Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  One local friend, impossibly slim, poker-faced, as speedy as someone sorting letters into piles, is switching her paddle from left hand to right in the middle of a point, to flip the ball devastatingly into the opposite court. A cheerful neighbor twists his wrist around and hits a gawky penholder backhand spinning fast across the net. The tall woman who sports a frilly black skirt above her leggings and tells us how she came here from Korea thirty-five years ago curtsies between points, even as she’s standing almost as far back as the mirrored wall, hitting textbook chops.

  For so much of the day, our neighbors are standing in front of these mirrors, practicing how to become Margot Fonteyn, how to die like a Russian swan; for me, the studio is my classroom for learning how to play at being Japanese. How to be invisible, and how to read the unwritten rules that guide us; how to compete not to win but to make sure that as many people as possible can feel that they are winners. How, in short, to be a voice within a choral symphony, and not a soloist tootling off on his own.

  Soon after Hiroko quietly urged me to give the game a try, nine years ago—I’d played as a boy, she remembered, and now our local health club was rolling out some tables—I stepped into the studio, to be greeted by a smooth, warm man in his late sixties, with rimless glasses and some words of English. Next to him was a smiling, shiningly gracious woman who might have been welcoming me to an elegant dinner party.

  As they introduced me round—“Pico-san’s a writer! He comes from California”—the “Emperor,” as I began to think of him, inducted me into the customs of the place: the sign-up sheet, the thirty-minute segments, the way we had to run up and down the studio in parallel lines with mops as soon as we were through, to make sure that the space was as immaculate as when we entered. Then he started seeking out players of my level with whom I could practice.

  Very soon, however, I sensed that it was everything silent, as always in Japan, that bound us together. My friends were exceptional when practicing; even the weakest players could keep a high-speed rally going for minutes. But get them into a game and hit it where they weren’t expecting it and they were instantly at a loss. They were born for duets, I realized; playing with each other was their strength, treating each other as a part of themselves, as in a dance or an act of love. Playing against each other never would be.

  I learned, therefore, never to say a word about the result of any game, even though some of the women (most notably Mayumi-san) would hoot and improvise a war dance if they scored a victory. In any case, we switched off pairs so rapidly that nobody lost for long—and two-set games guaranteed there weren’t so many losers. If ever there was just one person in the room when I arrived, I learned never to contemplate a game of singles; our job was to rally with each other until two others showed up and practiced enough to be ready for some doubles.

  I learned not to leave so long as there were even numbers in the studio—one person’s departure would throw three others out—and how, discreetly, to leave as soon as a newcomer arrived, if that left us with an odd number. And if I did go home before the others, I had to turn towards everyone when I reached the door, bow deeply and say, “Please excuse me for leaving before the rest of you.”

  One afternoon, as I was exchanging forehands with the Federer-graceful Empress, her husband placed a kindly hand on my shoulder and said, “Pico-san, why don’t you hit a few with Nakai-san?” Nakai-san was a tiny man, with a sweet, clumsy smile and the air of a geek, not least because he was the only one to come into the studio carrying a stylish man-purse instead of an Adidas bag full of equipment. He hit my balls back, but always a little tentatively, like a boy in a science lab who’s trying to pour some semi-poisonous liquid into a test tube. I learned how to take spin off my shots so he could always block them back, and soon we were something of a dance team ourselves.

  One bright morning, I saw him stepping out of a long, very new black Mercedes outside the post office, leaving the engine running, and realized, many months too late: Nakai-san was a professional gangster, the rare soul who had decided to ignore that section of the health-club registration form that requests every prospective member to confirm, “I have no tattoos,” and “I am not a member of any criminal organization.” And I was the ideal person to be encouraged to play with him, as a kind of outlier, too.

  I thought back to the gym, where flirty, ultra-feminine Ms. Teraki, the septuagenarian with the sweeping masculine strokes, sought me out each week. The same principle, I realized: she must be a member of the parallel universe that is the night world—the proprietress of a bar, perhaps—so the others almost imperceptibly left the foreigner to take her on. Everyone was cordial to her, full of laughs and warmth, but when we paired off, she was the one routinely left behind.

  My friends always made allowances for me when I didn’t put my name on the sign-up sheet, or inscribed it in roman letters in the box for hula dancing by mistake; only one man whispered behind his paddle to his wife, “You see! He never signs up, and still they let him play!” The women, after almost every shot, cried, “Amazing!” or “Pico-san’s balls are so incredible,” even though many Japanese men in our circle were far more skilled. When Hiroko came to meet me at the studio once, she marveled, “You’ve become a teen idol!” She never guessed that her bedraggled, hairless husband would become a kind of mascot, a sporty proto-Bieber in his mid-fifties.

  My role, I saw, was to develop a kind of social penholder grip, to match the one so many of my friends deployed with their paddles: to pass as a local, just another member of the community, whenever possible, though to be able to flip over to be the token foreigner whenever that would enhance the happiness and harmony of the whole.

  * * *

  —

  The equinox is not many days behind us, but already we can feel a pinch in the air, a draft of something chill. It will go and come back again over the refulgent days of October, but it’s like a premonition of sorts, the first knock on the door from a visitor who will pull us closer and closer to the cold and dark. I find myself watching now for the days when Hiroko complains of a crick in her neck, or starts to cough; her twinges become mine.

  “You remember when your father died?” Hiroko says, coming out onto our tiny terrace, where there’s barely room for the washing machine and me on my kid’s blue folding chair, the laundry flapping in my face. She shivers; sunshine and warmth are taking their leave of each other as the season turns.

  It’s hard to forget the rainy-season day on which the phone began to rattle in the dark, and I heard a half-familiar voice telling me my father had been rushed to the hospital back in California. Pneumonia, I was told; the small, noxious brown Madison cigarillos he’d been smoking for twenty years had knocked the strength out of his lungs.

  I flew back that day, and for two weeks, my mother and I watched him, eyes closed, in his bed, the numbers on the monitor going up and down. We descended into the sunny courtyard to take lunch, my mother trying to will him back into the world even as I wondered if, perhaps, at sixty-five, he’d had enough; not so much to look forward to, other than regrets.

  Then, just after Father’s Day, one day before the longest day of the year, we arrived in another bright, silent dawn to see that the ups and downs were over and the line on the monitor was as flat and changeless as he was.

  “I never met your father,” Hiroko says, and it’s true; I’d worried that he might blame his son’s defection from the world of financial security and achievement on her.

  But then I catch myself, and remember: the books scattered across my desk, the nonsense songs with which I was serenading her ten minutes ago, the occasional fluency that even I don’t trust.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “You’re keeping him company every day.”

  * * *

  —

  The lemon scent of kinmokusei—daphne, as I’d taken the local flower to be—is perfuming the lanes now. Hiroko draws me
closer to a bush in the park, so I can catch the full air-freshener impact. There are plastic leaves fluttering off the lampposts of central Nara, and signs for “Maple Lattes” and “Chestnut Sundays” along the busy streets. In our local supermarket, someone has drawn a picture of a maple leaf, and the matrons have long since prepared moon-shaped rice balls to eat on the day of the harvest moon. The season’s beginning to pick up momentum as heat softens in the days.

  Hiroko, though, seems at times to have cast off in a little boat across a wide lake thick with mist. In all the years I’ve known her, I’ve never sensed a gap, something important that she can’t get across to me, or I to her. But now there’s something remote in her at times, beyond even the probate work she has to do, the forms to complete, the many ways in Japan she has to work to take care of her father in the afterworld. As we walk through the deer park, she still breaks into the deep voice of a stag, saying, “Hello, Pico, where have you been?” She chatters merrily about the friends of mine she refers to as “Miss Rabbit” and “Bison” and “Million Yen Mark.” But sometimes I can hardly recognize the small, accelerating figure who was roaring around the neighborhood on her Honda Hurricane not so long ago, I the bulging-eyed passenger clinging to her back.

  “So strange,” she says today, and then stands absolutely motionless in a wash of light. “Almost I can feel my father inside me. I not Hiroko.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Good, but so strange. Almost I not here.”

  Then, without warning, as she moves towards the refrigerator, her face crumbles and she collapses into racking sobs, this invincible spirit who handled everything with such aplomb in remaking her and her mother’s lives overnight. I stand up and hold her, and she lets out all that’s been gathering inside for weeks, the rending gasps starting up again each time they begin to subside.

  Then, almost visibly collecting herself, she says, “I’m sorry,” and heads towards her dresser to prepare for the world.

  * * *

  —

  That evening, returning from Kyoto, she says, “Sachi so thin now. So elegant.” She turns on her phone to show me pictures of our daughter, in a shapely indigo dress, looking like a magazine cover with her bright smile and ponytail, though her oversized dark glasses reveal her to be very much her mother’s girl.

  “It’s just the uncertainty,” I say. “The waiting.”

  I try to banish the images of women wasting away for love that I’ve met in nineteenth-century novels. I try to assure Hiroko that our daughter could not be in better health physically.

  Four years after we moved into this area—good schools, safe streets, forty-five seconds on foot from our flat to post office and bus stop and supermarket and clinic, with a seven-hundred-dollar monthly rent that never seems to increase—Sachi, then thirteen, started to lose weight. She’d always been blessed with the big-boned, red-cheeked health of her father, and she excelled at the backstroke in the swimming pool, the forehand on the tennis court; she and her brother had uncomplainingly adapted to wearing headphones when they wanted to watch TV because a strange foreigner called Pico was sleeping on the living-room couch, and to inhabiting a space so cramped that we could not open our bathroom door by more than seventeen inches.

  But now—was it puberty?—she was growing leaner and more delicate by the season, ever more irresistible to her brother’s high-school friends, willowy and long-legged.

  A doctor assured us she was fine—girls change at this age—but six months later, we felt we had to consult him again. He told us everything was as it should be, and then he said, “Oh, wait a minute…” and went into the next room, where his textbooks were. When he returned, he looked like a man on the run. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but your daughter has Hodgkin’s disease. It’s almost unknown in Japan. That’s why I didn’t catch it before. It’s now in Stage Three; you must get her into a hospital tomorrow.”

  Sachi cried for a few minutes, and then she picked up her culture’s sense that an argument with reality is one you’ll never win, and never cried again. Together with her mother, she gathered her sketchpad and her pens, a Jewel CD and a few textbooks, and took the three trains to Kyoto; three weeks before her fourteenth birthday, she was just young enough to qualify for the pediatric oncology ward. Soccer stars came by to rally spirits, young nurses allowed her to prop a small black-and-white TV on her table. Next to almost every bed, in the Japanese fashion, was a mother, who slept in a chair by her child, for a year or as long as it took.

  But over the twelve months she was in the ward, Sachi saw the beds around her slowly empty out. The mothers, with smiles, made their apologies and went back home. Most of the patients, seven- or eight-year-olds with leukemia, were never to be seen again.

  Meanwhile, all kinds of other surprises began to rain down on us, as if to bring home how every blessing, like every curse, comes from nowhere, unmerited. We would not have to pay a penny, the doctors at Kyoto University Hospital informed us one evening; Hodgkin’s was so rare in Japan that students and researchers were grateful to have a chance to observe it up close on a real-life patient. And then, equally out of the blue, a letter from a nearby university announced—though no one there knew of her current predicament—that Sachi would not have to go through Japan’s infamous “examination hell” to gain admission to its hallways, so long as she agreed to bring her enthusiasm for learning English into a major in Spanish.

  Her brother and I, back in the apartment, took to bonding over delivery pizza and nightly broadcasts of Hanshin Tigers baseball games; Hiroko, most evenings, once her job was finished, took a sixty-minute ride through the dark to the hospital, to sleep by her daughter’s side. When Sachi emerged, one autumn later, she was closer to her mother than ever and seemed wiser than her classmates, and not only because of the teacher who came to her bed to make sure she didn’t miss out on her lessons. But even that happy ending—sixteen years have shown no signs of recurrence—leaves an echo.

  We look now at the picture of our daughter, and don’t know whether to shiver or rejoice.

  * * *

  —

  With the first of October—the day when, traditionally, the Japanese begin preparing themselves for winter—Hiroko erupts into a kind of “baby spring” cleaning that’s no spectacle for the faint of heart; it reminds me of the typhoon that swept through last week, sending cars around the neighborhood all night long to broadcast warnings, while our TV screen filled with stranded passengers at airports and departure boards that read “Canceled.” I’m still in bed as I sense her running—literally—through our two rooms, picking up every stray piece of lint or paper she can find. She’s rushing through the junk mail that’s assembled near the telephone and sweeping items into a ball, gathering up the pair of jeans I set out to wear today, and adding it to an ungainly pile to fling into the washing machine on the terrace.

  Our family history is a litany of the treasures she’s been far too eager to clean. The armband Takashi got autographed by his favorite heavy-metal guitarist that she mistakenly hurled into the machine. My green shirt with the tag “Wash by Hand” that came out from the washing machine a perfect size for one of the Seven Dwarves. The cute fox her daughter’s teacher gave the little girl upon graduation from second grade, whose stomach looked even grimier than before it went through a spin cycle.

  I can hear keys still jangling in my trouser pockets as they revolve in the gurgling machine. But by now Hiroko is sweeping everything she can find into two large garbage bags, for me to take out to the designated street corner three days from now, then slip-sliding across the wooden floor with a cloth under her foot before pulling out a vacuum cleaner to poke into the area where my notes are stacked, leaving me worried that now 2006 is above 2011, with 2003 in the next prefecture.

  It’s her compulsion, I realize, the way she gets her energy out. “She’s a beautiful storm,” marvels
a young friend who’s visiting from California. “It’s like you get picked up in this fast breeze and carried somewhere you can’t guess at. You don’t know what’s going on, but it all feels magical, a kind of dream.”

  “Don’t worry,” I assure him. “She has no idea where she’s going, either.” It’s one of the qualities I most admire in her: she doesn’t stop to think. She’s so caught up in this moment that she seldom looks back, to her first marriage or the many things she’s left behind; apart from worrying about her daughter, she doesn’t bother much with needless thoughts about the future. “I’m sorry, I little crazy lady,” she brightly announced to this friend when they first met. “My son say I have only accelerator. No brake!” And though every decision she makes is crazy, it always proves the right one.

  Every autumn, when I return to our apartment after visiting my mother, it’s to find the whole place rearranged: in an overflow of energy, Hiroko has moved the piano—a substantial piece of furniture in so tiny a place—and in the process transformed both rooms. The Van Morrison CDs I’d tried to protect from the domestic hurricane are now stashed in some pretty, frilly box where I’ll never see them again; the magazines I spent long afternoons sorting into piles last autumn have been mixed up higgledy-piggledy again, and stashed into a black shopping bag on whose cover is written, unfathomably, “Global Collective Unconscious Mind! See on earth now it in heaven.”

  Sometimes this radical freedom from care, as if my wife were herself as implacable as autumn winds, can make for problems in quiet, ever-cautious Japan; but a part of me can’t help admiring her fluency in the realm of action. Out—as I try to avert my eyes at my desk—come the long black boots from the closet, the gloves and sweaters that she’s stashed in closets through the spring and summer; out come cashmere scarves and heavy socks. Sandals and thin blouses get put away for hibernation; my shapeless black down jacket emerges from its hiding place, and I gratefully stuff its four capacious pockets with granola bars and Proust.