The word ‘aware’ appears over 1000 times in the novel, roughly once on every page. Norinaga hailed the classic Japanese novel of the Heian period, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (c.973-c.1014), often considered the first real novel in world literature, for being particularly saturated in mono no aware. Norinage believed that this sharing of feeling between the poet and reader – the way in which we can all be moved, for example, by the sad beauty of falling petals – was the basis of human community itself. The breath that sighed in exclamations of wonder, pain or relief – the original meaning of aware as a word – was converted by the poet into articulate patterns of language, images, and sound. The writing of poetry ( uta or ‘song’), he suggested, was an act that turned sighing into singing. Norinaga claimed that the whole task of literature was to represent mono no aware. While science or abstract philosophy may give us a knowledge of things in their generality, mono no aware is a more immediate and direct knowledge of the distinctive qualities that characterize a unique phenomenon – what cannot be generalised, but can only be felt by the ‘heart-mind’ (the Japanese word kokoro means both the heart and mind) as it experiences something singular. He wrote: ‘To know mono no aware is to discern the power and essence, not just of the moon and the cherry blossoms, but of every single thing existing in this world, and to be stirred by each of them’. Zeami Motokiyo (c.1363-c.1443), the major theoretician, actor and writer of the Noh drama wrote that ‘the flower is marvellous because it blooms, and singular because it falls’.įor the eighteenth-century scholar of the Edo period, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), mono no aware is more than just a subjective feeling – it is also a form of knowledge. Mono no aware is in deep sympathy with Japanese Buddhism, which stresses the impermanence of life and states that we should willingly and gracefully let go of our attachments to transient things. It is the way in which something affects us immediately and involuntarily, before we are able to put that feeling into words – and Japanese art has often sought to present objects and experiences whose emotional impact is both powerful and obscure to us. Mono no aware has hence also been translated as ‘the “ahness” of things’. The word ‘aware’ was first used, in the Heian period of Japan (794-1185), as an exclamatory particle to express a spontaneous and inarticulate feeling – as with the particles that we use like ‘ah’ or ‘oh’ or ‘wow’. Japanese art and literature has been especially concerned with the moods of pathos around mono no aware : falling blossoms, the changes of the moon, the passing of the seasons, the plaintive cries of birds or insects, and the absence of friends or lovers. It is often associated with a poignant feeling of transience, a beautiful sadness in the passing of lives and objects, like the glorious colour of autumn leaves as they are about to fall. So mono no aware signifies the deep feeling or pathos of things, the powerful emotions that objects can evoke or instil in us. ‘Mono’ means ‘thing’ or ‘things’ ‘aware’ means ‘feeling’ or sentiment, and the particle ‘no’ indicates something an object possesses. Mono no aware is a key term in Japanese culture.
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