Autumn Light

Borrowed a book from J because I uhh didn’t want to buy it and she already did. It’s supposedly a biography, but it really is a love story, subtly written — Pico Iyer’s newest ‘Autumn Light, Japan’s Season of Fire and Farewells’ (2019). (Reviews here, here, here and here.)

While I’m not a fan of the genre of biography or travel writing or his books, I was a bit curious about this book which promises a more personal voice. I rather read this title than his other book about Japan, 'The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto' (1991). I've resolutely refused to read that. I am, however, intrigued by his story about meeting Leonard Cohen and their friendship built on Zen Buddhism and meditation.

Written in first person narrative, the author slowly reminisces his time in Japan each autumn. He lives in Nara with his wife for 27 years. He shares the stories of his associates and acquaintances at the local ping-pong club he regularly turns up at when he's in town. He actively plays ping-pong; there's a whole 12-minute TED talk about what ping-pong taught him about life. The author also muses on the relationship with his wife Hiroko Takeuchi, and the going-ons within her family after her father passed on. He wrote of how she had to care for her mother who has dementia and lives in an elderly care facility.

"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.

I was a little perturbed by the English and the grammar used by his wife. Does she really speak like this in real life? Apparently she does. I have it on very good authority that she speaks exactly like the book narrated. Hiroko Takeuchi's spoken English is probably better than Pico Iyer's spoken Japanese. This seeming 'lack of communication' to outsiders doesn't seem to affect the couple. It works for them, and it seems beautiful that much of the success of their relationship lies in the unspoken and a lot of tolerance for each other's quirks.

Pico Iyer writes, "The fact that she has 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." In a talk and seminar hosted by the Cogut Institute at Brown University just this early April, Jackson Trusdale of the Brown Herald reported on what transpired — "Iyer reflected on his journeys and how he has found stillness in modern life through solitary retreats and writing."

But the language barrier seems to be no hindrance for Iyer and Takeuchi. “I genuinely feel I have more serious communication problems in California with the illusion of a common language,” Iyer said. “You know any relationship is basically founded on intangibles and the things you don’t need to speak about.”

There isn’t a plot or strong storyline. I can't call it piecemeal because it traverses one autumn, and traces the happenings within. It’s exactly what this biography is- his thoughts about Japan in autumn, season after season, year after year. Snippets. Vignettes. 62-year-old Pico Iyer till today, still doesn't own a cellphone. He does do emails though, and promptly. I don't know how he keeps track of his travel schedule for his speaking engagements. To be honest, I think this book would 'read' better if I had listened to it as an audiobook. Phillip Lopate’s ‘Pico Iyer Reflects on a Quarter-Century of Life In Japan’ for the The New York Times published on April 22, 2019 wrote,

Self-described as having a restless “ ‘birdlike’ traveler’s temperament,” he spends half the year tending to his aging mother in California or reporting on subjects like “the warlords of Mogadishu,” but tries to get back to Japan each fall. This season teaches him the lesson of impermanence, the inevitability of decay, and “how to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.”

This particular piece in The New York Times written by Phillip Lopate about the book reasonates with my thoughts about it. I prefer to quote it than to highlight passages from the book itself.

His own self-portrait is dimmer. He comes across as a modest, kind, gentle man, somewhat colorless, as though trying to practice spiritual erasure of the ego. He had moved to Japan “to learn how best to dissolve a sense of self within something larger and less temporary” — an admirable pursuit, though problematic for autobiographical writers. He admits he finds “belief” in general difficult, and says he doesn’t consider himself a Buddhist, but treats with fascinated respect his wife’s conviction that spirits and ghosts exist. He’s a big proponent of his own ignorance, saying he doesn’t choose to learn more than a smattering of Japanese because he needs mystery and “a sense of open space in life, something to offset the sense of the familiar.” 

In a way, his attraction to Japan can be seen as an attempt to hold onto its exotic, eternal appeal — to his partly idealized picture of what the East has to offer a Western man in the way of healing. “Autumn Light” isn’t the book to turn to for an account of the political, social and economic problems of today’s Japan. Now in his 60s, Iyer feels free to communicate his tentative revelations about life. There’s much wisdom in what he says, though some of it comes close to platitude. But then, perhaps it’s the nature of hard-earned wisdom to sound like something we’ve heard many times before.