Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  And after Masahiro broke from the family, claiming that he was traumatized by his sister’s divorce, Sachi and her brother lost their only uncle, too, their only cousins that we know about, their other aunt.

  “No problem” says Sachi when I ask her about it, and I can believe she has successfully erased them from her mind; but with their grandfather gone, too, now—and a grandmother failing—I worry that a part of autumn will be with her and her brother even in their spring.

  * * *

  —

  The phone starts ringing in the dead of night, and I fling myself up from the bed and race across the room, heart pounding. I fumble for the receiver in the dark, grab hold of it. A beep-beep-beep signals a canceled call or wrong number. I go back to bed, more slowly, and lie there, heart thumping against my rib cage like a grandfather clock striking the hour every second.

  For many long minutes, I cannot go to sleep. I listen for the sound of a bus groaning outside our window—a sign that it’s not yet midnight, and the last bus hasn’t passed. Occasionally, I hear a single car pass through the avenue of ginkgoes, off on who knows what kind of assignation. Sometimes, on evenings like this, Hiroko, as attuned to the world around us as a creature of the forest, says, “Rain.”

  “Really?”

  “You can’t hear it?”

  I turn on my side and try to will myself back into the dark.

  My mother is so far away, in her big house alone on a ridge, two-thirds of the way up the mountains in Santa Barbara. She’s stoical and patient, never once complains about the winds that rattle the doors and can sweep her off her feet as she’s coming in from the car after a night at the movies; when she calls, she sometimes forgets to mention that she just found a scorpion near her toilet, and a tarantula—regular October visitors, when the rains begin—underneath her bed.

  Fires sweep through the hills around her as the sundowner winds pick up, and just to get a carton of low-fat milk, or take her arthritic cat to the vet, she has to drive around mountain curves so precipitous that many of her friends are too frightened to visit.

  I’ll be with her a few weeks from now, and I try to spend as much time as I can with her and to draw out from her now all her vivid, magical recollections of going downstairs every day as a girl in Bombay to give chili peppers to a parrot, of getting lost in a blizzard in the Himalayas during the war. I’ve taken her on four cruises in the past four years—Tallinn, Ephesus, Alaska, St. Lucia—and I bought her a shiny new car two years ago. The seasons are one of the ways we remember that children become parents of their parents.

  But I can never protect her from fires or the earth moving, from autumn. The shadow side of being lucky enough to spend time in a country of my choosing is that I have one mother who’s eighty-six and in a nursing home here, and another who’s eighty-two and living even more precariously, alone, on the far side of the Pacific.

  * * *

  —

  Sachi and I are seated beside a narrow stream in the center of Kyoto, overhung by apple-colored leaves in the October sunshine. The light is knife-sharp on this crystal day; passing under the forbidding wooden gate of Nanzenji, one of the city’s five great “mountains of Zen,” we’d found ourselves in an intricate latticework of light and shadow, the sun making shifting shapes on the white walls, across the raked-sand garden, on the greening moss. The light so fresh and clarifying in the quiet morning—sharpness and dryness define the season—that we might be stepping into a brand-new world.

  “Uekusa-san called yesterday, from the nursing home,” says Sachi, more and more lustrous and slender as her pining advances—such a long time now waiting by the phone. “I think she wants to decide what to do with my grandma.”

  “How does your grandma seem to you?”

  “She’s getting slower.”

  “But she’s always so happy when we see her. I wasn’t sure she’d last long after your grandfather went.”

  “Yes, she’s happy. But when she goes to the bathroom, it’s difficult. Even though it’s not so far.”

  Next to us, four young women, elegant in their black outfits and with sleek ponytails, glasses of sparkling wine in front of them, take the warm afternoon in a flutter of (uniquely Japanese) chatter and birdsong. It’s seventy-five degrees today—a rich, deep blue—and old men are walking in short-sleeve shirts along the canal at the center of town, past us.

  “Your mother thinks so much now about prayers and ghosts and old Japanese customs.”

  “How about you?”

  “I don’t know. More than I used to.”

  “So that means, maybe twenty years from now…”

  “I don’t know. You didn’t grow up with such a strong sense of old Japanese traditions and beliefs.”

  “Hmm. Who knows…?”

  The brightly smiling waitress brings out a thin white plate on which is perfectly placed some persimmon sorbet, with a thin slice of persimmon on the top, and another plate, mixing a mango madeleine with grapefruit pie.

  A grandfather sits along the grassy bank, casting a line into the water.

  “What is the name of this restaurant?” asks Sachi.

  “Au Temps Perdu. Does that mean anything to you?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Basically, it means El Regreso de Tiempo Perdido.”

  “A nice name.”

  “You never think about your uncle?” I ask. “You probably don’t remember him.”

  “No,” she says; she barely remembers her biological father anymore, she tells Hiroko.

  “Masahiro was always so proud of you. His wife got jealous, I think, because he had a picture of you and your brother up above his desk in Switzerland.”

  “I don’t remember,” she says. Women walk past us, carrying parasols to protect themselves from the sun in the slatted light.

  Then she adds, “So tasty, isn’t it?” Her smile is guilelessness itself, fresh and open; a part of me hopes she’s acquired the Japanese gift for phasing out a past that can no longer be amended.

  * * *

  —

  “You never think about your home?” asks Sachi, as we wander through the festival sunshine beside the stream; much of Kyoto seems to be pouring towards the hills today. It’s almost as if summer has come back for a moment—to retrieve something it forgot—and everyone is crowding round it, the way the women at the ping-pong club do after I return from a trip, crying, “Long time, no see!”

  “This is my home,” I say. “I’ve never felt more at home than here.”

  “I mean England,” she goes on. She’s had to suffer, as has her mother, from hearing me say, again and again, when the fields are very green in midsummer, or on a day of constant rain, “I’m back again! In the place I’ve been trying to get away from all my life.”

  “Hiroko says it’s the only place you can’t find exotic. The only one where you’re never surprised. But now you take her there every summer.”

  “That’s true. I suppose it’s pulling me back, just as Japan’s now claiming your mother.” I look at the hills, a mosaic of faded colors under the razor-sharp blue. “I like being in Oxford with her, because she can see it with such freshness. No memories or prejudices.”

  “Like you with Kyoto,” says bright Sachi.

  “Maybe.”

  I can’t put a finger on it as I try to explain it to my daughter; maybe autumn is the season when we start to turn within, and forgotten moments begin to bob up to the surface. In any case, if I could put an explanation on it, I wouldn’t believe it.

  The women are chatting outside the post office, and the boys are heading back through the early dark with their satchels, in dark uniforms. There’s a sense of settledness and continuity to the cycles here, as to the ones I grew up in; the menacing world seems very far away. That sense of childhood’s protectedness mixed with c
hildhood’s excited sense of not knowing what’s going to happen next: liberation from a sense of future.

  “Sometimes,” I tell Sachi, “when I come back from the ping-pong club, through the neighborhood, I can smell cooking from every other house. Which is the smell of family, of home. Even if it’s not a home that can ever officially be mine.”

  “Is that the reason you don’t learn more Japanese?”

  “Not exactly. That’s just laziness. But it’s the reason I live here on a tourist visa. I don’t want to pretend I know more than I do, or fully belong where I don’t and never can.”

  “Hiroko says you’re always laughing when you’re in England. So it must be your true home.”

  “Maybe. But you need a sense of open space in life, something to offset the sense of the familiar.”

  The chill begins to come at 4:20 p.m. now, though the flaming last thirty minutes of sun are a true magic hour in this season; the golden light slanting through the streets gilds everything it touches.

  “Maybe you see Japan more happily, too?” I tell my bright-eyed daughter. “Now you’ve lived for eight years in Europe?”

  * * *

  —

  The TV screens are filled with stories of old people in Japan who have to rent actresses to come and visit them on Sundays—to call out, “Hi, Mom and Pop, how are you?”—because their own daughters have moved abroad, or lost their appetite for filial piety. Teenagers now sit, shirts untucked, on the silver seats reserved for their elders on buses, and each young woman who manages to fashion a new life for herself by marrying a foreigner or by joining a foreign company is that much further from the part for which she was raised.

  I think of the trains that keep running through Tokyo Story, rattling out of sight even when the characters who watch them cannot do the same. They speak for an age of movement in which parents give their children the freedom they never had, only to wonder why, in their sunset years, they’re feeling so abandoned.

  When the old couple in Ozu’s film look in on their daughter in her workplace—the Ooh La La Beauty Parlor—the young woman explains to a colleague that they’re “just friends from the countryside.”

  No hearth, no storm, no explosions of rage in this version of Lear. Things are as they are, and every year people go out and watch the autumn, because it’s always the same, and always not.

  * * *

  —

  I’m playing the club chair today, the amiable, poker-faced gent who chuckles every time he gets the days mixed up and who regularly announces the score as “All nine,” only for his wife to remind him, “Father! It’s seven-four!” He’s a lot like the absentminded father in every Ozu film, harmless and engaging, but never quite to be counted on for knowing what’s going on (for that, you have to look to sharp-eyed wife or aunt or daughter).

  Get him behind the table, though, and his pleasant, easygoing demeanor becomes lethal. In nine years, I’ve never seen him register emotion, other than affability and amusement; but on every service return, he threatens to flip his paddle to wrong-foot me, and he eases up so well when playing against newcomers that one forgets he can twirl his penholder grip around and send a low ball over so fast that it’s at the wall by the time I notice it.

  He guides us all by saying almost nothing, and when he tries to be stern—“Remember to take good care of the three-star balls; they cost three dollars a pop”—he defuses his own authority by lapsing into apologetic smiles, the same ones he flashes when he skillfully allows a 9-1 lead to turn into 9-9. The studied vagueness—the trailing-off sentences—with which many of my neighbors speak puts those around them at ease, even as it usefully lulls one into forgetting how effective they can be.

  Besides, we’d be lost without our leader. Last week, I went into the studio to find eight of my friends rallying furiously at two of the tables, while, at the third, a quartet of old guys not connected to our group shouted and laughed over their weekly thirty-minute session. As I watched, however, I noticed that my pals were getting more and more tired. Mrs. Tanizaki always likes cutting through practice to get to the fun of real games, a person after my heart. The moon-faced “Doctor” in his spectacles canters after stray balls following every single rally, never complaining, but he’s past retirement age now, and he’s beginning to sweat under his beaming exterior. I looked around and realized: Mrs. Kyoto was gone. The woman who effortlessly organizes us all with the skill of a hostess at a garden party, taking pains to include every last person and jollying everyone along with encouragements, was away, and no one knew how to function without her.

  My friends kept on and on, rallying, even though nobody wanted to; if they were to stop, it seemed, nobody would know what to do. I think of the government in Beijing, so convinced that if strong leadership is missing, everything will fall apart; a Confucian group is only as strong as its commitment to a clear hierarchy.

  Finally, Mrs. Tanizaki could take no more. “Shall we get out the trump cards?”

  But no one knew where they were.

  “Okay, let’s play rock-paper-scissors to choose sides.”

  “But there are nine of us now. That’s not going to work.”

  “That’s right. Let’s play goopa”—rock and paper only—“so we can eliminate someone.”

  “But Pico-san’s just come. He ought to get to play. Especially since he has to leave before the rest of us.”

  “Good idea.”

  “But Pico-san hasn’t had a chance to practice. Is that okay?”

  “You don’t mind, Pico-san?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Please,” a woman said at last, seeing where this was going—or not going. “I’m sitting this one out. Truly. I’m too tired. You’ll all be doing me a favor if you take my place.”

  In the presence of an odd number, everyone was at odds. But now we had a solution—until a newly permed matron with an oddly lunging style walked in with a smile, eager for a game, and we were nine again. The greatest happiness of the greatest number is never so easy to achieve unless somebody—Mrs. Kyoto, the gods, just the autumn chill—takes the lead in putting us in our place.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, I’m reminded again what the season of interiors can do with us. In summer, it’s easy to be caught up in the rites of open-air festivals and evenings watching the moon along the Kamo River; but now, pushed inwards, we’re picking up pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of the past, especially as Hiroko keeps taking the long series of trains to Kyoto for the melancholy business of sifting through her parents’ stuff.

  She’s always been one who loves to toss things out—it goes with her constant generation of new hobbies—and in her it speaks for a positive, forward-looking nature. But now, as she goes through her parents’ lives, she says, “I find so many letter today. Always my brother writing to my father. Saying, ‘Thank you, thank you. Thank you you give present! Thank you you send money!’

  “We never knew.”

  “You mean, all the time your brother was in Switzerland, your father was helping to support him? Not only when he went to graduate school in Kansas?” She nods.

  “And then, after he’d paid for him to go abroad for all those years, he saw his son come back and turn his back on him.”

  “Same you,” she says. “Your father pay your time at college.”

  “You’re right,” I acknowledge, taken aback. There’s never any questioning her quick lawyer’s logic.

  As she takes things out of her bag, the stories that come out are such a confounding mix of superstition and fact that I lose all bearings.

  During the war, she tells me, her father’s mother put out fresh rice for her son every day, and tea, even though he was thousands of miles away; since his other brothers were not tall enough, he was the only one of her six children to go to war.

  “Bad luck
he had to go to war,” I say.

  “Not so bad. That time, so many love Emperor, love Japan. If not go war, little embarrassed feeling.”

  One day, she tells me, her father’s mother collected the miso soup she’d put on her homemade shrine and noticed no condensation on the lip. She shivered. It was almost as if the faraway son she was trying to support suddenly lacked the strength to breathe.

  That very moment, Hiroko says, her father was close to death. But, out of nowhere, he felt a spirit close to him—his mother—offering him rice, and he got up and came back to life.

  Such are the stories with which a family, or a country, sustains itself, perhaps. They come to sound like the classical Japanese folktales that Hiroko used to spin out to me when first we met. It’s hard to know what’s true or not, but only a few weeks ago I saw a daughter bring her mother back to life, when Hiroko came to her mother’s bedside and got her to eat again.

  “It’s strange,” I tell my wife. “By being in Siberia, your father managed to survive. If it hadn’t been for that, he might have been in his hometown, in Hiroshima, in 1945. He might not have lived to ninety-one. You might not be here now.”

  “Strange,” she agrees. “We cannot know so many thing.”

  And who knows why, but, as I watch her gather her sword and kit for tai chi, her regular meeting with a gaggle of fresh retirees, I recall a bright morning in California, three months ago, where we’d gone to look in on my mother and ease her through recovery from back surgery. Hiroko is always reborn in the fresh light of the West, and the land of taco shacks and tawny hills is reborn for me through her excitement; no one can appreciate endless summer so much as a visitor from the world of autumn.