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

If you take a poll in Japan as to which artistic form the word yugen brings to mind, the majority will say, no 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. ba Takemitsu, Starr Conservator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, asked over a drink to define yugen, came up with the image of an old man emerging out of mist.