Review of Autumn Light, by Pico Iyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Writer Pico Iyer reflects on the changing of seasons in Nara, Japan, where he has a home. Having fallen in love with Japan and his wife Hiroko almost three decades before, he returns to Japan each year. As a fan of Japanese literature, I enjoyed his reflections on Japanese culture, people, and seasonal rituals. For him, Autumn is a season of reflection and remembrance, as he looks back on his early encounters with Hiroko, how they created a life together with her two children, their encounters with the Dalai Lama, and their visits to temples in the vicinity of Nara and Kyoto. Of the famous Nara deer, he says: “If they are true messengers of the gods, the deer speak for gods as ungovernable as Zeus and Hera” (151). Nara itself is a mix of neighborhoods with names like Deer’s Slope and Slope of Light, convenience stores, Starbucks and other borrowings such as “Silent Night”, Mickey and Minnie, juxtaposed to pockets of wilderness, and ancient wooden temples.
At the same time, Iyer is aware of the slowing of his own life and the lives of the elderly Japanese around him, symbolized in the flaming leaves and cooling temperatures of autumn. “Autumn is the season when everything falls away” (10). This particular autumn marks the death of Hiroko’s father, and the decline of her mother, who now lives in a nursing home. As the author observes, “change itself is an unchanging truth” (159). The sense of loss is heightened by the estrangement of Hiroko’s brother, whom she and her family haven’t seen in almost 30 years; and by the silent loneliness of her daughter, who waits patiently for an absent boyfriend. Mundane trips to the post office and visits to Hiroko’s mother alternate with lively ping-pong matches between Iyer and a group of elderly ping-pong devotees at a local club. These scenes reminded me of playing ping-pong with international students in the dorm as a graduate student in Minneapolis. It is especially through these ping-pong matches that Iyer comes to know the Japanese: the retired businessmen and their chic wives, the teasing sense of humor, the daring paddle action that belies their age. As someone who has never learned Japanese well, and who spends part of the year abroad, Iyer retains the sense of being both an observer and a familiar in this place that he calls home—a perspective he shares with his reader.
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Published on August 30, 2019 20:24
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Tags:
aging, japan, kyoto, nara, reflection
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