The Lady and the Monk Audiobook (Free)

When Pico Iyer went to Kyoto and reside in a monastery, he did so to learn on the subject of Zen Buddhism from the within, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old metropolitan areas in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today-not the world of businessmen and creation lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons as well as the silence of temples, from the images woven through literature, from the lunar Japan that still lives in in back of the rising sun of geopolitical power.

All of this he did. And he fulfilled Sachiko.

Vivacious, appealing, thoroughly educated, speaking British enthusiastically if eccentrically, the wife of the Japanese “salaryman” who seldom still left any office before 10 p.m., Sachiko was as conversant with tea wedding ceremony and traditional Japanese literature as with rock music, Goethe, and Vivaldi. Using the lightness of touch that produced Video Night in Kathmandu so fascinating, Pico Iyer styles from their romantic relationship a marvelously ironic yet heartfelt book that is at once a family portrait of cross-cultural infatuation-and misunderstanding-and a delightfully clean way of viewing both the previous Japan and the new.