Using a canonical literary text to elucidate a noncanonical one--and vice versa--is an effective means of teaching multicultural literature. For instance, John Keats'"Ode to Melancholy" and many of his other poems comment on Murasaki Shikibu's 10th-century Japanese novel "The Tale of Genji." Helping college students to understand the concept of "mono no aware," a pervasive feature in the Japanese novel, becomes considerably less difficult with the help of a western text employing virtually the same technique. "Aware" can be defined as the simultaneous existence of beauty and sadness in life as well as the ability of a character to see this in even the most ordinary of events. After students have begun reading the Japanese novel, an instructor might follow a three-step process: (1) define "aware"; (2) pass out Keats'"Ode" as a reinforcement and ask students to free write, as homework, a journal entry relating it to the novel; (3) after a discussion of the journal entries, guide students through a reading of the poem and then suggest passages from previously assigned readings in the novel that parallel the ideas in the ode. Three themes might be emphasized in the ode: how nature mirrors the poet's mood; how Keats selects natural objects that are both beautiful and transitory; and how Keats plays on the imminence of death. (TB)