Autumn Light

Because Nathan loves all things Japanese, his family is planning a trip there this summer.

Freda told me about a book she was reading: Autumn Light/Season of Fire and Farewells by Pico Iyer.  He's a wonderful writer and it's one of those books that makes me want to go right out and get all of his books before even finishing this one.

In this book, he conveys so many tender moments in his life in Japan with this Japanese wife, Hiroko.

I'd been looking for books about Japan for Nathan.  I'm not sure he'd want to read a memoir at this age, but I'm learning lots I can share with him.


     Nothing essential ever seems to die in Japan, so the land is saturated with dead ancestors, river gods, the heavenly bodies Hiroko gives honorifics, as if they were her country's CEOs."

     It took me a while, after I settled down here, to realize that every detail--the apples, the boxes they sit on, 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 apologize! To table.  That table has heart. It never hit you.  Why must you hit it?'"

     If she threw a pencil across the room, she was told, she might have been flinging her brother against a wall.

     We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it's their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty....Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.  How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.