Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  At the end of the war, the old woman, who had lost her husband years before, was effectively stripped by the Occupation government of the one hundred houses she owned in Osaka. So she decided to move to Kyoto to buy a little wooden structure near the most central fox shrine in the land, and set it up as a place for selling cigarettes and candies. When, soon after her arrival, a minor mobster arrived on her doorstep to demand protection money, the stocky lady stepped out and said, “Show me your boss! I’m not going to deal with some tiny hoodlum like you!” She never got bothered again.

  After Hiroko returns this evening from the long trip—cleaning the headstone, sweeping the area around the grave free of debris, bringing in more buckets of water in case the old woman is thirsty—I ask her how it went.

  “I so happy talk my grandma,” she says. “Little Takeuchi family newspaper.”

  “What was the news?”

  “My mother okay. My aunt okay. My children fine. My brother okay, I think, but we don’t know.”

  “Your grandmother was close to him?”

  “So close. Always he her favorite. My grandma little introduce candy, I always want more, more. Too greedy! She not so like me. My cousin little princess feeling. But everyone love my brother.”

  Decent, steady, high-achieving: he sounds like the solid pillar in a hurricane.

  “But when she was old…”

  “I always together her. My brother in Kansas that time, so far. My cousin very busy.” Hiroko always gets on best with people when they’re broken, their needs clearly visible. “She watching my husband, she little think my brother.”

  “And by the time your brother returned…”

  “She gone. He so upset. Even he marry, he thinking Grandma.”

  “He wanted her approval?”

  “Different! He choose wife because she same Grandma.”

  I’m lost, as ever; his bride was in her late twenties then, and her similarity to an elderly grandmother would not, I think, have been the greatest of her attractions.

  But Hiroko assures me that her grandmother, apart from arranging her parents’ marriage, was the force behind her brother’s wedding, too. And now that her sister-in-law has put on some weight…well, she does look a lot like her husband’s grandmother.

  “Sorry,” Hiroko says abruptly, “I must erase.” She hurries to the bathroom, pulls out the bucket of salt under the sink, and scatters it all around. I’d forgotten that every trip to a grave must be annulled through purifying salt.

  Then she showers and changes her clothes, to remove all scent of the dead. She’s back in the fresh white shirt and jeans of the living.

  From outside, we can hear a ball being thrown against a wall, again and again, as the sky turns dark blue and the night begins to chill.

  * * *

  —

  The light is streaming through our windows this morning before the hands on my clock are upright, for 6:00 a.m. I look at Hiroko, and we know: summer’s gone. Gone the ceaseless, seething buzz of crickets in the park, making the whole place seem to buzz and thrum; gone the shuttlecock rain of late afternoon that carries us in a moment into the tropics during the rainy season. I look out the window, and see no women cycling around in black elbow-length gloves and Darth Vader visors to keep the sun at bay; the old men who walk around the neighborhood in groups of four or five, green armbands around their elbows as they clean up every windblown piece of trash or rescue children who’ve gotten lost, no longer flap about like soggy ducks in flip-flops or baggy trousers, pulling out hand towels to mop their brows.

  Summer is the impossible season in Japan; news programs report how railway lines nearby have warped in the heat, after eleven straight days of three-digit temperatures, and in the shadeless spaces and temples, there’s nowhere to turn as the sun goddess reminds us of who’s boss. Summer is also, paradoxically, the season of death: I flew back this year from a brief trip to Kashmir, and stepped out of a clamor of soldiers and roadblocks into the central event of midsummer Japan, Obon. For three days in mid-August, it’s believed, the dead return to their homes, to look in on their loved ones, and the whole country stops while people scatter to their ancestral places to welcome back the ghosts.

  In our case, the ceremonials were hardly impersonal; we’d lost someone close to us this year. On the last day of Obon, our son, Takashi, with his wife and two-year-old, comes down from Yokohama, 220 miles away, and Hiroko’s cousin, an almost-sister from around the corner, shows up, with her nine-year-old son and aged mother and father. Our daughter, Sachi, joins us, too, in the tiny upstairs bedroom in the little wooden house near the train tracks. In the middle of the empty tatami room where sits the family shrine, my mother-in-law has arranged herself on a cushion on the floor, next to her departed husband and her mother.

  In the countryside, villagers are carving cucumbers in the shape of horses, to urge their ancestors to return for the Festival of the Dead as speedily as possible; they’ll make oxen out of eggplants, to send them back to the heavens at a slower pace. Bonfires are lit outside homes so that none of the specters will lose their way. In Kyoto, a lantern appears next to each of the gravestones in the Otani Cemetery, overlooking the busy streets of downtown; twenty thousand lights come on at dusk, wavering above the neon and streaking cars of the geisha district.

  When Hiroko and I walked along the broad white gravel pathway last night—the nearby bells rang out, “Everyone soon die,” as Hiroko translated, “Do something now!”—we found the huge medieval gates to the “city of tomorrow,” as a cemetery in Japan is called, pulled back. Beside them was a large white board on which bold strokes of calligraphy had been scrawled in black. “We may have radiant faces in the morning,” read the translation into English, “but in the evening are no more than white bones.”

  Now, as the buzzer goes off in the little house, Hiroko flies down the stairs and returns with a cheerful priest, as brisk as an insurance salesman in his gray crew cut, even as his purple-and-green robes billow around him. Almost no one had laid eyes upon this man this time a year ago; but as soon as my father-in-law died, Hiroko was obliged to track down the temple with which the family is associated. The priest appeared and sold her a headstone for ten thousand dollars. He offered her a special Buddhist name to protect her father in the afterworld for another thousand dollars (I questioned this, and she protested, “Very special name is two thousand!”). And on the seventh day after the death, the forty-ninth, the hundredth—for years into the future—he will appear and chant the Heart Sutra at high speed: “No old age and no death; no end to age and death; no suffering, nor any cause of suffering, nor end to suffering; no path, no wisdom.”

  Now the ceremonial figure settles in on the tatami mat in the bright morning sunshine, in front of the shrine, and delivers, so fast as to be almost incomprehensible, the unflinching verses, the roar of a passing train drowning him out every now and then. My father-in-law was always impatient with such rites, but I can see how they offer a container for grief, a time-tested way of channeling sorrow so that every family can be joined with every other. The big question after any death is “What now? And what will I do with this confusion and rage?” Perhaps the by-the-book rites offer a release?

  As soon as he’s finished, the priest accepts a cup of green tea and makes small talk, in the way of a country vicar. “So,” he tells Hiroko’s mother, “your son is now the head of the family.”

  He catches the unsettled glances all around and says, “No, no. I mean your grandson.”

  The prodigal son is fifteen minutes away, presumably celebrating the Festival of the Dead alone, with his wife and two daughters.

  Then—there must be many deaths to mark—the priest makes his apologies and bustles off to his car downstairs. Across the hills of Kyoto tonight, five bonfires will be lit—one in the shape of a gateway to a shrine, another to represent a boat—as the depar
ted leave the earth again.

  Hiroko’s mother looks around, startled.

  “Where’s Grandpa?”

  “He’s here, Grandma,” says Hiroko. “But not exactly here.” She points to the small photo on the shrine. “That’s why everyone’s come today.”

  “Ah yes,” says the old lady, with an apologetic chuckle. “He died. On the tenth. He never would have wanted to miss an occasion like this.”

  She seems as cordial and full of wrinkled smiles as ever—the days of widowhood are accumulating—but underneath that is something that hasn’t forgotten at all where she is. After lunch, we take her to a hospital, to which she’s been committed, because the nursing-home staff can no longer get her to eat.

  As soon as she’s back in her thin bed in a room full of beds, she turns away from us and faces the wall.

  “Grandma,” says Takashi, who used to sit beside her along the river, as a boy, talking about the light on the water, “we’ve come all this way to see you!” He steps to the head of the bed, to address the back of her neck. “Everyone’s here. Don’t you want to see your great-granddaughter?”

  No sound emerges from the body in the bed.

  “We’re worried, Grandma,” he goes on, always kindly and protective. “We don’t want you to be sick.”

  It takes determination, I’m sure, but the old woman doesn’t stir.

  “Grandma,” says Takashi’s nine-year-old cousin, a soft boy with shiny hair and a sweet manner, who now steps forwards to address her back. “Won’t you play cards with us? I’ve been waiting!”

  Nothing. If all of you are going to close your doors on me, she might be thinking, why should I have any time for you? A husband gone, a son missing, a daughter who’s placed her in a nursing home: it isn’t hard to understand why she’s gone on strike.

  Concerned glances flash among the small group gathered around the bed. The nurses and doctors have so many people to deal with who are suffering from nothing but old age that they are always busy.

  Finally, Hiroko steps up. I’ve seen how the season’s complications have drained her of some of her brightness and left her confused and pale at times, but she’s never been slow to seize an occasion by its throat.

  “Grandma,” she says—she might be talking again to her kids when they were young—“what’s up? We’ve all come to see you; we love you. Why do you want to make us sad?”

  The body in the bed might be gone already; it doesn’t stir.

  “You want to make us all suffer? You want your daughter to be an orphan? Already this year, I’ve lost Grandpa. Now…” A nurse comes in and hurries away, looking terrified as Hiroko’s voice rises. “Now you want to take Grandmother away from me, too?”

  The body squirms deeper under the sheets, as if to place itself outside the reach of words.

  “You always say I’m selfish,” Hiroko goes on. “But what about this? Why do you want us all to be miserable? Think of how we’ll feel if you’re gone, too.”

  Then, coming up with an unexpected flourish: “You don’t want to see your son? What if Masahiro comes? He’s been missing you for so long. What if he comes to visit and you’re not here?”

  The figure remains motionless, and Hiroko turns around and says, “Let’s go.”

  The next day, however, when the two of us return, a nurse greets us at the elevator. The old woman didn’t want a soul to notice, the nurse whispers, but she could be seen nibbling a little in the night. There’s every sign that something in her has turned.

  We walk to the bed, and my aged mother-in-law, catching sight of Hiroko, clamps her hands to her ears to block her daughter out.

  “Okay, Grandma, if you want to deprive us of everything, to deprive yourself, if you want to keep this up…”

  As we go back out into the street—“Strike over!” Hiroko announces—the sun is blazing, and we gird ourselves for the next typhoon.

  * * *

  —

  Now, weeks later, everywhere I go, I see Masahiro: the fact that I’ve never seen him in real life means he inhabits every face. That could be him outside the Kerala restaurant, I think; I know he teaches at the culture center across the street. That smallish man at the Dostoevsky shelf at the bookstore: might he not be the one who told Hiroko when they were young that blue skies are for kids?

  I’ve seen him in photographs, but the photographs come from half a century ago. Still, I can recognize the bright confidence, the way his peaked cap is tilted above his Prussian school uniform, the determined eyebrows: his father’s son at every turn. Hiroko routinely refers to him as a turtle—he always called her a hare—and yet she never forgets that he always pointed out that the turtle won the race in the end. Retracting his head does not have to mean he’s ready to recede into the background.

  “I small time,” Hiroko told me recently—though she’s told me before, as the dusty memories become most of what she has—“always my brother little protect me. One day, so rainy day, he say, ‘Little sister, I carry your book.’ Even he cannot carry his own book!

  “So rainy day, he has umbrella”—she delivers a typically spot-on rendition of a small boy struggling with an umbrella and a pile of books, even as he’s weighed down by a full satchel—“but he say, he must do this. Always so big protector.”

  “But you told me he was always sick.”

  “Yes.” She nods gravely. “Not so strong.”

  Whenever her father tried to throw her into the closet, she says—I can see the scene unfold—she clung to the knob so fiercely that he had to admit defeat. But her brother regularly lost that same struggle. As they ate, she and her parents could hear him shouting, “Please, let me out! Please! It’s so dark in here. I’m scared.”

  Hiroko would always be an outdoors person, exploring the garden, or wandering into neighbors’ backyards to collect crabs for schoolyard crustacean-fights, while her brother was sequestered in his room with his books. But she never denies his fortitude and determination. “My brother not so usual Japanese,” she tells me now. “Me, my father, also not so usual, but he so different.”

  In elementary school, she says, he declared he wouldn’t learn the abacus because he was sure more sophisticated computational machines would be coming soon; upon graduation, as his father urged him towards a business course, he announced he was going to study psychology. After its loss in war, he knew that Japan would face no end of problems of the soul.

  Upon my arrival in Japan, I’d read that there were all of four registered psychologists in the whole of Tokyo, population eight million. Traditional societies turn to grandmothers—to temples or the community—for their solace. But, like his sister, like his father, Masahiro was never going to fit into a society in which to be as bland and invisible as a grain of rice, at least on the surface, was the price of admission.

  When I invited Hiroko’s father on his only foreign holiday, to California, he installed himself at the counter at Sushiya on Sunset Boulevard (as at every such Japanese restaurant up and down the coast) and told the bewildered chef preparing uni, “My son studied in Kansas: the only boy in the neighborhood to go abroad! He got his doctoral degree at the Jung Institute, in Zürich, the fourth Japanese ever to do so. Writing his dissertation in English, but living in German!”

  When we took my father-in-law on drives, he spoke so much about his missing son—pride giving way to anger before winning out again—that Hiroko had to remind him that he had another child, and she was right there, by his side.

  I don’t need to reflect that, were I to run into my brother-in-law—and if we had no relation—I’d probably have more to share with him than with any of my neighbors. As a boy, Hiroko tells me, he devoured Goethe, Nietzsche, Tolstoy; she turned to Hesse only because that was the one foreign author of the time her brother hadn’t claimed (blue skies and a sense of possibility were for kids). And yet, if he
began to guess who I was in relation to him, his other side might flare out.

  When Hiroko introduced him to her best friend, she tells me, he greeted the not-so-confident woman with “You really think you’re beautiful?” And when a friend of his confessed that he liked Masahiro’s sister, Masahiro said to him, “My sister thinks you look like an animal!” They never saw the friend smile again. Following his own complicated logic, Hiroko’s brother announced that he was cutting off the family because Hiroko was getting a divorce.

  “Maybe he was worried that he’d have to support you if you ended up alone with your kids,” I say. “And then support your parents, too, if you couldn’t look after them.”

  “Maybe.” She shrugs, genuinely perplexed. “I don’t know.”

  Then, continuing: “I have only one speed. Always fastball. But my brother not so straight. Only curveball. Change-up. Slider.” One of her graces is to radiate transparency; her brother is the question mark in the corner of every room.

  * * *

  —

  To enter Japan through the narrow gateway of ping-pong: it didn’t sound like any of the loftier ideas I’d had when I came over to Kyoto, weighed down with readings of old poets and philosophers. I’d moved to Japan, I thought, to learn how to live with less hurry and fear of time, and to see how an old and seasoned culture makes its peace with the passing hours. I’d moved there to learn how best to dissolve a sense of self within something larger and less temporary.

  But now to step into the health club—or, on Saturdays, the old, drafty gym—feels like stepping into the thick of a society in the middle of a convivial, long-running drama in which I have to tease out every turn and nuance.