Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  “So close! He similar my mother. Anytime she looking him, my aunt thinking older sister.”

  But I remember, too, how Hiroko’s brother, while their aunt was looking after them when their mother was in hospital, said, “Why should I listen to you? You aren’t my mother.” The poor woman broke into tears.

  She’d always been Hiroko’s protector; absolved from the competing interests of parenthood, but living round the corner, she’d taught Hiroko cooking and made her a special kimono for her twentieth-year coming-of-age ceremony. When Hiroko’s parents briefly disowned their daughter, after she told them she was getting a divorce, it was her aunt who came running after her, along the line of ragged wooden shops, to assure her shadow daughter that she’d look after her, whatever happened. When we are old, she told Hiroko’s parents, this is the one who’s going to look after us.

  But her aunt began to lose her memory in her seventies; and her marriage, as so many, had given her plenty of things she was happy to forget. Whenever she sees Hiroko, she lights up; the rest of the time, she smiles vaguely, staring straight ahead in the old persons’ day-care center a few steps from where her older sister now lives.

  “It’s strange, don’t you think?” I say. “All the time you were growing up, you were so worried about your parents. They were always in the hospital, your mother with asthma, your father with problems he’d brought back from the war. Every day, you were prepared to lose everything. And now your mother is eighty-six, and singing when we take her for a drive; your father barely fell ill in fifty years.”

  “True,” she says. “That time, every day, I thinking, ‘Maybe I never see mother again.’ One time my mother and father little introduce circus. I so excited. Kinoshita Circus. All light gone. One woman in kimono walking on rope. Very sad, slow music.”

  “ ‘Be careful,’ say announcer. ‘One mistake, she dies.’

  “Such sad music, on and on”—Hiroko re-creates the downward-leaning tune—“and she walking such thin rope, in kimono, holding umbrella. I so scared, monoganashii.”

  The sadness of things; no one in Japan needed a reminder of that, especially in the years that followed war.

  “After that time, I never want return circus.”

  “But here you are, fifty years on, and you have a granddaughter, and you’re well.”

  “Maybe,” she says.

  I see the spotlit figure on the tightrope, walking in the dark. Hiroko feels so innocent and without designs to me—women warm to her as much as men do—even though she’s been through so much. Yet looking at our mothers, her aunt, is like seeing a preview of coming attractions; Hiroko is terrified—she keeps on trying to stem the habit while there’s time—that I’ll start hoarding things as my mother does, and I wonder whether she, like her father, will start abruptly cutting off friends. Or failing even to know who I am.

  Last year, a young friend from Los Angeles came over for his first trip to Japan. His second day in the country, he asked if we could meet, and I suggested we get together in the musty and deliciously unswept Nara Hotel. We settled into two thick armchairs on an empty second-floor landing, and, very soon, he pulled a notebook from his bag and read me an observation about Japan.

  It was a startling perception, the kind I could never have come upon after all my years here.

  Then another, the kind that reasoning would never uncover.

  “Where did you get all this?” I asked at last.

  He looked at me to see if I was joking.

  “No, seriously. I’d never see that in a million years. You must be blessed with exceptionally fresh eyes.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” He looks at me and realizes I’m not. “You don’t remember you wrote that in the book you brought out after your first year here?”

  “Not at all,” I say, genuinely taken aback. “I’d never be able to see that now.”

  Later, the same thing happens again. I marvel at the clueless kid I’d been, barely out of my twenties, wandering around Japan not knowing a thing and therefore seeing so much. It reminds me of the time last week when I had a revelation—change itself is an unchanging truth—so new and unlike anything I’d caught before that I had to scribble it down. A few days later, going through my notes, I found that I’d had precisely the same revelation, word for word, a year before. Eerily, on the same November day.

  Later, I came upon exactly the same “discovery” once more, in my notes from six years before.

  We’re so convinced we’re moving forwards, when all I seem to do is go round and round with the seasons, certainly no wiser, and often only more sure of how much I cannot know. Progress is a New World notion I’m not sure I believe in.

  * * *

  —

  My neighbors dress up when they go to see the maples, as we might when we go to church. Old women look sleek and regal again in dark kimono, and the men beside them are sporting three-piece suits and trilbies as if posing for a turn-of-the-last-century photo. Girls from the countryside—and these days from Xi’an—pay two hundred dollars to get themselves up as geisha for the day, and the boys beside them, proud in indigo jackets and black Edo-period costume, present themselves as samurai protectors. “I can’t believe we’re seeing one!” cries a happy visitor from Minnesota as she snaps away at one such antique couple (and I take pains not to tell her that this is only a regular young woman eager to disappear into a geisha outfit for a day).

  “Grandpa,” calls back one woman as she stands with a fixed smile under a blaze of scarlet. “You got it?”

  “Just a minute,” fusses her husband while a gaggle of other sightseers clusters behind him to walk past.

  I walk around Tofukuji, the great southern-Kyoto temple famous for its autumn colors, and the crowds are so intense that white-gloved policemen are standing at twenty-foot intervals, directing foot traffic to the left, and dozens of visitors are gathering on the temple’s celebrated “Road to Heaven” bridge, under a board with a red line through a camera, posing for photos, while the guards shout, in English, “No photograph, no photograph!”

  A very old man, leaning heavily on his cane, coat tightly buttoned, shuffles along a path beside an attractive young woman, fresh in her orange blouse—and a maple-haired beauty whispers “Date club” to her equally tall, lean beau as they pass.

  I think of the time I was talking to a woman who’d lost her husband, a man who had not often been kind to her.

  “If only he were here,” she said, and started talking of all the happy times they could be having together.

  “But you know he’d never change…” I began, and then I stopped, as I saw her face.

  “Leave me with my illusions, can’t you?” she all but spat, and I bit back my youthful foolishness. Even the illusions that wound perhaps preferable to none at all.

  “Chee-zu,” urges a woman with a camera, as she fiddles with the buttons and three friends stand with frozen smiles in front of her.

  “No, no, don’t worry,” says the chunky old man with a gold tooth who is waiting to walk past to the next blazing corner. “We can wait.”

  The sun emerges from a brief disappearance behind clouds, and the whole grove of maples turns into a burning bush. I think of the old abbot of the temple—the place where Hiroko and I first met—who served so doughtily as Hiroko’s protector for more than twenty-five years, offering to support her and her children when she got her divorce, encouraging her children to play hide-and-seek in his monastery (or get married there, if necessary), taking the three of them out for steak dinners. “Roshi,” nine-year-old Takashi asked, “aren’t monks meant to be vegetarians?” “Yes,” said the Zen master, as his business card described him—a child of divorce himself—and cut into his filet mignon.

  Whenever Hiroko called, he picked up on the first ring; when she asked if they could meet, he was always free, though in truth he
was one of the busiest Zen elders in the land, in charge of 370 temples across Japan. Every time we walked down the private path to his monastery and Hiroko shouted, “Excuse me,” a responsive howl would sound from a junior monk within, and a shaven-headed figure in robes would appear to lead us down a series of narrow, polished corridors to the fourteenth-century audience room, where Fukushima-roshi, official Zen master, would emerge, a tiny, smiling figure in heavy orange silk robes, and take his place in a thick armchair. A young monk would be summoned to fetch us tea, and our friend would elucidate again the meaning of his calligraphy: “Every day is a good day.”

  One time, with a smile, Roshi announced, “I have five attachments.” All of us knew that attachments are one of the main things Zen practice is meant to dissolve.

  “First,” he said, counting them out on his fingers, “Latte. Starbucks Caffè Latte. Then chocolate. Particularly Godiva. Third one, a little bit spiritual idea: bridge. In San Francisco, I always like the view of the bridge, a room with that view. The fourth is ice cream: Häagen-Dazs.

  “Then, finally, fifth attachment”—he paused, and looked straight at us, with a confiding smile—“Joan Baez. I used to keep this one a secret, but secret is not good idea. Because students have many imaginings.”

  Though Roshi had seen his home destroyed by American bombs, and had felt obliged to become a monk at fourteen to protect the souls of his dead grandmother and sister, he was already drawn to the American spirit of openness, and soon he began touring the New World every year, explaining how Dirty Harry had Buddha nature and why his teacher told him to let go of any longing for understanding. In Zen practice, he explained, when you see a mountain, you should become that mountain. If you’re observing the autumn, you become the autumn.

  One time in America, he told us, after he’d confessed to his love of Häagen-Dazs, an impish student had asked, “How does a Zen master eat ice cream?”

  “He becomes the ice cream,” Fukushima had replied, delighting in his new name: “Roshi Ice Cream.”

  When we finished talking to him, the man who was proud to have been our “Cupid,” the bridge in whose temple we met, rose out of his chair and stood beside it, small and round in thick robes, waving and waving with a broad smile as we walked across the large prayer hall next to his receiving room.

  He stood there until we had turned a corner and were on a wooden corridor, shuffling towards the entrance.

  But two autumns ago, when we went to see him, his hands were shaky as they reached for ours, fingers like thorns. He could barely stand, and he had to wave to us from inside his chair as we departed.

  When he gripped Hiroko’s hands between his own, to say goodbye, she shivered, and not just because of the chill. Six days after our only grandchild came into the world, Fukushima was gone, exiting the world on the day he’d been born, seventy-eight years before.

  * * *

  —

  When I come back from my day of stolen radiance and step into our apartment, everything of Hiroko is there except the woman herself. The photos of our parents she’s placed in indigo frames and set above the piano; the Vietnamese bamboo hat she brought back from Hanoi, her spare set of keys in the hallway. Her gossamer-light emerald scarf, draped around her black jacket from Milan. The small white tiger she’s given me for protection, the gold Kashmiri stole and scarlet gown folded up not far from the tiny, bare blond wood desk at which I sit in one corner every morning.

  The light, too, turning the panes of the window beside me into a color field of yellow and blue. In my twenties, watching the leaves scatter around Boston, I’d thought that autumn was the season that taught us how to die; only now do I see that in truth perhaps it’s dispensing the much harder challenge of learning how to watch everyone you care for die. Death can be hardest on the living.

  Then I tear open the envelope I’ve taken out of our clanking little gray mailbox downstairs. Inside, unexpectedly, I find a sheaf of thin sheets of paper, covered with small black characters inscribed in the classical style, vertically, to be taken in from right to left.

  Who could be writing to us both, I think? And then I remember: the “Empress,” as I always called her, with the beautiful tennis-honed forehand and the striking red headband, who welcomed us all with broad smiles every time the table-tennis club began.

  One day, she arrived in the studio and never got up from her chair, clapping politely from where she sat. She didn’t know what was happening, she told me; she felt dizzy. The next time, after a game began, she requested yellow balls, not white; her eyes were playing up. Then, one Sunday afternoon, I went to play in the local junior high school and found her, shockingly, in a wheelchair, blanket stretched across her lap. Then I never saw her again, and her husband, our deft and smiling leader, was gone as well. Off in a hospital, I heard, several train stops away.

  On our travels, Hiroko and I managed to find a giant postcard of blue skies and a golden beach; I drafted a message, and Hiroko wrote it out for our friend in Japanese. Now I’m guessing we’ve received an answer; I lay the envelope on the table, for Hiroko to translate after dinner.

  Right now there’s a very blue sky. I can see through my hospital window a plane flying through the heavens. You move all across the world, Pico-san; such a nice life! As I watch the plane, I dream of looking everywhere in the world.

  Last December I fell very ill. I lost all hope. I hit rock bottom. Slowly I began crawling up again. Everyone gave me love, and now my heart stands up again. I can’t move, but I receive so much kindness. They teach me painting here, and poetry; I’m studying both. In the rehab center, I’m trying everything, very hard.

  Today a nurse trainee is here with us for the first time. It’s like a breath of fresh air.

  I never forget you, Pico-san; your card is so beautiful! I look at it all the time—so lovely! I enjoyed ping-pong very much—such a beautiful memory. Thank you so much for your letter; I’m so happy. Thank you, thank you.

  I must defeat this illness! Everybody is giving me love to help me knock it out. All my life I worked very hard at sports; I’m in bed now, but I dream that I’ll feel better tomorrow.

  Painting is very mysterious; I’ve cried so much, no more tears can come.

  May your kindness give me power!

  Next to the letter, our friend has enclosed five drawings: one of three bright-eyed puppies—“Looks like her,” Hiroko points out, in a characteristic leap. A drawing of two kids waving from bicycles. Two paintings of snowcaps, a river beneath them. A still life of persimmons, harbingers of winter.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, at the health club, I’m registering absences a little more. The seasons keep on circling around us, even as I seem to step into the same space again and again. People are moving back to their hometowns to care for elderly parents; others are receiving invitations from grown children to join them far away. This person disappears for six months—an eye operation—and when I meet Mr. Kyoto after I’ve been away and ask how he is, he says, “Very well indeed!”

  But when he gives me a ride home, an hour later, he says, “To be honest, I’m staying at home more now. A little while ago, I had to be taken in an ambulance to the hospital. And then again, a little later. A punctured lung: I had to have an operation.”

  I’m silenced.

  “So I’m playing in the garden these days. I don’t like to be completely idle. She”—he gestures towards his wife, sitting silently in the back seat—“doesn’t like it. But I need to be doing something.”

  That book Mr. Joy gave me from the exhibition in 1974, I think now: he’s probably moving to a nursing facility of some kind—he’s so healthy, but who knows about his wife?—and doing his final edit on his life.

  The third table in the studio today is taken over by two teenage boys, in flamboyant shirts, who are smashing the ball at ea
ch other, many feet behind the net, as if on a badminton court, and swinging wildly at easy lobs as if they’ve never played before. I watch my octogenarian friends dart across the space to hit pointed forehand winners from three feet behind the table, and think that seasons never go the way we think.

  A wild ball clips the side of the table as it flies wide, and someone bows in apology.

  “Lucky, lucky,” says somebody else, in English, and I stop for a moment: where could they possibly have gotten that? I lose all sense now of whether that’s a strange phrase I picked up from them, or whether the English-language mantra is something they picked up from me. Quite often these days, even the least friendly of the men, wispy hair flying as he spins the ball illegally with his hand when serving, says “Oh no!” when he nets it, partly in parody of me, perhaps, but also a tribute.

  “Pico-san,” says one of the matrons today, always too complimentary, “your arms are so long. Stand against Mrs. Nakajima for a moment.”

  I stand back-to-back with one of the older ladies, arms held out, and someone says, “Ten centimeters at least. No wonder you can hit so far to the left or the right.”

  Most of the men here are taller than I am, with far longer arms, but no matter. “Arms and legs so long,” says a woman who’s put on quite a bit of weight herself in the past year. “But stomach, well, it’s a little…”

  We go back to the table, and I, with a straight face, hit short spinless balls to Mr. Joy, knowing he’ll swing for the fences every time and more often net an easy ball than a tricky one. I start aiming every shot to the backhand of Miss Tubby, as I think of her after her comment about my stomach, and she grows more and more flustered as she misses them, losing, more than the single point, her confidence. I’ve been here long enough by now to realize that not going for winners is the winning strategy.

  Another woman then starts hitting hard balls fast to my backhand, and my replies fly off. “Da-me!” I cry, and smile: my involuntary curses are coming out in Japanese.