A Tale for the Time Being (26 page)

You might say, “Sure thing, Nao. I’m okay. I’m doin’ just fine.”

“Okay, awesome,” I would say to you, and then we would smile at each other across time like we were friends, because we are friends by now, aren’t we?

And because we’re friends, here’s something else I will share with you. It’s kind of personal, but it’s really helped me out a lot. It’s Jiko’s instructions
on how to develop your superpower. I thought she was kidding when she said it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when a really, really old person is kidding or not, especially if she’s a nun.
We were in the temple kitchen, helping Muji with the pickle-making at the time. Jiko was washing these big white daikons, and I was cutting them up and salting them and putting them into plastic
freezer bags. It was after old Jiko had found my scars, and I was telling her about my funeral and how my classmates had chanted the Heart Sutra for me, and how I became a living ghost and launched
a tatari attack on Reiko and stabbed her in the eye. Jiko stood at the sink, scrubbing this big old daikon that was longer and fatter than her arm, and when I finished talking, she plunked the
radish on top of a stack of other radishes that were piled next to her like firewood and said,

“Well, Nattchan, you don’t have to worry. You’re not really dead. Your funeral wasn’t real.”

I was like, Huh? I kinda already knew that.

“They chanted the wrong sutra,” she explained. “You do not chant Shingyo at a funeral. You must chant Dai Hi Shin.”
¹⁰⁷

Then, before I could say how relieved I was, she said, “Nattchan. I think it would be best for you to have some true power. I think it would be best for you to have a
superpower.”

She was talking in Japanese, but she used the English word,
superpower
, only when she said it, it sounded like supah-pawah. Really fast.
Supapawa
. Or more like
SUPAPAWA—!

“Like a superhero?” I asked, using the English word, too.

“Yes,” she said. “Like a
SUPAHIRO—!
With a
SUPAPAWA—!
” She squinted at me from behind her thick glasses. “Would you like
that?”

It’s weird to hear a really, really old person talk about superheroes and superpowers. Superheroes and superpowers are for young people. Did they even have them back then when Jiko was a
kid? I was under the impression that in the olden days, they only had ghosts and samurai and demons and oni. Not
SUPAHIRO—!
With
SUPAPAWA—!
But I just nodded.

“Good.” She slowly dried her hands and took off her apron and gave Muji some instructions about the pickles, and then she took me by the hand.

First we went to the foot-washing place, and we said a little foot-washing prayer, which goes like this:

Of course I immediately started to think about the power of supernatural feet, and how I wanted some, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted all beings to have them, too, because then what’s
the point? But that’s the difference between me and Jiko. I’m sure she wants all beings to have supernatural feet. Anyway, we washed our feet, and then she led me into the
hondo.
¹⁰⁸

The hondo is a special room, very dark and still. There’s a big gold statue of Shaka-sama and a smaller one of Lord Monju, the Wisdom Lord,
¹⁰⁹
at the other end, and in front of each is a place with candles, where you can offer incense. Jiko and Muji spend a lot of time doing services, but not many danka come anymore,
since most of the people in this village are either old or dead, and the young ones aren’t interested in religion and have moved away to the cities to get jobs and lead interesting lives.
It’s like throwing a party that nobody shows up for, but Jiko doesn’t seem to mind.

There are lots of services you have to perform, even at a tiny temple like Jiko’s. Muji explained it to me once. There used to be more nuns living there, but now it’s just the two of
them. From time to time, a couple of younger nuns come from the main temple headquarters to check up on things and help with the bigger ceremonies. They’re really nice. When old Jiko dies,
one of them will probably move in to help Muji, unless the main temple decides to sell Jigenji to a real estate developer, who will probably tear down the old buildings to build a hot spring resort
or a driving range. Old Jiko looks sad when they talk about this kind of thing. The little temple is falling apart and there’s no money to repair it, and Muji says she wonders what’s
even holding it to the mountain. She worries about earthquakes and is afraid the buildings will just collapse and slide down into the gulch and wash out to sea.

Zazen usually happened insanely early, like five o’clock in the morning when I was still asleep, and also later in the evening, after dinner, when I was tired. Actually, the whole
meditation thing made me a little nervous because I don’t really like sitting still, but I liked the feeling in the hondo, so when Jiko showed me how to offer incense to Lord Monju, touching
the stick to my head before I stuck it into the bowl of ashes, I felt excited. She did three raihai
¹¹⁰
bows and I did, too, just like she taught me,
kneeling and touching my forehead and elbows to the floor and lifting my hands, palms up, toward the ceiling. Then when we were finished she led me to a zafu
¹¹¹
and told me to sit down, and that’s when she gave me the instructions.

Hmm. Wait a sec. I didn’t actually ask her if I could tell you this, and now that I think about it, maybe I should ask her first.

Okay, I texted her and asked her if I could tell my friend how to do zazen. It will probably take her a while to answer, but since the Apron’s totally dead and nobody’s bothering me
right now, I might as well tell you about how old Jiko became a nun. She told me this story once and it’s pretty sad. It was right after the war. In Japan if you say “the war,”
people know you mean World War II, because that was the last one that Japan fought in. In America it’s different. America is constantly fighting wars all over the place, so you have to be
more specific. When I lived in Sunnyvale, if you said “the war” it meant the Gulf War, and a lot of my friends at school didn’t even know about World War II because it happened so
long ago and there were so many other wars in between.

And here’s a funny thing. Americans always call it World War II, but a lot of Japanese call it the Greater East Asian War, and actually the two countries have totally different versions of
who started it and what happened. Most Americans think it was all Japan’s fault, because Japan invaded China in order to steal their oil and natural resources, and America had to jump in and
stop them. But a lot of Japanese believe that America started it by making all these unreasonable sanctions against Japan and cutting off oil and food, and like, ooooh, we’re just a poor
little island country that needs to import stuff in order to survive, etc. This theory says that America forced Japan to go to war in self-defense, and all that stuff they did in China was none of
America’s business to begin with. So Japan went and attacked Pearl Harbor, which a lot of Americans say was a 9/11 scenario, and then America got pissed off and declared war back. The
fighting went on until America got fed up and dropped atom bombs on Japan and totally obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which most people agree was pretty harsh because they were winning by then
anyway.

Around that time, old Jiko’s only son, Haruki #1, was studying philosophy and French literature at Tokyo University, when he got drafted into the army. He was nineteen, just three years
older than I am now. I’m sorry, but I would totally freak out if someone told me I had to go to war in three years. I’m just a kid!

Jiko said it freaked Haruki out, too, because he was a peaceful boy. Think about it. One day you’re sitting in your little boardinghouse room, warming your feet over a charcoal stove,
sipping green tea and maybe reading a little
À la recherche du temps perdu
, and then a couple months later, you’re in the cockpit of a suicide bomber, trying to keep the nose
of your plane pointed at the side of an American battleship, knowing that in a few moments you’re going to explode in a great big ball of fire and be totally annihilated. How awful is that? I
can’t even imagine. I mean, talk about temps perdu! I know I keep saying that I’m going to exit time and end my life, but it’s a totally different thing, because it’s my own
choice. Being annihilated in a great big ball of fire was not Haruki #1’s choice, and from what old Jiko said, besides being peaceful, he was also a cheerful, optimistic boy who actually
liked being alive, which is not at all the situation with me or my dad.

And even though I said I can’t imagine how awful it was, maybe I can, just a little. If you take all the feelings I felt when we were packing up to leave Sunnyvale, and when Mom found my
scars in the sento, and Dad fell onto the train tracks, and my classmates tortured me to death, and then you multiply those feelings by a hundred thousand million, maybe that’s a little of
how my great-uncle Haruki #1 felt when he was drafted into the Special Forces and forced to become a kamikaze fighter pilot. It’s the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to
forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening.

Jiko felt like that when she learned that her only son was going to be killed in the war. I know, because I told her about the fish in my stomach, and she said she knew exactly what I was
talking about, and that she had a fish, too, for many years. In fact, she said she had lots of fishes, some that were small like sardines, some that were medium-sized like carp, and other ones that
were as big as a bluefin tuna, but the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki #1, and it was more like the size of a whale. She also said that after she became a nun and renounced the world, she
learned how to open up her heart so that the whale could swim away. I’m trying to learn how to do that, too.

When Jiko found out that her only son was going to die as a suicide bomber, she wanted to commit suicide, too, but she couldn’t because her youngest daughter, Ema, was only fifteen years
old and still needed her. So instead of committing suicide, Jiko decided to wait until Ema was a little older and could be independent, and then she would shave her head and become a nun and devote
the rest of her life to teaching people how to live in peace, and that’s pretty much exactly what she did.

Old Jiko says that nowadays we young Japanese people are heiwaboke.
¹¹²
I don’t know how to translate it, but basically it means that
we’re spaced out and careless because we don’t understand about war. She says we think Japan is a peaceful nation, because we were born after the war ended and peace is all we can
remember, and we like it that way, but actually our whole lives are shaped by the war and the past and we should understand that.

If you ask me, Japan is not so peaceful, and most people don’t really like peace anyway. I believe that in the deepest places in their hearts, people are violent and take pleasure in
hurting each other. Old Jiko and I disagree on this point. She says that according to Buddhist philosophy, my point of view is a delusion and that our original nature is to be kind and good, but
honestly I think she’s way too optimistic. I happen to know some people, like Reiko, are truly evil, and many of the Great Minds of Western Philosophy back me up on this. But still I’m
glad old Jiko believes we’re basically good, because it gives me hope, even if I can’t believe it myself. Maybe someday I will.

Oh, hang on. Cool. Jiko just texted me back and she said it’s okay if I teach you how to do zazen as long as we’re both serious and not just horsing around. I’m not horsing
around, are you? I don’t think you are horsing. At least, I’m going to imagine you’re not, and then maybe you won’t. I’ll just give you the instructions, and if you
don’t want to do them, you can skip ahead.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ZAZEN