“One of the oldest and most deeply ingrained of Japanese attitudes to literary style holds that too obvious a structure is contrivance, that too orderly an exposition falsifies the ruminations of the heart, that the truest representation of the searching mind is just to “follow the brush”…. It is not that Japanese writers have been ignorant of the powers of concision and articulation. Rather they have felt that certain subjects – the vicissitudes of the emotions, the fleeting perceptions of the mind – are best couched in a style that conveys something of the uncertainty of the mental process and not just its neatly packaged conclusions.”
other things
