Autumn Light: Pico Iyer

Autumn Light

Pico Iyer

246pp

A bit of controversy surrounded Pico Iyer's newest work, or at least surrounded the New York Times review of his latest work.

In the review Iyer was supposed to have suggested that he had chosen to never learn Japanese because it lent to the mystery of the life he led. It added to his never settling anywhere in the world, never sprouting roots, never belonging. 

Many the twitter maniac (me too?? to a much quieter degree I shared my distaste for such ideas) lambasted Iyer and his ignorance.

Well, I'll start this review with a quote of Iyer speaking with his step-daughter that at least tells Iyer's true feeling:

"Sometimes" I tell Sachi, "when I come back from the ping-pong club, through the neighborhood, I can smell cooking from every other house. Which is the smell of family, of home. Even if it's not a home that can ever officially be mine."

"Is that the reason you don't learn more Japanese"

 "Not exactly. That's just laziness. 

So, at least in my book, Iyer can be forgiven his misdeeds, as the only suggestion I disliked from the NYT article was that he had somehow purposefully decided to avoid learning Japanese. Being lazy, is at least understandable, and at least taking the blame for his own circumstances... so, that being settled, I can attempt to look at this with purely fresh and open eyes... mostly, since this is basically the sequel to a book that I found beautiful and troubling.

And so, well, let me focus on all the positives before I find myself getting into the gossip of my old friends, the characters of these two books.

Again, and as always with Iyer, this is a wonderfully moving and insightful book. The prose are often nearly poetry, and Iyer's gaze sees those things that we all see, but maybe deeper, and his words continue past where our own stutter and stop.

Describing the beauty of seasons (the split main theme of this work, along with the theme of death), Iyer writes:

Cherry blossoms, pretty and frothy as schoolgirls' giggles, are the face the country likes to present to the world, all pink and white eroticism; but it's the reddening of the maple leaves under a blaze of ceramic-blue skies that is the place's secret heart

Pretty, that description. Insightful, quite possibly, but just as much into Iyer and the preferences of those reaching the age of 60 for autumn over spring and for subtle over bright.

The work is full of such quips, and anyone looking to love Japan a little more than they already do will find a million little lines to give them what they want.

Additionally, anyone with death on their mind will find a million tiny little pokes into that beast. Iyer is watching his mother and mother-in-law come closer and closer to leaving this realm, and he is struggling with finding meaning within the losses that have and will come.

Those are the reasons to read this book. They are there, they are throughout and they will satisfy many.

However, overall, I didn't love this book and would say I didn't like about as much of it as I did like, which should explain my giving it a middling 3/5 on my GR score.

What didn't I like... (stop here if you want to read this book, or not think I obsess too much)

First, Iyer has never, in the 28 years or so since his first book about his wife, been able to get past his split personality in relation to Japan.

For Iyer, Japan is an amazing land of mystery and gorgeousness that has really found so many answers to the problems that the west cannot solve.

However, at the very same time it is a land of rigid rules and awful weights stacked up upon the people, that are destroying them, and that he must save them from (or at the very least, save his wife from). 

Can both of these be true? Sure. Japan is not a single thing. But, what is infuriating in reading Iyer regarding this is that he is so sure that everything in front of him is an example of the prior, while the former are the powers unseen. Do they ever appear? Yes, but just to disagree with Iyer and then disappear again for the beauty to shine.

If that all feels cryptic, allow me to expand. 

The Lady and the Monk was the "fictional" story of a man who moved to Kyoto, fell into love with a married woman with two children and then... well, it ended there.

In real life, Iyer married his Hiroko, and the children were taken away from their father. Was that to his dismay? It's never spoken about in that work or this new one. Surely that's private, but it's that kind of unspoken undertone that paints a slightly unflattering picture of Iyer, at least as he is as a character within these books.

One of the revelations of this new book is that Iyer admits that the children never saw their father again, and that the divorce led to Hiroko having massive difficulties with her mother, and that her brother completely cut off all contact with the family (ah... the monster of Japan shows itself again, only to disappear and just be mentioned like gossip, whispered late at night).

Who chose, husband or wife, to not meet the children? I don't know, and it's not in the book, so it's not my business... though it would have been so terribly interesting.

Is Iyer to blame for the rigid beliefs of the brother and mother? No, that was Hiroko's issue to deal with, and she doesn't ever make much progress. 

And then there is the character of Hiroko. (I'll skip past the fact that she is written as if she learnt to speak from Yoda).

Numerous times Hiroko is spoken of as if a renegade martyr, such as:

Hiroko, a pioneer in remaking her life by walking out of a marriage that was wrong for her

or

like his sister, like his father, Masahiro (the brother) was never going to fit into a society in which to be as bland and invisible as a grain of rice, at least on the surface, was the price of admission

or

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

Hiroko is not to ever be considered a woman who chose to marry an interesting foreigner at the loss of her ex-husband, her brother (by his own doing) her mother and father (more on that later) and likely her children...

Iyer, for all his time in and love of Japan, writes the great American explanation for his wife's actions. She deserves her freedom and chance at life and love, damned to all others.  

But, am I reading too much into everything. The husband has disappeared and certainly didn't, in the great American father tradition, fight tooth and nail to keep contact with his ex-wife and her family.  And the brother is maybe just a fool (and a loose end to this book as well, as nothing is ever resolved with him). And the mother... screw the old woman, what has she lost?? For all Iyer spouts off about the great community of Japan, this elderly Japanese lady is quickly set aside for convenience. 

But, even if some people notice those oddities, I wonder how many other readers will pick up on Iyer's numerous mentions of money.

Iyer coming to Japan was basically his abandoning of a well paying New York career for a dive into the blessings of poverty. It started with Buddhist learning, but even though that was abandoned, Iyer loves to mention how small and empty his 90,000 yen a month apartment is (although in a rather spiffy Nara suburb, which Iyer provides a map to, for god-knows what reason?).

It's often mentioned that Iyer, "doesn't work", and that the neighborhood children mock him as a kind of sugar baby to his working wife. Yet, this is Pico Iyer, the writer. Certainly he provides for his family. Likely, but, maybe by choice, Hiroko is presented to not benefit from the money from Iyer's fame, in her small apartment (that she loves, as all Mari Kondo Japanese women do), constantly working and cleaning and cooking.

Hiroko once says to her mother, now stuffed into a nursing home, begging to be taken home:

"No, Grandma," says Hiroko, struggling to keep calm. "I have a job in Nara, remember? If I don't work, we can't eat. You have a new home"

Hmmm... but surely Iyer could afford to let his wife stay home and help her mother... but, then that small apartment, filled already to the brim just with shadows... but, the parents house in Fushimi-Inari... it's all empty now, they could move there and save that 90,000 yen a month that's keeping Iyer from properly eating... it's closer to Kyoto, closer to a shinkansen, to getting to an airport for our writer's travels.

And then I get it. I get what is bothering me about this story and what somehow wasn't hidden better.


In the first book I felt that Iyer had written it expressly to excuse and explain that he was not at fault for his wife's divorce.


And in this one I can't help but feel that Iyer is trying to explain why his mother-in-law couldn't live together with them during her dying days. 


The apartment is too small.

Hiroko is too busy working to put food on the table.

It's the older brother who bears the responsibility and he's gone and run away.

Maybe I'm crazy. But I beg any other reader of this work to take note of the way Iyer speaks of his own mother, whom he lives with and cares for much of the year. At one point he mentions:

I've taken her on four cruises in the past four years - Tallinn, Ephesus, Alaska, St. Lucia - and I bought her a shiny new car two years ago. The seasons are one of the way we remember that children become parents of their parents.

It's as if, when in America, Iyer is the well off famous writer, but when in Japan, the poor dreamer.  He embraces simplicity... but not for the whole year. We all know summertime is for cruises.

But maybe it's more fair to say, that with his own mother, he is the doting asian Indian son who knows his place to care for his elders, while in Japan, he's the American or the Englishman, pulling Hiroko away from caring for her own family. Pushing her to be more American, abandon all those heavy duty duties. Come walk with me among the reddened fallen leaves. Come dream with me.

I wonder how many will get this far... I apologize for the length, but assure you I have actually avoided the half dozen quotes I highlighted that suggested that although Iyer was at home all day playing ping-pong it is his wife who did the shopping and cooking... and I have also left out the odd subplot where Hiroko's daughter is abandoned by her foreign husband/boyfriend (I was unsure) and Iyer explains it's all tragic because the boy is obviously gay.

So, a rather odd book overall, but one I found amazing depth within, though not the depth I feel that author felt he was revealing.

Comment below please if I am on to something, or am just a madman.