Mono no Aware

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

— Matsuo Bashou

An aesthetic first popularized by the 18th century scholar Motoori Norinaga, Mono no Aware (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.

Tropes associated with Mono no Aware

Trope List

Examples

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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.
Haibane Renmei
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.
Only Yesterday
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".
Sound of the Sky
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).

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.

Newspaper Comics

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

Religion and Mythology

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.

Video Games

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.
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 bttersweet part of the ending pretains 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.

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.