Love Among The Temples

By Stefan Kanfer

THE LADY AND THE MONK by Pico Iyer

Knopf; 338 pages; $22

In the fall of 1987, travel writer Pico Iyer flew from his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., to Japan. Aware that too much had already been said about "the capital of the future tense," Iyer avoided the Tokyo scene. Instead he chose to spend four seasons in and around a Kyoto temple, seeking enlightenment in a place where "the social forms were as unfathomable to me, and as alien, as the woods around Walden Pond."

The reference is apt. Like Thoreau, Iyer combines an acute sense of place with a mordant irony. The revealing detail is his specialty: he recalls "an old monk brush, brush, brushing a pathway clean . . . a sitting Buddha imparting a peace so strong it felt like wisdom . . . Yet one could never forget the world entirely. Floating up from below came the sound, plangent and forlorn, of a garbage collector's truck playing its melancholy song."

Iyer tries to focus on spiritual aspects, but Westerners break his concentration. A potter from California confesses, "For a long time, you know, I used to repress this thing about being a witch." Another American, long resident among the Japanese, warns, "The one subject you never mention to them is politics. Never, man. Makes them go dead." Sex is a different matter. Evidences of it are everywhere: in the omnipresent skin magazines, the vending machines for X-rated videos, the cryptic mechanical devices. Iyer notes and rejects them all.

And then he meets Sachiko. Her husband is a typical "salaryman," continually absent from home. For a while, the monkish American and the lady regard each other at arm's length. But the couple are soon overtaken by enchantment. "I little ghost," she tells him. "Old Japanese story: ghost visit man many many times, many very happy time together. But man's friends much worry. His face more weak, more pale. Ghost eating his heart." Reflects Iyer: "She could hardly have given more eloquent expression to all my unspoken fears."

No conventionally happy ending can come of this Madama Butterfly for the '90s. Still, renunciation has its own rewards. By the time of their parting, Sachiko has assumed a Western assertiveness, and neither she nor her marriage will ever be the same. As for Iyer, the detached observer has finally succumbed to love -- in typically Zen manner: "By now it was so much a part of my life that I had not even seen it until it was gone."