It’s National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, but I don’t yet know this as I wander up a side street in Nozawa Onsen, a bit bedraggled in my yukata and short jacket. I’ve left our inn with no clear destination, just want to be outside in the clear autumn air while I wait for whatever will happen next. I’ve already bathed in the inn’s onsen, eaten savory buns steamed in the springs’ hot water. My travel partner is taking a nap. We’ve survived a typhoon, the day-long storm derailing our itinerary, and now the sunny afternoon lures me outside once again.

The town is busier than it had been this morning, with schoolchildren congregated at the corner who yell hello! hello! A few elderly men sit at the footbath soaking their feet, smoking and scrolling through their phones. I instinctively turn right and head up a steep cobblestoned lane, glimpsing the red torii, a curved arch, that signals an entrance to a Shinto shrine or temple, a holy place.

As I approach the temple complex, I’m drawn to a shrine that holds several seated Jizo, the Bodhisattvas that protect unborn children. I’ve seen these shrines before, at Yamadera, a pilgrimage site with over a 1000 stone steps leading up to a temple that shelters a massive gold Buddha. In these shrines, the seated Jizo are often dressed in red bibs and aprons, surrounded by bright whirly-gigs or wheeled prayer sticks that pile up against the rocks.

 

Jizo line the wall

To tend our unborn children.

My own follow me.

 

There’s so much we don’t know about Japan, so much we can’t understand, and we ask a lot of questions. Our guide, Kaz, is patient with us. He tells us the unborn need toys to occupy them in their journey toward the afterlife. Now, in Nozawa, I pause at the Jizo shrine and snap a few pictures. The statues smile, always smile, patient and calm. They are dressed like children so that children won’t be afraid. They guide our unborn who need help finding their way.

It’s very quiet here, and I turn to find the sun filtering through the first autumn leaves. Cold spring water bubbles into a cistern. I bend to feel it on my hands, splash it on my face.  Later I’ll learn that all around the world, at this very moment, women are remembering their lost babies, and I’ll remember my own miscarriages, those barely clotted cells that never even reached the womb; instead they caught in the fallopian tubes where they burst. For years I tried to figure it all out—the why, the repercussions. They weren’t even babies, I thought for a long time, and so I tried not to mourn them.

 

The unborn need toys,

Something to play with, says Kaz.

The prayer wheels turn.

 

I continue to climb. Temples always require some exertion, some effort, to get where you think you should go. At the top, I see a large, silver bell hanging inside a gazebo, with a mallet striker roped to the beam. I saw a similar bell at a shrine to Kannon, the Japanese name for the Bodhisattva of compassion, and there we were encouraged to strike the bell, allow the reverberation to resonate through our flesh and bones. So now I climb the steps, holding my robe to avoid tripping, and push the heavy striker against the bell. It booms out across the valley, and I strike it again.

A monk hurries out of the house behind me, yells hi! hi!, but not in a friendly way. With gestures he tells me I’ve made a mistake, that this bell is not for me, and he says what sounds like please leave. I bow repeatedly, so embarrassed in my tourist’s robe, murmur sumimasen! and hurry back down the steps. Of course that bell is not a toy, a trifle, but an intricate part of village life, keeping time.

I’m a reprimanded child, flushed with shame, as I scramble back toward our inn, anxious now to be done with this town, with Japan, with myself. But I stop for a moment, take a deep breath, hear the same stream, feel the same gentle breeze on my face. I try not to dwell on my mistake as I begin to walk more slowly, past the Jizo who hold their steadfast smiles.

 

Sumimasen!

I’m sorry. Excuse me. Please.

Jizo nod, forgive.

 

___

Brenda Miller’s new hybrid collection, Love You, Bye: A Daughter’s Journey in Essays and Poems, is just out from Skinner House Books (April 2026). She is the author of six additional essay collections, including A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, and An Earlier Life, winner of the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her work has received seven Pushcart Prizes. She co-authored with Julie Marie Wade the essay collection Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, and with Suzanne Paola the craft textbook Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, now in its third edition.

Photograph by Sherry Shahan