mortuary tablets

The mortuary tablets are the small family memorials that Mr. Tanaka sends to Chiyo after she leaves Yoroido. Packed in a dark wooden box, they carry the news of her parents’ deaths into the Nitta okiya: Chiyo must make room for her family’s remembrance even as she is being trained for a life far from home.

Arrival in Kyoto

The package bears Mr. Tanaka’s return address and is marked with Chiyo’s name. Before she can open it, Auntie takes charge, cuts the twine, and unwraps coarse paper and canvas sacking stitched with heavy fishermen’s thread. Inside the dark wooden box, the tablets lie among folds of white linen. The careful layers hold out the possibility of a gift or a rescue; what they reveal instead is a set of objects that turns Chiyo’s hopes toward grief.

The tablets had once stood before the altar in Chiyo’s family’s tipsy house. Two are unfamiliar to her and look newer than the others. Their Buddhist names are written in characters she cannot understand, and she is afraid to ask why Mr. Tanaka has sent them. The objects arrive before their meaning is explained, making their presence a forewarning of loss.

The News They Carry

In his letter, Mr. Tanaka explains that Chiyo’s mother died six weeks after Chiyo left for Kyoto; her father died a few weeks later. Their remains are enshrined in the village cemetery, and services were held for them at Hoko-ji Temple in Senzuru, with women in Yoroido chanting sutras. The tablets thus connect the small domestic altar Chiyo remembers with the rites performed after her parents’ deaths.

Chiyo had kept hoping her mother might still be alive, because hope was scarce and she had clung to what little she could imagine. The news makes that hope impossible to sustain. The tablets do not merely represent an absence already understood; their arrival is the means by which the truth reaches her, bringing the deaths into the life she has begun in Kyoto.

A Place in Daily Life

Too pained to pray before the tablets herself, Chiyo asks Auntie to put them somewhere she will not see and to pray on her behalf. Auntie refuses, saying Chiyo should not turn her back on her ancestors. She helps Chiyo set the tablets on a shelf near the base of the stairwell, where Chiyo is to pray before them every morning.

Auntie tells her never to forget her parents, because they are all that remains of her childhood. The tablets consequently become part of Chiyo’s daily routine, not keepsakes she can put away until grief has passed. Their place by the stairwell makes remembrance both physically present and recurrent: each morning, Chiyo encounters the family past while living within the okiya that has taken her away from it.

Memory and Loss

The tablets bring together two forms of separation: Chiyo’s distance from Yoroido and the deaths that have made her return to her parents impossible. Their unfamiliar inscriptions also mark a limit to what she can know at the moment of their arrival. Only Mr. Tanaka’s letter supplies the names and circumstances behind the objects, turning a frightening package into a family memorial.

Their significance lies in the contradiction they preserve. Chiyo wants the past hidden because it hurts, while Auntie insists that remembering is an obligation to the dead and to the childhood Chiyo has lost. Set on the shelf, the tablets remain a concrete link to her family, but also a reminder that the life they commemorate cannot be recovered.