The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

Somehow, at this ceremony for tourists (many of them Japanese, who are tourists in their own history), I see something I recognize.

  Perhaps the way in which my neighborhood most solidly uplifts and steadies me is by virtue of its tonic blend of cheerfulness and realism, measured (as I see it) with the wisdom of a culture that’s been around long enough to know how to mete out its emotions. To many I know from the New World, the Japanese response to every setback, from terrorists to burning houses to long hours, crowded trains, and sudden deaths—Shikataganai, or “It can’t be helped”—sounds fatalistic, and too ready to surrender power to the heavens. But to me, coming from a California where it sometimes seems as if everyone is restlessly in search of perfection in his life, his job, his partner, and himself, it feels bracing to hear of limits that imply a sense of past as well as of future. A republic founded on the “pursuit of happiness” seems a culture destined for disappointment, if only because it’s pursuing something that, by definition, doesn’t come from being sought; a culture founded, however inadvertently or subconsciously, on the First Noble Truth of Buddhism—the reality of suffering—seems better placed to deal with sorrow, and be pleasantly surprised by joy. In a world that’s overheating with the drug of choice and seeming freedom, Japan, for all its consumerist madness, suggests, in its deeper self, a postglobal order that knows what things can really be perfected (streets, habits, surfaces) and what cannot.

  In practical terms, this very serenity—some would say complacency—is perhaps what gives an air of pink-sweater innocence to protected neighborhoods such as mine. I do not believe the Japanese are more innocent than anyone else, but they are, perhaps, more concerned with keeping up appearances, especially of innocence, and whole communities are urged to play their part in this display of public sweetness (it is certainly the only culture I know where women, to look seductive, don’t narrow their eyes, but widen them). Much of this can be converted in translation into what is regarded as hypocrisy, but it can also suggest a prudent drawing of boundaries in a world where they are in flux, and a sense of which illusions can be serviceably maintained, and which cannot (as the ad outside my building ambiguously promises: HONEST COSMETICS TO MAKE YOU FOREVER YOUTHFUL AND BEAUTIFUL).

  The society urges its members to conceive of a purpose and an identity higher than themselves (people give you their business cards when you meet them here, but not their résumés or dogmas). And even punky nose-ring boys and scruffy Indians are implicitly urged to tend to responsibilities beyond their mortal bodies. I find myself picking up stray pieces of trash as I walk down the street (almost as reflexively as I find myself, now, bowing to a public telephone as I put it back in its cradle on my return to California); getting up from my seat in the bank, I stop to brush it clean as I would never do “at home.”

  The homes we choose, in short, deserve a tolerance we might not extend to the homes we inherit, and in a world where we have to work hard to gain a sense of home, we have to exert ourselves just as much to sustain a sense of Other. I choose, therefore, to live some distance from the eastern hills of Kyoto, which move me like memories of a life I didn’t know I had. To visit the city of temples from here involves a ninety-minute pilgrimage by bus and train, and second train, and then another train, so that every trip has an air of ceremony and anticipation. Thus Kyoto is unclouded for me by the routines of paying bills and cleaning clothes. And coming to it from a suburb of white Ascots and Clever coffee shops, I still catch my breath when I see the lanterns in the autumn temples, leading up into the bamboo forests, as into another life, or hear the temple bells ringing along the Philosopher’s Path at dusk.

  Once every six months or so, I take my girlfriend back to her hometown (her Oxford, in a sense), and for six hours we rent a car and drive deep into the countryside. The very novelty of motion, in a space of our own, with a tape deck of our own, is itself a small enchantment, and Kyoto swings open, often, like a heavy gate admitting us to a deeper, ancestral quiet.

  One cold winter night, we went there to celebrate a ninth anniversary of sorts and, awakening in the dark, saw the year’s first snow coming down to cover the old spires and the few wooden buildings remaining in the center of town. Going out into the freshened chill, still hushed and smoky in the early morning, we rented a car and drove it up into the northeast, traditional area of demons and therefore monasteries, towards Mount Hiei.

  As we left the town behind and began climbing the narrow, winding roads of the old mountain, we found ourselves in a festival of silver, the first car admitted up the mountain since the snowfall, and the only car in sight in a world of silence and whiteness for as far as we could see.

  Everything was newly minted, virginal in the fresh snow, and the pines were still coated with a sugar lining against a sky now wideawake and blue. We drove up and up, into a wonderland of sorts, with nothing around but green trees and white, chunks of snow falling from their branches, and everywhere a newborn hush.

  The large parking lots with their vending machines stood empty; the occasional tall red torii gates were fringed with white.

  We moved along the road in a suspended state of wonder, through a soundless trail that cut high into the dark mountain. Stopping at last, we got out in a silent landscape of huge trees and silver everywhere. The sky was blue and the day was windless. There was no sound anywhere, nothing but dark trees, white lacing, stone Buddhas fringed with snow. A steep slope led up to a temple, hidden away in a grove like a secret pendant against a heart. Huge clumps of white kept falling and there was nothing else to be heard.

  Outside Shyaka-do, we sat on a wooden platform while a gong sounded within and a man prepared the day’s austerities in front of a large Buddha. My stockinged feet were cold on the wooden steps, and as far as I could see, across the valley, there were just ranks of pines, in whitened rows, extending towards the cloudless sky. Then, briefly, four young monks in blue work clothes, tramping into the forest, headbands white against their shaven scalps. And the silence and the whiteness and the calm.

  We sat for a while in the secret sanctuary, quiet on this quiet day. Then we drove back into the high rises and belching trucks and maddened pachinko parlors of the ancient capital.

  A large part of the liberation of being here comes, I think, from the enforced simplicities that accompany a very foreign life. Living far from anywhere, without a bicycle or private car, I conduct my days, nearly always, within the boundaries of my feet; living without newspapers or magazines—and a television most of whose words are modern Greek to me—I can be free, a little, of the moment and get such news as I need from the falling of the leaves, or the Emerson essays on my shelf. Living in a small room, moreover, prompts me to be sparing, and to live only with the books and tapes that speak to me in ways I can respect. And not knowing much of the local tongue frees me from gossip and chatter and eavesdropping, leaving me in a more exacting silence.

  This can, of course, be an evasion more than a transcendence, and in any case, I cannot hold very much to these austerities: I fly back to California every now and then to pay my bills, and sometimes I can’t resist turning on the computer to see how the Lakers are doing. I cannot refuse technology too aggressively when it is technology that allows me to communicate with bosses half a world away, and to get on a plane when I need to see a dentist. Yet being in so alien an environment is the first step towards living more slowly, and trying to clear some space, away from a world ever more revved up. In our global urban context, it’s an equivalent to living in the wilderness.

  Once, after I’d been living here, on and off, for three years, I decided I needed a typewriter: the machine I was using, an ancient Japanese manual, was as arthritic, almost, as myself, and the only other implements I had for composing my articles were a box of $1.19 pens, a limited supply of paper, and an entirely illegible scrawl. I picked up a local magazine and started going through its classified section, finding at last the name of a company that offered simple, cheap electric typewriters similar
to the one I’d had in college. I called them up, faxed them some forms, deposited a payment at the post office, and waited.

  A few days later, as if by magic, a Black Cat messenger appeared at my door with my salvation in his hands. Eagerly, I began typing all the articles I’d previously handwritten, and before long, thanks to my expertise, the correction tape was all used up. Suddenly, I was helpless (having survived quite happily for years without a typewriter). Fretfully, I called up the company, got some more forms, faxed them back, deposited a further payment at the post office, and waited. Soon a whole box of correction tapes arrived. By then, however, the regular ribbon was worn out.

  Again I was at a loss, stranded, with no apparent way to complete the article I’d started. I rang up the poor salesmen again, completed more forms, made more trips to the post office, and paced up and down like an expectant father. The problem, of course, lay not in the machine but in me, and I was reminded, firsthand, of how quickly we become the servants of our tools, habit-bound machines ourselves.

  The story is as old as the camel and the tent—we’re always possessed by our possessions—but it reminded me forcibly that the less one has, the less one has to worry about (a lesson that having one’s house burn down, and all one’s projects and hopes go up in smoke, ought to teach, but somehow does only on paper). And it brought me back to some of the defining principles of the society all around me, which more or less patented the notion that if you decorate a simple room with a single chrysanthemum, it will concentrate the mind and consecrate the flower. It pulled me back, too, to a simpler time, when small pleasures were big and old sensations new. If some of us feel nostalgic for childhood, for all its limitations, that is mostly because we long for a time when days could be eternities and the mind would be where the body is. In a small way, in Japan, with few belongings, no space, and not much savoir faire, I’m carried back to that state of quick enjoyment, where phone calls are so occasional that they’re actually welcome and every movie, seen once a month perhaps, seems special.

  I dwell, of course, in a kind of parallel universe here, and it takes my girlfriend (who’s away at work most of the day) to explain to me that the frightened, kindly woman at the convenience store is, in fact, the cruel owner’s wife and the lady who sells me croquettes has a daughter at the local junior high school.

  One summer evening, after I’d been here for perhaps four years, she offered to take me on a tour of the neighborhood on her motorbike, and suddenly, five minutes from our flat, I was in a sleek, unanticipated world of Big Boy burger joints and Château d’Or bistros, with the Hotel Silk Road nearby. In parts, the area looked like Atlanta with subtitles, a random suburb made for those with wheels, and appointed with the look-alike global props of Book Bahn, Sushi Land, and Bottle World. Here was the standard jabberwocky of the convenience universe in the latest International Style—Mr. Pachinko, Taco Donald’s, boys in baseball caps that said WHAT’S NEXT? SEX trooping into Neo-Geo Land.

  In parts, though, it was something other, and as we drove, the shopping centers fell away, often, and gave onto open fields, and rice paddies, and farmers working outside straw-thatched houses, in villages still so linked that the news of the community was transmitted to every single house by speaker at seven o’clock each night.

  And as the sky turned indigo, and a huge pulsing moon rose above the hills, suddenly we came upon something even stranger: huge transparent modern buildings, complex with tubes and workspaces, like the innards of a laptop, erected in the middle of nowhere. The signs said they were the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, here in the vastness of old green hills, and other tidy notice boards nearby explained, in English and Japanese, that they were the first signs of a whole Kansai Science City, which would one day extend for forty miles in every direction, linking all the areas of western Japan into a Silicon Valley East.

  A road sign pointed us to Hi-Touch Research Park, and scale models showed the outlines of an urban corridor that would pulse in our midst like an answering machine blinking with some message from the future.

  I had been staying in Nara for half the Heisei Emperor’s reign, and yet had never known that I was in the middle of some cosmic city of the new millennium, and suddenly to come upon these spacecraft was vertiginous, like being lifted up so high that one could see one’s home as a dot on some enormous canvas, fashioned by a meta–Thomas Pynchon. All the driving ranges, all the Family Marts and Tomato gas stations and billboards of Felix the Cat I’d taken to be the things of commuting doctors were, in fact, part of some Techno-City of tomorrow that would, among other things, help to displace the green hills that stirred me so deeply.

  We got back on the bike, and drove past rice paddies and village streams and wooden houses huddled against the dusk, then turned a corner, and came upon a sign for PARK-DORI, the quiet street I walked down thrice a day.

  • • •

  The person with whom I shared all these adventures was, of course, a little like the society itself to me, alluring both for the parts I could recognize and for the parts that were beyond my ken; daily, she recalled to me that the point of familiarity is to make one comfortable with mystery. All of us know too well that no place is more foreign than the face asleep by our side, under the distant moon; yet in our modern world, such old truths gain especial force, as more and more of us find ourselves sharing homes with our own private Japans, half strange and half strangely familiar.

  Every couple has its private tongue—that could be said to be the distinguishing sign of being a couple; but, in my case, the setup is even stranger, since I share no public tongue with my partner. Because my Japanese has never been good enough to teach her English, nor her English good enough to teach me Japanese, we can communicate only in a kind of fluent pidgin, with English words thrown into Japanese constructions. It sounds a little like the way the neighborhood looks to me.

  What this means, though, is that we’re free, for the most part, from subtexts, and from the shadows and hidden stings that words can carry; I can’t make puns with her, spin ambiguities, or engage in very much verbal subterfuge, and she can’t pore over my words to see what they mean or what they don’t mean, what covert weapons they hide or betray. Speaking across a language gap means speaking less to win than to communicate.

  The global village has given more and more of us the chance to move among the foreign, and so to simplify and clarify ourselves in this way; even in the neighborhoods where we were born, often, we find ourselves speaking by gesticulation, or enunciating very slowly, like language tapes, to saleswomen and telephone operators. And living a little bit away from words means living a little bit away from the surfaces they carry: my partner of more than twelve years has little sense of who I am in terms of brand names and labels—what my job means, what my schools connote, who I am on my CV—and I, likewise, can’t confine her to the answers on an application form. Neither of us can read a word the other has written, and so we have to apprehend one another, to a small degree, in some way deeper than the known.

  For me, being surrounded by a language I can’t follow means, at the lowest level, that I can sleep while the television’s going full blast (so long as it’s not in English), and am never disturbed by all the chatter outside my window about O.J. or Diana’s death. The one steady companion I’ve had all my life (the English language) is done up here in a foreign garb, of “live house” music clubs and “Viking-style” breakfasts, “pocket bell” beepers and “hammer price” auctions. And living out of a linguistic suitcase, I’m reminded of what I find on every foreign trip, which is that, leaving home, I’m convinced I don’t have all I need; and, within a few days, I feel I have three times more than I require. The extra words (the extra goods) get in the way.

  Best of all, in Japan, bringing strange eyes to the things the Japanese take for granted, I can see the places that I might otherwise take for granted (England or India or California) through the marveling eyes of those who take them in from right to lef
t: once I took my girlfriend’s seventy-four-year-old father for the only foreign trip he’d taken since the war, to California. Suddenly, in this incomprehensible space, he was a child again, rolling up his trousers and dodging the Pacific surf, collecting shells to take back home. Everything was new to him—albeit translated into the terms he knew—and before he’d even boarded the plane, he’d emptied a roll of thirty-six exposures. For the duration of the eleven-hour flight, he sat with his hands pressed against the window, peering out into the dark.

  Such minglings are more and more the fabric of our mongrel worlds, as more and more of us cross borders in our private lives, or choose to live with foreign cultures in our arms. In Toronto, in Hong Kong, even in the Olympic Village nowadays, I seem to see as many couples dissolving nationalities as other kinds of distinctions, and so bringing to light unimaginable new cultures in which the annihilation of traditional identity is turned to something higher.

  • • •

  In Kyoto once, on my way with my girlfriend to the Holiday Inn, I saw a foreigner, tall and sweet-faced, walking down the street with a Japanese woman in one hand and a Japanese-English dictionary in the other. The hotel itself, set along the Kamo River, on a narrow street with the northern hills behind it, is not unlike that couple—all the global properties of the Atlanta-based chain reproduced in a setting that could only be Japan. There is a hundred-lane bowling alley there, a driving range, tennis courts, and a room-service menu in English; but when you go to the hotel swimming pool, you are reminded, by written rules, that it is “restricted to guests with tattoo or under influence of alcohol.”

  One day, as we were sitting in the lobby of this hybrid place, an elderly woman looked over at my girlfriend, and then leaned over to talk to her. “Excuse me, can I ask you something?” She was Japanese, it turned out, and it was Sunday morning, and the Wedding Hall and Holiday Hall were filling up around us. “What is it like communicating with a foreigner? Do you have problems with religion, customs, other things? How do you get yourself across?” My partner, used to my propaganda, replied that we probably communicated better than if we had too many words, and were free from at least a few distractions; words tend to be most divisive in a common language.