Shibui: The Beauty That Doesn't Ask to Be Noticed

Bite into an unripe persimmon and your mouth puckers. The tannins grab the tongue and dry it, and the fruit that looked so promising delivers not sweetness but a kind of clenched, astringent resistance. The Japanese word for that taste is shibui (渋い).

It is also the word — the same word, unchanged — that a Japanese person will use for a perfectly cut suit in a colour you cannot quite name, for a tea bowl that seems plain until you have held it for a week, for a jazz musician who plays fewer notes than anyone else on the stand, and for an old man who says little and is listened to. It is one of the highest compliments in the language. How a word for an unpleasant taste became a word for the deepest kind of beauty tells you a good deal about Japanese taste, and about taste in general.

The taste and the turn

Shibui was first a description of tannin: the dry, mouth-tightening quality of green persimmons, strong tea, and certain wines. It was not a compliment. By the Edo period, though, it had begun to be used for people and things that had the same quality — reserved, unshowy, a little severe. Merchants in eighteenth-century Edo used it for an aesthetic of restraint that was partly forced on them by sumptuary laws forbidding the lower classes to wear bright colours, and that they then turned into a matter of pride. If you could not wear red, you learned to wear forty shades of brown and grey, and to tell them apart, and to consider anyone who needed red a little vulgar.

The word went from unripe to restrained to sophisticated, and by the twentieth century it was the term of praise that the folk-craft movement, and then Western design writers who discovered it in the 1960s, held up as the essence of Japanese taste.

Seven qualities

The design magazine House Beautiful devoted two issues to shibui in 1960, and its attempt to define the word has held up better than most. The editors, working with Japanese designers, identified a cluster of qualities: simplicity, implicitness, modesty, silence, naturalness, everydayness, and imperfection.

The list is useful because of what it excludes. Not novelty. Not brilliance. Not perfection. Not luxury, in the sense of visible expense. A shibui object is not trying to impress you on first sight. It has, in fact, something of the persimmon about it: a first encounter that may be slightly withholding, even dull, and a quality that only reveals itself with time and use and attention.

Shibui and its neighbours

Japanese aesthetics has a family of terms for restraint, and shibui has a particular place in it.

Wabi-sabi is about age and imperfection — the weathered, the cracked, the humble. Shibui can be new. A brand-new kimono in a muted indigo can be shibui. What it cannot be is loud.

Iki, the Edo-period ideal of chic — the geisha's sidelong glance, the gambler's quiet flair — is shibui's cousin with more edge. Iki has a wink in it. Shibui does not wink.

Jimi means plain, drab, subdued, and it is the word for shibui that failed — the brown that is merely brown. The line between jimi and shibui is the line between a thing that is quiet because it has nothing to say and a thing that is quiet because it does not need to say it. Only time and a trained eye can tell which is which, and this is the whole point of shibui as a value: it rewards the person who looks twice.

Where you find it

In objects: the unglazed stoneware of Bizen, fired for days in a wood kiln until the ash melts onto the clay in colours no glaze could plan. A dark lacquer box with no decoration at all. A carpenter's plane whose blade is set so finely the shaving is transparent. The dense, plain, extraordinarily comfortable cotton of an old noren curtain in a shop doorway.

In clothing: the whole range of Japanese menswear that foreigners often find puzzlingly sober — the navy that is not quite navy, the grey that is not quite grey, the near-invisible pattern in the weave. Shibui dressing is dressing for the person who will notice the weave.

In people: the word is used, with real warmth, for someone who is reserved, competent, and does not perform either quality. The shibui man — it is more often used of men, though it need not be — is the one at the end of the bar who says nothing all evening and, when he does speak, is right. The actor who underplays. The chef who does not decorate the plate.

In music and film: it is the term Japanese critics reach for when something is spare. A film with no score. A guitarist who leaves space. The word is common in jazz writing, where it describes precisely the quality of a player who has learned what not to play.

The persimmon principle

I think there is a general truth hiding in the word's origin, and it is this: the things that reward long attention often resist short attention.

The persimmon's tannins are what allow it to ripen slowly into something extraordinary; the same compounds that pucker the mouth in September are what protect the fruit until it sweetens in November. A shibui object is astringent in the same way. It does not give itself up on first contact. It is designed — or has grown — to be lived with, and its beauty is a return on the investment of living with it.

This is nearly the opposite of how most things are designed now. The product is built to seize attention in the first second, on the shelf or the screen. Everything is ripe on arrival. Shibui is a reminder that there was once, and could be again, a kind of beauty that arrived unripe on purpose, and that the people who prized it were prizing their own capacity to wait.

A test

Here is how to tell if something in your life is shibui, as opposed to merely plain.

Have you had it for years? Do you still notice it? Has your regard for it gone up, rather than down, with time? Would you struggle to explain to a stranger what is good about it, and would the stranger, on being handed it, probably not see? Does it seem, somehow, to be keeping something back?

If so, you have a persimmon. Keep it. It is ripening.