by Pico Iyer
She nods, and looks away. “I know.” The voice shakes. “I know what you are saying. But…”
* * *
—
This evening, when she comes back from her job, Hiroko unpacks an anthology of stories, from her colleagues and her customers. As usual, they’re of the autumn hiding behind midsummer. When I visit her at work, I walk through a gallery of brightly smiling, perfectly lipsticked, chirping young women, a light in their eyes as they deliver sincerest greetings. But Hiroko, of course, spends much of her life backstage. That young woman who professed a love of Joseph Gordon-Levitt left her diary out for everyone to see, and in it her friends could read, “I don’t trust a soul!” That other one, so full of guileless cheer in her sixties, has a secret boyfriend. This one has a mobster father who looks out for her, and that one, so ladylike in cardigan and pearls, called Hiroko in the dead of night after burying a kitchen knife in her two-timing husband’s thigh.
The sweetest and brightest of them all, time after time, had asked Hiroko to join her one evening for dinner. We soon learned why: in her mid-forties, with two high-school sons at home, she’d grown fascinated with a young musician whose concerts she’d been attending. Should she throw everything over and join him?
Hiroko, a pioneer in remaking her life by walking out of a marriage that was wrong for her, listens politely, and asks her friend if she’s thought it through; indigo lasts longer than love, as the old Japanese axiom has it, turning on the fact that the two words are homonyms in her language.
She feels happy with the rock star, her friend says; she feels young again, alive. Back to the person she’d feared she’d lost.
And then, one day, as Hiroko drops her large bag on a chair and starts to take out the food she’s brought home for dinner, she tells me how her cheerful friend’s husband—we were going to have dinner together, to discuss our shared love of Raymond Chandler—has been diagnosed with cancer. Only a few weeks to live.
The next thing I know, the man is gone, and his wife is buying a cake for a dead man’s birthday, listening again and again to his voice on the answering machine, remembering how handsome and attentive he always was, a star in his fancy company and her love since college time.
The musician’s still there, Hiroko assures me, but as an admonition, now. The opening her friend turned away from, too late.
* * *
—
It’s bright and sharp again as I walk past a group of elderly vigilantes up the hill to the health club. I stop outside the sign (in English) for “Murakami Juridical Scrivener Office” to record in my little white notebook some thought before it flies away. I’m writing an essay on the weather now, it seems such a perfect reflection of the mind: a clouded day can make everything look bleak, even though the blue has never gone away; it’s just obscured.
Part of the special joy of ping-pong here, of course, is that I don’t have to clutter my mind with irrelevant knowledge about my friends: I don’t know exactly what Mr. Joy did for a living, or what kind of household awaits Mrs. Endo after we’re done (even if she’s “Miss Endo”); my friends are likewise freed from all that extraneous stuff with me. I feel I know almost everything about the essence of each one of them, her station in life, her level of refinement, her readiness to work with everyone else; I know who tries always to cadge an extra game, who volunteers to play with weaker players, who will always cry out “six-four,” when actually it’s 5-5.
They know, in turn, my strange ways, and how I always wear worn jeans, add needless commentary to each point, look confused when rock-paper-scissors is replaced by another version that has no scissors, then head home before the rest of them.
All the surface stuff—salary, place of education, the implication of an address—falls away; we’re left instead with some irreducible human reality that exists before and beyond all data, and with an appropriate sense of all we don’t and cannot know.
One day, not long ago, I was walking to the post office when I passed the tiny woman with wire-rim specs and a tumble of gray hair whom I thought of as “the Bodhisattva,” for her unhardened innocence and good nature, which sometimes expressed itself in a friendly lack of tact. “How many years did you say separate you?” she once asked the pretty young woman with the much older husband.
That day, to my surprise, she was with her equally pint-sized husband; they looked like a hobbit couple, though the husband, who’d always seemed a bit ill-at-ease with me, was not walking ahead of her, as most Japanese men of their generation do.
“How are you?” I asked brightly. “It’s so beautiful today!”
She looked into the distance, saying nothing.
I remembered, too late, that she hadn’t been well.
“How’s your dog?”
She brightened visibly and said, “Very well.”
Then, as before, she said, “You should come to the community center, Pico-san. Some Thursday afternoon. It’s really fun. We all dress in kimono. And we perform the tea ceremony. It’s fun. Bring your wife.”
“I will,” I said. “I have things to do the next couple of Thursdays, but I’ll make it as soon as I can.” I wasn’t kidding; she’d asked so often, I was determined to make it happen.
But when I came back from the health club, not many days on, Hiroko told me that the Bodhisattva had looked in on us and in fact drunk tea with Hiroko, whom she’d taken to be a nurse.
“She came to say goodbye,” Hiroko went on, and I realized all I hadn’t heard in my friend’s sentences. So happy not to live in the illusion of knowledge, I’d missed the most important fact of all.
* * *
—
Every year, on October 20, her father’s birthday, Hiroko and I used to rent a car for six hours and take her father and mother on a drive into the hills. It always began as an ordeal: the roads were narrow, and it wasn’t easy for me to gauge distances in an unfamiliar vehicle navigating the “wrong” side of the road. The little lane outside my in-laws’ house with the sign for “Takeuchi Tobacco” above it was permanently thronged with sightseers ambling towards the fox shrine, and the gates to the railway next to it came down every few minutes as a train whizzed past. In my head, I could see them drawbridging down while I was midway, slicing the car in two.
There was never room to park outside the little house, so Hiroko had to race in and fetch her parents, often unprepared for the regular surprise, while the neighbors stole glances at us and whispered, “Don’t they say Takeuchi-san’s daughter married a foreigner? Someone strange? Isn’t that why Takeuchi-san is bringing down her shutters? So we don’t see him?”
But soon enough her father came out, in well-pressed black jacket and turtleneck, even in his nineties—this was where Hiroko got her sense of style—and, seeing me, bustled back into the house to collect some sachets of extra-special tea. “Thank you,” he invariably said, pressing them into my hands, and then “Sorry” and “Thank you” even before he’d said hello.
And before much longer, we were driving along the Kamo River in the sun, and Hiroko’s mother was singing the classic song “Autumn Leaves,” about flashes of crimson and ocher across a water’s surface.
I know we have to maintain the tradition this year, even if the person we’re celebrating is not here, and marking his birthday after marking his death day makes only a kind of paradoxical Buddhist sense. We stop in front of the trim three-story nursing home where Hiroko’s mother now lives—across from a Filipina bar—and press a bell. The doors slide open, and we hurry in; Hiroko straightens the shoes in the entrance area, reflexively, and calls out a bright “Hallo?”
A woman bustles out—“Hi! How are you? Isn’t it a beautiful day?”—and when we get out of the elevator two floors up, it’s to find Hiroko’s mother chattering and playing cards at a long table with the other patients.
“Sumiko-san, look! Your daughter’s here to see you.”
We’re not sure she recognizes us—or maybe she’s delivering a pointed hint by pretending not to recognize us. “Sumiko-san,” says a nurse. “Your daughter’s come to take you out! Stop complaining. You’re so lucky to have a daughter nearby who comes to see you.”
So nearby that she could be living with her, it’s hard not to think. And a son even closer.
My mother-in-law, the picture of alertness and fun when talking to the other elders, takes on a sad look, and screws her face up into a mask of pain.
We wheel the old lady, draped in a blanket and hurriedly dressed in layers for the early-autumn morning, into the elevator, and down into the reception hall, then into the tiny Toyota “eco-car.” We pull out onto a main street, and then we’re driving along the broad street—“Riverside Drive,” as it could be translated—that runs along the water, leading towards the blue hills to the north.
Trucks are honking at me, and I can’t read the signs. None of us knows how to program the GPS, and Hiroko is crying, “Careful! You’re too close to the edge!”
But my mother-in-law is singing again, as if all the years have fallen away.
“Oh, I was such a cute thing when I was little,” she says. “Everybody used to say I was so adorable. So sweet. We used to find cats when Hiroko was a child.” (“It never happened,” Hiroko says to me quietly from the passenger seat. “It’s all imagined.”)
“I’m so happy!” exclaims the old lady as we turn off the main drag, leading through an upmarket area of drive-through McDonald’s outlets and BMW showrooms, and begin to navigate the winding turns that lead to Mount Hiei.
The trees are already starting to turn up here, where there is snow on the ground much longer than in the plains; the blaze of leaves is intense as we look down on the bright, hazy city cradled between hills on three sides. On the other side of the mountain is the modern town built around the lake that shares its name with a lute.
“Oh, let’s pray for a long life!” cries the eighty-six-year-old woman in the back. “Let’s live till we’re one hundred.
“When I was a girl,” she goes on, “everyone said I was so cute. Where did you get such a pretty little girl?” they asked my mother. “Sumi-chan’s so beautiful.”
She breaks into song again, a song from the days just after the war ended. “ ‘Don’t you worry, little sister, don’t you stop. Keep on moving, little sister, don’t lose hope.’ ”
We drive around the miles of curves that encircle the celebrated temples here. Mount Hiei is renowned for the sacred space known as Enryakuji. I’d been visiting the site for years before I realized that “Enryakuji” is not, in fact, the name of any single structure; the whole mountain is the temple, a place of prayer and preparation. There were once more than three thousand buildings on this mountain, brooding over the capital below, and sons of the emperors came here for twelve years of ascetic training.
Handel’s “Ombra mai fu” is playing on the sound system, and each turn affords another dizzying view of slopes beginning to rust and blush, four weeks before the conflagration fills the streets below. Blue sky, bluer sky, completely depthless. Occasionally, when the window is open, I can hear a solemn bell resounding between the trees, an eerie sound in this place of untamed forests and ancient temples revealed in sudden clearings.
Kyoto is a sophisticated modern metropolis, lavish with urbane excitements. But Mount Hiei is the solemn, beating heart beneath the shiny surfaces. We might be taking my octogenarian mother-in-law to the secret shrine of her adopted home.
On the way down, two hours of songs and blue skies behind us, signs along the winding road advising us to keep an eye out for bears, we come to a coffee-shop-style “family restaurant” where parking looks easy, and pull into the lot beside it. We walk in, and over to a booth, and push the button that summons a waitress.
Then, as Hiroko orders food for her mother and asks her what she wants to drink—my wife’s a young mother again, as when I met her—suddenly her mother looks down and begins to sob.
“What is it, Grandma? You were singing just a minute ago. Aren’t you enjoying our outing?”
“I remember coming here with Grandpa,” says the old woman.
“Don’t worry,” says Hiroko, soothing a little one. “He’s right next to you. Always at your side.”
The old lady keeps crying and crying, and then the food arrives and she forgets and perks up.
As we drive down Riverside Drive again, past the wooden platforms that frame the river till November—great white herons stand on rocks in the middle, as they never did, Hiroko says, when she was a girl—my mother-in-law abruptly seems to remember where we’re heading.
“Let’s go back to our home,” she says. “We can live there together.”
I could set my watch by it; the rending complaint begins every time, about thirty minutes before we have to say goodbye. And who can blame her? Hiroko understands as well as anyone how bleak a nursing home can seem.
Understanding doesn’t help, though.
“We’re going home?” says her mother.
“To the nursing home,” says Hiroko.
“No! I don’t want to go to the nursing home. Are you saying I have to die there?”
“No, Grandma. You’re going to live to be a hundred. You were just saying so.”
“But why can’t I go home? I have two children, they both live near Kyoto. Why do I have to be alone in a nursing home?”
“I have to work, Grandma. If I’m not there, who’s going to look after you?”
She looks confused. “Where’s Grandpa?”
“He died, Grandma. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh yes, he died. On the tenth of the month. Of pneumonia.”
“I think it helps that she doesn’t understand,” I tell Hiroko after we say goodbye to her mother. “Or perhaps tries not to understand. Or doesn’t want to understand.”
“Helps,” says Hiroko. “But still it hurts my heart.”
* * *
—
I feel I’m walking into the Himalayas as I step out of our flat this morning. A sudden mist enshrouds our little lane, and there’s a mountain enclosedness to everything, though in Nepal the trash would never be confined to a single compact square on the street corner. An old woman is patting down the green netting that covers the bags of garbage—to protect them from the crows, cawing on our terrace—and then she secures it with a brick set out for the purpose, and a large, full bottle of water. Another woman is padding past in her jammies with her bag of refuse; I suppress a smile, until I remember I’m in jammies, too. At the bus stop across the street, a young woman appears to be sleeping where she stands, one of those Japanese tricks the likes of me will never fathom.
As the sun emerges, the day begins to fill the blank spaces in. A man appears outside our tiny post office, with a tank of goldfish. (Yesterday, in the same spot, was a micro–farmers’ market, including boxes of lettuce and apples.) Inside, old ladies are sitting and chatting on a bench, sipping some cordial the man selling things outside brings them, in paper cups, while the Filipina from the apartment above ours (a mobster’s moll, we assume, deputed to look after his aging mother) chooses among gorgeous new lines of stamps featuring Buddhist mudras, “Tales of the Stars” and the uniformed teddy bear who serves as post-office mascot.
Of late, the young cadaver with the ashen, sharp-boned face who inherited the post office from his father—even this is a family business—is devoting most of his attention to the garden he’s developing in the four-car parking lot beside the building, a makeshift net converting it into a kind of greenhouse. He potters around the gated entrance while a woman beats her rug in her backyard. Nighties and blouses thicken the terraces of the apartment blocks, and washing machines gurgle and spit. A mini-pickup, white, is inching through the neighborhood, while a recording of a female voice
sings brightly, “TVs, personal computers, air-conditioning units, PlayStations….” Space is so limited in Japan that people pay these collectors to take their valuables off them, to be replaced by a new one every few months, it seems to me.
As I carry my letter into the post office, I catch the sound of two women, around my age, chattering outside it. “You know the waiting list is three years, they say?” “Tell me about it! You feel terrible if you keep them at home, you feel guilty if you don’t.” “And this morning, when I tried to give her her pills…”
After I’ve dispatched my postcard to Amman—only four minutes are needed to figure this out—the young woman on duty (my regular partner in crime is not to be seen) hands me a bag of tissues, points out the special postal-issue Kit-Kats and gorgeous Hiroshige reproduction stamps issued for International Letter Writing Week, while I take in the huge stuffed rabbit in front of her post, the CDs on sale, the umbrellas that are for some reason on offer.
Outside, fourteen young mothers in one-piece dresses and leather trench coats are waiting for a yellow minivan to pick up their kindergartners, one of the women with a baby pouched against her chest, another with a little girl playing at her skirts. The post office is also where our community’s main public phone booth stands, gleaming in its glass box.
“How was your mother?” I ask Hiroko, much later, as the day subsides and the streets begin to empty again. Today, as on so many days off, she’s made the long trip to southern Kyoto, and, because the weather was mild, taken the old lady to the zoo. I know the feeling: my mother has begun to take such delight in videos of dogs and stories about kittens that I’ve put away the histories of philosophy and Iris Murdoch novels I used to give her and offer her cat cartoons instead.
My wife plunks down her shopping bags, her heavy purse, tonight’s spring rolls—all the debris of a long day out.
“My mother not so good.”
“She was asking why you can’t live together?”