It is sultry summer in Japan. There are fireworks displays in the night sky as I walk home from work, distant orbs of shattering ochre and turquoise exploding in the distance followed by a dull thud. In nearby parks and schoolyards, I hear the taut rhythms of taiko drumming, the musical skeleton on which are hung the ringing of high-pitched bells and the tremulous singing of old folksongs.

Those who attend the pyrotechnic festivals are often dressed in yukata, a simple cotton robe perfect for the nighttime swelter. People of all ages, fanning themselves and mopping their brows, gather on riverbanks by the thousands to watch fireworks burst into spheres and fall back to earth in weeping-willow showers of sparks. They go oooohh and aaaahh.

 Others follow the sound of drums, bells, and amplified singing until they find people already doing the o-bon dance under strings of electric lights. The entrancing jingle-jangle and gong-gong of the o-bon music swirls dancers into a slow-motion choreographed vortex. They move in a lazy circle, arms swaying up and out, down and in, feet shuffling along below. An occasional clap momentarily breaks the graceful movement and the dancers make fluid forms: “Come hither,” they seem to be calling out, “but not too close, and now, please leave.”

In Hiroshima, perhaps in a reprise of local o-bon customs dating from long ago, people ink messages of peace and remembrance on floating paper lanterns. With a lit candle in each lantern, the bobbing, glowing processional makes its way down the slow-moving Motoyasu river, passing under the midair point where the world’s first atomic weapon was exploded in war. 

These are the sights and sounds of summer here, and rightly so. For o-bon is rooted deep in Japanese culture, and even deeper in Asia’s Buddhist past. The word “bon,” some scholars believe, comes from an old Chinese transliteration of an even older Pali word meaning “to raise up” and, metaphorically, “to save.”  At o-bon, we help the dead to paradise with our exertions in the summer heat. We dance them up and away; we sing them and drum them along as they continue their journey on the soul’s path beyond the horizon of our mortal senses. The dances make this tension explicit in a poetic way: We call the dead toward us; we brush them aside.

We do this for their benefit—and for ours. For o-bon is the time when the dead wander back to earth. What does one do when the ghosts return? One welcomes them with fire, the mukaebi or “welcoming flame.” But fire, even the welcoming kind, can also dazzle and ward off.

We dance for them, put out fine foods for them to enjoy. But in treating the dead as guests instead of as peers, we acknowledge—because perhaps they have forgotten—that this world is for us, not for them.

 We entertain the dead with raucous music and fireworks displays. Maybe a little too raucous. Make enough racket, we seem to think, and perhaps the dead will have had enough and depart, leaving us alone.

We sweep the graves where their ashes rest in metal urns. But one does not meet the dead in cemeteries. One meets only the living.

 Finally, as o-bon ends, we send the dead away again, the okuribi or “seeing-off flame”  lighting the way back to their world, which is no longer here with us. Feted and fussed over, the dead are firmly reminded that they must, at last, be off.

The dead may pass among us for a while, but they may not linger. We may hope to see them again. But not here. When the dead come to us, instead of us staying with the other shades, we know it is the tide flowing backwards. We are uneasy. We want them to go away.

 *****

 O-bon makes us think about the borderland between life and death, the sometimes porous standing screen that separates the quick from the departed. At certain times of the year, maybe the dead really can stray back into our environs. On hot, sticky summer nights in Japan, that much is easy to believe.

 But maybe things are not as straightforward as there being only the dead and the living. After all, our memories cross the murky no-man’s-land between them and us with ease. I can see my grandmother’s face in living color, smiling at me on a sunny day in the early 1980s. But she has been gone for ages. The dead can be alive again, in some ways, much more easily than we might grant.

Or than we might like. For other people are complicated, and we spend our lives doing a kind of o-bon dance with them. Come close, we beckon, but not too close. And when it is time, then be gone, and leave me to control my world as I like.

Maybe o-bon is not meant simply to conjure up ghosts that re-cross the Sanzu River—the Japanese Buddhist equivalent of the River Styx—when the weather stalls in hot summer doldrums. Maybe o-bon exists to remind us that we don’t know how to deal with the dead who return because, yes, we didn’t know how to deal with them when they were here with us. The ghosts come back looking for something. Something we could only have given them when they were living—if only we knew how.