The last section of Chapter 2, “The Habit of Savoring Prose,” takes up, of all the sections in this chapter, the most familiar topic. Mishima speaks not of prose itself but of how prose is read — how that has changed with the times. (Page numbers follow the edition described in the overview article. English rendering of the quotation is a ToL translation.)
“Shall I do some reading now”
The section opens with a scene from kabuki. Now and then a samurai comes on stage in a leisurely pose, sets a book on a reading stand, and says, “Well then, shall I do some reading now,” and begins to read. Mishima says we scarcely read this way any more.
He goes on: once, if you used a dictionary as a pillow or sat on it, your parents would scold you; now, he says, no parent would scold for that. He cites the anecdote that Izumi Kyōka never treated carelessly even a scrap of newspaper with a bit of writing on it, and remarks that in today’s mass-media age, treasuring letters that much would wear a person out.
The weekly magazine is thrown away
The weekly magazine is fated to be discarded. Read through cover to cover on a commuter train passing three or four stations, it is left on the luggage rack. Mishima tells of an episode: in the waiting room of a foreign airport, he saw a large issue of Life left on a chair and, thinking it forgotten, called out to someone about it. The person answered that it was meant to be thrown away.
Driving a car, and traveling on foot
Mishima speaks of this change through the image of a journey. Modern people read a novel the way they drive a car: the hedge outside the window, the mountain in the distance, are not savored as themselves, but only tracked for the development of the theme and the course of the plot. Yet these, he says, are really a fabric woven of words — and it is by the beauty of that weave that the novelist hopes to please the reader.
Readers of old, by contrast, read a book the way one walks it slowly, Mishima says. Where today’s reader, with the growth of transportation, lets the scenery outside the train window vanish in an instant, the reader of old could savor each sentence the way one enjoys, one by one, the wildflowers by the roadside — this is Mishima’s contrast.
The color of a painting, the sound of music
Mishima deepens this contrast further, through the images of painting and music. The following sentence can be confirmed against an image of the original.
あなた方は絵を見るときに色彩を見ないでしょうか。（p.44）
(When you look at a painting, do you not see its color?)
No one, looking at a painting, can fail to see its color. And yet, reading a novel, we fail to savor the words themselves, and chase only the plot. Mishima turns the same question toward music. In listening to music, we have long had the habit of savoring the sound itself, at length, with the ear. Words are, in the novel, its color; its musical notation — this is what Mishima is trying to say in this section.
A question to modern readers
At the close of the section, Mishima poses a quiet question to today’s readers. How literary works are received changes with the times. Even so — do not lose the habit of savoring the words themselves. This is Mishima’s wish, in this section and across the whole of Chapter 2.
What to keep in mind when reading
First, much of this section is badly affected by scanning noise, making an exact word-for-word quotation difficult. This article quotes only the one sentence confirmed with confidence against an image of the original (“When you look at a painting, do you not see its color?”); everything else is written as a summary that carries the gist. Read it not as a strict, literal claim, but as Mishima’s intended point.
Second, Mishima’s diagnosis — that modern people have stopped savoring prose — presupposes the media environment (weekly magazines, commuter trains) of 1959. Later changes in media (television, the internet, e-books) are not covered in this article. Whether Mishima’s diagnosis still holds in the same form today is a separate question.
Third, this section returns, as the close of the whole chapter, to the question of “how to read.” This connects to the same concern we read in the first feature, the distinction between the lecteur (ordinary reader) and the liseur (attentive reader).
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Reading of old | Kabuki’s “shall I do some reading now.” Izumi Kyōka treasured even newspaper scraps |
| Modern reading | Weekly magazines are thrown away. The Life magazine mistaken for something left behind |
| Two images | A journey on foot (savoring each thing) versus driving a car (tracking only the plot) |
| Savoring | Savoring the words themselves, as one savors a painting’s color or music’s sound |
| Link to Chapter 1 | The same concern as the lecteur/liseur distinction |
In a nutshell — Mourning the change from a journey on foot to a drive by car in how prose is savored, Mishima tried to draw readers back to a way of reading that savors the words themselves.