“Otōsan, Okāsan… tadaima. I’m home. Sorry I’m late. The train was packed… and then I couldn’t get a cab…” Emi swiped her hand across her brow, fighting the summer humidity as she set her bag down and took her shoes off.

“Okaeri, Emi. You’re here now,” her mom, Yoshiko, tottered to the door and regarded her daughter warmly.

“Always late, sis,” Ryo poked his head around the corner, his thousand-watt smile teasing. “I mean, I came all the way from Boston. You only had to come from Kyoto? I still made it on time…”

Emi scrunched her face into a mock smile. “Very funny, Ryo. When did you get in?”

Ryo crossed the small entryway and hugged his sister. “Yesterday. You’re right about the trains though – I always forget how insane they are this time of year.”

“I’ve heard it’s getting worse,” Hiroshi, their father, said as he joined his wife and their children. “More young people moving to the cities… At least they still make an effort to come home…”

“Daddy…,” Emi started in a conciliatory tone.

Hiroshi held up his hand to forestall his daughter’s words. “It’s just the way of things. You’re both here now. That’s what’s important,” a smile creased his face, causing the laugh lines around his eyes to stand out as he stepped close to his wife. Turning to her he nodded. “Shall we?”

Emi and Ryo let their parents pass them and open the front door. In the humid dusk, Hiroshi knelt slowly towards the bier he had prepared earlier in the day, quietly groaning with the effort. Ryo and Emi exchanged glances at the sound, reminded that age was catching up to their parents faster every year. Yoshiko handed her husband a long match which he lit and watched the small flame burst to life and settle into a blossom of fire at the head of the match before carefully setting the flame to the kindling in the bier. The small branches caught with an intensity and spread throughout the small sticks. Yoshiko helped him straighten up and then stood by her husband as the fire grew. Ryo and Emi smiled as the white curls of pine smoke rose into the night, the fire snapped and spat in staccato reply to the cicadas’ steady drone.

As the light of the small fire outside the Satō family home in Takayama blazed, what they didn’t see were the spirits in the darkness. As Hiroshi held Yoshiko’s wrinkled hand, his parents became aware of the Mukaebi and flittered across the barrier into the open door of their former home. Their parents followed them. Yoshiko’s parents, too, drifted unseen into the dark wood house in the small village. A grinning uncle. An aunt whose legendary Ohagi recipe Yoshiko had used earlier that day…

Seven weeks ago, the Obon festivals started across Japan with similar ritual lightings of Mukaebi, “welcoming fire,” to invite the ancestors to come home and be celebrated.

In a months’ time, families across Mexico will similarly gather to venerate their family members who are no longer with them. Día de los Muertos. In Michoacán, families will cross the lake in candlelit boats to keep vigil all night at the cemetery. Ofrendas will be decorated in homes with marigolds, food, candles, photos, mementos. Silently, invisibly, the spirits will enter the houses, rise from freshly cleaned graves, admire the ubiquitous brightly colored sugar skulls as they regard their families gathered to honor those who had passed on.

It is in this season of light and memory, of lanterns and marigolds, that I return once again to my own ritual, here on October 1, for the first night of 31 Ghosts.

No, it’s not a generations-long tradition, but this year marks the ninth year of ghost stories, and that’s no small feat, let me tell you. Despite wildfires, pandemics, the daily grind of work, and everything else, come October 1 we kick off our own celebration of ghosts, ghouls, things that go bump in the night, unexplained lights in windows, hollow voices in the darkness, the chill touch of ethereal fingers on exposed skin…

And, pulling back a little from the macabre, we do also celebrate the real ghosts that we remember and visit us in dreams and memories.

Last Sunday I took part in the Spartan Trail 10k race in Saratoga. Having grown up hiking in the Santa Cruz mountains, part of me reveled in the homecoming of running through redwoods and madrone, the damp, aromatic scent of California bay laurel perfuming the air. The trail climbed more than three unrelenting miles up towards Skyline Boulevard, and I pushed myself to better my time from last year. Numerous times on that climb, I moved to the side to let someone pass, alerted by the sound of their footfalls immediately behind me. But when I turned, the closest person was still several meters back on the trail. Was it my dad, ahead of this October 1, spurring me on?

Later, speeding downhill, dodging exposed tree roots, errant rocks, and narrow single-track trails, I realized there’s no better example of focusing on the present than by having to focus on each and every frenzied footfall. Step there, now there, now…there. Head down, forest a blur around me… it felt kind of like this year so far. Work trips have taken me from northern Kentucky to northwestern Germany, San Diego to Las Vegas. Back home, weekends spent exorcising books and clothes and mementoes from dozens and dozens of boxes long ago stored in a garage – what do you keep? What do you give away? Rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat…

I look up and, well, it’s October!

So, let’s light the Mukaebi. Let’s clean the graves and set a bright orange marigold on the ofrenda and let the ghosts in for our month-long celebration. Thank you for joining me for this ninth annual festival of mine. Stick around, let’s see what kind of spirits we can attract this year!