AP – On a recent visit to New York I stopped at a Japanese bookstore in Manhattan. Among the English-language books about Japan, I encountered a section of a shelf marked WABI-SABI and stocked with titles such as Wabi Sabi Love, The Wabi-Sabi Way, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, and, in all lowercase, simply imperfect: revisiting the wabi-sabi house.
What is wabi-sabi, and why does it rate its own section alongside such topics as sushi and karate?
Wabi-sabi is typically described as a traditional Japanese aesthetic: the beauty of something perfectly imperfect, in the sense of “flawed” or “unfinished”.
Actually, however, wabi and sabi are similar but distinct concepts, yoked together far more often outside Japan than in it. Even people who have been brought up in Japan may struggle to define wabi and sabi precisely, though each is certainly authentically Japanese and neither is especially obscure.
As a scholar of classical Japanese language, literature and culture, I too have a professional interest in wabi and sabi and how they have come to be understood outside Japan.
A cursory search of Google Books shows that the term began to appear in print in English around 1980. Perhaps this was a delayed reaction to a book by Japanese art critic Yanagi Soetsu,
The Unknown Craftsman, which was translated into English and published in 1972.
In it, in an essay titled, The Beauty of Irregularity, Yanagi wrote about the art of the tea ceremony and its simple grace. More broadly, as the title suggests, he was captivated by a sense of beauty apart from traditional ideals of perfection, refinement and symmetry.
Behind “roughness,” Yanagi wrote, “lurks a hidden beauty, to which we refer in our peculiar adjectives ‘shibui,’ ‘wabi,’ and ‘sabi.'”
Shibui means austere or restrained, yet it was wabi and sabi that caught on abroad – perhaps because they rhyme.
After taking off in America and other countries, the phrase wabi-sabi was imported back to Japan as a compound term; the mentions I found in online Japanese sources typically addressed such topics as how to explain wabi-sabi to foreigners. Wabi-sabi does not appear in standard dictionaries of the Japanese language.
MISERABLE POETRY
Wabi is a noun derived from the classical Japanese verb “wabu,” related to the modern verb “wabiru” and adjective “wabishii.” Wabu means to languish or be miserable.
Here is a celebrated example from a ninth-Century waka poem, the brief verse of 31 syllables that forms the backbone of classical Japanese poetry.
The poet, a courtier named Yukihira, was a provincial governor who, by some accounts, was exiled to Suma Bay, a famous stretch of coastline in western Japan.
Should by chance
Someone ask for me,
Answer that I languish
At Suma Bay, shedding
brine upon the seaweed.
Suma Bay wasn’t all misery for Yukihira; according to legend, he loved and was loved by two sisters there.
But his poem well captures the pain of wabi – the misery of having been exiled from the courtly world he knew.
MISERABLE TEA
Eventually, the misery of wabi made its way into one of Japan’s most iconic traditions: tea. The custom of drinking powdered green tea, called matcha, entered Japan around 1200.
Over time, tea spread to the rest of the population; by the middle of the 16th Century, it was a mundane part of everyday life. It was precisely then that the preparation and serving of tea was sublimated to high art, now known as “chadō” or “sadō,” the so-called Way of Tea. – Paul S Atkins
