Picking Bones from Ash Read Free Page B

was wildly excited. Over the past few weeks as the competition date had grown closer, her shifting moods had settled into pure and radiant happiness. I would have traveled to a hundred competitions that year to keep her so steadily elated.
    The competition came with a grand prize in each age category. The prize included a month’s supply of Erubi fermented milk drink, a large bag of rice, a free toothbrush, and two tubes of toothpaste. It was by far the most ambitious bounty I’d ever tried to win.
    Every trip I have taken since reminds me of that first journey. My mother, emboldened by our adventure and by our anonymity, spoke confidently about our plans to the little ladies who shared our seating area on the train. She had spent the last few days preparing a gorgeous
bento
lunch box for us to eat. A bed of rice was a blank canvas on which she had painted scenes from home: wild greens formed a bamboo forest, eggs cut into flowers bloomed in the foreground, little wisps of seaweed arched into the silhouettes of cranes flying off into a blushing sunset of pickles and sour plums.
    The ladies on the train nodded with admiration as we ate. Whoever you are, they seemed to say, you must be special, wandering off into the world with such beautiful food, with all your youth and enthusiasm and talent.
    “My daughter is the talented one. Piano.”
    I nodded.
    “A musician?
Ah so
. Good luck,” everyone said to me, bowing as they departed the train, for most ended their voyage before we did.
    When we arrived in Akita, it was dusk, that uncertain time of day when gentle animals watch for predators and many flowers close their petals like fingers forming fists against the night air. Mother had found a little
ryokan
for us to stay in through the help of one of her customers. The building was old, a depressing place that had seen better times and seemed to know it; the windows clung to cobwebs and dust, and the dingy entryway refused to offer up any heat. I was so cold I clenched and unclenched my toes inside the faded blue slippers and tried to warm my feet. I was homesick for our little
yojōhan
, the four-and-a-half-
tatami
-mat room that my mother and I shared at home. And I didn’t like the elderly woman who ran the place; she was hunchbacked and slow and stared at me. But my mother soon calmed me down.
    “Did you see the fishpond in the entrance? And look at how each beam of wood in our room is from a different kind of tree. This was once a fine old inn.”
    “It feels haunted.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. Anyway, there’s a surprise here that I know will cheer you up.”
    She was right. Like most traditional inns, the
ryokan
had a large communal bath: one for women and one for men. The water, unlike the water at the bathhouse we frequented at home, came from a hot spring. There were three pools, each lined with stones. My mother read the signs by each bath aloud to me. One of the springs was said to be good for the heart, one for the skin, and one for the joints. This last pool had the face of a demon made out of wood attached to the wall, with hot water spurting out of his nose.
    “When I was a girl,” my mother said wistfully, “my home had a hot spring bath. A real one. People used to say that was why all the girls in the family were so beautiful; we bathed in minerals.”
    “How many girls?” I asked quickly.
    “Oh,” she shrugged. “I’m from the moon, remember? My sisters were all the stars you see in the sky, and that’s too many to count.”
    “You had hundreds of sisters?”
    “Thousands. The moon people have large families.”
    My mother wanted to eat dinner in town at a noodle shop, but the proprietor of the inn informed us that our dinner was already under way.
    “There must be a mistake,” my mother said. “I reserved a room to sleep in, but no meals.”
    “The meals have already been paid for by a gentleman,” the proprietor huffed.
    I had heard from Tomoko, whose family often spent part of