ABSTRACT
Medieval times in Japan were marked, in the arts and aesthetics, by some of the most powerful developments to emerge in any tradition. Regardless of the choice, without the membrane centered in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, nothing we hail as "Japanese" would look as it does. It follows that the middle ranges of Japan's artistic history are in no way "dark ages"-anti-humanist, depressing, negative, or colorless (although these last two were among the highest ideals of the time). This chapter shows one of the main characteristics of literary, performance, and plastic productions was the coexistence of seemingly paradoxical elements in a fruitful balance. Human needs to shape and comprehend the most terrible losses were well served by an acceptance and even celebration of paradoxical complementary opposites. An aesthetics that preferred the imagination of perfection to actual physical completion, recognizing the inevitability of ends and beginnings.
