諸行無常

しょぎょう　むじょう
shogyou mujyou

Oh MAN, do I have a long and intense post for you. And I just wanted to write about fireflies...

See, firefly season is just wrapping up in Saga, and there are some really nice places to go and watch them: long winding walks along the river in Ogi, or Tafusegawa in Saga City. I went last year and I loved it. This year, however, I've been busy, the weather's been bad, and I didn't have the time to make it out there, which makes me feel the poignancy of today's yoji all the more intensely.

Last year, when we were watching the fireflies, I heard about today's

BONUS WORD: 物の哀れ (mono no aware)

for the first time. 物の哀れ is famous for being the aesthetic heart of the Japanese literary classic The Tale of Genji*. Nirav, who was kind enough to educate me, since I've never formally studied Japanese literature, said that it was like the beauty of a sunset that reminds you that another day is ending, or the beauty of the fireflies who will light up the night for a few brief weeks and then pass away into the Grave of the Fireflies. Rikai-chan, who is smarter than me, translates 物の哀れ as an "appreciation of the fleeting nature of beauty," but I like to think of it as a little bit deeper than that. I define it as having to do with the existential sadness of being, with kind of a melancholy appreciation of the value of life due to an understanding of its transitory nature. Can you see how this concept might be deeply, deeply rooted in the Japanese psyche even to this day? No? Click here, and then read on to see why we're talking about this in relation to today's yoji: 諸行無常

Definition:
生きていることは、儚いこと。この世のいっさいの現象は常に変化・消滅して絶えない形容。
Translations:
1. The impermanence of worldly things
2. The transitory nature of life

Much as the concept of 物の哀れ was given a voice in The Tale of Genji, 諸行無常 has it's place in the opening lines of the Tale of the Heike, which tells the story of the Genpei war.

The Genpei war was fought at the end of the 12th century, between the Taira and Minamoto clans, which are also referred to as the Heike and Genji clans, respectively. Does this sound familiar to any one yet? The Original Tale of the Heike, collected in the late 1300s, has been retold and re-imagined many times, providing inspiration for manga, woodblock art, and most recently, the Miike Takashi film, Sukiyaki Western Django, which I watched last week. It features an all Japanese cast who recite their lines in English, to a very interesting effect, and it transports the feud between the clans to a place claims to be Nevada, but is clearly not. In it, Quentin Tarantino actually recites, in a bizarre narrative voice, the first lines of the book, which go something like this:

祗園精舎の鐘の声、諸行無常の響きあり。娑羅双樹の花の色、盛者必衰の理をあらわす。
おごれる人も久しからず、唯春の夜の夢のごとし。たけき者も遂にはほろびぬ、偏に風の前の塵に同じ。

The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.
-trans. Helen Craig McCullough

Those lines alone are enough to make me want to read the whole thing. There's another yoji buried in there, for those of you who noticed, but I'll leave it alone today because this post is dense enough.

For those of you who made it this far, know that any of this knowledge and vocab will earn you MAJOR えらい points, but if that's not enough of a reward for putting up with my ramblings, I'll also give you this small piece of advice.:

This is 紅音ほたる. She's an actress of sorts. She's also the reason that you don't EVER, EVER want to do an unfiltered Google Image search for ほたる (firefly) from your computer at work, unless you want to be reminded of the transitory and impermanent nature of having a job as a school teacher, and the fleeting beauty of receiving a paycheck. Yikes.

Notes:

• Articles on the Genpei war, the Taira and Minamoto Clans (and alternate readings of their names) all come from Wikipedia, where you too can read about them.
• Sukiyaki Western Django hasn't yet been released in the US yet, but you can probably find a DVD rip from the Japanese copy, as it's already out here. It's filmed in English, but when we watched it, we had to rely on the Japanese subtitles to understand what they were saying sometimes, so try to get those too.
• If you're going to immediately search for that girl in Google images, as I assume all of our male readers will, search in hiragana. Both ホタル and 蛍 searches will get you... pictures of fireflies.
  

例文:　Fireflyの短い寿命は諸行無常を感じさせる。Joss Whedonはまだ生きていてよかった。
The short lifespan of Firefly really makes you reflect on the impermanence of things. I'm just glad that Joss Whedon is still alive.

*Though The Tale of Genji was written in the Heian Period, the idea of 物の哀れ didn't find itself popularized until Motoori Norinaga articulated it in his definitive criticism of Genji during the Edo period.