Enduring the Gaze of Strangeness — fushigi and the Art of Understatement in Japan

What is fushigi (不思議), and why does Japanese art so often leave us with things unsaid? From Zeami’s nō theatre and Edo’s “one hundred tales” to contemporary anime and games — about a strangeness that works without explanations.

The Beauty of Cracks in Reality

You’re sitting on a train that’s traveling in the evening through completely ordinary suburbs, and suddenly, for a few minutes, absolute silence falls: there are no conversations, no phones, even the engine sounds as if it has drifted somewhere far away. You look through the window — outside, something is different, strange, though you can’t quite name it — as if everything has been shifted by half a tone. Nothing happens, and yet something remains inside: that one feeling, difficult to name — “something is wrong”… This is fushigi: a suspension in which nothing “supernatural” occurs, and yet meaning thickens between pause and breath. The same mechanism that Zeami described in his treatises on nō theatre returns across centuries of Japanese history: from the “hundred tales” gatherings held so often in Edo, to today’s anime like “Mushishi” with its mysteries beyond explanation, or games like “Silent Hill”, where the dark stains of the story must be filled in with your own fear.

The Japanese have a word for this: fushigi (不思議) — “strangeness without explanation”: not a “mystery to solve”, but a state in which we do not try to talk over an incomprehensible reality with logical commentary. The word leads straight into the heart of Japanese aesthetics: into the art of understatement, where meaning is not handed over like an instruction manual, but awakens in a person like a whisper. In nō theatre, Zeami taught that if you speak an emotion too directly, you kill its aura — which is why rhythm, pause, the “musicality” of a phrase, what remains in the half-light, are what matter.

In the European gaze, a mystery is often a promise of a solution: if we do not understand something, it means we lack data, and the world — sooner or later — can be closed into a logical whole. Fushigi is an aesthetic that goes in the opposite direction: it does not say “you don’t know yet,” but: “absorb the phenomenon with your whole self, even if you do not comprehend it, because reality is far greater than our simple words.” Classical Japanese sensibility — from Buddhist mistrust of the mind’s chatter to the poetics of allusion in old literature — teaches that meaning can be more like a shadow than a definition: it cannot be seized, but it leads. When we feel fushigi, we experience reality not as a puzzle to conquer, but as a space to inhabit. A love for non-literal “strangeness”, for the unspoken, for an unsettling crack in reality, is such a frequent element of Japanese art — theatre, poetry, anime. This is precisely fushigi — an aesthetic of “accepting the inexplicable strangeness of the world”, which has accompanied Japanese creativity for centuries — and leaves the door ajar. Shall we look inside?

What is fushigi (不思議)

It is easiest to confuse fushigi with “mystery”, because in European languages words usually like to be obedient: a mystery should have a solution, a riddle should have an answer, and what is unclear should eventually be explained or at least named. Meanwhile fushigi lives in a different mode. It does not so much ask for understanding as for consent to a temporary suspension of understanding; it does not demand an investigation, but openness and attention. And when we say that “something is fushigi”, we do not automatically trigger the need to “look into it more closely”, but rather: “let us accept that the world has, for a moment, become foreign” — gently, beautifully, often disturbingly — and that we do not have to disenchant it immediately.

That is why fushigi is not a crime mystery or a puzzle. A puzzle is defused: one gathers clues, arranges elements, fits missing pieces, until a whole emerges that closes the case. Fushigi works in reverse: it opens the case and does not close it at all. It is like a door left ajar in a well-known house — you know it is still the same corridor, the same silence, the same smell of wood, and yet something appears in the air that does not fit into everyday proportions. It is not about a miracle in a religious sense, nor about horror in the sense of pure terror; more often it is a slight shift that makes the ordinary take on a strange glow…

It is also worth distinguishing fushigi from the Japanese nazo (謎) — a straightforward “riddle”, the kind that can be (and should be) solved. Nazo is an intellectual construction: it poses a question and promises the satisfaction of an answer. Fushigi is an experience: it does not so much pose a question as change the temperature of reality, introducing into it a peculiar surplus. It may be something supernatural, but it may just as well be an ordinary coincidence, a strange tone of voice, a shadow in the wrong place, a silence that does not fit the time of day. From the perspective of storytelling, this difference is fundamental: nazo strives toward resolution, while fushigi strives toward mood.

This difference is not “East” versus “West”, nor is it a simple thesis about national temperaments. It is rather a difference in preferred storytelling tools. Some traditions like to close, to reach the point where “everything adds up”; others more readily leave a crack, because imagination works in that crack. And Japanese culture — from old tales and theatre to contemporary media — can be exceptionally sensitive to the fact that such a crack has value in itself. Not as a “lack”, but as a space in which meaning is not given, but is born in the recipient.

Here we arrive at the very name of this state, because “fushigi” says a great deal already at the level of writing. The form 不思議 consists of three characters: 不, 思, 議. The first, 不, is a simple “no”, a negation. The second, 思, is “thinking”, but not only cold analysis — in this kanji there is both head and heart; thought as inner living-through, imagining, arranging the world within oneself. Thus — not analysis, not deduction, but experiencing through thinking and feeling.

The third, 議, is “deliberation”, “discussion”, “debate”, that is: a linguistic attempt to order things; when we discuss something, argue it, fasten it into words. Together this yields a concept that can be read almost literally as: “that which cannot be thought-through and talked-through.” Not because we lack information, but because the very nature of the phenomenon resists that mode. As if the world were saying: here your “explain it to me” does not work; here you can only see, feel, accept.

At this point it is good to remember that this is not a purely colloquial word. Fushigi has a long cultural path and — importantly — a philosophical one. In Japanese (as in classical Buddhist texts circulating in the Sino-Japanese world) 不思議 could be associated with what is “incomprehensible”, “ineffable”, that which transcends discourse. This was not “strangeness” in the sense of an eccentric detail, but a boundary of cognition: something that may be true, may be real, may be experiencable, yet cannot be reduced to a logical procedure. Over time the word became domesticated in everyday life, and today “fushigi na” simply means “strange”, “mysterious”, “peculiar” — but in the background that older note still resonates: not everything must be explained in order to matter.

This double life of fushigi is crucial for literature and art. If we treat it only as “strangeness”, we turn it into decoration: something meant to surprise, to break rhythm, to create an effect. But if we remember that within the word lie meanings such as “beyond thinking” and “beyond debate”, we begin to understand why so many Japanese stories do not go toward unequivocalness. It is not that the author “cannot” explain, or that the culture “avoids logic.” It is that meaning does not always arise from an answer. Sometimes it arises from leaving an image in half-light — so that the recipient must “complete” it within themselves (speaking of half-light — Tanizaki writes wonderfully about this in his “In Praise of Shadows”, which I warmly recommend to those who want to understand Japanese aesthetics better — we write about the ideas from this book here: "In Praise of Shadows" by Tanizaki – Let Us Touch the Japanese Beauty of Twilight, So Different from the Western Aesthetic of Light).

In practice this means that fushigi is a kind of contract between the work and the recipient. The work does not promise: “I will explain what happened.” It promises rather: “I will show you a crack in the ordinary.” And the recipient, instead of demanding immediate rationalization, takes on a different labor: the labor of resonance. That is why fushigi so easily links eras and forms. In old tales it can be a whisper about an encounter that “had no right” to happen; in theatre — a moment when a character turns out to be a shadow and an illusion; in modern narratives — a scene left without commentary, because commentary would kill its power. Fushigi is therefore not a concrete phenomenon, but a way of seeing: an acceptance that the world can be larger than our explanations, and that imagination blooms not when we understand everything, but when something remains gently un-closed.

And here we can state a first, quiet thesis that we will need later: fushigi is a tool. Not in the sense of a trick, but in the sense of a cultural practice — it teaches us to leave room for what cannot be translated. And since the word says “beyond thinking” and “beyond debate”, perhaps its true function is not to “explain strange things”, but to remind us that not everything must become discourse in order to become experience.

Fushigi as an Aesthetic of Understatement

Nō theatre is one of the most accomplished Japanese schools of “not-closing.” Not because it “cannot” speak directly, but because it understands the price of literalness. The moment a feeling is fully named, it loses its aura; when meaning is pronounced like a verdict, it ceases to resonate in the recipient. Nō prefers meaning that does not end — meaning that continues to work after the words have sounded out. And it is precisely here that fushigi ceases to be “strangeness” understood in plot terms, and becomes a property of form: the way language and rhythm produce the sense that beside what is visible, there exists another level — invisible, yet real as a shadow.

In his treatises, Zeami recommends choosing words that are “gentle”, and at the same time such that they cannot be immediately “heard by the mind”; when these gentle words are set together, “in an astonishing way” the actor’s body and presence themselves pass into the aura of yūgen (what yūgen is — here: When something has already vanished, but has not yet ceased to exist. Yūgen – the Japanese Aesthetics of Suspension). This sentence is a key. It says that mystery is not a “theme”, but a byproduct of properly arranged language. Nō does not create an “effect of strangeness” with a prop or a sudden plot twist. It creates conditions in which fushigi is born like fog: not through information, but through arrangement.

In this sense yūgen is not a “pretty word for depth”, but a practice concerning perception. Yūgen — in Zeami’s classical intuition — does not consist in the actor “showing emotion”, but in guiding the form (voice, pause, tempo, gesture) so that emotion “begins to infer itself.” It is the difference between fluorescent light and an oil lamp. Fluorescent light clarifies. An oil lamp suggests. And suggestion does not have to be “less true”; it can be truer, because it does not close experience into a definition. That is why in nō language must sound beautiful — but it cannot be beautiful in a smooth and unambiguous way, because smoothness is a form of violence here: it smooths the world before it has had time to reveal itself.

Zeami speaks of “onkyoku” (音曲) — of the musical organization of voice and phrase: of the fact that words should not only be “interesting”, but should have the proper rhythm, should carry beautifully into one another, as if the sentence were a band of waves, not a chain of definitions.

At this point fushigi begins to be something very concrete: the effect of continuity and consistency in building atmosphere. When a phrase “moves” without seams, when it “shifts” from image to image without clumsy joints, the viewer’s mind has no chance to switch on detective mode. Instead it enters resonance mode: it begins to feel before it can name. And this is exactly the space in which fushigi breathes best — between understanding and sensing, between “I know” and “something in me sort of seems to suspect”.

One can describe this philosophically in several ways. Wittgenstein would probably say that there are areas where language has no right to behave like a tool for “stating facts”, because it would then shatter what it wants to grasp. Heidegger would say that truth can be an “unconcealment” (aletheia), not a sentence correctly matched to things — and that art can unconceal the world before it explains it. And the Japanese line of thought, from Buddhist mistrust of discourse to Nishida Kitarō and his “pure experience”, would add yet another: that there are qualities of presence that exist truly, but vanish when we try to pin them to a board of concepts. Nō is a practice of such unconcealment. Instead of stating the truth about a feeling, it organizes a situation in which the feeling happens — and the happening has priority over definition.

This leads us to the form most strongly coupled with fushigi: mugen nō, “dream theatre”. Here, strangeness is built into the very structure. Many nō plays begin like a travel report: a wanderer (the secondary character waki, 脇) arrives at a place, meets someone local, talks, hears a story — and then it turns out that the interlocutor was not “someone”, but a trace: a spirit, a memory, a shadow that came because the place is a wound or a desire. In these performances, “beings from another dimension” speak to people, and time is not a line: past and present intersect, roles double, an arrangement appears resembling a circle or a return, and images of dream and illusion become the basic tools of representation.

This is exceptionally important for our topic. Western modernity has accustomed us to think that “the strange” is what must be explained: either by science, or by a narrative mechanism. Nō takes a different path: it shows that strangeness can be an ontological state, not a plot device. The spirit does not come to offer a riddle to solve. The spirit comes to reveal something small, yet decisive. That is why fushigi in mugen nō is not “contrary to logic” — it is logical, only according to another order: an order in which a human being is immersed in time as in water, and does not stand above it like a judge.

The most beautiful thing about this form is that it does not turn the viewer into a gullible consumer of wonders. It turns them into a participant. Because if time overlaps, if characters are simultaneously “here” and “from there”, if the encounter is like a dream, then the recipient must learn a different attention: less police-like, more contemplative. That is also why language is so important here. It is not “special words” that create the effect, but the way they are distributed — ordinary words arranged so that suddenly they point to something higher and “inexplicable.” That is how poetry works, how nō works, how fushigi works: not through definition, but through arrangement that triggers something in us.

When we look at this through the prism of specific plays, it becomes clear that mugen nō is a machine for extracting yūgen. In “Atsumori”, the spirit of the young warrior is not a “bogeyman”; he is a wound that has not been closed, and that can become compassion. In “Izutsu”, the memory of love is so dense that a person becomes a recollection, and a recollection becomes a person. In “Sumidagawa”, grief is not described, but summoned like a landscape: a river, a journey, a rite, the monotony of footsteps — and suddenly, what is emotional becomes material. These are all stories that do not so much “explain” as change the viewer’s state. And only that change of state is the true “meaning.” It is a mature, almost meditative definition of art: not to transmit content, but to reorganize perception.

At this point we can state a thesis that will accompany us when we move into modern art: the Japanese “love of leaving things strange” is not a lack of logic. It is a choice of a different function for art. Art does not have to be a machine for answers; it can be a machine for deepening experiences. Zeami suggests that when words do not immediately submit to the mind, then — paradoxically — the body and the world become more true, more “lived-through”, more “saturated.” And fushigi is the name of that saturation: the moment when reality stops being merely describable and begins to be experienced as a mysterious presence that does not need to be solved in order to be acknowledged.

Edo and the Technology of Storytelling: “Hyakumonogatari”

If nō theatre teaches fushigi through the form of language, Edo teaches fushigi through the form of meeting. “One hundred tales” (hyakumonogatari kaidankai) is not only a set of scary stories, but a precisely designed mechanism — like a simple machine for changing a state of consciousness. Night, a closed space, community, darkening air and the rhythm of a repeated action: one lights one hundred lights (one hundred candles in an andon covered with blue paper), and after each tale one is extinguished, all the way to the threshold at which supposition begins to work more strongly than sight. In traditional imagination, it is precisely then — when the tales reach one hundred — that something “from the other side” is supposed to appear. And importantly: this practice was widely known in Edo precisely as a ritual of communal storytelling, in which the dying of light becomes dramaturgy in itself.

This is the key to fushigi in Edo: it is born not so much from the content of one story, but from tension between “I know” and “maybe.” The candle acts like a metronome. Each subsequent flame fewer is another step downward — not toward hell, but toward imagination, which in darkness always becomes more autonomous. And that is why hyakumonogatari was a “technology”: a set of conditions that makes space in the mind for an event not entirely rational. If the same tales were read at noon, their power would be different. Edo understood that fushigi is largely situational: it needs a threshold, a ceremony, a social “agreement” that tonight we allow the world to be a little foreign.

Hyakumonogatari originally began as a meeting in the type of a samurai “test of courage”, and in Edo shifted toward a social event in which people “played” with story, mood, fear, their own reaction. Remember: people did not believe in it blindly; rather, they allowed themselves to “pretend” belief in order to experience real emotions. What’s more — the tradition itself began, at some point, to parody its own terror.

This taming of fushigi through irony is fascinating, because it shows that “strangeness” does not have to stand on literal belief in order to be effective. In one Edo text (“Sato susume”, 1777) the author plays with the horror convention: he describes a “hundred tales” gathering as if, in the darkness, a monster truly lurked, waiting for the finale. Except that one of the stories drags on endlessly, so the “monster” — instead of striking with a bang — begins yawning with boredom somewhere behind the wall. It is an ironic joke showing that in Edo fushigi did not have to be deadly serious: terror could be consciously amplified, but also defused with humor, without destroying the pleasure of a “strange atmosphere” itself.

And suddenly we understand: Edo could maintain fushigi even when it stopped believing in it as “fact.” Because the function was not to prove the supernatural, but to activate imagination — and imagination does not require dogma, only the conditions of play.

This is the model of contact with strangeness in Edo times: the tension is real, the fear is real, the atmosphere works — but the solution can be absurdly mundane. And yet no one feels deceived, because the aim was not ontological truth about demons, but the experience of a threshold.

Edo could therefore treat fushigi as a social instrument. The “hundred tales” gathering is a bit like collectively producing darkness: people put into it their fears, their fantasies, stories heard “from someone”, and watch how it begins to live. From this perspective it is not “primitive superstition”, but a very modern intuition that psychic reality can be as strong as physical reality. Horror can be real as a state, even if its object turns out to be a joke. Fushigi in Edo is thus both serious and not-serious — as befits Edo, after all.

Moreover, with the development of print and mass culture in Edo, hyakumonogatari began to move from a fleeting event into a written form: “collections” (hyakumonogatari kaidanshū) appear, which imitate the rhythm of the gathering, but turn it into a reading product. And along with this appears another device — very important for the mechanics of fushigi: an obsession with “source” and “proof.” The author cites typical preface formulas: “I selected only tales of certain testimony,” “I gathered those of proper provenance” — not because the editor is a historian, but because the appearance of “authenticity” is fuel for imagination.

It works like a gentle pressure on the mind: you don’t have to believe, but if you want to go deeper, here is a pretext to suspend skepticism. Edo understood that credibility in fantastic literature is not a scientific method — it is a dramaturgical tool.

And then an even more interesting process begins: taming strangeness through genre shifts — evolution. Over time, tales become more “bizarre”, more “unpleasant”; a didactic (moralizing) and erotic component appears, and in late Edo one can already clearly see the professionalization of creators and performers who compete in the intensity of motifs — from bloody spectres to “bakeneko” and “snake obsession.”

On the one hand it is escalation — the market demands stronger stimuli. On the other, it is proof that fushigi is a living ecosystem. It is not museum fear. It is a form of cultural energy that flows between entertainment, moral tale, sensation, and sometimes pure play.

And here we return to the question: what does Edo do with fushigi when it stops treating it literally? The answer is beautifully perverse: Edo does not “kill” strangeness by rationalizing it — Edo modernizes it through irony, through form, through awareness of the mechanism. At some point hyakumonogatari becomes the curiosity of “let’s see the monster” — a game in which the very expectation of fushigi can already be weaker than the appetite for experience.

And yet the tradition does not lose its meaning. Only its function changes: instead of “I believe” there appears “I want to feel.” Instead of “it’s true” — “it works.”

That is precisely why Edo is so valuable for this topic. Because it shows that fushigi is not bound to one metaphysics. It can exist in a culture that believes in spirits, and in a culture that already laughs at spirits. It can be a religious “incomprehensible,” it can be urban entertainment, it can be a literary device, it can be a social ritual — and yet in each of these states it does something similar: it opens a crack in certainty. And when the flame goes out for the ninety-ninth time, it is no longer about whether a demon will really come. It is about the fact that in darkness — shared, created step by step — the world always, for a moment, becomes larger than our explanations. This is fushigi Edo-style: produced, shared, tamed, with a squint of the eye, but the experience itself — still authentic.

Fushigi Today

The greatest misunderstanding among Western recipients in a conversation about fushigi is that we try to read it as a “plot mystery.” Meanwhile, it more often works like weather: it has no single explanation, but it has density, temperature, and light.

Contemporary anime and games do the same thing that creators in Edo or in theatre once did — only instead of phrase and pause they have editing, silence, background sound, understated scenography, and a deliberately cut-out “why”.

Let us look at “Mushishi”. It is almost a model example of fushigi as mood: Ginko is like the waki in nō theatre — a wandering witness who does not come to “solve riddles”, but to restore balance between the human world and what exists beside it. Each episode offers a phenomenon (mushi) that is both “natural” and “incomprehensible”: as if biology had its spirits. The most important thing is that the series does not close this into a rational grid; it leaves the impression that the world is wider than our categories, and that a person can live in it only thanks to humility and attentiveness. Fushigi is not fear here, but a quiet destabilization of certainty.

A similar work is done by “Mononoke” (the 2007 series, not the princess), only more sharply and more formally. The medicine seller does not “hunt monsters” but activates a narrative ritual: to defeat a mononoke, one must learn the Form, the Truth, and the Reason — but this is not a detective puzzle, it is an entry into human trauma. The visual style (flatness, ornament, violent color transitions) works like a contemporary version of nō “cuts”: it reminds us that we are watching not a literal world, but a world of emotions that take shape. Fushigi is born from friction between the beauty of form and the uncertainty of meaning.

There are also titles that make fushigi a pure ellipse — the art of leaving gaps. “Serial Experiments Lain” is such a semi-philosophical lesson: the more “explanations” you get, the more you feel that you are not touching the essence. Strangeness does not lie in the fact that “something terrible” is happening, but in the fact that the boundary between self and network, between body and information, between memory and identity becomes fluid. This is the fushigi of modernity: not a spirit in a shrine, but a spirit in a wire — or rather the suspicion that the cable is a new shrine.

Finally, there are anime that show fushigi as the “strangeness of everyday life”, without metaphysical pathos. “The Tatami Galaxy” does it through rhythm and variation: the same hero, the same campus, the same decisions, but reality shifts slightly each time, as if life were a labyrinth of different possible versions. “Sonny Boy”, in turn, takes a school class and throws it into a world that works like a dream — yet this is not a world to “crack.” The more you try to close it into rules, the more you feel that it is a story about growing up, loneliness, and the fact that meanings are not given from above, but arise ad hoc.

Video games can deepen this aesthetic even more, because in them fushigi becomes an experience of space and sound — not only story. The purest example is “Yume Nikki”. There is practically no plot in the classical sense: we do not get dialogues, goals, explanations; we wander through dream worlds where logic is consistently inconsistent, and meanings are impressions. That lack of “gameplay” supports is the core: the player themselves becomes the interpreter, but never receives the stamp “this is correct.”

In another register, but with a similar philosophy, “ICO” and “Shadow of the Colossus” work. Here fushigi is born from the understatement of ruin: the castle and landscape look as if after a catastrophe no one will recount; characters say little; the story is fragmentary like a broken hymn. Strangeness is not a monster leaping from the bushes, but the impression that a place has memory, and that this memory has not been translated into words. The player walks through space as through an ancient myth — and that is very “nō”: less information, more presence.

There are also games in which fushigi is laced with fear and guilt, but again: not as a “riddle to solve”, but as a state. In the “Silent Hill?” series the town is not a “place” but a projection — space reacts like a psyche, and the player does not so much discover the truth about monsters as experience that monsters are a form of memory of harm. And it is precisely in such games that one can see how close fushigi stands to dream theatre: this is not an “other world,” it is “the same world, only lit from within” by what is repressed.

The common denominator of all these examples is simple, though somewhat demanding: fushigi in modern media is not a promise of an answer, but a method of deepening perception. When a creator does not spell things out, they are not always “escaping meaning” — sometimes they create meaning of a higher order: meaning that cannot be reduced to a sentence. Of course, there are also such “works” that mask the shallowness of the message and the laziness of creators with a superficial and inauthentic sense of fushigi — but such is the charm of culture — we do not have masterpieces alone.

Conclusion

So we return to the same scene from the prologue: an ordinary train, ordinary suburbs, the ordinary breath of the world. Only now, after Edo and after nō, we already know something that was difficult to grasp at the beginning: fushigi is not a “malfunction in reality”, but a moment when reality stops pretending it can be fully summarized in our imperfect language. This experience is not the enemy of reason — it is its boundary. When you do not receive an answer, you begin to co-create: not in the sense of fantasizing “anything at all”, but in the sense of active presence that stops being only the consumption of meanings. And perhaps that is why fushigi can be cleansing: it teaches that uncertainty is not a failure of cognition, but the normal state of a living mind.

This has psychological consequences that are today surprisingly practical. In a world where everything has an immediate label and an immediate opinion, fushigi is an exercise in restraining the reflex “name it and close it.” Phenomenologically, it is a small turn: instead of pushing strangeness into the drawer “error”, you leave it on the table as an experience that may still work. It reminds us of something philosophy has long suspected: that our “understanding” can sometimes be a mechanism of calming anxiety, not of reaching truth. A curiosity here is even the history of the word itself: 不思議 for a long time carried in the background not only “strange”, but also “incomprehensible”, “ineffable” — as if the culture were reminding us that there are things that have the right to remain beyond debate, and yet are real in experience.

Sometimes meaning is not there to be possessed, but to be approached — like a light in the distance that does not give a map, but gives direction. Fushigi restores imagination to its proper status: not as “making things up”, but as a tool for seeing more. It teaches the absence of haste — so that when seeing something disturbingly strange, we do not react immediately with the defensive reflex of naming and impoverishing pigeonholing, but allow ourselves to absorb that strangeness, contemplate it, experience it.

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