Writer Pico Iyer has lived in Japan for 32 years — on a tourist visa. His new book Autumn Light explores life as an outsider in a country he very much feels is home, exploring along the way what home is and how we can communicate by not speaking at all.
Writer Pico Iyer has lived in Japan for 32 years — on a tourist visa. Although he’s married to a Japanese woman and has two Japanese children, he says he moved to Japan, in part, to learn to speak silence, not the native language. His new book, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells, [Indie bookstores|Amazon] explores life as an outsider in a country he very much feels is home, exploring along the way what home is and how we can communicate by not speaking at all.
Iyer writes regularly for the New York Times, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, the Los Angels Times and others. He's the author of many books, including The Lady and the Monk, The Man Within My Head and The Open Road.
Watch Pico Iyer's most recent TED Talk, "What ping-pong taught me about life," here.