Mono no aware

In plain terms

Mono no aware is the feeling that arises because something will not last - and the claim that this feeling is what makes it worth attending to.

The usual Western move is to treat impermanence as a problem: beauty is admired despite passing, and the passing is regrettable. This inverts it. A blossom that lasted all year would not be what it is, and the value is not diminished by the transience but constituted by it.

The response is not grief, and it is not resignation either. The closest English is something like a tender, unresentful ache at things being as they are - which is a mouthful because the language has no word for it.

Norinaga's claim was that this sensitivity, rather than any moral lesson, is what literature is for.

As a philosopher would put it

Motoori Norinaga developed the concept in his commentaries on the Tale of Genji and on the Kokinshū, arguing that the novel's purpose is neither Buddhist admonition nor Confucian instruction but the cultivation of mono no aware - a sensitivity to the moving quality of things, and to the emotional responses they properly evoke.

The claim is anti-moralist and was polemical. Genji's conduct had been read as a warning; Norinaga's argument is that the work asks the reader to be moved rather than to judge, and that the capacity to be moved is itself the achievement.

It belongs to a cluster of Japanese aesthetic terms - wabi, sabi, yūgen, iki - which resist translation and are usually presented together, at some cost, since each has its own history. The Buddhist background of impermanence is real, and Norinaga's nativist project was explicitly directed against Buddhist and Chinese frameworks, so treating the concept as simply Buddhist misdescribes what he was doing with it.

What is actually disputed

Whether the concept is distinctively Japanese.

Norinaga's project was nativist: he argued that mono no aware expressed a Japanese sensibility that had been overlaid by Chinese and Buddhist frameworks, and the concept has since been used, including in the twentieth century, to support claims about national uniqueness. Historians of the idea have shown that these claims are constructed and comparatively recent, and that comparable sensibilities are documented elsewhere.

That does not empty the concept. It does mean that presenting it as an ancient and unchanging Japanese essence repeats a position rather than reporting a fact.

A second question is whether such terms can be explained at all in another language. The standard practice is to leave them untranslated and gloss them at length, which preserves something and also produces the impression of ineffability - and a concept that resists all statement is difficult to distinguish from one with no content.