The phrase 物の哀れ, mono no aware, is usually translated as a gentle sadness at the passing of things. It is a flatter rendering than the Japanese permits, and most translators concede the point in their footnotes. Aware began as a cry, something close to an English "ah", the sound a person makes when something touches them, and mono no aware is the capacity to be touched in that way by the world: by a blossom, a change in the light, a line of a poem, precisely because none of them stays.
Said aloud it is six even syllables, mo-no no a-wa-re, with no stress on any of them. The nearest English attempts are "the pathos of things" and, more literally, "the ah-ness of things", and the second is closer: the word names a response, not a mood. It is not melancholy, which turns away from the world, and it is not nostalgia, which prefers the past to the present. It is a sharpened attention to the present, with the knowledge that the present is moving.
the scholar
What Norinaga meant by it
The term entered criticism through Motoori Norinaga, who lived from 1730 to 1801 and practised as a physician in the merchant town of Matsusaka in Ise, giving his evenings to the oldest Japanese texts and to what they said before Chinese learning came to explain them. He set out the idea in a short treatise on The Tale of Genji in 1763, and returned to it at length in his great commentary on the novel at the end of the century.
His argument was a quarrel with the moralists. The scholars of his day read Genji as a Buddhist lesson on impermanence, or as a warning against the prince's many loves. Norinaga held that it was neither. What the novel produced in a sensitive reader was not detachment from the world but a heightened attachment to it, sharpened by the knowledge that it is passing, and to know mono no aware was simply to know what it is to be human.
the poets
A feeling already a thousand years old
Norinaga did not invent the feeling; he named what the court poets had been writing about for eight centuries. The Kokinshu, the imperial anthology of around 905, opens with a preface in which the poet Ki no Tsurayuki says that Japanese poetry has the human heart as its seed and grows into ten thousand leaves of words. In the same anthology Ariwara no Narihira wrote that if the world had no cherry blossoms, the heart in spring would be at peace: the most famous complaint in Japanese poetry, and a love poem to the blossom that disturbs it.
The monk Saigyo wrote that he hoped to die beneath the blossoms in spring, at the full moon of the second month, and in 1190 he died at almost exactly that season, which Japan has never forgotten. A century and a half later Yoshida Kenko, in the essays of Tsurezuregusa, asked whether blossom should be looked at only in full flower and the moon only in a cloudless sky, and answered that the branch about to open, and the garden strewn with fallen petals, move the heart as much.
The branch about to open and the garden strewn with petals move the heart as much as the full flower.
the neighbours
Mono no aware and wabi-sabi: the neighbouring words
Mono no aware sits among a handful of Japanese words that English readers meet together and tend to blur. They are related, and they are not the same.
Behind all of them stands mujo, the Buddhist teaching of impermanence. The Tale of the Heike, the great war chronicle of the thirteenth century, opens with the sound of a temple bell that tells of the impermanence of all things, and with the observation that the proud do not last, like a dream on a spring night. Mujo is a doctrine about the world. Mono no aware is what the doctrine feels like when a person stands under a blossoming tree and the doctrine is suddenly true.
Wabi-sabi belongs to the tea room, and it moves the same feeling from the season to the object. Wabi is the beauty of the plain and the quiet, a rough tea bowl preferred to a perfect one; sabi is the beauty that time leaves on things, the patina on bronze, the moss on a stone lantern, the softened edge of an old beam. Where mono no aware is moved by the blossom falling, wabi-sabi is moved by the bowl that has been used for two hundred years, and by the gold seam of kintsugi where it was once broken and mended.
Yugen, the word of the noh stage, is the beauty of what is only half shown: the moon behind thin cloud, a dancer's slow turn, a mountain path disappearing into mist. And ichigo ichie, from the tea ceremony, holds that each meeting happens once, so that a host prepares an ordinary afternoon's tea as though it would never come again, which in truth it will not. A guest who has felt mono no aware in a garden will recognise all four, and the recognition is half the pleasure of travelling in Japan.
the calendar
A concept the country built around
Mono no aware describes a pattern that had already organised itself, and to which someone eventually gave a name. The cherry blossom is the plainest case. People assemble under the branches, eat beneath them, write poems about them and photograph them, and when the petals fall the country has words ready: hanafubuki, a blizzard of blossom, and hanaikada, the raft of petals floating on a moat. The falling is part of the event, looked forward to as much as the flowering.
The maple season is the same event in other colours, and it has its own word, chiri-momiji, the scattered maple on the moss. And the kaiseki kitchen has made the feeling into a working vocabulary. Every ingredient has three moments: hashiri, the first of it, served in small amounts as a herald; shun, when it is at its best and most plentiful; and nagori, the last of it, served as a farewell. A September menu may set the last of the summer's hamo beside the first matsutake of the autumn, and a guest who knows the words can read the season in a single tray.
The year has other such moments, and Japan keeps them all. The plum opens in February in the cold, a month ahead of the cherry. In June the fireflies come out over the streams of the northern hills of Kyoto, an evening's walk in the dark among small moving lights. On the fifteenth night of the eighth month of the old calendar, in September or early October, the full moon is viewed over a pond or from a temple veranda, tsukimi, with pampas grass in a vase and white rice dumplings stacked on a stand. The first snow has its own word, hatsuyuki, and at midnight on the last day of the year the great temple bells are struck one hundred and eight times, one stroke at a time, while the year goes out.
Hanami: how Japan watches the blossom →
why it travels
Why it travels
Mono no aware is one of the few Japanese aesthetic terms that has passed into English without being flattened. The underlying experience is universal: every culture has its late-summer evening whose pleasure is bound up with the summer ending. What Japan has done is build a calendar, a cuisine and a literature around the feeling, and teach it to visitors without appearing to teach it at all.
A first-time visitor to Japan in the cherry blossom will often describe the experience afterwards in language they did not have before going. They say, and mean, that it was more beautiful for being part of a season that moves on, and in their own words they have produced a working translation of a term that has stood in Japanese criticism for more than two and a half centuries.
where to feel it
Where a guest feels it most
Mono no aware is a way of attending rather than a destination. Certain places make the attending easier: the moss garden of Saiho-ji in Kyoto under autumn rain; a ryokan room in Kinosaki with the last matsuba crab of the winter on the table; a dry-landscape garden at a temple late in the afternoon, when the sun is low and the raked gravel is the only thing still catching the light.
The guest does not need to know the term. The feeling arrives without the word. What the word supplies, afterwards, is a handle by which to hold the memory.
Kyoto: the city and its places →
questions
Questions
What does mono no aware mean?
Mono no aware is the heart moved by things as they pass: a sharpened, tender attention to a blossom, a change of light or a line of a poem, because none of them stays. The usual translation, "the pathos of things", is gentler than the Japanese, in which aware began as a cry, close to "ah".
Who named mono no aware?
Motoori Norinaga, the eighteenth-century scholar of Matsusaka, set out the idea in a treatise on The Tale of Genji in 1763. The feeling itself runs through Japanese poetry from the Kokinshu of around 905.
What is the difference between mono no aware and wabi-sabi?
Mono no aware is a response to the passing of things, most of all the seasons. Wabi-sabi, from the tea room, is the beauty of the plain and of what time leaves on an object: the rough bowl, the patina, the mended crack.
How is mono no aware pronounced?
Mo-no no a-wa-re: six even syllables, with no stress on any of them, and the final e said as in "bed".
What is an example of mono no aware?
The falling of the cherry blossom, which Japan treats as part of the flowering rather than its end, with its own words for it: hanafubuki, a blizzard of petals, and hanaikada, the raft of petals on a moat. The kaiseki kitchen's nagori, the last of an ingredient served as a farewell, is another.
Is mono no aware a sad feeling?
Not chiefly. It holds an awareness that things pass, but it turns towards the world rather than away from it: the heart is moved, and the thing is loved more for it.