Chapter 49Hiroshi and Sakaguchi joined the long line of people waiting to pay their respects at Yushima Seido Temple. Higa’s mourners were an odd mix of stiff funeral suits and designer black-on-black, but they stretched along the outer temple wall of stacked flat stone and down the sidewalk to the corner.
“Look at all these people,” Sakaguchi chuckled.
“I thought he was a loner,” Hiroshi whispered.
Inside the courtyard, the mourners clustered around a large circular urn with a thick forest of incense smoldering to ash in the fine sand. A gentle wind dispersed the smoke in light grey wisps that rose up past the temple’s black pillars. Along the green copper roof, statues of squat dragon-fish and burly lion-cats glared and snarled at the milling crowd of humans below.
On the altar of a
