At Home in Japan with Pico Iyer

6 min readMay 26, 2019

This week, we’re talking about Japan with Pico Iyer, in pursuit of stillness and contemplation. Listen today at 2 p.m. or anytime on our website.

We caught up with Pico Iyer when he came to town a week or so ago. He has a new book out: Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells, a sort of meditation on life, aging, and death, and he gave us a sneak peak of another book out in the fall called A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations. He and Chris are old pals and talked about Pico’s life in Japan, the Dalai Lama, and of course, the Concord transcendentalists.

Adam Colman: Over thirty years ago, Pico Iyer left his job in New York and moved to Japan. Once there, he rearranged his life around a new kind of time, time loaded with literary, contemplative potential that the Burgess Meredith character in The Twilight Zone would envy.

From The Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last.”

He found hours to read, to spend with his wife, to write, and to think—about life and death, Zen, animism, Oscar Wilde, ping pong, and anime. He found expansiveness, in other words, or, in his words:

I moved to a temple in the back streets of Kyoto, Japan, to live for a year. My year in the temple lasted a week, which is long enough to see a temple in Kyoto, Japan, is not what I’d imagined on Sixth Avenue. But 32 years on, the little apartment my wife and I share is probably more monastic than the monastery I envisaged. So whatever intuition took me to Japan—which had to do with seeking out contemplation, stillness, and spaciousness (in my suitcase when I moved to that monastery there was Thoreau, Emerson, and Oscar Wilde)—that intuition was a correct one. And I knew that if I didn’t spend time in Japan, something would always be unresolved and I would spend the rest of my life in New York City or wherever, thinking, “What if I were in Japan?” As soon as I arrived in Japan, I never thought of anywhere else, and I thought this is the place I need to be.

Read: “The Superannuated Man,” by Charles Lamb

Two hundred years ago, around the start of the Industrial Revolution, people also understood the need to be non-industrious, to do as Pico Iyer did and leave their equivalents of a New York job. In England, Keats wrote an ode to indolence, and Charles Lamb wrote the following (one of his glittering essays written under the pseudonym “Elia”), about the joy of doing nothing:

It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round — and what is it all for? A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him NOTHING-TO-DO; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative.

Watch: Tokyo Story

MM: Pico introduced me to the films of Yasujirō Ozu. I binged on a few over a weekend and was hooked. The stories are simple and unfold slowly — a young woman cares for her widowed father; elderly parents come to visit their children in the big city. Not a lot happens; the subject is ordinary life; the actors are often the same, but the films are incredibly emotional, and the whole experience puts you into a kind of zen trance. Try Tokyo Story (frequently listed among the greatest movies ever) and Late Spring.

You can see Ozu’s aesthetic style — his placement of objects, the framing and meticulous composition in the films of Wes Anderson. We know Wes borrows from all the greats, but Ozu is a key influence.

Visit: Japan

Our artist friend Susan Coyne has lived in Japan and traveled there recently. She writes:

I remember the first time I read Pico Iyer. I was in rural Japan, in a teachers’ staff room with wide windows that overlooked miles of rice paddies in every direction, the Japanese Alps blue in the distance. I had a lot of time in those days to read, between classes and on summer breaks, and the New York Times Opinion Page was my reading of choice then. I read Pico’s piece, “The Joy of Less,” and thrilled at the mention of Kyoto, where I’d already spent a year before moving out to Toyama (and where I’d move again the following year). I didn’t know many Westerners who knew the dreamlike pull Japan can have; I certainly knew few who’d up and moved there. In the coming years, I was always delighted to see a Pico Iyer byline, and I hoped that I might one day meet him. Chris (my dear boss) tried to arrange our meeting when I was last in Japan in October, but Pico was regrettably out of the country, and I was traveling when Pico was last in Cambridge.

Reading his latest two books to prepare for our show with him was rapturous for me. When he wrote about the cheery “Ohayo gozaimasu” he receives from an elderly passerby during a dawn walk; or about seeing a businessman slump over onto a complete stranger’s shoulder on the subway; or about everyone heading out excitedly to see the autumn leaves or the spring cherry blossoms, I was immediately taken back to Japan and lived in my memories.

While there this past October and November, I visited my old homes in Kyoto and in Toyama, staying with friends along the way. Here’s my friend, Hirohito Ikeda’s garden in Ikuji, Toyama, Japan, which I painted in the garden, listening to the sound of water flowing through the pond. (The old director of the program I attended in Kyoto, Professor MacDougal from Columbia, mused to us students once during a walk at Nanzenji Temple that “Japan is the sound of running water). My friend Hiro’s grandfather, who established a wildly successful salmon fishery, designed this garden with his wife in the 1950s.