Autumn Light Page 3
Our club chair, wordless and imperturbable in his dark-blue warm-up jacket with flashes of yellow lightning across it, sits out a game so others can play. Every now and then he intervenes to rearrange couples who seem to be mismatched, pairing this shy matron with that chubby grandfather who’s just her level. Quite a few of the women sit on gray folding chairs against the wall and chat; the men, more silent, give themselves over to ferocious, intense rallies, flinging themselves to the floor to return a spinning forehand.
“Well, Pico-san,” says tiny Mrs. Fukushima as she shuffles past, holding what might almost be a lacrosse stick, to pick up loose balls across the gym. At eighty-three, she’s scooping up balls for the rest of us as if she were one of the teenage girls on the volleyball court.
“You aren’t tired?” I ask, as she takes the table for another game, standing in place as she prepares to tilt her bat at mathematical angles.
“Oh no,” she laughs back, moving an inch to block my fast topspin drive with a paddle so craftily bent that the ball tickles the far side of the table before flying away.
“I’m not tired, because I never move.”
* * *
—
It was in autumn that I first got upended by Japan, and realized that not to live here would be to commit myself to a kind of exile for life. I was returning, at the age of twenty-six, to my office in New York City from a business trip to Hong Kong, all high-rising boardrooms and banquets in the casinos of Macao, and my Japan Airlines itinerary called for an overnight layover at Narita Airport, near Tokyo. It was the last thing I wanted; Narita was infamous for eleven years of violent protests by local farmers over the demolition of their rice paddies, culminating in a burning truck sent through the new airport gates not many years before. But I couldn’t argue with flight schedules, and soon I was walking through the high-tech quiet of the arrivals area, and out into a singing autumn afternoon.
A shuttle bus took me to an airport hotel, and an elevator carried me up to my floor. When I got out, the long corridor was so spotless that all I could see was the window at the far end, framing the first crimson and gold from the surrounding trees. It was hard to tell where the forest ended and the building began.
After breakfast next morning, I still had four hours to kill before check-in, so I followed a sign in the lobby to a free shuttle van into the airport town. Twenty minutes later, I was dropped off on a busy road and crossed a street to find myself in a world suddenly intimate and human-scaled. The streets were barely wide enough for cars here, and many of the houses were made of wood. Paneled doors were pulled back, and, above the tatami mats of tearooms and restaurants, I could see, again, trees beginning to turn, through the picture windows at their back. Everything was silent, deserted, and the mildness of the late-October sky gave a sense of brightness and elegy to the day.
I followed the riddle of streets up to a large gate, which led into a courtyard thick with sweet incense. At the far end sat a wide wooden meditation hall, and all around stood protective statues and what looked to be graves. I didn’t know then that Narita was a celebrated pilgrimage site, consecrated to the god of fire, or that people were known to walk the forty-six miles from central Tokyo to pay homage to its thousand years of history; I had no intimation that the Dalai Lama would be visiting months later, and sent his monks here to gain familiarity with the Shingon sect of Buddhism, the esoteric, mystical Japanese school closest to his own.
I simply followed random impulse out into the temple’s garden, where a flock of kindergartners, in pink and blue caps, was scattering across the lawns, collecting fallen leaves. And almost instantly, for no reason I could fathom, I felt I knew the place, better than I knew my apartment in New York City, or the street where I’d grown up. Or maybe it was the feeling I recognized, the mingled pang of wistfulness and buoyancy.
I was so affected—the quiet morning went through me so deeply—that by the time I boarded my plane in early afternoon, I’d decided to leave my comfortable-seeming job in New York City and move to Japan. Four autumns later, I arrived, suitcase in hand, outside the door of a tiny temple along the eastern hills of Kyoto. My boyish plan was to spend a year in a bare room, learning about everything I couldn’t see in Midtown Manhattan.
That idea lasted precisely a week, which was long enough for me to realize that scrubbing floors and raking leaves before joining two monks crashed out in front of the TV was not quite what my romantic notions had conceived. So I moved to an even smaller room, seventy-five square feet—no toilet, no telephone, no visible bed—and told myself that in the margins of the world was more room to get lost and come upon fresh inspiration.
Better still, I was back to basics here, with few words to support me and no contacts; my business card and résumé, liberatingly, meant nothing in Japan. Every trip to the grocery store brought some wild surprise, and I barely thought to look at my watch, every day seemed to have so many hours inside it. When, on my third week in the city, I went to Tofukuji, one of Kyoto’s five main centers of Zen, to observe its abbot, Keido Fukushima-roshi, receive initiation into some new level of responsibility, I was placed next to a spirited and charming young mother of two from southern Kyoto whose name was Hiroko. She invited me to her daughter’s fifth-birthday party, five days later, and very soon my year of exploring temple life became a year of watching a new love take flight.
Now, as I step into the post office in Deer’s Slope, I can hardly recall the bright-eyed kid who made such a pious point of telling himself that purity and kindness and mystery lay inside the temple walls and that everything outside them was profane; the beauty of Japan is to cut through all such divisions, and to remind you that any true grace or compassion is as evident in the convenience store—or at the ping-pong table—as in the bar where two monks are getting heartily drunk over another Hanshin Tigers game.
My trusty protector behind the post-office counter, black waved hair down to her shoulders, flashes me a smile of welcome, and I allow myself to imagine she might be glad of a break after a morning of handling family pension matters. I place the kimono I’m sending to a ten-year-old goddaughter in London on her scales and, long familiar with my clumsiness, she offers to box it up and asks if the little girl would enjoy some pictures of Nara deer on the package. The one time, fatally, I came in during the designated Pico-handler’s lunch break, a much younger woman collected my postcard as if it might be infectious, asked if Singapore was in Europe, hurried back to whisper frantic questions at the coffin-faced boss near the door and ended up charging me four dollars for a stamp.
Now, after buying a 3-D postcard of two bears enjoying green tea in kimono—my mother never can resist such zany pieces of Japan—I head out into the little lane of shops, past the computer store that once placed two white kittens in its windows to attract customers. In the local supermarket, the quiet, pale lady with the sad Vermeer face and braids running down to her waist looks relieved that, for once, I haven’t left a copy of Henry Miller effusions in the photocopy machine. An old man is sitting alone at a small table next to where the mothers are briskly boxing up their groceries, as if waiting for a bridge game to begin. Across the street, the fountain of good cheer at the bakery is bustling around to slice fresh loaves as a soft-voiced woman purrs on the FM station.
Our main park begins less than two hundred yards behind the shops, and as I pass the elementary school, I can hear kids chanting, this warm blue day, the forty-seven syllables of the hiragana alphabet, in the ceremonial song that features every syllable once and once only.
A little like the Anglican hymns we used to sing in school, I think—or the Pledge of Allegiance, which we had to shout out during my brief time in a California classroom.
This song, though, might be the scripture of Japan. “Bright though they are in color, blossoms fall,” I hear the children shouting out. “Which of us escapes the world of change? We cross the farthest lim
its of our destiny, and let foolish dreams and illusions all be gone.”
* * *
—
I’d never lived by a farmer’s calendar until I arrived in Deer’s Slope, and it was hard for me to guess that even the Disney-worthy Californian houses along School-dori could be guided by a cycle of nine harvests and petitions to the sun goddess. Last autumn, Hiroko and I went to spend two nights on Mount Koya, the mountain of Shingon temples two hours from our home, and watched monks carrying fresh breakfast and lunch every day through the forest to the founder of the temples, Kobo Daishi, who “passed into deepest meditation” in the year 835. In Ise, two hours in another direction, I’d seen similar meals transported twice a day to the empty space that houses, so it’s believed, the sun goddess. There are sixteen phases of the moon here—I try never to confuse the “waiting moon” with the “waiting for the twilight” moon—and I’m sometimes reminded that, as in classical China, there are seventy-two seasons in the year, so that every five days marks a new old world.
“Soon must eat rice cake,” Hiroko had said yesterday, pulling out her compact diary, adorned with pictures of Peter Rabbit, and showing me that the harvest moon, said to be so bright that farmers can continue working after dark, will be visiting a few days from now; little boys will race around a pond in central Nara, carrying white globe lanterns with rabbits on them—there’s a rabbit, not a man, on the moon in Japan—while a bamboo flute stabs notes out into the night. I never forget the year I showed up to find a completely empty setting, nothing but silhouettes of temples all around, and, realizing I’d got the day wrong, had to walk down nearby shopping streets to a screening of Rush Hour 3 in an equally deserted cinema.
My neighbors all bow before the seasons here, as before the larger forces that keep us in our place. And autumn is at least more radiant, and a little less abrupt, than the earthquake that set off three hundred fires in Kobe, thirty miles away, not long after we moved here, or the tsunami two years ago that swept more than eighteen thousand people away to their deaths. The season is a kind of religion, I think, to which we offer poems and petitions, but it’s not one you believe in so much as simply inhabit.
Very soon, there’ll be tangy apples in the supermarket, replacing watermelons, and they’ll bear the kinds of names that Thoreau relished as the trees turned apple-red around him: the Truant’s Apple, the Saunterer’s Apple, Wine of New England, the Beauty of the Air. A little later, tiny, sweet tangerines will appear, the kind my father-in-law used to send me every year from a special farm in his beloved Hiroshima.
It took me a while, after I settled down here, to realize that every detail—the apples, the boxes they sit in, the table on which we place them—counts, because none of these things is inanimate in Japan. Only yesterday, Hiroko remembered, “I small time, I kicking table—sometimes little angry—every time, my father say, ‘You must apologize! To table. That table has heart. It never hit you. Why you must hit it?’ ”
If she threw a pencil across the room, she was told, she might have been flinging her older brother against a wall.
When my mother-in-law was born, there was a deity on the throne, direct descendant of the sun goddess; but after the Emperor was pronounced a mortal, it was other forces that the people of Japan could more dependably rely upon, the “eight million gods” of rice paddy and wind, maple tree and constantly changing sky, whose presence we can never forget.
* * *
—
As my second autumn in Japan came to an end, twenty-five years ago, I had to return to California, in part because I’d promised a book to my publisher; but I could no more take leave of the place than I could of Hiroko, or of the world she’d opened up to me. I started pitching ideas for pieces that would bring me back to Kyoto, or finding assignments that would take me to Thailand, when Hiroko could free herself up to join me there. A little like Japan itself in its postwar decades, we’d stumbled out of the lives we’d planned, with nothing definite to step into.
In the book I published, I took pains to make its ending wistful and ambiguous, Japanese; Hiroko and I were eager—of course—there be no ending at all, but by then she had drawn me deeply enough into her culture that I couldn’t believe any emotion could be unmixed, and I could see how sadness often lasts longer than mere pleasure. Endings seemed like sanctuaries in which humans hid to protect themselves from a larger, wilder landscape, and it hardly mattered to me whether they were happy or sorrowful, since the story kept unfolding.
Hiroko, in the meantime, had walked out of her marriage and taken her kids off to a tiny apartment one train station away from where they’d been. Her closest American friend was living alone with two kids in Kyoto, teaching English and studying Zen; why, she thought, could not a Japanese woman do the same? A divorce was heresy in Japan in those days—an act of failure on the woman’s part, a rent in the country’s woven tapestry—but, as more and more Japanese women began to be exposed to foreign lives, such separations became quite common.
Once more, it seemed, she was taking her prompt from the visitors she met; if we could travel far from home, and live quite happily, why could not she as well? And soon this small woman who’d never been on a plane a year before—barely stepped outside Kyoto—was leading equally bewildered Japanese everywhere from Hong Kong to Bangkok.
But a life of adventure doesn’t go easily with raising kids, so, finally, she took a job near Kyoto Station, at an English-language school, and then, two autumns later, she found a very small apartment in Deer’s Slope, ninety minutes away from her former life, but, conveniently, only three efficient train rides from where her parents and old friends were.
“Maybe you little try?” she said to me during one of our daily long-distance phone calls, and I could see that it was time. My parents’ house in California, where I’d been staying, had burned to the ground in a forest fire, leaving me with nothing but the clothes I was wearing, and after five years of knowing Hiroko and her children, it hardly seemed too early to shelve my boy’s fantasies of the writing life and move in, devoting my days to sending the kids through school.
Now, as I leave the two-room space that has been home for more than twenty years, I watch the office girls pull the straps of their dresses straight as they hasten to the bus stop a few yards away from our flat. Boys are playing catch outside the small wooden shack plastered with posters on environmental issues and unfair trade agreements that Hiroko calls “little Red group world.” I think of how, just days after I came back this month, we marked a seventh-century holiday instituted for respecting the aged, a practice that cuts ever deeper as the years flip past.
On two sides of Deer’s Slope are plunging valleys, one of which is entirely empty, the other of which leads to Susano Shrine; on a third side is a small hill, at the foot of which sit large bulldozers, ready to turn wilderness into profit. The fourth side opens out onto the normal, less gated world of coffee shops and convenience stores and the next suburb along, Slope of Light. There was once a small convenience store in Deer’s Slope, ten seconds from our flat. But then our neighbors noticed that it was a magnet for restless teenagers, and it went the way of the little cross on the second floor of the drab apartment building above the convenience store that marked the “Baptist Church.”
My friends in the West sometimes ask if Japan isn’t crowded, and I can’t always explain how a people used to living together in a small space have grown so adept at self-containment—even at self-erasure—that our two-room apartment, when four people slept here, felt larger than my mother’s five-bedroom home in the hills of California. What makes the air feel thronged is the presence of household deities and ghosts, the spirits that for my neighbors inhabit every last desk or box of chocolates. Nothing essential ever seems to die in Japan, so the land is saturated with dead ancestors, river gods, the heavenly bodies to whom Hiroko gives honorifics, as if they were her country’s CEOs.
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nbsp; This morning, as I’d called out, “Would you like some tea?” Hiroko had shouted back, “Please give some my father.”
I know better than to say a word. Every day at first light, she heats up food and boils his favorite tea to place in front of her improvised shrine, before getting herself up in tight ponytail and Italian short coat and grabbing the American Idiot CD from the boom box next to the shrine to serenade her on the way to work.
Today, when she got up, she hurried off for a shower. Then, on emerging, she started scrambling around the room at very high speed, sweeping up every piece of scrap paper, stuffing sunglasses and iPhone and lipstick into her Michael Kors bag, then hastening to the door.
“Isn’t it your day off?” I called from the desk. The flat is so small, we’re effectively in the same room wherever we are.
“Day off,” she called back. “You no remember? O-Higan.”
I don’t remember. I never do. On the autumn equinox—today—the sun sets in exactly the western area where the Japanese believe their paradise to be; divisions between the living and the dead are porous.
“I little go visit my grandma,” she says, wriggling into her short black boots and then heading off, for a two-hour, four-train trip in each direction, as if forgetting there’s now another presence in the plot of graves, her father’s.
It’s hard to say what separates her grandmother from the Buddha. The picture of the deceased old lady has stood on the shrine in the wooden house in Kyoto ever since my first visit, and it’s her maxims I hear more often than those of any sutra. In Hiroko’s stories, her mother’s mother sat above the daily family squabbles like a kind of household god, administering justice even as she was impassively stitching the group together. When Hiroko closes her eyes and prays for my good health, she might be praying to her grandmother as much as to any religious figure.