The Lady and the Monk
Four Seasons in Kyoto
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Narrated by:
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Geoffrey Howard
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By:
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Pico Iyer
About this listen
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 PM, 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.
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This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach.
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Unfathomable Font of Blue: Life's Serial Goodbyes
- By W Perry Hall on 04-18-19
By: James Salter
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All the Lives We Never Lived
- By: Anuradha Roy
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter, The Folded Earth, and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present day about a son’s quest to uncover the truth about his mother....
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Beautiful book
- By Sonia S. on 12-13-19
By: Anuradha Roy
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The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
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Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
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The Canterbury Sisters
- By: Kim Wright
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Che Milan's life is falling apart. Not only has her longtime lover abruptly dumped her, but her eccentric, demanding mother has recently died. When an urn of ashes arrives along with a note reminding Che of a half-forgotten promise to take her mother to Canterbury, Che finds herself reluctantly undertaking a pilgrimage. Within days she joins a group of women who are walking the 60 miles from London to the shrine of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.
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The Canterbury Sisters
- By Melissa on 09-22-19
By: Kim Wright
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The Tale of Murasaki
- A Novel
- By: Liza Dalby
- Narrated by: Allison Hiroto
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 11th century Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, the most popular work in the history of Japanese literature. In The Tale of Murasaki, Liza Dalby has created a breathtaking fictionalized narrative of the life of this timeless poet - a lonely girl who becomes such a compelling storyteller that she is invited to regale the empress with her tales. The Tale of Murasaki is the story of an enchanting time and an exotic place.
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Great book, reader lacked emotion
- By Epiphany on 06-05-18
By: Liza Dalby
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Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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Solid Character based Stories
- By Michael on 06-06-24
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
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Everywhere I Look
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning 15 years of work, Everywhere I Look is an audiobook full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of rereading Pride and Prejudice.
By: Helen Garner
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Insomniac City
- New York, Oliver, and Me
- By: Bill Hayes
- Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at 48 years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.
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Touching and Intimate Portrait
- By Amazon Customer on 01-18-19
By: Bill Hayes
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The Fairy Tales of Herman Hesse
- By: Hermann Hesse, Jack Zipes - translator
- Narrated by: Donovan
- Length: 2 hrs and 53 mins
- Highlights
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Step into a world of visions, philosophy, and passion in which dreamers, seekers, princesses, and wandering poets dwell. The 6 wonderful, romantic tales in this collection are reminiscent of ancient Oriental and German fairy tales. The selections, "The Poet," "The Flute Dream," "The Dwarf," "Faldum," "Ziegler," and "Dream of the Gods" were hand-picked by the narrator, legendary folk and rock musician Donovan.
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The reading is quiet and heavenly
- By Atalante Lemuria on 11-12-20
By: Hermann Hesse, and others
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Clara Callan
- By: Richard B. Wright
- Narrated by: Anne Twomey, Joanna P. Adler
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Abridged
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Two sisters, small-town Ontario, 1934. Canadian author Richard Wright tells their story, from the ordinary to the extraoridinary with an eye for the commonplace and poignant sense of the larger undercurrents that change people's lives.
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charming intimate refreshing
- By L on 09-10-04
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Come to the Edge
- A Memoir
- By: Christina Haag
- Narrated by: Christina Haag
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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When Christina Haag was growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was just one of the boys in her circle of prep-school friends. A decade later, after they had both graduated from Brown University and were living in New York City, Christina and John were cast in an off-Broadway play together. It was then that John confessed his long-standing crush on her, and they embarked on a five-year love affair.
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Thoroughly enjoyed Come to the Edge
- By CapeCodLady on 11-15-19
By: Christina Haag
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The Art of Stillness
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In this age of constant movement and connectedness, perhaps staying in one place is a more exciting prospect, and a greater necessity than ever before. The Art of Stillness paints a picture of why so many have found richness in stillness and what - from Marcel Proust to Blaise Pascal to Phillipe Starck - they’ve gained there.
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Nothing Special
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Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into warzones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld – or can it be found in the here and now?
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Would enjoy Meeting Pico and having a deep Conversation while having some good tea.
- By M. on 02-13-23
By: Pico Iyer
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Aflame
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Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian—or a member of any religious group—but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It’s not just freedom from distraction and noise and rush: it’s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way. In Aflame, Iyer connects with inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery.
By: Pico Iyer
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The Snow Leopard
- By: Peter Matthiessen, Pico Iyer - introduction
- Narrated by: Peter Matthiessen
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
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In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Z en Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one.
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Worth the wait
- By Robert on 04-13-14
By: Peter Matthiessen, and others
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The Sweet Life in Paris
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Like so many others, David Lebovitz dreamed about living in Paris ever since he first visited the city in the 1980s. Finally, after a nearly two-decade career as a pastry chef and cookbook author, he moved to Paris to start a new life. Having crammed all his worldly belongings into three suitcases, he arrived, hopes high, at his new apartment in the lively Bastille neighborhood.
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Great content, but it needs a different narrator
- By Jennifer Sader on 09-22-12
By: David Lebovitz
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The Samurai's Garden
- A Novel
- By: Gail Tsukiyama
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
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Performance
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The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for her unusual story about a 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight.
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A Novel Painted with a Master's Brush
- By Bay Area Califa on 06-25-18
By: Gail Tsukiyama
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The Art of Stillness
- Adventures in Going Nowhere
- By: Pico Iyer
- Narrated by: Pico Iyer
- Length: 1 hr and 20 mins
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In this age of constant movement and connectedness, perhaps staying in one place is a more exciting prospect, and a greater necessity than ever before. The Art of Stillness paints a picture of why so many have found richness in stillness and what - from Marcel Proust to Blaise Pascal to Phillipe Starck - they’ve gained there.
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Nothing Special
- By Tyler on 01-14-18
By: Pico Iyer
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The Half Known Life
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- By: Pico Iyer
- Narrated by: Pico Iyer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into warzones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld – or can it be found in the here and now?
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Would enjoy Meeting Pico and having a deep Conversation while having some good tea.
- By M. on 02-13-23
By: Pico Iyer
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Aflame
- Learning from Silence
- By: Pico Iyer
- Narrated by: Pico Iyer
- Length: 4 hrs and 49 mins
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Overall
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Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian—or a member of any religious group—but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It’s not just freedom from distraction and noise and rush: it’s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way. In Aflame, Iyer connects with inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery.
By: Pico Iyer
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The Snow Leopard
- By: Peter Matthiessen, Pico Iyer - introduction
- Narrated by: Peter Matthiessen
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Z en Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one.
-
-
Worth the wait
- By Robert on 04-13-14
By: Peter Matthiessen, and others
-
The Sweet Life in Paris
- Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City
- By: David Lebovitz
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Like so many others, David Lebovitz dreamed about living in Paris ever since he first visited the city in the 1980s. Finally, after a nearly two-decade career as a pastry chef and cookbook author, he moved to Paris to start a new life. Having crammed all his worldly belongings into three suitcases, he arrived, hopes high, at his new apartment in the lively Bastille neighborhood.
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Great content, but it needs a different narrator
- By Jennifer Sader on 09-22-12
By: David Lebovitz
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The Samurai's Garden
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- By: Gail Tsukiyama
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for her unusual story about a 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight.
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A Novel Painted with a Master's Brush
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What listeners say about The Lady and the Monk
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JK
- 08-03-21
INTERESTING
A book unlike anything I have ever read before.
I was hesitant to get the book, but since it is “included”, you can’t go wrong.
So glad I did.
I have read several books about Japan. This book is very different.
I recommend an interesting article about the author mr. Pico Iyer
on Wikipedia.
The narrator Geoffrey Howard did an excellent job.
My thanks to all involved, JK
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1 person found this helpful
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- John E Dowaschinski
- 02-11-24
Great exploration of Japanese culture.
What a wonderful book that explores Japan, its people and culture from the perspective of a foreigner and his interactions primarily with a Japanese lady. I highly recommend this for a deeper understanding of Japan.
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- Janice Stemper
- 06-07-24
exceptional storytelling
beautiful story, subtly told, absolutely necessary to read between the lines, looking forward to more from P Iyer
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- Mike
- 08-14-23
Travelogue at its Finest
Great travel literature doesn't just tell you about a particular culture; it tells you something universal about life. So if you love Japan, walk here in Pico's footsteps and admire his keen eye for what makes Japan unique. But if nothing else, read this to remind yourself that neither adventure nor enlightenment are exclusive to any one place and time.
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Overall
- Duane
- 04-26-15
Informative, Poetic, Engaging
Consummate love unconsummated. Filled with insights into Japanese culture and Zen. Glittering imagery weaves perceptions into feelings. Narrator spot on.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Elmira Cancelada
- 10-16-18
Excursion to Kyoto and Japanese way of life
Wonderful that the book is from the era before smartphones. The author is observing the feminine world of Kyoto, zen temples, family life, dreams and attitudes of the locals and the foreigners. Loaded with the feel of the place, not the facts of history.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Kaye Linden
- 12-21-22
Riveting
A story that captures the essence of romance in the haunting magic of Japan. Beautiful writing.
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-21-24
Absolutely wonderful. A joy for anyone who visits Kyoto and wants to bring the feeling home to you
Iyer perfectly translates the beauty of Kyoto and the impression it leaves on your heart. He exquisitely (and evenly) exposes everything holy, good, hard, and bad that is to be confronted while living in Japan. And this would be enough for a five star review, but the narrator’s touch is the icing on the cake - an absolute joy to listen to.
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- Kat
- 09-22-21
A little everywhere
This book started off really strong for me. I thought I was going to love it. Then by the middle it took a turn. It drifted in story. It literally started not making sense. By the end of the story I literally had no idea what was happening. Do not get me wrong, the writing is beautiful in fact quite lyrical. It just got lost in the magic for me.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Stuffpuff
- 04-22-22
Boring
boring . unless one wants to be a monk. struggled to finish. hours not to be regained.
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