Mono no Aware

"I probably just want to leave a trace of myself behind in this world."

"Summer grasses—
the only remains
of warriors' dreams."

— Matsuo Bashou

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All things in life are fragile and impermanent. Everything we love is doomed to fade... but at the same time, isn't that what makes it beautiful?

An aesthetic first popularized by the 18th century scholar Motoori Norinaga, Mono no Aware (物の哀れ; often translated as "the ahh-ness of things") is a kind of wistful sadness that would come to be considered the Central Theme of Japanese art, and one of the pillars of Japanese identity. Cherry Blossoms, the national symbol of Japan, are considered to embody this sentiment — blooming for a short time in vibrant colours before falling away. This also extends to the seasons in general, leading to the heavy emphasis of seasonal motifs in Japanese poetry. Because it is so short-lived, Mono no Aware considers childhood to be beautiful, which may go a way to explaining Kawaisa culture and the tendency of Japanese works to portray (non-active) paedophilia as a character flaw rather than an outright villainous trait.

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On the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism Mono no Aware tends towards the idealistic, while in the conflict of Romanticism Versus Enlightenment it falls somewhere in the middle, embracing change while mourning the past.

Stories built on Mono no Aware rarely have big, climactic endings, and are more likely to be bittersweet or fizzle out gently.

Compare The Anti-Nihilist, Bathos and Martyrdom Culture. Contrast They Changed It, Now It Sucks!, The Fatalist, Mortality Phobia and Nostalgia Filter. See also UsefulNotes.Buddhism and It Can't Be Helped.

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Tropes associated with Mono no Aware

Trope List

• Alas, Poor Villain: The villain's death is portrayed as sympathetic.
• And Man Grew Proud
• Antagonist in Mourning: The villain is sad that the hero has died.
• Anti-Climax
• Best Years of Your Life
• Big Brother Instinct
• Birth/Death Juxtaposition
• Bittersweet Ending: The ending is both happy and said.
• Bittersweet 17
• Cherry Blossoms
• Children Are Innocent
• Children Are Special
• Christmas Cake
• Coming-of-Age Story
• Contemplate Our Navels
• Cosy Catastrophe
• Determined Defeatist
• Doomed Moral Victor
• Empty Nest
• End of an Age
• Evil Luddite: A villain who opposes modern technology.
• Evil Reactionary
• Face Death with Dignity: A person about to die calmly accepts their fate.
• Feeling Their Age
• Four-Seasons Level
• Future Imperfect: In the future, people will have inaccurate ideas on how things were in the past.
• The Future Is Shocking
• Graceful Loser: A character accepts it when they lose.
• Growing Up Sucks
• Hollywood Mid-Life Crisis
• Humans Are Flawed
• Humanity's Wake: The story takes place after humanity has gone extinct.
• Improbable Age
• Innocence Lost
• Innocent Flower Girl
• It Can't Be Helped
• I Will Fight No More Forever
• Iyashikei
• Just Before the End
• Kigo
• Littlest Cancer Patient
• Long Last Look
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!
• The Lost Lenore
• Ma'am Shock
• The Magic Goes Away: The story ends with everything magical ceasing to exist.
• Manly Tears
• Mayfly–December Friendship: Friendship between an immortal being and a mortal being.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Romance between an immortal being and a mortal being.
• Mortality Phobia
• No Place for a Warrior
• No Place for Me There
• Not Afraid to Die: A character is okay with dying, but not necessarily because they want to die.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The status quo is permanently ended.
• Obi-Wan Moment
• Ode to Youth
• Outdated Hero vs. Improved Society
• Passing the Torch: The hero chooses someone to continue their legacy.
• Peaceful in Death
• Perfection Is Impossible
• Pyrrhic Victory: The characters win, but the consequences of their victory undermine their intended goal.
• Reluctant Mad Scientist
• Reluctant Retiree
• Ruins of the Modern Age
• Science Destroys Magic
• Seasonal Baggage
• Slice of Life
• So What Do We Do Now?
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Two people are in love, but for some reason cannot be together.
• Stranger in a Familiar Land
• Technophobia
• Time Dissonance
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth
• Troubled Sympathetic Bigot
• Velvet Revolution
• Victorian Novel Disease
• Watch the World Die
• We All Die Someday: Someone casually points out that everyone dies eventually.
• We Are as Mayflies
• What Are Records?: Younger people are completely unfamiliar with older technology.
• "What Now?" Ending
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: An immortal being sees their inability to die as a curse.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Your destiny will be fulfilled no matter what you try to do to prevent it.
• Your Days Are Numbered

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Girls' Last Tour: The world as we know it has been destroyed by some vague apocalyptic event. Two young girls are left alone with only each other as company, as they travel around the ruins surviving the best they can, enjoying what little creature comforts they come across, and wondering how the world around them might have been.

• Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions portrays Chuunibyou as something we need to grow out of, but which is beautiful for precisely that reason, and should be looked back on without shame.
• Kino's Journey: A young teenager wanders across the world, with the self-imposed rule of only staying three days in each country she visits. Yet the world is as beautiful as it is dangerous, and she is often confronted by the uglier aspects of human nature.
• Both Mushishi and Natsume's Book of Friends narrate gentle explorations of the supernatural with heartwarming and tearjerking results, though Mushishi is much more episodic.

• In the anime adaptation of Shaman King, this is Hao's motivation. To remedy the sorrows of a changing world, he plans to destroy the past and the future, creating only "a neverending stream of now".

• Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou looks at the dwindling of Humanity's Earth through the eyes of a long lived Robot Girl, Alpha Hatsuseno. The story addresses it sometimes, but the underlying tragedy is usually shown through simple Slice of Life moments that, while nice, give us clues to what happened to Earth (i.e. large packs of rice explicitly referred to as uncommon, fireworks being launched are actually leftover rockets, etc).

Fan Works

• Discussed and averted in Tales of the Undiscovered Swords as the character bringing it up, Konotegashiwa, has a bad case of Mortality Phobia.
  • Many Shipping fanfics by the same author, Ki_no_Shirayuki, feature this theme rather anviliciously when characters living in the Heian period or Mikazuki Munechika are concerned.

Literature

• The Last Unicorn

• The Martian Chronicles

• The Secret Garden
• The Tale of Genji is one of the most famous examples of Mono no Aware, with the term entering the popular lexicon primarily because of Motoori Norinaga's use of it in his analysis of the story.

Music

• Most of the songs composed by hinayukki (AKA Shigotoshite-P) revolve around blooming flowers, withering leaves and the passing seasons, which symbolizes the ephemeral beauty of the world and life in general, and how every moment must be treasured precisely because it's so fleeting.
  • "Tsugai Kogarashi", Shigotoshite's most famous song, tells the story of the wind and the leaf fluttering together towards an uncertain future. They count each precious moment as they soar together, knowing that in this fleeting life, even the tiniest mistake could lead to death.
  • "Hana no Namida" compares life to a flower, beautiful and transient. The singers vow to spend the limited amount of time they have with their loved ones, and collect as many precious memories as possible, before they would wither like a flower themselves.
  • "Oni o Karu Mono" is about a human warrior hunting down a crimson demon. As they clash over a winter battlefield, the hunter sings of the passion he feels for the demon in the heat of the battle, all the while knowing that this intense feelings would end when one of them dies. The song ends with the hunter finally defeating and killing the demon and moves on with his life, but notes that the encounter had left a mark in his heart.

Mythology and Religion

• From The Bible, the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes seems to take this view. Everything created by human hands is doomed to be forgotten, but at the same time, the world isn't actually getting worse so you should make peace with it and enjoy the simple pleasures of life.
  "What a heavy burden God has laid on men! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind."
• The Epic of Gilgamesh is the Ur-Example, with Gilgamesh only becoming a wise king after coming to terms with his own mortality.

Newspaper Comics

• Calvin and Hobbes: Hobbes invokes this when he says fall is his favorite season.

Video Games

• Final Fantasy X heavily invokes the "dream" motif when using this trope. The once futuristic city of Zanarkand of 1000 years ago is referred to as Dream Zanarkand, and the reason why it and the main character Tidus exists at all in the present is because the Greater-Scope Villain is a sorcerer who really couldn't let go of its memory and continues to invoke it even if it means letting a kaiju named Sin constantly ravage the rest of the world to defend it. When you finally meet him, he's been reduced to a literal parasite. To drive the point home, the BGM that plays when you finally reach its ruins is called "Someday the dream will end," and the final destination is Dream's End. Ironically, the end of the game has Yuna give a speech about how Sin's death means everyone can dream again, which is the game saying that impermanence is necessary for other life to flourish, and that denying impermanence only strangles the future by preventing things from changing.
• The Legend of Zelda
  • The Wind Waker is a distant sequel to Ocarina of Time's Bad Future — with the hero absent from the timeline, the gods were forced to defend Hyrule from Ganondorf by flooding it, leading to the creation of the Great Sea. Both the heroes and villains perceive the kingdom of Hyrule as a golden age, far grander than anything modern hands have accomplished. However, Ganondorf takes it to the point of obsession, even mistaking the game's Link for a reincarnation of his old adversary, while Hyrule's own king ultimately decides that his kingdom is better off forgotten so that the people of the Great Sea can create their own future, free from the shackles of the past. Games set after Wind Waker indicate that they succeeded, breaking the setting's Eternal Recurrence forever.
  • Breath of the Wild, set in a different timeline, opens with the powerful image of the Master Sword lying rusted and overgrown with weeds. After many, many cycles of the Triforce conflict, Hyrule is covered in ruins, Zelda, for all of her bluster and love for technological research, cannot call upon the sacred powers her ancestors possessed, and Ganondorf has degenerated from a cunning king into a vaguely boar-shaped cloud of pure hatred known simply as "The Calamity". Even the Sheikah tribe has collapsed and lost much of their old technology. The gameplay reflects this as well, with weapons gradually falling apart and normally plentiful resources being much harder to find. But at the same time this crumbled world is a beautiful one, and its inhabitants continue to go about their lives more or less content.
• Shows up in, of all things, Sonic and the Black Knight. What starts off as a Universal-Adaptor Cast take on the King Arthur legend ends up turning into a metafictional take on the story where the main villain, knowing the story will end with the kingdom in ruin, intends on using her magic to create an eternal world that never changes. Sonic, in his usual snarky style, thinks that sounds pretty lame and stops her, afterwards saying that he figures everything will end someday, so we should live life to the fullest in the time we have.
• Touhou:
  • The Lunarians are a race of gods who fled to the moon to escape the taint of death as it first began to spread around the world. Their world is perfect, unchanging and far more advanced than Earth, but at the same time it is not truly alive. Those from the Lunar Capital who come to Earth, such as Princess Kaguya, can find themselves entranced by things as simple as the changing of the seasons, and eventually develop a sense of human empathy.
  • The setting of ZUN's Music Collection is a wistful one, with the inhabitants of future Kyoto embracing science while feeling bereft at the loss of mystery from the world. It's implied that all civilisations will eventually come to resemble the Lunar Capital, but that humans are all the more tragic because they still remember what they lost.
• Undertale, being a western game thematically inspired by several Japanese works, has elements of this in the Golden Ending.
  • According to the shopkeep Gerson, the main character's relationship with Toriel and possibly Asgore is a parental Mayfly–December Friendship due to the bio-magical traits of their species. Despite that, the choice to stay with Toriel is still depicted as an unambiguously happy one, even if it might end on a sad note in the far future.
  • The most bittersweet part of the ending pertains to Asriel Dreemurr who will soon lose his true form and his ability to feel love. Despite that, this character takes their imminent fate in stride, and despite not having much time to spend with the main character, still considers them a friend and wishes for them to do the same.
    Asriel: ...I just want you to remember me like this. Someone that was your friend for a little while.
• In Ghost of Tsushima, the achievement for completing the game is literally called "Mono no Aware", fittingly how Jin accepts that his old ways of fighting are gone by confronting his Uncle Shimura, and moving on to his new mantle as the ghost.

Web Comics

• minus. has this aesthetic, being very wistful throughout. The title character’s powers seem to just represent childhood and how one isn’t permitted to act like that past a certain age, rather than being any serious attempt at a fantasy story. And then the world ends, and the melancholy goes Up to Eleven. Even minus and her best friend are affected at the very end.
• In Questionable Content, when Hannelore found herself mulling over the idea of quantum vacuum decay and how the universe could spontaneously end at any time. Dora comforted her with the idea that, even if that is the case, all things are impermanent regardless, and that at least there's beauty in the time it's around.
  Dora: Like, nothing lasts forever. We get old and die, the earth becomes uninhabitable, eventually the sun burns out... Why should the universe be exempt? Maybe the entirety of existence is just the rainbow film on the surface of a soap bubble. The bubble pops, the rainbow is gone. But it was beautiful while it was there.

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