Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  ALSO BY PICO IYER

  The Art of Stillness

  The Man Within My Head

  The Open Road

  Sun After Dark

  Abandon

  Imagining Canada

  The Global Soul

  Tropical Classical

  Cuba and the Night

  Falling Off the Map

  The Lady and the Monk

  Video Night in Kathmandu

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Pico Iyer

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Iyer, Pico, author.

  Title: Autumn light : season of fire and farewells / Pico Iyer.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | “This is a Borzoi book.” | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018020713 (print) | LCCN 2018048323 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451493941 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451493934 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Iyer, Pico—Homes and haunts—Japan. | Nara-shi (Japan)—Description and travel. | Autumn—Japan. | Death.

  Classification: LLC DS897.N35 (ebook) | LCC DS897.N35 I94 2019 (print) | DDC 952/.184—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018020713

  Ebook ISBN 9780451493941

  Cover photograph by Sunnywinds/Moment/Getty Images

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub

  Map © Susan Hunt Yule 2018. Based on a sketch by Sachi Yabu.

  v5.4_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Pico Iyer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  In memory of Jikan, who showed me how to cherish the seasons inside us—and how to seek out changelessness in change

  How happy

  to see lightning

  and not think, “Time is fleeting!”

  —BASHO

  I

  “Tonight the crimson children are playing in the west,” wrote Emily Dickinson in the fall of 1854, “and tomorrow will be colder.”

  “I’m sorry.” Hiroko’s voice, made for singing, sounds flat, provisional.

  “What is it?” Fumbling for the phone, I catch sight of the red digits on the hotel bedside table: 1:23.

  “My father now hospital,” says my wife, a dozen or more time zones away. “I’m sorry.”

  I try to clear my head. Drunks are reeling through the warm Florida night around me, taking me farther and farther away.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” I’ve never heard her so hesitant. “All white. Doctor say his blood all white.”

  “I’ll be there soon,” I say, though I know that words are useless when it comes to fear. I curse my job for taking me so far. In my mind’s eye, I see my ultra-chic, motorbike-riding wife all but alone in a room of empty beds.

  “It’s difficult,” she says again.

  “But he came with you to the shrine last week? For a ritual visit?”

  “I know,” she says. There’s another long pause. “They say, ninety-one years old, it can’t be helped. Almost they don’t care, he’s so old.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again uselessly, almost Japanese. “I’ll be there on Tuesday.”

  “No problem,” she says. “It’s difficult.”

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, the phone again—a bright Key West morning, all birdsong and sunlight.

  “He’s gone,” says Hiroko, her brisk and efficient self again.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. All night I hold his hand. Always together my father.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Cannot understand.”

  “Maybe that’s better?”

  “Maybe.” For years now, Hiroko’s father, boyishly proud of his good health, has been tending to his beloved wife of sixty years, even as her mind and memory come slowly apart. Cycling to the shops to get their food. Heating up the green tea he chooses with such care as they gather on the tatami mat around a tiny table in their three-room wooden house. So caught up in his own concerns, he hasn’t noticed—or chooses not to notice—that she’s asking the same question again and again.

  And then, bracing myself, I ask, “Your brother?”

  “I don’t know. I talk his wife.”

  Neither of us says a word. There’s nothing to say. For twenty-three years, no one in the family has heard a thing from Masahiro, as I’ll call him. We know he lives in a suburb of Kyoto, fifteen minutes from the creaking two-story structure where his parents stay. His office is in the same neighborhood as the elders’ day-care center to which they’ve been taken three days a week for the past three years. But Hiroko’s only sibling, a Jungian psychologist two years older than she, decided to sever all relations with his family soon after he returned from getting his doctorate in Europe. He’s stuck to his resolve through sickness and typhoon.

  “You’re okay?” I ask Hiroko. “I’m so sorry I can’t leave until Monday.”

  “Okay,” says Hiroko, who seems to have emerged from a fog. “Now must make new life.”

  * * *

  —

  Masahiro’s on my mind, he’s all around me, as I rise from my bed a couple of return trips later. I’m sixteen hours out of sync following last night’s flight, and when I draw back our thick gray curtains, I see just a few small white badges of light under a blue-ing sky. Hiroko is asleep in the only other room of our tiny rented flat—she’s never lost the light sleep of a young mother—so I slip on T-shirt and jeans in the dark and shuffle into loafers in front of our gray door. The beaker of salt Hiroko placed outside our anonymous entrance purifies us all, I remember her saying, as I steal down two short flights of stairs in our three-story yellow apartment block, known as Lime Village.

  Around me, the thin, straight, silent streets are empty. Most of the homes in our neighborhood, Deer’s Slope, are Western-style, two-story, family dwellings, with tiny gardens out in front, the spotless lanes that run between them so narrow they lack even sidewalks. You can walk down any street here as if it were your own. Under a child’s basketball net, a silver Mercedes dozes. Across the way, a midnight-blue Audi sits beside a chirpy sign advertising English lessons.

  I hurry past the only house that takes up a full block, the place’s gargoyles and silver cornices, its ornamental garden just visible behind the kindly old lady who sometimes pulls back the gate, marking it out as the haunt of a gangster. In the mini-park on the next block, I see a cartoon dog on a billboard smiling with relief as he scoops up his own poop.

  When I arrive at the edge of the settlement, seven or eight minutes later, I can look across a valley of gray-tiled houses, a nine-family village, to the outline of hills far beyond.

  Down the secret flight of stairs and through
the middle of a mini-forest I hurry, to emerge in another century. A rambling two-story wooden house overlooks a persimmon tree and fields. The vegetable garden that Mr. Makihara from the ping-pong club tends in his autumn years is sprouting white radishes and lettuce. A giant emerald rice paddy in front of the pond looks like a vivid green hairbrush, overturned, bristles out.

  The lane is so slim I’d have to press myself against a wall if a car came past. The speed limit here, a sign announces, is barely twelve miles per hour. I head up a steep slope and come to a stone torii gate, only a couple of feet taller than I am, slips of white paper fluttering from its top. Our closest place of worship—our modern neighborhood is cleansed of all shrines and temples—is named after Susano, the bad-boy god of waves and storms who was banished for smashing a hole in the hall of heaven belonging to his sister, the sun goddess.

  I’ve never been a great one for belief, or for trying to put words to what’s beyond us. Ten years in English boarding school was a lifelong training in skepticism, or at least in keeping to yourself anything you held sacred; every time I returned to my parents’ yellow house on a hill in sixties California, the earnest, open faces of their students betrayed the poignancy of a longing for certainties. Yet, whenever I’m in the Deer’s Slope post office, I thank the kindly woman who seeks out gorgeous stamps to affix to every postcard so that someone unknown to her in a distant land can enjoy a piece of Japan. I often tell the cheerful, head-scarfed matron in the Deer’s Kitchen bakery how tasty her “hard bread” is. So it doesn’t seem amiss to pay respects to the local spirits, who, Hiroko assures me, are the ones who ensure our health and long life.

  A light comes on the second I walk across the darkened courtyard. I push a button with my foot next to the old stone basin in one corner, and cold water flows out of a dragon-headed spout. I pick up one of the blond wood ladles laid out on two rough boulders inside the basin and rinse my right hand, then my left. Then my mouth.

  The shrine itself, a few steps away, is nothing but a rickety open-fronted wooden building behind a sign that says it’s been here since 1575. Along the rafters are cracked paintings of scenes from classic plays, a yellowing portrait of a fresh-faced boy, faded depictions of the court, splinters of wood showing through the walls. Behind a barrier, keeping me from the cricket-chattering trees, two lion-dogs guard a wooden box, and ten stone lanterns—some with paper in their openings, some blank-eyed—protect a compact courtyard.

  I pull the thick rope, clap my hands twice to summon the gods and close my eyes, hands joined. “Thank you,” I think, “for looking after our home, and our family, this community, while I was gone. Thank you for protecting my mother and me in California. Thank you for keeping Hiroko safe. And her brother not so far.”

  Then, as the sun shows up above the hills, I turn around and begin to head back, through the silent village and up the stairs to our bright, rectilinear neighborhood of vending machines and hair salons. An old man is taking a walk through the sleeping streets—“Good morning,” he calls, in the democracy of first light. In our central park, a square-block expanse across the street from our flat, the local dogs are gathering on the ridge for their daily 6:00 a.m. conference. The first executives, in suits, are lined up at the bus stop on the silent main drag, and Hiroko, I know, will soon be ringing her bell and sitting stock-still for twenty minutes in front of her homemade shrine before heading off, in black leather jacket and cat-cool shades, to her job selling overpriced English punk clothes in the temple town two train stations away.

  Autumn is the season when everything falls away.

  * * *

  —

  “Pico-san!”

  I swivel round as I emerge from the elevator on the fifth floor at Renaissance, the local health club, fifteen minutes by foot up a hill, and see a cherubic badger in spectacles, buzz cut turning gray, barreling towards me, with a broad grin. Mayumi-san, as I’ll call her, is a one-woman entertainment center; life is such constant delight for her that she fires out bulletins from some private sitcom, delivered at such high speed that even Hiroko cannot follow.

  “Long time, no see, Pico-san. Where you been?”

  Before I can stammer out a reply, she’s casting an appraising glance at my T-shirt with the twenty-second-century blue robot cat on it, my Payless ShoeSource slip-ons with a hole in the sole, my battered expression.

  “You look fat, Pico-san,” she chuckles. “So old. Tired, too. What’s with that?”

  “I’m just off a plane. It’s one in the morning in my stomach. Even later in my brain.”

  “You here for ping-pong?”

  I nod. In the days when Mayumi-san was regularly part of our gathering, I often ended up, picking yarrow sticks, as her doubles partner. Before each serve, she whirled her arms around like a broken windmill and chuckled maniacally, “Here it comes, folks!” On the rare occasion when we won, she danced around with the abandon of a drunken bear, slapping my palms and flinging her arms around me in a crazed embrace.

  “So, Pico-san, that your boyfriend?” She chortles as a very old man pads past, on his way home. He does not look amused.

  My burly pal fills me in on the news, though at the speed of an old tape that’s got snarled in fast-forward: Mrs. T. is still in hospital, and we seldom see her husband now, because he has to make the long trip out to take her home-cooked food every day; Mr. I. is not in evidence, because his wife expressed dissatisfaction at the fact that he devoted every spare evening and weekend minute to table tennis. Mayumi-san’s eyes hurt, so she comes here only for the baths: no ping-pong for her now. But she sees me often, she reports, at the market, whenever she takes her grandkids for a walk.

  More breaking news flies out, in local dialect, amidst a torrent of chuckles, and I just say, “Oh, really?”—happy at times to be limited in my Japanese.

  Then she bundles off, an unstoppable force of self-amusement, to make mischief somewhere else. I walk down to the locker room, change quickly, and head up again, into the spotless, bare space marked “Studio.”

  There are four players at each of the three tables when I arrive, in front of the mirrored wall. Two different pairs are rallying at each table, across the diagonal, one pair hitting forehands to each other, very fast, the other backhands. Every now and then, the balls collide in midair, and everyone cries, “Waaah!”

  Mrs. Fukushima, a tiny figure with short, waved dark hair, dressed as always in a pink shirt and long black slacks with thin pink stripes on them, comes up to me.

  “Pico-san,” she says in her soft, self-effacing voice, with a small smile. “Shall we?”

  One pair pulls back from a table with a quiet word of invitation, and we take over. Our rallies begin slowly, but with each return, the ball starts flying over the net faster and faster, till, finally, our exchange concludes and Mrs. Fukushima begins giggling in shy delight, covering her mouth with her hand as she laughs.

  When it’s time for a game, my pale-faced, impassive adversary, barely five feet tall, stands where she is and blocks every shot, her paddle tilted at such a fiendish angle that the ball flies hard and fast over the net and nicks a corner, unanswerable.

  I walk back to collect one of her lightning returns, and wonder whether I could ever have foreseen, in bright youth, that my ideal of an exhilarating Saturday night would one day involve hitting ping-pong balls to an eighty-three-year-old grandmother who says, so softly I can barely hear it, “I’m so glad I came today.”

  * * *

  —

  I long to be in Japan in the autumn. For much of the year, my job, reporting on foreign conflicts and globalism on a human scale, forces me out onto the road; and with my mother in her eighties, living alone in the hills of California, I need to be there much of the time, too. But I try each year to be back in Japan for the season of fire and farewells. Cherry blossoms, pretty and frothy as schoolgirls’ giggles, are the face the co
untry likes to present to the world, all pink and white eroticism; but it’s the reddening of the maple leaves under a blaze of ceramic-blue skies that is the place’s secret heart.

  We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty. In the central literary text of the land, The Tale of Genji, the word for “impermanence” is used more than a thousand times, and bright, amorous Prince Genji is said to be “a handsomer man in sorrow than in happiness.” Beauty, the foremost Jungian in Japan has observed, “is completed only if we accept the fact of death.” Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.

  This year, however, autumn’s no mere decorative riddle. Four days after my father-in-law’s death, I was back in Japan and taking a train to the station in southern Kyoto, just down the lane from the most important of all the land’s twenty-two thousand harvest shrines, its ten thousand orange torii gates leading up and up a hillside of tiny statues and secret hollows. Posted alone outside the tiny wooden house where her parents had lived for five decades, Hiroko let me into the damp, stone-cold entrance hall, and led me up the short, winding staircase to two near-empty rooms.

  In one, I saw a single bed, a chest of drawers; in the other, a bare tatami space and, within a dark corner, the household shrine, with a small framed photo of Hiroko’s father on it, ghostly pale, the last time we took him for a drive. Behind him, a black-and-white picture of his longtime antagonist, his mother-in-law, severe in black kimono.

  For thirty years or more, the gray shutters opening out onto the street rattled up every morning, and Hiroko’s mother, in her worn apron, cat sleeping by her side, took her seat in front of a row of candies and soft drinks, to hand them out with smiles to passing kids and do a little business; behind her, in the bathroom-sized main room, her small, trim husband sat on a cushion on the floor, around a low table, taking care of accounts and sipping green tea, as horses clattered past on a small TV.