Abstract
The Katsura Imperial Villa has had a profound influence on modern Western architecture. In order to understand the reasons for this, we need to study in greater depth the historical interconnections between Japanese arts and the “Way of Tea”, for which the villa stands as the most complex monument and, at the same time, take a hermeneutical, transcultural approach, which can offer an additional methodological perspective based on the Japanese concept of kire-tsuzuki (a discontinuous continuum).