When Pico Iyer decided to go 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, among the loveliest old metropolitan areas in the world, and to find out something about Japan culture today-not the world of entrepreneurs and production lines, however the traditional world of changing seasons as well as the silence of temples, from the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives about in back of the rising sun of geopolitical power.

All of 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 simply because conversant with tea wedding ceremony and traditional Japanese literature much like rock and roll music, Goethe, and Vivaldi. With the lightness of contact that produced Video Night in Kathmandu so captivating, Pico Iyer styles from their romantic relationship a marvelously ironic however heartfelt book that’s at once a portrait of cross-cultural infatuation-and misunderstanding-and a delightfully new way of viewing both the older Japan and the very new.