Pico Iyer arrived in Japan in 1987 at the age of 30 just as the country had pulled off its economic miracle and emerged as a technology leader – an assertive modernity that Iyer sought to reconcile with Japan’s meditative character and ritualistic traditions. Four years later, he published his third book, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto in which he wrote, “It did not take me long, in autumn afternoons, to find that whenever I tried to find any particular place in Kyoto, I ended up wandering around in circles … There was, I thought, a metaphor in this: one could not plan epiphanies any more than one could plan surprise visits from friends.” He settled in at a monastery to live as a studious recluse, but soon met “Sachiko,” a married 30-year old with two children who embodied both the classical habits of Japan and an enthusiasm for Western culture.
In Autumn Light, Iyer’s fourteenth book, Sachiko is now his wife Hiroko, his wanderings continue, and his gentle epiphanies still arrive unanticipated. Their marriage and family life form the core of the narrative. Hiroko’s father dies at the outset. Hiroko’s mother is living in a facility for the memory-impaired. Masahiro, Hiroko’s brother who practices as a Jungian psychologist, lives nearby but is estranged from the family; they speculate why this has happened, but Masahiro’s behavior is largely a mystery.
If The Lady and the Monk entailed a stranger’s introduction to the irreconcilable aspects of Japan, Autumn Light is a narrative based on routine, including the modest persistence of earlier insights. The couple lives in the city of Nara, just south of Kyoto, in a neighborhood called “Deer’s Slope” where Iyer is a regular at the local ping-pong club, frequented mainly by the elderly who appear in Iyer’s micro-portraits. “Now, as I look around me,” he says, “at these neighbors older than my uncles and aunts, everything is upended: a reminder that Japan has the oldest population in the world – more diapers are sold to the elderly here than to babies …”
He writes further about the ping-pong players, “These guys exploding in infectious laughter over a missed shot at deuce, and flashing their hands so that scissors cut paper, were among the ones who made the so-called Japanese miracle, rebuilding their country after the war in record time, so that, very soon, their kids could spend summers in Redondo Beach, their wives could take three-day trips to Fairbanks to catch the Northern Lights.” On the one hand, Iyer points to the Japanese habit of taking a long view of history in which “nobody talks much about the war after all these years, and yet its signs, its implications haunt every neighborhood.” On the other hand, “older men sometimes mutter rough insults if they see Hiroko with me in a train.”
Hiroko performs household ceremonies to honor her ancestors, and offers blessings – “she comes to where I’m sitting and speedily scribbles some characters across my back with her finger, then blows on them as if to make them stay. An impromptu Hiroko blessing to protect me from all evil, copying a little of the Heart Sutra onto my spine before she puts on her shades and struggles into her tall black boots.” Moments of pause, solemnity and care arise modestly throughout the prose, such that a reader begins to register these rhythms and tones as if they emanate from within oneself. The discovery of the ordinary is always enigmatic, the return to where one was yesterday, but a day older. With no impulse for sententiousness, Iyer seems to write out of a fervent fragility. At age 62, he experiences a more profound “wistfulness and buoyancy” in the autumn season. There is no consensus between such apparent opposites; one gives in and accepts them.
Iyer mentions that he travels frequently to visit his aged mother in California where he grew up. His parents emigrated from India; their son was born during their years in Oxford. American life vibrates off in the distance of Autumn Life. Towards the end of the book, Iyer digresses to speak of Thoreau and the confrontation with the actual. “In Thoreau there’s the snag of something tougher, as of the branches of real life,” he remarks. Thoreau, who held his dying 26-year old brother John as he died. When Iyer talks about autumn, there is the same appreciation for both beauty and austerity. “Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.” Do we hear this as banal? Perhaps the point is that death is banal but our hearing is rather intriguing.
More on autumn: “Autumn is the season of subtractions, the Japanese art of taking more and more away to charge the few things that remain. At least four times as many classical poems are set in autumn and spring, the seasons of transition, than in summer and winter.”
Their daughter Sachi was 13 when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease. Sachi regained her health after spending a year in a hospital ward, Hiroko by her side. Her form of the disease was so rare that the hospital presented no invoice in exchange for the opportunity the doctors and med students found in examining and observing her. This and other events bring Iyer to say, “Meanwhile, all kinds of other surprises began to rain down on us, as if to bring home how every blessing, like every course, comes from nowhere, unmerited” – a statements that echoes in its spirit and form “one could not plan epiphanies any more than one could plan surprise visits from friends” from almost three decades earlier. Let’s just call that wondering habit of response Iyeresque.
In a recent interview, he said, “As I go through the autumn of my own life, I realise that everything essential in it has happened without a reason. I have my own little plan that I’m trying to foist on life, but life has a much wiser and more inscrutable plan that it’s foisting on me! And really the commonsensical thing for me would be to defer to life’s plan because it almost certainly arises from a deeper logic than my own. For example, why did I choose one woman, who became my wife, from among tens of thousands of other beautiful women of the same age in Kyoto? Why did I choose to live in Japan of all the many places I could be in the world? Almost everything that’s happened to me has come by chance.”
Gratification arrives unmerited, unanticipated and unannounced from a descriptively simple paragraph by Iyer. Try this one – what we take away from these words coincides with what is taken in the final sentence:
“Two grandmothers are on a bench across from 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,” he writes. Fortunately, he doesn’t attempt such a haul of language and relies instead on delicacy and tact, observation and musing. He found that among the ping-pong players, “playing with each other was their strength, treating each other as a part of themselves, as in a dance or an act of love. Playing against each other never would be.” By the end of Autumn Light, I realized that he had been volleying with me the whole time, and generously letting me win.
[Published April 17, 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf, 236 pages, $25.95 hardcover]