Motoori Norinaga

Norinaga earned his living as a doctor in a small town. He saw patients by day and studied at night. He belonged to a movement called kokugaku, or "national learning." Its scholars wanted to look past centuries of Chinese and Buddhist influence and find an older, native Japanese way of feeling. His great project was the Kojiki, Japan's oldest book. He spent more than thirty years on a line-by-line commentary. With it he taught people to read a text that almost nobody could still understand.

Norinaga also read The Tale of Genji, the thousand-year-old court novel. He put his finger on a feeling that runs all through the book and gave it a name: mono no aware, "the pathos of things." It is the gentle sadness we feel because nothing lasts. Norinaga argued that this quiet, tender response to a passing world was the true heart of Japanese literature, not moral lessons. His phrase is still one of the most useful keys to Japanese art and its love of things that fade.