'Mono no Aware' as Epistemological Critique in The Tale of Genji — Epoche C2
Motoori Norinaga's Genji monogatari tama no ogushi ('The Jewelled Comb of the Tale of Genji', 1796) makes the claim from which every modern discussion of mono no aware descends: the purpose of Murasaki Shikibu's tale is mono no aware wo shiru — to know the aware of things — and reading it as moral instruction, whether Buddhist admonition or Confucian correction, mistakes what sort of object it is. This essay takes the verb in that phrase at face value. Aware begins as an interjection, roughly 'ah', the sound a person makes when something strikes them; by the tenth century it also names the quality in a thing that produces the sound, and mono no aware is the aware belonging to things. Norinaga's contribution is the verb. On his account, a person who meets a thing apprehends its kokoro — its heart, the quality proper to it — and is moved as that quality warrants; a person not moved, or moved wrongly, is mono no aware wo shiranu hito , one who does not know the aware of things. A formula with a success condition and a failure condition is an epistemic formula, and the argument here is that the Genji is constructed to exercise and to test the capacity Norinaga named. Four corrections to the earlier and shorter version of this essay are owed at the outset, because two of them bear on whether the argument is available at all. The first is the serious one. That version treated mono no aware as a faculty for judging characters' moral blind spots, and glossed the reading with the Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names ( zhèngmíng ) and with a supposedly Daoist teaching about the ripple of consequence. Norinaga's polemic is aimed precisely at this manoeuvre. His term of abuse for it is karagokoro , the 'Chinese heart' — the imported reflex of reading every text for the instruction it might yield — and he holds that applying it to the Genji produces judgements the tale itself never makes. Nor does the doctrine invoked say what it was made to say: in Analects 13.3 the rectification of names is a claim about office and ritual title, that if names are not correct then speech does not accord with things, rites and music do not flourish, and punishments miss their mark. It concerns the ordering of a state, not a lover's misperception of a woman's character. Importing it here is not a neutral comparison but exactly the move Norinaga forbade, and the essay must either defend the import or drop it. It drops it, and keeps something better, which is Norinaga's own verb. The second: the sentence attributed to the I Ching in that version — 'Things that are joined together in the beginning do not remain so in the end' — cannot be located in the received text and is withdrawn as unverifiable. Third, the character 知 ( zhī ) means knowing, not practical wisdom; the Aristotelian sense was smuggled in by the translation, and the doctrine of consequence the Genji actually uses is not Daoist but Buddhist. The tale's own word is sukuse , the bond or destiny carried over from previous lives, which its characters reach for whenever they are trying to account for why a particular attachment has taken hold of them. William LaFleur's argument that Buddhist concepts furnished the terms in which experience was articulated in the Japanese literary arts, rather than decorating an independently formed picture, applies here directly: sukuse is the causal vocabulary available to these people, and it is the vocabulary in which they misread each other. Fourth, and smaller: Genji's attachments do not 'invariably' lead to suffering. Suetsumuhana and Hanachirusato are maintained in his household for the rest of his life, and the Akashi lady's daughter becomes empress. The claim that survives is narrower and more useful, and is given below. 1. The aware of impermanence, as a condition on judgement rather than a moral The first of the three dimensions the earlier version identified was impermanence, mujō , as a prompt to reflection. That is right about the material and wrong about what the reflection is for. Impermanence in the Genji is not primarily a lesson; it is the reason the tale's characters are permanently short of evidence. Their world makes inference from proxies the standard condition of knowing anyone. A woman of rank is not seen: she is behind blinds and curtain-stands, and what reaches a suitor is her handwriting, the paper and scent she chooses, a few notes carried from an instrument, the report of a gentlewoman, and — if he is lucky and unscrupulous — a glimpse through a gap in a fence or a blind, the practice the tale calls kaimami . Every judgement of a person is therefore an inference from a sign to a character, made once and acted on for a lifetime, in a world where the sign is not stable. Murasaki Shikibu says so in the second chapter of fifty-four, before her hero has done anything. In 'Hahakigi' four young men are shut in on a wet night and rank the women of the middle grades — the passage known as the amayo no shinasadame , the appraisal of ranks on a rainy night. Its content is a set of heuristics for judging a woman one cannot examine: which faults are recoverable, which accomplishments are affectations, how much a handwriting discloses. It is, in form, a seminar on inference under uncertainty, and it is placed at the head of the work. Haruo Shirane's structural reading of the tale gives the second half of the picture: these judgements are also political, since marriage in this society is the instrument by which a house rises or fails, so an error about a woman's character is simultaneously an error about an alliance. The stakes of misjudging are not private. The controlled case follows four chapters later. In 'Suetsumuhana' Genji pursues a princess he has never seen, on the strength of her orphaned pedigree, a rumour, and a few phrases from her kin . Every proxy points the same way and every one of them is uninformative: when the snow-light finally shows him her face, she has a long nose tipped with r