In fleeting times, when emotion ages before reaching consciousness, it is necessary for the individual to opt for being in the world: to set out in search of memory. At the limits of memory, the Japanese garden is discovered as a transcendent mesh woven with an asceticism and an aesthetic that do not seem to be of this world. The Japanese garden resembles nature in that it adopts the forms and elements of the landscape, yet it distances itself from the exuberant and chaotic perceived world. Nature is evoked in the Japanese garden, but this aesthetic recreation of the landscape is always striving to reach the sacred.
This book does not aim to be a detailed description or a catalog of the various types of gardens built in Japan over the last thousand years. It is a study that, using the "gaze" as its primary phenomenological concept and making a clear distinction between seeing and looking, is grounded in the philosophical and aesthetic principles of Japanese culture.
To explain what occurs in these outdoor spaces—always associated with the dwelling and its inhabitation—the text turns to geometry and meticulously examines the basic concepts of this ancestral culture, noting the inseparability of its various artistic manifestations: haiku poetry; the anecdotes and poems of the famous Genji Monogatari; the painting of different eras; and, in particular, the well-known ukiyo-e pictorial movement that peaked in the first half of the 19th century. To make the spatial structure of these gardens comprehensible to Western scholars, the analysis is not limited to the Japanese world; it draws upon anthropological themes, utilizes Western philosophy, and incorporates the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard or the poetics of Antonio Muñoz Rojas and Octavio Paz, among others. In short, this is an initiatory journey through the Japanese garden, perhaps one never undertaken before.
