My Grandfather’s Unspoken Dead

My Grandfather’s Unspoken Dead

Inside an Osaka temple, ten thousand flames burn for the dead. It took me fifty years to understand which ones my grandfather was carrying

Obon ended a few days ago. The heat has not, and will not for weeks, but my summer is over. It ends every year on the same evening, at Shitennō-ji in Osaka, in a courtyard full of candles.

The service is called mantō kuyō（万灯供養, an offering of ten thousand lights. The temple gives you a candle and an ink brush, and you write on it the name of someone who has died. The candles are set out on tiered wooden stands that run the length of the compound, so the flames stand at about the height of a man’s waist. After dark the monks walk the central compound chanting the Heart Sutra, and they begin again every fifteen minutes until the gates close, and anyone standing there can walk with them. Printed sheets of the sutra wait at the entrance for people who never learned it. By full dark there are close to ten thousand flames burning at once.

As a boy I hated going.

My grandparents took me. I have no idea what year it was or how old I was, only that I was small enough to be led by the hand. August in Osaka is thick enough to lean against before anyone lights anything, and inside the compound ten thousand flames had been working on the air for an hour. There was wax in it, and smoke, or the steam that comes off that much burning at once. It sat in my throat. I remember breathing carefully, the way you do when the air seems to be running out.

Then I looked at the flames, and at that age they were level with my face.

They moved without any wind. A whole field of them in the dark, each one leaning and recovering on its own schedule, none of them agreeing with the others. I understood at once, the way a child understands things, that they were not candles. Every one of them was somebody who had come back, there were ten thousand of them, and they were standing all around me breathing the same used-up air. Nothing about this was consoling. I was frightened badly enough to still have it, fifty-odd years later.

Not once did I ask my grandparents why we were there. Children accept the shape of the year the way they accept the weather. We went because August came.

Then my grandfather died, and we stopped going.

I did not notice the absence. I was young. The summers filled with other things, and later with work, and the service became something my grandparents used to do, filed away with the rest of what disappears when the people who organized it are gone. Thirty years went past. I stayed away for no reason at all, which is to say that nothing was asking me to go.

Then a friend from my university years died.

We had been close as students, the kind of closeness that assumes an unlimited supply of future afternoons. After we started working we still made time, less often each year, and then several years went by in which neither of us managed it. We were busy. That is the entire explanation and it is not much of one. The last time we met I did not know it was the last time, and nothing about the evening marked itself. It had never crossed my mind that the next thing I would do for him would be to write his name on a candle.

Five or six years ago I went back to Shitennō-ji.

My friends have graves. Every one of them is somewhere, in a family plot, in a city I would have to take a train to, on a hillside I would have to find. A man with a working life does not have many free days in August, the graves are scattered, and the honest accounting is that I can reach one or two of them in a summer and not the rest. So they come to Osaka instead. There is room on the candle for a single name and I choose one, which is not a comfortable minute, and the others stand behind him while I hold the flame steady. Nobody at that temple writes down everyone they mean. You put down the one you can manage, and the rest are understood.

I was standing there with the brush in my hand when I understood what my grandfather had been doing.

The Kitagawa family has a temple. It is Konkai-Kōmyō-ji in Kyoto, it belongs to the Pure Land school, and our dead are there. That is where a family goes for its ancestors. Shitennō-ji has no claim on us at all. It belongs to Washū, a school founded to stand outside the sect system entirely, tracing itself back to Prince Shōtoku in the sixth century. My grandparents crossed the city in the worst heat of the year, with a small boy in tow, to a temple that was not ours, for someone who was not us.

My grandfather was a naval officer. He came home from a war that had taken most of the men he trained beside, he never spoke about them, and nobody in the family asked him to. A family stone has room for the family. It has no room for the men he served with, and there is no ceremony in the Japanese year for someone who wants to remember people he has no standing to remember. Shitennō-ji belongs to no sect and asks nothing of a visitor except that he come and write a name.

He also came home, and they did not. He lived another forty years after that, married, raised children, took a grandson to a temple in the heat. I doubt he ever put words to what he owed them or what he thought he had done wrong by surviving. He simply went every August and stood in the smoke, and whatever he was carrying in there with him, affection was only part of it.

I cannot prove any of this. He never said so, I never asked, and there is no one left to ask now. I know only that at fifty-something, with one name chosen out of several, I was doing something I had watched him do without understanding it, and it suited me for reasons he would have recognized.

Something else had changed by then, and it took me longer to admit.

Ten thousand is not a number you can feel by reading it. In that compound it stands at waist height and runs the length of the courtyard. Every one of those flames is a person who died of something. An illness that took a long time, or a road, or an age that finally arrived, or a war. I know nothing about any of them, and outside the gate a stranger’s death does not reach me at all. Inside, with the whole field of them burning at once, I cannot get rid of a single one. All of these people had reasons, and all of them ran out.

The man crouching beside me, shielding his candle with one hand until it catches, will not be at this service in some August either. Neither will the woman behind him holding a sutra sheet she does not need. I have known since I was young that everybody dies. The courtyard puts it in front of me as a quantity, and a quantity is harder to look away from. I spent most of my life not looking. The thing I was frightened of at five and the thing I avoided at thirty are the same thing, and it can be stood in for an evening without much happening to you.

The flames I was so frightened of as a boy were never the dead. They were an evening’s worth of people who had agreed to carry a name for a few hours in the heat. My grandfather stood in that compound with names he could not say out loud. I stand there now with my friends. In some August I will not be standing there, and I will be one of the small flames leaning and recovering in the dark.

This year I stayed until the chanting started again. The heat over the compound had warped the air so that the far wall came and went. I went back to find my friend and could not tell his flame from the ones on either side of it, doing what the rest of them were doing.

Then I walked out through the gate and left them to the evening.

Takeshi Kitagawa heads the SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT, which aims to introduce Japanese culture. Rooted in his years of Kendo, Zen, and Shinto practice, the project explores whether these traditions have anything real to offer modern life―without pretending they have all the answers.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.