by Pico Iyer
Satisfied, the woman sat back and surveyed the men all around, patting her bouffant hairdo.
A few minutes later, a trim black American, with a gold stud in his ear, sauntered in with his tall Japanese wife (in knee-high boots and miniskirt) and a baby in a stroller. Seeing my girlfriend, the baby cried, “Mama!”
Perhaps the deepest obligation of any foreigner in a place he loves that’s not his own is to remember, daily, that his paradise is a fallen one, if only because it is an everyday reality to those around him, and offers conveniences far outside the reach of most people on the planet. And whenever I read the books of Haruki Murakami, the highly contemporary Japanese novelist who has seen his country from the perspective of living in Europe and teaching at Princeton, while translating Raymond Carver and John Irving into Japanese, I recognize that Japan can appear as soulless, to a native, as sad with loneliness and loss, as London or LA can to me.
In the six hundred pages of his magnum opus, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami delivers a series of X rays on modern, affectless Japan that amount to a virtual autopsy on a culture that’s lost dimension and depth, and dwindled into a reflexive creed of “I don’t think, therefore I am.” Almost all his characters have vacant signs hanging up outside their souls, and float through life as through the pages of a glossy magazine, hardly more substantial than the images they devour. “I was like a walking corpse,” says one character, and another says, “I was now a vacant house.”
“I had turned into a bowl of cold porridge,” a young woman explains, and the friendly unemployed narrator volunteers at one point, “I am a weed-choked garden, a flightless stone bird, a dry well.” Life is a numbing haze of Percy Faith orchestra Muzak and Dunkin’ Donuts mugs of coffee and cinder-block abortion clinics (so without weight or direction that it comes to seem like a waking dream).
Perhaps the most shocking thing in Murakami’s synoptic novel is that he comes almost to express nostalgia for the atrocities of the war, and the campaign in Manchuria, when people at least had lives instead of lifestyles, and a sense of intensity and humanity that arose from a close acquaintance with suffering (by contrast, the contemporary narrator blandly reports, “My reality seemed to have left me and now was wandering around nearby”). The other, quieter shock of his book is that all its dislocated fashion victims and Sprite-drinking teenagers, sleepwalking through their planless days as if on Prozac, might be dropping in from an Ann Beattie story. The hero wears a “yellow promotional Van Halen T-shirt” and listens to FM radio while cooking up spaghetti; the women he runs into are called Nutmeg, Malta, and Creta. “I felt a strange emptiness inside, a helpless kind of feeling like that of a small child who has been left alone in an unfamiliar neighborhood,” the narrator confesses, and it isn’t hard to see that the foreign country where he is stranded is a suburb of a chill and soundproofed future. Japan to Murakami certainly looked no better than Hong Kong or Atlanta did to me.
And so I sit at a small blond-wood desk in a child’s bedroom, with a stubby Hello Kitty pencil, a Japanese folder that says PERK UP YOUR SPIRITS (TRY TO TAKE THINGS JUST AS THEY COME), and a T-shirt (given to me in California) that says, I DISLIKE FEELING AT HOME WHEN I’M ABROAD—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, and write the essays in this book. On the desk in front of me is a pencil-box that says WELCOME TO MY HEART, a ruler from the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (how it got here, I don’t know), and a small James Dean mirror with my quasi-stepdaughter’s name on it, a memento from a school trip to the Temple of Clear Water in Kyoto.
The items are the ones to be found in many a teenager’s room anywhere, but here they make up a kind of anthology of foreign worlds brought into this unremarkable modern flat: a huge sombrero from the Yucatán; a mock-Californian license plate that says IAN; a large poster of Hideo Nomo pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers; and, next to a Japanese fan advertising the local Hanshin Tigers, a button from the Istanbul 2004 Olympic Committee.
I sit against the midnight blue pillow and listen for the sound of a motorbike, a familiar footfall on the stair.
That this is my home, I realize now in incidental ways; I can tell when the trees in the park are going to change color, and when the vending machines will change their offerings from hot to iced. I know when my girlfriend will bring out the winter futons from the cupboard, and when her daughter will change her school uniform from white to blue. I read Thoreau on sunny Sunday mornings, as Baptist hymns float over from across the way, and think that in our mongrel, mixed-up planet, this may be as close to the calm and clarity of Walden as one can find.
One midsummer day two months ago, I took Hiroko to Kyoto on the final day of Obon, the traditional holiday in August when most faithful Japanese return to their hometowns to pay respects to their departed ancestors, and when the departed ones themselves are believed to return to earth for three days. It is a time of solemn obsequies and traffic jams on the expressways, and it is the time when, quite by chance, thirteen years before, I’d stumbled upon a Kyoto alive with ghosts and lanterns, and decided to return.
Heading now towards the eastern hills, the two of us walked along a broad avenue of trees, with the night before us, through a receiving line of lanterns, white, with the names of stores in black upon them. At the end of the gravel path, we passed through a huge wooden gate, into an area thick with the smell of incense and the sound of muttered prayers, men in priestly raiment hovering all about. Old, old men, from another age, walked past in kimonos, half-doubled over, to visit loved ones at their gravestones. Cicadas buzzed deafeningly, and lanterns began to glow as the sky darkened.
We followed the old men through a small entranceway to the south, and came out in a world of shining lanterns, for as far as we could see, all across the slope above us, zigzagging towards the heavens like fireflies trembling in the dark. Below us, at our feet, were the lights of the modern city, cacophonous, fluorescent, a distant hum; above us, stretching towards the sky, a shivering sea of golden lights, soundless somehow, and strangely disembodied, as if about to float off into the night.
We walked up the steep slope, with its worshipers at headstones, and followed the paper lanterns up and up, past rows of illuminated graves, till it felt as if we were bobbing on the sea of golden lights. There was nothing really to anchor us, and nothing to see but the tremulous lights, and the ghosts who were whispering farewells. To my amazement, I realized that the moment I’d seen before, on my brief first trip, a decade before, had been real, and not, as I’d half-imagined, some fabrication of jet lag and culture shock and wishful thinking. More searchingly, I realized, too, how miraculous it had been to come across the sight while here for only three days, on a stopover in Kyoto, and staying in a high-rise hotel on the wrong side of town: the gate was open only three nights a year, and in all the succeeding thirteen years, I’d never seen this field of ghostly lanterns.
I pointed out the magic to Hiroko (who, though born here, had never seen the scene before), and she, a part of it, confirmed that it was true.
Then we walked back into town and dined on a summer platform, along the Kamo River, while five great bonfires were lit up along the northern and eastern hills, spelling out a Chinese character. We moved, through girls in yukata and figures carrying lanterns, up to the northeast quarter, to stay in an acupuncturist’s flat in an apartment block with Global in its title.
That night, I fell into a deep, deep sleep, and found myself in a country house in England. There were only a few other people there: some flop-haired schoolboys, a woman who’d been kind to me in youth—and Hiroko. It was a lazy Sunday morning, and we were doing nothing more special than reading the Sunday papers and making the occasional witticism. Everything had a languid, undirected air; once, we went for a walk, in green, green hills, encircled in mist; once, I asked something about Egypt before the war.
Somewhere, Lou Reed was playing “Heroin” and upstairs there were some fashion magazines, and a few half-familiar figures drifted in and out. All the
unremarkable languor of a weekend in the country.
And something in this unexceptional scene felt absolutely right. I couldn’t find the words, and I didn’t need to find them, but as I slept, I heard myself saying, of the everyday English scene, “This is my home. This is where I belong. Usually, I’m not very sociable, but this is me. This”—I meant the large redbrick houses, the gray afternoons, the musty light and dullness, the sense of nothing special going on—“is who I am.” Words I never thought to say in waking life, but here, suddenly, I could not just feel and see all the days of my childhood but taste them and be inside them, in this distant science-fiction land, on the night when departed spirits find their way back home.
Then I woke up, to the sounds of a bright Sunday morning in the northeast quarter of the ancient imperial capital of Japan, in the tenth year of the era known in English translation as “Achieving Peace.”
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the many people who helped me on and off the page during the writing of this book. In Toronto, Paul Tough was my cheerleader and guide, well beyond the call of duty, for many years (from New York to LAX, as well), and the incomparable Louise Dennys and Rick Young took me into their enchanted world and made me feel that their city was the civilized heart of the planet; David Rothberg and Alicia Peres were hospitable friends, over and over, and Guy Lawson and Tom Perlmutter were strikingly generous with their wisdom. Marge O’Regan graciously showed me the future of the city, and Noelle Zitzer gave me the archbishop of Toronto’s new name.
During more than a decade of covering Olympiads, I am especially grateful to the cheery stalwarts of the Time team, who kept me afloat in all kinds of multicultural venues, especially Susanna Schrobsdorff, Larry Mondi, Joe Ferrer, Paul Witteman, and Maryanne Golon, not to mention my one-man technology team, Lamarr Tsufura.
In Hong Kong, Richard and Sharon Rawlinson were wonderful and inimitable cronies to me, as they have been for decades, on several continents, always on hand with a spare room and good counsel; and I owe a debt, too, to Don and Ann Morrison, and their staffs, especially Isabelle Ng, for help with Vietnamese refugees.
My parents, before I knew it, were supporting the consequences of my global lifestyle, in ways I would not recognize till later, and bestowing on me all the blessings of their various homes in Oxford, Bombay, and California.
In Japan, my best reader and lifeline for many years has been Michael Hofmann, who gets to the heart of things with a wisdom that’s rare; in this case, he characteristically went through every comma and last letter of my manuscript, noting where I repeated the word orange and seeing how a single line break could open up a universe. Often, writing sentences, I was spurred by the wish to pass his infallible radar for sifting the global surface from the soul.
In New York, the great caretakers of this project, for many years, were the unrivaled Lynn Nesbit and Sonny Mehta, and I owe a huge debt of thanks to my longtime editor, Charles Elliott, and to my new one, Dan Frank, who took me on as a writer and, with an intuition and insight that are increasingly legendary, suggested I read more of the writer I love most, and prompted me towards more thoughtfulness with his own.
Cullen Stanley and Tina Bennett, at Janklow & Nesbit, indefatigably passed my words around; Jennifer Weh and Carol Edwards helped transmit them; and around the West Coast, the inspired readings of Mark Muro and the global kindness of Mark Wexler were invaluable, too, on many fronts.
I do not have a research assistant I can thank, alas, or a secretary or typist; but my travel agent, Sue Crispin, has kept me happily in the air for years with imperturbable aplomb, while Pam Henstell, at Knopf, has organized my official movements seamlessly; and, like anyone who longs to keep abreast of our fast-moving future, I travel vicariously through the New Perspectives Quarterly, the only magazine I know that keeps globalism in steady but shifting perspective. Its editor, Nathan Gardels, had the inspired idea of bringing all the world’s great minds and spirits together in one place, in his magazine—not trying to get them all into one room, but traveling himself from place to place to bring them into the same conversation. It is a happy coincidence that his global forum is the official voice of the same Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions that first brought my father (and so my mother and me) to the New World.
Finally, my great companions throughout the living and writing of this book were Hiroko Takeuchi and her children Sachi and Takashi; and, embarrassing though it is to mention, the ceremonious rhapsodies of Handel, the craggy transports of Van Morrison, our modern Blake. In a world where the sense of “home” can prove so elusive, they root us firmly in the lasting.