Picking Bones from Ash Read Free

chicken meat and served this to her customers at the
izakaya
. With the tips, the most delicate part of the shoots, she made a
sunomono
salad, with seaweed and
miso
. The middle part of the bamboo shoots she added toour daily rice pot, sprinkling in some
ginkgo
nuts I’d harvested the previous fall.
    “I’ve gone to look for shoots at the edge of the woods,” she said. “But everyone else gets there before I do. It’s all this work I do. It doesn’t leave me much free time.”
    “You have to go deep into the woods,” I said. “
Very
deep.”
    She gave me a strange look. “What were you doing there? Who did you go with?”
    “I went alone!” I protested. “I was looking for the bamboo where the moon princess was born.”
    She smiled then, and I could almost hear her thinking to herself that I was still just a little girl after all. “You must be careful. There are many strange people in the woods. Not to mention
oni
s.”
    “I saw an old woman. She was carrying a basket on her back and picking shoots.” I described how the woman had been dressed.
    “Must have been your imagination.” She smiled kindly. “No elderly woman would go tromping around in there on her own. And how would she get up into the hillside?”
    “But I
saw
her.”
    “I haven’t heard of people collecting bamboo shoots and wearing the outfit you describe since I was a little girl. And if there was a woman collecting that many shoots, surely she’d be trying to sell them in town.”
    “Maybe she is selling them now and you just don’t know about it.”
    “I’d know about it if there were such a thing as an old woman selling delicacies that have been scarce ever since this stupid war ended.” A black mood overcame her then and my mind’s eye darkened with hers.
    “Maybe it was a ghost,” I said. “Or a god.”
    She liked this idea. “A god showed you the way to give us some food for dinner? That’s a much better explanation. And much more likely too.”
    “Or maybe,” I whispered with reverence, “the moon princess sent the bamboo shoot lady to me.”
    “We must,” she whispered in kind, “thank the moon people for this generosity.”
    “It’s a sign.”
    We looked out of the window and up at the sky at the same time. There was the deep, blue-black night filled with hundreds of silver knowing eyes and a moon as round as an
omanju
. I was happy in the fantasy of themoon people and pleased that my mother had so enjoyed my gift. But the moment didn’t last long. My mother began to breathe quickly, and I could feel her eyes darting around as though searching the room for the answer to an unarticulated question. My attention fell down from the sky and back into the room with the one lightbulb fixed inside a paper lantern filling the kitchen with a weak yellow glow. My mother put down her chopsticks. Though I hadn’t been prompted to do so, I put mine down as well. She took my fingers in her hands and examined them. “You have to be careful. You have a competition next week and you can’t win if you hurt your fingers by digging up bamboo shoots.”
    “My hands are fine.”
    She pushed my hands away as though she had just borrowed them and was now returning them to me. “You have to remember that you aren’t like everybody else. You are a very unique person.”
    “I am?”
    “I’ve told you that many times,” she said loftily. “I’ve met many, many people. Before you were born, when life was different, I used to know many people who are famous now. And you are smarter and even more talented than they are. Remember that.” She nodded.
    I remembered and I believed her.
    I won the piano competition easily, and another one the following weekend in which I was awarded a photo album, which was very often the grand prize in those days. Due to labor laws, children weren’t allowed to earn money, even from a contest. It was nearly always the same two dozen or so students and their parents from several neighboring towns