about how horribly he was being treated:
‘Your grandmother must’ve put maggots in my rice!’
‘My wicked wife put sake bottles all around me while I slept, can you believe it? I slipped and nearly died!’
‘That crazy woman, she wrote the kanji for USELESS in blood on my bathroom mirror–and still swears she didn’t do it. I’m living in a madhouse, I’m telling you…’
“Senjuro’s nagging drove my grandmother to an early grave. Until the very end, she swore she had nothing to do with the weird pranks that plagued her layabout husband. After her death, grandpa Senjuro got even crazier:
‘The mud-man is here again. I can hear him walking around downstairs. Send the police!’
‘He lays on my chest at night, whispering in my ear. He’s so heavy…I can’t breath…and I wake up covered in filth! One of these nights he’s going to crush me!’
“They found grandpa Senjuro’s body a few weeks later. There were muddy bare footprints going from the door to his deathbed, but since they stopped there, the police figured grandpa Senjuro had smothered himself. Just another alcoholic suicide.
“My father Ichiro was never the same after that. He moved the family to Osaka, where my mom got a job as a nurse…but my father didn’t improve. He said drinking himself to sleep was the only way to make the nightmares stop. He kept losing things, nothing was ever where Ichiro left it. He wasted money on telephone exorcists and plugged up the gaps around our doors so that ‘evil spirits’ wouldn’t get in. No company in Osaka would hire a guy like that!”
“I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like…” I reached across the table and squeezed Miko’s hand.
“That’s the thing about family. Whatever is normal in your family, that becomes normal for you. My brothers and I would stay up late hiding beneath the sheets with flashlights, looking at all the creepy pictures in our father’s paranormal books. They didn’t do him much good, though. No matter how many psychics Ichiro paid or how many rituals he performed in our living room, he could never change his luck.
“The first night our father didn’t come home, mother didn’t even notice. She worked late, and it wasn’t the first time. By the third night, though, she started getting suspicious. It turned out that the police had found him back in Saruo, in one of great-grandpa Tamuki’s rice fields. Ichiro was, well, naked. His bare feet were bleeding like he’d somehow run there all the way from Osaka. They said he just kept scratching at the ground, saying ‘I’m sorry, forgive me’ over and over. He died of exposure, and all the seeds he’d eaten.”
“What?”
“Well, that was in February, right after Setsubun, so it was quite cold,” my wife shrugged.
“No, the other part–seeds?!”
“Ichiro’s belly was full of them. So full that it burst. Pumpkin, taro, lotus root–all the crops that great-grandpa Takumi used to plant. The crops that got the family through the war. One policeman suspected that our father had been force-fed the seeds…but by that point we all just wanted to put the whole thing behind us, so he left that part out of his report. Officials in the country are like that when they know a family, and besides, I think they wanted to get us out of there. They considered us sort of, well, cursed.
“Our mother Yoriko never used that word…but I think she believed it, and she had a plan. Other kids our age slept in dorms at private academies and ate picture-perfect meals at trending cafés…the five of us stayed in the same tiny apartment and ate the cheapest bulk food we could find. Our mother was saving up to get all five of us out of Japan, and while she never mentioned the word ‘curse’…she did a good job of making it clear what might happen to us if we didn’t study hard and leave the country.”
“If those fields were really so important to your great-grandpa…if there really is a…you know…why didn’t one of you just go there and work the land?”
Miko looked at me like I’d just swallowed a Tide Pod. “You’ve never done subsistence farming, have you? It’s backbreaking work, all day long, and all you get is enough to feed yourself and a few other people. There’s barely anything left over to sell, and no one wants to buy your ugly handful of vegetables anyway. There’d be no money for housing or fuel or fun…you’d have to work a night job just to make ends meet. I don’t know when you’d sleep. There’s a reason that most rice and vegetable patches in Japan nowadays are cared for by retirees and schoolchildren. No one else has the time.” Miko sighed and crumpled up her beer can. “Well, I guess you can see for yourself soon enough.” She squeezed my hand tight. “Will you come?”
“Of course, but I mean…after all this time…Why?”
“Yoriko, our mother, died recently. That’s what the call was about. My brothers in Taiwan got a letter from the local government, and another one from a priestess back in Saruo. The letter says that our mother’s last wish was to be buried in her hometown, and to have one last exorcism performed on the family house so that we could all finally visit home.” Miko burst into tears. “I can’t stand it! I can’t stand the idea of leaving mom’s funeral to a bunch of lawyers, no ceremony, just shoved in a box in the city! After all she did for us–”
“It’s okay.” I stood up. “I can take some emergency time off work. Just tell me when to book the flight.”
At the time, I was committed…but somewhere over the nighttime Pacific I started to have doubts. First off, the only place that mentioned Yoriko’s ‘last wish’ was the letter of this so-called ‘priestess’ in Saruo. Even Miko admitted that all of this was based on the testimony of someone she’d never heard of, who was hiring herself on as the family exorcist to boot. I looked at Miko, dozing on my shoulder. I thought about her father’s misplaced trust in psychics, his drinking habits…and suspected that maybe there was more of him in Miko than she’d like to admit.
It was still night when we landed in Osaka: a multi-leveled honeycomb of light, sound, and people. Miko seemed even more disoriented than I was. In a 24-hour restaurant attached to a forgettable hotel, I finally met my in-laws. It was a somber event of bows, handshakes, and badly-translated condolences. A waitress vacuumed in the background.
If I hadn’t been so tired that night, I might have been uneasy about being here, the country where my wife’s family seemed marked for death–but nothing strange happened in the hotel. Well, almost nothing. While I was using the tiny hotel toilet that night, I heard footsteps in the hallway. They paused in front of our door, and after a long minute, moved on. I went back to sleep and thought nothing of it, not even when we had to roll our luggage around the muddy bare footprints on the hallway carpet.
We got to know each other on the three-hour car ride to Saruo. Hiroyuki and Kiyoshi were the pranksters; they spent the ride telling bad jokes in worse English and trying to teach me obscene tongue-twisters in Japanese. Yui was the cynical one, rolling her eyes and smoking like a chimney, while Hina acted like our kindergarten teacher, making sure we all had our lunches and knew how it would be before the next bathroom break. For Miko’s family, it was almost like no time had passed at all. Even though we were packed into the car like sardines, I liked them immediately.
At the local town hall, we were told that the priestess would meet us at Tamuki’s house in the country. From there, she’d accompany us to the funeral ceremony. I was a little disconcerted to learn that the priestess wasn’t from Saruo at all; she’d just turned up shortly after Yuriko’s death. I was starting to smell a scammer, but this was an important moment for Miko’s family and I didn’t want to ruin it.
I’d never seen Takumi’s house, but I recognized it right away from Miko’s description: a simple wooden structure among fields beside the river, two-storied but somehow squat, abandoned but somehow sturdy. We stood in the weeds in front of the shuttered building. Everyone else had gotten very quiet. It was like the whole countryside was holding its breath.
“We used to spend so many summers here…” Hiroyuki said, just to break the silence. No one answered. Something else was bothering me: where was this ‘priestess’? Had she walked here somehow? Could priestesses even drive?
Finally, Yui sighed impatiently and grabbed the house keys from the dashboard…but the door was already unlocked. One by one, we stepped inside.
The water and electricity had been shut off long ago. The empty rooms smelled of sun-baked wood and dusty straw. Nothing moved; not even spiders scurried away across the tatami. There was already one pair of sandals in the entryway.
“Akano-san?” Yui called out the name from the priestess’ card. She held it like some kind of talisman. I saw, or thought I saw, a hunched-over figure in the shadows of the old wood-fire kitchen at the end of the hall. We all exchanged an uncomfortable glance. It seems silly now, but we all stopped to take off our shoes before continuing to the kitchen. To do otherwise seemed rude…and none of us wanted to make any loud noises in Takumi’s house.
The priestess stood in the center of the kitchen, backlit by the overgrown windows. All we could see were her stray gray hairs and white-and-red traditional outfit. “Akano-san…?” Yui repeated.
The priestess held up hand for silence. There was something wrong, almost puppetlike, about her movements.
“Well well,” she announced in creaky, formal Japanese. “Everyone together at last. Where have you all been?” No one dared to answer her. Her head twisted unnaturally as she looked from one guilty face to another. “I said, where have you all been?” her voice became raspy, then deep and gurgling like something bubbling up from the earth– “There are fields that need planting!”
Suddenly, it was like a hundred things were happening at once. ‘Priestess Akano’ collapsed into an empty pile of cloth, topped with a hairlike nest of straw. Drawers flew out of the kitchen wall, slamming into Hiroyuki and Kiyoshi with so much force they were thrown back against the wall. Yui ran for it: she crashed through a flimsy paper door into a dark storage room. I don’t know what happened to her in there, but I heard fingernails being dragged across straw mats and a shriek that seemed to fade into the distance forever. Hina got down on her knees and started to pray. Behind her, pots, cabinets, and loose furniture continued to batter Hiroyuki and Kiyoshi–even though they were surely already dead. The sickening meaty sounds reverberated through the house, but weren’t enough to hide the footsteps coming down the stairs.
The thing that came into the kitchen had the gaunt eyes and emaciated body of a death camp survivor, but was completely made of mud. It casually picked up a giant wooden mallet from the wall and smashed Hina’s head in while she was still praying. It kept hammering, repeating three words that I’ll never forget:
“Disrespectful. Wasteful. Traitors.”
Then it turned to Miko and me. We were pressed against the back wall holding each other, too frightened to move. The thing placed a hand on Miko’s abdomen.
“New heir.” It burbled. I was still processing the fact that I’d just learned of my wife’s pregnancy from an angry spirit made of mud when the thing turned to me, living behind a dirty handprint on my wife’s sundress. Its empty eyesockets were only inches away. “New face.” It wrapped its mucky fingers around my throat. “Raise the heir. Plant the fields. Bury the dead.”
It’s been two years since that day, but the villagers in Saruo still slow down and stare when they see me–a sunburned shirtless foreigner in a straw hat–working Takumi’s old vegetable plots. Of course, they don’t know that the rest of Miko’s family is still here as well, just a few feet below the pumpkin patch.
When I first picked up a spade, these fields were choked with thorns and weeds. They had no drainage, irrigation, or nutrients in their soil, but now I’ve brought them back to life. As long as they’re cared for, our family will never go hungry. I’m beginning to feel a connection to the dirt on my fingers. I’m beginning to feel that Takumi was right all along.
I can hear my son playing in the baskets of turnips and carrots I harvested today. I’m going to make sure he takes care of this land after I’ve gone–
One way or another.