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.

Portrait

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.