Snow in a Silver Bowl: A Quest for the World of Yūgen

by Hiroaki Sato

If you take a poll in Japan as to which artistic form the word yūgen brings to mind, the majority will say, “nō drama.” This, in an important way, is correct. But there is an apparent contradiction in the response, because, if you go on to ask for a definition of the word, most Japanese are likely to say it suggests something “dark,” “mysterious,” “ambiguous” or, as my tanka poet friend Ishii Tatsuhiko put it, “artistically contrived ambiguity.” It may also suggest something “ancient,” even “withered.” Ōba Takemitsu, Starr Conservator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, asked over a drink to define yūgen, came up with the image of “an old man emerging out of mist.” Hiro Sato’s study of the phenomenon is a unique cultural offering, studying it as it threads throughout the arts, both in Japan and as it has been handed on to cultures around the globe.

134 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2020

About the author

Hiroaki Sato (佐藤 紘彰) born 1942, is a Japanese poet and prolific translator who writes frequently for The Japan Times. He has been called (by Gary Snyder) "perhaps the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English."

Reviews

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hiroaki Sato’s book Snow in a Silver Teabowl: A Quest for the Word Yūgen is a gem. Before trying to define Yūgen , Sato asks friends and experts how they would describe it. The answers range from “a bagel” to “an old man emerging from mist.”

Yūgen is dark, ambiguous, mysterious. It is “an awareness of the universe that triggers emotional responses too powerful for words.”

From the opening of the dao de jing, '“the way that can be called the way…” the second kanji “gen” 玄 can be found to mean ineffable and mystery. (Here is Ursula le Guin)

In ancient Chinese, it mean distant and remote.

My favorite response was by the great Liza dalby, when she answered that Yūgen is the ku of shiki, soku, ze ku— From the Heart Sutra this is the emptiness in the line form is emptiness…

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[Ed Bremson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't really like this all that much.
For $20, I should have liked it more... didn't
A lot of discussion of No drama
not very enlightening regarding yugen