Tricycle | Awake in the World

In 1974, when Houghton Mifflin published Janwillem van de Wetering’s The Empty Mirror,
the Netherlander’s account of his Zen training in a Kyoto monastery
stood virtually alone in its class. In those days, Zen memoirs written
by Westerners were as rare as sushi in Peoria. Now all that has
changed. Zennists, apparently, are not spared the backward gaze of
middle age, nor the impulse to make some narrative sense of it all.
Now, with boomers hitting their forties and fifties, spiritual memoirs
have boomed also, creating the burgeoning stream of Zen-inspired
autobiographies presently coursing through American bookstores.