The lady and the monk

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 the book that interweave together. Iyer claimed that he always had a fascination for Japan and he wanted to see if the Japan of his imagination matched the reality. He also had the dream to go live in a new city by himself in a sort of globalized Therouvean experiment. He also wanted to explore more about Zen Buddhism. Throughout the book he returns to the metaphor often found in Japanese literature about the Monk and Lady, which can stand for the tug and pull between the spiritual and the secular world. He looks at Japanese literature and Japanese religion. And he describes his encounters with Western expatriates in Japan. You get many of the stock images of Japan that you might come to expect: a strange combination of Eastern and Western, past and future. Strange habits and mannerisms. The perplexity of outsiders trying to make sense of Japan.

One thing I liked about the book is that you get the sense that this might not have been the book he intended to write - if he intended to write a book at all about the experience. While he had planned on living an austere life enmeshing himself in Japanese literature and the spiritual Kyoto, his plans were dashed by his meeting and subsequent affair with Sachiko, a married Japanese mother of two children. Initially I was off-put by their affair and I expected it to be predictable. With her simple English sentences and her "childish" likes and dislikes. They way she seems to embody all of the stock images you might expect to see in any book about Japan. But what makes this book particularly strong is that we discover Japan along with the author. We see him constantly reassessing Sachiko and his own biases and impressions of her and Japan generally.

When we encounter a new place, we often rest of stereotypes or received images of a location. It helps us cope with the sensory overload and foreignness of a new location. And if Iyer had rested on the the surface images, he would have written what would have been an enjoyable if unremarkable book. But Iyer's sensitivity and questioning of his experience lifts it above other travel books. Does Iyer eave Kyoto fully understanding Japan? Not at all. Even though he felt that Kyoto had come to reside deeply inside of him, he would still remain outside of Kyoto and Japan. His experience destroyed many of his illusions but replaced them with new understandings of a place that for which he felt a deep, instinctual infinity.

It is possible that the book is outdated - it was written in 1991 before the economic crash that has continued to cripple Japan. But, according to Paul Theroux, a good travel book is prescient without being predictive and a good travel book should give a sense of the character of a place. While I have not experienced Japan myself, I felt that "The Monk and the Lady" falls into this type of travel book and that I have gotten a good sense of the place.