Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  * * *

  —

  “I really don’t trust myself,” I say to Hiroko after I come back from the post office. They’ve set out blankets beside the little ATM kiosk at its entrance, even though the place is protected by two doors and admits no wind. The stacks of New Year’s cards for the coming Year of the Horse are almost down to nothing.

  She stiffens at the table.

  “No, I don’t mean like that. I just mean that I can’t trust a single perception. That sentence that seemed so vibrant yesterday, it’s flat and dead today. That street that was a flood of gold this afternoon may well be no-colored gray and puddling rain tomorrow. You’re always scratchy and tired at four-thirty, the way I stop making sense at eight p.m. Night thoughts invariably seem unbalanced in the morning. How can we find importance in any of our responses?”

  “You writing this in your book?”

  “It makes all writing irrelevant.”

  * * *

  —

  In parts of Kyoto, as we take the long series of trains into the city twenty miles away next morning, the hills are still a blaze of color, though a skirruping wind is turning the leaves into a snowstorm, a shower of the kind we see with the lighter blossoms of April, but brilliantly colored now instead of white. When we get to the little building just around the corner from the glassy, futuristic Buddhist university, a young woman greets us at the entrance and hands us white masks to place around our mouths. In winter, you can never be too careful.

  Then she presses the code in the elevator and we’re getting off at the second floor. Hiroko’s mother is in the small common area as we approach, and waves at us gamely, vaguely, with both arms, as if sending out an SOS.

  “She doesn’t know who we are,” murmurs Hiroko, under her breath.

  “Sumiko-san,” says one of the ever-patient nurses, bustling over to the old lady. “Look who’s come! Your daughter. Let’s get you into your room so you can talk to her. Aren’t you lucky to have a daughter who lives so close?”

  We head into her tiny cell, the two large orange Beanie Baby cats Hiroko brought back from California sprawled across the bed, a line of pink silhouette teddy bears on the wall. Printed sheets, a futon decorated with whales and dolphins, a pink-and-white striped pillow. The furniture of early spring.

  From the dresser, her late husband beams down—a little wan in his later years, but glowing as he dandles his great-granddaughter.

  “Where’s Grandpa?” the old lady asks. “Is he in Hiroshima?”

  “Yes,” says Hiroko, resolving to try a new tack. “He decided to see his sister. You’re not jealous, are you?”

  “Oh no,” says her mother. “Why should I be jealous? He’s with his sister.”

  There’s a knock on the door, very soft, and a caregiver comes in with three tiny cups of green tea and some cakes wrapped in cellophane. I pull out the chocolate cake and doughnut I’ve bought for my mother-in-law.

  “Oh, thank you.” She smiles at me, the tears of our first meeting long forgotten. “So tasty!”

  Then she looks around her.

  “Masahiro? Did he die?”

  “No, Mother,” says Hiroko. “He’s fine. He thinks of you all the time.”

  “Is that so? He didn’t die.”

  “No, Grandma!”

  “I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

  She munches happily on her cake—“So tasty!” In the past, this tiny woman never had much of an appetite.

  “And Grandpa, he’s in Siberia?”

  “That’s right.”

  What is the self, I think again, if so quickly it turns into something it couldn’t recognize two days ago? I remember the time my friend Michael, a longtime student of Zen, told me how sometimes, in delivering a sentence, he omitted a “not,” reversing the meaning entirely. “But nobody seemed to care,” he said. “Oftentimes, we’re responding to a tone of voice, a feeling. The words aren’t so important. Especially in Japan.”

  I told this story to a Buddhist-minded friend in California, and she said, “How cynical!” But to me it sounded the opposite: an expression of faith, in something deeper than mere words. Words have little value in the kingdom of essential things. They’re just decorations on the feelings too deep for us to put into syllables.

  “He’s sending you love letters, Grandma,” Hiroko says, because it’s true: she discovered, while cleaning out the wooden house, a whole cache of letters her father had sent, and held on to for sixty years. “Love letters from Siberia.”

  “He is.” Question or statement, it’s hard to tell.

  “He loves you so much.”

  Just one change of a letter, and a death is reversed. The old woman shows off to me the two toy cats who, for all the world, might be the living kittens she’s always loved, though more amenable.

  Eager to divert her, Hiroko pulls out her phone and shows her mother pictures of the old lady’s grandson, her great-granddaughter.

  “Masahiro,” she says proudly.

  “No, Grandma. That’s Takashi. My son, your grandson.”

  “Ah, so. This one is a woman, no?”

  “No, Grandma! That’s your grandson. It’s just the hat that…”

  “I’m sorry,” the old lady says, smiling over at me. “My mind’s broken.”

  She doesn’t seem perturbed. “My mind’s totally broken,” she says, and chuckles happily.

  “I was such a pretty little girl. So beautiful. Everybody used to ask my mother, ‘Where did you get such an adorable daughter?’ ”

  There’s a pause as she eats.

  “My mind’s broken,” she announces.

  * * *

  —

  When we walk out into the sun, Hiroko’s a little rattled, as I would be. Sometimes her mother asks, “Why? Why? Why?” as a child might. But a child is coming into understanding, and this one is leaving it behind. “I think it’s best to stick with animals,” I say. “And candies.” I know: I show my mother pictures of her beloved cat and she breaks into delighted smiles every time, becoming again the person she was when the cat was snuggled next to her in the chair.

  At one point, when Hiroko pulled out an old photo album and showed her mother some black-and-white snapshots of a trip in a boat in the 1960s, the old lady said, “Who’s that?”

  “It’s you, Grandma!”

  “Me?” She looks closer. “I see. It’s me.”

  “It’s you, Grandma. Don’t you remember?”

  Around us, the ancient capital, with its sixteen hundred Buddhist temples and four hundred Shinto shrines, is a rash of red, white-bearded Santas. At the huge central post office, the “Official Santa Mail for Finland” box is still on display, though most will have sent their greetings long since, as Takashi did when young. In Tokyo, there are said to be two hundred performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the Christmas season alone, as people flock into churches to hear of Jesus’s birth and to sing “Adeste, Fideles.”

  Just a kind of air freshener, perhaps, a mood sweetener, to keep public cheer at its regular level. Anyone who’s fallen in love because she longs to forget where she is—or who—knows how that works.

  Maybe Masahiro will never make himself visible again, I think, but all of that comes to seem immaterial in so many ways. His mother sees him, everywhere she looks. “He came to visit me last night,” she told Hiroko a week ago. “He just wanted to make sure that I’m okay.” She can protect the side she loves of him, and let the rest fall away. Even if that’s part of the impulse that drove him away in the first place.

  So much of the fretting—did I put a “not” in that sentence? is he thinking of me now, and if so what form does that thinking take?—just a kind of idle, useless scratching of the mind. Because then the weather changes, and the next morning, the house has burned down, and all those worrie
s are wiped out along with it.

  * * *

  —

  “Everything Is Nothing, Nothing Is Everything” was one of the sentences that our Zen friend in Tofukuji used to scrawl across huge sheets of paper in his unhesitating black calligraphy; we can see the gray roofs of his temple floating above the two-story buildings in the neighborhood, like a ship waiting to carry us off across the seas, when we take the train from the nursing home into central Kyoto. It was him in six words, really, and his tradition: an easy paradox if you look at it one way, but something much more haunting if you’ve seen everything you care for dissolve into smoke and dust, and then realized that that smoke and dust are everything.

  When we stop off at Hiroko’s parents’ home later in the day—everyone is preparing the little lane for New Year’s, when two and a half million people will throng, almost impassably, up the two blocks to the shrine—the past comes flooding back as Hiroko lights the incense on her altar, guarded by the framed photos of her father and her grandmother.

  “Every year, we little play Monopoly,” she says. “New Year time, so busy. Crazy busy! So many people coming shrine. You cannot imagine! All night, cigarette shop open. We cannot sleep.

  “Then, three day later, so quiet. All Japan sleep. We sit under kotatsu”—the heated blanket placed under a low table that suggests a hearth—“and play game.”

  “Who won?”

  “My brother. Every time. So clever. He such good plan. Make hotel—Pennsylvania Avenue, Park Place. I must pay more, more money. Soon all money gone!”

  “Better than going to jail,” I say. And maybe not so different from where we are now: going round and round, passing Go in order to move round again, rolling the dice, paying rent. The Game of Autumn.

  At the top of the narrow, creaking set of wooden stairs, in the two rooms so small they might be prison cells, she starts bustling through a chest of drawers.

  “Look,” she says.

  It’s the poems she discovered earlier in the year, after her father’s death. Neatly typed out into a kind of laminated poster by Sachi.

  “My father so romantic! I never expect. Always he little thinking hometown.”

  She hands over the poems.

  Please come and see Hiroshima.

  Before, dead bodies everywhere.

  Now, a beautiful new town arises.

  And, underneath,

  When young, so many dreams.

  Now—nothing but soap bubbles.

  Dead bodies everywhere in the poems: the ones he witnessed during four years in Manchuria, three years in Siberia, the ones that awaited him on his return to Hiroshima. Every other street in Kyoto has a trim wooden board announcing the people who were slaughtered there, or died in some coup d’état.

  “Maybe your brother will forgive his father one day,” I say, as we see what we could almost never see in life: what was inside her quick-tempered, stoical father.

  “You, too,” she says, and I start.

  * * *

  —

  Back home, Hiroko, like all the neighbors, is busy again, polishing Buddhas, sweeping up salt, preparing to pound rice for the special treats of New Year, one of the other times when the departed return, but accompanied on this occasion by neighbors and old friends. Everyone is punctilious about observing the first sunrise of the year, the first meal, the first visit to a parent; after the stained-glass radiance of last November, winter brings blue invigoration and the promise of a fresh start.

  I, meanwhile, start gathering my things to return to California; my mother, grateful child of British India, celebrates Christmas with the vigor of a Hindu-born Theosophist who grew up surrounded by Christmas trees, Advent calendars, Christmas puddings, Wesley hymns. Even in her eighties, she drives to the supermarket to buy a live tree, around which to open presents on Christmas morning; until very recently, she’d steal down in the dead of night on Christmas Eve to leave a stocking outside my bedroom, full of Trader Joe’s treats and gift cards for books.

  A way to keep her only child a child, perhaps, consoling; but no bad thing, I’ve learned in Japan, if it gives her a sense of youthfulness and long futures. The symbols mean everything if you accept the feelings that they carry.

  * * *

  —

  When I wake up, after midnight, I look in on Hiroko and see her enfolded in her thick futon in her room, her heating blanket underneath her, uncharacteristically motionless; she has the gift of making everywhere she inhabits a warm, cozy nook, even as her strange husband reels through the night in fractured dreams of missed flights and foreign hotel rooms.

  It feels odd to turn the tables: so often, even now, I’ll sense something in my sleep, somewhere between full consciousness and dreams, and open bleary eyes to see her standing in the dark, looking down at me. Just as she did, twenty-six years ago, when we first met.

  * * *

  —

  At the ping-pong club, the smell of liquor is stronger now. Everyone’s heading off, every other day, to year-end parties; they all might be back in a children’s calendar of classmates’ birthday parties, like the one where I first visited Hiroko. A rich, chatty lady with long dark hair—well over sixty-five, I’m guessing—says, “Pico-san, please teach me,” which is the polite Japanese way of saying, “Let’s have a game!” and asks me to show her how to hit a backhand slice on return of serve.

  We hit a few practice shots, and then some backhand drives, and another woman, small and voluble, says, “Wow, Pico-san: so beautiful!” My backhand topspin is just the shot I never trust and about which I’ve always been embarrassed.

  After all these years as a tourist here, observing, I seem to have one small thing to offer.

  “Like this?” asks the small woman, flipping her backhand with her wrist.

  “Yes, yes. Exactly!”

  As I walk home, I look at the sturdy-seeming houses and shiver for a world of wood and paper. Fires are such a constant visitor in Japan that there are separate words for a fire caused by accident, a fire caught from the next-door house, a fire set off by an incendiary device, the condolence call after a fire. In Tokyo, it used to be said, a house was built for only three years, so likely was it that fire would visit soon.

  The buildings are much less fragile now, but out of one I can hear the mournful chorus of “Auld Lang Syne,” here a song renamed “In the Gleam of Fireflies” and ending with the pregnant lines:

  Light of fireflies, snow by the window

  Suns and moons spent with books.

  Years have gone by without a trace.

  It’s daylight now, and we must part.

  * * *

  —

  When Hiroko and I first met, much of our talk was of endings. Of course: I had come to Japan for a year, and Hiroko could see I was the kind of fool who stuck to my plans, even if circumstances suggested I should work with a larger logic rather than against it. She, meanwhile, was in the process of tearing up the life she’d made and burning down her house: preparing to leave her husband, take off on her own with her kids and commit herself to everything that was unknown to her, stepping a little away from the collective script that is Japan’s unchanging musical score.

  I, by contrast, came from the world of Hollywood endings—the clinching kiss over the final credits, the tidy resolution of every plot point, the kind of therapy-inflected “arc” in which her brother perhaps believed, now that he was studying Jung in Zürich. In the New World, unlike in Japan, baseball games never end in a tie.

  And I, no less, was recalling through the fog what her culture was slowly beginning to show me, in those Ozu movies named after spring or autumn: the seasons cycling round so you can see the folly of trying to put a human period on a rushing stream.

  The yin-yang earrings that she wore the first time I visited her house were the first thing I
noticed: no black-and-white in Japan, since every end marks a fresh beginning, and in every forgetful love, there’s an urgency born of the sense that nothing lasts forever.

  “You remember the story Fukushima-roshi told us the final time we saw him?”

  She remembers.

  Our Zen master friend had found himself in New York City, on one of his final tours to teach Zen practice across the New World, and he’d heard that his near-secret fifth attachment, Joan Baez, was appearing at Town Hall.

  The concert was sold out, but he sent some of his monastic attendants out onto Forty-third Street to scalp some tickets. Pulling wads of cash out of their robes, they’d managed to score four seats, quite close to the stage, in the very center.

  That night, when the singer, close to seventy, delivered her rich soprano renditions of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Forever Young,” it was to see three Japanese monks in full black robes flapping up and down in front of her, dizzy with delight and relief. At their center was a small, shaven-headed figure in thick golden robes, visibly transported, not long before Parkinson’s rendered his smallest move impossible.

  “Though the years are sad,” I read this morning on our terrace in the sun, on the last page of Edith Wharton’s autobiography, “the days have a way of being jubilant.”

  * * *

  —

  I know I could track down Masahiro if I wanted—but what could I tell him that he doesn’t know already? I see him in his closet, as when he was a boy, calling out, “Please, let me out! Please! It’s dark and lonely; I’m scared.” But the only one who can let him out now is himself, and interference from outside could easily throw off such a delicate instrument.