Jizō at the Riverbank of the Dead Children

The riverbed is made of flat grey stones.

The children pile them into towers. They pile the stones carefully, one on top of another, because someone told them — or because they know instinctively — that the tower must be tall enough to reach the other side, must be tall enough to be seen by the parents they left, must be tall enough to count as something. The children are three years old, two years old, six years old. Some of them have never walked. Some of them never learned to talk. They are building towers on the Sai-no-Kawara, the Dry Riverbed of Souls, which is the place in the afterlife where children go when they die before their time.

The towers never finish.

Every night, before the towers can be completed, the demons of the riverbed come and knock them down. The stones scatter. The children must begin again.

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The poem that describes this scene — the Sai no Kawara Jizō Wasan, attributed to the saint Kūkai — is one of the most sorrowful texts in the Japanese literary tradition. It lists the actions of the children with the specific detail of someone who has watched them: the youngest ones crying for their mothers, the older ones trying to comfort the younger ones, the way a child of five will try to act older than she is when she understands that no mother is coming.

The demons arrive at dusk. The towers fall.

But then, before the next day begins, Jizō arrives.

He is the bodhisattva of the earth, the one who vowed to remain in the world until every being in all the hells is liberated. He is depicted throughout Japan as a simple stone figure in monk’s robes, carrying a staff and a wish-granting jewel. He is present at crossroads and mountain passes and river crossings — all the places where the world is thinnest, where the living might slip across into the dead country or vice versa.

On the Sai-no-Kawara, he comes to the children.

He gathers them into his robe. He lifts the smallest ones and holds them against him, their cold hands gripping the cloth of his sleeve. He tells them: Do not weep. Your parents are still in the living world. They have not forgotten you. The fact that you are here is not your fault. You did not die because you were bad. You died because the world is like this, and you were small.

He sits with them through the darkness. He is the parent they do not have here.

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In the morning he leaves, and the demons return, and the towers begin again.

The theology of this myth is not that Jizō solves the problem. He does not rescue the children from the Sai-no-Kawara. He does not build the towers for them or protect them from the demons permanently. The towers will keep falling. He will keep returning. The grief will not resolve.

What the story offers is presence in the grief rather than its resolution.

Across Japan, at the sides of mountain roads and along river banks and at village crossroads, stone Jizō figures stand. People dress them in red bibs — the bibs parents make for infants. Parents who have lost children, or who have had abortions, or who are afraid for their living children, come to these stone figures and dress them and bring small offerings and speak to them.

The figure says nothing back.

It stands at the crossroads in its red bib in every kind of weather, and it is clearly there, and it is clearly present.

This is what Jizō offers: not that the children will come home, not that the towers will stay built, but that someone knows they are building, and someone comes in the dark to hold them.

The towers fall.

He returns.