Kapiolani Community College
Horizons 2003

A Personal Account of a Japanese Funeral
Jennifer Thorbjornsen

All I could feel was the warm darkness through my eyelids, while this constant noise scorched through my haze of dreams, dissipating the dark blanket of comfort surrounding me.

“Ring! Ring!”

Slowly, my eyes began to open and close as if deciding whether to fall back into the night, or to adjust to the blinking glowing numbers that read 2:48 AM.

“Ring! Ring! Ring! Ring! “Ring! Ring!”

It seemed to stretch out to infinity, blaring louder and longer. Almost immediately the noise transformed into a muzzled ring of a telephone.

Who the hell would be calling at three in the morning and for what reason? I thought to myself. I kept my ears open and heard my mom’s faint voice murmuring in the distance.

“What!?” Her voice rang out with disbelief a second later.

Right then at that moment, I knew who and why they were calling. I knew he was gone; the instant I heard my mom, I knew.
Bit by bit I became numb to the echo-less conversation piercing through the walls. All I knew was that my grandpa was gone. Once more, the kindness of darkness became my only comfort.

Early next morning, little Japanese hands roughly shook me awake. “Jenni-fah! Wakeup! Pack your bags, grandpa died”.
I wasn’t dreaming. All this was actually hap-pening! I forced my body out of bed and packed dirty socks with clean undies Who would care anyway? At that moment, I didn’t.

The quiet, long plane ride was even worse than my grandpa’s death. Every time I glanced over to the hole-in-the-wall window, my mom would be gazing out at nothing.

Sometimes, I’d see a tear or two roll down the silhouette of her shadowed cheek, but there was absolutely no conversation between my mom and me. That’s just the way the average Japanese family functioned. There would be no explanation, communication, or comfort for now.

We landed in Narita Airport and rushed to the nearest taxi. The ride to the house was like the other dozen times I’d visited, but today the rice fields were turning an ugly shade of brown. Perhaps because it was a colder season then they were used to.

Through the narrowest roads I had ever known, I saw my teeny grandma push open the heavy, rusted gate to let us in. Tiny stones crunched beneath my sneakers with each long stride through the walkway. Once inside, the smell of burning incense and its ashes filled my mind with humid, summer afternoon memories of my grandpa. We’d break off fat, succulent aloe leaves—not like the crappy ones we have in Hawai‘i—and rub it on our dry toes. Sometimes, we’d catch a warm breeze or two, filled with the smell of incense dancing over our skin.

As the nippiness of the hallway zapped me back, my grandma opened a wooden sliding door you’d see in old samurai films. My grandpa lay on a futon with a tiny white kerchief resting over his face. In my head I was thinking, “Whoa, there’s my grandpa’s body chilling on the ground, and it’s not even the funeral yet. What’s going on?”

But as I paused for a moment I took a really good look around. This wasn’t weird or gross, I thought, it was beautiful.

He was clothed in a white silky kimono with wooden Japanese slippers called gettas, supposedly for his journey back to the spirit world.

In front of him were rows of flowers people had sent, golden Buddhist figurines, and an intricately detailed bowl where sticks of green incense stood burning in a mound of ashes. My mom and I lit more for him, then bowed our heads in prayer.

The next day, a pale woman came over to bathe his body. She dipped a folded cloth into a bowl of warm water and gently dabbed clean his milky body, preparing him for the funeral. Shortly after, men robed in black took him to the place the ceremony was to happen.

That night, my grandma, aunts, uncles, cousins, mom, and I stayed the night in the ceremonial place. The custom is to stay up the whole night with him so that we would see his spirit off. Throughout the night the lingering, smoky smell crept into my dreams.

As night turned into dawn and dawn into morning, the ceremony began. Distant relatives, friends, colleagues, and town-folk gathered to pay their respect. More unfamiliar faces filled the room while we took our seats to the low humming of the priest. His intense chant would lead my grandpa back to the spirit world. As the steady chanting died down, boxes of every kind of colorful flower were passed out to everyone and anyone present. Hands quickly fluttered from all sides of me reaching for the box.

Gradually, the coffin filled up with soft petals covering his bony toes. Then the colors flowed to drown out the white of his clothes, leaving only his face shining through. It was like he was Ophelia, drowned in a pond of daisies. As the sobbing grew louder with each flower placed beside him, the very last flower adorned him. We followed as they carried him out of the building to place him into a golden carriage. My discomfort departed as the flicker of gold disappeared into the sun. In death was life.