This will be the last of my posts about my father, Fukujuro, for the time being. They were nothing particularly special, just some memories of a father and son from a poor cab driver's family. The buddhist priest of the Jōdo sect who came to read a sutra gave us a talk after reciting the Nembutsu. The content of the talk was about luck and fate. Through reincarnation, the process by which a living being is reborn many times—not only as human beings but also as other creatures including animals—at this moment we are living our given lives as human beings. He explained that the idea that we should not leave this as a mere coincidental "luck" of the moment but must find the meaning of our time in life by respecting our relationships with other people constitutes the concept of “en,” or a fated relationship. I was grateful for the wisdom of the doctrine, which frees us from the all-consuming sorrow of loss caused by death through such abstract concepts. In Japan, when a person dies, they are customarily cremated. After being cremated for about an hour in the chamber, the white bones come out in pieces, which are then collected, put in an urn, and placed in a tomb. But before that final step, there is a period of 49 days during which we welcome the cremated remains into our homes and pray for the dead. We are going through that period at the moment. I would like to put my palms together in a prayer for my father once again, in gratitude for the reincarnation and all the fated relationships during the time he has lived. Namu Amida Buddha. 南無阿弥陀仏 🙏 translation: @tabi_the_fat

My father, Fukujuro Murakami, passed away on September 11 at 2:38 pm. He was 87. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for the past ten years or so, and finally succumbed to multiple organ failure due to metastatic cancer that spread throughout his body from the liver. He had supported his family as a cab driver. In the 1960s, our family lived in the midst of poverty. He was not a smart man, so all he could do was to work incessantly, sparing no time even to sleep. My younger brother and I grew up watching him do so, and are here now thanks to him. As his sons, we are copies of our father; also not very bright, all we know how to do is to keep working, sacrificing sleep. In order to survive in Japan that had lost the Pacific War, he chose to join the Self-Defense Forces. There, he obtained a variety of licenses, from a standard driver's license to a large special vehicle license. After leaving the Forces, he got married through an arranged marriage and moved to Tokyo. He had lost his mother when he was in junior high school, and in his later years with dementia, he often seemed to have visions of her. It can readily be surmised how happy he must have been to meet his beautiful wife, Itsuko, as someone starved for love from his mother, from the fact that he lived a single-mindedly serious life thereafter, devoted to his wife and family. (I apologize to my followers here, but I'm going to make a few more posts to sort out my feelings. Thank you for your understanding.) To be continued... translation: @tabi_the_fat

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