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Vagabonding
Skepticism and salvation in Cyprus
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[02/18/00]

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[02/18/00]

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By Pico Iyer

Feb. 22, 2000 | My daily life in Nara is itself a curious artifact, belonging to a kind of existence that even I could not have imagined only a decade ago, before "home office" fax machines and Global Village modems, with international telephones on every other street corner, made centrifugal lives possible. In terms of the world I grew up in, almost none of it makes any sense, but in terms of the world we're entering, it forms the outlines of a complete sentence.

I go to sleep here every day by 9:00 p.m., in part so as to wake up at 5:00 a.m., when my employers (thirteen time-zones away) are at their desks (their office hours stretching from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., Nara time). My research facility, if I need to check on something, is an English language bookstore ninety minutes away by train, and my version of the Internet is a copy of the World Almanac. The person I see most often, outside my immediate household, is the Federal Express boy who comes to collect and deliver packages from distant Osaka. In this newly shrunken world, I can complete articles or even books without having to exchange a word with editors, and can draw out money in a local department store from a bank account on the other side of the planet.

Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home By Pico Iyer Knopf 320 pages Buy Global Soul

For breakfast, I generally enjoy some combination of asparagus cookies or chlorella biscuits, chaperoned by what is here known as "Royal Milk Tea," and for lunch I go to a convenience store round the corner, where all the goods of England and America are on sale, yet nothing is quite as I would expect. Little old women are photocopying Chopin scores to the sound of piped-in Clash songs, and teenagers with safety pins all over their faces are consulting magazines with names like Classy and Waggle and Bang. Though the whole place is only four aisles wide, it is crammed with wild plum chews and mangosteen candies, tubs of Grand Marnier pudding and vitamin jelly drinks. There are ice-cream sandwiches here made of Darjeeling tea, tandoori-flavored potato chips and Kiss Mints that come in flavors of litchee and lime, kiwi, "Wake-up," and "Etiquette." There are "Moisture Desserts" and cups of "Mango Dream Snow," injunctions on packages to "Listen to the sweet murmurings of vegetables. You'll feel pleasure and find a smile." Once, while munching from a bag of potato puffs, I looked down, to see three characters prancing around the bag, identified as Jean and Paul and Belmonte.

Usually, in the afternoons, I go to the post office next door where all the clerks look up as I enter, as at the arrival of their daily soap opera. My principal means of communicating with the world at large is fraught with hazards: the envelope I'm using (from my company) is too large -- measured against a transparent green ruler the workers wield -- or I've neglected to attach a Par Avion sticker. Once I was rebuked for including too long a P.S. on the back of the envelope, and once, during the holiday season, I came in only to be presented with a special invoice for thirty dollars when it was discovered that my New Year's greetings exceeded the regulation five words.

Afterwards, I walk around the local park, past the "bad boy" son of the electrician, polishing his Corvette till it's red as his waist-length hair, past the dogs that bark furiously at my alien scent and children who back away as if at the sight of the summer horror blockbuster from California. At one street corner in this placid country neighborhood, there is a set of vending machines where I can buy 49 kinds of cigarettes, 36 alcoholic drinks, 92 nonalcoholic drinks, and a bewildering array of brightly colored cans advertising Corn Potage soup and Melon Cream soda, Calorie Mate Block and Drafty Beer. In the supermarket, grannies handle radishes with black-fingered gloves and the shifty character beside me at the butcher shop sports a gold star on his breast that says ASSISTANT SHERIFF, LARIMIE.

Japan is notorious for treating all the world as a kind of giant souvenir store from which it can mix and match at will, and many a newcomer, to Kyoto, for example, is taken aback to find the old imperial capital gaudy with "Think Potato" bars, "Amazement Spaces," and stores styling themselves "American Life Theater" (while the Eagles' "New Kid in Town" is piped into the geisha quarter). Yet the impersonality of Japan, to me, is not that of a country that hasn't matured into character so much as one that keeps its passions to itself. The public world strives to be generic, to keep friction and confusion to a minimum; individuality flowers behind closed doors.

And though the reach of such daily oddities is only shallow, I often think of that moment in Christopher Isherwood's "A Single Man" in which a woman from Sarah Lawrence reproaches California for offering "unreal places" instead of history and nuanced depth. Instead of Gothic cathedrals, she implies, it serves up Motel 6.

Next page | Two packages of Kleenex to ease the silence