Lectures on the Art of Forgetting and Other Essays

Why does an unpleasant memory linger when useful knowledge slips away? Inoue Enryō turns the fashionable pursuit of memory training on its head: the ability to forget, he argues, deserves an art of its own. His lectures examine attention, habit, pleasure, belief, reasoning, and willpower as ways of releasing the mind from anxious preoccupation.

Two companion works extend that inquiry into dreams and apparently supernatural events. A grieving son dreams of his father’s drowning; a caged bird seems to announce its fate; sounds and sensations become dream scenes. Enryō presents the reports and asks how coincidence might be distinguished from a discoverable cause. In a lively public address, he gathers weather verses, fortune-telling practices, household charms, and observations from his travels into the beginnings of a proposed discipline.

A philosopher and Buddhist educator, Enryō sought to make mysterious phenomena objects of systematic study. This complete collection preserves his arguments, correspondents’ voices, audience laughter, and historical uncertainties, with concise explanatory notes. AI-assisted translation, prepared and edited by Valentin Sarić.