Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.

Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty. It occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West . . . Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about the delicate traces, the faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness . . . Author Leonard Koren was trained as an architect but never built anything-except an eccentric Japanese tea house-because he found large, permanent objects too philosophically vexing to design.

Koren resides in both America and Japan.

Soft cover.

94 pages.