TRAVERSE

THE ANALYST
HOME IS EVERY PLACE
WRITTEN BY PICO IYER
PICO IYER WRITES ABOUT THE INFLUENCE JAPANESE AMERICAN
ARCHITECT, ISAMU NOGUCHI, HAS ON HIS PERCEPTION OF HOME
BEING IN EVERY PLACE. THIS IS A PERSPECTIVE OF LIVING WITH-
OUT BOUNDARIES BY CHOICE. FOR IYER, “HOME IS NOT JUST THE
PLACE WHERE YOU ARE BORN—IT’S THE PLACE WHERE YOU BE-
COME YOURSELF.”
When I walk out of the little apartment where I live, for much
of the year, in Japan, I have to shake myself and tell myself
I’m not in southern California. The little lanes are straight,
and run between two-storey Western houses with two-car
garages and name-plates on their front walls to commemorate
their owners. Many of the cars parked outside of them
are Jaguars, BMWs, even Cadillacs, clearly never meant for
streets as narrow as these. There’s no hint of tatami in the
area; there are no temples or shrines or neighborhood sushi
bars or jagged lanes in the entire neighborhood. We are
living in a sanitised, synthetic world here, in the shadow of
the ancient capital of Nara, Stephen Spielberg’s suburbia
polished to a high, strange sheen. And then I notice that the
maples, in our small park, are turning
with a five-pointed brilliance in the
warm October days. There’s an almost
indefinable sense of elegy, of gathering
chill in the blazing aftrernoon, a suggestion
of what the Japanese call “monoganashii,”
or an exquisite sadness.
The little children are playing neatly
in their school uniforms, their grandparents
seated on benches taking in
the stately sorrow of the scene. But
the mix of elegy and celebration in the
air, the sense of coming darkness and
even death, under skies more exalted
and cloudless than any I have seen in California, remind me
that I’m on the far side of the earth, and caught up in a frame
that sings a faintly Buddhist tune of impermanence and loss.
And then–since I am an Asian at heart, Indian by blood,
if not by residence–I go back to Santa Barbara to visit my
mother (who lives alone there) following the ancient logic that
parents are more to be listened to than pleasure. And when
I get there, I find myself surrounded by Japanese gardens,
the small pieces of stillness and meditation that friends have
built in their back yards, stepping stones to tiny ponds of koi,
or stone lanterns set next to hermits’ sheds, and I see how
the people in the New World try to escape their immediate
surroundings through these little splashes of the East, like a
90 TRAVERSE