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the town right away but set off again in search of the graveyard.
    These towns all connected to the highway in the south and placed the graveyards in the north. Wanting to stay out of public view and settle her nerves first, Shushou circled around to the north. The town was small enough that in a corner of the field, the golden roof of the cemetery shrine soon came into view.
    Many of these cemeteries had no fences or walls. This one was no different. Neither was the patch of ground defined by a cluster of new graves, a scene she’d observed in each of the six towns she’d stopped at so far. The fresh mounds of earth were painted white by the catalpa branches stuck into the ground. People were dying here too.
    Shushou set Hakuto down next to the cemetery shrine. Cemetery shrines were, by and large, stark and uninviting buildings. Unlike the ancestral shrines that occupied the city centers, the cemetery shrine stood alone. The walls barely kept out the wind and rain. In an alcove lacking even a door was an altar where respects could be paid to the dead.
    The only dead buried in the potter’s field of this town had died far from home, so the altar saw little in the way of memorial services. Behind the altar was a small annex where the dead could be temporarily housed until they were buried. There wasn’t much more to the cemetery shrine than that.
    Shushou went to the well next to the shrine, removed the well cover, and drew out a bucket of water for Hakuto. She squatted down next to him. Stroking his neck, she took in the rest of the graveyard, one that had become all too familiar during the journey. In fact, it seemed that with every new town, the number of graves only multiplied.
    “That’s what becomes of us when we die.”
    Placed in a coffin, buried in a hole in the ground, the earth piled up—and that was the end.
    Some said the dead were reborn in Yamato at the eastern reaches of the Kyokai and became wizards. Or their spirits flew off to Mt. Kouri in the midst of Mt. Hou. There an accounting was made of their sins, and according to their good and bad deeds they were given positions in the world of the gods.
    Shushou wasn’t the only one who thought this a bit fishy. If it was really true, then the number of the dead would only grow until Gyokkei, the legendary home of the Gods, became jam-packed.
    Others claimed that the dead were reincarnated. Except that Shushou had never heard the reincarnation of her dead grandmother calling out to her. If she’d been reborn in a different form, with no memory even of Shushou, then her grandmother had hardly come back again. That’d make her little more than a stranger.
    In any case, Shushou thought, staring out at the graveyard, a person’s final resting place was a sad and lonely place.
    The surrounding fields served as a fire break to spare the town from wildfires. Houses, barns and crops were forbidden. The bleak, shorn meadows spread outwards. Only here in the rubble-strewn wasteland was the earth exposed in mounds. Catalpa shoots fluttered in the winter wind, here and there fallen over, with no grave tender to straighten them.
    The dead were usually born back to their home towns by their families. A child, grandchild, sibling or parent heard the news, and no matter how far away, would come as quickly as they could. They would bear the body back home and bury it on their own soil, build a mound and plant the catalpa shoots. The wealthy would construct a shrine, make offerings, and yearly on the vigil burn articles of clothing made out of paper.
    Even supposing the spirits had already departed, for hearts that longed for and missed them, the least they could do was prepare a vessel to serve as a home for their souls so as not to lose that connection with the dead.
    This cemetery had originally been a temporary gravesite for those coming to retrieve their dead. So if a family did not live too far away, the mourning period could be extended and the burial put off for a