There was a small old cemetery near the house where I grew up. As the
Japanese law hadn’t been changed to cremation until I left home, all of
my ancestors were buried there when I was a child. A patch of land was
allocated to each family in our hamlet of an old city Kyoto, and a
family would divide the patch into individual graves for the deceased.
Our family’s patch had about ten small graves each of which was marked
with a few small insignificant stones. It was a very primitive burial
site that young people nowadays wouldn’t believe.
My grandmother used
to accompany me when she visited there twice a year. We would bring
incense sticks, a box of matches, stale cookies and a tin kettle filled
with water. She would stick lighted incense into the ground of each
grave, put a cookie beside it and spilled some water from the kettle
onto the ground. Since the stones didn’t bear names, who was, or were,
under the particular grave depended on my grandmother’s memory and what
she was told. After we finished praying to each grave, she always said,
“Now, the dog,” sounding like the most important event remained. And she
would stick the last incense and spill the rest of water along with the
last cookie onto the foot of a weed-grown mound that was beside the
narrow trail to our family graves. Under the mound was the place where
our family dog had rested in peace.
I had never kept a dog but my
father had. My grandfather reigned harshly over his family members and
never allowed me to keep a dog. But he hadn’t started his hobby of
growing chrysanthemums when my father was a child. No chrysanthemums
meant an approval for a dog. When my father told me that he had kept a
dog, I couldn’t picture that a dog was running freely in the yard of our
house.
From time to time, I visited the cemetery with my father. His
main purpose there was to pull out the weed that easily gulped up the
entire grave patch, rather than to pray. After clearing up the ground of
our ancestors’ graves, he would pray to each grave shortly. And in the
end, he prayed to the mound, for his dog. Although among our ancestors,
there were his brothers who were twins and died shortly after birth, he
prayed for his dog longer than for them. Seeing him do that every time, I
knew how much he loved his dog. That also explained my grandmother’s
ritual for the dog’s grave. He was an important member of the family
back then.
According to my father, the family never decided or even
talked about keeping the dog. He was a stray dog that showed up one day
from nowhere, and kept coming. Soon he stopped leaving and just began to
stay in the yard. My father fed him and he slept under the eaves of our
house. That was how they got to keep a dog. He was a big dog with long
fluffy white fur. My father named him Maru, that means ‘round’ or
‘circle’ in Japanese, because he looked like a big white hairy ball. In
those days, keeping a pet was so easy and casual that Maru didn’t wear a
collar and wasn’t on a leash. They had never taken him for a walk
because it was unnecessary. He was strolling and running around the yard
all day. Although he had died long before I was born and I had never
seen him, it was one of my customs to pray to Maru on a visit of our
family cemetery.
I had wanted to keep a dog all through my childhood
but never been allowed because my grandfather filled the yard with his
chrysanthemums. When I was a teenager, my first boy friend gave me a big
white stuffed-animal dog for my birthday. My father looked at it
affectionately and said, “It looked exactly like Maru.” Instead of to a
live dog that I couldn’t have, I named that stuffed-animal dog Pon-maru
by mixing my nickname ‘Hidepon’ and ‘Maru’. He became my official
make-believe pet. A few years later, I left home. My grandparents passed
away. The family house was demolished and the site was sold. The rest
of my family moved out of Kyoto. The custom to visit the family cemetery
was gone. Only, Pon-maru still lives with me in my apartment that is
far from my hometown, in a shape of a big, a little-grayish fur ball.
Friday, February 14, 2020
The Dog with An Eternal Life hr627
Labels:
dog,
Family,
grandmother,
grandparents,
grave,
Japan,
Japanese,
Kyoto,
pet,
stuffedanimal
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