SynopsisWhen 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 today-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 Japanese 'salaryman' who seldom left the office
before 10 p.m., Sachiko was as conversant with tea ceremonies and classical
Japanese literature as with rock music, Goethe and Vivaldi. With the lightness
of touch that made Video Night in Kathmandu so captivating, Pico Iyer fashions
from their relationship a marvellously 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.
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Binding: PaperBack
About the author
Pico Iyer is the author of seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Global Soul and, more recently, The Open Road, as well as two novels. An essayist for Time since 1986, he contributes regularly to The New York Times, The Financial Times, and many other magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific.