The Bangkok Survivor's Handbook: A Guide to Living in Asia's City of Angels Book

I may be biased because I am actually interested in living in Japan at some point, but I feel like Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk is a mostly forgotten classic in the vein of travel writing. I had never even heard of it before chancing across it while perusing writings about Japan at Powell's. I picked it up because I had just applied for a teaching position in Japan (which I was subsequently denied) and wanted to read different accounts of life over there. What I discovered was a combination of memoir, travel essay, philosophical treatise, and flat-out romance novel that left me stunned by its insight, tenderness, and sheer beauty. Chronicling a year he spent living in Kyoto, Iyer patterns his book after the seasons, each of which takes on particular cultural and physical resonance in Japan. His mood and understanding of the Japanese changes with the seasons as well, along with his slowly developing love affair with a beautiful, vivacious, fascinatingly contradictory woman named Sachiko. He peppers all this with a growing knowledge of Zen Buddhism, as well as excerpts from, and his own critical writings on, Japanese poetry and literature. The way he synthesizes it all to explain the impact the country and people has had on his own growth and awareness is profoundly interesting and moving. Additionally, the India-born, Oxford-educated Iyer is a flat-out sensational writer, capturing the simultaneously austere and lush beauty of Japan with warm, colorful details. As far as travel writing goes, Lady and the Monk has it all: It's a tender, lovely homage to a people and their landscape; it's a deeply empathetic, carefully wrought observation of a culture vastly different from our own; and it's a steamy, simmering love story that affects you like a Victorian novel might, where every strand of hair that brushes Iyer's arm sends shivers down your spine, and a simple kiss feels like fireworks in the sky.