"The intent of Japanese literature is to provide the reader with a means to develop in himself or herself, through an immersion in the text, an ability to intuit the deep realities of life as perceived by the author. The feelings on the part of the reader that emerge from reading may be ineffable, but they can be exceedingly powerful. Thinking about those realities, or arguing about them, as opposed to feeling them, however, would require an aesthetic stance very different from that which has evolved over the centuries in Japan."

-- Thomas Rimer, A Reader's Guide to Japanese Literature

Western fiction is conditioned not by renga but by Bible narratives and especially by Shakespeare: the theatrical clash of powerful personalities, in which deeds count more than feelings because deeds have ethical, social, and personal consequences in a universe of cause-&-effect. So traditional Western narratives move "horizontally," dramatizing processes of becoming. Moments of ecstasy (e.g., Joycean "epiphanies") are markers on journeys toward or away from fulfillment of purposes or ideas. The end-point in history is needed for making the present moment meaningful.

(Of course, modern Western fiction departs from this tradition, dissolving unitary points of view and disrupting narrative continuity to evoke the incoherence of felt experience: Joyce, Woolf, Borges, Kafka. But the fact that authors engaged in such disruptions and departures attests to their inheritance of dominant traditional or conventional ways of rendering experience.)

• TRADITIONAL JAPANESE PLOT - usually loose, casually chronological, wandering, circular.
• POINT OF VIEW - usu. not that of a characteristic Western speaker, an individual personality, but more a communal ancient storytelling persona that can slip into any story, an undifferentiated group identity, a "we-self" (vs. Western "I-self" -- Alan Roland).
• CHARACTERS - usu. more like types than individuals. (Hierarchy among characters and of storyteller to reader - important in Japan, but hard for Western reader to discern.)
• SCENE - usu. set by suggestion & evocation rather than elaborated description.
• WRITING - for the traditional Japanese, is always to some degree a gesture of defiance. In a culture primarily visual not verbal, Japanese are socialized to dislike and distrust the act of verbalizing. In the arts, or according to traditional aesthetic ideas, it is not clarity or eloquence of articulation that is to be appreciated or valued, but the subtle art of silence. Silence is a consummation: "the heart becomes quiet."

(1) Some important (but mysterious to the Western sensibility) Japanese aesthetic and emotional responses to life and art (Zen-derived):

• Mono no aware: "the 'ah-ness' of things" as in the transience of falling blossom petals.
• Sabi: tranquil, beautiful loneliness: e.g., "the scarred old samurai, fresh from the bath, dressed in new robes for the evening" -- Basho.
• Wabi: lonely poverty, e.g. a raku tea bowl
• Yugen: a mystery deep within things, e.g. a mountaintop glimpsed thru haze, sliver of cloud crossing the moon, a traveler disappearing into deep forest.
• Makoto: spontaneous sincerity in the sense of "so intently focused that nothing is added." Purity and "depth of heart" (kokoro no fukasa). When the rhythm of the universe flowing into a person is strong, he feels united to a spirit transcending the self.

(3) Social feelings: Gimu & On - 2 forms or feelings of obligation; Giri -- repayment for On (Gimu impossible to repay) Amae-the expectation of being affectionately indulged by another in the group (to amaeru is to court, or to communicate one's desire for, that indulgence from someone else in the group).

(4) Authors: Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata (1968 Nobelist), Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe (1994 Nobelist), Haruki Murakami. Filmmakers: Ozu, Kurosawa.