Studi di estetica, anno XLVIII, IV serie, 2/2020 Sensibilia
ISSN 0585-4733, ISSN digitale 1825-8646, DOI 10.7413/18258646129
Lorenzo Marinucci
Hibiki and nioi
A study of resonance in Japanese aesthetics
Abstract
In this article I will attempt a definition of “resonance”: first reflecting about it in
general terms and then trying to address its role in Japanese aesthetics, in particular poetics. While far from being limited to East Asian aesthetic expressions, I will
show how the experience of “resonance” has played a comparatively more central
role in this cultural context, shaping peculiar forms of poetry. It is therefore useful
to observe non-European sources, if only to understand our hidden cultural assumptions before this kind of phenomenon and suspend our prejudices more effectively in examining it. After examining the use of atmospheric resonance in waka
and in renga I will focus on haikai 俳諧 poetics and on the notions of hibiki 響き
(echo) and nioi 匂い (scent) in the theoretical discussions on poetry among Matsuo
Bashō 松尾芭蕉 (1844-1894) and his disciples.
Keywords
Resonance, Synesthesia, Japanese poetry
Received: 10/04/2020
Approved: 10/06/2020
Editing by: Giulio Piatti
© 2020 The Author. Open Access published under the terms of the CC-BY-4.0.
lorem86@gmail.com
119
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
1. Resonance
How do we define “resonance”? A first safe assumption is declaring that
resonances are phenomena. A resonance is not, however, a single,
isolated phenomenon: in order for a resonance to occur, it is necessary
for two elements, two noemata, to be both present in our consciousness.
This is not enough, however. Two cubes on a desk are most likely not in
resonance: they are just two given elements within my horizon. Similarly,
we do not talk of resonance when we hear two synchronous sounds,
whether harmonic or disharmonious. To have a “resonance” we clearly
need a certain pause, gap or spacing: one of the two elements has to hide
or recede into non-presence. Our definition is not yet complete, however:
simple sequentiality is not enough. Finding out that today on my desk
there is a cube and tomorrow there is a prism will not necessarily, or likely,
ever produce a resonance. Similarly, hearing two identical trumpet blows
is not automatically a kind of resonance. In this case we find, within the
classical structure of time retention described by Husserl, the substitution
of object A by object B, or a repetition of the identical A in two different
moments; both these noetic modalities are not, in my opinion, the
interesting and aesthetically active case of resonance. Through the
exclusion of these cases I want to define a resonance, paraphrasing an
expression of the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎, as
what happens in the presence of a “continuity of discontinuity”
(hirenzoku no renzoku 非連続の連続). This paradoxical character is
characteristic of an active, aesthetically valuable resonance. Resonance is
therefore a dialectic within the phenomenon, or even better dialectic as
phenomenon, unfolding within what we feel and perceive, rather than in
abstract thought.
According to this tentative definition, a resonance can occur when
two elements are close and similar enough to be given within a relation,
and at the same time, however, separate and distinct enough (both
spatially and temporally) to allow us to perceive their connection in a
mode different from that of identity or unity. If an acoustic echo produces
a resonance it is by restituting the original sound in a fragmentary,
distorted, even melancholic way, as the nymph Echo from the original
legend. For a resonance to occur, the medium through which the first
element passed through needs to transform it and produce a discontinuity, without, however, transmuting it into something so different as
to be wholly other. It has to keep something of the original “air”, also in
the sense of Benjamin’s aura or Schmitz’s and Böhme’s idea of
120
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
atmosphere. Without putting too much emphasis on it, we should admit
that in the aesthetic perception of resonance we go against both the law
of identity and that of non-contradiction. We meet something that has to
manifest to us as both united and distant, one and two, old and new at
the same time. In this case, tertium datur.
2. Acoustic metaphors and synesthesia
It is significative that the expressions and concepts dealing with
resonance do not usually rely on visual metaphors. With their powerful
pull towards abstraction and their clear-cut definition of “things” – their
differentiation both between things and things and between perceived
objects and perceiving subjects – visual traits, and especially formal traits,
seem less central in a style of perception based on a blurring between
phenomena. If we accepted too quickly and too literally the acoustic
metaphor, however, we might be inclined to think that resonances are
simply or mostly relative to musical and auditory aesthetics: phenomena
that can be grasped within a pre-understood arrangement of aesthetic
matters and kinds of perception.
Far from it. While the absence of form and their temporal extension
makes some acoustic phenomena some of the most obvious examples of
resonance, what I tried to define as “resonance” in the first paragraph is
first of all a noetic style (just as perception, phantasy or abstract thinking),
much wider than what the acoustic metaphor alone would seem to
suggest. We can have resonance, for instance, between the hues of a
painting, of a garden, or why not between the clothing items of a welldressed person. To expand this last example, a good attire is not simply a
matter of fine materials and good tailoring. “Dressing well” also and even
chiefly manifests itself as a “resonance”, not only between different items
of clothing and accessories, but also as their overall relation to the moving,
expressive body of the person wearing them. Clothing items are not
appreciated as isolated objects, but because they (hopefully) blend into
the personal aura, the “air” of a person. This process is even more
important in the case of costumes, whether religious or artistic: we can
think of resonance as the expressive relationship that blends together
costume, dance movement, music, scenography and story in a ballet.
Many, if not most aesthetic Gestalten are thus examples of “resonance”,
if we define the latter in this way.
121
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
The noetic model of resonance has therefore a fundamental aesthetic
role, implicit in our example of ballet. Music can resonate in a sharp
movement; the red of a costume complements the aggressive or sensual
gait of a dancer. This happens because resonance does not simply occur
among noemata within the same axis of perception, but it is the primitive
kernel from which synesthesia arises. The Japanese phenomenologist
Ogawa Tadashi tried to address this “mutual erosion” between senses,
refusing to dismiss it in terms of association and recognizing in it a
fundamental “irradiation” between senses at the core of perception and
imagination:
Synesthesia is often considered, as in the case of the famous linguist Roman
Jakobson, as a problem of rhetoric (metaphor), collocated on a level of purely
linguistic structures. It is true that describing a sound as high or low is already a
kind of metaphor. A sound is an acoustic phenomenon; it essentially lacks a
connection to spatial coordinates. And yet if we look at the senses in this way,
considering them as reciprocally isolated, we are just trying to avoid the
inescapable problem of what sort of thing lets us understand synesthesias, even
in rhetorical terms, what it lets us comprehend metaphors such as “high pitch” or
“a velvet music”. “A yellow voice” does not surely look yellow, nor does a “velvet
music” have the tactile texture of velvet. Nonetheless, we do understand these
metaphors. Moreover, such comprehension cannot possibly happen on the level
of predicative language: it presupposes a sort of mutual erosion between sight
and hearing or hearing and touch. […] What we experience is that a meaning
arising in one sense is “irradiated” on a meaning belonging to another, “resonates”
onto it. (Ogawa 2000: 16-7)
Ogawa points out how resonance in this deeper sense is something that
is always involving our bodies and producing itself as horizon or atmosphere. It is, in other words, part and parcel of our leibliche Befindlichkeit:
“what makes us grasp the totality of atmosphere manifesting itself
throughout the world is nothing else than what makes the various senses
reciprocally resonate and project onto each other by their common
ground: in other words, it is the affectedness of the body.” (Ogawa 2000:
17-18).
This nexus of living body and atmosphere, which Ogawa dubs “the
world’s logos”, is communication of the body into the world – both
natural and intersubjective – and conversely of the world into the body.
Elsewhere Ogawa considered this logic of “suggestion” (kehai 気配) as
comparatively more developed attitude in East Asian culture (Ogawa
2004). It is worth noting, however, that even while employing notions
such as ki 気 (breath/feeling/spirit, cfr. Marinucci 2019) or kibun 気分
122
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
(mood) to describe this process, Ogawa (unlike other Japanese theorists,
who emphasize their alleged cultural uniqueness) conceived them to be
universally valid, despite their cultural imprint. The problem of resonances intersects that of sensus communis, both in the Aristotelian
meaning of common perceptual ground and in the Kantian one of
requisite for intersubjective communication.
Indeed, if we look for a very clear, if suggestive, description of this
deep structure of resonance, we can turn to what is likely the most
famous synesthetic poem written in Europe, Correspondances by Charles
Baudelaire:
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.
Nature is a temple, where the living pillars
Sometimes breathe confusing speech;
Man walks within these groves of symbols, each
Of which regards him as a kindred thing.
As the long echoes, shadowy, profound,
Heard from afar, blend in a unity,
Vast as the night, as sunlight’s clarity,
So perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond.
Odours there are, fresh as a baby’s skin,
Mellow as oboes, green as meadow grass,
— Others corrupted, rich, triumphant, full,
Having dimensions infinitely vast,
Frankincense, musk, ambergris, benjamin,
Singing the senses’ rapture, and the soul’s. (Baudelaire 1993: 19)
The “living pillars” faced by the poet are beings that don’t stay put as
objects, and instead keep “breathing” around themselves an aura, suggesting through their expressive effusion a shift into the spiritual or the
123
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
fantastic. By being more than simple objects, expanding around and
above themselves in this poetic atmosphere, their “long echoes” “blend
in a unity” in which “perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond.” Here is
a powerful example of resonance that highlights how this “continuous
discontinuity” does not simply occur between noemata, but also between
sensory modes. Baudelaire in the second part of the poem focused not
on acoustic echoes but on the atmospheric ecstasies (in all senses of the
word) of perfumes. As we will see later, a theory of resonance stressing
olfaction just as much as hearing is a distinctive product of Japanese
aesthetics.
3. Resonance as an aesthetic mode
From this cursory introduction it should in fact have become clear
already: a phenomenology of resonance needs not only a theoretical
definition (my attempt: an atmospheric and living-bodily, perceptive and
imaginary “noetic style”) but also insightful examples. Occurring as a located relation, resonance cannot be discussed in general and in abstract.
Moreover, such examples would not do if they ignored another central
fact: that is, how a typical effect of resonance are the “raptures” of the
senses and of the soul sung by Baudelaire. Even when such raptures are
not so total and decadent, they occur and are relevant: they make out an
essential part of what moves us. What resonates with us and with other
things, all the while keeping its difference and discontinuity, seems to
engulf us and these other elements in a kind of non-logical, affective unity.
This dynamic can be described as one of the fundamental traits – not the
only, but a fundamental one – of natural beauty (Rosa 2019: 453-71).
There is resonance, for instance, between the song of a cuckoo and a
summer evening; the fresh air of dusk reverberates in the voice of the
bird, and the staccato of his song resonate acoustically within the calm of
summer. In this case, the correspondence occurs between to natural
noemata, involving a human subject as a simple perceiver.
Resonances however are by no means confined to natural phenomena: as we saw in paragraph 1, even something as banal as dressing (well)
is a management of resonances. Another field of human activity that is
heavily involved in spatial resonances is architecture: we might even say
that spatial resonances are one of the fundamental tools of architecture.
Browsing on the internet several hundred images corresponding to the
query “aesthetic resonance”, one image made me consider this point in
124
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
particular, also for its similarity to the Japanese poems that we will
analyze in paragraph 5. It is a picture of the uniquely brilliant full moon of
November 2016 shining over the Gate of All Nations of Persepolis, Iran.
Apart from its immediately striking character, the picture suggests several
kinds of distance. One is the extreme remoteness of the ancient ruin,
physically available but separated from us by the “cloak of history”. By
contrast, the moon shining on it bears witness of an even greater cosmic
distance, and at the same time speaks of an eternal present, of a
perpetual cycle of waxing and waning that opposes the historical, finite
permanence of stone. The two kinds of time resonate with each other:
each one needs to touch the other to become aesthetically and
emotionally active. The interaction between ancient ruin and landscape
(not as a collection of objects, but as horizon of manifestation) is
reminiscent of Heidegger’s description of a Greek temple in The Origin of
the Work of Art. In this passage, Heidegger actually sketches something
that is already very close to the definition of “resonance” we are attempting:
A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle
of the rocky, fissured valley. […] It is the temple work that first structures and
simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in
which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and
decline acquire for the human being the shape of its destiny. The all-governing
expanse of these open relations is the world of this historical people. […] This
resting of the work draws out of the rock the darkness of its unstructured yet
unforced support. Standing there, the building holds its place against the storm
raging above it and so first makes the storm visible in its violence. The gleam and
luster of the stone, though apparently there only by the grace of the sun, in fact
first brings forth the light of day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of night. The
temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of the air. The steadfastness of the work stands out against the surge of the tide and, in its own repose,
brings out the raging of the surf. Tree, grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first
enter their distinctive shapes and thus come to appearance as what they are.
(Heidegger 2002: 20-1)
As a nexus of cultural and natural, visible and invisible (“wind and earth”
in the sense of Watsuji’s fūdo, cfr. Watsuji 1961), the aesthetic sense of a
temple or a monument like the Gate of All Nations does not simply abide
in the positive form of its construction. It resides instead in its capacity of
becoming the focus of resonances that gather and clash throughout it. In
the case of the two lammasu, too, “eagle and bull”, together with human
shape, acquire their expressive force through their reciprocal fusion into
125
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
a chimeric being, a majesty that would not belong to a line of distinct
figures.
It is not by chance, however, that these first examples of resonances
deal with forests or ruins. Even Heidegger, when later in the same essay
tries to expand his discussion on physis and “Earth” and turns to the
“famous picture” of a pair of shoes by Van Gogh and to the “farmer
woman” supposedly wearing them, suddenly becomes much less convincing. The reader, Derrida claimed, has the right to be “disappointed by
the consumerlike hurry toward the content of a representation, by the
heaviness of the pathos, by the coded triviality of this description, which
is both overloaded and impoverished” (Derrida 1987: 292). Derrida argued that in this contrived example, Heidegger failed to recognize the
discontinuity between the actual field (or the ageless temple) and a modern artwork, framed in terms of autorship and debatable content. In the
context of our inquiry, this example highlights another important element
of resonances: their spontaneity. While that of resonance is a noetic
mode that occurs freely and even frequently on a fundamental aesthesiological plane, it is harder (not impossible, but harder) to voluntarily
create the middle space of “continuous discontinuity” necessary for its
manifestation in the definite space of a single artwork1. This is a limit of
the artwork in the modern sense, as concluded opus of a single author, a
tight unity of form and content that does not include often the gap or
opening needed for a resonance. The loss of the aura lamented by Benjamin
affects in this sense even original artworks: as they become more object-like,
they lose their “unbridgeable distance”. In neophenomenological terms,
this is the heart of the dispute between Hermann Schmitz and Böhme
about the structural possibility, denied by the former and affirmed by the
latter, of willingly producing atmospheres through artworks. In the case
of resonances (a subset of atmospheres in general), what is the cause of
our inability of not only producing at will, but also of foreseeing or
definitely arrange a resonance? My answer is that once we understand
resonance as a noetic mode (not simply as a subjective projection), the
more the artwork tries to exhibit and present positive traits, the less
1 We used the example of an elegant person as one of personal air and resonance.
While this seems to contradict this point about the spontaneity of resonances, we only
need to think of how often “elegance is innate”, or at least very slowly embodied, to
admit that beyond all the objective elements of clothing, elegance is definitely not
something that can be produced at will. Nonchalance, as a defining trait of a dandy, is
what ultimately distinguishes true elegance and a pose.
126
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
guaranteed is the spacing or gap that would allow such resonances. For
something to resonate, there must be some kind of internal fissure, a
nexus of presence and absence.
4. Apollo’s command
Aesthetic resonance before a work of art will often happen, however,
through another axis: the surprising, moving and somewhat uneasy sense
of distance opened between the work and ourselves. Resonance in this
sense is a paradox, since on one hand it makes us correspond and attune
to the work, no matter what it is, on the other hand forces us into a
relationship that passionate but often bittersweet, or even painful, since
it is asymmetrical. The work speaks to us, can even feel like observing us,
but does it through something that cannot become a dialogue. A
powerful poetic example of this interrupted dialectic dynamic is the
famous poem composed by Rilke after seeing a headless statue of Apollo
in the Louvre:
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
Darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
Sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
In dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,
Sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
Der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
Der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
Zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
Unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
Und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;
Und brächte nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
Aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
Die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
127
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. (Rilke 1995: 67)
The poem builds on the traditional picture of Apollo as a god of light. But
here Rilke speaks with great precision of “gleaming” (glänzt), “dazzling”
(blenden), “translucent” (durchsichtig) and “glistening” (flimmerte)
elements in the statue. Far from being a self-enclosed object, as the
Nietzeschean Apollo as patron god of forms would dictate, the artwork is
an active field of mobile, even feral curves, a blinding aura in the original
double sense of “air” and “light”. Rilke’s poetry has an almost
phenomenological vocation, as it states that the stone can burst open and
observe the observer in turn. Here is a case of aesthetic resonance with
a human product. The iconic ending of the poem, Du mußt dein Leben
ändern, is however totally ambiguous. In which sense, towards which
direction? The command of the divinity (and following Schmitz we can say
that divinity, qua atmosphere, actually exists as such inescapable,
blinding authority), like an ancient oracle, cannot be asked further
questions. Thus, Rilke’s poem seems to include both the ecstatic sense of
resonance and the frustration inherent to its artistic manifestation. While
Baudelaire’s resonating nature was mysterious and yet welcoming,
inviting human subjectivity towards a blissful (if temporary) communion,
in the case of a statue attraction cannot be returned: this is the essential
difference between a resonance with nature or other humans and that
with artistic products. But there is undoubtedly a certain pleasure even in
this striving or Sehnsucht: its unattainability allows for an unlimited
movement of imagination and desire, the striving towards absence
typical of aura, the “strange web of space and time” that always gives
itself as “the unique appearance of a distance, no matter how close it may
be” (Benjamin 2008: 285). This negativity, no matter how pleasant or
rarefied, is an essential element of our relation to the artwork as a human
artefact.
5. Resonance and Japanese poetry: three examples from waka
The example of a statue (one adopted by Benjamin, too, in his discussion
of aura) suggests quite clearly what kind of frustration (and, masochistically, pleasure) unfolds in the resonance sparked by a work of art. The statue
128
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
has a human form, but it will never be available for a dialogue, or able to
reciprocate our falling for it: this is the gist of Pygmalion’s myth. Needless
to say, falling in love for someone else in flesh and bones puts us in a state
of ecstasy, engendering a powerful resonance: and yet this does not imply
an aesthetic production. On the contrary, the stress on the autonomy of
a single aesthetic subject (with the passage from archaic demonic inspiration to inborn genius first, and then further on to the judging subject of
Kant) and on the inherent qualities of the work of art has often erased
this dialectical dimension of the aesthetic. In Europe it would be hard to
find a genuinely dialogical art form until the early 20th century avantgarde. Even then, the stress often still lies on the bold innovation of a
disruptive subject.
This does not mean, however, that an actually dialogical art practice,
one in which resonance is an essential part of the productive process and
not a possible outcome of contemplation, does not exist elsewhere. In
the next three sections I will deal with a uniquely Japanese kind of poetic
practice, haikai, which has taken, in a way perhaps unique in the world,
the noetic mode of resonance both as object of its poetic discourse and
as form of its poetry itself. Haikai 俳諧 is an intersubjective composition,
made possible by the interaction and resonance – not only between the
“continuous discontinuty” of the world elements gathered in the minimal
space of 17 syllables, but also between the heterogeneous subjectivities
of different authors gathered in a poetic session, the za 座.
Haikai literally means “comic”, and it is the abbreviation of haikai no
renga 俳諧の連歌: “comic linked verse poetry”. Renga is in fact a way of
composing poetry collectively, which evolved from one of the oldest
Japanese forms of poetry, the waka 和歌 or tanka 短歌. To better
understand this genealogy, we will have therefore to begin from the
oldest of these three forms and explain what waka is. However, quickly
browsing through these genres also offers us a chance to observe the
important role of resonance in all three.
Waka literally means “Japanese poetry”, as opposed to those
composed in Chinese; its alternative name tanka means “short poetry”.
Waka is a short poetic form composed in a 5-7-5-7-7 morae 2 metric
scheme, often suggesting a switch in theme between the first 17 and the
A mora is a metric unit; it does not completely equate a syllable since it distinguishes
between long or short vowels, as it happens in ancient Greek and in Latin too; in the
case of Japanese /o/ and /u/ can be either short or long and also the sound /n/ counts
as a mora when not followed by a vowel.
2
129
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
last 14. Affirming itself (alongside poetry written in Chinese, kanshi 漢詩)
as the official poetic language of Japanese aristocracy, its history reflects
the refinement but also the competition for status and the often suffocating etiquette characterizing the Japanese Imperial court. Its composition
was bound by very complex formal rules, and mastering its language was
often a means for hierarchical ascent within the court. Its vocabulary
eschewed both the Chinese influences in the Japanese language and
colloquial expressions. Its tone was set instead by purely Japanese words
(yamato kotoba 大和言葉) and by precisely defined and sophisticated
seasonal themes: often times the nature praised by waka was more a pattern of literary topoi than an actual exposure to anything wild (Shirane
2012).
Even if heavily conventionalized, in waka nature was a powerful screen
on which human emotion would resonate. The resonance effect in waka
often occurs not through explicit similes or metaphors, but rather hinges
on the non-explicit shift between the first 17 morae and the closing 14.
Out of thousands of possible examples, I choose three well-known
masterpieces that should work as examples of resonance in waka.
隠りのみ
居ればいぶせみ
慰むと
出で立ち聞けば
来鳴くひぐらし
Komori nomi
woreba ibusemi
nagusamu to
idetachi kikeba
kinaku higurashi
Shut indoors
And sunk in gloom
What could ever console me?
Going outside I hear
He evening cicadas come calling
(Ōtomo no Yakamochi,
MYS VIII: 1479)
In this poem by Ōtomo no Yakamochi (718-785), the resonance mostly
spatial, on an axis of sound. There is a cathartic correspondence
established between a gloomy interior monologue – literally interior:
produced by prolonged stay indoors, likely due to long rains – and the
enveloping voice of the higurashi, the evening cicadas. Ōtomo no
Yakamochi lets these two worlds – inside and outside – resonate through
a “pivot word” (kakekotoba 掛 詞 ), a poetic trope that consisted in
choosing a homophonic expression and working both its meaning into the
poem. Idetachi kikeba, can be in fact translated both as “I come about
asking” and as “Coming out I listen”. The enveloping sound – not that of
a single bird but an environmental, spatialized noise in the approaching
dusk, visually contributing to a loss of distinctions – works as a response
to the subjective state of uneasiness and boredom: it reworks the human
subject into an atmospheric flow. The word ibusemi expresses in fact not
130
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
simply personal sorrow, but a state of atmospheric oppression: like gloom
it can refer to weather too, or even to an unappealing, disheveled
appearance of another person. A subject forcedly disconnected from the
world and from others, far from gaining its autonomy from it, quickly
becomes stuffy and obtuse.
月やあらぬ
春や昔の
春ならぬ
わが身ひとつは
もとの身にして
Tsuki ya aranu
haru ya mukashi no
haru naranu
waga mi hitotsu wa
moto no mi ni shite.
Is the moon not the same?
Is the spring not that
of a long time ago?
It seems that just I am
The one I have always been.
(Ariwara no Narihira.
KKS XV, 747)
In this second poem by Ariwara no Narihira (825-880) the resonance is
temporal, arising from the paradox constituted by the “discontinuous
continuity” of a natural topos like spring and the “continuity of discontinuity” of individual human existence. Moon and spring are always the moon
and the spring of a given moment: the first waxes and wanes, the second
is fleeting; and yet as natural phenomena they are enshrined in a circular
time or an “eternal now”. In comparison, personal existence (wagami 我が
身, literally “my own body”, “my embodied self”) faces the contradictory
identity of impermanence and sameness in an inverted way: it is only when
the self realizes its own underlying impermanence (Jp. mujō 無常) that
its biographical, continuous existence acquires its meaning. Through the
resonance with these aestheticized natural phenomena, human existence can recognize the linear time from birth to death as something
forced upon itself, but not exhausting the totality of possible temporalities. The temporality of this resonance is not the linear one of the
Heideggeran Sein zum Tode, and as such offers to human existence a kind
of deliverance, even when it unfolds as the melancholic recognition of
one’s finitude in an infinite nature, like in Narihira’s poem3.
3
About this metaphysics of time in Japanese aesthetics of nature, see Kuki, KSZ-1:70.
131
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
花の色は
うつりにけりな
いたづらに
わが身よにふる
ながめせしまに
Hana no iro wa
Utsurinikeri na
Itazura ni
Wagami yoni furu
Nagame seshi ma ni
The hue of flowers
Has gone away
Like nothing at all
On my body I’ve felt the time
Of long showers falling
(Ono no Komachi
KKS II: 113)
In the third poem by Ono no Komachi (825-900), resonance as a spatialized atmosphere and resonance as a continuous discontinuity in time are
intertwined through her mastery of poetic language and “pivot words”. If
in Yakamochi’s poem we found the relatively straightforward play between two meanings of kiku 聞く, “to listen” and “to ask”, in the case of
Komachi’s almost every verse is open to multiple translations. Mostow
has collected and compared many different English versions of her waka
produced by 19th and 20th century English-language Japanese studies,
showing how before such an ambiguous text different translators are bound
to express different emotive responses and scholarly agendas (Mostow
1998: 59-82). Even translation can be interpreted in this sense as a kind
of resonance. In the case of Komachi, the first pivot word is iro 色; a word
that can mean “color” but also “beautiful appearance” and “erotic love”.
In the first verse hana no iro the natural (if conventional) spring scenery
of blossoming cherries and the beauty of the poet, for which she was
famous in her youth, are expressed together, resonating with each other.
Itazura ni is an adverb that can convey a sense of loss, disappointment,
or the sense of “in vain” as well; flowers falling are a reminder of impermanence, but itazura as a pivot word can refer to Komachi’s own “idly
spent” beauty, as she was left alone and miserable in old age. In fact in
the following verse the verb furu ふる is another pivot word: it represents
both “rains falling on me” (降る) and “becoming old” (古). Lastly, nagame
ながめ too can be read as the verb “while I watched”, “while I was lost
in thought” (眺め) and as the substantive “long rains” (長雨). The last 14
morae can be therefore translated as “I have seen myself turning old” just
as “Long rains have fallen on my body”, and its overall meaning is never
an either/or between the two, but rather resides in their reciprocal
pivoting (or resonance). This level of language craftiness might be considered a kind of sophistry; and yet the chaotic overlap between these two
lines of description conveys a scene in which the whole is greater than its
parts. On one hand brilliantly colored flowers falling under the long rains,
quickly disappearing into nothing; on the other the beauty of a woman
132
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
that goes away and is lost in vain, as her body grows old and she gazes
upon the world lost in thought, likely seeing herself in those very flowers.
As Brower and Miner commented:
By establishing a symbol and developing it at length by means of pivot-words,
Komachi has managed to suggest – in the very act of statement – the relation
between nature and herself. Her view of nature and her attitude of what might
be called passionately resigned despair are part of one brilliant poetic whole.
(Bower, Miner in Mostow 2015: 79)
This relation is what we have defined as resonance. Far from being a
simple show of poetic craftsmanship, the overlap of the natural and the
personal in Komachi’s language is the result of an effort to convey their
common, inextricable arising. The idea of a “passionate resignation”
suggested by Bower and Miner seems to apply also in the two other
examples. This paradoxical state, in which the subject finds itself both in
a heightened emotive state and able to accept a wider flow of things,
seems like a common feature of resonances in general. While it has surely
been explored in depth and often in Japanese artistic thought, it could be
used to describe, for instance, also Rilke’s attitude before Apollo’s statue.
6. From waka to renga
From these three examples only, it should be evident how resonance was
a fundamental tool for Japanese poetics already in an early stage. It is
undeniable however, that despite its masterpieces the genre of waka was
often prone to fall into mannerism. The need for more original and more
entertaining composition – waka was an integral part of the nobility’s
social life, with recurrent meetings and competitions – resulted in an
increasing popularity of renga, chained link poetry. The natural hiatus
between the first 14 morae (kami no ku) and the final 14 (shimo no ku) in
waka already lent itself to a dialogical kind of composition, with one
person beginning and the other completing it. Examples of this twoperson waka are much older than the medieval development of renga. It
is from the 13th century, however, that a more autonomous kind of renga
emerges, as a long chain of collective composition, balancing witty
impromptu and the sophistication of waka, or more in general the
traditional elegance of court aesthetics (ga 雅) and a more informal and
playful sensibility. The general rule of renga was simple. After the first 17-
133
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
morae starting composition (the hokku 発句, 5-7-5) by a first author, a
different one would add a completion to the first image with another 14morae stanza (the wakiku 脇句 or tsukeku 付け句). These two poems by
different authors would become a new unity of 31, called tsukeai 付け合
い. At this point another person composed a third stanza of 17 morae and
added it to the second: now the second and the third stanzas would have
become a new unity, with the first one to be “pushed away” (uchikoshi
打ち越). As the links chained in renga grew, often reaching 50 or 100
(hyakuin 百韻), rules were developed to avoid an excessive uniformity of
tone, season or images: repetition was to be avoided, and the
composition had to unfold with a continuous sense of novelty. Lists of
coupled themes were developed, as an additional way to guide the common composition and show one’s skill. Renga styles would almost immediately split into a “serious” (ushin 有心; literally “with heart”) mode
closer to waka, and a more relaxed and humorous one, mushin 無心 (literally “without heart”, in the sense of “carefree”). In his Meigetsuki treatise Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) describes the competition between a
ushin and a mushin group held in 1206, with the latter winning by outpacing the former group (Konishi et al. 2014: 275).
By the Muromachi period (1336-1573), the relevance and dynamism
of renga outweighed the nobler but increasingly stiff production of waka
(Keene 1977: 241), and the mushin (or haikai, “comic”) kind of renga was
in many respects more consequential for later literature.
It is not by chance that among the most popular and accomplished
authors of 15th century renga we find not simply noblemen, but also Buddhist monks of humble origins, such as Shinkei 心敬 (1406-1475) and his
disciple Sōgi 宗祇 (1421-1502). Among the most renowned works of Sōgi
we find the 100 verse renga “Three poets at Minase”, composed in 1488
with his disciples Shōhaku and Sōchō. Without relying on wordplay or
clever puns (referring however to many older tropes), it conveys a splendid, melancholic image of flow through natural space, the hours of the
day and the seasons of a year. The first four stanzas:
雪ながら
Yuki nagara
山もとかすむ夕か yamamoto kasumu
な
yube kana
134
As it snows
The mountain foot misty
In the evening
(Sōgi)
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
行く水とほく
梅にほふと
Yuku mizu tōku
ume niou sato
Far where water flows a village
In the perfume of plums
(Shōhaku)
川かぜに
一むら柳
春みえて
Kawagaze ni
hitomura yanagi
haru miete
A group of willows
Swept by the river wind –
Spring has arrived
(Sōchō)
舟さすおとは
しるき明がた
Fune sasu oto wa The sound of a rowing boat
Shiruki akegata Clear at dawn
(Sōgi)
[…]
Sōgi also embodied this newfound sense of movement in its very
biography, punctuated by long travels across the politically unstable
provinces of Japan. Renga poetry, as Barnhill noted, embraces and puts
into practice two key Buddhist insights (Barnhill n.d.). First, the
impermanence of its subject, since the uchikoshi means that the earlier
verses of a sequence are effectively erased, and they can only linger as a
kind of emotive aftertaste or atmosphere. The apparent lack of content
unity, which in modern times made renga a “non-literary” form in the
eyes of both Japanese and Western critics, is a conscious choice,
reflecting into poetic practice the East Asian metaphysics of
impermanence, heightened by an age of political clashes. In the words of
Nijō Yoshimoto (1320-1398), an early renga master and patron:
In renga the thought of a moment does not remain in the moment that follows.
The realms of glory and ruin, of happiness and grief lie side by side, the one
slipping into the other in a manner no different from the condition of the floating
world. While we think it yesterday, today has come; while we think it spring, it has
become autumn (in Ramirez-Christensen 2008: 138)
Secondly, in renga the author is not a single subject, but a contingent,
unique meeting of multiple personalities. Even a master like Sōgi did not
rely on a distinctive personal style to demonstrate his skill, and the quality
of a good renga sequence lied rather in the resonance between its
different scenes (in terms of content) and in the “continuous
discontinuity” between the stronger and subtler, faster and slower, finer
and bolder movements of poetic utterances. In a definition by Shinkei
that would be unthinkable in the context of European notions of the
artistic subject and of artwork as form: “the supreme renga is like a drink
135
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
of plain boiled water. It has no particular flavor, but one never tires of it,
no matter when one tastes it” (Shimazu 1969: 146).
7. Nioi and hibiki: Bashō’s haikai
Despite its innovation and the larger pool of composers, which included
samurai and Buddhist monks, earnest renga kept itself very close to the
original language of waka, while its more ironic modes conceived itself as
a simple game, more social entertainment than authentic poetic effort.
However, it is from this latter mushin mode that the great poetic novelty
of 17th century, haikai, would emerge as a full-fledged poetic form. During
its evolution, haikai drifted further away from waka language, and in
anthologies such as the Inutsukubashū (1542) by Yamazaki Sōkan 山崎宗
鑑 (1465-1553) a quick wit relying on wordplays, often vulgar puns,
helped to popularize the genre. It was after the pacification of Japan and
the beginning of the Tokugawa shōgunate (Edo period: 1603 – 1868) that
a burgeoning and increasingly literate bourgeoisie, lacking the status and
the specific education associated to waka or renga, made this lighter kind
of poetic game very popular. Popular haikai masters tried to define the
status and the potential of the genre: Matsunaga Teitoku’s (1571-1654)
Teimon school emphasized the continuity between traditional poetic
elegance (ga 雅) and this minor form; Nishiyama Sōin’s (1605-1682)
Danrin school relied instead on puns, Chinese terms and everyday
language (zoku 俗) to create striking expressions. Adhering to both these
schools in his youth and then elaborating his own distinctive style from
the 1680s, the most iconic poet of haikai literature, and perhaps of Japanese poetry at large, was Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉 (1644-1694). Bashō’s
mature style added to the dialectic between ga 雅 and zoku 俗 already
present in haikai a deep spiritual melancholy showing Daoist and
Buddhist overtones, associating his poetry to the hijiri 聖 culture of
spiritual recluses (despite what is often stated, however, Bashō himself
never became a monk). In Bashō’s style the echo of older noble themes
from waka in the modern, popular setting of haikai is not parodic, but it
is meant instead to generate an earnest resonance between high and low,
past and present, trivial and sublime. Bashō was a compulsive traveler,
spending the last ten years of his life almost continuously on the road and
writing travel diaries (in a poetry-prose style dubbed haibun 俳文) in
which this spatialized resonance with the poetic aura of Japan’s cultural
136
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
geography is further mixed with their imaginary doubles in Chinese historical landscapes (Shirane 1998: 218-19). Part of the meaning of Bashō’s
biography as a traveling writer lies exactly in this quest for spatialized
resonances.
The temporal echo that constitutes another central element of resonance poetics, as we have seen in section 4, is moreover explicitly
theorized by Bashō both as part of the poetic object (nature as something
ever-changing and atemporal at the same time) and of poetic style (something historically embedded and yet able to resonate with its unique aura
throughout the ages). Bashō expressed this complex idea through the expression fuekiryūkō 不易行 “eternal-changing”. It is also in this perspective that the famous verse about a frog jumping in a pond of water is
rightly celebrated as a masterpiece. In it, the sudden, fleeting movement
of a jumping frog and the metaphysical stillness of the old mire resonate
in the sound of the water, something in which both are paradoxically
expressed.
古池や
蛙飛び込む
水の音
Furuike ya
Kawazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto
The old pond:
A frog jumps in
The sound of water
The other great coincidentia oppositorum in Bashō’s poetry is that between the two genres of the “unreal” (kyo 虚) and “real” (jitsu 実). While
the tone of waka and renga was generally earnest in its description of
suffering and impermanence, mature haikai reaches its emotional effect
also by remaining ready to reveal through imagination and humor the underlying “emptiness” (kū 空: in Buddhism, the fundamental interpenetration between codependent phenomena) that constitutes the background of both worldly phenomena and our emotive reactions.
Many modern receptions of Bashō, however, tend to look at his work
through the assumptions of modern, Western poetic authorship. The
worldwide popularity of haiku, the modern, single-author 17-syllable
poetry that Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) developed in late 19th century
detaching the hokku from the “non literary” sequence of renga, mistakenly creates in many contemporary readers the impression that Bashō’s
hokku were totally independent works, to be appreciated as such. It is
important to stress instead that despite the growing appreciation of his
single hokku, which often appeared between the prose of his travel diaries,
Bashō was first of all a master of haikai no renga, chained haikai poetry.
So much that he himself reportedly claimed: “Among my disciples there
137
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
are many who can compose hokku that have nothing less than mines. But
when it comes to haikai, none of them can compete with me.” (Uda no
Hōshi, in KBZ-7: 305). Bashō’s most precious skill, according to this selfevaluation, was not revealed by what he positively composed as an author, but lied in his conceiving an innovative model for the empty space
between verse and verse, poet and poet. In fact while the associations
between verses had hitherto been conceived by predefined lexical associations (a heritage of formal renga) or by meaning, Bashō began using and
recommending to his circle a new mode of connection based on “resonance” (響き hibiki) or “scent” (匂い nioi). As reported by Kyorai, one of
Bashō’s disciples:
The Master said, “The hokku has changed repeatedly since the distant past, but
there have been only three changes in the haikai link. In the distant past, poets
valued lexical links. In the more recent past, poets have stressed content links.
Today, it is best to link by transference, resonance, scent, or status.” (Kyoraishō,
KBZ-7: 139)
This collection of metaphors – acoustic, visual, olfactory – does not refer
to distinct modes of connection, but to different aspects of Bashō’s
typical manner of strophe linking. This style is characterized by a greater
distance between the scene of one strophe and the other (soku 疎句) and
by the impossibility of reestablishing a direct logical unity between the
two discontinuous elements, that are thus left free to resonate as such.
Today, literary criticism chiefly refers to this kind of link as nioizuke, “scent
link”, since it was the preferred term in the influential studies on Bashō’s
renga by Higuchi Hisao in the 1920s. Haruo Shirane, in his seminal article
“Matsuo Bashō and The Poetics of Scent”, has observed how the
metaphor of scent refers to “the way in which a verse carries the
atmosphere of its predecessor much as the fragrance of a flower is
carried by the wind” (Shirane 1992: 77), so that “the mood, atmosphere,
or emotion of the previous verse is carried over to the added verse or
made to move back and forth between the two” (Shirane 1992:82). It is
significant how Shirane, even while being not concerned with general
phenomenology of resonance we tried to develop in this essay, clearly
highlights how this aesthetic effect relies on an undefined “atmosphere”
rather than on any positive element. In his study, Shirane also argues that
the basic dynamic of nioi works on what Jakobson defined as the paradigmatic axis of language, rather than on the syntagmatic level presupposed
by the older syntactic or logical links. In the resonance space that the scent
138
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
link produces, two verses work as “mutual metaphors”. Ogawa Tadashi
too (Ogawa 2019; 2011) has tried to observe this dynamic through
explicitly (neo-)phenomenological lenses, conceiving renga and haikai,
especially Bashō’s, as forms of poetic production that ought to be understood primarily in terms of atmosphere:
No strophe of the renga can stand alone for it is always complemented by a
strophe composed from another participant’s perspective. This complementarity,
rooted in an individual strophe’s incompleteness, renders each strophe of the
renga idiosyncratic. Utilizing a phenomenological concept, one can say that this
sense of incompleteness opens up a freely moving space [Spielraum] or the possibility of a horizon of satisfaction. This horizontality opens up a possibility that
could be variously interpreted and, in this sense, it makes possible the complementarity between strophes. Nose Asaji notices “the exchange of moods” and
“how each strophe should be, being made alive in the wholeness”, that originates
in the opening present in each individual strophe’s incompleteness. In a fundamental sense, one could call this complementarity a “hermeneutical circulation”.
That is to say, the respective poets create and interpret each strophe in light of
the poem’s totality while at the same time attempting to understand each individual strophe within the contextual atmosphere of the particular renga as a whole.
(Ogawa 2011: 259)
Bashō’s haikai is therefore first of all an “empty space” in which this
resonance or perfume can exist and unfold. This applies to present
participants, to their relation with older literature and to their common
connection with natural times and spaces. “Empty” does not imply that
this dialogue of resonances is something simple or automatic. On the
contrary, a significant self-discipline, a bracketing of one’s ego, is one of
its necessary conditions. This self-effacement, which Bashō incarnated
with his ironic and melancholic worldview, is a more concrete and even
democratic instance of Apollo’s demand in Rilke’s poem. A first pitfall,
into which disciples tended to fall already in Bashō’s times, was believing
that the distance between resonating links could be stretched arbitrarily.
Nowadays, poets tend to believe that close connections are to be left to beginners.
As a consequence, many poets compose verses that do not connect at all. Afraid
of being criticized for a lack of understanding, many informed observers do not
criticize a verse when it fails to connect to the previous verse and laugh when a
verse is well connected. This is contrary to what I learned from the Master." (KBZ7: 143)
An actual response to the alterity of other people’s composition means
instead modulating one’s sensitivity as a middle stance, a “not too far, not
139
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
too close” that Ogawa considers not only as a radically alternative way of
producing art, but also as a transformative experience for the subject.
Just as in the case of perfume the scent is at the same time inside and
outside of oneself, part of one’s sensitivity and an element of the lifeworld, the poets gathered in the za find themselves in a intersubjective
resonance:
The essential basics of renga lie in both self-abandonment and the participation
in za, which is “the opening place” belonging neither to one’s self nor to that of
the others. In short, what matters most is to abandon the “funk hole” or “dugout”
of the self and enter into the ocean of a shared life with others. Abandoning the
belief that the origin of poetic creativity is located exclusively in the “funk hole”
or “dugout” of the self, one must now try to face the openness that issues from
the presence of others in order to create poetry collaboratively. (Ogawa 2011:
263)
This opinion has already been voiced almost a century ago by Watsuji
Tetsurō, in his Studies on the History of Japanese Spirit (日本精神史の研
究 Nihon seishinshi no kenkyū). Watsuji too employed an atmospheric
language to express concretely how the contemporary conjunction and
disjunction between the human and natural other in haikai opened up
the dimension of “emptiness” (in the Buddhist sense) which is the active
core of both ethic and aesthetic experience.
It is only because a dialectical unity between individual and totality is concretely
manifested between (aida) the composers, that linked poetry can be created as a
unitary thing […] People fully maintain their individuality and yet return to nothingness; or, in other words, while people that are realized as single and yet dissolved in unity act in this “great void”, the totality of the poetic session is realized,
and the flux of creativity can emerge […] thus the pleasure of “literature” was the pleasure of the non-difference of self and other, the religious ekstasis of standing
amidst the Great Void. (WTZ, IV: 403)
To conclude we can observe one of the great examples of “resonance” or
“perfume” in haikai poetics, the beginning of the 36-link sequence (kasen
歌仙, one of the most popular formats in Bashō’s time) collected in the
1691 Bashō school anthology The Monkey’s Straw Raincoat (Sarumino 猿
蓑). This work usually referred to as “Summer moon”, from the theme of
the first stanza, is an ideal case study, since it includes the theme of scent
both as its poetic object and as the formal, noetic element of its
composition (for a full translation: Miner, Odagiri 1981: 249-66).
140
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
市中は
物のにほひや
夏の月
Ichinaka wa
Mono no nioi ya
Natsu no tsuki
In downton Kyōto
The scent of things:
Summer moon
(Bonchō)
あつし/\と
門/\の声
Atsushi atsushi to
Kado kado no koe
Hot, so hot
Gate by gate voices say
(Bashō)
二番草
取りも果さず
穂に出て
Nibankusa
Tori mo hatsazu
Ho ni dete
Rice ears sprouting
Even before being done
With the second weeding
(Kyorai)
灰うちたゝく
うるめ一枚
Hai uchitataku
Urume ichimai
Dusting off the ashes
A dried sardine
(Bonchō)
[…]
The hokku opens with the horizontal space of Kyōto’s downtown and the
many different smells of the market – a vernacular image that apparently
bears very little continuity with the poetic refinement of the old capital.
But in the expression mono no nioi, “the scent of things”, we can feel how
the myriad of different elements of a bustling city fuse into a powerful,
“chaotic manifold”4, from which in turn each ingredient and each voice
will reemerge. The particle ya is a kireji, an internal “cut-word” whose use
is typical of Bashō: while almost empty on a semantic level, apart from a
faint expression of emotion, its use is that of creating a discontinuous cut,
a jump, between the two asymmetric parts of a composition. From this
horizontal atmosphere we are in fact suddenly pulled up vertically, as the
scent of the city resonates with the summer moon, a visual image that
with its (synesthetic) sense of freshness does not negate the sultriness on
the ground level, but frees it into a wider aesthetic space. Bashō’s wakiku,
the second stanza, adds a linear movement, a spatial and acoustic
progression, to the static (atemporal) image of the first one. The sound
of the voices resonates at each gate, echoing the same sentence (the
4 A useful definition by Schmitz: “I call relative chaotic a manifold, in which the
distinction between identity and difference is only partially available and opened up,
but which has not fully and definitely dissolved each chaotic relationship between the
elements of the manifold” (Schmitz 1964: 312).
141
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
verse is based on repetition: atsushi atsushi … kado kado) and highlighting
how this atmosphere is perceived as a common immersion in a collective
environment: this applies to the citizens in the city and to poets as well,
who are delving together in the imaginary summer evening. The poetic
sequence keeps going through 36 such movement, a systolic and diastolic
progression made up of long shots and close ups, urban and rural setting,
humorous twists and scenes of travel. What is conserved, and effectively
produces the beauty of the sequence, is the creative contrast – the
resonance – between single snapshots and their common flow through
the world.
Today despite the great popularity of modern haiku throughout the
world, renga poetry is functionally extinct: even in Japan, only few circles
try to reenact it (Ogawa 2019). However, we can see how the notion of
resonance developed by Japanese aesthetics and powerfully expressed in
this historical form has a validity that goes beyond its original context. On
the contrary, all the particular features that we tried to highlight in this
text invite us to reconsider how hastily we assume the universal validity
of hegemonic categories of modern and Western aesthetics – to the point
of obscuring important elements surfacing even in the European canon.
This observation of waka, renga and haikai and of their use of resonance
should offer us a different insight into resonance as a universal phenomenon, bound to express itself in constantly changing forms both in our aesthetic histories and in our daily lives.
Bibliography
Abbreviations:
KBZ: 校本芭蕉全集 Kōhon Bashō zenshū, 11 vols., Tokyo, Fujimi Shobō, 19881991.
KKS: 古今和歌集 Kokinwakashū, 20 vols., Charlottesville (VA), University of Virginia,
2006 (available on-line: http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/).
KSZ: 九鬼周造全集 Kuki Shūzō zenshū, 12 vols., Tokyo, Iwanami shoten, 19801982.
MYS: 万葉集 Man’yōshū, 20 vols, Charlottesville (VA), University of Virginia, 1999
(available on-line: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/AnoMany.html).
WTZ: 和辻哲郎全集 Watsuji Tetsurō zenshū. Tokyo, Iwanami shoten, 22 voll,
1961-1978.
142
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
Literature:
Barnhill, D.L., Renga: The literary embodiment of impermanence and nonself
https://www.uwosh.edu/facstaff/barnhill/244-japan/Renga.pdf.
Baudelaire, Ch., The flowers of evil, Engl. transl. J. McGowan, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1993.
Benjamin, W, The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and
other writings on media, Engl. transl. E. Jephcott, R. Livingstone, H. Eiland, London,
The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2008.
Derrida, J., Margins of philosophy, Engl. transl. A. Bass, Chicago, The University of
Chicago Press, 2002.
Heidegger, M., Off the beaten track, Engl. transl. J. Young, K. Haynes, Cambridge,
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982.
Keene, D.The comic tradition in renga, in Japan in the Muromachi Age, Engl. transl.
J. Hall, Y. Toyoda, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1977.
Konishi, J., Miner, E.R., Gatten, A., Teele, N., A history of Japanese literature, Vol.
e, The High Middle Ages, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014.
Marinucci, L., Japanese atmospheres: Of sky, wind and breathing, in T. Griffero,
M. Tedeschini (eds), Atmosphere and aesthetics: a plural perspective, Cham,
Palgrave, 2019, pp. 93-118.
Miner, E., Odagiri, H., The monkey’s straw raincoat: And other poetry of the Basho
school, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981.
Mostow, J.S., Pictures of the heart: the Hyakunin isshu in word and image,
Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2015.
Ogawa T., 風 の 現 象 学 と 雰 囲 気 Kaze no genshōgaku to fun’iki, Kyoto,
Kōyōshobō, 2000.
Ogawa T., A short study of Japanese Renga: the trans-subjective creation of poetic
atmosphere, “Analecta Husserliana”, n. 109 (2011), pp. 257-274.
Ogawa T., 環境と身の現象学: 環境哲学入門 Kankyō to mi no genshōgaku:
Kankyō tetsugaku nyūmon, Kyoto, Kōyōshobō, 2004.
Ogawa T., Renga and atmosphere, in T. Griffero, M. Tedeschini (eds.), Atmosphere
and aesthetics: a plural perspective, Cham, Palgrave, 2019, pp. 287-291.
Ramirez-Christensen, E., Emptiness and temporality: Buddhism and medieval
Japanese poetics, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1981.
Rilke, R.M., Ahead of all parting: the selected poetry and prose of Rainer Maria
Rilke, Engl. transl. S. Mitchell, New York, Modern Library, 1995.
Rosa, H., Resonanz: eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2019.
Schmitz, H., System der Philosophie, Bd. I, 1. Teil, Die Gegenwart, Bonn, H. Bouvier,
1964.
Shimazu, T., 連歌史の研究 Rengashi no kenkyū, Tokyo, Kadokawa Shoten, 1969.
Shirane, H., Matsuo Basho and the Poetics of scent, “Harvard journal of Asiatic
studies”, n. 52/1 (1992), pp. 77-110.
143
Lorenzo Marinucci, Hibiki and Nioi
Shirane, H., Traces of dreams: Landscape, cultural memory, and the poetry of
Bashō, Stanford (Ca), Stanford University Press, 1998.
Shirane, H., Japan and the culture of the four seasons: Nature, literature, and the
arts, New York, Columbia University Press, 2012.
Watsuji, T., A Climate: a philosophical study, Engl. transl. by G. Bownas, S.L.:
Printing Bureau, Japanese Government, 1961.
144