Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  We change ends to begin a new game, and no one remembers quite whose turn it is to serve.

  “It’s Mother’s turn,” I say, “because she received after rock-paper-scissors last time.” Hearing myself, I wonder who I am.

  * * *

  —

  “Do you think it was going to the West that made your brother feel so far from all of you?” I ask.

  Hiroko has come back from work and set a maple leaf she picked up along the road on our table; she’s sweetened dinner with the latest news from the hip girl who calls her “rock-and-roll elder sister,” the sixty-five-year-old with the clandestine lover, the one whose father won’t allow her to marry her longtime love because he’s from the outcast section of society.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Do you think it was Jung? Or just that sense that therapy offers that there has to be an answer to everything, even a resolution?” If there’s an arrow in your side, the Buddha famously said, you don’t ask where it came from, or quibble about what kind of arrow it is; you simply pull it out.

  “He always lone wolf,” she says, though she could be talking about herself. “I more good mind-doctor than my brother!”

  Perhaps; if only because she listens so well and then can relay one’s forgotten thoughts back to one.

  “He must be lonely.”

  She nods. “So sad. I pity my brother.”

  * * *

  —

  The days pulse on, rising and rising, it can feel, till the moment when they’ll break. “Every day, I’m wiped out,” a visiting friend from California tells me on the phone, “by a goodbye. People put so much feeling into it! I thought the Japanese would be poker-faced, restrained. But even the smallest moment carries such emotion.”

  “Maybe the end of the encounter is the time when people can best get out their feelings? Like us at a deathbed. In the middle of a meeting, it could be dangerous: You may say the wrong thing. Or the right thing may be taken wrong. It’s only when it’s all over—or about to be—that you can let everything out.”

  “Almost like the heart starts to open when the doors begin to close?”

  “Well,” I say, “it could be.”

  At the bus stop this morning, a freezing wind pushing my hands into my pockets, I look across the street to our second-floor window and see Hiroko, who’s pulled the heavy panes back, waving brightly with both hands, back and forth, back and forth, as I board the 112 for the library.

  * * *

  —

  “Pi-sama!” Sachi’s bell-like voice chimes across the phone, the name she’s given me and the way she says it a ringing blend of affection and singsong delight. Through most of our lives together, my stepkids and I have been quiet friends across the dinner table; they, being Japanese, are unwaveringly tolerant and polite with the strange, disheveled creature their mother has brought home—he might almost be an exotic pet who doesn’t seem quite fatal—and their limited English and my limited Japanese has left us in a peace of smiling courtesies. But now that Sachi has returned from Spain with fluent English, I feel as if I’ve gained a daughter, as well as a wonderful confidante.

  “How have you been?” she asks in her nation’s tones of public cheer and warmth. After all these years, I never know—and Hiroko even less—what kind of sadness or worry Sachi might be pushing down. Hiroko, honorary foreigner—“My family little crazy Italian family,” she explains to bewildered friends from abroad, “always so much emotion. I so sorry!”—broadcasts most of her feelings as clearly as the heavens.

  “Are you enjoying your favorite season?” my daughter continues.

  “I always do,” I say. “As you know too well! It’s hard to feel defeated in the autumn.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “The usual. Ping-pong. Taking walks in the temple gardens. Vacuuming.”

  She giggles. My disinclination to clean is a long-standing joke.

  “Last night, I was watching an Ozu movie,” I continue. “Do you know Late Spring?”

  She doesn’t, and I’m relieved. “I don’t think you would like it.”

  Ozu’s films are almost like panels in a single screen taking us through the seasons, akin to the folded, lacquered paintings, human-high, with delicately traced branches on them, I recently took Sachi to see in the National Museum. The characters bear the same names in film after film; we look in on them as we might the neighbors we see every day along the street. But whereas Tokyo Story now seems to be about Hiroko’s parents, Late Spring is painfully close to the story of our daughter.

  A young woman is looking after her absentminded father, a kind of professor and writer who, amiable enough, appears unable even to make himself toast. She gets him tea and towels; she dances attention on his friends like a practiced hostess. She flashes an irradiating smile in every circumstance. It’s only when the father’s sister points out that the girl is getting old—so old that she might never get the chance to marry—that the old man (my age, fifty-six) realizes that this cozy arrangement, almost marital, is keeping her from the marriage and independent life she deserves.

  In classic Japanese fashion, the father gradually resolves to pretend that he’s going to get married so that his daughter will feel free, even impelled, to pursue her own course. One form of self-sacrifice tilts against another, and when his plot comes to fruition, both characters savor its success by finding themselves profoundly alone, separated from the one person they love.

  The film becomes more and more crushing as it unfolds. When father and daughter take a trip to Kyoto, they might for all the world be a couple on a final weekend together before separating for good. “We should have done this more often,” the father says, as they begin packing their things. In Ozu, a wedding means the opposite of union—we never see the daughter’s groom, a basketball player, throughout the film—and freedom means, in fact, the relinquishing of duties that can be life’s deepest pleasure.

  When the father, fragile on his cane, returns to an empty house at the end, assuring everyone that he won’t be lonely, it’s desolating. I’d looked up from the shot of his head falling down as he peels a summer pear, able at last—when alone—to admit his sadness, as the tide comes in outside, and thought how we’ve rejoiced to have Sachi back with us. She’s stood by Hiroko’s side through all the complication that follows a death, been capable when her mother was uncharacteristically lost, navigated the Internet to locate her missing uncle. She’s set her hapless stepfather up with a printer and video delivery service, and with someone with whom to share his concerns about the family.

  Yet, the more we relax into the blessing of her company, the more she’s losing her life sitting by the phone, waiting for a call from Spain that never comes. As charming young boys circle around her, she talks pointedly about her “boyfriend” back in Europe, and Hiroko and I bite our tongues as the young men recede.

  * * *

  —

  “So many time my father tell us,” Hiroko says next morning, in the dark, “if family or parent, must choose family. Last year, I say to him, ‘Masahiro is a good son. He do what you say. Please, remember this. He listening your voice!’ ”

  “What did he say?”

  “Cannot say anything.”

  I imagine him fumbling, muttering darkly, as his own arguments are turned against him by his quick-witted daughter. “Who is the one who stood up to you when we were growing up?” she asked him recently. “You!” he chuckled. “You were the only one.”

  They’re so much alike it hurts. He was always the one who said Hiroko’s name most melodiously, even as she was shouting down the phone, at his failing ears, “It’s Hiroko! HI-RO-KO!” And now that he’s gone, Hiroko is him more than ever, and not only because she’s de facto boss of the family.

  I wonder anew how much Masahiro’s impatience and violence m
ight have come from his father. I was impressed—it served my interest—when Hiroko, walking out of her first marriage, said, “That life finish!” and barely looked back.

  But now—fate’s artful tricks at work—we’re on the receiving end of the same brisk efficiency.

  “My brother mind doctor,” Hiroko says with early-morning impatience, “but he need mind doctor himself! Why he cannot understand my mother is old? She miss him.”

  “You said that he always thought you were your mother’s favorite.”

  She nods. If he acts on that assumption, it will always be true.

  “It’s hard,” I say. “Sons so often want to protect their mothers. Look at Takashi’s friend.” This classmate, who grew up around the corner—and often in our house—could never forgive his father for deserting the family in pursuit of a young woman.

  Hiroko watches me warily; the central tug in so many a Japanese household is between wife and mother, and her first marriage died when she asked her husband directly, “Where are your loyalties? With your wife or your mother?” and he chose his mother.

  “Is it pride, do you think?”

  “Pride! Cannot change his heart. I don’t know.” She’s often told me how her father and I have the same protective deity, according to the Japanese calendar. Fudo-myo, the god of fire. Sometimes known as the wisdom king who will not be moved.

  I remember how her brother’s father-in-law had shown up at Hiroko’s father’s funeral, to pay his respects; he, too, was bewildered, all apologies. He’d barely seen his two granddaughters, though they lived a few train stops away.

  “I never give up,” she says now, and I tell her the story we all had to read in school, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale; the passing of seasons sometimes brings us to the very positions we could never take before.

  “Maybe it’s different for women,” I say. “Or wives.” One day, the father of Takashi’s friend, the one who had abandoned his family, called up his ex-wife from Kobe, ninety minutes away. He was sick—close to death—and he had no one else to turn to. She called an ambulance, and hurried to the far-off hospital to be with him. The man died in his wife’s arms, though his son was still in no mood ever to make peace with him.

  * * *

  —

  Outside, the autumn is getting brighter, louder, if anything more resplendently bright. Like the signs eager merchants place on their front windows: “Closing Sale! Everything Must Go! Come Soon While It Lasts!” The opposite of the near-silent effects of the Ozu films I’ve been watching—the deliberate procession of steady still lifes—though, in the end, the feeling is not so different. Setsuko Hara, who takes on the name of Noriko in one Ozu film after another, smiles more brilliantly the more she’s pushing down her losses; in life, as soon as Ozu died, the actress retreated to a house in Kamakura, where the never-married director was buried (under a black stone that says, simply, “nothingness”), and, unmarried herself, seldom showed her face in public again. It wasn’t hard for the press to cast her as the true-life daughter she played in Late Spring, tending to her honorary father’s memory till she became a nunlike figure in her nineties, coming out only to lay flowers on his grave.

  I open the heavy glass door to our toddler’s terrace—the washing machine gurgles and clunks, as ever—and I take out my tiny blue chair to sit in the jubilee light. “Gambaranai!” cries Hiroko from inside, getting herself ready for work. “You are a ‘responsibility’ person,” she comes out and says. “Always want to try hard. Please, don’t try hard today. Play, play, Pico!”

  A bright cheerleader’s dance ensues.

  When I go to mail some letters three hours later, it’s to find the makeshift farmers’ market up again in the three-foot space in front of the post office: small boxes of onions and persimmons, sweet tangerines. A tiny old lady, fumbling with a string bag, shuffles into the place and asks my beloved protector behind the counter, “There are five of you here, right?”

  “Five.”

  “Please,” she says, and hands over a little bag containing five persimmons.

  Down the street, in the park, six old men are sweeping leaves off a path, under the direction of an old woman wearing a black visor to avoid a tan. She looks uncannily like a riot-police officer with rifle raised towards demonstrators in the street. “Yes, over there, too,” she barks. “And here. These leaves also.”

  Two grandmothers are on a bench across the green lawn, clucking over the colors. A very old man is leaning against a bench, doing push-ups. Across the street, a taxi has stopped, and a gray-haired woman steps out, very slowly. She gives a deep bow to the driver, to bid him depart, but, before she walks into her house, bends down to pick up two, three, four ginkgo leaves to carry inside.

  * * *

  —

  I think of my friends in the West and despair of ever being able to convey the bounty of this life to them. They have their own equivalents, in every case, but the details of mine would make no sense to them, as if delivered in some version of Japlish. Some of them have grown used to the same rhapsodies every year—my words and excitement barely alter—and simply assume that I’m drunk on the foreign substance of exoticism. Or lost in some paradise in my head. I cherish still the friend from high school—friends from England understand—who sent me a postcard after I’d left my Midtown office for a bare room in the middle of nowhere that said, “Sounds like you’ve gone mad. Well done.”

  “Don’t you get bored?” the occasional new acquaintance asks, and I think about the light changing with every second at times, as new conditions appear and disappear with every week. Working four blocks from Times Square, where so much was so crazily in movement, I barely registered a thing.

  “Don’t you get lonely?” someone may ask, with kind intent, knowing how I’ve been stripped of my words, as of people who share my official interests. It feels to me as if I’ve walked out of a cluttered warehouse into a simple bare room with a scroll on the wall, everything so singular that emotion is brought to a pitch.

  Of course, there’s nowhere to hide here; in the absence of diversions, I’m alone with whatever haunts me. And every year the autumn poses the same question, which I, every year, am barely able to answer. There’s no time to waste, the yuzu-colored light reminds me; and yet it would be a crime—a sin—to turn away from the beauty of the season. The bright days make me unable to resist the impulse to go outside; the days of sudden, unrelenting rain commit me to solitary confinement. I’m not always ready to accept that it’s in surrendering my hopes and careful designs that real freedom comes—even though I have a wife who reminds me with every gesture that the only impulses to trust are the ones that arise without thought.

  The lesson of the desk, really, though never an easy one to learn. I write and write, struggling to create this pattern and squeeze this point in, relishing the fact that this word or that—to no one but the author—turns in a hundred directions. And then I go for a walk, across to the ginkgoes and the old women standing under their light, marveling, and realize that I’m never in tune with anything unless I’m not in my solitary head at all.

  * * *

  —

  The leaves have reached their climax now—cars are lined, bumper to bumper, along the narrow lanes of Kyoto, and uniformed guards stand outside the trains to push passengers into overcrowded carriages—as Hiroko and I hurry out to the bus stop at dawn and join the bankers stamping their feet in the early-morning cold, the nurses hurriedly applying mascara. At the local station, we take a train to Saidaiji, home to “the Great Western Temple” from the eighth century, and then another train to Takeda, near the eighth-century pagoda in southern Kyoto, and then another train to the conference-center hotel in a park in the far north of the old capital.

  On the top floor of the hotel, a group of old friends of ours—seven men in suits, four red-robed monks—stands in formal silence outside a closed
door.

  It opens, and the Dalai Lama comes out. “Ah,” he says—he gathers his gold-and-maroon robes around him with the help of an attendant—“an old friend,” and comes forward to touch foreheads with me. Then he enfolds Hiroko in a bear hug.

  “Little more weight, I think,” he says, looking at me closely. “And less hair.”

  Then, tickling my chin, “But maybe more experience now!”

  It’s been our November rite for the last eight years, traveling across Japan with the Tibetans on their annual visit, almost the only outsiders to join the small circle of private secretaries, bodyguards and translators brought over from Dharamsala. I first met the Dalai Lama when I was a teenager, through my philosopher father, who had sought him out as soon as the Tibetan leader came into exile. Now, because I often write about Tibet, the Dalai Lama allows us to travel with him, and even to sit in on every one of his private audiences, with old friends, potentates, heavy-metal musicians eager for a blessing.

  Sometimes we find ourselves stopping with his small convoy outside a deserted countryside 7-Eleven, where the Dalai Lama buys everyone a can of hot, sweet milk tea and stands at the entrance, extending a hand to bewildered truck drivers. Once we went with him to a crowded Yokohama shopping mall so he could buy some eyeglasses, and I watched him fondly rubbing the arm of the surprised elevator operator all the way up to the third floor. In an instant, we’re out of our tiny neighborhood existence in Deer’s Slope and whisked into a nine-story glassy Japanese parliamentary building, or a fancy lunch filled with the stars of fashion and society.

  It’s always a tonic and liberating experience insofar as the Dalai Lama is offering the world, in effect, a fresh pair of glasses. A change of perspective that is human, universal, not connected with any religion. When his longtime teacher died, he tells us this morning, he really felt sad. As if he’d lost his “ground,” the foundation of his life. But then he realized that sadness was not going to do anyone any good. Better by far to try to bring to life the ideas his teacher had passed on, and to honor him in some more practical way.