Pico Iyer

With the same lightness of touch that made his widely-praised Video Night in Kathmandu so captivating, Iyer now tells the story of The Lady and the Monk. Pretty, in her early 30s, and a typically bourgeoise Japanese housewife, Sachiko is locked into her arranged life--and yet utterly fascinated by the West. What happens when the tea ceremony and rock music cross paths is the focus of this delightful novel, which evokes both the old and the very new Japan.

Four Seasons in Kyoto

The Lady and the Monk

Marek Hnatiak

On the night of the May moon, the famously hazy spring moon beloved by monks and second in importance only to the harvest moon, I walked with Mark through the local temples in the early warmth. The moonlight magnetized my attention this night, glowing at the edges of my mind - it blazed - and Mark told me the story of the Chinese poet who tried to grab the moon's reflection in the water and drowned.

Now that Matthew had finally exhausted Tokyo, there was nothing left for him in Japan. Having found the worldly life he'd always craved, he decided that he should, in fact, be seeking out the spiritual life. He doubted what he knew, and then revised his doubts. And the very qualities that attracted many foreigners to Japan - that it left one alone, and therefore free - were for Matthew, I could tell, an ordeal; Japan offered him everything except direction. He felt his own uncertainty mocked by the equable calm and self-containment of Japan.

I drank tea with a slice of orange and ate melon sorbet in a coffee shop whose window announced, unexpectedly, "I'd like to eat with you and gaze into your eyes while we talk of UFOs, (…)

My one problem, in fact, with Japan was that it sometimes seemed so free of problems. That was one reason, I often thought, why these people, so famously considerate in the domestic realm, appeared so notoriously indifferent to refugees, or war victims, or to the demands of the world at large. In its way, Japan had constructed such an orderly, friction-free society that its young, at least, free of the Occupation, could not easily grasp the details of a world of pain and privation -the real world, (…)

A few days later, as the month drew to its end, I awoke at dawn to find my window all fogged over: the first hard frost of winter. Longing to share the moment with someone - I had not experienced winter for three years now - I hurried out into the mild invigoration of the morning to visit Mark. It was a joy undiminished to awaken in the cloudless blue and see the mountains sharp in the distance, to feel the briskness of a winter morning in the sun. The whole world felt uplifted and refreshed: the narrow lanes alive with oranges, old women chattering away below the muted sun, and everywhere a sense of purpose.

Meanwhile, my occasional dabbling in Zen straggled on. Often, I asked Mark directly about the Zen experience, but more often he gave me glimpses of it when I did not ask. Left to his own devices, he rarely seemed to talk about either his painting or his training. There was, in a sense, no seam in him: cut him in any place, and he was the same. His doctrine was his being as surely as his being was his doctrine.

Making our way towards the port, we looked out at the ocean liners, black in the chromium light, and sitting down on a log, the wind blustering all about us, we fell into our usual patter, she telling me how America was the land of the free, I telling her how much of what I saw in America was loneliness.

"When I was young, you know, I was always afraid of all that stuff about devils; I believed that knowing anything about them was a form of possession. And then one day, Pam, who ! knew from Connecticut - but shes in Santa Cruz now - came up to me and said, 'You're a witch, you know!’

"And at first I just said, 'No, no, I'm not.' But she could tell. And she had her own coven. And then one night I saw my dead mother in a dream, and I could just tell she was in a very different place, but a good place. And that's when I accepted being a witch"

Siobhan smiled, and the day smiled with her.

"Man, I was reading Charlie Chaplins autobiography the other day," Joe started up again. "Chaplin, man, the only guy I know who started out life with no ideals — just tryin' to survive - and then he got famous and started having’ ideals. Great, man. Fuckin’ great!"

One reason I had always been interested in Zen was my sense that for people like myself, trained in abstraction, Zen could serve as the ideal tonic. For Zen, as I understood it, was about slicing with a clean sword through all the Gordian knots invented by the mind, plunging through all specious dualities - east and west, here and there, coming and going - to get to some core so urgent that its truth could not be doubted. The best lesson that Zen could teach - though it was, of course, something of a paradox to say or even think it was to go beyond a kind of thinking that was nothing more than agonizing, and simply act.

"Old Japanese people say, ‘Onna-no kokoro, aki-no sora’," said Sachiko-san, shooting me a sidelong glance (The autumn sky is like a woman's heart). "Your country same?"

The East, of course, had always been filled with Bobs, with Western men seeking Asian wives, as well as Asian wisdom, and not always troubling to distinguish between the two. Romance and religion had long constituted the double lure of the Orient, and in recent years, the confusion of the two had grown even more intense as the presence of U.S. troops on the continent - in Japan, then Korea, then Vietnam and the Philippines - had turned every war zone into a kind of erogenous zone (…)

"And so I say to you, my friends," Juan Carlos said through me, my unhappy look a fair translation of his own, "that your efficiency and discipline and unity have turned this country into the third-strongest power in the world. Just think what you could do if you worked on behalf of human rights!"

I doubt anyone depicted in the book found Zen.

The Lady and the Monk Four Seasons in Kyoto

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