Autumn Light and Pico Iyer - rush and distraction as foreign words

I have posted a few times about the British essayist, novelist, travel writer, Pico Iyer. I never tire of reading his work, experiencing vicariously his travels all across the globe, or his memories from boyhood to yesterday. The most recent book of his I read (in August of this year) was Autumn Light, a book Publishers Weekly recounts as being about "aging, death, and family fracturing...seen through the lens of Japanese culture," with Iyer describing his and Hiroko's (his Japanese wife) "efforts to cope with her father’s death, her mother’s entry into a nursing home, and her estrangement from her brother." 

Although there is much given to reflection in this book, there is still a lot going on, stirring one's stomach juices not toward gastronomy but toward hopefulness, anxiety, isolation, you name it, it went on inside me. He tells us 90+ pages into the book, "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 than in summer and winter."


I jealously read onward, as he compares the life he left in New York City with the one he's living now:

"There's no car to take in for a smog test..., no breaking news banner...from CNN. I take my watch off the minute I arrive in Deer's Slope [the neighborhood Iyer and his wife live]. I'll never have to be anywhere at 3:00 p.m., and when I pull back the door to the terrace and walk out for an hour with a book and a cup of tea, I feel as if "rush" and "distraction" are words in a foreign lexicon."


For Iyer, who was often referred to as Pico-san by his neighbors, adjusting to the culture of modern Japan was as interesting as it was trepidatious.


"For so long..., the local men seemed a kind of alien species impossible to get close to. Women were always welcoming; everyone from the older ladies in shops, who spoke to me in crystalline Japanese, patient and kindly, to the young girls at cash registers, deliberately chirpy and full of processional smiles, did everything they could to make communication possible."


His socialization with many of the men and women at the athletic club he visits daily is where the real friendship-making takes place. Mostly elderly men and women playing ping pong and other activities, they eventually become warm and inclusive, as they are  "Allowed to be human again--their responsibility formerly to protect their families by being away from them, is now to protect their families by being with them...."(pp. 78-79)


With his wife, trying to make sense of her brother's estrangement from the family...,

  "That time, little they showing children many pictures. Then ask: Which face happy? Which face calm? Which person you think beautiful?
  "One boy, he every answer perfect. So intelligent. Every answer correct. But then my brother show him two picture--'Which one beautiful?' And this boy choose one with very strange face. Not so gorgeous.
  "They so surprise! Little shock feeling. Then, test-finish time, boy's mother coming, take him home. She look exactly same face, so strange."
  She smiles back up at me. "Every kid, mother's face so beautiful." (p.92)


Waking from a nap, Iyer writes: "As I come to consciousness, she's waving incense all around, as in a church, and throwing open every window to the predawn chill--the way we'll fling out roasted soybeans in early February, crying, "Devil, go out! Happines, stay in!" then, dread moment, she puts on a recording of low-voiced Tibetan chants, and sits stock-still for 20 minutes, before hauling every spare piece of clothing she can find into the washing machine and whipping up in 8 minutes or less tonight's dinner. ...This from the woman who runs out of the room, hands clamped to her ears, whenever I put on Leonard Cohen...." (p. 93)

Pico Iyer, The Dalai Lama, Hiroko Takeuchi

Hiroko is a marvelously good-hearted, sweet, and kind woman. You can't help but love her dearly.  When Iyer tells her over the phone, calling from Marrakesh to say that he feels darkness everywhere, "she told me to put salt in my pocket." [For Hiroko], her whole country is for her a teeming network of chattering crickets and tutelary spirits and heavenly forces she has to appease and watch closely, as she might a boss." (p. 98)

the Heart Sutra

One morning, Hiroko dressed to go outside in the rain, sat on the bed and drew on Iyer's back with her index finger, then blew on the "characters" she made: "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." (p. 98)



The book is full of meditations and remembrances, both by Iyer and Hiroko, by her father and by her mother. It's a wonderful book. Let me leave you with this:

"I marvel at the clueless kid I'd been, barely out of my twenties, wandering around Japan not knowing a thing and therefore seeing so much. It reminds me of the time last week when I had a revelation--change itself is an unchanging truth--so new and unlike anything I'd caught before that I had to scribble it down. A few days later, going through my notes, I found that I'd had precisely the same revelation, word for word, a year before. Eerily, on the same November day. Later, I came upon exactly the same "discovery" once more, in my notes from six years before." (p. 159)