The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

  Onstage, a young Englishman had come forward to relate his conversion experience. “Eleven years ago,” he was saying, “I became a Muslim. Before, I was a Christian; I was confused; I got drunk. Now my name is an Arabic name. It means ‘forever.’ ”

  “See,” said the woman, stopping her harangue to assess the crowd. “They’ve moved the homosexuals from round there to over there.” I followed her gaze, and sure enough, there was a whole crush of people waving signs that said LESBIAN AVENGERS and VIGILANTE LESBIANS, some of them engaged in long, passionate kisses for the TV cameras. The Islamic Labour party Hizb-ut-Tahrir, I gathered, had denounced gays as “filth” and “scum”; now the signs on the far side of the street said SCREW HIZB-UT! and OUTRAGE!

  The chanting all around me continued steady, unabating, as one figure after another came up to bear witness. Tourists drove past in open-topped double-decker buses, staring at the English conflagration in action; women in veils sipped shyly from cartons of Ribena and Muslims from Malaysia sat nervously around the edges. Teenage boys went around collecting money for the mujahedin in Bosnia, their jihad; a fresh-faced, sandy-haired American, carrying a bag from Barnes & Noble, wearing a money belt that said MAGELLAN, stopped off to put forward a missionary response.

  “It’s a pity the bomb wasn’t perfected earlier,” an Englishwoman grumped, apropos of nothing I could see. “Because where they should have dropped it is Germany.”

  “My name used to be Robin,” came the voice onstage. “I used to be a born-again Christian.…”

  Around the square, men were seated at tables, selling pamphlets entitled Islam and the Space Age and Fundamentalism and the New World Order; others were waving banners in Turkish under a statue of Major-General Henry Havelock, KCB, the soldier who had fought in Lucknow during the Mutiny (“Saved by the valour of Havelock,” in Tennyson’s words, “Saved by the blessing of Heaven!”).

  Suddenly there was a distinctive blast, and, as so often happens in central London, for as long as I can remember, a team of jangling Hare Krishnas came past, banging drums and cymbals and chanting, their faces daubed in paint, their shirts and pantaloons pink, delighted, no doubt, to have found such a large crowd today for their exertions.

  It was the England I remembered, though the colors and contours had changed a little; a country where the hunger for opinions was exceeded only by the eagerness to vent them. Many of the people around me, I now realized, were here because they loved the chance to fight, and their outrage was working to inflame the Muslim anger, while the Muslim anger was working to fuel their own rage. This was Speakers’ Corner—a few minutes away—with real flames.

  “This man Sarid Kassim,” said a woman who had clearly done her homework and come prepared, “I hate to use the word fanatic, but if I could use it, I would use it for him.” Her audience—a man in shorts and heavy brown-laced boots who looked as if he were here for a Sunday hike—nodded dumbly. “You see, this is monitored,” she went on cunningly. “Nothing escapes the gimlet eye of the service.”

  A young English boy onstage was shouting, “I used to believe in freedom; I believed in democracy; I believed in secularism. Now I believe in only one thing: Islam.”

  Irish Catholic girls in veils walked by; football hooligan types and black guys with their blondes. Around me someone was saying, “So you think it’s okay for women to go around naked? In this society, there is incest; people are doing it with animals,” and someone else was saying, “Jesus was a Muslim, believe me.”

  “They won’t help the Bosnians. Why? Because they are Muslim.”

  “What is this? No education; self-educated. I don’t want to hear this on a Sunday afternoon.”

  The antinukes were here, and the feminists—on the far side of the road, under the building that said SUID AFRICA on it, around the sculpted nymphs and Latin inscriptions. The cranks were shouting about “nuclear war” and the “Third World War” that would come in 1999. It was easy to write the whole thing off as just the way the English (and newcomers to England with a missionary bent) liked to spend their summer Sunday afternoons—in simulation of war and furious debate.

  But thinking of my Indian friend, and of what had drawn those of his generation here (British India preparing them not at all for Indian Britain), I couldn’t dismiss the tumult so quickly. The grand statue around the corner had DEVOTION written on one side and HUMANITY on another; at the very top, it said FOR KING AND COUNTRY, and at its base, PATRIOTISM IS NOT ENOUGH. I MUST HAVE NO HATRED OR BITTERNESS FOR ANYONE (from Edith Cavell). The angry Muslims, as ever, had chosen their site and their timing well.

  “This Nelson’s Column,” an African was crying. “You think it just appeared here? Well, it’s the same with your own body? Look at Nelson’s Column. Look at your own body.”

  “Listen,” a man said. “Jesus was a fanatic of his time. He was a terrorist of his time, an extremist of his time. Why? Because he challenged the law of his time!”

  A thin-haired Christian looked around at the ring of debaters that had formed around him. “I don’t even see a crowd like this in my church,” he said.

  Perhaps the last time I had contact with my Indian friend came after a long absence. I had happened to call him to tell him of a death in the family, and he, fumbling for words on the international phone lines, had left a message on my answering machine in which he reached for a quote from Christina Rossetti, then lamented that he couldn’t quite summon the right words from Eliot, and then concluded, in his antique voice, “Look after yourself, dear boy,” with a resonance that sounded theatrical and emotional both, India and its version of Great Britain.

  When I saw him a couple of months later, though, he was playing the same tape as before, over and over, as if some mechanism had gotten stuck somehow and, in the process of emigration, he’d gotten caught in a revolving door, unable quite to come through to the place he’d set out for.

  “Of course, if you talk with a thick Indian accent, they’ll love you. But if you’re middle-class and have some sense of decency, they feel threatened. The working-class white hates a middle-class Indian much more than a working-class Indian with a thick accent and Cockney slang.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he finally said, turning the tape off at last. “I suppose I just miss an England that is built on elegance and love of language and love of literature, instead of money. Maybe I’m kidding myself; maybe it never existed. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was right in saying ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ ” (I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was Samuel Johnson.)

  “But I just grew up believing that if you played with a straight bat, things would turn out all right. And somehow it’s as if everything’s changed. I don’t believe in England anymore, and I don’t know what I do believe in. And that’s a sad and lonely place to be.”

  THE ALIEN HOME

  Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home.

  —HUSTON SMITH

  And so our dreams of distant places change as fast as images on MTV, and the immigrant arrives at the land that means freedom to him, only to find that it’s already been recast by other hands. Some of the places around us look as anonymous as airport lounges, some as strange as our living room suddenly flooded with foreign objects. The only home that any Global Soul can find these days is, it seems, in the midst of the alien and the indecipherable.

  And so, a wanderer from birth, like more and more around me, I choose to live a long way from the place where I was born, the country in which I work, and the land to which my face and blood assign me—on a distant island where I can’t read any of the signs and will never be accepted as even a partial native. Specifically, I live in a two-room apartment in the middle of rural Japan, in a modern mock-Californian suburb, none of whose buildings are older than I am, with a longtime love whose English is as limited as my Japanese, and her two children, who have even fewer words in common with me. Once every few months, I see a foreign fac
e in the neighborhood, and occasionally my secondhand laptop greets me with, “Good morning, Dick.… The time is 6:03 p.m. [in Houston],” but otherwise, long weeks go by without my speaking my native tongue.

  You could say that much in the area is familiar—my apartment building is called the Memphis (as in the city of the hero of a thousand karaoke bars), and my girlfriend worked for years at a boutique called Gere (as in Hollywood’s most famous Tibetan Buddhist). The Gere store is to be found inside the Paradis department store, which houses the Kumar Indian restaurant on its fourth floor and sits just across from a Kentucky Fried Chicken parlor, a Mister Donut shop, and a McDonald’s eatery. But the very seeming familiarity of these all-American props serves only to underline my growing sense of a world that’s singing the same song in a hundred accents all at once. The Kentucky Fried Chicken parlor is generally rich in young girls with black silk scarves around their throats, waiting, in thick black furs and fedoras, for the lucrative (elderly) dates they’ve just arranged to meet on their miniature cell phones. Mothers with silent kids beside them sip demurely at blueberry flans and pear sorbets, rice taco salads and tomato gratin, while a country-and-western singer on the sound system croons about the sorrow of lost truckers. Colonel Sanders is dressed, often, in a flowing blue yukata, though the recipients of his old-fashioned Southern hospitality are largely carrot-haired boys and girls in black leather microskirts slumped, in untraditional fashion, across the spotless tables.

  On rainy days, the unfailingly perky cash-register girls (with TEAM MEMBER and ALL-STAR written across their chests) race out to place umbrella stands in front of the entrance, and hand out “Gourmet Cards.” The scented autoflush toilet plays a tape of running water as soon as you go in (just past the elegant sink for washing your chicken-stained hands). And every time a cashier presents me with my change, she cups my palm tenderly to receive the coins.

  I go for walks, twice a day, in and around the neighborhood—the “Southern Slope of Deer,” as its name translates—and pass through silent, tidy streets that look like stage sets in some unrecorded Star Trek episode. I pass Autozam Revues and Toyota Starlets, Debonairs and Charmants, Mazda Familias and Honda Todays (with Cat’s Short Story tissues in the back). Mickey Rourke grins down at me from a bank of vending machines. The local dry cleaner hangs out a sign that promises REFRESHING LIFE ASSISTANCE. At the intersection of School-dori and Park-dori (as these science-fictive locales are called), dogs wait patiently for the lights to change, and everything in the whole firm-bordered area is so clear-cut that every single house is identified on maps at the number 12 bus stop.

  Outside my window, toddlers cry “Mommy” and men in white shirts and black ties scale ladders to polish the sign outside the bank. Most mornings, a truck rumbles past, playing the unbearably mournful song of a traditional sweet potato salesman.

  There are two small strips of stores in my “Western Convenience Neighborhood” (as the Japanese might call it), and both are laid out as efficiently, as artfully, as batteries inside some mini disc player. I can get fresh bread at the Deer’s Kitchen bakery and éclairs (and Mozart) at Père de Noel. The Wellness building stands just across from a twenty-second-century health club, which offers qigong classes twice a week, its gray walls thick with autumn leaves, and the man at the Elle hair salon tells me (every time I visit) about his one trip abroad, to Hawaii. Right next to the Memphis Apartments, competing with the Elle, the Louvre Maison de Coiffure, and the Musée Hair and Make, is the Jollier Cut and Parm, and I had been in the neighborhood for three years before I realized that the name probably referred to Julia (as in Roberts). A ten-minute bus ride takes me to the Bienvenuto Californian trattoria down the street; the Hot Boy Club (with surfing shop next door); and a coffee shop, above an artificial lake, that used to be called Casablanca and contained the very piano that Dooley Wilson played for Humphrey Bogart.

  At one level, of course, all these imported props could not be more synthetic or one-dimensional, and participate, as much as anything in Los Angeles or Hong Kong, in all the chill deracination of the age. The Japanese are probably less apologetic about embracing artifice and plastic replicas than anyone I know, and have few qualms about modeling their lives on the Spielberg sets they’ve seen on-screen. Those who worry that history is being turned into nostalgia, and community into theme park, could draw their illustrations from this suburb.

  Yet the children in the neighborhood call every older woman “Auntie,” and the Aunties feed whoever’s child happens to be around. At dawn, old women take showers in freezing-cold water and shout ancestral prayers to the gods. The very cool clarity with which the neighborhood shuts me out, calling me a gaijin, or outsider person, is partially what enables it to dispense courtesy and hospitality with such dependability, and to import so much from everywhere without becoming any the less Japanese. Surface is surface here, and depth is depth.

  The old ceremonies are scrupulously observed in Japan, even in a place where there are no temples and no shrines. Every year when the smell of daphne begins to fade from the little lanes, and the first edge of coldness chills the air, the baseball chat shows on TV transfer their interviews to sets melancholy with falling leaves, and Harvest Newsletters appear beside the Drink Bar at my KFC. And as soon as the five-pointed maples begin to blaze in the local park, it lights up with matrons, sitting at easels, transcribing the turning of the seasons on their canvases.

  And sometimes, on these sharpened sunny days, when the cloudless autumn brightness makes me homesick for the High Himalayas, I fall through a crack somehow, and find myself in a Japan of some distant century. Not long ago, as I was looking out on a light so elegiac that it made me think of the magical transformations of the Oxford of my youth (where Alice found her rabbit hole and a wardrobe led to Narnia, and where the Hobbit sprang out of some dusty Old Norse texts), I went out for my daily morning walk along the shiny, flawless streets, held as ever in a tranquil northern stillness of tethered dogs and mapled parks and grandfathers leading toddlers (in Lovely Moment hats) by the hand.

  Men were washing their white Oohiro Space Project vans in the street, and girls, or sometimes robots, were crying out “Welcome” from the computer shop with the two kittens for sale (at five hundred dollars a pop) in the window. Fred Flintstone in a White Sox cap invited me to a local softball league, and a Mormon, by a park, promised some form of enlightenment. A simple prelude of Bach’s floated down from the upstairs window of the stationery shop. And, just behind the power plant, which I’d passed almost every day for five years, I chanced, for the first time ever, upon a flight of stairs, leading down into a valley.

  I followed the steps down, and ended up in a thick, dark grove of trees. I passed out of it and found myself inside another country: green, green rice paddies shining in the blue-sky morning, and narrow, sloping streets leading up into the hills. Two-story wooden houses, and a small community ringed by hills. Grandmothers were working in traditional white scarves outside their two-story homes, and as I passed one, she favored me with a gold-toothed smile. “It’s warm,” she said, and so was she. “Look at me! I’m working in my socks!”

  I walked on farther through the silent village streets, past flowering persimmon trees and a central oval pond. Then I turned back, and greeted the old woman—my friend now—as I passed. I climbed the fifty-four steps, and the hidden world fell behind me as a dream.

  Four-year-old boys were playing catch in Harvard T-shirts; women walked with parasols to shield their faces from the sun.

  Japan will never be entirely my home, of course, and Japan would never really want me to come any closer than I am right now. It assigns me a role when I enter (a role that diminishes every foreigner with glamour, and marvels at his stammerings as at a talking dog), and asks me to go about my business, and let it go about its own. It offers politeness and punctuality without fail, and requests in exchange that I accept my fixed role in the bright, cheerful pageant that is official life here. Coming from quicksand C
alifornia, where newcomers are warmly welcomed to a vacuum and no one really knows where he stands in relation to anyone else, I find a comfort in the culture’s lack of ambiguity.

  Magic realism, the literary form native to our floating world, tells us that the simplest fact of our neighbors’ lives may read like fairy tale to us. The forgotten, tonic appendix to that is that our lives, in their tiniest details, may seem marvelous to them, and one virtue of living in so strange a place is to be reminded daily of how strange I seem to it. Whenever I am tempted to laugh at the notebook on my dinner table that says “This is the hoppiest day of my life,” or the message from the abbess of a famous local nunnery that prays (in the English translation) for “Peace on the earth and upon every parson,” I recall that the real sense of local comedy, for the Japanese all around, is me: an unshaven, disheveled, seemingly unemployed Asian who speaks like a three-year-old and seizes the senior citizen “silver” seats on the bus. “The most peaceful place on earth,” Canetti writes, “is among strangers.”

  This is a way of saying only that many of us are exiled amongst strangers now, and it makes most sense to embrace the odd fusions we cannot resist. For me, I can relish all the conveniences and courtesies of Japan (which come to a foreigner without the value-added tax of social responsibility), and savor, too, the fact that the most ordinary transactions are extraordinary (to me). Every time I call the local Federal Express office, I get put on hold to the sound of the Moonlight Sonata, and when I turn on the TV (bilingual, and with headphones attached), it is to find an exotically dubbed drama—from California, as it happens—called The Wonder Years. Even the places that have least romance to me—especially the rainy redbrick England that is the stuff of childhood—pass through a kind of magic looking glass and reemerge in dreamy dissolves of country houses and Beatrix Potter figures, pretty young boys on sunlit lawns and the “University of Oxford” shirt my girlfriend gives me from the Piccolo Sala store.