 Hi everyone and thank you for joining us at the British Library online. I'm Leslie Downer and I am thrilled to welcome Pico Aya who is beaming in from Santa Barbara in sunny California. I really don't need to introduce him, he is why you are all here but I'll have a go anyway. He's very often described as the world's greatest living travel writer. He was the international correspondent for Time Magazine and has traveled pretty much everywhere in the world and written brilliantly about it. He's written many books including two novels and is much loved account of his early days in Japan The Lady and the Monk and he's given TED Talks which have had nine million views so far and has spoken at Davos and many other places. Now he's come full circle and come back to Japan and written these two books. A Beginner's Guide to Japan and Autumn Light which are delightful and riveting and lyrical and absorbing and utterly different from each other. One might say two sides of the same coin. So we'll be in conversation for the next 40 minutes after which you'll have a chance to ask your questions. Please use the form just below the video and I'll take them as best I can. Also you can order copies of Pico's books using the bookshop button in the menu above and you can also give us your feedback and donate to the library in this menu. The British Library is a charity and your donations help us to continue sharing knowledge. So Pico it's a real privilege and a joy for me. We've known each other since the last century I think for about what more than 25 years when I'm used to hang around Kyoto together. You were in Nara and I was in Kyoto living in a Geisha district. We had some coffees we had some meals and we exchanged views of Japan and at the time you had just written The Lady and the Monk which was all about your youthful experiences of Japan and the beginning of your love affair with your wife Hiroko and we were both young and now dare I say it not anymore alas in the first cluster of youth which seems kind of appropriate because now you're writing about old age and death. Autumn light has the most beautiful elegiac quality it's a kind of elegiac portrait of Japan and I've loved reading your latest books and catching up with your life. So before we actually get into your books I wondered if we could ask a little bit about language you emphasize your outsider status you're always in Japan on a tourist visa and as you told me many years ago you chose not to learn Japanese. Why was that? Well just before I answer it I want to say the reason I'm here is because of you Leslie I'm so thrilled to see you I'm embarrassed to see you because you know Japan and Japanese much better than I and I really should add for anybody who doesn't know that if anybody ever reads The Lady in the Monk now it's only because of the really generous review of yours that's splashed across the front cover but in terms of language when I got to Japan as you remember from our early talks I had one ambition which was not to speak Japanese and it's the only ambition in life that I've succeeded at and you know I should stress I never speak English there I only speak Japanese when I'm going around the neighborhood but it's a very rudimentary Japanese and so of course I'm missing out many subtexts I can't eavesdrop on people the way I otherwise might the subtleties that evade me but you know I noticed when I traveled to England or the U.S. with my Japanese wife whose English is somewhat limited she noticed so much that I never would and the great writer on Foreigners in Japan Donald Ritchie I think said that if you don't speak the language it's like watching a foreign film without subtitles so clearly you're missing aspects of the plot and characterization but on the other hand you're catching all kinds of things that you wouldn't otherwise and I find my Japanese neighbors are much more comfortable than anybody I've ever met elsewhere who's saying as little as possible and I also find that very good at reading body language and reading the air as they say in other words quickly gauging the dynamics and the unspoken currents of any room and so I do sometimes tell my friends who are visiting Japan it's wonderful if you can speak some of the language but really it's more important to speak silence and to speak body language and to and to be attuned to the unsaid and I think when I think about it growing up in England and then the U.S. I was encouraged to keep babbling and I went to Japan partly to learn how to listen but also to be liberated from words in some ways so that I might try to be a little more sensitive to other things it's a poultry excuse but as you say it goes with being a bewildered and fascinated tourist for 33 years I could get an official visa since my wife is Japanese but I feel as if I'm a tourist and that I actually in some ways know less than when I arrived 33 years ago it's called the fresh view isn't it I think quite editors of national newspapers tend to ship in somebody who has not gone native that has the fresh view of a country and I think the Japanese talk about belly talk don't they I mean Japanese are very into communicating without words I mean I found when I was first there and my Japanese was not very good that actually people are perfectly happy if your voice kind of trails off um whereas in England in England if you sort of stop in the middle of a sentence everyone's going to sit there thinking well come on come on what are you trying to say but in Japan it's like people are ready people are kind of it's like it's a tennis match it's not just you holding forth exactly and I think what many people notice when they first arrive in Japan is if you just say hamburgers kudasai oh your Japanese is so good but if you speak beautiful Japanese for three paragraphs they're unsettled and feel intruded upon and they're more comfortable with a foreigner who speaks little Japanese who fits the role in the pantomime of being the foreigner than somebody who's halfway in and that's one of the reasons I live on a tourist visa to reassure my Japanese neighbors I'm not planning to intrude on them I'll never be Japanese and don't presume to be I know my place in the system which is outside Japan and and and enjoying all the benefits that brings often and to go back to the um the fresh view I think I learned soon after I got to Japan this phrase beginner's mind and the way in which you know when you're with a child she'll often see many more things than adults and she'll be missing out again but there are virtues to that beginner's mind yeah I mean I've loved having that beginner's mind in other countries I must say going to Thailand or going to China but I don't speak the language it's a whole it is it's a lovely fresh experience and you see everything very freshly um I just had this little suspicion reading your book that you did seem to know what the people in the ping pong club were talking about will come to ping pong later um and you did seem to know what your father in law was talking about so I just thought maybe you had a deep dark secret maybe your secret was that actually you speak more Japanese than you let on there may be some of that and that would make me a Japanese if ever you hear somebody say I speak really good Japanese it means they don't because no Japanese would ever say that it means they're not catching the self-basement and modesty intrinsic to Japan but you're right I probably have two dirty secrets that my wife would share with you if you were here the first is I'm incredibly good at ping pong vocabulary changed partners all seven chance bowl I can I'm good at the ping pong table stuff and secondly with my father in law he loved to talk unusually so he would talk for about six minutes and I say ah so Desuka is that true and he's talked for another nine minutes I said ah so then he talked for another 11 minutes I said so and he came away saying this is the best conversationalist I've ever met because I couldn't say anything except really and oh and that allowed him to keep speaking very familiar experience um let's move on to autumn light this is autumn light beautiful book beautiful cover and also very evocative um it's a really marvellous book it's partly it's about getting older and the different perspectives you have on a place when you've known it for a long time and on how the world and life and stuff looks different as you get older which we now very sadly have discovered um and so it's kind of light and it's relaxed but there's a sort of undertow of melancholy I thought and it's a kind of sequel to the lady in the monk would you say that's right I would say exactly so and I would say it's partly about how to stay enough with a place with a person with a lifestyle and as you know um most of us know it's relatively easy to go to an ancient capital with 1600 temples and fall in love with somebody and and be bewitched by the exoticism of somewhere but when you've been there 33 years and the new most of your life is going to the laundry and the supermarket and you're with the person you've known for 33 years how do you stay bewitched and how can you keep that enchantment alive and and that seemed a much more interesting challenge and you're right it's absolutely a sequel and and therefore since the first book was about springtime and discovery and this is about autumn and things beginning to pass away how can autumn actually have blessings beyond those of spring and how can the fact that nothing lasts actually move you to appreciate it deeper and I I thought that a lot actually with the pandemic that with mortality looming so imminently upon all of us many of us have actually cherished every moment and every day we've gotten through it and the things we previously took for granted much more than than we had I think when I first went to Japan I'd heard this phrase from Joseph Campbell about how life is a about joyful participation in a world of sorrows and I felt that was actually close to the heart of Japan and that in Japan sadness and beauty have always been into mingles through an unusual degree and that coming from the endless summer of California autumn was was where Japan lives in its deeper self it pretends to be spring and all the frothy pretty cherry blossoms but really it's the maple leaves and that question of how can you exalt and things even though you know they're falling away and you're falling away from them so I'm glad if it struck you as melancholy and I included the the ping pong as a way of reminding myself and anybody else that in the middle of the irrevocable facts of life that we're all moving towards the termination that there is that melancholy arc is momentless as much moment occasion for laughter and merriment as ever there was and what hits me in the ping pong club is my friends and neighbours who are in their 80s are probably having a better time than when they were in their 20s and when they're in their 20s the burdens of society and the workplace were coming down on them now they're suddenly freed from that and finding a joy that's the deeper because it's come through sorrow and emerge at the other end. There are these words in Japanese that I know you know very well like sabishii which is not just lonely but it's the kind of beauty of loneliness there's lots of poetry about that yes natsukashi it's not it's in English it's such a kind of dead word it's just homesick but natsukashi is about the beauty and the melancholy of kind of yearning for your your old hometown. Yes monogramashi the sadness of things and I remember I learned that the latin equivalent when I was a kid in England but in in japan it's much deeper than in any other culture I've met and while I was writing my book I was thinking where I can maybe I can write a book that's like an ozu movie from the 1950s a Tokyo story or late spring and what I love about those films is that they'll often be the sound of a festival outside while somebody is crying in the room next next door and it's about bringing those two together and in some ways about keeping up the festival excitement and optimism in the midst of a life which takes things away. Yeah I mean I love the way that autumn is almost like a character in the book autumn is such a powerful force in the book that's so Japanese that sort of focus on the seasons and you write about the changes in the weather you write about the trees you write about the customs you write about the different festivals the different activities that people have in different seasons and you know it's obvious that the whole Japanese awareness of the seasons is something that strikes a great chord in you but um but then there's also Hiroko who is your wife who is absolutely not at all autumnal far from it she's a force of nature you write about her whizzing around she's cleaning she's cleaning so fast she's whipping the genes you were going to put on into the washing machine she's sort of going to the shrine she's putting her father's favorite tea in front of his photo on the altar I mean she's just full of life and yeah not at all autumnal in any way and not at all melancholy so I felt you know there's these two sides to the story you're telling some of it maybe is your own life in dear slope but there's also Hiroko's take because she's your wife so she tells you everything as wives do so you have her in a way you see Japan through her eyes in a way. Yes I mean I'm cheating really because it's an intimate book about Japan and the Japanese family but it's through my wife and her family I'd probably be too shy about writing about my own but you're absolutely right and I think of course when I wrote the book I assumed I was writing about the mix of wistfulness and buoyancy and the passing of time and mortality all that and as soon as it came out everyone said oh you've written a book about your wife so the writer is always the last person to know what he's actually writing about but in some ways Hiroko when I first wrote about 30 years ago and now does embody for me a lot of Japan partly in just the way you mentioned because as you say she's in a leather jacket roaring around a neighborhood on her motorbike and going off to sell high fashion clothes but then comes back to put fresh food before her father's you know grave or as it were every day of the year and to me that speaks for Japan and I think many of us when we first arrived in Japan a struck at how western and modern and it's contradictory it seems and the longer I've been there the more I find is very much rooted in in the eighth century and that actually beneath those surfaces it's a traditional custom loving place and that's very much how Hiroko is so if you saw her and I know you've met her you would say he has a very kind of western leaning cool modern woman and if you began to talk to her she'd be talking about spirits and ghosts and praying to the kami sama the local gods and you say here's somebody from a deep ancient indigenous culture and I'm so glad also that you mentioned the seasons because I think actually when I brought out my first book you reviewing it noticed how I'd structured it around the seasons and the subtitle was four seasons in Kyoto and my working subtitle for this was one season in the suburbs to make the contrast that it's a much more concentrated experience after you've been somewhere 30 years and and also rather than exotic dazzling Kyoto this is a life in a very typical worker day banal seeming but in fact magical neighborhood that doesn't have the obvious appeal and when some of my friends come and visit Japan and they'll often as with you I'm sure they'll ask about what's the religion in Japan and sometimes I say I think the religion is the seasons and that's how people learn about changelessness and change and that's how they orient themselves and as you've witnessed more than I everyone gets up in her Sunday best and goes out to watch the maple leaves in late November I think almost the way in England people would go to church in other words in order to be joined in a congregation and to learn certain lessons about the the cycles of time and and to be put in place to be reminded of all these forces much larger than we are to which we are subject and so I as again you've written about it know more about it than I do but I do feel that the Japanese connection with the seasons is at the heart of their sense of reverence and attention and humility many of the things that are so striking in that culture and and the only equivalent would be a church going person in the west maybe but I just remind everybody to put your questions in the place at the bottom of the menu where you're supposed to put them and yeah I mean as you were talking I was thinking about what makes Japan so unique and it is that kind of extraordinary mix of unbelievably ancient I mean up in the mountains with these Yamabushi these mountain priests who blow conch shells and take cold baths under waterfalls and commune with the gods on the one hand and then on the other hand you know Shinjuku in Tokyo with its kind of skyscrapers and yet it's the same country and actually it's sort of the same people I mean you know some of some of those Yamabushi can kind of do this Japanese thing of put on the set of clothing become a Yamabushi take it off and become a farmer because I don't think that kind of thing happens in the west particularly exactly I mean I think the Japanese are as you say uniquely gifted and living in many different contexts all at once which to us looks contradictory but it's just the way a bento box will have the first course the last course in the middle course all in the same place so again speaking of religions some of my friends who visit are surprised that as you know in the last week of the year many Japanese will go into a Christian church and listen with great reverence to bark and handle and a week later they'll go to the Buddhist temple for the ceremonial ringing of 108 ringings of the bell that purge the sins of the year just past and then a few hours later they'll go to a Shinto shrine for an auspicious greeting of the new year and some of us from the west will say wait a minute how can they go to three places of worship and bring their whole heart to each of them in the same eight days and they would say each serves a different purpose it's like talking to your mother your sister and your brother you're related to all of them but you speak to them in in different ways and as you were saying you have different selves for each of them and the one reason I write a lot about my neighborhood in the autumn light book this is a perfect example of what you were saying and the beginning of your comment because literally the main streets are called school Dori and park Dori using the English words all the houses of western style it's built more or less to look like a suburb of California but there it is in the suburbs of the eighth century capital of Nara and as you know the center of Nara is the largest municipal park in Japan it's all temples and pagodas and shrines and most visibly 1200 year who pretty much ruled the place and I think that's very much my image even in the 21st century of Japan which is a makeshift post-war western place on the outskirts of something very deep and and changeless and sometimes I think Japan changes more and more on the surface so has not to change so much deep down which is why I think in the other book I wrote I described it as an old man in a in a planet Hollywood t-shirt because as you know it's more up to the moment and and hip to global fashions than almost anyway but that doesn't really make it any less old or less Japanese than ever it was and as you say people can comfortably straddle those those centuries when I first moved to Japan going straight from New York City I settled into a temple in Kyoto with all the romantic expectations a foreigner brings to a temple and just as you were describing I was rather surprised that the monks spent most of their time sitting around watching baseball and drinking beer because that wasn't my notion of a temple but it was just as you were saying about the Yamabushi these monks would be absolutely monastic when they had to pray every morning at 5 a.m. and absolutely normal and non-monastic when they were relaxing in the evening it actually reminds me of going to Zoroji temple in Tokyo and meeting a monk there and chatting away to him in Japanese and then he said well he asked where I was from I said England he said ah Manu and suddenly kind of came alive but he was a monk he was a serious monk just going back to Shinto I just wondered what do you think what do you how do you think Hiroko feels about washing the family graves does she see any contradiction it's just like normal is it to do with belief when she washes the family graves and puts the tea before her father's photograph um what how do you think it is for her such a deep in searching question because you're right it looks to us like ritual or even like superstition but I think religion in Japan is not theoretical and analytical it's about customs rather than texts and so it's very much about belief and you know she prays to the Buddha and she petitions the Shinto gods just yesterday I was feeling rather tired so she started writing the heart suitor on my back as a kind of talisman or protection in fact yesterday night we met a friend whose wife was quite ill and Hiroko instantly took the kind of rosary she just two weeks ago bought at a temple and gave it to him to give to his Iranian wife and said this is what's going to keep her going so very very much so that I think it's as serious as as any recitation of him or some would be in England and Hiroko was actually just saying in answer to the friends how when she comes to England say she's very happy to go to the church or cathedral and pray there because that seems the appropriate thing in that context and of course the Japanese are more context sensitive than anybody I know and the other thing that came out from your man you loving monk was just that the relation between public and private is quite clear there but the relation between surface and depth is very ambiguous and even after many years it's hard to see the relation between them and that's part of what makes it fascinating it's it's some level very impenetrable when people talk about not being able to graph Japan it's partly they're saying that they don't know how to relate to the depths of the country to the surface that they see if for example is that a real monk or not he probably is a thousand percent real monk but more than a vicar in England he feels no embarrassment about expressing the other sides of himself. There's an implied comparison throughout your books between your two homes I feel Japan and Santa Barbara in fact you have a great quote from Philip Larkin about living between California and Japan which is rather surprising so autumn light is about old age and death in a country with a famously rapidly aging population. Do you think the Japanese deal better with these seismic events than we do? Are they less likely to rage against the dying of the likes? Could you write a book about growing old in California? Such a wise perception Leslie and having spent all of my life officially based in California since the age of seven I would say it's very hard to be a grown-up in California for me at least I haven't figured out how one would raise children or how one would be over the age of 30 in California which is sweeping generalizations but by that I mean when I was growing up in England California but which me and my friends because it was a land of long horizons and possibility and opportunity and I think all of that is true it's the capital of the future tense but and so I love being here when I was a teenager in my 20s but as I got closer to 30 I thought I need a hard dose of reality and for that I have to go to a much older culture and that's when I moved to Japan precisely because as you put it so perfectly in the quote from Dylan Thomas I don't feel my neighbors in Japan are raging against the dying of the light I think they're celebrating as you were saying earlier the dying of the light because that's the that's the only response to reality any argument for reality is an argument you're going to lose so you might as well work with it as a as you would with a sparse actually or with a colleague and I think this has been very pronounced to me during the pandemic season because I've been going back and forth between California and Japan and again this is a sweeping thing to say but I think many of my Californian friends were really shocked and put out by the arrival of the coronavirus as if it was an affront and a disruption of all their plans and of course it's been a disruption of all our plans but in Japan there was much more a sense that people are prepared for difficulty and don't expect life to be challenge free and for 1400 years they've been living with constant typhoons and earthquakes and forest fires and warfare and so nobody around me in Japan was saying oh this is a great shock that our lives have suddenly been thrown off course they were they're watchful and worried of course as anybody would be but I think there was more the sense this is the way of things and that's why earlier I spoke about the difference between endless summer and autumn and the reason I wrote about autumn and this book partly is that autumn and winter there was much a part of life as as summer and buoyancy and youth and I think when I moved to Japan I had this very strong sense that I was leaving a culture that was predicated on the pursuit of happiness which is especially acute in California for a culture that's based on the Buddhist truth of the reality of suffering and that that was what I needed to live with in the second half of my life though that the abundant possibilities of California was so exhilarating to me as somebody in England and after I came over here so so you're right and there are many exceptions to this but I do think as you say the relation to reality is very different and around me here as I sit in California it's really people are living in a state of grace but the funny thing about Japan right now is that it's in a state of emergency officially where we were two weeks ago in Kyoto and Osaka but the state of emergency is a state of normalcy in other words if you were to fly to Japan tomorrow all the kids are in school the trains are packed the buses are packed the 17 people squeezing into an elevator on the way to the health club looks exactly the way it always does and the notion that the state of emergency and normalcy might be the same thing is one that almost makes sense in the culture maybe of East Asia China South Korea Japan but doesn't translate at all to California where a state of emergency is an exception to the rule rather than the rule I would think most Americans think they're never going to die and they're busy we must go on about America having facelifts and all sorts of other things and making dead sure that they're going to stay alive because I think Japanese are much happier to just take life as it comes so true and I think that's true generally but of course especially so in California in the east coast at least there are seasons on harsh weather harsh weather to put us in place but California has such a golden charmed quality that you're right it's easy to forget the fact that death is approaching up the avenue should I remind everybody again to please put your questions into the little box beneath the menu I think it is so I think we should we'd better move on sadly to Japan and what makes Japan Japan and you have these two books this is the beginner's guide to Japan with this staggering cover and this is your autumn light these are like the most different covers the two books could possibly have I know it's only the British covers but I just wondered what you have what you what this makes you think of when you see these two covers that which are both supposedly about Japan and yeah and and even more surprising both written at exactly the same time and I'm planning to bring them out in exactly the same month and put exactly the same publisher but what it first brings to mind is my editor in London just like my editor in New York to oh these books are so very very different and a part of me rejoiced in that because I brought them out as brother and sister as well or maybe husband and wife but complimentary opposites partly because we all know that if you care a lot about somebody or someplace what you feel at 10 o'clock in the evening is very different from what you feel at six next morning and then you have a row and then you have a beautiful romance and it's constantly in in flux and it's almost reductive to concentrate only on one aspect of that complex emotional relationship and another aspect is that near the heart feels one thing and the head notices another often contradictory but most of all I feel that as we were saying Japan is a culture that lives very calmly with contradictions and in Kyoto they sometimes say every reverse has a reverse in other words as we were saying about your your monk or what I was saying about Shinto and Buddhism every possible contradiction becomes part of a very very consistent hole in in Japan so as you as we're saying at the outset I've lived there for 33 years now as a tourist so on the one hand I'm very much part of a Japanese family because I've known my Japanese wife and my Japanese stepchildren for 33 years I've been in the same little two room apartment in the same neighborhood for 28 years I've been playing ping-pong with the same elderly folks for 16 years so I'm deeply within those but as you said earlier I'm always going to be an outsider and I wanted to give voice to both those sides of me which I'm sure you having been to Japan even longer than I speaking the language but still never being Japanese I'm sure you know this feeling and that you can I think better than most people you Leslie can see it as an insider but you'll always be seeing it as an outsider too so the book Autumn Light with that very delicate cover it's really being about being in the midst of a neighborhood and almost I'm invisible in that book just watching Japan unfold itself and the season unfold itself around me and the persona in the second book is that of again a bewildered and fascinated foreigner who's just arrived last night in Narita Airport in Tokyo and is noticing everything that's different about the country and startling and impenetrable and I think whenever we're looking for a perfect partner or place or job we're looking for that mix of the familiar and the fresh we want the fresh to keep us engaged and stimulated and surprised we want the familiar to calm our hearts and give a certain steadiness and so I think I was trying to give voice to two of the extreme selves with which I relate to Japan and I'm very glad if they look different and I think probably feel very different too this this book actually um what it is is it's it's quite a lot of aphorisms isn't it it's kind of brief aphorisms I think quite a lot of heavyweight comments quite a lot of things that you have to sit and think about and some lightweight comments some observations some factoids um each snippet is very interesting um thought provoking sometimes annoying sometimes I wonder if you're teasing sometimes I wonder if you're making a joke um some I agree with some I disagree with some of your aphorisms I've never heard of before such as being able to order a buddhist monk on amazon I'm very envious of that I wish we could order buddhist monks here in London but we can't so all in all it's a kind of sort of patchwork quilt picture of Japan as seen through your eyes and it's also in I think in its way it's also very Japanese I mean it's compact it's pithy it's to the point it's like a haiku maybe a load of haiku like an ink painting um or like a zen koan it's like juxtapositions that spark new insights so I wondered um how you put it all together is it things have you been taking notes over the last 26 years or is it things you suddenly thought of have you been keeping a notebook um or is it the result of deep pondering well I must say Leslie that is the perfect response that's what I would dream any reader would say about this book and especially I loved what you said of calling it haiku saying how deeply Japanese it is because of all the empty space between the lines and when you said that some of the sentences you want to stay with for a long time um that was very much my hope so to call it a pen and ink classical Japanese sumi drawing is the ultimate compliment but yes the reason both these books are the way they are is that um I I do keep notes on every day I've been in Japan so I've literally gathered maybe 8000 pages of notes and when I came to write these books some years ago um I saw this huge pile that was getting bigger the longer I was in Japan and I thought how how will I ever manage to complete either book and as I would start organizing my notes I'd go to the ping pong club and come back with 20 pages of new notes so I was very much going backwards so remarkably they're both as you know very small books and I spent 16 years trying to make them as small as possible partly that sense that silence is more the Japanese language than speech that if they were very long-winded that would be counter to the aesthetic that I've absorbed in Japan and partly that sense that absence is is it sometimes fills us up even more than presence you go into the room of somebody you care about and she's not there she's more there than if she's physically there and that's I feel a very Japanese principle so I so the short answer is faced with this tower of notes I thought well I can't um begin to get my mind around 33 years of experience so why don't I just settle on one season in one tiny neighborhood and I can instantly dispense with 90% of my notes and just concentrate on the autumn light book and then of course I had all kinds of indispensable stuff I couldn't bear not inflicting on an audience and so I used much of that for the second book that as you say quotes moments observations that seem to open a door and invite the reader in because I think that's what I love about the haiku or the pen and ink drawing that it's a collaboration it's not one person laying down the law it's one person offering as you said maybe an annoying suggestion so that the reader can engage in a dialogue and when you said you disagree with some of those that's almost a perfect response because that means that you and I can have fun with them and indeed I was teasing and between us we can come up with something much richer and more refined than what I put down on the page so that was very much part of my deliberate notion so with the beginner's guide which is maybe 200 pages I think I probably originally had about 1,000 pages of these one liners or koans and just season after season after season I would sift and new ones would come in but really I was working on the space between the lines more than as much as the sentences themselves so everything you said was perfect because I think you are catching up catching on to the fact that it's it's about not just what's unsaid but what you get by having two contradictory sentences right next to one another which is a way to begin to understand Japan I think. Let's home in on some of your points which may or may not ring a bell with our audience. Early on in the beginner's guide you talk about what you see as the Japanese inclination towards play acting that your persona is something that you can put on like a set of clothes which makes me think actually of geisha I've seen who put on their white makeup first of all they just look like ordinary girls on the street you wouldn't know they were geisha then they put on their makeup they put on their kimono and they actually become somebody else and that makes me think well I've I've felt that myself when I've been wearing kimono I behave differently I hold my body differently from start you have to but I am somebody else and you know we have this thing in the west don't we about being oneself it makes me think of pure gint to thine own self be true whereas I thought it was really liberating in Japan that nobody assumes you have a true self that was the impression I had that you could be anybody you want so I could recreate myself in the back not just once between England and Japan but like every day every moment do you think that is that the sort of thing you were thinking of absolutely and that the aim often is not to be yourself because that's an intrusion when I go to a convenience store here in California dare I say there's a good possibility the person at the cash register will tell me all about her breakup with her boyfriend and her parents problems and what she had for breakfast this morning when I go into the 7-11 in Japan the woman will try to be as invisible as possible so she's like the platonic model of a convenience store worker so that she's she's not Mariko Yoshikawa and she's keeping and her job is to be almost identical to every other convenience store worker so as not to impose upon all the customers she meets so exactly right it's it's a place where you try not to be yourself and just as you said about the Yamabushi selves that you put on and take off constantly and right at the beginning of my book there's a section on the Love Hotel and I think with any piece of writing I want to be very precise and detailed in particular but also to tell a kind of universal allegorical story so I have that in their party as a genuine suggestion for anybody here who hasn't been to Japan before if it's a Saturday night or better maybe a non-Saturday night and you can't find a place to stay go to a love hotel it's less expensive than the regular hotel it's much more beautifully appointed it's more intriguing it's pretty lavish actually and good value for the price while a typical Japanese hotel regular hotel is actually impersonal it's impeccable but it has no imaginative flourishes and it's actually rather boring so I'm offering that practical tip for the visitor to Japan but what lies beneath it is that interesting difference between a love hotel and a regular hotel because my sense of Japan is in public people want to be as I say is invisible as anonymous as possible and to fit within this symphonic orchestra that's public Japan but in private there is wildly colored and eccentric and full of mad hobbies as many people I've met I thought the British were good in that way but I think the Japanese are even beyond them so the fact that the love hotel is so full of peculiar features and intricate details while the regular hotel is so boring I think speaks a little bit to Japan and when again a visitor comes for the first time to Japan she'll sometimes tell me it's such a conformist place and I'll say it's trying hard to be extremely conformist on the surface because it's wildly non-conformist deep down and I'm guessing for me or nothing that that's your experience too well yeah I mean as you say you know basically the Japanese as anyone that's been in Japan knows the Japanese work very hard and they play very hard they play just as hard as they work in fact you you wrote very nicely the Japanese are so committed to hard work we sometimes overlook their rare gift for having fun and you also said Japan abounds in fantasy spaces love hotels being a prime example and you describe it as a culture that deals with illusions by marking out a place for them and I thought is that one of the the points that there's like a place for everything and everything in its place so for example in the old days and the days of geisha culture the man would have his wife and children on one side of the river Kamo in Kyoto living in their nice house and he'd go to work and then he'd cross the river Kamo into the the the carnival area of the geisha and the kabuki and and there he could be somebody else and he could be with other women who uh who had a different relationship with him but both of those were valid worlds for him unfortunately only men could have that that that latitude but is that the sort of thing you're thinking of when about you know the Japanese love of play and and I think women actually can have that latitude too in the terms of what you were saying about the geisha you know she plays a certain role when she's the geisha but as soon as it's off she can be as as wild as she wants perhaps but yes and in the sense of illusion I was remembering how I think across East Asia many of us in the west are surprised that um there are theme parks everywhere and that I think for some of my Japanese neighbors to go to a replica of the Eiffel Tower uh around Tokyo is as good as going to the real thing and maybe better because it actually looks more perfectly like the Eiffel Tower than the one in Paris thrown with crowd stars and we are taken aback by that but it's a kind of a leap of faith and indeed the longer I've been in Japan the more I see that a replica or a fake Eiffel Tower can move me just as much or fake Van Gogh let's say can move me just as much as the real thing seen in the Louvre and I think travelers are often in search of the authentic sometimes our sense of the authentic is very superficial and when my friends come and they say I want to see the real Japan I say well do go to a geisha house do go to a 300 year old traditional inn but go to McDonald's too and just watch the way the women are speaking and not speaking covering their mouths when um when they laugh and that's as truly Japanese as as an ancient sushi bar would uh would be uh and and so yes I think that the place for illusion is is important and the Japanese are very good at making their peace with situations that look very difficult to us including the dual families that you were describing and um I think it's because because they know where reality belongs and where illusion does so I agree with you entirely can I just remind everybody to please ask questions we haven't got very many so far um um sorry so we get more questions from you okay okay I've got lots here um there's also the manga side of Japan in your pages we have mascots robots puppets who are as you say a whole lot more noisy and outgoing and assertive and colorful than the people around them um and you write about hotels staffed by robots I think that's something that kind of puzzles visitors to Japan the whole kawaii culture do you have any insights into this how does that fit into I don't know the japan of zen and temples and so on where does that come from well it's a land of convenience stores for sure and it's it's wonderful you ask that question because just this morning I was researching something else and I found that the prime minister of japan in 2016 Mr Abe at the um 2016 olympics dressed up just up as the Nintendo's character Mario and I thought which other head of state anywhere in the world would have the temerity or courage to um to dress up as a cartoon character and it shows that again cartoon characters which we think of as two-dimensional can be three-dimensional in Japan again many of my friends are surprised when they find that there are services at character temples for um for needles that have given given their lives up for sewing or for badges whose belts we are using and I think just that sense of um what is animate and what isn't is very different so I think anime is the natural expression of a culture based on animism and I think I cite in one of my books how my wife when she was small and six years old and she kicks the table and her father will say please don't cook kick the table because that table has a spirit it's done nothing to hurt you kicking the table is like kicking um your brother and to ask again that sounds strange but of course you see this in all the wonderful films of Murakami like spirited away or pincers mononake every blade of grass every piece of dust is believed to have a spirit in japan as it would in many indigenous cultures and therefore um my wife will talk to teddy bear or when we get into a train she'll say um this train's name is Henry and instantly the train ride has a very different quality than if I'm riding British rail from from London to Oxford or whatever and it's actually a great gift that they have I've read in japan about 2.5 dimensional characters in other words not 2d and not 3d um and again they have a much more nuanced sense than things I think old cultures as a whole and especially in East Asia specialize in not thinking in terms of black and white but more as in the classical yin yang that black always has a piece of white in it and white has a piece of black in it and and it's too reductive to try and separate things um so yeah there's much more I could I could say about anime but for example Marie Kondo who at least in the US has become a great hero with decluttering she'll tell people um when you're throwing out your teddy bears please cover their eyes so they won't be too wounded and people hear oh what a fascinating idea but that's that's pure shinto and nobody in japan would think twice about that because their teddy bears like their dishcloths like their teabags all all have souls and so I think when I first went to Japan I was I was confused about the the ubiquity of robots for example and I was taken back in recent years goes back to your question about illusion this thing that's got a lot of play in the west how grand aging grandparents whose daughter has moved to London and don't have a daughter to come and visit them will literally hire a young woman from an agency an actress to play their their daughter and come and knock on that door every Sunday say hello mom hello dad it's so lovely to see you haven't seen you for a week let's spend a lovely Sunday afternoon together and I guess to us that doesn't make sense but I think in the Japanese context they're prepared to suspend disbelief to kill that hole in their hearts and it's a very practical response and I do think the Japanese are much more pragmatic as some people across East Asia than maybe here in the United States and so if you've got a problem try to find a way to solve it and and puts put aspects of yourself to the side so that you can better receive the gift that that actress will bring um and as you know life in Japan is very friction-free and people are very good at navigating difficult things you were talking about living with grief and living with death too just um two months ago I was in Kyoto and my wife's uncle died and as with every Japanese funeral what struck me was death is universal grief and sorrow loss are universal but the Japanese have such a practical and ritualized and efficient way of dealing with death so as soon as he died everybody knew that they would gather at 6 p.m for um some prayers and 8 a.m the next morning and they would have a slap up dinner with their corpse right in the middle and they would be offering beer and food to the corpse and then they'd go for the cremation they pick out the bones um and and take the ash home and have another big dinner and give the bottle of beer to the iron of ash and at this moment when we're all at a loss and we don't know what to do they're told which marks to hit and I think there's a real wisdom in that so they're grieving as much as anyone else would but they're grieving five days later after certain of the logistical details of death are taken care of and I wish we in the west had that so that because I was thinking about the possible death of a loved one today and I was thinking it would send me into a flurry and I'm doing a hundred things all at once and I wouldn't know where to start and I would be so grateful for a sort of Japanese manual that would tell me this is where you have to be at noon this way have to be at 6 p.m and then a week from now when you're alone again you'll have time really to be with your grief but for now we'll maybe help to alleviate a little bit of it and I mean you must have had even more experience of this in Japan than I and probably this is your experience of how things are um not I mean what what I was thinking about actually was when you were talking about um all these fantasy places I thought about Las Vegas I thought quite a lot of these things that we find in Japan are actually in the west with us too and quite a lot of this kind of taking on of roles is in the west with us too and we do put on different sets of clothing and become different people um so and also you know caregivers um people are people are people are growing old and growing lonely um I remember being up in the countryside in the north of Japan and there's these little villages where there are only grandparents possibly a bit like your suburb in Nara and the young people have simply gone um I was actually offered a house for sale uh and it would have been £2,000 it was a little house and it had the thatched roof and corrugated iron walls um and it was very damp but it was like this old lady had lived there alone and then she died and her family had disappeared um so there's a whole there's a sort of world that is coming to an end in some ways I don't know actually whether whether that that part of Japan is going to carry on I don't know if it will I know it's it's shocking when you read that when the last century began 50% of Japan was agricultural and by the end there was only 2% there was we were saying earlier nonetheless the rights that go with a very old agricultural society propitiating the gods to being a good rice harvest and all the rest at least where I live is still very much alive and well and you're so right I think the biggest demographic problem certainly certainly in Japan is the aging population and so in the autumn light book I wanted to take that out of the realm of statistics that we read so often and and bring it into a human reality and also to show that a story about death doesn't have to be sad and there's a book about the aging doesn't have to be all elegy as I was saying before but has moments of celebration and as I was listening to you talk about some illusion again I couldn't agree with you more and we find it's so strange that people might hire a daughter or a father for the weekend but in our culture we're ever more glad to buy into the girlfriend experience and you know if you go to Manila or Bangkok there's no shortage of Westerners more than happy more or less to rent a girlfriend and tell themselves she loves me this is the best love I've ever had and we're doing exactly the same we do it when we it suits us but then when it takes another form we say how bizarre and that I think that's slightly a double standard on our part we are also developing robot carers over here I don't know yeah I mean people you know some if you are a lonely person it's better to have a robot than to have nobody at all which is a bit like your your manga um we do have some questions um now Jonathan Matheson writes if one doesn't speak Japanese and is not married to a Japanese person how can one penetrate the surface of Japanese life and culture um I don't think it's so hard to pick up conversational Japanese that's not so difficult the three alphabets can be or two of the alphabets very easy and one involves memorizing Chinese characters so that's very very hard but um for example in my case I write a lot about ping pong because with limited Japanese as soon as I joined the ping pong club I was the lone foreigner among 30 Japanese people in fact I was a sort of mascot I'm like a Justin Bieber figure because I'm the youngest and at my five foot seven I'm almost the tallest in this little group and it's remarkable how much kindness and warmth and solicitude um they show me and I feel I've learned Japan um I learned about Japan as well from the ping pong club as um as I would if I were in a workplace or university whatever and I know just which woman whenever the score is four four she's going to say it's five three and I know just which woman who's always giving everybody else a chance to play and I know which just which guy when he's nine to one ahead will start hitting the ball so it becomes a nine nine game and much more interesting in other words I think I have a pretty keen sense of who they are and they have a very good sense of me even though the words we share are very limited and so if you study TE or if you join any kind of association in Japan um I think you can get to know them as well as you would know anyone in England and in fact I two weeks ago flew back from Japan to California and I was thinking I know my ping pong friends in Japan I think better than I know most of the people around me in California where I extensively um share the language and I think I have a stronger emotional bond uh I somebody recently told me that 80 percent of communication is non-verbal and in fact the word is words are only like the surface of the froth on on the top of the ocean and Japan has really underlined the truth of that for me um and the way in which you can form a strong bond with somebody with whom you have relatively few words I you've gathered already maybe I've been with my wife 33 years and I mentioned she has English is limited and my Japanese is more limited and I don't think we've often had any communications problems at all partly because the Japanese are so good at as I said communicating without words so don't be daunted I think you will find a way into Japan um and you will probably find quickly some Japanese friends and partners too I was going to say Japanese are they're incredibly friendly I mean it's it is unbelievably easy to make friends in Japan just wherever you go maybe it's due with being a foreigner I don't know but I mean I did things like tea ceremony and um flower arranging and yeah immediately one is just drawn into the group uh there's a very open people and very innocent and I think it does have little to do with being a foreigner I mean to be a foreigner in Japan is to enjoy all the beauties and graces of culture with none of the tax in terms of social pressure so it's an it's a charm position to be in and you're right people are inherently interested in us in the way they might not in some of their other neighbors sorry I cut you off the next question I should say there's a funny question here um do Japanese this is Jonathan Matheson again do Japanese understand humour in the way we do in the west do they tell jokes do they laugh at themselves like the British uh thank you Jonathan and I am keen to hear what Leslie says about this but your you pinpointed something essential because I think humour is one of the most culturally specific things ever so um I can't understand any of what my wife finds funny and I subject her to Borat or Johnny English or Monty Python whatever she said oh how could you watch anything so boring so yes um I don't understand Japanese humour at all and I'm not sure most of my Japanese friends understand our humour at all I think they're good at laughing at themselves and I find that Japanese jokes I hear all follow a certain pattern every time I go back to the ping-pong club all the males there will say have you got divorced yet and that's a joke I think and all the women will say how's your wife and that's not a joke but um I think everyone in the world is good at um laughing themselves and the Japanese as Leslie said earlier are good at not taking things too seriously partly because they think other things including their duty and their work related obligations so seriously what's your experience Leslie of jokes goodness me I was just racking my brains trying to think of a Japanese joke um I don't know Japanese laugh a lot they find lots of things funny it's more things happening in their lives um I had to home in on things like Kyogen and and Rakugo which are all about things it's usually um the the servant making a fool of the master it's that sort of thing that they which is which is maybe a more like a Tokugawa period joke um there's lots of goodness me there's lots of jokes on television aren't there but I'm afraid I didn't spend a whole lot of time watching Japanese television so I'm not quite sure what they are about maybe maybe you've seen jokes on Japanese TV there's lots of humorous programs do you remember there was Takeshi and um oh this this other guy I've forgotten his name very funny yes summer summer yes it's almost it seems to me almost the only thing on Japanese television every night from seven to nine p.m and it's mostly lots of people laughing laughing laughing um at everything that's said and because yes I just read Jorge Luis Borges said um that the grace of Japan is the other person is always right and another way to put it is the other person is always funny so whatever you say people are going to be so responsive and enthusiastic and encouraging that they'll laugh even if it isn't meant to be funny but none of it makes any sense to me um but but I would say that it's one of the many ways in which the stereotype doesn't hold because Leslie was saying that jolly jolly people and especially out in the country that um it's as full of sort of mirth and warmth as anywhere in a royal place in in Europe and I like what Leslie was saying about the servant getting the better of the master because to me that sounds like Shakespeare or Molière or really it's the universal stories yeah no there are lots of funny stories um now Laura writes is it hard writing about people in your real life such as your wife and her family has it ever caused problems it's very very hard and I've never found a good way to do it and when I wrote my first book about Japan 33 years ago um I tried to describe everything that happened but I gave all the real people fake names which is the worst possible thing and confuse the reader because say my book was suddenly characterized as a novel as if I am my wife to be fictional characters but that was my fault by not making things clear um but by and large uh I think every writer and I'm sure Leslie is the same tries to think about what another person will be embarrassed by and to keep it out but I've also quickly learned that it's impossible to anticipate the responses of people and to that extent that liberates one I remember with my first book on Japan there were two things that struck me once I described going into an open mic event and I said there was a guy with a green shirt and a guy in a white shirt there and when the book came out the guy in the green shirt I can't believe you would say that I want to press suit that's the most terrible thing anyone's ever said about me the guy in the white shirt said thank you thank you you've made my life you've given it meaning I'm so touched that you said something so beautiful about me um so I realized that that's really the reader is creating the book in his or her own mind and there's nothing I can do to really control those responses the other more interesting um response I had I was very young when I wrote that book and very tackless and I made a lot of very simple diplomatic mistakes and I wrote at length about the love life of a former American monk whom I only met once and I didn't write very generously about it and before the book went to print um I sent the manuscript to him and understandably he was infuriated and he did talk about setting his lawyers on me because I'd taken the liberty of knowing nothing about him meeting him once and then writing this unflattering account of him so I said well I understand your reservations I'll take this out to amend it however you see fit he said well I'll get back to you and two months later he got back to me and he said everything's fine whatever you want to say about me please say no problem and I thought gosh all those years of monastic training really did help and he came to some degree of wisdom and forgiveness and detachment that humbled me and there was far beyond what I would have felt in the same position and I was really touched that he had the generosity to let go of his image in the world and of course his doing that made sure that I amended it quite a lot and tried relatedly to ensure that there wasn't anything too shameful in there it reminds me my one of my first books was called on the narrow road to the deep north and it was about a farming village in Tohoku and about following Bashar's path and I wrote about the real people in this farming village I changed their names and then I discovered to my horror that the local schoolmaster had got hold of a copy of the English edition and had translated it and they were all reading it and when I went back I was actually I was terrestrial because I had written they thought I was writing about Bashar and I was actually writing about them and I thought oh dear oh my god they're going to be so angry at me they were just thrilled that they had been written about in a book that was published in England they thought this was marvellous and there's one bloke who was a poet whose hair was he had long hair and I said it was like a lion's mane and when I saw him he said oh you said I was like a lion that's wonderful so yeah you can't you can't anticipate people's responses I think we're running out of time Pika this is very tough but I'm so glad you mentioned that book because when I first got to Japan one of the books I really learned about Japan Farm was on the narrow your book about Bashar so because you've been that you got them quite a few years before I and that became one of my textbooks and and guidebooks to Japan so I'm glad it sort of culminates our conversation here today. Maybe I can slip in one last question which is are you working on a new book? I am I mean in a selfish way about which I'm guilty the pandemic has been a dream for me because I've got to spend 400 straight days at my desk because I never could otherwise so I broke the brack of four different manuscripts last year and I think one will come out next year about visions of paradise everybody everywhere from Iran to North Korea to Jerusalem to Varanasi to in fact Koyasan the temple filled mountain in the middle of Japan so yes this has been a productive year for me. That's marvelous well thank you very much Pika it's been just wonderful to see you again and wonderful to talk to you and everybody thank you very much for your excellent questions and good night.