by Pico Iyer
In the studio today, Mr. Gold Tooth is already getting ready to leave, pouring oil on his paddle and stashing it between sheets of transparent plastic before placing it within a cover; he’s told me with pride how he spent $250 on it. My tall and stately friend who speaks perfect English, the picture of athletic cool in his blazing orange T-shirt (he’s about to turn eighty), is coming in with his trim, ponytailed, constantly gracious wife and telling me how they’d just gone into central Nara to get new rubber for their rackets—only sixty dollars (every month). I look at the eighteen-dollar bat I bought in a department store and am reminded how different I still am from my passionate hobbyist friends; they’re waggling a finger under the table, like Olympians, to show partners how they’re planning to serve, while I’m trying to unriddle my piece for The New York Review of Books on the warlords of Mogadishu.
It’s almost dark by the time I get home, and as the days begin to shorten, and night comes ever earlier, I can see Hiroko going back, again and again, to the mystery that encircles us.
“One time,” she says, as she demolishes some eggs in a wooden box while I eat the broccoli and cabbage she’s kindly cooked for me, “my brother telling me he must do some test. With his friend.”
I stop eating; it’s not often Hiroko has told me about her brother’s professional life. It’s almost as much a closed book to her as it is to me.
“That time, little they showing children many picture. Then ask: ‘Which face happy? Which face calm? Which person you think beautiful?’
“One boy, he every answer perfect. So intelligent! Every answer correct. But then my brother show him two picture—‘Which one beautiful?’ And this boy choose one with very strange face. Not so gorgeous.
“They so surprise! Little shock feeling. Then, test-finish time, boy’s mother coming, take him home. She look exactly same face, so strange.”
She smiles back up at me. “Every kid, mother’s face so beautiful!”
* * *
—
As autumn seeps into my spirit—I’m beginning to lose track of what is it and what me—I feel as if I’m starting to disappear. My sentences grow slower, bodiless; the hyper, super-sensory teenager who got off the plane in an adrenaline rush is settling into a rhythm, and growing harder and harder to discern. Last December, when a visitor took a picture of us, Hiroko and I pored over the result, barely able to see the nearly invisible ghost that was me, almost part of the furniture in the background. Then I flew back to California, and the whole process was reversed again, as if rewound at sixteen times normal speed, and I became a high-pitched adolescent once more, ready to speed through the seven ages of man again in the next seven weeks.
Very early today, Hiroko is out of her bed, ringing a bell beside her homemade altar, and placing sweet tangerines in front of her four Buddha statues, her cat’s-eye rosary in a green velvet bag, a spray of fresh lilies in a vase behind them, her Tibetan prayer wheel. As I come to consciousness, she’s waving incense all around, as in a church, and throwing open every window to the predawn chill—the way we’ll fling out roasted soybeans in early February, crying, “Devil, go out! Happiness, stay in!” Then—dread moment—she puts on a recording of low-voiced Tibetan chants, and sits stock-still for twenty minutes, before hauling every spare piece of clothing she can find into the washing machine and whipping up (in eight minutes or less) tonight’s dinner.
This from the woman who runs out of the room, hands clamped to her ears, whenever I put on Leonard Cohen, because he sounds too much like the Buddhist funeral chants she heard all around her as a girl amidst the temples of southern Kyoto.
Her kids and I tease her remorselessly about her devotion to cleaning, but of course it’s Hiroko’s deeper cleanliness—her freedom from second thoughts, from the need to gossip, from malice or the hunger for complexity—that is one of her sovereign gifts. Dusting is how she clears her head. Cohen himself, asked about his Zen training, explained, “It’s just house cleaning. From time to time the dust and the dirty clothes accumulate in the corners and it’s time to clean up.”
Today, after she completes her ritual, she starts riffling through drawers and then takes a seat at the dinner table, above scattered sheets of pink writing paper, cherry blossoms fluttering along their sides.
“Isn’t this the day for your tai chi class?” I call from the bed, four feet away.
“Soon,” comes the distracted answer. “First, I little write letter.”
“Who to?”
“My brother.”
She’s silent for a long time, and I think of all the hours she spends sending the absent Masahiro birthday greetings or postcards, assurances that all is well.
When she gets up, I ask what she wrote.
“Same. Always same. Our mother not so young. Doctor say her heart not usual size. Double. Any moment, she can die. He still our blood, member our family. Cannot erase.” She stops. “Always my brother and my mother so close. Her dream, all life live together my brother.”
“I hope he listens.”
“I hope, too.”
“My mother so weak now,” she goes on. “Always she asking, ‘Where my son? He die?’ ”
“ ‘No, mother, he here.’ Then so confused. Because he never there.”
“I’m proud of you,” I say, getting up. “Please, keep writing. Even if he doesn’t answer, none of it is wasted.”
“I try.”
She tells him not to worry about her, she has a happy life. Her children are happy and healthy, and they feel she chose well, the second time, in love. He’d be surprised if he could see how comfortable she is abroad.
She doesn’t want or expect anything from him, she writes. But if he could spare a thought for their mother…
She folds the paper, very carefully—in shops sometimes, she asks the woman behind the counter if she can do the wrapping—and puts it in the flower-decorated envelope, flipping through her address book to find out where he lives.
Then she’s out into our two-square-foot entrance hall, and wrestling on her boots. Sunglasses on, she speeds to the bus stop to go for a day’s ghostlike movements in the park.
* * *
—
It’s raining when I wake up. The buses are grinding their gears on the road outside, and darkness has lifted, but still no light is coming through our heavy, frosted-glass doors. I pull them back and see water puddling on the roof of the post office across the way, pattering down on the few parked cars that are visible, streaming in one unceasing torrent down on the young girl who’s tottering on four-inch heels to the bus stop, struggling to hold purse and shopping bag and open umbrella all at once.
Autumn is the season of subtractions, the Japanese art of taking more and more away to charge the few things that remain. At least four times as many classical poems are set in autumn and spring, the seasons of transition, than in summer and winter. But what that means, I realize as the years pass, is that nothing can be taken for granted; people are on alert, wide awake, ready to seize each day as a blessing because the next one can’t be counted on.
And, in the luxury of our shrinking and uncluttered days, I recall why I was so glad of an empty room when I left my crowded life back in New York City; as Hiroko tells me stories from her girlhood before breakfast now, I give myself to her entirely, for as long as she speaks, with nothing else to carry me away. She does the same in return. There’s no car to take in for a smog test this afternoon, no “breaking news” banner perpetually scrolling across a screen from CNN, telling us what we already knew six months ago. I take my watch off the minute I arrive in Deer’s Slope—I’ll never have to be anywhere at 3:00 p.m.—and when I pull back the door to the terrace and walk out for an hour with a book and a cup of tea, I feel as if “rush” and “distraction” are words in a foreign lexicon. “To learn something new”—a wise friend from New York sent me
the sentence from John Burroughs last week—“take the path that you took yesterday.”
* * *
—
“I small time,” Hiroko says now as the world outside our window gets erased in the seeping gray and the rain beats down on the little lane, “always I little thinking about death. What it mean? Where we go?”
“That’s so strange. That’s usually the time we’re thinking of nothing at all.”
“Your life so different! Every time my mother little asthma problem. Cannot breathe. Always hospital. My father, too. So many operation.”
“You learned about autumn early.”
“One time only, my father hold me. That time, my mother hospital. I thinking, ‘Maybe she never come back. Maybe I never see her again.’ I cry.”
“You never cry.”
“Yes. That time only. My father come, hold me.”
“How about your brother?”
“We don’t know anything. So small. My brother, too, always sick.” She’s told me how, even when healthy, he spent all his time in his room, with his books, behind a sign that said “No Entrance. Especially to Hiroko.”
“Always that time,” she goes on, “people coming to our house.”
“Friends?”
“No! Religion group! They want to pray. They know my mother sick, so they come. ‘Something in your house wrong,’ they say. ‘We can help.’
“One time they burn everything. ‘You must burn these things. This is poison in your house. In your heart.’ That time, my father come back, he crazy angry! ‘You are going to hell!’ ”
Outside, we can hear kids scuffling off to school. The buses stop, a few yards away from our window, and then start up again, more frequent in the early morning. The rain comes down on cars and gray tile roofs.
“Same when Sachi hospital. You no remember? Maybe Takashi little tell friend. Then always these group calling our house. ‘You need help. Join us.’ ”
She has no time for such interventions. And yet, I think, Hiroko is always talking of “God.” I can’t imagine she’s got a white-bearded man in mind, but I don’t know what exactly she does see: her whole country is for her a teeming network of chattering crickets and tutelary spirits and heavenly forces she has to appease and watch closely, as she might a boss. When I called from Marrakesh to say that I felt darkness everywhere, she told me to put salt in my pocket.
“How am I going to get salt?”
“Please, try room service. Please. Order food, then they bring salt. Not so difficult.”
Whenever something good happens, she says, “God little give you prize. You good person, so you win lottery.” And if circumstances turn bad, that means I’m terrible and have brought on the bad future?
When she gets out of bed this morning, and buttons herself up into an elegant black raincoat and dons a navy-blue beret—being with her has taught fashion-allergic me to notice such things—she comes to where I’m sitting and speedily scribbles some characters across my back with her finger, then blows on them as if to make them stay. An impromptu Hiroko blessing, to protect me from all evil, copying a little of the Heart Sutra onto my spine before she puts on her shades and struggles into her tall black boots.
* * *
—
When Masahiro decided to cut off from his family—perhaps he needed to give reason to what was simple, human impatience—he sent a long letter to his parents, another to Hiroko; he might have been bringing the modern therapeutic way of settling accounts to an old society that thrives by stepping around conflict and allowing the seasons to sort everything out. I never forget the day when Hiroko, during her day’s cleaning, found a cassette marked Edward Scissorhands under the bed of our thoughtful and bighearted son, then in his teens. With unabashed excitement, she thrust it into the VCR player—she could never get enough of Johnny Depp—only to find scenes from a much racier kind of movie begin to unreel before her. Boys will be boys, she thought as she flung the disappointing tape into a giant white garbage bag to be left out on the street.
A few hours later, our son came back from school and at some point no doubt registered that his tape was gone. As silently as his mother, he replaced it, I presume; boys will be boys, he surely felt. Both passed through what can be a turbulent phase of shouting and confrontation with a grown-up sense of what reality is and what their place in it might be, never needing to exchange a word.
But Masahiro seems to be convinced that boys should be something more than boys. He’s importing a vision of perfection into a cyclical order that turns around the knowledge that everything is mortal. I’m not sure psychology, and looking for the human cause for all our suffering, can work in a place that flourishes on not looking for answers and ascribing difficulty to something in the heavens.
“Maybe I wrong,” says Hiroko, as she remembers the pivotal moment. “I not perfect, I know. I many mistake. But my parent so old. He writing twenty page, telling everything they wrong.”
The kind of letter shrinks advise their patients to write, but never to send.
“Me, too,” she says. “Such a long letter. Not wrong. What he say true. I cannot usual Japanese life, I always little balloon; I need more ground. But now too late. We cannot change past.”
I don’t need to remind her that it was her brother who told her, when they were young, that they could blame anything until the age of twenty on their parents; after that date of official adulthood, they had to take responsibility themselves.
“Maybe…”
“Sometimes,” she goes on, “I watching my son…” And she doesn’t need to say more, since every parent is found guilty before the jury of her children—until, perhaps, those children become parents themselves.
We hear the wind outside blowing through the trees, the cars stopping and starting; soon the paths will be so full of fallen leaves we’ll barely feel the ground beneath us.
* * *
—
“No word from your brother?” I ask three days later.
She barely bothers to answer.
“Why is it, do you think? How can he…”
And then I stop. I see myself at fourteen, nineteen, twenty-six, walking through my father’s room while visiting my parents’ home in California. Usually, my charismatic, wildly mischievous father is sitting in his blue chair, the cat by his side, reading a book and looking up, eyes alight with pride, as his only child walks past.
He says something fond or admiring, to me—or about me to whichever student happens to be there—and I smile politely and walk through without a word, freezing them out with courtesy.
Outside, it’s still gray. The Japanese love the word naga-ame, for the long rains of winter, the sound itself conveying extended hours by the window waiting for the skies to clear.
* * *
—
That night, in my sleep, I feel Hiroko shaking me awake. I fumble around, and see from the clock it’s after midnight.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
“I see dream, my father,” she says. “I’m sorry. Your friend there. One bus driver. We need money. I talking father, telephone. But he not know he dead. So I must pretend he alive. I so careful; I cannot say anything he understand dead.
“Then telephone stop. He not say anything.”
She pauses and says nothing for a while.
“That means he gone. He knows.”
I hold her close, and we listen to the rain, still coming down outside. The hiss of tires, the occasional gasp of water that deepens the silence of a Japanese garden.
“I miss my father,” says Hiroko. “But so much I feel I talking him. So natural. Just like every time. I trying so careful in my dream.
“Then telephone stop. So sudden.”
I hold her till she sleeps.
* * *
—
“You no catch?” she says when I mention it.
I shake my head; professional observer, I’m expert at failing to observe anything important.
“He want to give you; you no remember?”
Not quite. More than once, when we visited, her father would eagerly make me some of his special green tea, then hurry off upstairs to burrow in the closets of the tiny house for a set of silver medals he’d been given on retirement after thirty years of service to the post-office bank.
I didn’t know what to say when he handed them over to me.
“You should keep these,” I tried to respond. “They mean so much.”
“No, no, I want you to have them.”
So generous in one way, but poignant, too: he had no one but a son-in-law whom he barely knew on whom to bestow his proudest possession.
Another time, it was the watch.
“When I go hospital last time,” Hiroko says, “I get everything he like. To take to him.”
“In case…”
She nods. “And now I feel—not exactly guilty. But sad. Maybe I shouldn’t.” She falters. “Maybe I little waiting my father die.”
“You were trying to bring him back. By showing him all the things he loved.”