The Unknown Craftsman: Japanese Insight into Beauty. - book reviews

Like a swift loving slap across the face. The author is the founder of the Japan folkcraft movement -- National Treasure craftspeople and all that. The translator is Bernard Leach, high lama of deep pottery and fifty-year friend of Soetsu Yanagi. The message is that simplicity and essence and material and use and utter craft are all facets of the same transparent core truth. That's so easy to forget that this brief book is rapidly acquiring a towering reputation.

"Why should one reject the perfect in favour of the imperfect? The precise and perfect ... admits no freedom; the perfect is static and regulated, cold and hard. We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite. Beauty must have some room, must be associated with freedom. Freedom, indeed, is beauty. The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom.

"Rather than in precious and refined forms of art, it is amongst the odds and ends of things hitherto scorned or derided, amongst objects of unstressed and ordinary everyday life (getemono), that the norm of health may be found. By health, I mean to point at the honest quality, the form and feeling that is in full accord with use, which is the very seeing eye of craft. The bad handling of material, the over-complicated procedures of technique, over-employment of decoration, slick skills, one-sidedness of personality, over-self-consciousness -- these are all forms of disease for the simple reason that they do not fit the purpose of use.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group