The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer [Iyer, Pico]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76113-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

3

WINTER MADE EVERYONE a kind of monk in Japan, bringing out a streak of worldly asceticism that was never far from the surface in this land of spartan epicures. It was not so much that the weather was punishing; indeed, it was cold only indoors. Yet even the affluent here, in the world’s most advanced society, lived often, it seemed, in conditions that we would regard as neoprimitive, in miniature, half-furnished houses, with outdoor toilets, and flimsy walls, and an absence of all central heating. Their homes, very often, seemed as scaled down as their hopes.

Again, this suggested to me how public dress here was almost a form of public address. In public, people presented themselves in highly expensive clothes and shiny, late-model, lily-white cars; behind closed doors, they lived like paupers almost. The whole society, it sometimes seemed, schooled its people in denial even as it indulged them — as any parent might — allowing them to believe that they could find any kind of cake or good or service, at any time of day, yet reminding them that they could not hope to gain a more intangible kind of license. And winter seemed to enforce the lesson, bringing a penitential strain to the rites of self-negation.

Even the Emperor, as a boy, had been made to stand out under an ice-cold waterfall, in dead of winter, for fifteen minutes each day, without complaining or even permitting himself a grimace. And even Sachiko, jeans-wearing, Tom Cruise–loving Sachiko, observed her own monastic rites: each day, she told me, in winter or summer, come rain or shine, she got up at dawn and took a shower in freezing-cold water, crying out chants to the gods to ensure good health and fortune for her family.

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