Old Bones and Ghosts

Chapter 4 of The Family Business

I walked up the road by the river and soon arrived at the bottom of the vast graveyard draped over a gentle slope stretching up the hill behind the school. As far as the eye could see, stone markers stood sentry over their precious treasures, small boxes containing urns of ashes and bone.

No bodies were buried here. Only the cremated remains of the dead, buried in small square or rectangular family plots, under grey or brown stone pillars engraved with the family name.

The plots were packed closely together so as to not waste any space, accented here and there with white or pink blossoms of fresh flowers. Almost all were neatly swept and many of the granite gravestones gleamed as if they had been recently scrubbed and polished.

The afternoon breeze had died down as if to prepare for the early evening, and a somber calm settled over the area. A small column of wispy white smoke rose in the distance, and I caught a faint, sweet scent of burning incense drifting lightly in the air.

I tugged the corner of a folded sheet of paper wedged into my front pocket and retrieved Jimmy’s note from earlier.

I carefully unfolded the message, and read it again.

“SAKAMOTO 1428”

I began walking slowly up the path along the left edge of the graveyard.

Sakamoto (坂本) is a common Japanese surname. The kanji for saka (坂) means slope, incline, or hill. Moto (本) has several meanings including origin, so the meaning of the name can be roughly translated as “the base of the slope,” in this case, the spot in which I had been standing before I started walking.

Jimmy had thought up several such clever names for reference points in the graveyard, part of an elaborate game we played whenever we could.

As I walked, I counted the paths to my right spaced evenly between each pair of family grave markers, joining my path at right angles, forming a…

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