 Perhaps we should say “mu-logy” rather than “meontology”; for, strictly speaking, the Greek meon, “non-being,” should be translated into Japanese as hi-u. What I am translating as “nothingnesss,” mu, is written with a single character rather than as a negation (hi) of being (u). This is crucial since the nothingness with which they are concerned is not the simple negation or privation of being. It is closer to what Heidegger means by “being.” Attentive to what he calls the “ontological difference” between being (das Sein) and beings (das Seiende), Heidegger notes that with respect to beings, understood as determinate things, being can only appear as “no-thing.” We fail to attend to the no-thing of being when we think only of things, and especially when we think of thinking as a mere calculation of predetermined beings. Heidegger thus calls “the nothing” (das Nichts) the “veil of being.” Being cannot but appear to us as nothing, insofar as we know only of beings. Yet it is das Sein or das Nichts which grants an open place, a clearing (Lichtung), for beings to show themselves in the first place. But this clearing lets beings be by withdrawing itself from view. Just as “nature (phusis) loves to hide” (Heraclitus), being lets determinate beings come to presence by withdrawing its indeterminate abundance into absence or self-concealment (see Heidegger 1975, Vol. 9, 103–22; and Vol. 65, 246–47).