ABSTRACT
It is a truism among the Japanese that songs about sadness or Ungering attachment or homesickness or impermanence are not sung in order to divert the mind or to forget. Their larger function is to deepen the feelings all the more by purifying, intensifying and objectifying them, and thus plumb the depths of the abyss and stay the tremblings of the soul. The real-life effect of these sorts of songs is recounted in one of Oshima Michiko’s letters in the runaway bestseller Gazing at Love and Death. When she sings ‘Going Back North,’ popular in 1961, ‘I grow excessively sad, but it puts my heart at peace.’ This is no extinguishing of sadness.
