Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  As Hiroko stirs in the predawn dark, I hear her say, as if half in dream, “That time, my father so, so tired.”

  “What time?”

  “Last time I go with him to shrine.

  “He say, ‘I want die!’ He never say like that before. I tell him, ‘You cannot choose. Only God can decide. You must be strong!’ ”

  “He was worn out from looking after your mother.”

  She nods. Only one week later, his body did give out, and he was gone.

  “All night,” she continues, “I singing song for my father. In hospital.” She’s never told me this before. “His favorite.”

  About the sun going down and his friends being laid in the ground, as he thinks of his beloved Hiroshima.

  “I singing time,” she says, “he so, so calm. Never close die. Then nurse little introduce me bed. I sleeping, two, three hour. When I wake up, he gone.”

  “He’s lucky. No pain, no struggle. You beside him.”

  “I know. That time I promise…”

  And the sentence trails off.

  * * *

  —

  I walk out before the light comes up, as Hiroko falls into sleep again; I need to imprint this scene upon my mind to sustain myself through the weeks to come. The kindergartners scattering across the lawn, in pink and blue and yellow hats; the old man shuffling along the path to catch the last maples in his viewfinder. The grandmothers padding around in pink slippers, as if the entire neighborhood is their home.

  As I come back down onto School-dori, I notice that a heavy mist has gathered while I’ve been waiting, so that now I can scarcely see the post office fifteen feet from our home.

  When I step into the flat, Hiroko is bustling around at high speed, flinging open doors and windows, preparing to carry the futons out.

  “You don’t know?” she calls out as I saunter in. “Mist mean sun is coming soon!”

  * * *

  —

  A week from now, the days will start to grow longer again, and cycle towards spring; sprigs of plum blossoms will appear in a tall jar in the entrance hall to the post office, and people will be on alert to see the bare branches begin to put on their floral dresses again. On the solstice, the dead are said to be within reach once more; Hiroko will take her family newspaper to share with her long-departed grandmother.

  All thoughts of what is home and what is not dissolve as I arrive in the park on an unseasonably warm afternoon. The little girls running, screaming, up the ramps to the Spanish galleon might be my neighbors, and the fathers kicking soccer balls to sons could well be my ping-pong buddies’ kids. As I step into the damp old gym, Mr. Joy offers me a wave from one corner, and a matron presses a doughnut on me (“For later,” she urges, when I say I’ve just eaten).

  No sign of my flirty, lipsticked friend. The last time I’d seen her, five weeks ago, I’d asked, reflexively, if she was well, and she’d said, “No,” and given me such a long medical answer that I feared the worst.

  When I say that I’m happy to be here since I’ll be gone again soon, a gaggle of women gathers round me to ask where I’m going. “California? Waaah! Hawaii? So cool!” But the going seems less important now than the coming back; the autumn waits to greet me, many returns from now.

  * * *

  —

  “What kind story your book?” Hiroko asks, just two mornings later; a no-color blur is coming through the windows, and when we notice how all shade is absent, we pull back the doors and see snow drifting down, burying the already silent lanes of the quiet, rectilinear neighborhood, making everything new.

  “You writing autumn story?”

  The fact that she has as little a sense of what I do for a living as I do of what she does has always been a shared relief; one fewer area to muddy with second-guessing.

  “Not so much story,” I say. If autumn is a religion, it’s something you recite—or see with your eyes closed—more than put into words.

  “Like Ozu movie?” she asks in apprehension. My attempts to inflict the seasonal explorations of mood and dissolving families on her have not been a success; when I watched Late Autumn, the same film as Late Spring essentially, but with Setsuko Hara playing the mother now instead of the daughter, the one losing a child rather than moving away from a parent, I spared Hiroko and watched it alone.

  “You know me,” I say. “I’m so greedy for sunlight, I need to be pushed into the dark.”

  “Your book, nothing happening?”

  “Well, not exactly nothing. But what happens is not so visible. It’s hard to see which parts are important until years later. Or maybe never.”

  I see her watch me skeptically, and gird myself.

  “When I came here, I was so taken by everything that was different, full of drama, so distinctly Japanese. Like you when you go to America. Now I see it’s in the spaces where nothing is happening that one has to make a life.”

  “Little no-action movie,” she says, visibly unpersuaded, and closing the pages of this book without needing to open them. “Rain come down window. Car stuck in traffic jam. Quiet music playing. Autumn light.”

  Exactly.

  * * *

  —

  Almost the last time we took my father-in-law for a birthday drive—on his final birthday but one—the day dawned cloudless and warm again, a late-October morning like the one that had pierced me on my first day here, thirty years ago, in Narita. Mild and brisk in equal measure: “Come on out,” the blue sky said, “but don’t expect me to be around for long.”

  As we drove along the Kamo River, my mother-in-law broke into song. “Oh, I’m so happy,” she said to everyone and no one. “It’s so good to have a long life. We’re going to live to be a hundred!

  “You’re ninety now,” she said to her husband, sleepy and ashen beside her, and he flashed a shy boy’s grin, so happy after all these decades to be the object of his wife’s affection.

  We turned off the main roads and onto the narrow lane that wends its way around sharp turns to Mount Hiei, the haunt of demons—and ferocious soldier monks—overlooking the modern city. Stopping at a 7-Eleven, we bought a picnic of green tea and rice balls and gobbled it down in the parking lot; soon we were in the bracing quiet of the mountain, where monks walk through the night in threadbare sandals, and the thick boom of a temple bell was resounding between the trees as we snaked through the emptiness of the early-autumn afternoon.

  Halfway up, we came to a lookout point, completely deserted, with a long wooden board on one side, and a rusty green metered pair of binoculars on the other. Hiroko’s father had always wanted to be a teacher, so I encourage him to come and explain the board to me, the history of the mountain. Hiroko’s mother sits down on the bright-blue bench, smiles in the brilliant sunshine.

  Then Hiroko takes a hundred-yen coin out of her purse and urges her father towards the lookout post. Neither of us has forgotten his delight in purchasing costly binoculars his first afternoon in California; scouting the distance might be his way of returning to the most memorable days of his life, at war.

  “Grandpa, step up here,” she says, and eases him up by the arm onto a stone, placed there to allow children to peer through the lens. When she puts in the coin, the small figure silently swivels the old instrument from right to left and then, very slowly, from left to right, scanning the horizon.

  A silver sliver far below, making a “V” with another river, which it meets. Thick foliage everywhere else, the first touch of yellow and red at its top. A huge expanse with no sign of human habitation; the young man reborn moves the glasses back again from left to right, scanning, scanning.

  Behind him, his wife is taking in the sun; Hiroko is delighting in her parents’ calm. The cover on the lens is meant to flip down after a minute or two, but it’s so ancient, perhaps, it never closes; her father might be lookin
g out for enemy troop movement—for signs of autumn—miles away.

  “You’re lucky, Grandpa,” she sings out. “God is giving you a present. You’ve been a good man, worked so hard. Now you get a prize!”

  He doesn’t say a word, as his daughter rubs his shoulders in encouragement, the way I saw her rub her seven-year-old son’s shoulders soon after we met. From the back, I see only his sharp jacket and creased trousers; no sign of the rheumy eyes, the teeth now jagged and brown.

  “Please enjoy,” she goes on. “You have special chance. You don’t need stop looking. Ever.”

  I glance at Hiroko’s watch; later this afternoon, I’ll have to drop the aging couple at their home, and take the rented car to Kyoto Station. Then a six-hour trip, via a series of bullet trains, up to a broken little town in Fukushima, where a nuclear plant melted down after the tsunami seven months ago.

  A war photographer is waiting for me there, and we’re going to talk to some of the workers who are risking their lives to go into the poisoned area to try to repair the plant, and ask them why they’re doing it. How learn to live with what you can never control?

  For now, though, there’s nowhere to go on the silent mountain, and a boy who’s just turned ninety is surveying the landscape with the rapt eagerness of an Eagle Scout, while his wife of sixty years sings, “We’re so lucky to have a long life!”

  Hold this moment forever, I tell myself; it may never come again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My first thanks must go to my lifelong adversary and boss, Time, for allowing me, over sixteen years, to sift through an hourly mounting pile of impressions and experiences and feelings, and for showing me, finally, how many of them were useless, or temporary at least. My official bosses at Time magazine supported me for many years, and I can never thank them enough for that; but it’s Father Time himself who sometimes seems the most bracing editor, even as his reward (as with most editors) is to receive curses around the clock.

  On a more day-to-day level, the reader can thank my longtime editor at Knopf, Dan Frank, for the fact that this story isn’t weighed down with pages—and more pages—on Wallace Stevens. I grew used, as I was surfacing from a watching of Wimbledon, to receiving engaged and probing messages from Dan even on a Sunday morning, bringing me back to earth and a stronger, better self. Betsy Sallee, in the same office, who helped me in so many ways over the years, offered me the great blessing of her own reading and suggestions for this work, and Terry Zaroff-Evans graced me with a reassuring and very light copy edit. The pièce de resistance came with a radiant cover designed by Carol Devine Carson (who designed the cover of a book set in Japan I published in 1991) and Abby Weintraub, the intuitive genius who’s worked on seven covers for me over nineteen years.

  It’s a luxury beyond measure, in truth, to be attached to a publishing house where so many of the same encouraging faces have been greeting me for more than three decades now. I can never thank enough Sonny Mehta, Robin Desser, Nicholas Latimer, Kathy Zuckerman and Kate Runde, among many others, who make the creation of books seem such a warm adventure.

  In recent years, my life has also been quite wonderfully transformed by the wisdom of the prodigiously resourceful and attentive Miriam Feuerle and her unfailingly friendly and patient crew—Andrew, Hannah, Abigail, Eira and Paige—at the Lyceum Agency. My old friend Lynn Nesbit, together with her colleagues at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, has been keeping me afloat for almost half a lifetime now. In this instance it was Lynn who had the sense to urge me to stop dawdling and start writing again.

  I owe a constant debt, too, to those buddies who are always, with a chuckle and a prompt, ready to hold me up to higher standards: Richard Rodriguez and Nicolas Rothwell and Ngari Rinpoche—unlikely trio!—all of whom are brilliant enough to see the limits of brilliance and kind enough to be unsparing in their urging of something a bit beneath the surface.

  For quite a while now, my life has been made infinitely warmer and more collegial thanks to the unceasing kindness of Jim and Lynne Doti at Chapman University, such perfect (and irresistible) hosts and friends; and I owe daily thanks from my digital self to the incomparably fun and stylish David Tang and Jeff Cheong at DDB Singapore, and all their cohorts and families, whose generosity humbles, when it isn’t inspiring me.

  Michael Hofmann has for thirty years been enduring my effusions about Japan, and gently, almost inaudibly, reminding me that there may be more things going on than I can see. He was the only nonprofessional reader I turned to for counsel on this work, and he promptly opened up new horizons with subtlety and tact, much as he’d been opening me out, with quiet care, for several lifetimes.

  I’m forever in the debt of the extravagantly spacious—and dangerously addictive—Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, a place so inspiring it could move a moose to compose sonnets or an Iyer to write symphonies. Is it any wonder that Canada, so generous when it comes to supporting the arts, is also a world leader when it comes to creating community, fashioning a global vision and nurturing an expansive vision of humanity?

  It must be obvious from this book how much I owe my neighbors and friends around Shikanodai, in suburban Nara, as well as those (especially the never-complaining Susana Ortiz and Erika Chavez, the saintly Christine and Carl Nolt) who take such loving care of my mother while I’m away. Hiroko Takeuchi and her family have been bringing light and fun to my life for more than half its duration now, and it was the late Keido Fukushima-roshi who brought us all together; this is not a sequel to the book I wrote on Japan twenty-eight years ago, except insofar as autumn is a sequel—a prequel—to spring, the companion piece that rounds the picture out.

  I’m very grateful, too, as of this writing, that our daughter is married, to a highly supportive-seeming Japanese Hanshin Tiger fan, and that most of the elderly people I describe in this book are going strong, in their way—even as autumn keeps turning the pages with a dryish smile.

  Quite often I’ll sit on our tiny terrace, nibbling at sweet tangerines under a high, deep-blue sky, a cup of tea and a novel beside me in the busy quiet, and wonder what I did (or didn’t do) to deserve such blessings.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Pico Iyer is the author of two novels and ten works of nonfiction, translated into twenty-three languages. He recently gave three TED Talks in three years, and they have received more than eight million views so far.

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