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Mono-no-Aware is central to traditional Japanese culture and aesthetic consciousness, as well as the essence of Japanese literature. All aspects of Kawabata Yasunari’s masterpiece “Snow Country” are infused with the concept of Mono-no-Aware. The trend is most visible in the depiction of the female figure, Youko. In this study, we analyze the aesthetic consciousness of Mono-no-Aware in the portrayal of characters from both the front and the side, knowing they mainly appear in the aspects of “view of life” and “the interplay of sorrow and beauty”.

In the decades between the two World Wars, Japan made a dramatic entry into the modern age, expanding its capital industries and urbanizing so quickly as to rival many long-standing Western industrial societies. How the Japanese made sense of the sudden transformation and the subsequent rise of mass culture is the focus of Harry Harootunian's fascinating inquiry into the problems of modernity. Here he examines the work of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who, like their European counterparts, saw modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless change that uprooted the dominant historical culture from its fixed values and substituted a culture based on fantasy and desire. Harootunian not only explains why the Japanese valued philosophical understandings of these events, often over sociological or empirical explanations, but also locates Japan's experience of modernity within a larger global process marked by both modernism and fascism. What caught the attention of Japanese thinkers was how the production of desire actually threatened historical culture. These intellectuals sought to \"overcome\" the materialism and consumerism associated with the West, particularly the United States. They proposed versions of a modernity rooted in cultural authenticity and aimed at infusing meaning into everyday life, whether through art, memory, or community. Harootunian traces these ideas in the works of Yanagita Kunio, Tosaka Jun, Gonda Yasunosuke, and Kon Wajiro, among others, and relates their arguments to those of such European writers as George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille. Harootunian shows that Japanese and European intellectuals shared many of the same concerns, and also stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its late entry into the capitalist, industrial scene should cause historians to view its experience of modernity as an oddity. The author argues that strains of fascism ran throughout most every country in Europe and in many ways resulted from modernizing trends in general. This book, written by a leading scholar of modern Japan, amounts to a major reinterpretation of the nature of Japan's modernity.

This study takes a close look at Japanese romance films made between 1990 and 2010, examining them through both traditional and modern Japanese aesthetic ideas such as Wabi-sabi, Mono no aware, Yūgen, and Kawaii. By connecting this age-old aesthetics with today's pop culture, the research reveals how these varied principles create a distinctive cinematic language. By analysing films like Love Letter and Sky of Love, this study highlights the dynamic interaction between ancient philosophies and modern storytelling methods, showing how Japanese aesthetics have deepened and evolved in today's cinema. The study offers fresh insights into the cultural and artistic importance of Japanese romance films, providing a deeper understanding of their emotional impact and lasting charm.

In this paper, I describe a conservative disposition to change which is capable of operating alongside three other dispositions: First, a disposition to accept a degree of epistemic humility with respect to the kinds of change that count as an ‘intimation’ or continuation of the value contained in some given situation. Second, a disposition to acknowledge the legitimacy of democratic majorities, even when these are not always expressions of those ‘intimations’ or continuations. Third, the disposition to help alleviate recognizable injustices as these might be suffered—and understood—by minorities. A conservative disposition to preserve the value of some given status quo operates in tension with these other three, and can sometimes give way to those other dispositions. An important part of managing tensions between these dispositions is an additional practice of reconciliation, one that helps conservatives treat change in properly conservative ways. I develop an account of this practice through a reading of Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows and the Japanese concept of mono no aware. I argue Tanizaki’s work offers an approach to change that is conservative in spirit while still being capable of accommodating itself to change which will reduce—and even eliminate—things of value that were possible prior to that change.

Motoori Norinaga occupies an ambivalent place in the history of Japanese thought as at once a brilliant literary critic and a vociferous proponent of Japanese nativism. Most studies have tended to focus on one or the other facet of Norinaga’s thought. Even when the two have been analyzed in relation to each other, attention has been paid to his nativism as the foundation of his intellectual project. This article, by contrast, argues that Norinaga’s poetics, particularly his theory of mono no aware, or sensitivity to the emotive power of things, played a constitutive role in his articulation of a nativist politics. More specifically, it suggests that Norinaga’s nativism was predicated on his construction of classical Japanese literature as a sacred Way and situates this sacralizing effort in the medieval tradition of Buddhist waka poetics founded by the poet Fujiwara no Shunzei.

This essay analyzes the children’s imaginative play in Kazuo Ishiguro’s various novels, with a special focus on . Children often engage in various types of repetitive imaginative play, acting out stories about things that do not actually exist in order to avoid the pain of confronting their problems. An exploration of children’s play and the roles performed by the guardians and Madam helps us read the novel from a new perspective – the view of Buddhism. is the Buddhist philosophy which describes “the impermanence of all phenomena.” In , shadows of death weigh heavily on the reader as an unavoidable reminder of the nature of life. This brings to the Japanese readers’ minds. The view of Buddhism has imbued Japanese literature since the Kamakura Era (1185), and a reading of from the Mujo perspective sheds light on the condition of its protagonists. My analysis aims to introduce the doctrine to anglophone literary studies by foregrounding the poignancy and resilience found in

The present study debates the way in which the Japanese author uniquely re-semanticises old Japanese aesthetic concepts such as mono no aware ('the beauty of simple and transient things') or yugenbi ('mysterious beauty'), by exploiting the valences of sight, in an interdisciplinary analysis where the poetic perspective and that of cultural semiotics is foremost. If touch, taste, smell and kinesthetic sense are senses centred on the body, which privilege direct, unmediated contact, it is acknowledged that hearing and seeing are senses that imply distance and perspective. Harnessing this characteristic of the optical, the Neo-Perceptionalist Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1970), in his novel House of the Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru bijo, 1961), transforms sight into a narrative technique that tries to re-sacralise the real world. A millennium after the The Tale of Genji, the first Japanese novel, signed by Murasaki Shikibu, in which the ideal of pure beauty was given by the faceless woman, reduced to long hair and 12 layered kimonos (junihitoe), the nude and sleeping female body in House of the Sleeping Beauties becomes the transient moment of pure beauty in what the Japanese woodblock print calls \"the floating world\" (ukiyo) or the infinite variety of an ephemeral world. In a house of pleasures where elderly clients either dream pleasantly or remember their youth during the nights they spend next to (drugged) sleeping maidens, old Eguchi, who delights in contemplating the sleeping beauties' bodies, finding himself somewhere between mystery and voluptuous fantasy, gains \"the last gaze\". Before fading away, it captures the image (imago) and the icon (eikon) of impermanent things, changing them into purity and beauty.

The work of Japanese filmmakers Yasujiro Ozu and Hirokazu Kore-Eda are examined in terms of Buddhist concepts. Frequently compared to Ozu, Kore-Eda makes films that open forward into an attitude of awe before the immensity and mysteriousness of the universe and all the particulars within it. An unmoving camera induces a stance of contemplation, one that respects and relishes what may forever remain unknown in things. The stance is one that becomes satisfied with no need to \"break through\" the world of phenomena to locate some entity that lies somehow beyond the penumbra of the known. Kore-Eda's \"Maboroshi no hikari\" is discussed in light on these concepts.

How are myths understood? This essay examines the centrality of Motoori Norinaga's interpretation of the Japanese myths for present-day understandings of these myths. It shows that Norinaga's theories and his preference for the Kojiki over the Nihon shoki in reflecting his theory of mono no aware (the pathos of things) continues to influence our interpretation and evaluations of these texts and their contents. It argues for the need of a meta-history, a study of how interpreters have attempted to understand the myths, rather than attempting to recover the \"original\" contents or meanings of these texts and their myths.

Yoda examines the manner by which \"The Tale of Genji\" presents its poetry in relation to the prose, manipulating the distinct properties of the two forms of discourse. The focus is on the text's construction of poetry as a privileged medium for representing the diegetic world.