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 so captivating, Pico 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.

• We started tracking this book on December 27, 2011.
• This book was $11.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 124 times in the past 4,525 days.
• The current price of this book is $6.99 last checked 10 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past year.
• The lowest price to date was $4.99 last reached on February 13, 2022.
• This book has been $4.99 2 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $14.99 last reached on July 3, 2018.
• This book has been $14.99 one time since we started tracking it.

• TravelAsiaJapan
• HistoryAsiaJapan

• Publication Date: August 10, 2011
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 251 Pages
• File Size: 492 KB