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Foreword by Pico Iyer

SAYING YES TO THE WORLD

The last time I ran into Don George, it was one of those piercing, radiant early autumn days in Japan that leave you exultant and strangely wistful all at once. The sky was a richer, deeper blue than you’d see in California; the sun was so warm, even shirtsleeves seemed too much; most of Kyoto was spilling out into the leafy lanes, to enjoy yuzu-flavored “soft creams” and aloe-and-white grape juice cordials and the exhilarating buoyancy of a “second summer” Sunday afternoon scented with what smelled like daphne. Don and I sat out by a stream, the blaze of the sun beating down on us, and spoke of some of the wandering heroes—Peter Matthiessen, Jan Morris, Donald Richie—who had sent us out into the world to be transformed.

Both of us, in our twenties, had chosen Japan as our secret home; both had married women from western Japan and raised kids on Doraemon, the 22nd century blue robotic cat from Japan who has a “doko-demo” (or “anywhere you want”) door in his stomach. Both had found in Japan a way of making gentleness, courtesy, affirmation and robust public cheerfulness seem not the stuff of childishness, but something seasoned and mature. But Don spoke perfect Japanese, as I could never dream of doing; Don had taught English here and appeared as a talk-show host on Japanese TV. Don could open the door of any Japanese person we met along the streets, with his idiomatic, unaggressive, always smiling manner; it wasn’t hard to imagine that he had taken the optimism and openness of his longtime home in California and somehow wed it to a natural sweetness and unintrusive sympathy I associate deeply with my home near Kyoto.

As we sat in the sun, drinking tea made from maple leaves (seasoned with apple and apricot), as we meandered through the 19th century European park that leads towards the tiny lane on which our favorite tatami tea-house is hidden—Don had come here ten months earlier to collect himself after his Japanese father-in-law died—I thought how distinctive Don’s relaxed and responsive spirit can be. I’d walked these same streets with other friends for 27 years now, many of them celebrated travelers; they’d fired questions at me, shot out theories, spun this notion about Japan and that judgment.

Don, by comparison, hung back. He seemed eager to take in as much as he possibly could. He didn’t have agenda or preoccupation, and in that regard appeared to rejoice in the rare traveler’s gift of allowing the day and the place to take him where it wanted him to go.

He recalled for me the dorm advisers at Princeton who had opened the door to Asia for him, forty years before; the way he’d read This Side of Paradise before going to university, and still remembered his first reading of Tender is the Night. He reminded me of his early travels to Paris and Greece and then to an M.F.A. Writing program in the hills of Virginia; by the time he was barely 30, he had a lovely Japanese wife, a new perch in San Francisco and a job that allowed him to call up writers as established as Jan Morris and invite them to write for his newspaper on the places that had changed their lives.

“How’s your mother?” I asked him, as we walked along the narrow, willow-lined lane of Kiyamachi, in central Kyoto, sidestepping girls in pinkly flowering kimono sipping at Starbucks’s seasonal frappuccinos.

“She’s 98!” he said with an astonished laugh. “But she doesn’t complain about a thing. She has this way of greeting everything that happens to her, and not getting sidetracked by what she’s lost.”

“So that’s where you got it from,” I said, and he laughed again. “Hidamari.” The Japanese, not surprisingly, have a word for the strip of light the sun makes on otherwise chilly days, akin to the one where we had been sitting, by the stream.

As a boy, traveling between California and England, I’d come to think, in my simplistic way, that the cultures of the Old World were the cultures of “No” (or, at best, “Maybe”), and those of the New World the ones of “Yes.” That’s much too reductive, of course, but if you meet Don on the page or in the flesh, you quickly see that he’s always tilted towards the sun, as a perpetual singer of yes to life, to fun, to innocence, to vulnerability and to surrender. All his writing, and much of his being, seems to be about rendering oneself open, daring to listen and putting forward one’s best and most hopeful side, in the conviction that it will be answered in kind.

This is in any context a kind of balm, but never more so than in the realm of travel, which is one of life’s most charged leaps of faith (writing, of course, is another). Every time you set out from home and throw yourself into somewhere as alien as Tokyo or the Peloponnese, you’re trusting in the universe, you’re counting on the capacity of friendliness to inspire friendliness in return and you’re assuming you don’t have all the answers and don’t even need them.

There are many travelers, from Old World and New—Paul Bowles, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux—who revel in the shadows, and in unsettledness and dislocation; all of them give us wonders with their readiness to look unflinchingly at the dark. Don gives us something else, healthy and cheerful and forward-looking, that tells us that, if you leave yourself at home and are eager to let the world remake you as it sees fit, you can be at home almost everywhere you go. Home is the condition, the state of unencumbered ease, you export to everyone you visit.