by Pico Iyer
She’s twirling herself around like an ursine ballerina the next time I try to cover rock with my paper, and when we win the equivalent of the coin toss, she throws her arms triumphantly up to the sky.
“We won, Pico-san. We won! The only thing we’re going to win today!”
She never knows what the score is, so every moment comes to her as a shock. “What? Ten to two?” Then she collapses into abdomen-stretching, convulsive laughter it’s hard not to catch like the flu. “As we get older,” says an elderly gent in Ozu, “we seem to enjoy things more and more.”
I wonder what dramas—even sadnesses—await Mayumi-san at home. I remember the elegant salaryman, silk scarf around his throat, who gave me a ride home once from a game and asked, “Pico-san, do you drink?”
“Not so much. I never developed the taste.”
“I drink beer,” he declares. “Shochu. And every night, before I go to sleep, I drink brandy.”
He gives a deep laugh of satisfaction.
“You drink alone?”
“Yes. Sometimes with my son, when he comes home from work.”
“Your wife doesn’t drink?”
“My wife is sick,” he says, straight out. “She got diagnosed with cancer two years ago.”
We drive through the quiet country roads in silence.
* * *
—
Back in the club, though, with Mayumi-san, silence is forbidden. She rattles off some bulletin—or lecture, or imprecation—and when I see she’s expecting an answer, I say, “Sorry, I can’t quite follow.”
“ ‘Can’t quite follow?’ Pico-san, you don’t understand a thing I’m saying? You haven’t understood a word I’ve said? I could be asking for emergency help and you don’t know! All this talking, and you can’t follow a word!”
“It’s such a waste.”
“Isn’t it, though?” And she giggles forgivingly. “Oh, I missed again. What? We’ve lost already?”
She collapses into laughter. Winning, losing, it doesn’t matter; she’s almost as unprofessional as I am.
As we’re paired up again by the unbiddable yarrow sticks, I say, “I’m really happy. Mayumi-san is so terrible.”
“What? ‘Terrible?’ You think I’m terrible?” And she’s off and running again, thwacking me on the shoulder with her bat, not so gently. “ ‘Terrible’? You’re telling the truth at last!”
A part of me thinks, “Why do I always get my adjectives in Japanese reversed?” Another part thinks, “Why not?”
IV
This road
No one on it
As autumn ends
—BASHO, near Kyoto, weeks before his death
Everything is burning now, though the days have lost little in clarity or warmth. The leaves are scraps of flame, the hills electric with color; as we fall into December, everything is ready to be reduced to ash. From the windows of the health club, I see bonfires sending smoke above the gas stations; I walk up through magic-hour streets and wonder how long these days of gold can last.
It still has the capacity to chill me: the memory of the flames tearing through the black hillsides all around as I drove down after forty-five minutes of watching our family home, some years ago, reduced to cinders. Death paying a house call; and then, when the house was rebuilt on its perilous ridge—where my mother sleeps right now—again and again, new fires rising all around it. One time after another, we receive the reverse-911 call telling us we have to leave right now, and we stuff a few valuables in the car, then watch, from downtown, as the sky above our home turns a coughy black, the sun pulsing like an electrified orange in the heavens.
“Everything must burn,” wrote my secret companion Thomas Merton, as he walked around his silent monastery in the dark, on fire watch. “Everything must burn, my monks,” the Buddha said in his “Fire Sermon”; life itself is a burning house, and soon that body you’re holding will be bones, that face that so moves you a grinning skull. The main temple in Nara has burned and come back and burned and come back, three times over the centuries; the imperial compound, covering a sixth of all Kyoto, has had to be rebuilt fourteen times.
What do we have to hold on to? Only the certainty that nothing will go according to design; our hopes are newly built wooden houses, sturdy until someone drops a cigarette or match. As I climbed all the way up to our house, the day after everything in our lives was reduced to rubble, I saw that everything that could be replaced—furniture, clothes, books—was, by definition, worthless.
The only things that mattered were the things that were gone forever.
* * *
—
“Don’t die before me,” Hiroko says, holding me tight in the dark.
There’s no sound from the street outside; only tiny white lanterns against the black.
“I’ll try,” I say, into her sweet-smelling, silky hair. “But I’m not sure it’s something I have control over.
“So strange,” I go on. “Your father was always so protective of your mother. You remember, when we were in California? All he wanted to do every night was to ask me to dial Japan, so he could report everything he’d seen to her. But she was probably really happy to be by herself, the first time in many years she’d had some days to herself.”
“I never thought…”
“I know. Nor did I. He was the healthy one. Always so eager to run up the temple steps, even after he turned eighty. I never thought, too, that your mother would become so fond of him, in those final years. The more frail he—and she—became.”
“He so happy that time. Little get prize.”
Fifty-five years of steady companionship, and finally all sense of “what if” and preference falls away.
“Maybe it’s better he went before her. He wouldn’t have known what to do without her.”
“Maybe.”
The sun begins to show up behind the far-off hill, and the whole room becomes a box of lemon light.
* * *
—
When I step into the ping-pong studio, it’s to step into laughter and movement. My friends are clustered round the seven playing cards laid out on one table, overturning aces and other number cards to choose partners. My old pal from my earliest days with the club, nine years before, is jutting her elbows back and forth, because she gets to play again. She’s almost the only one who lets out a half-muffled cry of “I’m so happy!” when she wins a point or game; she gets so caught up in the competition that she seems not to have noticed how our unofficial leader, Mrs. Kyoto, has given herself a losing card—she always does—so someone else gets a chance to have a go.
Always smiling and alert—she never speaks a word of English to me, after twenty-six years in the West; as Hiroko points out, she’s a “harmony person,” and doesn’t want the others to feel left out—Mrs. Kyoto is now making sure that shy Mrs. Fukushima is ushered to the table, and that the one whose knee had been a bit dodgy doesn’t feel she has to play just because her sitting out a game would mean odd numbers.
The one everyone calls “Doctor”—moon-faced, with his thick black spectacles and quiet, boyish giggle—is sporting yellow-and-black shoes with separate spaces for every toe, like gloves for the feet; six years after I met him, he suddenly declared, one afternoon, when we were the only two present, “It’s rude, I know, I’m sorry, but could you tell me what you do for a living?” and offered, in turn, in English, that he came here from Korea, forty-six years ago. He, too, is eighty, I recall, as he spins around the table like a jack-in-the-box. I ask him about his son in London, and he says, “Hillary Clinton? Do you think…?” and gives me a tentative smile.
“Kato-san, you look so healthy!”
“Always healthy,” beams Mr. Joy, as I’ve dubbed him, in spotless whites. He still delights in talking about his trips to London, to Indonesia and Nigeria; when he was
a boy, the only foreigners he’d see were soldiers.
“You’re seventy-seven, right?” By this stage, his age is an achievement.
“Eighty,” he says.
“But you never look tired.”
“Five times a week, four hours a day,” he beams, and then looks chagrined; his wife, I’m guessing, puts her foot down on those other days.
Meanwhile, I might almost be with my late father-in-law when I’m playing with Mr. Gold Tooth. The two of us have been rallying together for nine years now, he standing far back, hitting high, wildly topspinned lobs that I smash back, and often breaking into chortles as the exchanges go on. But he’s the rare soul here who doesn’t seem to know how to read the air, as they say in Japan. He deliberately hits balls that will throw out some of the less graceful older women; the point is won, but the trust of everyone else is in a second lost.
And who knows what he’s leaving at home? He’s here every morning at 9:30, to do aerobics, in Hiroko’s class; he’s still playing ping-pong at 6:00 p.m., when I leave. We’ve heard about a wife, but we never see her; every time I spy his small figure walking alone through the streets at dusk, I wonder what awaits him.
The Empress is still in hospital; we see her husband, smiling brightly and murmuring apologies as he clings to a strap in the crowded bus. The man with the unruly white hair and the pretty young wife—a professor, I assumed—disappeared overnight (cancer, it was whispered), and then his wife was gone, too, back to her first home, in the countryside.
* * *
—
Yet, every time I come back from a trip, everything seems much the same. I’m carrying the call to prayer above the flickering lights of Jerusalem inside me, or the intricate alleyways around the blue-tiled mosques of Isfahan, and my friends are exchanging fast forehands, squealing over long rallies, looking a bit askance if a new pair of matrons appears and takes over our third table.
None of us ever gets any better: Mr. Joy is still whamming his smashes from six feet back into the net; the matron with the girlish demeanor is still swinging wildly at any ball with backspin and failing to make contact. Skills occasionally improve, but only as joints and limbs begin to decline, so we’re all joyfully back where we began. The seasons turn and turn, and we seem to go nowhere at all.
Looked at up close, of course, the group is constantly shifting. There have probably never been two days when exactly the same combination of people has shown up. But that’s the beauty of a group, a larger piece of music; the river’s always the same, as they say round here, even though the water’s constantly in motion.
* * *
—
I walk in, next day, to find the whole group clustered around Mr. Gold Tooth; I go over and see that he’s excavated some photos from when our circle was formed, almost a decade ago.
“Look at how young you look!” “Look—you’re just the same.” We see a photo of the Empress, and no one says a thing. Finally, one woman offers, “Such a shame!”
Empowered by the impromptu viewing, a shy older man with neatly combed white hair—his quiet manner gives no indication of his killer forehand and backhand slam—brings out his phone, and shows us a picture of the maples. He and his wife, he explains, to universal acclaim, drove an hour or more to the place where the leaves are famous for lasting longest, and have brought back some mementos for us.
He might be a teenager on a first date, I think—so ready to find excitement from the same seasonal blaze he must have witnessed more than seventy times by now. Why, I wonder, must I so often be running against time, when I know that the only way to be happy is to make my peace with the autumn, and see it as a friend?
“You remember when you called Roshi after Sachi went into hospital?” I ask Hiroko after I get home; I must be thinking about how foolish it is to protest against the seasons. The lanterned narrow streets of our modern Western suburb look like a nineteenth-century woodcut in the dark.
“Cannot forget,” she says. “Your idea!”
It was indeed. I didn’t know where she could turn when our daughter received her chilling diagnosis, so I suggested she call her constant friend and guardian, the Zen master.
“So terrible idea,” she says as she lays down the salads she’s brought home for dinner. “I never forget. That time little working Gere clothes shop, next station. Lunch break, I have time, I call.”
Her daughter was in hospital, with Hodgkin’s disease, she told the kind older man, who’d never said a word of admonition to her when she got her divorce, and offered to protect her in every financial or legal way that mattered.
“Everyone dies,” he said sternly. “That’s the law of existence. Every life concludes in death.”
“I so shock,” she says now. “I hoping he say some kind word, give me power. But opposite!”
“He’s a Buddhist. That’s his job: reminding people of impermanence. Carrying a sign that says ‘Nothing lasts. Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.’ ”
“I know,” she says hotly. “All I know! But that time, I so upset. Little door closing in my life.”
We hear a mother calling to her son outside, and then a high voice calling back. “Later, I wake up. Little keisaku.” The wooden stick with which Zen students hit those nodding off in the meditation hall. “I cannot ask other person. Must be strong myself. Other person cannot help.
“Now I so happy thinking that moment. But first time I hear, so sad.”
* * *
—
Winter is the time when my new friend Gerold, an oncologist from Germany, comes to visit, and we take a walk together around Nara’s deer park. He, too, had felt an uncanny sense of recognition when he began to explore Japan—here was the home that had been waiting for him forever, it seemed—and he’d written to me, a stranger, after reading my old book. Now, shivering at the bus stop, I look down the long, silent avenue of bare-branch ginkgoes—the tree like the one under which the Buddha had his moment of clarity; the rare living thing to survive the bomb on Hiroshima—and head off to meet my friend beside the statue of the monk in central Nara. In the bright, chill afternoon, we take a long stroll through the line of stone lanterns to what is sometimes called the holiest Shinto shrine in Japan, outside of Ise.
“That drug I told you about,” says Gerold, as we note how the cherries are the first to lose their leaves, “the one I’ve been working on for years. It’s coming up for FDA approval, finally.”
“You must be excited.”
“Yes,” he says, “and no. Even if it is approved, it will give a patient only a median of three months, or maybe less, of extra life. It really makes you think.” The deers’ cheeks are getting puffy in the cold as we reach the “floating” pavilion that sits on a pond surrounded by hills. The does are growing heavy, the mating season behind them.
“Because, of course, it’s not how many days you have that matters. Only what you do with them.”
A young couple is sauntering between the trees. We pass the old wooden house used for storing Buddhist texts, a grove of wild plums. The papers, I say, are full of stories of what happens when people live and live, and autumn lasts till February. An eighty-two-year-old man slips too many pills into his wife’s tea because he cannot bear to see her suffer. A seventy-six-year-old is found collecting the pension of his father long after the older man has died. A third of all suicides now are over sixty-five.
“Actually,” says Gerold, as we count the cost of this inner climate change, “the miracle is that so little goes wrong. If you look at the hundreds of billions of cells in the human body—one hundred billion in the brain alone—and if you think that any one of these could go wrong, it’s quite amazing that we stay healthy so long.”
* * *
—
Branches are witchlike as I walk across the Deer’s Slope park. The path is still carpeted in scarlet and
orange, so thick I might be walking on a crackling, seething Persian rug. The light remains sharp, exuberant, and the evergreens look robust, but, with no leaves to filter them, the rays have nothing to alight upon but a barren landscape of gray and black and blue.
One woman is running up and down in place between the trees, on red and reddening leaves. Another holds a brown bag against her face, to protect it from December sun. “Look, Grandpa,” cries a young woman—caregiver or granddaughter?—to a man hobbling past on a cane, as ghost leaves shiver down from the bare-branch maples.
When I head onto our little line of shops, it’s to find a Christmas tree on the sidewalk, outside the Père de Noël patisserie; inside, the perpetually fresh-faced, ponytailed wife of the pastry chef has placed Christmas caps even on the two white chairs set out for customers in line. A bear is sporting a floppy Santa hat above the éclairs, while a soft-voiced Japanese girl on the sound system delivers a plangent Japanese rendition of “Silent Night.” The honorary anthem of Deer’s Slope.
By mid-afternoon, when the dying light is turning homes to gold, I see the Seven Dwarves on one lawn, not far from the flamboyant house where Mickey and Minnie stand. When first I arrived, I couldn’t get enough of such absurdities: of course Happy and Bashful were ubiquitous here, I decided, in this land of small, diligent souls who whistled while they worked and formed a tireless team to protect the foreign-seeming white princess at their heart.
But irony has nothing to bounce against in Japan, and ends up like a pun in a foreign language. Objects are only as important as the emotions they awaken. If Sneezy and Dopey and Doc can give rise to the same earnest fascination as the Three Wise Men, why quibble over details? The celebrated images of Santa on the cross that foreigners laugh at in this season are simply ways in which Japan takes everything it wants from everywhere, and makes it cute, or a source for fresh emotion. In California, Hiroko loves everything about the Zen temple I introduce her to except the fact that the angriest person there is sporting a T-shirt bearing the Japanese character for “love.”