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Figure 1: Dcoetzee, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

May is a month for appreciating the fullness of Spring (or Autumn), a month in the United States for celebrating Mother’s Day and Memorial Day. It is a month of lengthening days, blooming flowers, and rising temperatures. How bountiful! Yet how quickly such a bounty passes. Flowers wilt, blossoms fade, and days pass. While it is a month of acknowledging abundance, May is also a time to remember transience, the impermanence of everything. Frank Tassone here, your host for Haibun Monday, where we blend prose and haiku. Today, let’s face the inevitable passing away of it all: let’s embrace Mono no Aware:

Mono no aware (物の哀れ),[a] lit. ’the pathos of things’, and also translated as ‘an empathy toward things’, or ‘a sensitivity to ephemera‘, is a Japanese idiom for the awareness of impermanence (無常, mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.[2]

Mono no aware is not only “a Japanese idiom for the awareness of … the transience of things.” It’s a paradigm through which the Japanese, as far back as the Heian Court era, view life:

Japanese cultural scholar Kazumitsu Kato wrote that understanding mono no aware in the Heian period was “almost a necessity for a learned man in aristocratic society”, a time when it was a prominent concept.[3] Donald Richie wrote that the term has “a near-Buddhistic insistence upon recognition of the eternal flux of life upon this earth. This is the authentic Japanese attitude toward death and disaster”.[7]

Of course, it’s not simply a morbid attitude toward impermanence. Rather, it is accepting “the beauty of passing things.” As such, Mono no aware lies at the heart of Japanese poetry. Basho, the progenitor of the haibun, exemplifies mono no aware in the following excerpt from his Narrow Road to the Interior:

Here (Hiraizumi) three generations of the Fujiwara clan passed as though in a dream. The great outer gates lay in ruins. Where Hidehira’s manor stood, rice fields grow. Only Mount Kinkei remained. I climbed the hill where Yoshitsune died; I saw the Kitakami, a broad stream flowing down through the Nambu Plain, the Koromo River circling Isumi Castle below the hill before joining the Kitakami. The ancient ruins of Yasuhira—from the end of the Golden Era—lie out beyond the Koromo Barrier, where they stood guard against the Ainu people. The faithful elite remained baoud to the vastle—for all their valor, reduced to ordinary grass…

We sat a while, our hats for a seat, seeing it all through tears.

Summer grasses

All that remains of great soldiers’

Imperial dreams

–Basho. “The Essential Basho” (Samuel Hamill, Translator). 1999, Shambhala, pg. 18-19

Other haijin have also exemplified the aesthetic:

clear water is cool
fireflies vanish–
there’s nothing more

-Chiyo-ni 1703-1775; trs. Donegan & Ishibashi

good-bye…
I pass like all things
dew on the grass
—Banzan 1661-1730

the dead body —
autumn wind blows
through its nostrils
—Iida Dakotsu 1885-1962

This week, let’s imbue our haibun with mono no aware. Write on any topic that you like (although bonus points to any choosing one related to May) as long as your haibun embodies that wistful sadness marking the beauty of transience.

New to haibun? The form consists of one to a few paragraphs of prose—usually written in the present tense—that evoke an experience and are often non-fictional/autobiographical. They may be preceded or followed by one or more haiku—nature-based, using a seasonal image—that complement without directly repeating what the prose stated.

New to dVerse? Here is what you do:

  • Write a haibun on any topic that expresses mono no aware.
  • Post it on your personal site/blog.
  • Include a link back to dVerse in your post.
  • Copy your link onto the Mr. Linky.
  • Remember to click the small checkbox about data protection.
  • Read and comment on some of your fellow poets’ work.
  • Like and leave a comment below if you choose to do so.
  • Have fun!