Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  But as we got to see him more, both Hiroko and I began to wonder why he was changing his clothes four times a day and applying makeup before he slept. I’m not used to meeting Spanish males who travel long distances to hear George Michael in concert—who yearn in fact to consult George Michael for life decisions—and who continue to worship Michael Jackson long after his death. Francisco started to sprout male friends round every corner—Misha and Juan and Daisuke—and I began to wonder if, in his early thirties, he’d come to discover who he really was, and found it to be someone different from the one who’d fallen in love with a sweet and trusting Japanese girl he’d met at twenty-four.

  He’d accompanied Sachi back to Japan in the difficult days after her grandfather’s death, as if he had all the time in the world (we never could quite tell what he did for a living). He was always kind, strikingly good at finding his place within a complicated Japanese family, able to charm everyone he met. But after he’d flown back to Spain, he told Sachi to hang on.

  Days passed, and then weeks; soon months were speeding by. She waited by the phone, and I began to realize she was patient enough to wait forever. Francisco surely knew that, too; he came to China—less than three hours away by plane—and never flew over to visit her. He didn’t invite her to come and see him, either. She waited and waited, growing slimmer and more glamorous by the week, till she was wearing dresses many sizes smaller than before. He’d come to Japan soon, he said, and I began to see how “soon” in his language meant “tomorrow,” and “mañana” could easily mean “never.”

  Now I take pains not quite to broach the subject as I walk with my newly model-thin, determinedly cheerful young daughter through the autumn sunshine. She’s inherited Hiroko’s rare mix of beauty and innocence—she doesn’t notice the men who steal glances at her—but where Hiroko can never stop moving, Sachi, by her own admission, can barely start. She’s still more Japanese than her restless and rebellious mother, and where Hiroko whizzes around in a kind of spin cycle of her own, gentle Sachi is a picture book of sweet normalcy.

  “It must be quiet in your big house,” I say; Sachi’s in the two-story home owned by her grandparents, a three-minute walk down a canal from the wooden house near the fox shrine. The same house, in fact, that her runaway uncle and his family occupied after they came back from the Jung Institute in Switzerland.

  “Oh no,” she sings back. “I have lots of friends.”

  “And Francisco?”

  “He’s busy. He said to say hello. We Skyped last night.”

  What better than to have a sweet, helpful friend on hold for whenever he needs something in Japan? The men who walk past us shoot looks at us, hazarding guesses as to why a wintry bum is accompanied by a picture of spring.

  “He didn’t say anything about coming over?”

  “He’s really busy right now,” she says, and even the timbre of her bright response, just one tone quieter than usual, tells me to ask no more.

  “Shall we go all the way to Kiyomizu?” I say. The Temple of Pure Water towers over the whole city, via a squiggle of picturesque streets and elegant slopes.

  “Of course! I’m so happy to take a walk with you,” says Sachi, who never complains, and even in the hospital, in great pain, went out of her way not to betray sadness or anger.

  We walk through the brightness of the golden day, and I try to fight off the thought that our daughter’s looking as beautiful and thin as when she was thirteen, reduced by sickness.

  * * *

  —

  And all the while, the games of ping-pong go on, the way a river might sparkle past even as fires begin to rise above it in the parks. At first the players are a blur to me, other than the poised Emperor and Empress who preside over everything. The women mostly have jet-black hair above their pink T-shirts and dark slacks, though it doesn’t always go with their eyebrows; in the health club, they wear pink locker-keys around their wrists as surely as the men wear blue. A handful of the guys—all in shorts and trim shirts—show up with different hair every week (red, hennaed, black, snow-white), though most of the more elegant types are always their smooth, smiling selves, bringing the manners of the executive floor to our daily battles.

  After some weeks in their company, I’d begun to assign my new friends names so as to identify them when I come home with my stories. The tiny woman with short gray hair, who bestows grandmotherly kindness on one and all—as well as lightning penholder backhands—I dub “the Bodhisattva,” for her air of generalized friendliness; one of the other matrons, with a broad face and a constant smile, though a slight air of haplessness at the table, Hiroko, with her unfailing gift for these things, calls “Charlie Brown.” The man who will become our chairman when we form a guerrilla group—he must be a dentist, I somehow decide—has only two expressions: no expression at all and a quiet chuckle. They play off each other powerfully, as sunny days and rain.

  Two women in their late fifties who are always gossiping in the corner I cast as the Wyrd Sisters; the one who never reaches for balls and has a lazy air of command—I imagine a lot of gold jewelry and a slow-moving Benz—questions me so often on what I do for a living, who my wife is, why we’re here, that I decide it’s a very good time to know no Japanese at all. Her companion-in-arms, sometimes dressed in a purple T-shirt that says “Make an Enemy,” has a tall beehive cut out of The Flintstones, severe glasses and a somewhat ferocious air.

  But as soon as we’re rallying together, she’s all furious concentration, and capable of hitting the ball at terrifying speeds while staring down at it as if hypnotized. She becomes the first to call me “Pico-chan,” the affectionate diminutive extended to children and pets.

  One day her husband appears, an extraordinarily friendly soul with a constant smile. He seems to specialize in two words of English, “happy” and “retire.”

  “How are you?” I ask him in Japanese.

  “Happy,” he says, in my language, though his face broadcasts it even more. “Retire!”

  “No work, eh?”

  “No. Always happy now. Retire.”

  He’s the first one to invite me to coffee and a chat after the game.

  * * *

  —

  For so long in Japan, the local men seemed a kind of alien species impossible to get close to. Women were always welcoming; everyone from the older ladies in shops, who spoke to me in crystalline Japanese, patient and kindly, to the young girls at cash registers, deliberately chirpy and full of professional smiles, did everything they could to make communication possible. They were glad, I could imagine, of the real-life adventure movie and escape hatch a foreigner presents. Most men, however, wanted to have nothing to do with me. I saw them brusquely ordering around workers in the convenience stores, with never a word of thanks. Lecturing kids on their behavior in the bus. Under such pressure with their long commutes to unforgiving jobs that they often seemed to acknowledge no public emotion at all.

  Now, though, set loose in a gaggle of mostly retired men, I get to see them on a weekend perpetual. Mr. Kyoto, as I think of him, is coltishly running across the floor to collect fallen balls, and roaring “Okayyy!” when one of his slams goes in. Someone else does a little dance when he hits a winner, unable to contain his pride and relief. I pass one of them in the locker room, and he flashes a shy smile and asks if I don’t want to join them for golf. Allowed to be human again—their responsibility, formerly to protect their families by being away from them, is now to protect their families by being with them—they couldn’t be more engaging.

  The man with the gold tooth, in his Speedo-tight shorts with the lightning bolt across them—a strange complement to his shy accountant’s manner and ill-at-ease boy’s grin—happily greets me in the street and, proud that he knows the migratory habits of this odd bird, says, “Six months in America, right? To do your job and protect your mother? Six months here?”<
br />
  “That’s right.”

  A newcomer, when he picks a yarrow stick that allows him to play, while I get the one that obliges me to sit out a game, slips me his stick when no one’s looking so that I get the chance not to miss a single game. I protest, and he says, “No, no, Pico-san. Please.”

  Another man, who can hit a backhand winner with a carelessly flipped wrist, I suddenly encounter one evening in his other face on a plane from Okinawa, impeccable in his dark suit, thirty seats ahead of us, in Business Class. Others come up as I’m on the treadmill and tap me on the shoulder so they can shake my hand.

  Meanwhile, the Emperor and the Empress, perfectly groomed, canvass new players for our group, organize trips to tournaments across the area, make sure that everyone knows just enough about everyone else, but not too much. “Nice footwork,” says the Emperor in English; his wife, with her scarlet headband and flashing eyes, says, “So cool, Pico-san! We missed your long serves while you were away.”

  On my birthday, this elegant woman with a beautiful forehand she’s brought over from the tennis courts leads everyone in a chorus of “Happy birthday, dear Pico.” And every time I return—five times a week—she greets me, with typical sincerity, “Pico-san, how nice to see you. Have you been well?” Her husband clearly enjoys practicing his boardroom English with me, and one time, with a crinkly smile, offers, “You know John Deere tractor? I went to their factory in St Louis. And board meetings. Chicago, Memphis, everywhere. Forty years, work, work, work. No fun!”

  One day the good-natured man with the moon face—I’d taken him to be my age until he told me he was seventy-nine—comes up as I catch my breath between games and says, “Excuse me, Pico-san. I have a question.”

  “Of course.”

  “Is it ‘a practice difficult to deal with’ ”—he pulls out a little notebook—“or ‘a difficult practice to deal with’ ”?

  No wonder I so often feel out of my depth in Japan.

  “I think both are okay.”

  “Really? Both?”

  “No problem.”

  “Thank you, Pico-san,” he says and goes back to dancing around the table in his spiffy new Air Jordans and running happily after every ball that flies off.

  “You’re well?” I ask friendly Mr. Joy, standing almost at the wall as he patiently hits easy balls back to a woman who swings wildly at every one and smashes them into the net.

  “Always happy,” he says in English. “Old Power!” Then he remembers something, “Ah, Pico-san, just a minute.”

  He hurries across the room and rummages through his bag, extracting at last an elaborate catalogue from an exhibition of European paintings. From Osaka, I notice, in 1974.

  He hands it over, and I page through it slowly, admiring Monets and Renoirs, then hand it back.

  “No, no, Pico-san. I want you to keep it!”

  “You don’t need it?”

  “No! I’m going through my things—we’re moving house—and I found this. So I thought of you.”

  “But your grandchildren…?”

  “Please, enjoy it.”

  Then he goes back to the table and invites the matron to keep practicing.

  By the time I walk home, I can just make out one small, silent figure—Mr. Gold Tooth—shuffling his slow way home, alone. The season of separations is drawing on.

  II

  “I think I could write a poem to be called ‘Concord,’ ” Thoreau wrote one early autumn, when he was twenty-four. “For argument I should have the River, the Woods, the Ponds, the Hills, the Fields, the Swamps and Meadows, the Streets and Buildings, and the Villagers. Then Morning, Noon, and Evening, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, Night, Indian Summer, and the Mountains in the Horizon.”

  The days feel so newly minted as the mildness of early October gives a frame to the blue, I hardly notice I’m walking through a landscape of decay. The same landscape, in truth, that moved the Buddha to leave his gilded palace at the age of twenty-nine and try to find out how to make his peace with old age, suffering and death. I take the long walk out of our suburb and up the hill to the new shopping center next to the health club—I need to buy a cartridge for our printer—and as I step into the vast electronics store on the third floor, it’s to find all the sofas in front of its sixty-five-inch plasma screens fully occupied.

  An elderly couple is on one; a wisp-haired senior citizen occupies another. Slumped around the third, two old men are watching Tigers highlights as if seated together at the ballpark. How much better, they’ve clearly decided, to watch TV all day in a public place—brightly lit, full of faces, with diversion all around—than in an empty room at home.

  My next stop is the town’s main library, and when I get out of the bus, it’s to walk into four old men jockeying for position at the front doors. It’s 9:25, and each is angling to be the first to race in when the doors slide open, five minutes from now, and grab today’s copy of the Mainichi Shimbun and the carrel next to the window.

  I know there’s no hope for me in this battle, so I take a ten-minute walk, past a new forest of softly lit condos, up to our most lavish local train station, and visit McDonald’s on the second floor. Almost all its fifteen tables are taken; at every one sits a very elderly gent, newspaper laid out on the Formica table in front of him, or book in hand, a single straw poking through the lid of his paper cup.

  I claim a place, the last piece in the puzzle, and wonder if the others are going to be here all day, till their granddaughters spill in at 3:00 p.m.—a flurry of high-pitched squeals and pink handbags—and turn the place into an after-hours study hall. And then, as I join the abandoned elders, suddenly I recall the flight I’d taken over here four days after my father-in-law’s death. Scanning the offers on the video monitor, I’d been surprised to see the classic film by Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story, available, sixty years after its release.

  I’d turned it on, pulling down a shutter to close out the blue sky above the Pacific, and very quickly I was with an elderly man and woman just after the war, as they visited their children in their busy lives in Tokyo. The age-old Japanese theme of torn responsibilities, but given new force now that the young generation is in the city, working to rebuild its country, even as its parents belong to a rural order that seems to be on its way out. In a central scene, played out almost silently, the couple’s son, who’s promised to take his parents out on an exciting excursion to a department store, is interrupted, just as they’re heading off, by a neighbor: a boy nearby has come down with a fever; the doctor son has to attend to his professional duties, and his parents trudge upstairs again and change out of their Sunday finest, to spend the day alone.

  As I returned to the familiar story on this occasion, though, I realized I was following a shadow tale, much closer to home. The elderly couple came—I’d never noticed before—from Onomichi, the same small town not far from Hiroshima that my now late father-in-law claimed as his home. They spoke in the Hiroshima dialect that was his. Trains kept rattling through the black-and-white landscape, a symbol of how families were scattering in the postwar world, and people were always ready to move away, and to leave loved ones behind. I might have been sitting on the tatami around my in-laws’ low table as Ozu’s camera, always in the same low position, silently looks up at faces newly alone as the seasons turn.

  When three old men gather for a drink in the film, one of them complains that his son is no more attentive than a lodger would be. Another looks almost envious: his two sons are gone, casualties of war. The elderly mother calls out to her grandsons, but both little boys run away; the unhoused grandparents end up taking a quiet picnic beside a graveyard. The only one who greets them with warm cries of “Mother! Father!”—as fresh as April—turns out to be their daughter-in-law, free mostly because her husband, the couple’s son, was lost to war eight years before.

  The plane touched down in
Narita, and I walked out into the soft buzz of the terminal, crowded with spiky black heels and girls in fishnet stockings poring over smartphones and walking smartly out into the brisk blue. For many minutes, though, I was still with the elderly couple onscreen, being shunted, like lost luggage, from one house to another.

  “Life is disappointing, isn’t it?” says a young girl who’s just lost her mother, near the movie’s end.

  Her sister-in-law, only slightly older but a widow already, breaks into a radiant smile. “Yes,” she says, in the voice of classical Japan. “It is.”

  * * *

  —

  Now, on another “baby spring” day—there’s a strikingly Japanese absence of aggression and loudness in the air—I head up the hill again, past the new storage sheds and the old gas station, past the Paris hair salon and the Family Mart convenience store, through the Slope of Light suburb. The complex in which the Renaissance health club sits is distilled essence of modern Japan. Until six years ago, it was just rolling hills, like the ones we can see in every direction. The trees blazed and reddened in November; sheep grazed—as they still do—in the grassy area above what is now a long, spooky flight of steps, across from the fresh shopping center that calls itself “Life.”

  But postwar Japan is the story of the triumph of concrete over wood—Man’s designs over Nature’s—and so this virgin stretch proved too tempting to leave alone. A subway station, linking us to almost five hundred other stations around western Japan, came up in the wilderness. Next to it is that sprawling three-story big-box shopping center, with an Aeon outlet—the local Costco—overseeing Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders and other commanders from the Mall of America. “You know,” wrote a Japanese friend of mine in Tokyo who delights in chronicling the dissolution of old Japan, “that crime rates soar whenever there’s an Aeon in the neighborhood?” A sign, he suggests, of being in neither city nor countryside, but just suburban Nowhereland.