 The Structure of “Iki” (“Iki” no kōzō) by Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941) is arguably the most significant work in Japanese aesthetics from the twentieth century—and certainly one of the shortest. Kuki wrote the first draft in 1926 while living in Paris, toward the end of a seven-year stay in Europe, and published the book shortly after returning to Japan in 1929. It’s a phenomenological and hermeneutic study of a phenomenon, iki, that was central to Japanese aesthetic life during the previous two or three hundred years and derived from forms of erotic relations between men and geisha in the pleasure quarters of the big cities. Kuki remarks that although the French terms chic, coquet, and raffiné share connotations with the term iki, no European word is capable of translating the richness of its meanings—unsurprisingly, since it emerged from a particular cultural context and Kuki is concerned to grasp the “living form” of the phenomenon as experienced. Kuki mentions the French esprit and the German Sehnsucht as terms that are similarly untranslatable, for similar reasons of cultural embeddedness (Nara, 15–16).