The all too perfect? Feels empty. The seemingly imperfect? Fascinates. Thanks to a journey to Japan, writer Lenz Koppelstätter understood why. An admiration.

Is there anything more boring than the perfectly beautiful mountain? The perfectly beautiful pop song? The perfectly beautiful person? The exactly right piece of life wisdom? The seemingly perfect-tasting dish? Perfection, standing on its own, as it is commonly misunderstood, is an empty shell. Picture-postcard idyll, for the sake of supposedly perfect beauty alone, has never fascinated me. Which brings us to Japan. To my journey to Japan a few years ago, which the Munich barman Charles Schumann advised me to take. I had to go to a bar there, he told me. “It is quiet in these bars,” he enthused in the Hofgarten, in the shade of the chestnut trees, “almost devotional, monastic. Simple interior, five seats at the counter. That’s it.”

Before I went to Japan, I always thought something was wrong with me. With my understanding of beauty. Why does this so-called, so perceived, perfectly beautiful thing not appeal to me? Why does it bore me?

I roamed through Tokyo, through this enchanted city, which allows itself the amusement, towards us Westerners, of seeming so familiar at first glance. At second, third, fourth glance, it lets us know: I am so different, you cannot even imagine it. You cannot penetrate me.

After travelling on from Tokyo to Kyoto on the Shinkansen, the Japanese intercity high-speed train, I first heard in a whisky bar there about that sense of beauty which, subconsciously perhaps, unknowingly and naively, I had so missed in my life until then: Wabi-Sabi.

This Japanese category of beauty can only be described in our words by cautiously approaching it. Wabi-Sabi is the crack that gives the hand-formed tea cup its character in the first place.

The next day, I browsed in a nearby bookshop for English-language literature on Wabi-Sabi. I sat down in a corner with a small book by the American architect and artist Leonard Koren. I read. I lost myself in a world of which, until then, I had only suspected – unconsciously hoped – that it existed somewhere. Even if only as an idealised idea. As a utopia.

The birth of Wabi-Sabi is dated to the lifetime of the first Japanese tea master whose existence is documented in writing: Murata Juko, a Zen monk from the 15th century who came from Nara. He liked to use native tea utensils, made by simple craftsmen.

One hundred years later, the idea of restraint extended to the rooms of the ceremony; it was increasingly held in simple farmhouses. Through the tea master Sen no Rikyu, Wabi-Sabi reached a peak in the 16th century. He even placed roughly formed native craftsmanship above the perfectly shaped Chinese treasures that had until then been favoured by powerful Japanese warlords.

Wabi-Sabi, as Koren writes, is a philosophy of modesty. It describes the beauty of imperfect, impermanent and incomplete things. More precisely? It can hardly be described for us Westerners. Wabi-Sabi is simply there when one sees it, feels it.

Translated into our plain, modern world: the opposite of overload. Of mass taste, which is almost always rather tasteless. Wabi-Sabi is: no frills. No excess. “Everything present,” Koren continues, “has its justification.” Wabi-Sabi is: “profound, multidimensional, elusive.” And: “The acceptance and celebration of fragility.”

The simple tea cup, then, which only through its crack reveals to the viewer how beautiful it actually was. No: is. As Koren also writes: “Nothing that exists is without flaws. When we look at something truly closely, we discover its small imperfections.”

And as the marvellous Okakura Kakuzo wrote in his little Book of Tea, published in 1906: “Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.”

On my second evening in Kyoto, drinking whisky, I wondered what Wabi-Sabi could be today. In Europe. The scar-like crack on the cheek of the marble Adonis? The simple Alpine hut? The silk tie tied a little too carelessly, fraying at the tip?

In contemporary Japan? Not the cherry blossom, no. Rather the day after, when the first blossoms are beginning to wither. The transience of beauty, which makes beauty unfathomable.

The bar in which I was sitting. Small. Quiet. Of simple elegance. The peaty aftertaste in the whisky in my glass, which briefly lets the drinker’s sensory structure waver between disgust and supreme pleasure. Then guides him towards the latter.

Wabi-Sabi, I realised, is also a paradox. Balancing on a silken thread. For the unconditional avoidance of perfection can itself degenerate into obsession. We Westerners are quite expert at destroying what fascinates us from elsewhere by trying to perfect it all too perfectionistically.

Far after midnight, strolling through the streets of Kyoto down towards the river, I had to think of Charles again. Of his words: almost devotional. Monastic. And also of his warning, which he had thrown after me in the Hofgarten, concerning a good bar. But which should also apply to life: “Above all, do not follow fashions. Avoid trends. Celebrate the timeless. It just must not get out of hand, must not become a cliché.” If only it were that simple.

LENZ KOPPELSTÄTTER

Lenz Koppelstätter is a bestselling author — the Commissario Grauner series, the Gianna Pitti series, Ayla’s Laughter — and a travel reporter for Salon and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.