 Norinaga applied the concept of mono no aware (the sadness/pity of things) to The Tale of Genji as well as to the waka of the Shin Kokinshū poetry anthology, works that his teacher Mabuchi eschewed because of their alleged femininity and artifice in contrast to the Man’yōshū’s natural masculinity. Norinaga, by contrast, argued that The Tale of Genji realistically depicts how emotions profoundly infuse life’s major events, and how this contributed to the novel’s uncanny ability to inspire its readers to suspend didactic or moralistic interpretation and instead to enter emotionally into the tenth-century world that was its setting. From this perspective, when a character in Genji acts or emotes in a certain way, the reader is invited not to enquire into the Confucian moral or ethical propriety of the events depicted, but rather into whether the reader has ever shared the experience. This also overturned centuries of didactic Buddhist criticism of the novel on the grounds that it failed to praise good and condemn evil, and to show evil’s consequences. So Norinaga’s approach opened the door to a more modern literary criticism. In his words: 