The Lady and the Monk

Four Seasons in Kyoto

par

352 pages

Publié 29 octobre 2004 par Penguin Books India.

ISBN :
978-0-14-303207-6
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4 étoiles (1 critique)

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 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 ceremony and classical Japanese literature as with rock music, Goethe, and Vivaldi. With the lightness of touch that made Video Night in Kathmandu …

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Review of 'The Lady and the Monk' on 'Goodreads'

4 étoiles

I bought a copy of "The Monk and the Lady" by Pico Iyer about two years ago. I began to read it when a colleague who had lived in Japan for twenty years saw the book. He criticized the book heavily and told me it was not worth my time. He felt that Iyer had exoticism Japan too much and my colleague jokingly declared "And he didn't even get the girl!." I lost interest in the book and set it aside. For some reason, I recently decided to pick it up again and give it a go. After finishing it, I am pretty sure my colleague did not read the book at all. While it is not perfect, I found Iyer's narrative in Kyoto and Japan an wonderful, sensitive work about cultural confusions, spirituality, and the clash between our ideals and reality.

There are couple of different narrative threads in …