PICO IYER’S NEW BOOK
Pico Iyer’s new book is an ode to the plangent pleasures of the Japanese autumn
We know Pico Iyer as an apostle of travel, an evangelist of globalism. In a popular 2013 TED talk, he described the “typical person” he meets on his travels: “Let’s say a half-Korean, half-German young woman living in Paris.” And as soon, he adds, “as she meets a half-Thai, half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh, she recognises him as kin, she realises that she probably has much more in common with him than anybody entirely of Korea, or entirely of Germany.” Wait, there’s more. “So they become friends, they fall in love. They move to New York City. And the little girl who arises out of their union will of course be not Korean, or German, or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian, or even American, but a wonderful and constantly evolving mix of all those places.”
Iyer ascribes to this fabulously bijou being an entirely new way of writing about and seeing the world. He devotes seven seconds to acknowledge that of the over 220 million people who now “live in countries not their own”, most are “refugees who never wanted to leave home and ache to go back home”. He entirely ignores the products of equally cosmopolitan unions as his imaginary paragon, born in major ‘global’ capitals, who live in rough state housing and are systematically denied opportunities available to their richer compatriots. What about their ways of seeing or writing about the world? But Iyer writes for globalism’s winners, for people like himself.
Born in England to peripatetic Indian academics, Iyer moved to California as a small boy, though he returned to school in England. After Eton, Oxford and Harvard, he moved to a 25th-floor office in a Manhattan skyscraper to write articles for Time magazine. He gave up this fancy life to move to Japan in 1987, his decision the product of an epiphanous layover.
At a monastery in Kyoto, Iyer meets Hiroko, a young mother of two in
an unhappy marriage. Bereft of a common language, communicating in pidgin (whether English or Japanese), they are held together by fantasies of their respective cultures as much as by the reality of their attraction. Hiroko is named ‘Sachiko’ in Iyer’s 1991 book,
The Lady and the Monk, about that year in Kyoto. His latest book, Autumn Light, serves as a companion, although each can be read discretely with no loss. Iyer is now married to Hiroko, and is a friendly, if distant, stepfather to her two children. He goes to Japan every October, insisting on travelling only on a tourist visa, marvelling anew each time at the vivid beauty of the Japanese fall.
Autumn Light is a meditation on evanescence, on absence and presence, on how we cope with loss. Hiroko’s father dies at the beginning of the book and her mother is put in a home for the elderly. Hiroko’s brother, Masahiro, cut off all contact with the family decades ago, ostensibly because of his sister’s divorce. A Swisstrained Jungian analyst, Masahiro looms over Hiroko’s family (an absent presence/ a present absence), and so the book, though Iyer never meets him.
He models Autumn Light after the films of Yasujiro Ozu, placid on the surface, but turbulent with repressed emotion. And, despite the book’s many irritations, it is affecting. But Iyer
EVEN AS HE PENS SELFEFFACING JOKES IN HIS NOVEL, PICO IYER CAN’T DISGUISE HIS SELF-REGARD
is too fond of the flip paradox. His stepdaughter is at her most luminous, on the outside, when she has Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a teenager, and later when she is unable to see that she is being led on by a (possibly homosexual) Spanish boyfriend. In an act of apparently ‘Japanese’ self-effacement, Iyer is mostly absent from the book, a reticent, coy presence. He jokes that the neighbourhood kids’ nickname for him is ‘Isoro’ or parasite, a man dependent on his wife, but he can’t disguise his self-regard. In a scene at his local health club where he plays table tennis with a group of sprightly septua- and octogenarians, he notes: “I... am reminded how different I still am from my passionate hobbyist friends; they’re waggling a finger under the table, like Olympians, to show partners how they’re planning to serve, while I’m trying to unriddle my piece for The New York Review of Books on the warlords of Mogadishu.”
Later, he writes about how nothing seems to have changed at the club in his absence, that while he is “carrying the call to prayer above the flickering lights of Jerusalem” inside him, or, “the intricate alleyways around the blue-tiled mosques of Isfahan”, his friends are “squealing over long rallies”. His wife, a blur of activity, if not, according to her husband, much of a thinker, is frequently patronised.
The lucid elegance of Iyer’s prose is misleading. What you think is moving, you come to see as sentimental. What appears momentarily profound is, upon rereading, a banality, a commonplace. What suggests an appreciation of depth, evinces only the superficial.