Two Funerals

The phone call had come that morning. Etsuko’s sister-in-law, Akiko, her voice thin and stretched tight as a wire. “Kenji passed,” she’d said, no preamble, no softening. “In his sleep.”

Kenji. Her older brother. The last tether to the family that was.

Now, hours later, a cup of lukewarm green tea sat untouched on her table. The real question, the one that coiled in her gut, had nothing to do with train schedules to Kamakura for the service and everything to do with the contents of her wardrobe.

In the back of the closet, sealed in a garment bag, was the ghost. A dark, woolen suit, smelling faintly of camphor, and a life she had meticulously shed. It was a well-made suit. It had stood at a wedding altar next to a woman named Yumi, who had promised forever. It had held two squirming babies, a boy and a girl, who had called it ‘Father.’ It had sat stiffly in boardrooms and bowed to clients.

Yumi had used the word ‘selfish’ when Etsuko, at sixty-two, had finally spoken her truth. The word had been a stone, and it had shattered the stained-glass window of their life. The children, adults with their own lives, had sided with their mother. Their silence was a constant absence, a noticeable void, a socket where a tooth used to sit.

Etsuko reached past her blouses, her soft cardigans, her simple, elegant dresses. Her fingers brushed against the plastic of the garment bag. She could almost feel the weight of the man who wore it—a heavy, ill-fitting coat she’d been forced to carry for six decades. Going to the funeral in that suit would be a final performance for an audience who only ever wanted the actor, not the person inside. It would be quiet. It would be respectful. It would be a lie.

Her gaze shifted to the other side of the closet. To a simple black dress, jersey cotton, with a modest neckline. It was comfortable. It was hers. It was Etsuko’s. To wear it would be to walk into the funeral home not as Kenji’s brother, but as his sister. A stranger. An aberration. She could already feel the stares, the whispers cutting through the scent of incense. Akiko’s tight face would collapse into a mask of polite horror. Her niece and nephew, Kenji’s children, would look right through her.

She remembered Kenji, not as an ally, but as a man of quiet, unshakeable tradition. When she’d come out to him, he hadn’t yelled. He’d looked at the Yokohama Bay and said, “Shikata ga nai.” It can’t be helped. An acceptance that was also a dismissal. A closing of a door. They hadn’t spoken since.

Would he have wanted her there as she was? Or would he have preferred the ghost?

She pulled out the black dress. The fabric was soft against her wrinkled fingers. She held it up to her body, looking at her faint reflection in the dark window. An old woman with kind, tired eyes and hair, once black, now a graceful silver. This was her. This was the person her brother had never truly met.

To go in the suit would be to mourn a brother. To go in the dress would be to mourn a brother who never knew his sister. The first was a grief for the family. The second was a grief all her own.

She laid the dress on her bed as the lights of the Ferris wheel across the bay began their slow, kaleidoscopic turn, painting the ceiling with fleeting colors. Etsuko stood in the quiet of her apartment, a ghost in her own right, caught between two funerals: the first carried the family’s grief. The second carried a grief all her own.