Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  “Opposite. So calm!”

  I pause to take this in. “Isn’t calm what we want?”

  “Too calm,” clarifies Hiroko. “So happy. She talking about her hometown. Not yet wartime. Everyone so friendly, so kind my mother.

  “One boy next door—first time she told me this—he really like my mother. Every day he say, ‘Sumiko-san, Sumiko-san, where you are?’ He talk her, over wall. He carry her book to school. Same my brother.

  “First time she told me this; I never heard before.

  “His parents sell fish. So sometime he little thief. He taking fish, give my mother.”

  She catches my puzzled expression.

  “True or not, I don’t know. But she really like this boy. Then, one day—she high school, first grade—he say, ‘Now I go war. You never see me again.’

  “ ‘Don’t go!’ she shout. And he say, ‘I must. Okinawa. I never coming back. Please, you go Yasukuni Shrine—all dead soldier there. You can think of me.’ ”

  “We all start going back, don’t you think?” I say. As the years behind us grow so much richer than the years ahead.

  “That time,” Hiroko goes on, undistracted, “so many people believe war. They must die, help Japan. My mother thinking Emperor is god. Everybody shouting ‘Banzai! Banzai!’ But my mother call, ‘Don’t go! Don’t go to war!’ Then policeman hit her.”

  “Hit her?”

  “She showed me. And she shouting, ‘Everybody, this policeman hit me!’ ”

  “It sounds like a dream.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she thinking about this boy all her life. I don’t know.”

  Or maybe not thinking. I understand why Hiroko’s worried: the full-life review usually comes just before a death.

  “Sometimes she remembers things that never happened,” I remind Hiroko. “You told me so.”

  “Yes. I don’t know she telling me true or not. But I never know this story. One day, my mother little go Tokyo. Together my father. She talking this today. Then they go Yasukuni Shrine. Suddenly he say, ‘Somebody behind us!’ Joke only. He always so scary ghost story.

  “But my mother not thinking ghost. She think this boy!”

  “So many years later.”

  “This reason, she hate war. Not only her family lose everything. But this kind of memory.”

  That’s why, perhaps, she still thinks of all foreigners as spies, and the Japanese women who spend time with them—notably her daughter—as pan-pan girls.

  “Funny. It was your father who never had any interest in the Emperor. But he’s the one who had to risk his life to protect him.”

  * * *

  —

  Or not so funny. My father-in-law’s stories of war were the unchanging sound track of his household; his wife and daughter—surely his son as well—can recite from memory the story of how he got on a horse in the prisoner-of-war camp and his companions told him to get down, lest the enemy see him. The story of how the Russians initially approached his regiment in its hiding place, and said, “The war is over. You’ve got to come out now.” Some of the Japanese soldiers took it to be a trick and, by refusing to surrender, lost their chance ever to come home again.

  Yet now that he’s gone, these stories are most of what Hiroko has of him, her solace. Now it’s she, like someone in the time of Homer, who’s reciting the old stories she got by heart of how some of his comrades in the war lost their mind, and even the ones who didn’t could never sleep again.

  “Always,” she says, as the skies begin to turn blue through the thick glass door leading to our terrace, “my father tell us. They must shoot, everyone is shooting, every direction. He lucky, he never fight face-to-face. He kill someone, many people, he doesn’t know. But, everywhere, dead body. Even people eat dead body, they so hungry.

  “My father lucky. He never do that.”

  Or else, like his wife, he allowed stories to take the place of experience; even a perfect memory may be glad of some correction.

  “Worst thing,” says Hiroko, “is tunnel. You remember, even we little go autumn leaf, Arashiyama Parkway, my father so scared tunnel? Because, wartime, they must go there. So terrible smell. Everywhere dead body. Looks like balloon; so fat. But if they do not walk, they die.”

  “And, meanwhile, your mother back in Japan was eating sawdust—maybe rats—to try to survive.”

  “So terrible time,” she says. “Even you cannot imagine. We go Laos, Cambodia, for you so exotic. Monkey eating bread in street, kids want candy. For me not so exotic. I grow up time, Japan look like that. So poor.”

  It’s not the moment to tell her that the man in whose house I used to stay during short holidays from school could never stop talking about the atrocities of the Japanese in war; nothing the British soldiers saw in Germany could compare to that. A colleague of my father’s when I was a boy cut off his own finger while interned in Japan during the war to shame his guards into giving their prisoners more food.

  Outside, the moon has come up, fat and low above the rooftops; it’s warm tonight, an autumn day out of a poem.

  But Hiroko is very far away. “You remember last week, I go parent house little check my father thing? I find magazine. Nineteen eighty-eight. All show Siberia.”

  Forty years after he got out of his prisoner-of-war camp, he was still revisiting Khabarovsk, where more than half a million Japanese died. Telling the same old stories, of which everyone grew tired, or which they wrote off as an aging man’s hazy fictions.

  * * *

  —

  When I go back to the ping-pong club today, I start to make the calculations. My tiny, intrepid friend in the black slacks, Mrs. Fukushima, is eighty-three. That means she was eleven when Japan entered the war, and probably had to join other young women in bayonet practice, using bamboo spears; in her teens, she may have had to get her protein eating worms and snakes, like the girls around her. Perhaps she even collected cyanide along with her rations, as others did, in case enemy soldiers drew too close.

  Mr. Gold Tooth, so full of boyish giggles, kindly Mr. Joy, the one with the shy, soft smile, all were in their formative years when up to eighty thousand civilians were killed in two and a half hours during the firebombing of Tokyo, and two-fifths of the city went up in flames. Mr. Kyoto has told me how his family moved out of the old capital to a remote village in the hopes of being safe. Kyoto was spared bombs during the war, but they could not know that until it made no difference.

  “When I arrived in Lichfield,” he goes on, in his poised, fluent English, speaking of the rural town in the British Midlands to which he was suddenly assigned by his Japanese company in 1963, “the exchange rate was a thousand and eight yen to a single pound. I never forget that. And I was the first foreigner from Asia in the whole town! A town of eighteen thousand—no Indians, no Pakistanis, no Chinese.”

  “People didn’t know what to do with you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Were you happy to get posted there?”

  “No,” he says, and I recognize in the directness one souvenir he brought back from the West. “At that time,” he goes on, “there wasn’t even a Japanese restaurant in the whole of England. There was only one place where you could get Japanese food—the Japanese Club. But for that we had to go to London, a long drive.”

  “So you couldn’t even get ingredients to cook the food you recognized?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t speak English—only ‘This is a pen,’ something like that. I didn’t know the difference between Birmingham and Buckingham!”

  “You learned by immersion.”

  “That’s right.” The wit and sense of irony that his twenty-six years there armed him with are never far away. “My only weapon was my youth.”

  Every now and then, a very slim, striking young woman, whose accent is pure Kensington, arrives i
n the health club and starts working out with straight-backed determination; it’s his soignée daughter, with whom, my friend says, he still exchanges e-mails only in English. Now a senior purser for Cathay Pacific Airlines, living in Hong Kong and making of her international background a glamorous new life, which her parents, perhaps, could never have imagined when young.

  “I small time,” says Hiroko, when I relay some of this, “you cannot imagine. Nothing there! Everything gone. War finish time, we always feel war. That time, nobody can think anything. Only idea: we must repair. Only think of country, hard work every day.”

  Everybody looked after everybody else’s family, she goes on. “I do something naughty, neighbor house say, ‘Hiroko-chan, you bad girl! You must say sorry!’ ” Even fifteen years after the war ended, desperation brought everyone together. The Americans to her were oni, or devils; she launched exploratory adventures around the American base with her six-year-old friend, and they tingled with the thought that if the devils saw them they would eat them.

  “No TV,” she says, “no video game. Only we play Nature.” Her kindergarten had been an American training camp. The local Buddhist university had been turned into a site for the army. When, finally, a TV arrived in the neighborhood—her father, characteristically, was the first to spend his secret savings on this new contraption—everyone gathered around the machine every evening, to see the world.

  Six-year-old Hiroko, convinced there must be someone inside this box to deliver all the lines, used to go round the back in search of the ghostly presence.

  “We watching Tokyo Olympic, we see Abebe from Africa, we cannot believe. Looks like other planet coming to our country.”

  In those days, I recall, no Japanese was permitted to go abroad, unless on a diplomatic mission or (as in Mr. Kyoto’s case) for business.

  * * *

  —

  Next morning, before the sun comes up, she begins to talk again. I’ve opened something up in her, and I’m guessing she hasn’t slept much for the memories.

  “I elementary school, first grade, second grade, my aunt tell me, ‘Such a terrible wind. Black wind.’ Everywhere—all our hometown, Hiroshima, broken. Like end of world.

  “Children are crying, ‘Mother, mother!’ Their skin hanging out—like piece of kimono. So my aunt pretend be their mother.

  “But other people are crying, ‘Give me water, give me water or I die!’ But if my aunt give water, she know, they die. One second.

  “So what she can do? ‘I only young woman,’ my aunt tell me. ‘Twenty year old. All hospital, doctor gone.’

  “She look little same daughter in Tokyo Story. Kind, but looks so scary. She working Hiroshima bomb come time. Very close. Later, everyone little laughing her; she cannot make baby. Many, many time try, but always baby die in stomach.

  “My uncle, too. He working Army School. Safe. But when bomb arrive, he must check school. Later, everyone call him bum. He always so hard worker, but he cannot work. Everybody so angry him. Then he die, so young. They understand leukemia. So many people die after bomb.

  “My cousin, too. So happy. They have wife, children. But then, suddenly, they dead. Not so old. Cancer.”

  It strikes me that I almost never hear about her cousins; her father had five brothers and sisters, but the aftereffects of war were such that Hiroko has only three cousins, all women, that I’ve heard of. She grew up in a world of absences.

  * * *

  —

  As autumn begins to surround us—there’s no ignoring now the first reddening in bushes, the cosmos flowers, the signs in trendy department stores crying, “Oh! Autumn”—we follow its prompts as clearly as if it were our conductor. We know there’s no budging it or anticipating its moves; like every god, it holds us through caprice. When first I arrived in Japan, I noted how much, like every religion, the seasons were turned into big business; and now that Japan has one foot in the West, the shops are filled with notices for Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas. But still there’s something hushed and reverent about the billboard I see in an elegant hotel in Kyoto, citing twenty-eight local temples, their leaves graded “Early Stage” or “Partial View” or “Best.” It’s less like a weather forecast than a listing of the day’s services.

  This year, as I go to look in on my mother-in-law, I carry with me what Hiroko recently explained: that the old woman, when young, had to blacken her face with charcoal, or rough stones, because she was told that if she met an American soldier he’d want to rape her. In truth, the soldiers who appeared startled everyone with their kindness and generosity, distributing bars of chocolates to kids who hadn’t seen candy in years and carrying themselves with a Gary Cooper elegance that makes Hiroko tremble even now.

  But it’s hardly surprising that my mother-in-law bars her doors reflexively to foreigners; older men sometimes mutter rough insults if they see Hiroko with me in a train. Five years after the war ended, fourteen or more had to share a single bare room in Nagasaki, and every year till 1951, one hundred thousand people in that city died of tuberculosis, while others tried to scrape the last piece of meat out of leftover American tins.

  * * *

  —

  I start to ask more pointed questions now when I return to the group at the health club, as I begin to see what lies behind the stories of visiting factories in Tijuana or that company excursion to Mombasa. These guys exploding in infectious laughter over a missed shot at deuce, and flashing their hands so that scissors cut paper, were among the ones who made the so-called Japanese miracle, rebuilding their country after the war in record time, so that, very soon, their kids could spend summers in Redondo Beach, their wives could take three-day trips to Fairbanks to catch the Northern Lights. They’re the ones who bulldozed all the broken buildings to the ground so as to erect this gleaming, ultramodern spectacle. It’s almost as if they constructed the airport runway that now allows their loved ones to fly away.

  I think of our own family and see how the story is the same: my father-in-law, after seven years in war and twenty years working for the government, saves up enough to send his son off to America for graduate school. The result is that his son barely speaks to him again. Hiroko longs to get a foreign destiny for her daughter, and then the daughter’s gone to Valladolid, scarcely seen by us for eight years. Japan opens up to the world, and then worries that the world is diluting Japan. The country’s wealth is so established by now that the whole land seems to be crying out for direction and a fresh sense of purpose, while the elders chatter that their kids, in cargo pants and hip-hop dreads, look like they’re in one of the more broken parts of L.A.

  Japan, like Hiroko after her first marriage, has a gift for turning the page and embarking on a new destiny that stuns and humbles many of the rest of us. But its neighbors and former enemies ask how you can create a future based on such a selective view of the past, and how turning a blind eye allows you to come to terms with the problems you’ve caused. Nobody talks much about the war after all these years, and yet its signs, its implications haunt every neighborhood. Maybe that’s the silence Masahiro, too, after spending time abroad, chafed against.

  I serve a hard, long one into the corner, and Mrs. Fukushima, using her bat as a kind of flyswatter, thwacks it into the far corner, for another winner.

  * * *

  —

  The streets are turning into a sea of orange and black. Pumpkins are everywhere, and the gaudy ads for “Pumpkin Spice Latte” outside Starbucks almost make us forget the fire festival held since the eighth century in a village north of Kyoto, the arrival of persimmons and grapes, the apple crispness of the sharp blue days of late October. In the deer park, the stags’ antlers were ceremonially cut two weeks ago, and soon, every evening, all twelve hundred four-legged gods’ messengers will retire to a special grove as soon as they hear Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played on an ancient instrument; more tha
n sixteen hundred shrines around the country, and the Emperor himself, are sending their first harvest of the season to the sun goddess at Ise, not far from us. Traditionally, October is the “month of no gods” (since the gods are all said to convene at a shrine in Izumo for matchmaking); this is the time when farmers used to bring in their scarecrows—often made in the shape of gods—and offer them rice and vegetables in return for their service.

  One dizzyingly clear day—akibare is the almost onomatopoeic term my neighbors use for the chill that begins to penetrate us now, in early mornings and after dark—Hiroko returns from Kyoto with a memory.

  “Everything okay in your house?”

  “Okay. I find more, more thing from Switzerland. My brother such big smile, he come back from there. So happy return my mother home. I tell you about Swedish people, New Year time?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “One year—so strange—Sweden couple come my parent house, say hello. Happy New Year. Usually never foreigner visit.”

  “Sweden?”

  “Maybe my brother spy? He want see my parent, so he send agent.”

  “Swiss people, you mean?”

  “Yes, Switzerland. They so kind couple, so friendly. Little can speak Japanese. All asking my parent they healthy, everything okay.”

  “It sounds like that story of Kurosawa and his favorite actor, Mifune. After sixteen films together, over thirty years, out of nowhere something came between them. But one time, years later, both of them were making films in neighboring lots at the studio. Both of them, people said, started peeping over the wall to see how their old friend was doing. Each missed the other unassuageably.

  “Your brother might be thinking of you at least as much as all of you think of him. Maybe more.”

  I recall that Masahiro will be sixty next year; the daughters of his we’ve never met must be close to thirty. And I think of how our kids lost a set of grandparents, and an aunt, their father’s sister, when Hiroko got a divorce; but they also lost their biological father. He sounds like a kind and nice enough man, but he’s never once seen his friendly, loyal, more than charming kids in over twenty years of living down the street. His responsibilities lie elsewhere now, as Japan’s cut-and-dried divisions have it.