"Paper is the materialized energy of itoshiroshi, that extreme form of purity that is ladled out of chaos and which appears to us as both potentiality and actuality." (p. 14)

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I hesitated before buying this and had even gone a few strides down the road when - thinking again - I turned around and went back in. If I hadn't I know the book would haunt me for the next few weeks, I'd go back, the shop would be shut for the holidays, the only copy had been sold, they didn't know when they'd get another ...

I'm thinking of In Praise of Shadows - White working as a contrasting essay of sorts. And, indeed, Hara mentions the book in his first chapter. Yet it's another text that starts to emerge out of the shadows -

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- an Orientalism latent in Beckett? It had never occurred to me before. (Yeats & Noh drama ... Pound's Chinese fixations ... Mallarme's white page ... )

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"In fact the word iro, "colour" in Japanese, also signifies "lover" ... " (p. 5)

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