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Updated: May 24, 2025
Ah, how time speeds for the old. It seems but a short year or more that we two entered here together, she and I. From childhood I had nursed her. I thought your father old for her, in spite of his young heart and increasing fame. But he loved her truly, and has mourned for her. Even now he prays thrice daily before her ihai on the shrine.
In the smile he bent upon her, the old nurse fancied that she caught a tenderness as of Umè's smile. Perhaps, indeed, the homeless soul, denied its usual shelter in the shrine, made sanctuary of the husband's earthly frame. Perhaps, too, Kano had hoped for this, and so refused the ihai.
So they sold their small house with all that it contained, excepting the ancestral tablets, and the holy things which must never be sold, and the ihai of their buried daughter, which were placed, according to the custom of those about to leave their native place, in the family temple. Now the family was of the Nichiren-Shu; and their temple was Myokoji.
And the aged patriarch about to pass away knows that loving lips will nightly murmur to the memory of him before the household shrine; that faithful hearts will beseech him in their pain and bless him in their joy; that gentle hands will place before his ihai pure offerings of fruits and flowers, and dainty repasts of the things which he was wont to like; and will pour out for him, into the little cup of ghosts and gods, the fragrant tea of guests or the amber rice-wine.
The ihai might as well be set up, and prayers offered for the dead man's soul. Umè-ko, wearied by the heat, and the incessant strain, lay prone upon her matted floor, listening to the chirp of a bell cricket that hung in a tiny bamboo cage near by. The clear notes of the refrain, struck regularly with the sound of a fairy bell, had begun to help and soothe her. Mata sat dozing on the kitchen step.
Upon the table is an ihai, or mortuary tablet; in front of the tablet burns a little lamp, and incense in a cup of bronze; a small repast has been placed there, fruits and dainties such a repast as, upon festival occasions, it is the custom to offer to the dead.
In the last hour of her illness she had said: "From what time I die till three full years be past I pray you to leave the child always united with the Shadow of me: never let him be separated from my ihai, so that I may continue to care for him and to nurse him since thou knowest that he should have the breast for three years. This, my last asking, I entreat thee, do not forget."
When a husband dies, two ihai are made, in case the wife resolves never to marry again. On one of these the kaimyo of the dead man is painted in characters of gold, and on the other that of the living widow; but, in the latter case, the first character of the kaimyo is painted in red, and the other characters in gold. These two tablets are then placed in the household butsuma.
One usually larger than that placed in the family shrine, is kept in the temple of which the deceased was a parishioner, together with a cup in which tea or water is daily poured out as an offering. In almost any large temple, thousands of such ihai may be seen, arranged in rows, tier above tier each with its cup before it for even the souls of the dead are supposed to drink tea.
He lisped and laughed and held out his arms, being evidently used to petting; and while playing with him I looked closely at the tablet. It was a Shinshu ihai, bearing a woman's kaimyo, or posthumous name; and Manyemon translated the Chinese characters for me: Revered and of good rank in the Mansion of Excellence, the thirty-first day of the third month of the twenty-eighth year of Meiji.
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