by Allen S. Weiss. Stone Bridge Press, 184 p
Reviewed by Stephen Mansfield

Early in ‘Illusory Dwellings,’ Allen S. Weiss, writing of the journey and the environs it takes us to in the quest for identity, states, “We map a city according to our fantasies and desires, and in turn the city frames our lives and inflects our destinies.” This collusive process could as easily be applied to art and aesthetics, the author’s primary interests in this book. 

    Weiss’s work is difficult to categorize, but might be termed one of the higher forms of rumination on art and aesthetics, a practice restricted to a small group of writers, critics and polymaths, stretching from Walter Pater and John Ruskin to Alain de Botton. Geoff Dyer and Teju Cole come to mind for their considered meditations on states of being.

    The beauty of Weiss’s prose, which is evident throughout this book, is an enticement to proceed to his ideas, a process that is a form of ensnarement, forcing the serious reader to reexamine their muddled thinking. Whether he is pondering the transformative work of an ikebana master, an iconoclastic ceramicist, or John Cage’s abstract score for Ryoanji, a composition played in chance-determined sequences based on the perception of the garden and its fifteen stones as a pre-existing form of musical score, or commending the experience of restaurant interiors, tableware, calligraphic displays and flower arrangements, an entrée into the refinements of Japanese culture, he does so with an uncommon refinement. Here is a book that doesn’t present itself as a work of literary merit, but cannot fail in being one. Books like this are a supreme rarity.

   With deft hands, Weiss peels back the fine layering of opaque membrane that wraps the core of Japanese aesthetics, and takes us, in the case of the tea ceremony, into a “utopia with a single ritualistic purpose, a space that prepares one for enlightenment.” Eschewing the anointed look of the culturally mesmerized, and, thereby, compromised, Weiss writes of the practice, that the purity of its origins have been, “corrupted by the commodity aspect of tea utensils and the utilization of the private space of the tea room for political and financial intrigues.” The author understands the dilemma faced by the more aesthetically conscious tea masters, trapped between material forms, consumer valuations, and a striving for “pure connoisseurship, which can appear “mannerist, even decadent.” Does one adhere to a form of ritual so formally correct and minimalist it compromises the social leveling of the event, or stage a presentation so opulent, you end up with over-stewed leaves? 

    Could this very fastidiousness, the sedulousness of a practice that keeps the unschooled hordes from the door, amount to, not just an affectation, but an over-attention to perfection? This put me in mind of a tea ceremony I attended earlier this year, in which the master, an elderly woman, apologized profusely for the condition of the winter camellia chosen for the event, which had suddenly blossomed that morning into a showy, unintended efflorescence. She hoped that the raku ware tea bowl that was being passed around, with its more muted tones, would moderate the over-exuberance of the flowers.  

    Is the appreciation of such aesthetics in decline? Or, more to the point, how long has it been in decline? The appreciation of limited morsels of light in the Japanese home, for example, had already begun to lapse into a cult of quaintness by the time Junichiro Tanizaki published his long 1933 essay, ‘In Praise of Shadows’. Tanizaki, whom Weiss references, celebrates the merits of meager light and perishable, organic materials, noting in the case of the zashiki, the Japanese tatami room, that walls are deliberately made from soil and sand, in order to, “let the frail, melancholic, ephemeral light saturate the solemn composure of their earthy tones.” There is no question that, today, the appreciation of such refinements is confined to a very small number of Japanese. One would have to go to considerable lengths to experience the aesthetic sensations celebrated by Tanizaki, and now by Weiss.

    In an age in which the publishing industry, indiscriminate in its eagerness to bring out books on Japanese culture, to provide instant gratification, Weiss demands a great deal more from his readers. Spearheading a cerebral, unsparing school of intellectual inquiry, one you might term, “extreme erudition,” you’ll have to have your wits about you when encountering, for example, a sentence like, “If it is neither diegetic nor adiegetic, would it be paradiegetic?” which concerns the function of the frame in the visual arts.

    As someone who grew up in a house totally bereft of books, I have spent a lifetime filling empty rooms with the written word, with titles that turn barren emptiness into what Donald Richie termed “the nourishing void.” The aptly named ‘Illusory Dwellings,’ is a fine addition to this improvised library. 

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Writers in Kyoto were very fortunate to welcome Allen S. Weiss to speak on ‘Illusory Dwellings’ and a variety of other topics in May 2024. Reflections on the event can be found here. A listing of Allen’s books can be viewed on his Amazon author page here.

Photojournalist and author Stephen Mansfield’s work has appeared in over 70 publications worldwide, on subjects ranging from conflict in the Middle East to cultural analysis, interviews and book reviews. To read more from and about Stephen Mansfield on the Writers in Kyoto website, please refer to this link.