The Wings of Dreams

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 short while. And this being winter, all the more so.
    At the end of the day, buried in this potter’s field were the lonely dead who had no living to watch over them. It sounded better to called them wayfarers who had died on their journeys. But anyone who died and whose family did not come to get them was treated the same. Family or no, they lacked the resources or the respect and affection.
    And then there were entire families that died at the same time. There were vagabonds on the one hand, and those with families that cared but had no place to bury them on the other, and left them in a potter’s field out of necessity.
    After seven years, the grave keeper disinterred the unclaimed dead, crushed the coffin together with the bones inside, and reinterred them in the city mausoleum. And that was the end of it.
    In any case, the land a person owned was technically on loan from the kingdom, so when the old owner died, a new owner would take possession of it. Normally, people kept their hands off the catalpa trees at the borders of the hamlets. But if somebody inadvertently cut one down and discovered a coffin beneath, they’d dig it up and hand it over to the grave keeper, who would disposed of it in the customary manner.
    And so the end inevitably came, for people and every other living thing.

    “There are a few things I need to get done first,” Shushou muttered to herself, stroking Hakuto’s throat. She smiled into those golden brown eyes and took off her satin padded kimono. Beneath it was Keika’s thinner padded jacket.
    “It’s freezing—”
    Once the sun began to set, the chill in the air grew fierce. She’d traveled a considerable distance southeast from Renshou, but the weather hadn’t improved at all. She’d heard that winter didn’t visit kingdoms far to the south like Sou, and had been hoping that things would warm up a bit.
    With a sigh of regret, Shushou folded the satin kimono and stuffed it into the traveling pack on Hakuto’s back. Now to find an inn to spend the night.
    She’d donned Keika’s padded kimono—and before that had devised a way to take it off Keika’s hands—because she’d imagined that strutting around in her best outfit would make her a prime target for highway robbers.
    However, there was still the moukyoku. She needed an inn that had stables equipped to care for him. Except that Shushou certainly did not look like a seasoned traveler who knew her way around inns, or was wealthy enough to