Japan's harmonious contradictions

Since Mr Iyer is a consummate craftsman who understands that he is writing a beginner's guide, he doesn't allow his book to become heavy with elucidations of the many omnipresent principles of Japan

Even before you’ve gone through much of Pico Iyer’s book, you will realise two of its essentials. First, it’s easy on the eye and, second, it’s challenging. The book moves forward with quick snapshots of Japan the nation and of the Japanese people with no discernable narrative arrangement, each click individually relevant —  much like those black-on-white, thin-brushed Japanese postcards stacked and then dealt out for you — but each digging deeply into the Japanese psyche and ethos, locking you in until the next card. Ironically, the process parallels Mr Iyer’s frequent promptings about the paradoxes (used by him as positives) that appear to be an integral part of the country and its people. We all know how the Japanese had shielded Michelangelo’s David from the public eye with artificial fig leaves while saying nothing about families and neighbours exposing themselves in community baths, but Mr Iyer says a lot without being half as facetious as this. His short paragraphs and sometimes haiku — like single sentences that constitute 90 per cent of the book make enjoyable reading and he imbues each with insight and meaning that are not to be taken lightly. 

However, as Mr Iyer concludes in his prelude distilled from his 32 years of living in the country with his Japanese wife Hiroko, “The first rule for any foreigner in Japan is not to talk of this-or-that, the second is never to take anything too seriously”. To that I’d add, the only people in the world today who don’t learn from Japan are the Japanese. For most readers, whether familiar with Mr Iyer’s emblematic writings or not, this apparent (I use the word with care) contradiction in terms forms the leitmotif of his Japanese reflections and you will find this coming through in his stylish prose. 

When I visited Japan in the mid-1990s, I declared that this was the most conformist nation in the world, indeed uncomfortably so. I understand now how wrong one could be. Mr Iyer relates the Buddha’s principle of flexing his teachings to reach disparate groups of devotees: “What we call inconsistency” he writes, “speaks in fact of a consistent wish to do the appropriate thing”; the operative words that didn’t occur to me then were “consistency” and “appropriate thing”. This book, for any number of reasons, is a primer for Mr Iyer’s “Beginner” who believes that it’s disgraceful to expose one’s body yet flagrantly opens his or her mind without pause. 

The other widely held conviction is that Japan is not only conformist but regimented as well and the sight of a phalanx of grey-suited men and women marching in step from their workplaces to their eating places on the dot of their lunch break and marching back at the precise end of that break was anathema to my Indian eye. As are the rigid ground rules that govern Japan’s after-office pleasure parlours where feeling ill at ease is the visitor’s problem, not the local’s. Mr Iyer presents this poser several times in his book and at one point relates his experiences at US’s West Point Military Academy to explain how regimentation tightens the bonds not only between cadet and cadet but also between cadet and country. Naïve, maybe, but the alternatives, we know, can be dreadful. The terrible punishments meted out to Allied prisoners of war  by invading Japanese forces during World War  II were carried out in accordance with strict rules and conventions.

Since Mr Iyer is a consummate craftsman who understands that he is writing a beginner’s guide, he doesn’t allow his book to become too heavy with elucidations of the many omnipresent principles of Japan —simplicity, clarity, emptiness and so forth — and uses his subliminal humour to surface as a natural counterpoint. For instance, an unusually longish narrative of his complicated and wildly funny exchange with an Apple delivery boy and the girl from the Apple Japan office concerning the replacement of his damaged keyboard is top-drawer. At other times Mr Iyer extols the Japanese virtues of silence; as he says, “Words only separate what silence brings together”, which I think is, forgiving the convolution, an aphorism worth a thousand words. 

Ironically, though various critics use the expression “elegant” repeatedly to describe Mr Iyer’s writings. Consider his take on Apple Computers, “It remakes the world by keeping most of the world out” and then, “As the world grows more cluttered, the spare Japanese aesthetic (of clean sushi bars and minimalism) grows even more appealing”.  Mr Iyer could have stopped at that, but he doesn’t and there lies his skill; he ends this capsule with, “In a global Varanasi, nothing so clarifies as a bamboo flute in an empty room”.  The images are sparse, but one needs to stop and reflect at length. 

The problem with a winning book when it involves an extremely interesting place and its appealing people is that it may leave the reader thinking more about the book than its subject matter. But these two positions have been known to coalesce in Pico Iyer’s work . The true reader will, therefore, have to read this book so totally that people will believe that he hasn’t read it at all.

A Beginner’s Guide To Japan   

Author: Pico Iyer

Publisher:  Penguin

Price: Rs 499 Pages: 210