Cirrus@Austlit

'There are always two landscapes in a Malouf story. The one you can touch with your hands, and the one that is dreamed – discoverable by language, always on the verge of disappearing. In medieval Japanese art and letters, this quality was known as yūgen (幽玄),which might be translated as ‘shadow-filled’ or ‘beyond words’ or ‘that which resists being clearly seen’. Arthur Waley, translating fifteenth century playwright and pioneer of Noh, Zeami Motokiyo, said that wandering in a great forest without thought of return is a path to yūgen, as is standing on a shore and gazing after a fishing boat that disappears behind an island, or seeing wild geese disappearing into white clouds. Kamo-no-Chomei (1155–1216) wrote in his Mumyō-sho (Treatise Without a Name), that yūgen occurs, ‘when an unseen world hovers in the atmosphere’.' (Introduction)