Pico Iyer - Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

Im sorry. Hirokos voice, made for singing, sounds flat, provisional.

What is it? Fumbling for the phone, I catch sight of the red digits on the hotel bedside table: 1:23.

My father now hospital, says my wife, a dozen or more time zones away. Im sorry.

I try to clear my head. Drunks are reeling through the warm Florida night around me, taking me farther and farther away.

What happened?

I dont know. Ive never heard her so hesitant. All white. Doctor say his blood all white.

Ill be there soon, I say, though I know that words are useless when it comes to fear. I curse my job for taking me so far. In my minds eye, I see my ultra-chic, motorbike-riding wife all but alone in a room of empty beds.

Its difficult, she says again.

But he came with you to the shrine last week? For a ritual visit?

I know, she says. Theres another long pause. They say, ninety-one years old, it cant be helped. Almost they dont care, hes so old.

Im sorry, I say again uselessly, almost Japanese. Ill be there on Tuesday.

No problem, she says. Its difficult.

Two days later, the phone againa bright Key West morning, all birdsong and sunlight.

Hes gone, says Hiroko, her brisk and efficient self again.

Im so sorry.

Its okay. All night I hold his hand. Always together my father.

Your mother?

Cannot understand.

Maybe thats better?

Maybe. For years now, Hirokos father, boyishly proud of his good health, has been tending to his beloved wife of sixty years, even as her mind and memory come slowly apart. Cycling to the shops to get their food. Heating up the green tea he chooses with such care as they gather on the tatami mat around a tiny table in their three-room wooden house. So caught up in his own concerns, he hasnt noticedor chooses not to noticethat shes asking the same question again and again.

And then, bracing myself, I ask, Your brother?

I dont know. I talk his wife.

Neither of us says a word. Theres nothing to say. For twenty-three years, no one in the family has heard a thing from Masahiro, as Ill call him. We know he lives in a suburb of Kyoto, fifteen minutes from the creaking two-story structure where his parents stay. His office is in the same neighborhood as the elders day-care center to which theyve been taken three days a week for the past three years. But Hirokos only sibling, a Jungian psychologist two years older than she, decided to sever all relations with his family soon after he returned from getting his doctorate in Europe. Hes stuck to his resolve through sickness and typhoon.

Youre okay? I ask Hiroko. Im so sorry I cant leave until Monday.

Okay, says Hiroko, who seems to have emerged from a fog. Now must make new life.

Masahiros on my mind, hes all around me, as I rise from my bed a couple of return trips later. Im sixteen hours out of sync following last nights flight, and when I draw back our thick gray curtains, I see just a few small white badges of light under a blue-ing sky. Hiroko is asleep in the only other room of our tiny rented flatshes never lost the light sleep of a young motherso I slip on T-shirt and jeans in the dark and shuffle into loafers in front of our gray door. The beaker of salt Hiroko placed outside our anonymous entrance purifies us all, I remember her saying, as I steal down two short flights of stairs in our three-story yellow apartment block, known as Lime Village.

Around me, the thin, straight, silent streets are empty. Most of the homes in our neighborhood, Deers Slope, are Western-style, two-story, family dwellings, with tiny gardens out in front, the spotless lanes that run between them so narrow they lack even sidewalks. You can walk down any street here as if it were your own. Under a childs basketball net, a silver Mercedes dozes. Across the way, a midnight-blue Audi sits beside a chirpy sign advertising English lessons.

I hurry past the only house that takes up a full block, the places gargoyles and silver cornices, its ornamental garden just visible behind the kindly old lady who sometimes pulls back the gate, marking it out as the haunt of a gangster. In the mini-park on the next block, I see a cartoon dog on a billboard smiling with relief as he scoops up his own poop.

When I arrive at the edge of the settlement, seven or eight minutes later, I can look across a valley of gray-tiled houses, a nine-family village, to the outline of hills far beyond.

Down the secret flight of stairs and through the middle of a mini-forest I hurry, to emerge in another century. A rambling two-story wooden house overlooks a persimmon tree and fields. The vegetable garden that Mr. Makihara from the ping-pong club tends in his autumn years is sprouting white radishes and lettuce. A giant emerald rice paddy in front of the pond looks like a vivid green hairbrush, overturned, bristles out.