Mono no Avare

The word “mono” ( 物 物 ) , literally “thing” is all that avare can cause. Sei-Syonagon in his book, Notes at the Head , writes: “The dawn of the twenty-seventh day of the ninth moon came. You still have a quiet conversation, and suddenly a month comes up from behind the crest of the mountains, thin and pale ... You won’t understand whether he is there or not. What a sad beauty! “How does the moonlight excite the heart when it oozes through the cracks in the roof of a dilapidated hut!”

Elsewhere, “Notes at the Head,” Sei-Syonagon writes:

“I like it if the house where a woman lives alone has a dilapidated abandoned look. Let the fence collapse. Let the water grass drown the pond, the garden will be covered with wormwood, and green stalks will break through the sand on the paths ...

How much sadness and beauty!
“I hate the house where a lonely woman with the appearance of an experienced housewife is bothering to fix and fix everything, where the fence is strong and the gates are constipated.”

Variability and inconstancy can also cause very strong feelings of avare. Yumemakura Baku writes about this in one of his short stories in the Omyoji series:

“I’ll tell you about a strange person. I'll tell you about a man who looks like a cloud floating in the wind in an empty night sky. The cloud appeared in darkness, a moment, another - and it has already changed, but these changes can be seen only if you look closely. It should be the same cloud, but who will understand what shape it is ...

I’ll tell about such a person ” ^[2] .

Hisamatsu lists ^{[ where? ]} four varieties of avare: the beauty of mental movement, the beauty of harmony, the beauty of sadness and the beauty of grace. The spirit of mono no avare, according to Hisamatsu, is most expressed in monogatari . The main goal of the monogatari is to convey mono no avare. In this they differ from Confucian and Buddhist books. Monogatari is not a way to overcome misconceptions, to achieve satori , which is the goal of the Buddhist-Confucian path. Telling about worldly affairs, the monogatari do not teach good and evil, but lead to good, revealing mono-no avare.

In the famous Japanese encyclopedic dictionary “ Kojien ” about avare it is said: “Mono-no avare - a sense of harmony of the world caused by the merging of subjective feeling (avare) with an object (mono). It can mean graceful, refined, calm - that which opens at the moment of contemplation. Mono no avare reached its completion in Heian literature, and above all in the Genji Monogatari, but it went through all our literature. ”

Famous authors of the manga ( , Kozue Amano , Kaoru Mori ) and the anime ( Yesterday directed by Isao Takahata and directed by ) use the principle of mono no avare in the development of the plot, emphasizing the course time and including flashbacks in the picture. Director Yasujiro Ozu is known for creating the feeling of “mono-no avare” with the help of the hero’s remarks, at the time of the change he suddenly says: “But the weather is nice!” ( Japanese い い 天 気 で す ね ı tenki desu ne ) .

In the book about the history of Ancient Japan, “The World of the Shining Prince”, Ivan Morris compares “mono no avare” with the term Virgil , “tears of things” ^[3] .

Irish photographer , has launched the Mono no Aware project, which posts a photo of sakura blossoms playing the role of a metaphor for a fleeting world change.

T. P. Grigoryeva, “Japanese Art Tradition” ^[4] :

Mono no avare - “the charm of things”, one of the earliest definitions of beauty in Japanese literature, is associated with the Shinto belief that each thing has its own deity - kami , each thing has its own unique charm. Avare - this is what causes delight, emotion. Avare is the inner essence of things (like Makoto : the Japanese did not share beauty and truth), so writers and poets were primarily called upon to identify avare. The heyday of this style dates back to the Heian era (IX-XII centuries), but the attraction to it never disappeared.

A few years ago, the Japanese aesthetics Yamazaki Masawa admits, during the year I lectured at American University on Japanese literature and art. Trying to explain what “avare” is, I gave various examples and repeatedly returned to this term. I understand it as a Japanese, but the more examples I gave, the more I became convinced that it was impossible to translate this word into English.

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