KUKI SHUZO: A Philosopher's Poetry and Poetics, translated and edited by Michael F. Marra. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004, 358 pp., $56 (cloth). THE STRUCTURE OF DETACHMENT: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shuzo (with a Translation of "Iki no Kozo"), by Hiroshi Nara, with essays by J. Thomas Rimer and Jon Mark Mikkelsen. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004, 186 pp., with drawings, $38 (cloth).

The philosopher Kuki Shuzo (1888-1941) was among the first to interpret traditional Japan through the context of Western aesthetic theory.

As noted by Nakano Hajime, "he analyzed Japanese sensibility using Western scholarship and, in experiencing Europe, tried to receive Western culture by employing a Japanese sensibility."

A kind of cultural anthropologist as well as a philosopher, Kuki went to Europe in 1922, studied under Edmund Husserl and was acquainted with Martin Heidegger. He also met Henri Bergson, and his French tutor was the very young Jean-Paul Sartre.