Chapter 1
Ever since I was a little girl, I have liked to press my palms together in contemplation. Nobody showed me how to do this. Nor did I have any concept of prayer as a ritual. My parents weren't particularly religious, nor was anyone else in my tiny circle of family, friends, and schoolmates. I don't remember when, exactly, I tried it for the first time. But an early memory suggests that communicating with invisible people came naturally to me. At the age of about six, I invented a little game. The only participant was myself. I called it playing grave.
Lest you think I grew up among the Addams Family, I should explain a few things. As in many Asian cultures, in Japan it's common to maintain a family gravesite and visit several times a year, cleaning the stones, burning incense as an offering, and sharing stories about your loved ones. To us, visiting a cemetery isn't a macabre or even necessarily a sad occasion. And in my case, my paternal grandparents and my maternal grandmother died before I was born; my mother's father passed when I was just four. I have many pleasant memories of visiting his and my grandmother's grave. They were buried in a leafy suburb on the west side of Tokyo. My father and mother would pack my sister and me in the car for the hourlong drive to the memorial park, where we'd meet aunts, uncles, and cousins. First we would all pitch in to scrub moss and grime off the family marker: a squared obelisk of smooth granite standing about three feet high, inscribed with kanji, characters I could then barely read. Next, the grown-ups would place small bouquets of chrysanthemums and light sticks of incense, and we would lower our heads in silent prayer as the smoky perfume swirled around us. Then came the fun: a leisurely picnic lunch under the sakura trees, adults gossiping about adult things while we young ones darted off to play badminton. Even today, decades later, cherry blossoms conjure up dormant memories of those long-ago graveside gatherings. The taste of my mother's bento boxes: rice balls with tart pickled plum, the sweet softness of tamago-yaki omelets. The smell of wet stone and of freshly cut lawn, kicked up by my tiny legs running for, and usually missing, the shuttlecock.
I didn't get to experience growing up with a grandpa and grandma in my life. When you're a kid who doesn't have grandparents yourself, you sense just how much other kids talk about theirs-especially after a holiday.
"We took the bullet train to see my grandparents!"
"Grandma took me to the beach!"
"My grandpa gave me otoshi-dama," cash-filled envelopes doled out by relatives to kids at New Year's.
All of which was inevitably followed by others asking, "Oh yeah? How much did ya get?" and finally, once they'd exhausted their comparisons, the dreaded ". . . So how about you?"
My answer, of course, was "nothing." Every time I found myself entangled in this kind of conversation, the same thoughts ricocheted through my head: I don't have grandparents. I never did. I said this outright the first few times I was asked, but this would so obviously quash the mood that I quickly learned not to say anything at all. I'd shake my head and smile shyly and hope the focus shifted quickly, as it always did with kids. But the truth was that their stories weighed on my heart.
"Playing grave" emerged spontaneously one sunny suburban Tokyo afternoon. My mother was hanging laundry on the second-floor balcony. My baby sister was down for her nap, so there was nobody to play with. Wandering the house in my boredom, I found an empty shoebox on my father's side of their bed. It was brand-new, and shiny white. I sat down next to it, opened the lid, and lifted it up to examine. This stirred something in my six-year-old mind, and I was hit with an epiphany: "It's a grave!"
I carried the empty box outside and set it down on the opposite end of the balcony from where my mother was working. Then I took out a pencil and an orange paper flower I had found in my parents' closet, a poppy made of yellow paper folded and twisted over a piece of wire. I placed the bottom of the shoebox upside down in front of me like a table. On the lid, I used the pencil to carefully print grandpa and grandma's grave. It was an innocent, generic epitaph. No names, no specification of maternal or paternal; in my young mind, grandparents were grandparents, regardless of which side of the family they came from. Then I stood the lid up vertically along the side of the box. Finally, I laid the orange flower atop the makeshift altar.
There it was. My grandparents' grave. Proud of my handiwork, I put my hands together and closed my eyes, just as I'd seen my family and relatives do whenever we visited our family plot.
"What on earth are you doing?" came my mother's voice from behind.
"Playing grave," I replied without missing a beat. "You can pray here, too, if you want."
"No, thanks," she replied. Her face was a mask of studied indifference.
The problem with my ad hoc grave play was that there wasn't much to actually do; once you crouched down and pressed your palms together in silence, that was pretty much it. I quickly grew bored, and even felt a little silly. So I disassembled my grandparents' grave and put it away. I wonder what my father must have thought when he found his shoebox newly decorated with a generic epitaph penciled in a child's hand.
I laugh to myself whenever I remember this moment. What a strange child. My mother must have really wondered what was going on in my head. But over the years, as I've dusted off the memory from time to time, I've come to feel that it was about more than simply child's play. That it was telling me something, something important. I was, in effect, creating a space where I could mimic and experiment with Japanese traditions of communicating with invisible people.
With no memories of spending time together with my grandparents, I didn't have any concept of having lost them. My sadness wasn't caused by their death. It wasn't the anguish of loss but the disconcerting emptiness of something never having been there. All my friends seemed to have grandparents who cherished them. I didn't. So I did the next best thing: I imagined them. How they would play with me. How it would feel to hold their hands. Because I'd never met them, their faces were always blurred out in these fantasies. But in those moments they were glowing with an aura of love and kindness. In my mind they were like what a Westerner might call guardian angels. And on that one day when I was six, the fantasy crossed over into reality when I tried to reach out to them using nothing more than a pencil, a flower, and a new shoebox.
In his aptly titled 1894 book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Lafcadio Hearn noted that "in Japan there are two forms of the Religion of the Dead-that which belongs to Shinto and that which belongs to Buddhism." He was one of the first foreign visitors to pick up on differences in the ways death was handled between Buddhism, the religion imported to Japan from India by way of China and Korea some fourteen centuries ago, and Shinto, the native beliefs with a much longer lineage in Japan. Today, Japan's funeral traditions are almost entirely Buddhist in nature, and my game of pretend unconsciously incorporated motifs from my family visits to my grandparents' grave: the headstone inscribed with the names of the departed, the placing of the flowers, the prayers, the incense, all of it intended to ease their transition into the afterlife, all of it Buddhist in origin. At the time, I didn't think about things in those terms, of course. I wasn't even really conscious of the concept of religion, let alone ritual. All I wanted, hungered for, was contact. Contact with something I couldn't sense or see but knew, somehow, was there, something that I loved and that loved me. Years later I'd realize: Imbuing the invisible with a spiritual presence represented something altogether different from funerals, or from Buddhism. It was the fundamental essence of Shinto.
Shinto, written with characters meaning "The Way of Kami," is the name for the native spiritual beliefs of Japan. You'll note I said spiritual rather than religious. The reasons for my reluctance to use the R word will become more apparent later on, but I can tell you this much now: Growing up, we never heard about Shinto in class, we never went to the equivalent of a Sunday school. We went to shrines mostly as a sightseeing habit, saying, Well, we're in Kyoto-maybe we should check out so-and-so shrine. I doubt any among our friends and family could have articulated in any concrete detail what Shinto meant to us personally, let alone historically or culturally.
Yet we absorbed aspects of Shinto nonetheless, as if through osmosis. I remember a fad for colorful "omamori" in my all-girls high school. They are charms that are sold at shrines, made of cloth embroidered with glimmery lamé thread, with cord toggles that allow them to be hung on things for luck. There are many kinds: talismans for safe births, for safe travel, for successful studies, for finding a partner in marriage. All sorts of things. They aren't substitutes for caution or hard work. But no matter how hard you study or carefully you navigate traffic, accidents can happen. They are hopes for things to go well, and an admission that we can't control everything. Omamori are like packaged wishes.
But that's my grown-up hindsight talking. When we were girls, none of us treated omamori as sacraments. We simply loved them for their kawaii cute factor, with their embroidery and colors and beautifully knotted cords. We wore uniforms throughout middle and high school, dark blue blazers and skirts. The skirts fastened on one side, and we would hang an omamori from an open buttonhole as a decoration. Looking back, I guess that was a way for us to express a little individuality. Omamori were cute and colorful enough to catch attention, yet not so much so that they would trigger a dress-code infraction. Everyone wore different kinds, some received as gifts from family or friends, others purchased for their fortunes: charms for academic success, safety in commuting to school, or even just luck in general. I wore several over the years, but tellingly, I can't remember what specific protection any of them were supposed to confer. All I can remember is my favorite, which I bought on a school trip to Kyoto. A few girlfriends and I went to a shrine in Arashiyama, where we bought omamori featuring embroidered images of a beautiful lady-in-waiting in a kimono, a scene from The Tale of Genji. To me, omamori are like Shinto in a nutshell. They are quiet reminders of the forces out there beyond our control-and they're also simply nice to look at.
So we went to shrines and carried amulets, but none of us ever actually spoke of Shinto. One of the reasons for this was that the imperial government co-opted Shinto in the long lead-up to World War II, incorporating it into a colonialist ideology. Today, academics call it State Shinto. It ended abruptly with the arrival of the American occupiers in 1945, who rewrote our constitution to strictly separate church and state. Teachers in particular took this secular mandate very seriously.
But there is another, even bigger reason, I think. Shinto was always just there. And in many ways, this is how it always had been. Shinto didn't even get a name until well after the arrival of Buddhism in the sixth century. Until that point, there wasn't anything with which to compare it-it just was. I think this might well be the most fundamental aspect of Shinto. It isn't flashy or pushy. It doesn't call attention to itself. It's always in the background, existing patiently, waiting to be discovered-as I had, in the park with the raven and the shrine.
I don't think it's any coincidence that the spiritual journey that began after my mother's death led me to these native beliefs first. It is like a spiritual substrate for everything that came after, the foundation of so much of Japanese culture as a whole. I didn't consider myself Shinto then, and I don't consider myself to be Shinto now. But none of that matters. When you visit a shrine, you don't have to believe or disbelieve. You don't have to swear any kind of loyalty, or refuse any affiliations. That inclusivity, without any obligation other than showing commonsense respect, energized my explorations.
Shinto has no holy book, no scripture, no sermons, no evangelism. This is precisely what can make it so difficult to explain to those not raised here-because we would have equal difficulty explaining it to ourselves. When I started to reconnect with Shinto in a more serious way after my mother's death, I struggled with where to begin.
What helped me were stories. Stories that can be interpreted in many different ways, about the deities we call kami-kami that often behave a whole lot like people.
Let me tell you about the first of them.
Everything begins, of course, at the Beginning: the genesis of the heavens, the coalescing of the Earth out of the primordial void, and the creation of the islands of Japan by a pair of kami. One, Izanaki, was male; the other, Izanami, was female. Next, they invented sex. From her womb Izanami bore a multitude of kami, one after the other. The first to arrive was the kami of ambition: a symbol of commitment to their task. The very last to emerge was the kami of fire.
It burned Izanami terribly, mortally. In her death throes she vomited, producing a kami of mining and a kami of minerals. As she released her bladder and bowels, more kami sprang into existence: a pair of water kami from her urine, and the kami of soil and clay from her feces.
I should mention that all of this was news to me when I first decided to read the Kojiki. Translated as Records of Ancient Matters, it is Japan's first book, composed in 712 CE on commission from the emperor. It retells local legends already centuries old at the time, dispatches from a prehistory in which the membrane between the visible and invisible was thinner, and we saw spirits everywhere: in plants, animals, natural phenomena, even the very terrain itself. By respecting and venerating these presences as divine spiritual beings, inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago had always positioned themselves as part of something much bigger: a universal, natural order. This worldview is called animism, and it is the fundamental concept underpinning the traditional Japanese system of beliefs.
Copyright © 2025 by Hiroko Yoda. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
