Autumn Light by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

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Or not so funny. My father-in-law’s stories of war were the unchanging sound track of his household; his wife and daughter—surely his son as well—can recite from memory the story of how he got on a horse in the prisoner-of-war camp and his companions told him to get down, lest the enemy see him. The story of how the Russians initially approached his regiment in its hiding place, and said, “The war is over. You’ve got to come out now.” Some of the Japanese soldiers took it to be a trick and, by refusing to surrender, lost their chance ever to come home again.

Yet now that he’s gone, these stories are most of what Hiroko has of him, her solace. Now it’s she, like someone in the time of Homer, who’s reciting the old stories she got by heart of how some of his comrades in the war lost their mind, and even the ones who didn’t could never sleep again.

“Always,” she says, as the skies begin to turn blue through the thick glass door leading to our terrace, “my father tell us. They must shoot, everyone is shooting, every direction. He lucky, he never fight face-to-face. He kill someone, many people, he doesn’t know. But, everywhere, dead body. Even people eat dead body, they so hungry.

“My father lucky. He never do that.”

Or else, like his wife, he allowed stories to take the place of experience; even a perfect memory may be glad of some correction.

“Worst thing,” says Hiroko, “is tunnel. You remember, even we little go autumn leaf, Arashiyama Parkway, my father so scared tunnel? Because, wartime, they must go there. So terrible smell. Everywhere dead body. Looks like balloon; so fat. But if they do not walk, they die.”

“And, meanwhile, your mother back in Japan was eating sawdust—maybe rats—to try to survive.”

“So terrible time,” she says. “Even you cannot imagine. We go Laos, Cambodia, for you so exotic. Monkey eating bread in street, kids want candy. For me not so exotic. I grow up time, Japan look like that. So poor.”

It’s not the moment to tell her that the man in whose house I used to stay during short holidays from school could never stop talking about the atrocities of the Japanese in war; nothing the British soldiers saw in Germany could compare to that. A colleague of my father’s when I was a boy cut off his own finger while interned in Japan during the war to shame his guards into giving their prisoners more food.

Outside, the moon has come up, fat and low above the rooftops; it’s warm tonight, an autumn day out of a poem.

But Hiroko is very far away. “You remember last week, I go parent house little check my father thing? I find magazine. Nineteen eighty-eight. All show Siberia.”

Forty years after he got out of his prisoner-of-war camp, he was still revisiting Khabarovsk, where more than half a million Japanese died. Telling the same old stories, of which everyone grew tired, or which they wrote off as an aging man’s hazy fictions.

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