by Pico Iyer
One morning, I took her to a yoga center downtown, a place she’d never tried before, and then drove back to my desk to work. An hour later, the phone began to ring.
“I’m sorry,” said a strange voice, “but I think you should come and collect your wife. She’s not making any sense.”
Her English often trips people up, I thought, as she tries to put the most elaborate feelings and ideas into a kind of Japanese syntax (while I, speaking Japanese, am so shy and reticent that I might as well be Japanese).
I made my leisurely way back to the large yellow converted church near a park and sauntered upstairs, to find Hiroko sitting on a bench, awaiting me.
She offered me a bright smile, and we walked downstairs.
“What happened?” she asked, as we went out to the car.
“Oh, nothing. The woman was worried you might be sick.”
She smiled as I let her in. I took my place behind the wheel, and she said, “What happened?”
I looked at her; attention is one of her striking graces. “Nothing. They were just worried.”
I turned the key, and we began moving between the white-walled lawyers’ offices and Pilates parlors that sit at the heart of the sunlit resort town.
“What happened?”
I looked at her as if to say, “You’re joking!”
And then she said, “How we get here?”
“You remember we were in Toronto last week, for my job?” Something in me was beginning to stir. “You went to Niagara Falls.”
“Niagara?”
“You don’t remember our trip last week?” Now I was getting worried.
“What happened?”
“You know where you are?”
“I know!”
She was the same bright-eyed, perky soul I collected every day from the gym. But our conversation was running off the tracks, and there seemed no way to get it back on them.
“What happened?” Hiroko then said again, and I pulled over beside our historic Spanish-style courthouse and raced over to a phone booth to call our doctor.
“I’m sorry,” said his assistant. “He’s just stepped out for lunch. Is it something I can help you with?”
I described how Hiroko seemed frozen in some way, and the voice at the other end said, “Go to the emergency room. Now. Right now. Don’t waste a minute. You have one hour; they call it the ‘golden hour.’ It could be a stroke.”
I got back in the car and accelerated towards the nearest hospital, gunning through a yellow light, barely halting at the stop signs. I stole a glance at the woman I’d known for twenty-six years, her smile and open face and excited eyes under her red headband. She looked just the way she always did. “You remember Bernie?” I said, and she smiled. “Yes. Of course!”
Then I sped towards the entrance to the emergency room, inwardly cursing as one blood-red sign after another led me around corner after corner until, at last, we arrived at the Cottage Hospital door that said “Trauma Center.”
What if…and all the what-ifs came pouring down on me. If she was fine in every way but we could never talk again? If truly her memory was gone, and now we no longer had a past, anything to share? What if I, notoriously ham-handed, was left to care for an invalid for life? What if, in a moment, on a carefree morning, our life together had been erased?
We ran into the tiny, overcrowded room, and a woman handed me a clipboard and pen. I led Hiroko to a seat and scribbled down answers to all the questions: name, date of birth, marital status, home address.
Then we waited.
“What happened?” asked Hiroko.
“We just need to make sure you’re fine,” I said, trying to push down a rising sense of panic.
“What happened?”
“You remember me?”
“Of course!” She smiled broadly. “Why you ask that?”
Thirty minutes later, we were ushered into another room, where a doctor in his mid-fifties with a mop of curly black hair, noting my agitation, invited me to sit down. Then he put his fingers on Hiroko’s temples.
“What’s your name?” he asked, and she answered as if it was a silly question.
“What date is it?”
She looked confused, though she might have had trouble with the question in the best of circumstances.
He asked a few more simple questions, and then he turned to me. “She’s speaking gibberish,” he said.
Something stopped in me.
“Which is good. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that she has transient global amnesia. She won’t remember this day ever again, and, most likely, she’ll never have an episode again. There’s nothing she needs to take for it, there’s nothing we can do. Just stay close to her, right next to her, for the next twenty-four hours. When she wakes up tomorrow, she should be fine.”
I stared at him, not speaking, as if he’d raised us from the dead.
“I’ll take some tests to make absolutely sure. But I’m confident that’s the case. I’d never experienced this till my mother got it. It comes to some people sometimes, for no reason. It shouldn’t happen again.”
“Isn’t there anything I should do?” I couldn’t believe a life could be turned around in an instant and put together again in another.
“Nothing. Was there anything different or unusual about what you did today?”
“No.” And then I remembered. “Well, she did try a new yoga center she’d never been to before. But I don’t think…”
“Yes,” said the doctor, looking relieved. “That would do it.” Maybe send the blood into her brain in some different way.
I led Hiroko out into the broad sunshine, and took her home to rest. Almost instantly, she fell into a deep sleep. When I prodded her awake for dinner, she started and stared at me in terror, as if not recognizing a thing.
“What happened?”
Next day, our lives picked up again, and the storm had passed through town. True to the doctor’s assessment, she could not remember the day or the episode. I, of course, could not forget. It was like one of those drills they conduct in schools and hotels, to prepare you for a fire. Except that the sign of a really good dress rehearsal is that it truly feels like the end of everything you know.
III
“I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time,” the very English poet Philip Larkin told The Paris Review in 1982. “Some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.”
As November dawns, we step into a world of light. The whole room seems to pulse with smudged gold, as the sun rises above the hills beyond us and comes through the diffusing thick panes of our frosted-glass windows. I remember my surprise when Hiroko told me that the builder of this place, who ended up calling it “Memphis Apartments” in honor of Elvis, originally wanted to make it a church. The heavy pebbled glass spreads light as if it were incense.
Now she puts Bach on our system, and very soon the sun is making gold stripes across the terrace with such extravagance that I’m pulled in every direction all at once. A great rejoicing, so it feels, which awakens gratitude and delight; but the sun is passing across the terrace earlier and earlier, and by mid-afternoon it will disappear behind a roof.
It’s nearly impossible to stay indoors on a day like this, not least because so many around me are being pulled, almost magnetically, out into the sharpened sunshine, to marvel at the fact that the sky is so blue even as the leaves rust and begin to flutter down. Many of Kyoto’s temples open their gates after nightfall now—another of the city’s fresh and ingenious seductions—and soon we’ll follow lanterns past stands of bamboo eerily lit up, watch fast-moving ghosts holographically projected upon raked-sand gardens. In the shallow crystal pond of Kodaiji, the five-pointed maples are almost
more brilliant than on the trees that the temple’s water reflects.
And yet, in our private lives, we’re perched on the edge of a cliff, and the slightest movement could send us tumbling over. Every time I come back to the flat, I look, by instinct, for the green flashing button on the phone—no news is likely to be good news—and when I walk into the park, I can’t help but wonder how often my mother-in-law will see the maples again. I take myself, to banish the thought, to Susano Shrine, where the light is slicing the courtyard into diamonds; and then I notice, as never before, that people have placed coins around rocks all across the forest, and there are stone lanterns everywhere, as if the whole wilderness were a haunted church.
I decide to take a train into central Nara today—I cannot squander this moment—and in the sun-washed carriage, I find myself looking at the hands on every side of me, tapping away on a smartphone, tightly gripping the handle of a designer bag, holding a toddler steady as the train rocks and rattles. The one part of Japan in which age cannot be concealed—hands tell the truth even when mouths and eyes cannot—is also the most beautiful.
In the deer park, an old woman has set herself on a bench, to transcribe the autumn colors in a sketchbook. Two toddlers are stumbling their way into learning to walk on the grass nearby. A deer is chasing some poor visitor into the store next to where special “deer cookies” are on sale for the equivalent of $1.50 each. If they are true messengers of the gods, the deer speak for gods as ungovernable as Zeus and Hera.
Around me there’s a chorus—“Waaah, aren’t the maples beautiful!”—and the chorus itself lends brightness to the day. A woman leads her dog, wrapped in a red blanket, up a slope and stops and tilts her head up, up, up, to where the leaves are picked out against the blue. “Quite something, no?” she says to her four-legged companion.
A young girl, in a denim jacket with frills, guides her grandmother, very slowly, by the hand, then sets her down in front of the turning leaves, a classic autumn tableau. “Would you like…?” a passing woman suggests, and the girl hands over her camera and hurries off to take her place next to the old lady.
“Now you?” asks the granddaughter, springing up.
Across the world, people are marking the Day of the Dead today, but in the park, the air so cleansed that the trees seem to gleam in the freshened morning, it’s not skeletons I see so much as aging elders struggling for breath. Dying is the art we have to master, it seems to say—not death; late love settles into us as spring romances never could.
* * *
—
Next day, unable to contain myself, I fling three protein bars, an apple and a copy of The Rainbow into my shoulder bag and head out to Kurama, the mountain that stands thirty minutes north of Kyoto by train, offering a long, steep walk through gates, up to a temple, along slopes said to be alive with spirits. Twenty-six years ago, on a November day like this, Hiroko and I walked up the mountain on a morning of mist and intermittent rain, drawn together but uncertain, since she seemed so rooted in Kyoto and I so constantly on the move.
The skies were a reflection of our hesitations when we set out, as I with my “birdlike” traveler’s temperament, here for a year, shared adventures in Lhasa and Havana, and she got ready, at day’s end, to return to her suburban marriage, the two small kids awaiting her. We looked around a turn and saw nothing but heavy clouds.
Today, the sun never falters. Excited matrons are gathering on the train platform for leaf viewing, their daughters having donned black stilettos to knock their boyfriends out. With each station, as the mountain train edges away from the city, there’s a greater sense of light and space: rice paddies through the windows; hills, where there had been concrete apartment blocks ten minutes ago. At one point, the whole train passes under a gallery of trees, so full and close that their red and yellow hands seem to reach in through the windows to make us theirs.
It’s transport into an illuminated text. At the tiny country station where I get out, young women in fishermen’s caps are selling bean-paste rolls from a van, and along the village’s single lane, everything is lit up, so you could believe diligent workers had been awake all night, polishing it to a sheen. I begin climbing the long slope towards the temple at the top, and then I stop for breath—this never happened twenty-six years ago—and pretend I’m halting for the view.
The other climbers, for the most part, are even older, if smaller, aided by sticks; they tramp past me without a word as if their entire lives were a climb and what awaits them at the top is nothing but the prospect of extinction. The only ones today who dawdle are two young lovers; they halt with every stride and play rock-paper-scissors to see who will climb the next three steps first. Separating and coming together again, playing with the notion of coming apart because they’re so sure they never will.
I pass the bench where Hiroko and I once sat, and still the slope zigzags up and around, the old people striding past me. The air is chill up here, and a sign says, “1300 meters.” But to what? More mossy slopes?
I stop for breath again and realize that, twenty-six years ago, we never made it to the top; we weren’t looking at the temples or the leaves. When East Asian students are shown a painting, they notice the background as surely as their Western counterparts tend to see the figures in the foreground; perhaps I was leading Hiroko out of her home simply by drawing her attention away from the temple and flowering trees and neighborhood. In those days, I couldn’t see that the best part of us is what’s ordinary, nothing special.
Finally, I come to a slope that heads down—and down and down, for twenty slippery minutes through thick forest—and at the end I’m on a deserted country road, following a stream. Little red tables are set out beside a river, even placed on huge boulders above the water, protected by tall scarlet umbrellas. Women in kimono glide out from their restaurants, inviting me to enter the picture and become a sight myself.
I stop on a bench to eat my apple, accompanied by a can of sweet milk tea from a vending machine. Five college kids sashay past, on their way to climb the mountain from this other side—two boys and three girls. Odd numbers are a challenge, the ping-pong club has taught me.
The colors roar back in the intimate space of this postcard village along a sun-glinting stream; the trees are thick, and every lantern and red tablecloth is picked out. But it’s 3:00 p.m. now, and soon the light will flare and begin to die; I realize, with a shock, that it was on this day, fifty-eight years ago, my parents got married. My mother has been eighteen years alone.
Five old people in their hats with their sticks, unstoppable, emerge around a corner and take the steps up to Kibune Shrine, the pretty little collection of wooden praying places that has been a famous appendix to Kyoto since the tenth century.
When I came here once with Hiroko, we began climbing those same steps, and then she turned back.
“You go alone,” she said. This from the person who always loved being together, and in fact was regularly urging me towards shrines I had little interest in.
“It’s more fun with two.”
“I no want go.”
“Come on.”
“Please.”
I walked up alone and inspected the typical cluster of shrines and doll’s-house openings, the little shop selling protective charms against car crashes or bad luck in love, the wooden box into which the charms could be tossed, to be burned with the ending of the year. But when I asked her, after descending, if she was tired, she shook her head no.
“This shrine so dark! Everybody know.”
It looked to me like any other place, offering protection and a place for meeting gods.
“You don’t understand?” she asked, and made a strange kind of devil’s face, with horns on either side of her head, saying something about placing candles above one’s temples, since the resident goddess could turn herself into a demon.
“What are
you saying?”
“Every night,” she said. “This so famous! All people coming here, nobody can look.” She goes on to say what sounds like something about blood sacrifices at the midnight hour.
“No!”
“Yes! Of course. Most important is nobody can see. Nobody watching. Many shrine this style. If want delay some person.”
“Delete?”
“Delete some boyfriend or something like that.” She grows quiet. “Spirit world so complicated.”
Now the young girl on the walk has climbed three steps along. Now her beau has shown scissors to her papers and come up to join her.
* * *
—
Another golden morning, half asleep—I left my car in a parking lot in my dream, and now, for the life of me, I can’t locate it—I feel the bed shake beneath us. The whole room seems to shudder for a few seconds, and then it steadies itself. Startled, I hold still, bracing myself for aftershocks. Each of our homes, on either side of the Pacific, is permanently girding itself for the earth to crack beneath it.
Sleepy, in pajamas that say “Happy Innocent Day,” Hiroko murmurs, “My aunt little go brother house.”
“You felt that earthquake?”
She shakes her head a bleary no.
“Your aunt went yesterday?”
“No. Twenty year before. Before lose mind.”
Japanese has only two tenses, and in Hiroko’s homemade, ideogrammatic English, things grow doubly conflated, especially as she’s more comfortable in present tense than past, the way I am in French or Spanish. And Masahiro’s spectral presence for twenty-three years only compounds the sense of losing track of where we are.
“She so clever. She find address, little go his house. But never knock door. Just want know he there.”
“She loved your brother?”