Autumn Light: Japan's Season of Fire and Farewells

Description

We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it's their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty. Returning to his home in Japan after his father-in-law's sudden death, Pico Iyer soon picks up the steadying patterns of his everyday rites: going to the post office in the day and engaging in spirited games of ping-pong in the evenings. But in a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honouring the dead, he soon finds himself grappling with the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love even though we know that they - and we - are dying. As the maple leaves begin to turn and the heat starts to soften, Iyer shows us a Japan we have seldom seen before through the season that reminds us to take nothing for granted.

Pico Iyer is the author of more than a dozen books, translated into twenty-three languages, and he regularly contributes to the New York Review of Books, Granta, the Financial Times and dozens of magazines around the world. His three recent talks for TED have received seven million views so far.

What holds everything together, besides Iyer's elegantly smooth prose style and gift for detailed observation, is a circling around the theme of autumn in Japan and this autumnal period in his life ... There's much wisdom in what he says * New York Times Book Review * A tender meditation on both Japanese culture and the impermanence of life * National Geographic Traveller * A memoir about transience, decline and Iyer's simple life among ping-pong playing pensioners * Financial Times, Books of the Year * Exquisite ... [Iyer] is a consummate tour guide * New Yorker * [An] exquisite personal blend of philosophy and engagement, inner quiet and worldly life ... A vivid meditation ... It's Iyer's keen ear for detail and human nature that helps him populate his trademark cantabile prose ... [A] genuine and loving tale * Los Angeles Times * Luminous ... An engrossing narrative, a moving meditation on loss and an evocative, lyrical portrait of Japanese society * Publishers Weekly * As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed -- praise for 'Sun After Dark' * New Yorker * Humbling and moving ... One of a handful of magical books that I have read straight through -- praise for 'The Man Within My Head' * Daily Telegraph * In his guise of travel writer, Iyer has really been our most elegant poet of dislocation -- praise for 'The Man Within My Head' * Guardian *