"Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells" by Pico Iyer. TNS

Michiela Thuman

Thirty years ago, travel writer Pico Iyer went to Japan seeking a life of solitude, a copy of Thoreau in his suitcase. “I went to Japan to learn how to live with less hurry and fear of time,” he writes, “Walden”-style. To live simply and alone.

What he found was an endlessly fascinating culture perpetually at the crossroads of ancient and now.

He also found a wife, and he ended up moving to Japan permanently, splitting his year between California and the sleepy Japanese town of Nara, where “I take my watch off the minute I arrive.”

“Autumn Light” is Iyer’s late-life accounting of what’s been learned from this experiment of a lifetime, and autumn is an apt metaphor.

The universal season of transition and mortality is a truly spectacular experience in Japan, and the book is a sensory feast alive with blaze-red maples, “yuzu-colored” light, haunting temple bells, smoke from fires lighting the paths of the spirit world and the firefly-like winking of lantern-lit graveyards.

Tribune News Service