Author: Pico Iyer
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 339
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143032070
Description
When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture-not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power.
All this he did. And then he met Sachiko.
Vivacious, attractive, thoroughly educated, speaking English enthusiastically if eccentrically, the wife of a Japaness salaryman, who seldom left the office before 10 p m, Sachiko was as conversant with tea ceremony and classical Japanese literature as with rock music, Goethe and vividly. With the lightness of touch that made Video Night in Kathmandu so captivating, Pico Iyer fashions from their relationship a marvelously ironic yet heartfelt book that is at once a portrait of cross-cultural infatuation-and misunderstanding-and a delightfully fresh way of seeing both the old Japan and the very new.
REVIEW
A beautifully written book about someone looking for ancient dreams in a strange modern place.
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
PRAISE FOR PICO IYER
Iyer is a sharpeyed and thoughtful observer, and he is successful in evoking the life of Kyoto's malls, temples and back streets, moonlit nights on the water, and the vulgarity of the Westernized nightclub and amusement quarter.
-New Yorker
Iyer has a poet's gift fort eh sharply drawn, just-right descriptive-Los Angeles Times
Iyer's observant traveller's eye notices the little details that bring a place to life-Statesman
Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed.
-The New Yorker