The Structure of Iki

A short book in which Kuki Shūzō, who had studied in Europe with Rickert and Heidegger and met Bergson, analyses iki, an aesthetic and ethical style that took shape in the pleasure quarters of late Edo, roughly a refined, unattached chic. Kuki argues that iki has three moments: allure toward the other sex (bitai), a proud, spirited resistance inherited from the samurai ethos (ikiji), and a Buddhist-tinged resignation or detachment (akirame). He maps iki against neighbouring taste concepts, such as the refined, the showy, the plain, the sweet and the astringent, on a geometric figure, and traces its natural expressions in posture, voice and dress and its artistic expressions in vertical stripes, subdued greys and browns, and architecture. He presents iki as untranslatable, an expression of the being of a particular people, a claim critics have linked to the cultural nationalism of the period.

It is the classic phenomenology of a single aesthetic concept, and a test case for whether ideas of taste can travel between cultures.