Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  Whenever the day is cloudless like this, Hiroko pulls open all the windows and screen doors, and hauls the futons out to our tiny terrace to catch the sun; she carries out carpets and towels and every last item from toilet and bathroom so they can bask in fresh air and come back renewed. That’s who she is, of course: dust never settles on her for long. She’s so unlined and bright-eyed that strangers often mistake her either for my daughter or, less happily, for some young beauty whose company I’m renting in old age. In California, I get asked if I want a senior discount while she, ten months older, gets carded if she orders a beer.

  Today, she flings herself down in an exhausted heap after the torrential burst of cleaning, pale and completely spent. An hour later, she leaps out of bed and starts buttoning herself into a long black dress and short boots, turquoise scarf knotted around her neck.

  “We little go shrine?”

  I know better than to remind her that going to the shrine was the habit of her mother’s she most complained about when we first met. As vexing as her mother’s way of calling up every day to complain about her husband—or shouting out prayers in a freezing shower every morning, to appease the Shinto gods.

  “Tsuku-tsuku-boshi,” she tells me brightly now, as we walk across the park. “Little sound of summer ending. Not bird; cricket. Special sound of cricket when summer ends.”

  Then we catch a whirring in the air beside us, a red dragonfly. “Aka tombo,” she explains. “This means autumn coming soon. Little autumn messenger insect.”

  I might be walking through a beginner’s guide to the season, with the covers thrown wide open. I know many more of our neighbors than she does, spending all day at home, and joining in the communal rounds of ping-pong and watching the maple leaves rising to a blaze in the park; but she knows the flowers and the winds that create a frame for the human pantomime.

  As we descend the flight of hidden steps, she goes on, “Little old person house,” pointing to a large wooden structure. “Day-care service, but for very old kids. This is where they train police dogs.” She’s gesturing towards a wide driveway and palatial house.

  “It looks silent. Maybe there aren’t so many customers?”

  “Many,” she upbraids me. “These dogs are learning to be silent.”

  She points out an early persimmon tree in front of a two-story villa. “This one you cannot eat. We call shibugaki, keep in house, one, two week. Little dry fruit feeling.” Then, a few feet later, “Yuzu.” Citrusy flavors of Japan are everywhere in the autumn.

  “Sometimes,” Hiroko goes on—the rice paddies are exquisitely tended on one side of us—“my grandpa see thief running, with vegetable. He little ‘Pfft!’ ” She makes a sound like wind escaping through a door. “Thief stop. He cannot move!”

  Her late father was the one famous for his ghost stories; neighborhood kids gathered at his feet to feel the chills stealing down their spine. The only other time he found a group around him was when, in old age, he started going to the elders’ day-care center; we opened up its monthly newsletter to see a picture of him drawing, amidst a circle of other gray-hairs. He’d never had much in the way of friends before.

  As we near the shrine, Hiroko peels off and stands by the side.

  “What is it?”

  “I cannot go.”

  “But you came all this way!”

  She looks at me, not for the first time, as if I don’t understand a thing. “I cannot shrine this year.” For one year after a death in the family, a person is polluted, and must not bring her scent of death into the place of gods. She cannot send out New Year’s cards this year, and if she lived closer to tradition, she’d be wearing black every day for twelve months.

  I pass alone under the torii gate, make my ablutions, and rehearse my jet-lagged routine of early autumn.

  Back in the apartment, Hiroko starts wrestling the futons into the room again—she wants no help from a malfunctioning husband, who will only make things worse—and bustles around, hair now swept into an elegant ponytail, beating the dirt from the carpets and taking the table mats out from the sun.

  “Summer little ending,” she says, settling down at last. “Now come autumn.”

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes Hiroko’s cousin sees Masahiro walking down the street outside his analyst’s office in southern Kyoto, not many minutes from where his mother now lives. “He just walks past me, as if he hasn’t seen.” Sometimes, Hiroko says, she sees him in the same place.

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Of course! I know my brother! One time, I little call to him, ‘Older brother, older brother!’ But never he turn round.”

  “Maybe, with your cousin, he didn’t recognize her. It’s been a long time.”

  “Doesn’t want recognize. They always so close. Too close! More close than me.”

  “It’s the same in my mother’s family,” I remind her. “The same in my father’s. One brother cutting off everyone, usually over property. All families are the same.”

  “I worry about my son,” she says. “Sometimes I looking him, I see my brother.” She stops. “But he cut me, it’s okay. I not always so kind before. He cannot forget.”

  Even on our honeymoon, fourteen years ago, when I took Hiroko to meet the Dalai Lama in his home in Dharamsala—“Prepare one question,” I’d told her, “something that matters the most to you”—she’d asked about her brother.

  “Maybe you should write to him,” the Tibetan monk said, turning to me with his doctor’s no-nonsense pragmatism.

  “Because I’m not part of the family?”

  “Also”—he laughed heartily—“not Japanese!”

  So I did, though, like all Hiroko’s regular greetings to Masahiro, it disappeared into an unanswering blank space.

  This year, however, for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, she exchanged words with him.

  Her father had left no will when he died, and although everyone knew what it would have said—a third to his wife, a third to his daughter, a third to the long-lost prodigal whose achievements made him glow—that didn’t help with the law. Or with a son who, fifteen minutes away, declined to exchange a word.

  Hiroko managed to find a friend of a cousin’s daughter’s school friend who dealt with probate and estate questions, and asked him if he’d help. The three of us gathered on the tatami mat in the room in her parents’ house presided over by the small, framed photo of her ashen father and her long-dead grandmother. Our young visitor, in his ill-fitting suit, shifted uncomfortably—we might have been sitting inside a grave—while assuring us it was no problem.

  “I know these cases,” he said. “It’s my job to deal with them.”

  He went off with Masahiro’s particulars, simply to get formal verification from the missing son that the dead father’s property could be dispersed as logic suggested.

  A few days later, the lawyer got back to us. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve never encountered a case like this. I called and called the number you gave me; he never answered. So I went to his apartment. I could hear someone inside; I could hear the TV. But I rang and rang and no one answered.”

  I suppose they’d seen a stranger’s face through the peephole, and reacted as Hiroko does when she sees a Jehovah’s Witness or someone from public television requesting a monthly donation.

  “I’ve run out of options; I slipped something under the door, and someone slipped it right back at me.”

  “I’ll try,” said Hiroko.

  Scanning online, Sachi found that her elusive uncle taught a class in central Kyoto on Tuesdays at 6:00 p.m., explaining the psychology of Jung. Weeks of preparing herself later, Hiroko decided to ambush her brother there, and Sachi gamely offered to come along as an emotional bodyguard.

  They arrived at 5:00 p.m. and waited while a few members
of the class drifted in.

  “You’re interested in Jung?” an old woman asked Hiroko.

  “No. I’m just here to meet your teacher. What’s he like?”

  “So cool,” said the woman. “We’re all in love with him.”

  “I’ll say!” said another student. “Such a good teacher. Like a movie star.”

  Then Hiroko heard the elevator doors open and saw Masahiro emerge. Though he had not officially laid eyes on her in years, he registered her presence instantly, and beckoned her to a corner.

  “Look,” he said, determined that it be just the two of them, “we’ll talk over there.” And then: “I have just two things to say to you. All the letters, the postcards you’ve sent, every one for twenty years, I’ve read them. Every one. And the second thing I have to say is this: I’ve cut off the family forever. I never want to have anything to do with anyone.”

  He looked cool, Hiroko told me, in a European cap; he hadn’t lost their father’s sense of style. Who knew but he was still a fervent supporter of the Hiroshima Carp, the hometown baseball team their father had taught his children to support?

  She told him about the paper he had to sign, and he said that if she sent it to him he would sign it (and he did).

  Then, with Sachi beside her, Hiroko went down in the elevator to take the train home. “She couldn’t stop crying,” Sachi told me, of her famously fearless mother, whose emotions, in so many colors, were jouncing around in a kind of washing machine after she met the sibling she so missed and loved.

  Even now, telling me the story, Hiroko chokes over her words, and I can barely hear her as she speaks.

  * * *

  —

  It was on an October day as warm as this that I was formally introduced to Hiroko’s parents, twenty-three years ago. They didn’t know exactly who I was in their daughter’s and grandchildren’s lives, but it wouldn’t have taken much to surmise: Hiroko was in a closet-sized apartment near the celebrated castle of southern Kyoto, the trains rumbling past even here, and she was ceremonially introducing them to someone she seemed to have known for quite a while.

  Her father—a bantam eagerness, a shy, strong-toothed grin, a careful courtesy that, in my case, translated into instant, undiscriminating friendliness—gave me a firm handshake, sat down and, coming from a world in which men are unchallenged bosses, began to speak.

  “In Siberia, during the war, there were wolves everywhere, and when the wolves began eating us”—or was it that the men were eating the wolves?—“we thought we’d left the mortal world behind. We knew that many of us were fated to die! And when the Russians came to inspect us a little later…”

  Hiroko and her mother looked away and went about their business—her mother was used to tuning her husband out, and Hiroko would often tell me that her father’s stories were a “stuck record.” I, meanwhile, abandoned by the two women, made desperate efforts to discern where the pauses in the story came, and said, “Isn’t that the truth?” whenever I sensed one, or “You really don’t say!”

  Never had my future father-in-law enjoyed such a responsive audience. “All our commanders had run away! Or died. So we were lost, lost in the wilderness. And then the Russians found us. But if they hadn’t…”

  I looked over to see what the other two were doing, and I noticed that Hiroko’s mother was sobbing and sobbing, as at a funeral. Her face was down-turned and she was not making much noise, but her shoulders were rising and falling, rising and falling, as if her heart were slowly coming apart.

  It could have been the sound of her husband’s war stories, but I got very much the feeling that it was simply the sight of me.

  “Come on, Grandma,” said Hiroko. “Don’t do that!”

  “I’m sorry,” gasped the old woman, then in her early sixties. She threw a typically charming and welcoming smile at me. “My daughter’s crazy, isn’t she? The two of them. They never stop fighting.”

  “Grandma!”

  “And then the Russians said, ‘Any soldier who wants to can leave….’ ”

  The old woman was still weeping. Just what I always feared, she might have been thinking, looking at the stranger with Indian features across the table; even when she was young, my daughter was too interested in Taj Mahal and elephants.

  Hiroko spent much of the evening loudly berating her mother, and the tiny old woman with the wrinkled, tanned face and the short gray hair didn’t try to fight back, but only adopted a beleaguered attitude that suggested that life had made an arranged marriage for her, with misery.

  Meanwhile, Hiroko’s father was continuing unabated. “And then I went up to the commander of the prisoner-of-war camp and said, ‘It’s not fair to give us so little to eat! We’ll starve.’ ‘I like your honesty,’ the man said, and after that, we never lacked for food, and…”

  Years later, I’d see that the evening was not so distant from the ping-pong practice in which two entirely different pairs kept hitting balls at the same time, across the diagonal; Hiroko’s father would always throw his arms around any stranger, however criminal, while his wife would despair at any prospective son-in-law, whoever he might be.

  “And at the end of the war”—these details would get filled in for me later by Hiroko—“I was free to leave. In 1948. So I wrote to my mother in Hiroshima to say I was coming home. But in the chaos of the time, my letter never arrived. So I went back to Hiroshima—there was nothing there, my hometown was just rubble—and I was walking down the main street when I happened to pass my mother.

  “ ‘Mother!’ I shouted.

  “ ‘What?’ she cried. ‘Do you have feet?’

  “She assumed I was a ghost! She thought she was hallucinating the ghost of her son who’d died at war. She’d never received my letter, and she couldn’t believe it was me, her long-lost son, walking past her down the street.”

  In Japan, Hiroko reminded me, ghosts don’t have feet.

  Her mother, all the while, continued sobbing silently into her cup of green tea, inconsolable. She would always be cordial to me—her eyes full of merriment and puckishness—but her outburst was a quiet reminder that she would feel so much happier if I were just six thousand miles away.

  Hiroko and her mother never stopped bickering all evening long—“No, Grandma! That’s not true!” “Why do you always do this to me?” As we dispersed, however, close to midnight, Hiroko threw her arms around the older lady and they walked arm in arm down the street, like the closest, most loving friends in the world, all warmth and affection.

  Hiroko’s father continued beaming at me, overwhelmed that he had found someone so enraptured by his tales of Manchuria and the sudden song he broke into, about his friends lying in the ground, and the sun beginning to set as he dreamed of his hometown far away. Before long, he was referring to me as his best friend in the world.

  At the time, I’d been surprised that, contrary to my experience so far, it was a Japanese man who was instantly warm and a woman who kept her distance. Now, looking back, I’m touched by how eagerly my future father-in-law was trying to make contact with the wider world in any form; his loneliness and his longing for adventure would always be of a piece. All this proud son of Hiroshima wanted, I’d come to see, was to enjoy the freedom of America.

  * * *

  —

  “Pi-sama, welcome home!”

  Sachi, our sparklingly bright-eyed, openhearted daughter is waving to me and jumps up from her chair to give me an un-Japanese hug as I arrive in the Starbucks outlet that occupies perhaps the choicest location in Kyoto: next to Sanjo Bridge, where fifty-two Christians were once publicly burned to death, children clinging to their mothers’ backs while others sang the “Te Deum.” Today, as if to stretch summer out by a few weeks, it still has a wooden deck open for looking out on the Kamo River and on the eastern hills a few long blocks away. Like many a resourceful J
apanese girl, Sachi fled Japan as soon as she could, moving to Spain and a Spanish boyfriend almost the day she graduated from university here; she’s been living in Spain (and Spanish) for eight years. But she’d come back after her grandfather’s death, and stayed around to help her mother with paperwork and visits to the nursing home.

  “You’re ready?” I say, because it’s another “second summer” morning—bright days in October become a regular miracle, the more glorious because they still seem unexpected—and it’s hard to stay indoors when the unearned brilliance is so dazzling. All Kyoto seems out today. As we walk towards the hills, Sachi fills me in happily on friends from high school, their husbands, the drawings she’s selling online, not least of the fox shrine near her grandparents’ house, and all the whimsical ghosts and spirits she’s superimposing upon the photographs she’s taken. That mention of “husbands” is a slippery one, though I’m less anxious than her mother might be. Sachi’s brother, like most Japanese males, followed a more conventional course—going to Tokyo as soon as he graduated, getting a job with a good, solid company (Japan Airlines), finding a sweetheart at twenty-five, settling down with his wife, his little girl and his steady, if not always exhilarating work. But Japanese women still have no good place in the system, so either they defect—as Hiroko had done by marrying me—or they try to make the most of the free time that being denied most public opportunity can bring.

  In Sachi’s case, she’d brought her beau home to us, and her mother and I had both been charmed and relieved to meet such an engaging, funny, quick-witted, handsome guy. “Francisco,” as I’ll call him, could go shopping with Hiroko—I’d never met a young male who so loved clothes—and could talk Scorsese and Oliver Stone with me, when he wasn’t cracking both of us up with renditions of a clumsy swimmer at the Olympics. As we walked through the narrow lanes of Kyoto’s geisha quarter, he told us how fetching he’d look in a kimono and wooden shoes. It wasn’t hard to see how innocent, accommodating Sachi had been wowed by someone who seemed as bright and colorful as her mother.