Pico Iyer
The Lady and the Monk: Four
Seasons in Kyoto
Where is he from?
• Complicated question
• He confesses to feeling at home in airports,
where everyone is in between (Global Souls)
• Parents are Indian, but he’s born in Britain
• Choose an Italian name for him so classmates
can pronounce it
Background
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Born in 1957
Parents are professors
Father = philosopher
Mother = religious scholar
Family moves to Santa Barbara when Pico is 7
Goes back and forth to England for schooling
Excels in school: scholarships to Eton, Oxford,
Harvard
Career
• Teaches writing and literature at Harvard
• Spends summers researching for Let’s Go:
Europe editions
• Joins Time in 1982
• Travels and writes constantly
• First book – essays on literature
• Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports
from the Not-So-Far East (1988)
The Lady and the Monk
Four Seasons in Kyoto
Background to book
• Travels to Asia (Thailand) and finds the
experience transformative
• Spends the night in Narita (stuck between flights)
and feels strangely attracted
• 4 “That first fleeting taste of Japan felt like the
answer to some unspoken question. For through
whatever curious affinities propel us towards
people or places we have never met, I have
always been powerfully drawn towards Japan.”
Testing a Theory
• Goes on a 4-day trip with mother
• 7 Wants to search for “the private Japan, and
the emotional Japan– the lunar Japan that I
had found in the poems of women and
monks… If this imaginative Japan existed only
in my mind, I wanted to know that soon, and
so be free of the illusion forever….”
Finding a model way of living
• 7 “In Japan, moreover, I wanted to put
another daydream to the test: the vision I had
always cherished of living simply and alone, in
some foreign land, unknown.”
• Buys a ticket, taking off for Japan on the first
day of autumn
Why Kyoto?
Kyoto
• He’s got the name of a temple
• Kyoto as a city: Imperial capital, so rich in
history
• Rich in temples: lots of temples, and lots of
famous ones (esp. along the Philosopher’s
Path)
Kyoto cont’d
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Modern and ancient
Number of foreigners
Geisha girls
Center for higher learning
UNESCO sites
Spiritual center
Four Seasons in a City
• Measure of a year as a narrative device
• Definition (clear arc and time frame)
• Promise to look at the city in at least four
different stages
• Promise to concentrate on one local (in
contrast to narratives that leave us breathless)
Lady and Monk
• Connection to a monk seems logical
• Connection to a lady? (Note my cover: Geisha
girl!)
• Interesting contrast
• Note: Monks usually don’t interact with ladies
• Hint of mystery
Autumn
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• When he first gets to Kyoto he goes to live
with a monk
• Soon meets a lady at an initiation celebration
at a temple
• (Much later, we find it’s a story he tells
Kachiko about unrequited love)
Storytelling
• Non-fiction, but many references to
storytelling
• Some stories within the text itself
• Also references to literature, poetry, cultural
stories
Other techniques:
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Incongruities
Gion= flower district
Also a temple
Lives in a monastery
Sneaks out to call NY
Temples to the east
Pachinko parlors,
Convenience stores
to the West
Birthday Party
• Meets lady at the temple
• Mostly, his world was filled with ladies and
women—everyone else was working!
• Sachiko invites him… cultural lesson in
strangeness
• He’s the only guest
• Winds up playing with the children and
inventing a raccoon story
Kyoto= Maze Excerpt
• 57 Tries to find particular places, winds up
going in circles, “defeated by the maze of
Japanese planning.”
• Realizes: he can’t plan epiphanies
• Expectations: defeat themselves
• His solution: Try to keep open, “waiting to see
what kinds of things found me”
Zen as Paradox Excerpt
• 65 Wants to cut through all the dualities,
east/west, here/there, coming/going
• Why?
• Mind was “a devil’s advocate, an agent of
diabolical sophistry that could argue any point
and its opposite with equal conviction”
• True things in life came not as thinking but as
thunder
City as Contradiction
• 78 Attraction of opposites esp. strong:
• conservative city in a traditional society
• Dotted with radical foreigners who did not or
could not fit in at home
• “Pairing of Western men and Eastern women was
as natural as the partnership of sun and moon.
Everyone falls in love with what he cannot begin
to understand.”
Language Fun Excerpt
• Records some of his conversations,
descriptions are hilarious
• 82 Fight over which bad language to use: “tugof-war as to which should be the medium of
confusion”
• Sachiko bravely ploughs through English: “She
was happy to plunge ahead without a second
thought for grammar, scattering meanings and
ambiguities as she went.”
Worse still…
• Sachiko naturally tries to be ambiguous and
thereby consensual
• He’s had the same training in England: “Might
it not be easier perhaps to try this road?”
• Would go round in circles, ending up where
they started
• “Should me meet on Tuesday?” I asked her.
“No problem! Yesterday, Thursday, okay!”
Techniques
• Narrative steps back and moves forward, then
pulls back
• Note contrast to Booth, Harrer, even Nicholl
• Literary touches:
107 “The sky was slivers of blue in a gray
porcelain bowl”
237 “Back home in Kyoto, the late-March days
eased by in a seamless flow of blue epiphanies”
Technique—Rich References
• 116 “Drifting along through the huge
antiseptic spaces of Kobe’s lonely De Chirico
streets, we chatted about Victor Hugo and
Jacky Chan…”
• 221 “It did not take a Roland Barthes to
identify Japan as an Empire of Signs.”
• 337 “the fishermen’s faces were lit up, in a
flash of Rembrandt gold…”
Doubts
Dangers
• 123 “Encouraging people to realize their potential
was an especially dangerous occupation in a
country that taught them to fulfill their duty
instead.”
• “To begin with, she was married, and I did not
know what exactly that betokened, especially in a
culture where marriage was often nothing more
than separation by another name”
• She tuned out her marriage—distant radio station
From Travel Story to…. Excerpt
• 128 “In terms of everything I knew, things
were fast becoming more and more slippery
and strange…”
• Husband: spectral figure on margins of her life
• Treachery of language
• Both have fewer inhibitions in the new
language
More Quandaries Excerpt
• 133 Quiet moment on the train
• “Be careful! He bird! He stay in Japan only one
year! But now heart control very difficult.”
• “Santa Barbara sunshine”
• He knows she’s wondering.. “whether a happy
Western ending might not be better than a
melancholy Japanese one.”
The Moment
• The night before he has to leave Kyoto for a
writing assignment:
• 151 “After the kettle had boiled, I put down two
mugs on the table and knelt down on the tatami
to show her some earrings I had bought for my
mother. She leaned forward till her hair was
tickling my face. In the winter darkness of the tiny
room, the fire glowing, I brushed back her hair,
felt her lips touch mine…”
Winter
Transitions
• 156 Becoming native: “Coming from Kyotoquasi-Japanese myself now—I found myself at
sea abroad, forgetting to leave tips, reluctant
to jaywalk across empty streets.. “
• 157 “At home, in California, I felt Japanese
enough to appreciate, for the first time ever,
the lavender blush of hibiscus days and the
piercing clarity of Venus in the denim sky.”
Dreaming
• 195 “Coming to Japan in search of romance [is
this what he says in the beginning?] I found
myself now a protagonist in someone else’s
dream, and found, too, that the favor was
returned.
• “This dream?” she often said, and the only
answer I could find was yes.
• But the section ends with another departure.
Spring
• Couples by Kamo River
Strategies
• Sachiko keeps getting closer
• Calls, has a cake, wants to stop by
• 241 Brings small presents. “And though I could
tell she was holding me hostage with
kindness, I could also tell that she truly did do
her thinking with her heart.”
• “Before very long, as I looked around my
room, I realized that Sachiko was colonizing
me … her claims on me were everywhere”
More Narrative Waves
• Sachiko is breaking out even as she’s reining
him in
• 244 claims she’s a “fox-woman” with a broken
marriage
• Extended information on Japanese marriages,
and the separation they usually represent,
with spouses operating independently of one
another
Sachiko Hazards Wrath
• She decides to take a course on how to be a
tour guide operator
• Her husband is bewildered
• Her mother is angry
• In the meantime, at the end of Spring, she
decides to tell Pico goodbye
Summer
• Philosopher’s Path
Sachiko
• Her “goodbye” doesn’t last
• He realizes how firmly rooted she is
• 313 “I could see how hard it would always be
for her to break away from Japan, and not
only because Japan had never taught her to
live without it.”
• There’s a deep connection she doesn’t even
realize she has
Final Ironies
• 328 “No place is an idyll to its residents as no
man is a prophet in his own household. And
foreigners everywhere are more solicitous about
the traditions of their adopted homes than
natives are”
• 329 “The tourists who came here for two weeks
could not stop marveling at the silence of the
place; the longtime residents heard only the
clatter of pachinko coins, the syncopated roar of
TV baseball crowds.”
What has he learned?
• 329 “For my own part, I began to realize that
every statement I made about Japan applied
just as surely in the opposite direction.”
Last Scene
• The night before he leaves, they go boating on the
lake
• 338 “It was only later, after I had left Japan, that I
realized that everything had been there that night:
the lanterned dark, the moon above the
mountains, the dreamlike maiden in kimono. There
was the Heian vision I had sought since childhood.
And yet, by now, it was so much a part of my life
that I had not even see it till it was gone.”