Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  My father-in-law, in the Japanese way, had officially become a member of his wife’s family after going into hospital in his thirties. “If anything should happen, will you protect my wife and kids?” he’d asked his own mother, and she, with characteristic briskness, always hungry for adventure, answered, “No.” So he’d taken on the name of his wife’s clan, and lived as a lone outlier from Hiroshima amidst wife and sister-in-law and mother-in-law, and all the constant whispers of a small, traditional Kyoto neighborhood.

  Now, after all these years, there’s almost nothing left in the tiny house. Hiroko shows me the albums of pre-digital photos her father used to keep under his pillow, of the one foreign holiday he took, when I brought him to California for five days. The images of Fisherman’s Wharf and the beach at Carmel that he brought out to impress all who visited so they could say, “How great!” and hurry off. Next to the photos, the binoculars on which he’d emptied nearly all his savings, one hour after arrival, so he could take in the larger world he’d always dreamed of. Throughout the nine-hour flight, he’d never nodded off, lest he miss a special moment.

  We gather a few supplies, and take a cab to the nursing home five minutes away where Hiroko’s mother is now living: a tiny room, with one thin bed and a dresser on which sits a small framed picture of her late husband, cradling their two-year-old great-granddaughter.

  I’m humbled by Hiroko’s emotional efficiency; I wouldn’t have had the courage to tell this eighty-five-year-old woman, who’s just lost her husband and much of her mind, that she’s now losing her home as well, for an anonymous cell. But if mother and daughter tried to share a space for even a month, we all know, neither would make it to the second week.

  When we step into the small room, it’s to find my mother-in-law gasping for breath, shoulders heaving up and down as she tries to catch some air. Hiroko bustles the old lady into sweater and socks, and, commandeering a wheelchair, steers her into an elevator and down into a waiting taxi. After we get out, ten minutes later, we might be entering a post-nuclear nightmare. In every chair in the large, bare entrance hall of the local hospital, a prospective patient is sitting in silence as red digits flash on screens above a broad desk. Hiroko parks her mother’s wheelchair next to us, bundling the old lady up in blankets, and we await our turn.

  Suddenly the old lady looks up. “Where’s Grandpa?”

  Since Hiroko’s son and daughter came into the world, her parents have become “Grandpa” and “Grandma” to one and all.

  “Is he at the races?”

  “No, Grandma,” my wife explains. “He died. Don’t you remember? Last week he got pneumonia, and he had to go into the hospital.”

  “Ah yes,” says the old woman. “He died. The tenth of the month. He always did love the races.”

  She returns to her silence, staring straight ahead of her, as other elderly souls are wheeled this way and that.

  “So you and I are going to live alone?” she asks at last.

  “No, Grandma,” says Hiroko, struggling to keep calm. “I have a job in Nara, remember? If I don’t work, we can’t eat. You have a new home.”

  “So I live in the nursing home for life? I die in the nursing home? Alone?”

  I reach for Hiroko’s hand, as I see her struggling to stay afloat.

  “You’re not alone, Mother. You have me. You have your grandchildren. Don’t you remember Soyo, your great-granddaughter?”

  “What about Masahiro?” says her mother. “Maybe your brother will take me in, now you’re refusing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have two children,” announces the old lady to all the world, shoulders rising and falling as she struggles to breathe, “and I have to live in a nursing home alone. Until I die.”

  * * *

  —

  “My heart goes out to your mother,” I say to Hiroko as we head into the first of the three trains—followed by a bus—that take us home. I’ve suffered from asthma all my life; I know it’s a strange compound of conditions in the world and conditions inside the heart.

  “Shikataganai!” says Hiroko—it can’t be helped. Though, the way she says it, so despairing, it sounds very much as if it can.

  Her circumstances have been upended all but overnight, and she’s responded to them with tremendous speed; but I notice there’s no talk of selling the creaking building. A part of her must want to keep a piece of the past intact.

  Our own home couldn’t be more different from the wooden houses sticking out like crooked teeth among which my in-laws have been living, where the woman who sells flowers is talking about so-and-so’s secret “second wife” around the corner, and the man in charge of fish is wondering what the policeman said to Morishita’s little boy about the shoplifting. Our entire community, Deer’s Slope, is laid out on a foreign model, like a stage set from the Universal Studios theme park a short subway ride away; a gray name-plaque gleams outside each discrete house, its front door six feet back from the street, and every Sunday I see men hosing down their German sedans to keep them as spotless as everything around them.

  The two main axes of our ten-block grid, ruler-straight, are named Park-dori and School-dori, as if to assure my mostly retired, comfortable neighbors that they’ve achieved their lifetime dream of migrating to a Japanese rendition of California. At the point where the axes meet, there’s a short strip of mom-and-pop stores, to take care of daily necessities: a pharmacy, a photo salon, a bakery and, this being Japan, four beauty salons. At each of the three bus stops in the neighborhood is a large board that shows by family name every house in the vicinity.

  If you’re lost, though, you can always stop off at the policemen’s shack, just next to the fire station, at the edge of the line of shops. Right across from it is the park, the village green that is the spiritual heart of our community, its line of maples and ginkgoes set out to project kaleidoscopic displays in late November, its avenue of cherries made for picnics as the blossoms begin to froth in early April.

  There used to be a sleek, two-story sports club overlooking the main park, like a fresh prop from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It had an Easter Island statue outside one door, ivy climbing up its gray walls and, quite often, a red Ferrari parked in the lane outside. Now, however, the club is gone, and all that remains is the park with its coloring leaves and, down a little lane in one corner, a tearoom with an English name, Autumn.

  A perfect reflection, in short, of the sleepy old city, Nara, of which Deer’s Slope is a young suburb. For seventy-four years, in the eighth century, Nara was the first permanent Buddhist capital of Japan. Broad avenues were laid out on the model of Chang’an, then the capital of China, and a storehouse marking its position as the last stop along the Silk Road came to be known as the world’s first museum. Two and a half million people worked on constructing a central temple, Todaiji—or so the temple’s administrators claim—and for twelve centuries it was the largest wooden building on the planet; inside is what remains the largest bronze sculpture in the world, a five-hundred-tonne, forty-nine-foot Buddha. A twelve-minute train ride brings you to the oldest wooden building in the world, and all around are the plains on which it’s believed the sun goddess gave birth to imperial Japan, six centuries before the birth of Christ.

  Yet what I love most about Nara is its neglectedness, a slightly forlorn quality that makes it almost a monument to autumn. Only three generations after the capital came up in Nara, the court moved to the outskirts of Kyoto, twenty miles to the north, and it was Kyoto, capital for the next 1178 years, that became the center of geisha culture, of Zen temples, of flower arrangement and garden design and kimono. More recently, it’s supple, worldly-wise Kyoto that gave birth to the Super Mario Bros., to Haruki Murakami, to the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who helped invent blue LED lights. Hiroko’s hometown is a silky courtesan who knows how to bewitch every newcomer, even in old
age, with her natural sense of style, her lacquered designs; Nara is the absentminded older brother who’s forever pottering around in his garden, wondering where he put the key.

  Whenever I consult a map from the tourist office in central Nara, I delight in the large empty swatches marked out in English as “ancient burial mounds” or “primeval forest.” There was once a single eight-screen cinema in central Nara, but it got torn down. There was once a single department store, but it closed its doors. So, too, the only Starbucks outlet. As in some fairy tale, the very heart of this city of 350,000 consists of the largest municipal park in Japan, through which roam twelve hundred wild deer. A white deer is said to have been seen carrying a Shinto god over the hills here in the year 763, and when the word arrived that the Buddha had delivered his first discourse in a deer park, the creatures’ status as “god messengers” was confirmed.

  Go to the five-story glass-and-concrete prefectural office on Nara’s wide main drag and you’re greeted by three antlered stags sitting serenely outside the front door. Walk out of the two-story wooden Nara Hotel, where one of Tanizaki’s Makioka sisters encountered bedbugs, and you’re less likely to see doormen than soft-eyed does. It’s hard not to feel that the deer, and in fact the whole spirit-filled realm they represent, are still the true rulers of this rustic town.

  At the time I arrived in Japan, in 1987, when the ten largest banks in the world were all Japanese, the government decided that it could now design the planetary future. Where better, it was decided, to base this bold Tomorrowland than in the proud, ancestral heart of old Japan, where even the train stations use the ancient name for Japan, Yamato, to invoke its talismanic magic? Very quickly, groves of cedar and cypress said to be thick with water spirits, and mountains so sacred humans could not set foot on them, began to sprout a national library with rainbow slats, futuristic research centers and pieces of concrete origami befitting a Mountain View East. Every time I walk away from Susano Shrine, near our home, along a patch of trees, I come, within ten seconds, to a view of a nine-story glass structure that reflects back a giant mosaic of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue. Across the street is an R-and-D center shaped like a retina.

  But six years after Japanese bought Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan—suddenly the complex that contained my office was Japanese—they had to sell it again, for half the price they had paid. So now, when I walk around our neighborhood, it’s to see the sci-fi cathedrals of tomorrow sitting abandoned along their empty highways, their parking lots empty, their ornamental ponds quite dry. Kyoto is said to be the most visited city in the world outside of Mecca, drawing fifty-five million visitors a year to its Golden Temple and Philosopher’s Path, its Parisian cafés and International Manga Museum; when I walk around Nara after dark, all I can see are dim lanterns, and deer stepping between the trees.

  * * *

  —

  Balls are flying across six tables as I step into the ancient yellow-walled gym where the Deer’s Slope Ping-Pong Club meets for maverick games on Saturday afternoons, the one day we don’t go to the health club. Mr. Joy, as I’ve named him in my head, is standing eight feet behind the table and delivering his fast, looping forehand topspins, again and again, at a tiny woman in her fifties, who is smashing efficiently back. A bespectacled man using a dull-gray towel as a bandanna is chopping back slams with practiced ease as another old gent, with a grizzled army cut, flips balls back at high speed.

  Many of the older men use the “penholder” grip associated with China, clutching their sanded-off bats between their fingers as if wielding chopsticks and turning themselves into human spaghetti to hit a backhand with the same side of the bat they use for forehands. The rest of us deploy the Western “shake hands” grip that I learned, almost fifty years ago, from an enigmatic Chinese sage in California who presented himself as “Gene” (or was it “Djinn”?) Lee.

  I think of the games I used to play as a boy, alone in our solitary house, halfway up the hills in Santa Barbara, flipping one side of the table up so that it hit my every slam back with the speed and wizardly angles of Mrs. Fukushima. At the Dragon School in Oxford, ping-pong was how I and my equally tiny friend, Peter, tried to show we weren’t completely hopeless in the only thing that counted—games—and at high school and even graduate school, it became the way I escaped from reading Beowulf yet again and reciting Greek irregular verbs, and slipped back into carefree boyishness.

  Now, as I look around me, at these neighbors older than my uncles and aunts, everything is upended: a reminder that Japan has the oldest population in the world—more diapers are sold to the elderly here than to babies—and a vision of how the characters around me are twirling the seasons around like dance partners.

  Outside, in the sun, kids are clambering across a huge-masted Spanish galleon in the compact park, while little brothers swing blue baseball bats at the softballs their fathers throw at them. Tiny girls are squealing their way down the chutes of an elaborate pink contraption that resembles nothing so much as a melted Dalí sand castle. Soon the trees will be flaming red and gold all around them—I’ll catch something of the vivid symphony through the door in the gym, the second-floor windows—and then my friends and I, in the dark days of winter, will find ourselves playing in mufflers and jackets, clutching paddles through mittens and unable to sit down as our hands grow numb as baseball mitts.

  Around me inside the gym, the furious shouts of twelve young female volleyballers, in tight ponytails, playing nine against three on the far side of the old basketball court, drown out our mild-mannered club boss as he summons our group for the day’s announcements.

  I’m the only one—foreigner’s prerogative—who skips the first seventy-five minutes of every session, starting with group calisthenics and informal pep talk, then turning into hour-long practice drills. Instead I arrive, straight from my desk and perturbingly fresh, halfway through the afternoon, just as the actual games begin. Very soon, however, I’m the only one sweating, hands on my thighs as I catch my breath, while the unrelenting chorus rises up around me. “Pico-san, what’s up? You’re the youngest by far, and you’re the first to get tired?”

  “¡Hola!” cries Noguchi-san now, coming up to shake my hand and grinning under his tousled white hair. He still listens to the radio for fifteen minutes every morning to master Spanish, but, so far as I can tell, they teach the same few words every week. He speaks pretty good English from his three years in Pattaya in the 1970s, helping to build one of the first beach hotels in Thailand, but for some reason—I’m no better, in Japanese—he specializes in asking questions in a language he can’t begin to follow the answers to.

  “How’s Silvia?” I say, trying to rescue us from an unending exchange of “¿Como está?”s.

  “Oh, you’re clever,” laughs my skinny, bronzed old friend. “You remember!”

  How could I forget? He’d named his golden retriever after a beautiful girl he’d seen, thirty years ago, in a village in the Philippines. He’d love to go back to Thailand or the Philippines, but the seventy dollars a day it would take to house aging Silvia at a pet hotel makes the prospect difficult.

  The women in the group are busy handing around halftime snacks, and a kindly matron in a purple T-shirt that says “I Believe in Love” presses a second ice cream on a large, chuckling man with a kind, soft face.

  “Izumi-san,” she says, “you should take this. You’re the biggest one here.”

  “How big are you, anyway?” one of the men teases. “Eighty kilos?”

  “Naw,” says another, as poor Izumi-san shyly collects the chocolate-chip ice-cream bar. “His head alone must weigh thirty kilos.”

  We pick yarrow sticks with black numbers inscribed on their bottoms to select doubles teams, and then, as pairs assemble on each side of every table, scissors cut my paper and someone on the other side of the table elects to serve. A man pulls out from a string bag a three-st
ar ball, much heavier and more professional than our “training balls,” and guaranteed to make each game a misery: since every table uses just one ball, we have to race across the gym to fetch it after every slam, slithering around someone at one of the other five tables who is preparing for a topspin drive, even slipping under the green net that separates us from the volleyballers if our ball begins to roll across the floor where a tall young girl is rising for a spike.

  When the two-set games are finished, after an hour of high-speed doubles, everyone changing teams every eight minutes or so, and nobody aware of having lost, it’s Ms. Teraki, as ever, who comes up to ask me if I’d like to hit a few. She’s always friendly to the point of flirtiness, pert in her fresh red lipstick and bowl of dark hair, tiny as a third-grader, yet smashing forehands and backhands with the long, swaggering strokes of a man. When I hand her my three hundred yen—it’s her turn this month to be club treasurer—she wraps my hand in her own warm palm as she gives me change.

  We stand behind the table and swap long, arcing topspins—she goes for a slam on every shot—and every now and then my brisk and never-tiring friend lets out a high-pitched squeal and flashes a girly smile.

  Not long ago, I asked her, as Japanese protocol encourages, how old she was, and heard, “Seventy-two.”

  “Not possible,” I said, and meant it; she hit me on the arm with a coquettish bat.

  “He’s a writer,” Teraki-san is saying now, almost with pride, as a newcomer, covering her mouth with her paddle, asks what’s up with the scruffy hooligan with the peeling rubber paddle. “He lives in Deer’s Slope, with his wife. Japanese, very cute. But his mother is in California. He’s a journalist. New York Times.” She’s taking some liberties, but I’m amused she doesn’t pass on the nickname I once heard the neighborhood kids use for me: “Isoro,” or “Parasite.” No surprise: I’m the only male in the neighborhood who doesn’t put on suit and tie and go out to the bus stop every morning before dawn; even worse, I send my wife out, while I slouch around the neighborhood unshaven, close to lunchtime.