More than Five : 共感覚が浮き彫りにする五感以外の感覚

It is commonly said that we human beings have five senses - touch, taste, smell, vision, and hearing. This classification of senses depends on the fact that a human being has five kinds of sense organ - skin, tongue, nose, eyes, and ears. However, synesthesia in language indicates that we have additional senses. This study examines synesthetic metaphors in Japanese. Synesthetic metaphors are expressions in which the words or phrases proper to one sense describe the experiences of another sense. When we describe our experiences of one of the five senses, we can use three types of expressions. Words proper to that sense, explanatory expressions such as “nakitakunaru-yohna iro”（＝a color which makes me cry), and synesthetic metaphors (that is, words which originally relate to another sense). Some words like “hukai” (＝deep), “hageshii” (＝violent), or “sabishii” (＝lonely) describe the experiences of some of the five senses, like “hukai oto” (＝deep sound), “hageshii iro” (＝violent color), and “sabishii iro” (＝lonely color). But they do not originally relate to any of those senses, and are not explanatory either. These expressions are synesthetic metaphors and the adjectives must be words of some senses other than the five. The existence of these synesthetic metaphors proves that we have three more senses other than the five, at least in Japanese, - “dimension,” “movement,” and “mood.”