The Lady and the Monk

Four Seasons in Kyoto

Author Pico Iyer
Paperback
$19.00 US
On sale Oct 27, 1992 | 352 Pages | 9780679738343

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When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside. Then he met Sachiko, the attractive wife of a Japanese "salaryman." 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.



"Iyer's book is about his own quest for a more ancient land of monks, rock gardens and paper lanterns.  Even more challenging, it is his search for spiritual enlightenment in the land of economic miracle.  Like a cultural anthropologist, Iyer digs into the dead metaphors of poets and beneath the antiseptic glitz of love hotels to unearth traces of his own misty nostalgia for a bygone Japan.  In dreamlike, beautiful prose...all these rich themes--East and West, spirit and flesh, old and new--become entangled in the author s relationship with a woman named Sachiko."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
© Derek Shapton
Pico Iyer is the author of fifteen books, translated into twenty-three languages, and has been a constant contributor for more than thirty years to Time, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His four recent talks for TED have received more than eleven million views. www.picoiyerjourneys.com View titles by Pico Iyer

About

When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside. Then he met Sachiko, the attractive wife of a Japanese "salaryman." 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.



"Iyer's book is about his own quest for a more ancient land of monks, rock gardens and paper lanterns.  Even more challenging, it is his search for spiritual enlightenment in the land of economic miracle.  Like a cultural anthropologist, Iyer digs into the dead metaphors of poets and beneath the antiseptic glitz of love hotels to unearth traces of his own misty nostalgia for a bygone Japan.  In dreamlike, beautiful prose...all these rich themes--East and West, spirit and flesh, old and new--become entangled in the author s relationship with a woman named Sachiko."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

Author

© Derek Shapton
Pico Iyer is the author of fifteen books, translated into twenty-three languages, and has been a constant contributor for more than thirty years to Time, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His four recent talks for TED have received more than eleven million views. www.picoiyerjourneys.com View titles by Pico Iyer

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