A woman's heart, a poet's quill

"One delicate autumn day - the sky now grey, now blue, always like a woman's uncertain heart, a little drizzle falling, and then subsiding, and falling once more - I met Sachiko outside an Indonesian store, for a trip to Kurama. She was, as ever, girlishly dressed, her hair falling thickly over one side of her face, held back on the other by a back comb with a red-stone heart in its middle; the tongues of her black sneakers hanging out from under lime-green legwarmers."

From Pico Iyer's The lady & the monk, a book of his time in Japan. This lovely passage is only one of several that make the book. Is he a writer, or a poet?