The Lady and the Monk : Four Seasons in Kyoto

Rating:
Summary: Iyer's Conceits
Review: Save your money by not purchasing this book.

Iyer strikes me as one of the most conceited writers I've ever come across, and I usually have a thick skin to that sort of thing.

His florid writing and puffery frequently turned me off as I waded into this book.

I'm an enthusiastic reader about Japan, and I've lived there and I can say that Iyer is writing for the folks back home (who may never visit Japan) and not reporting it straight. If you want a fancy-pants fairy tale, buy this book.

I'd even rate Dave Barry's book about Japan as better quality journalism.

If you want to read some first-rate books from an author who traveled in Japan and wrote about during roughly the same time, I wholeheartedly recommend Alan Booth.

His books, _The Roads to Sata_ and _Looking for the Lost_ have a well deserved place on my bookshelf.
Buy those instead.

Rating:
Summary: Superb!
Review: So accurately captures the cadence of not just this historic capital, but of the milieu of the country, at whole. Iyer is a delight to read.

Rating:
Summary: The Lady and the Monk : Four seasons in Kyoto
Review: Sorry Pico, I wasn't able to finish this one! It swings between being cliche and condescending to outright fantasy! "A high mountain clarity sharpened the October air" (talking about Narita Page 3). There isn't a mountain within about 100KM of Narita, it's situated in rice fields! He makes another reference early in the book about street vending machines full of every kind of fruit juice you can imagine. I wish it were so! The only fruit juice you can buy in a vending machine is from an American soft drinks company, sometimes! I use these two early points to illustrate the distortions of living in Japan which continue throughout the book (on almost every page). Mr. Iyer has written a fantasy, which really gives an unclear picture of life in Japan.

Rating:
Summary: An Englishman's exploration of what it is to be Japanese
Review: Subtitled "Four Seasons in Kyoto", this 1992 book by the British travel writer, Pico Iyer, is more than just a book about a place. Mr. Iyer spent a year in Kyoto to learn about Zen as well as Japan. Along the way he met a very special woman, Sachiko, and learned more about the essence of being Japanese than he ever expected. I was particularly interested in this book because I have a wonderful Japanese daughter-in-law and have been to Japan myself. I remember the few days we spent in Kyoto with fond recollections and smiled at the author's vivid descriptions. I also found myself nodding in agreement at some of the discoveries he made about Sachiko and her way of thinking as I, too, have had my eyes opened in similar ways.

Mr. Iyer has the ability to paint a complex portrait in words. I found myself sharing his discoveries, from his experiences in the temples to the very modern music clubs. The center of the book, however, is Sachiko. She's 30 years old, the mother of two children and married to a Japanese businessman who spends 18 or more hours a day at work. She speaks English with difficulty but has read a lot of classic literature and is also an aficionado of a wide variety of pop music icons. In spite of her traditional upbringing, she yearns for a larger life, beyond the confines of her home.

Mr. Iyer becomes her friend and they do a lot of sightseeing together. She's free all day and so is he, which makes their friendship easy. Some of the most interesting scenes are when he tries to speak Japanese and she tries to speak English and misunderstandings follow, both because of the language itself and also because of different ways of thinking.

I'm a romantic and fully expected their relationship to blossom into an intimate one, but Mr. Iyer is so evasive that even though they do become very close, he avoids those kinds of topics. Instead, he focuses on what he perceives to be her feelings and his growing understanding of her. It seems a little strange to me that only in the later part of the book did he drop a gentle hint that their relationship was a bit more than that of just friends. But even then, I never was sure.

This is a great travelogue. I not only learned a lot but also recognized things I have come to understand about the Japanese character. There are long sections about literature, both Japanese and Western, which I found to be boring. And the relationship between Iyer and Sachiko left me annoyed. But for a unique picture of Kyoto and a deeper understanding of the cross-cultural differences between Japanese and Westerners, I do give it a definite recommendation.

Rating:
Summary: An Englishman's exploration of what it is to be Japanese
Review: Subtitled "Four Seasons in Kyoto", this 1992 book by the British travel writer, Pico Iyer, is more than just a book about a place. Mr. Iyer spent a year in Kyoto to learn about Zen as well as Japan. Along the way he met a very special woman, Sachiko, and learned more about the essence of being Japanese than he ever expected. I was particularly interested in this book because I have a wonderful Japanese daughter-in-law and have been to Japan myself. I remember the few days we spent in Kyoto with fond recollections and smiled at the author's vivid descriptions. I also found myself nodding in agreement at some of the discoveries he made about Sachiko and her way of thinking as I, too, have had my eyes opened in similar ways.

Mr. Iyer has the ability to paint a complex portrait in words. I found myself sharing his discoveries, from his experiences in the temples to the very modern music clubs. The center of the book, however, is Sachiko. She's 30 years old, the mother of two children and married to a Japanese businessman who spends 18 or more hours a day at work. She speaks English with difficulty but has read a lot of classic literature and is also an aficionado of a wide variety of pop music icons. In spite of her traditional upbringing, she yearns for a larger life, beyond the confines of her home.

Mr. Iyer becomes her friend and they do a lot of sightseeing together. She's free all day and so is he, which makes their friendship easy. Some of the most interesting scenes are when he tries to speak Japanese and she tries to speak English and misunderstandings follow, both because of the language itself and also because of different ways of thinking.

I'm a romantic and fully expected their relationship to blossom into an intimate one, but Mr. Iyer is so evasive that even though they do become very close, he avoids those kinds of topics. Instead, he focuses on what he perceives to be her feelings and his growing understanding of her. It seems a little strange to me that only in the later part of the book did he drop a gentle hint that their relationship was a bit more than that of just friends. But even then, I never was sure.

This is a great travelogue. I not only learned a lot but also recognized things I have come to understand about the Japanese character. There are long sections about literature, both Japanese and Western, which I found to be boring. And the relationship between Iyer and Sachiko left me annoyed. But for a unique picture of Kyoto and a deeper understanding of the cross-cultural differences between Japanese and Westerners, I do give it a definite recommendation.

Rating:
Summary: An Englishman's exploration of what it is to be Japanese
Review: Subtitled "Four Seasons in Kyoto", this 1992 book by the British travel writer, Pico Iyer, is more than just a book about a place. Mr. Iyer spent a year in Kyoto to learn about Zen as well as Japan. Along the way he met a very special woman, Sachiko, and learned more about the essence of being Japanese than he ever expected. I was particularly interested in this book because I have a wonderful Japanese daughter-in-law and have been to Japan myself. I remember the few days we spent in Kyoto with fond recollections and smiled at the author's vivid descriptions. I also found myself nodding in agreement at some of the discoveries he made about Sachiko and her way of thinking as I, too, have had my eyes opened in similar ways.

Mr. Iyer has the ability to paint a complex portrait in words. I found myself sharing his discoveries, from his experiences in the temples to the very modern music clubs. The center of the book, however, is Sachiko. She's 30 years old, the mother of two children and married to a Japanese businessman who spends 18 or more hours a day at work. She speaks English with difficulty but has read a lot of classic literature and is also an aficionado of a wide variety of pop music icons. In spite of her traditional upbringing, she yearns for a larger life, beyond the confines of her home.

Mr. Iyer becomes her friend and they do a lot of sightseeing together. She's free all day and so is he, which makes their friendship easy. Some of the most interesting scenes are when he tries to speak Japanese and she tries to speak English and misunderstandings follow, both because of the language itself and also because of different ways of thinking.

I'm a romantic and fully expected their relationship to blossom into an intimate one, but Mr. Iyer is so evasive that even though they do become very close, he avoids those kinds of topics. Instead, he focuses on what he perceives to be her feelings and his growing understanding of her. It seems a little strange to me that only in the later part of the book did he drop a gentle hint that their relationship was a bit more than that of just friends. But even then, I never was sure.

This is a great travelogue. I not only learned a lot but also recognized things I have come to understand about the Japanese character. There are long sections about literature, both Japanese and Western, which I found to be boring. And the relationship between Iyer and Sachiko left me annoyed. But for a unique picture of Kyoto and a deeper understanding of the cross-cultural differences between Japanese and Westerners, I do give it a definite recommendation.

Rating:
Summary: points for restraint
Review: The author's account of his relationship with a married Kyoto woman is held together by the rationing of details. He gives himself and his reader the gift of romance and conscientious ingenuousness. If not for that, the story would have been something else entirely. The story that IS told i.e., the story of carefully marshalled purity would have been impossible.

Rating:
Summary: Gender wars!
Review: The title of this book is a bit misleading. Yes, Pico Iyer does live in a monastery for a few days but his main emphasis is an exploration of Kyoto, one of the holiest cities in Japan.

The title comes from a Buddhist story about a beautiful woman who tempted a monk, much as Buddha was tempted by an evil god as he sat under the Bodhi tree searching for enlightenment.

Pico is an essayist for Time magazine and he is far more interested in the somewhat schizophrenic nature of the Japanese people than he is in Buddhism. His main subject is a housewife named Sachiko who is married to a Japanese "salary man," who works from six in the morning until eleven at night. His family life is an afterthought. Sachiko loves everything foreign from the Beatles to Mickey Mouse. She calls Pico a "bird" because he is free to wander all over the globe while she is a slave to her husband and two young children.

According to Iyer, Japan is close to a utopian society and Kyoto is the cleanest city he's ever seen. Sachiko is a fascinating character. When she introduces Pico to her children she apologizes for their misbehavior although they are much more well-behaved than western children Pico has known.

Pico and Sachiko's relationship is perplexing at first. She hints that she might want something more than a platonic relationship. He's wise enough to know that it's the dream of a romance, the romance she's seen in the movies, that she's after.

There are some wonderful moments in THE LADY AND THE MONK: Sachiko's mangled English with the occasional Japanese word thrown in and the lack of articles; Iyer's description of cherry blossom time; the albino monk Pico meets when he stays at the temple; the Hanchu Tigers last game of the year when Randy Bass, their American homerun hitter, bows to the fans fifteen times. The fans are just as enthusiastic as they would be if this were a World Series team and not a team thirty-some games out of first.

The main emphasis of the book, though, is Sachiko's story arc; we see her beginning to grow away from her salaryman husband, we see her trying to make her dreams become a reality, despite the censure of her mother and friends. We get the impression that the more Japanese women are exposed to the West the more Sachikos there will be.

Rating:
Summary: PICO IYER'S BOOKS ARE A DELIGHT TO THE SENSES!
Review: This book is intriguing...like all of Iyer's work. His writing draws you in and makes you feel things just as he does. While this book is not quite as amazing as Video Night in Kathmandu, it is still one of the best pieces I've ever read on Japan.

Having traveled to Japan on several occasions, I can testify to the authenticity of Pico's experiences and reflections. I find that his writing really brings things to life...

As for the one reviewer who claimed that Mr. Iyer's work is self-indulgent, almost pretentious, I think you simply need to get out more. Pico is cultured, well-read, and well-traveled, and a true intellectual. His work is authentic.

Rating:
Summary: an authentic essay on the changing nature of japan
Review: This is Iyer's most lyrical, heartfelt work. More than a bit autobiographical, the book is rich with rhythms and cadences that conjure up Kyoto as it is: a complex, chaotic mix of old and new. Work and play have taken me to Japan many times, and to Kyoto in all seasons. This book remains among my modern favorites on Japanese culture, for the ways it captures the quirky little things so often "lost in translation."