Grave Friends

On the hyper tube ride from Tokyo Narita Airport to Niigata City, my sister never once reminded me how I abandoned the family five years ago. First everyone assumed I had simply extended my visit to America. But after a month passed and then another, I finally worked up the courage to send a letter home with a photo of me in a wedding dress on the shore of Lake Michigan. I’m sorry, I wrote. Sorry perhaps for making everyone think I had been kidnapped or worse. Sorry because I didn’t want to live in the same town my entire life and have my ashes stored in a shared urn with all the families on the street, stuck in place for all eternity. Beside me, Tamami chronicled the lives of my old neighborhood, the grave friends, the network of six tight-knit families who agreed to have their ashes mixed together generations ago. A push of a button in a mortuary suite would send a robotic arm into the bowels of a cemetery skyscraper to fetch the ashes, sending a coffin-sized urn up a vacuum shoot. Holograms of the departed would be projected along with anything else a family could wish for—in our case, a cherry blossom tree filling the room with luminescent floating petals. The climate plague that had swept the world in my great-grandparents’ time put pressure on what to do with the dead—a space and money saving venture to be sure, but the funerary innovations had brought together the street in ways nobody could have expected long after the pandemic passed. My Uncle Michihiro, who wasn’t really my uncle but lived three doors down, often came to drink and play darts with my father ever since I could remember because he said he might as well be friends with a man his body would be mixing with in a few decades. There are the Fujita sisters, the youngest of the bunch, who had become gothic Lolitas in my absence, donning frilly black Victorian frocks and way too much eye makeup. Mrs. Kishimoto used to invite the children for cookies after school and gave me koto lessons. Mr. Takata, after he retired from the Mitsubishi gas plant, cared for everybody’s gardens with his scorched fingers in exchange for a modest bounty of herbs and vegetables. And of course, there was my grandmother, my Baba, who went from house to house every afternoon to talk stories with all the other grandmas and grandpas, getting trashed over cheap wine. In a day, I would help pick out Baba’s bones from a tray of ash for our own personal memorials. And soon after, I’d hug my mother and tell her my ashes would never become one with hers and father’s and everyone we love. I would tell her I want it all to be okay.

As the tube capsule slowed, drifting beyond rice paddy villages stuck in time, I could see the outskirts of Niigata City. Once only notable for sake and tulips and a long-ago gold rush on an offshore island, the formerly nondescript skyline had become famous for several-dozen funerary skyscrapers serving a large percentage of northern Japan—dark, monolithic towers punctuated with clouds and 3-D billboards that reminded the city we’d all die one day and should take advantage of funerary package specials. But beneath their shadows, I could still see the old city, the aging utilitarian apartment buildings nestled next to secondhand shops and love hotels crowned with gaudy neon signs. Students and grannies on bikes still clogged sidewalks. Beyond the train station, self-driving company cars idled in a roundabout before zipping through the familiar arteries of Bandai district, past the Rainbow Tower with its spinning elevator where I used to watch fireworks every year, and through the labyrinth of bars and momand-pop shops that hadn’t changed in decades. I didn’t want to be trapped with memories of the good times, but I had a sudden hankering for pizza with mayonnaise, a shrimp burger from Mcdonald’s, and a bowl of udon with vegetable tempura that I could slurp alongside grumpy salarymen. I wanted to call my old friends from school, maybe sing our hearts out in a karaoke booth. Of course, I knew none of this would happen right away. “So,” I began. I wanted to know if my parents were going to play pretend like my sister. If, by the grace of Baba’s death, I had somehow been granted probation from my mother and reinstated into the family without a lecture. “What’s going on with Mom and Dad these days?”

“You mean are they going to rip your head off?” Tamami was the sibling doormat but not an idiot.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Dad is just happy to see you. Mom, on the other hand, I’m not so sure. She asked about your flight.”

“Basically a fifty-fifty shot of being murdered or tied to a chair.” “There are too many people coming and going, paying their respects. She’s not going to make a scene.”

Of course, Tamami never got the brunt of our mother’s wrath—like the time my mother found me making out with bad boy Kosuke outside a nearby corner store and dragged me back home so hard I had bruises on my arm for a week. Or the time she found my report card and didn’t talk to me for a month because she said I was a hopeless cause who was going nowhere. But where would I go? Where would she want me to go that wasn’t too far and wasn’t abandoning home and her sick sense of loyalty to our grave network? The next town? The one after that? Would the next prefecture be too much of a betrayal? This is where you belong. This is where our family has always been. Everything you need in life is here with us. This street is

a shining example of how people should be in Japan. We weren’t a cult, I tried to explain to friends in America, not really.

When we finally arrived home, my father ran to the door and hugged me tightly. I missed the smell of him—a strange mixture of cigarette smoke and tropical deodorant. He cinched his bathrobe, hiding the ancient and yellowed undershirts he refused to throw out. My mother was in the garden, trying desperately to be busy.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he whispered in my ears. “We’ve missed you.” He took my suitcase up to Baba’s old room and told me to take a load off, sit, relax.

“I’m staying in Baba’s room?”

“Well, we’re not sharing a room again,” Tamami said. “That’s for damn sure.”

I perched on the edge of the sofa as if I were a stranger, too afraid to make myself comfortable, ready to bolt. I could sense my mother staring at me. How would she guilt me? How might she pull me back into the fold? Perhaps she would even suggest that I move back home with my husband, start a life here where everything and everyone would be waiting for me. There was a tiny holo-portrait of Baba on the entertainment center surrounded by flowers and fruit, and I suddenly could feel my face growing hot on top of my already clammy skin from the summer humidity, a flush of shame for not sending so much as a postcard the whole time I was gone. After all Baba had done for me—my ally after a shouting match, a comfort in the form of freshly cooked dumplings, and the only one who knew somehow that I was planning to run away. Unpacking my bags in America years ago, I found an envelope with nearly a thousand dollars in Yen and a brief note: Follow your happiness wherever it may take you, but remember your family. I still had the note somewhere, but I tried not to dwell on it because a part of me knew how much Baba loved our street and having everyone together.

“Are you hungry?” My mother asked, washing the dirt from her hands before rummaging through the fridge. “We’re eating after our neighborhood walk. Not sure if you had enough on the plane.”

“I’m fine,” I said. I watched my mother ignore me and continue to fix rice balls stuffed with salted salmon that had probably been left over from a previous night’s dinner. I got up and sat near the kitchen counter. From here, I could see the shrine in the hall with photos of everyone on the street who had passed. A stick of incense and a tiny memento sat before each photo—a button, a harmonica, a lock of hair, an earring, a pair of glasses. As a kid, one of the main rules of the house was to bow to every single member of the shrine before moving on. And my mother frequently made

me go back to pay my respects until she was convinced I wasn’t half-assing it with a lackluster bow.

“Walk?”

“We take walks before dinner with some people in the neighborhood. You’re welcome to join us. Or, you know, you can just stay in your room and rest. We made some VR recordings for you of things you missed.” “Right,” I said. The walk was definitely not optional. I ate my snack as quickly as I could while my mother studied me, each of us figuring out a game plan for how to deal with each other.

“You and your husband doing okay over there?” My father asked, trudging slowly down the narrow steps. “Sean, right?”

“Yes, we’re fine.”

“I’m not sure how much an English teacher’s salary covers in Chicago,” my mother said.

“He’s not an English teacher. He just did that here for a year after college. He actually just passed the bar exam.”

“Oh?” My parents looked at each other unsure of what that meant. “He’s going to be a lawyer. A good one.” Of course, I couldn’t blame them for not knowing the details. All they knew was that Sean taught me business English after I got off my receptionist job at a travel agency and that I lied about a work trip to America. But here the pull of my adolescent routines and attitudes called to me. Here I wasn’t a newlywed or a dental hygiene student or even the woman who douses her pierogis in Sriracha. I was just a daughter who abandoned her family. “I should unpack.” Upstairs, I found Tamami’s orange tabby cat, Chibi, curled on top of my suitcase and an old model VR visor with two data chips. The closet drawers were still full of Baba’s belongings, so I had to transfer a small pile to a chair to make room. Nearly everything was as I remembered—a decade-old calendar of London a friend gave Baba still tacked to a wall, the stack of travel brochures on a dresser for cities Baba dreamed of visiting. A brightpink lopsided umbrella for her neighborhood strolls. Everything as it was except for the menagerie of pill bottles on an end table. At the bottom of a drawer was a plastic Ziploc bag containing paper envelopes no larger than a thumbnail and each containing a few grains of rice. Magic rice I used to think when Baba explained that they were blessed by a priest and had the power to heal, to make someone feel whole with the spirit of God. No one in the family really bought into the religion Baba grew up with, but Tamami and I would sometimes sneak a grain or two because we thought it would give us super powers, the ability to become invisible whenever we were in trouble. And the night before I left for America, I remember sneaking into Baba’s room and taking one last grain, imagining it growing inside of me, a new me that would shed the shell of all I had been.

“Sometimes I feel like I see her in here. Not to creep you out or anything,” Tamami said, standing in the doorway. “You should put that on at some point.” She pointed to the visor. “It’s not all mom’s guilt trip and grave friends propaganda.”

“I can still smell Baba,” I said. I could picture her pumping her arms and legs in the air like she was on an exercise bike before getting up. Tamami sat down cross-legged on the bed and coaxed Chibi onto her lap. “Look, I’m not mad anymore. I get why you left. But you’ll never know how tough it got. Mom thought I might leave, too and basically put me on lockdown. If I so much as frowned, she’d scream at me and call me ungrateful. Baba getting sick pushed her over the edge. I barely left the house.”

“You could have come to see me,” I said.

“Could I have though? Anyway, I’m not like you, Rina.”

I wondered what she really meant by that. I wanted her to be straight with me: not adventurous? Not a fuckup? Not a traitor?

“And even if I wanted to,” Tamami continued. She told me how the tranquilizers weren’t just so Baba could sleep, so she could have a break from the pain, but also because she had become violent in her final months—a thrown glass at Chibi, breaking her old records, a bite out of my father’s hand so hard that he needed stitches, too many cruel things that became harder to brush off as the ravings of a sick woman.

I held Tamami’s hands and noticed that among all the pill bottles was not one rice packet. As her mind failed her, did she simply forget? Was Baba’s daily ritual just a part of her spirituality or was she holding parts of herself together that had broken—when she was forced to marry a man she barely knew, our Jiji, when she lost mother’s sister in childbirth, when she realized one day that the borders of her life would always span a few blocks. “Everything I need is here,” she would say. My mother believed this, too, but Baba also fell asleep every night staring at Big Ben or London Bridge and surrounded by old articles about restaurants in Paris and safaris in Kenya. I pet Chibi on Tamami’s lap and debated on whether or not to tell her everything.

“What are you going to do now that you’re back?” Tamami asked. “I mean I’m not really back,” I said. I reached into my purse and pulled out the ultrasound photo—a heartbeat growing stronger inside me. My sister absorbed the photo and fell onto my shoulders.

“Rina, that’s wonderful,” she said. But I could tell from her tears, the somewhat stiff expression on her face that the news meant more. The grain of rice I took before I left gave me the strength to leave and become, but this child gave me a reason.

“Don’t tell them,” I said. “I need to find my own way.”

She hugged me again.

“I guess I get to be an aunt,” she said.

After Tamami left, I lay in bed and put the visor on and suddenly found myself beside Baba. Her almost zombie-like labored breathing punctuated the sound of Mrs. Kishimoto’s koto and the rhythmic clapping of friends and family who filled the room. A minister in black robes pushed grains of rice between Baba’s cracked lips and helped prop her up to drink a glass of water. I wished my family had VR gloves and hadn’t been cheap with their system, so I could have touched this day. I remained next to Baba long after everyone left for lunch in the yard. I could hear my name, people saying I should be there. I remained until the recording reached its end and looped back, populating the bedroom with everyone again. Chip #1 guilt-trip level: extreme.

Our family plus a few of our grave friends began the stroll to cemetery skyscraper number eighteen and back to the house, a two-kilometer path with stops for refreshments. The group paraded along the sidewalk following a strict hierarchy determined by age with the eldest members leading the way, swinging their arms with power walking enthusiasm. Shopkeepers and police officers waved to us with celebrity awe.

“All the grandpas and grandmas in our neighborhood think people like us because we’re doing something special. But most of our friends and their parents think we’re just weird,” one of the Fujita sisters said, noticing my slack-jawed confusion.

“Cult,” the other sister added.

“But we’re far from the only people doing the group urn.”

“We’re the only people who like to rub it in everybody’s faces,” one of the sisters explained. She stuck a finger in her mouth like she was going to vomit. “We’re broke, or we’d run away like you did.”

A few members ahead, I could see my mother chatting to Mr. Takata about plans for Baba’s service, about how her mother seemingly knew every silver or balding head in the city. “They don’t make women like that anymore,” my mother said. “She’s really the one who made our group work. She kept us together.”

“I’d be home alone right now if it weren’t for her,” Mr. Takata said. “I’d die alone.”

“We want to die alone,” the Fujita sisters said in unison.

It was no surprise that Uncle Takata joined us for dinner. Tamami noted he came over at least two or three times a week, always bringing a couple of bottles of wine to make up for the trouble. As expected, the real adults conversed loudly while drinking, while I tried to maintain my invisibility cloak for as long as possible, stuffing my mouth with spaghetti to avoid talking.

“Windy city,” Mr. Takata said, waiting for me to swallow. He smiled after everything, a habit he developed from a managerial style he called “Happy News.” If you give someone an unfortunate task, he explained to my father once, but are smiling while doing it, people are more willing to accept the task. “Shi-ka-go. Sear Tower,” he continued. “You see it?”

“Of course. Can’t miss it,” I said. “Tall buildings are tall buildings though, right?”

I glanced at Tamami to see if she could do anything to save me from the most boring inquisition in the world, but she had already volunteered to wash the dishes. She rubbed her stomach in a circular motion and raised her brows at me.

“And what do you do?” Mr. Takata asked.

I hated questions where people pegged your entire identity on a few words. Who was Baba? A country girl, a simple woman some would say. A decent human being. But her collection of travel brochures tugged at someone who was much more. A dreamer. But I knew what Uncle Takata meant, what he wanted to hear.

“I’m studying to be a dental assistant,” I said. There was the smile again—yellowed from smoking a pack a day and signs of severe gingivitis. Definitely not a flosser.

My mother turned on the Nippon Ham Fighters baseball game and opened another Kirin for Mr. Takata. She didn’t want me to speak or embarrass her.

“She’s having a lot of fun during her stay abroad,” my mother said. “Hollywood, the Grand Canyon. She doesn’t realize how lucky she is to have this time to play around.”

While my parents were busy entertaining after a few other neighbors dropped by, I decided to make a break for it. I could see my mother from the street through the living room window, shaking her head. As a teenager, she probably would have dragged me back inside by the ears and showed me my place, but now she seemed unsure of what move to make. I waved. I texted: I’ll be back at a somewhat reasonable hour.

I walked through dimly lit streets toward the shopping district and texted my old friend Miki who waitressed at the Immigrants Cafe and Bar, the local dive for foreigners. As usual, the bar was packed with a mixture of Americans and Canadians and Australians, maybe a dozen total, surrounded by their Japanese friends, practicing their English. A man with a Russian accent sang Cyndi Lauper on a karaoke machine while a few Japanese women danced, waving their arms wildly in the air. I sat at the bar and scanned the room when I saw Miki returning with a tray to the bar.

“Hello, hello, hello. So good to see you!” Miki yelled over the Russian’s singing. She gave me a kiss on both cheeks French style and hopped onto the stool beside me. “You look so American,” she said.

“Is that good?” I asked. I looked down at my jeans and bargain bin satin blouse, my beat-up Chucks that were as old as my time in the States. Miki, on the other hand, had a cute beret on, a dress with butterflies on it, and high heels.

“Yes, it’s good!” She excused herself for a moment and brought a drink to another table before hopping back up beside me. “How long are you here for? Everybody misses you.”

“A little over a week,” I said. Most of the details didn’t really need rehashing since she followed me on social media, but she gave me a rundown of old friends between her table-service duties—everyone at the same job, Maiko and Junpei getting married soon, most people still living at home. Kosuke, the boy with wolfed-up hair who I thought was the most beautiful thing in the world, still broke hearts in the back of Lawson’s convenience store after his post office shift.

“Nothing really changes,” she said. “Do you miss home?”

I thought about Miki’s question as she served a group of salarymen trying to outdrink their boss—kanpai! Kanpai! Kanpai!—but by the time she returned, I just wanted to enjoy being in the moment, being the person that used to go to the movies with Miki every week and jog along the river in the evenings. We used to complain to each other about our parents and Niigata and how it was nearly impossible to achieve your dreams in this country. But Miki looked happy now, and maybe I would have been as well. “Yes and no,” I answered. Miki apologized for being so busy when she returned, but I half-promised we could get together another time. I had another virgin margarita and told her my life in Chicago was pretty okay—i had Sean and his parents, friends from school, and a community of Japanese who’d recently moved to the city. My routines became comforts— same cafés in the morning, a smoothie after classes, Pilates every Saturday morning, and board game night on Wednesdays with a group of Japanese in an Irish pub.

After leaving Miki, I walked down the dark streets without any sense of danger. I didn’t feel the need to walk briskly and be mindful of the eyes around me. I had no pepper spray to clutch, no whistle that Sean insisted I carry in my purse. I had forgotten what it was like to say hello to strangers, to be known by half the neighborhood, to simply be. I guess I missed that. When I got home, it was past midnight, but my mother was in the kitchen cooking appetizers for Baba’s funeral reception. She offered me a sampler plate without a word, as I sat at the counter realizing I had barely touched dinner.

“These little cakes are delicious,” I said. “Mango?”

“Mrs. Kishimoto’s recipe,” she said. “There are several other trays in her fridge. We’re expecting a big turnout.”

“Do you need any help?” I asked.

“Maybe earlier. Not now. Just about done.”

Part of me wanted to run back to my room, but I knew I needed to stay with my mother. Maybe it was because I felt like I needed to be there for her, but even after all this time her immovable expression of disgust and disappointment still had power over me. She poured each of us a glass of water and sat across from me.

“I miss her,” I said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.” I fidgeted with the photo of the ultrasound in my purse, debating whether or not to get it over with. “You broke Baba’s heart,” my mother said. “You broke all of our hearts.” I wanted to tell my mother about the envelope of money and Baba’s note, but I needed to let my mother have this one for now—to reenact the dances that allowed us to have a relationship. I whispered sorry again, said I knew it didn’t mean much. I said that there was so much that she might never understand. When a tear fell from my cheek, my mother left to fetch a box of tissues from the bathroom. I placed the photo of the ultrasound on the counter, as she handed me a tissue.

“We’ve done enough of that,” she said, suddenly looking closer at the photo. She stared at the life inside of me and poured another glass of water. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or sad or even a little surprised, but something had changed—a new kind of gravity that cemented her to the kitchen stool and prevented her from hugging her pregnant daughter. “Well,” she said. “Boy or girl?”

“We don’t know,” I said. “We want it to be a surprise.”

“We thought you’d be a boy. One of the reasons why your father took you to all those soccer games when you were little. Think part of him still imagined you’d still fill that role if he tried hard enough. Life is always easier for boys.”

“We’ll be happy with a boy or a girl.”

My mother nodded and got up, pausing as she passed me. She looked at the altar in the hallway, flickering with LED tealights. For a moment, I thought she might congratulate me or hug me or do anything vaguely resembling normal motherly love.

“We’re remembering her tomorrow. Celebrating all that my mother built. I expect you up early,” my mother said. “Remember to pray before going to bed.”

Before I slept, I inserted the second chip into the VR visor and found myself surrounded by colorful stars exploding in the sky—the summer fireworks festival on the banks of the Shinano River. Baba, Tamami, and

my mother sat on a blanket, looking up and eating Yakitori while my father recorded. Baba had on her favorite navy-blue polyester dress with tiny white flowers and would raise her hands in the air and clap with each display. As other families came and went, they paid their respects to Baba, who they missed seeing walking around town. Even Miki and her family stopped by and asked Baba to send their regards to me in America.

“She’s doing very well,” my mother said, lying. At that point, they had barely heard a word from me.

Baba said nothing but just smiled, the canyons of her face filled with sadness and truth. Did she think I had forgotten home? When another explosion came, Baba did not clap. She stared at the dark water, reflecting the supernova above, and I wondered what I had been doing at that exact moment, what pressing matter had been keeping me from picking up a phone and telling my family: I love you, and I’m sorry, and this is something I have to do. I don’t think anybody in the neighborhood was really good at having important conversations with the younger generation. The elders had come to an understanding in an era recovering from a global pandemic that had erected funerary towers into our skies. Nobody asked us what we wanted. Nobody questioned the new tradition. We were grave friends, and that was that.

The soulful ballads of Misora Hibari, Baba’s favorite enka singer, woke me up the next morning. I could hear crowds chattering outside and trucks beeping in reverse, as they delivered tables and chairs and flowers. Half the street had been closed off with orange cones my parents borrowed from the local elementary school gym teacher. From my window, I could see the Fujita sisters smoking on the outskirts of the commotion, scowling. Everyone except Uncle Michihiro, who wore a T-shirt and an ill-fitting sports coat, donned a vibrant yukata—pinks and purples and oranges with ornate floral patterns. My mother barked orders to the delivery drivers while my father and some of the uncles set up pop-up tents. Mrs. Kishimoto and the priest who came all the way from Osaka, arranged flowers on the reception lunch tables. At the center of the affair was a large portrait of Baba surrounded by white chrysanthemums (the traditional choice) and sunflowers (Baba’s favorite), and beside this lay Baba herself on a long, metal tray under a plastic cover as if her ashes were part of a buffet. Chopsticks for the family to pick out the remaining bones rested atop. The large, stainless steel urn that might be mistaken for an alien space pod, rested on a wooden cradle that my great grandfather had carved. This is where everyone would end up. On its side was a serial number and the names of everyone in the neighborhood who had already been included—many victims of the climate plague like my great grandmother Shizuka, but most of the newer names

were there out of habit. I imagined my aunties and uncles and Jiji entangled inside the pod like so many chicks in an egg.

When I woke up, I found my father downstairs, steaming the wrinkles out of my old gray and pink orchid yukata. Instead of our usual miso and rice ball breakfast, he had made me waffles with a side of bacon and eggs. He hugged me tightly and told me he was happy for me.

“I’m looking forward to being a grandfather,” he said. “When all of this is over, your mother will be able to celebrate your future. Don’t worry.” After eating, I stepped out into what would look to an outsider like a street festival. Like the Fujita sisters, I stuck to the sidelines, feeling like an outcast at a party. I thought about returning to the house until the ceremony began, when slimy Uncle Mich raised his eyebrows from across the street and turned his hands into pistols, firing at me as he swaggered over.

“There’s my girl,” he said. “Long time. Too long.”

“Uncle Mich,” I said as more of a statement than a greeting. He asked me about America, about beautiful American girls, but I kept walking and said I needed to find my mother.

As I weaved between the growing crowds, I found myself engaging in the catch-up small talk that I hated as an introvert, parroting myself over and over again. Finally, the priest rang a bell and called the ceremony to order, telling the crowd how worldwide tragedy generations ago had brought our country closer together. “In suffering,” he said, “we found our heart. In suffering, we found new traditions, a new way forward.” My mother, father, Tamami, and myself stood before Baba’s remains as people found their seats. We waited for my mother to go first, but she signaled for my father to begin. We watched him slowly pick out the first bone fragments and place them in a small wooden box, one of several that we’d distribute among the neighborhood. A bit of toe or ankle? Who knows? But I couldn’t help but picture Baba watching us in the audience. Tamami followed—ribs and spine, and all that held the life of Kimiko Tadashi together, all that contained the sickness that ate at her until the doctors found out too late. Every movement was slow and considered as if Baba could feel us carrying pieces of her, the pressure of the chopsticks cradling bone. My father signaled for me to continue, and I’d like to imagine I picked up parts of Baba’s smile, her cheeks, her head that held so much love and secrets and wisdom—how she had given me permission to just be, to go, how she had wanted me to remember moments like this with my mother sobbing in the background. When it was finally my mother’s turn, I watched her tears darken the ashes, her unsteady hands barely able to hold onto the chopsticks. I stood beside my mother and wrapped one arm around her waist and steadied her wrist with my other hand.

“No tears,” I said. She looked at me and nodded and wiped her face. “Together.”

“Together,” she said. And as our hands combed the ashes, removing the final bone fragments, I felt like Baba had given us one final gift.

My mother transformed after the ceremony, and I could hear her laughing with the neighborhood, telling stories of Baba—how her mother sewed rhinestones onto jackets for several of the uncles during their clubbing phase, how when Jiji was still alive, Baba took ballroom and country line dancing lessons and won a competition. There were stories of Baba as a young woman, working as a volunteer nurse, singing songs to the comatose and to those who begged for consciousness to leave them, how, after her mother died, she raised her brothers and sisters while her father took extra shifts at the power plant. The street was crawling with stragglers well into the evening as clean-up began, and Baba’s ashes, now in the urn, had been taken away. Apart from the one burst of grief, the day seemed to energize my mother. When she asked if we should all walk to the cemetery tower together to see if the urn was ready, I wasn’t completely surprised.

“I know they said it might take a day, but I need to get off the street for a while,” my mother said. “We’ve earned it. Some power walking will do us good.”

Tamami stayed behind to help the drunk aunties and uncles home, so it was just me and my father, trailing far behind as my mother sprinted ahead of us. Even from our residential neighborhood, it was hard to escape the view of the closest cemetery towers. It seemed like in Japan, everyone was still either walking to or from a funeral. Death had become a way of life. “How was today for you?” my father asked.

“It was nice seeing everybody there for Baba,” I said. My father was an old-school type and didn’t really say much, was always a father who let our mother raise us unless backup was needed for bad behavior, but I could tell from the way he glanced at my stomach that the news of the baby filled him with a kind of joy that he was maybe guilty of showing after a funeral. We walked for several more blocks in silence.

“I think today really helped your mother. She’s always been sick—not like Baba of course—but the last few years have been hard. Our neighborhood has become a lot more important to her. It’s something that she can count on.”

“It sounds like you’re beating around a point,” I said.

“I was never angry with you,” he said. “And I’m so happy for you and Sean. I know it’s different for your generation, for you especially. You need to move on. But do you miss any of this? Could you ever come back?”

I watched my mother swing her arms into the air, occasionally waving to an acquaintance. A group of teenagers huddled outside the manga shop I used to call my church, the same old men I saw growing up sat at the counter of their sake bar. In the street, self-driving taxis began their nighttime circuit to pick up salarymen from required nights on the town with their superiors. Somewhere behind us, Tamami was walking the aunties and uncles back to their homes. I thought about how, if I raised my child here, they would have an entire neighborhood of love.

“I do,” I said. “Miss it, that is.”

As we approached the cemetery tower, my father stopped me before we caught up with my mother.

“Your mother loves you,” he said. “And I think she’s forgiven you even if she’ll never say it. She wants you (and your family) in our life even if you’re an ocean away.”

On the twenty-second floor in suite 38B, my mother tapped her phone against a sensor in a wooden pedestal in the center of the room. A holographic cherry blossom tree sprouted from the cold linoleum floor and Baba appeared sitting on a stone bench, staring up at the petals as they danced through the room. The urn arrived shortly after, emerging from a trap door and coming to rest on the pedestal. My mother pressed another selection on her mortuary phone app and Jiji appeared next to Baba, playing the violin. And then the great aunties and uncles came as if they had walked through the walls. A miniature poodle that belonged to my cousin who drowned in a pool, walked up to Jiji and slept at his feet. The barren floor now looked like a garden populated by stone lanterns and meticulously raked sand. I imagined how I might be captured here if I chose to remain a grave friend. Would I be immortalized as an old woman, a little girl, a mother? Could I see Sean and my child here, sitting beside my grandparents? Both my mother and I waved our hands through Baba’s image.

“She wanted to see the world when she was a little girl,” my mother said. “When our street was full.”

I walked around the room to every ancestor and prayed to them and let the light of their images wash over me.

There would be more conversations and arrangements to come—visits to Chicago, visits back to Japan when my child was old enough, but right then I sat silently on sand ripples made of light with my mother and father and listened to Jiji’s music, holding on to the perpetual flurry of cherry blossoms that held us together.