The Global Soul

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MOTHER:Why have you chosen to spend most of your time, when not on the road, in a place that is known for keeping foreigners at arm's length?

PI: The reason I live most of the time in Japan is that the values [there] are ones I find very steadying and centering. My feeling is that if I lived there for 50 years and spoke fluent Japanese, I would still be called a gaigin, an outsider person. By comparison, in California, which is such an accommodating and hospitable place in some ways, I feel as an immigrant that I always have one foot inside the society and one out. California is more than ready to accept me as another Californian, and yet if I were to live here for 50 years I would still never be a Californian. And so I suppose, in a world where borders are collapsing, I take comfort from living in an old-fashioned culture that has very strong borders - even if they are borders that exclude me.

MOTHER:Do you plan to stay there?

PI: I think if left to my own devices I probably would. This circles around to what we were talking about a few minutes ago. The only reason I leave Japan is that my mother is here in California, and in my floating life, my mother is one of my anchors, and one of my strongest affiliations.

MOTHER:In The Global Soul, you commented on the similarities between living as a foreigner and living in the wilderness.

PI: It's a kind of social wilderness for me. For the last six weeks there I don't think I spoke English to a single person. And I don't speak much Japanese, either. One of the charms to me of living in this very foreign place is that I can't read the newspapers, I can't watch the TV, and when I'm walking down the street if everyone is talking about Princess Diana or Florida politics, or the O.J. Simpson case - as they might be even in Japan - I can't understand what they're saying. And so in some ways I'm back in a world much closer to the sense of silence, and even of purity that I find when I'm in the Benedictine hermitage.

MOTHER:Many of us place a great deal of importance on staying in one place: building a home, tending the land, setting down roots. As a travel writer, you do just the opposite. Can you make an argument for not belonging to a place?

PI: I would say that movement is only as valuable as one's rootedness within. My hero has always been Thoreau - that sense of living by your own values, living on your own foundations, living by your own direction. For me, Walden Pond is portable in a sense. I don't think it has to be interpreted literally as, "you have to construct a cabin in the woods." I think it has to do with constructing a cabin inside yourself that's sufficiently strong so that [wherever you are], you're still living by the values that are inside that cabin - inside you.

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