This feature began with the overview article and read the four sections — “Men’s Script and Women’s Script,” “Prose and Verse,” “The Historical Change of Prose Aesthetics,” “The Habit of Savoring Prose” — along with the close reading. Here we look back over the range read.
Observations easy to confirm
Among the four sections, the observations that come with concrete examples and are easy for readers to confirm themselves are these.
- The survival of the 7-5 meter into the present (Prose and Verse). Confirmable in familiar slogans like “one second’s carelessness, a lifetime’s injury” or “let’s meet in Yūrakuchō.”
- The Man’yōshū’s alliteration-like effect through pillow words (Prose and Verse). Shown with concrete original text, such as the exchange of poems between Empress Jitō and Shii no Omina.
- The stylistic break after Futabatei Shimei (The Historical Change of Prose Aesthetics). That Higuchi Ichiyō’s and Ozaki Kōyō’s prose has grown distant to modern readers’ ears can be confirmed by actually reading the classics.
- That translated style has worked its way into modern Japanese (The Historical Change of Prose Aesthetics). Mori Ōgai’s translation work and Yokomitsu Riichi’s style are shown with concrete quotations.
Claims that remain Mishima’s own essay
On the other hand, the following are better read as Mishima’s personal judgment than as proven claims of linguistics.
- The claim that “Japanese has no abstract concepts of its own and cannot achieve clarity” (Men’s Script and Women’s Script; and near The Habit of Savoring Prose). As confirmed in the close reading, it is a fact that much of Japan’s abstract vocabulary is Sino-Japanese or translated; but the part that concludes from this “and so it cannot be clear” is Mishima’s own essayistic judgment.
- The generalization that “logic and intellect are male, feeling and passion female” (Men’s Script and Women’s Script). The Heian-period division of scripts — the names “men’s script” and “women’s script” themselves — can be historically confirmed. But the part that ties logic/intellect and feeling/passion directly to the essence of men and women is the view of one writer in 1959.
- Mishima’s own conclusion that “there is no great need to distinguish prose and verse in Japan” (Prose and Verse). This is a part Mishima explicitly states as his own opinion, not something presented as a scholarly claim.
Consistency with the first feature
The view we read in Chapter 5 of the first feature (overview) — that Japanese is “thin in logic” — stands on the same ground as the argument of “Men’s Script and Women’s Script” in this chapter. For Mishima, this was not a one-off thought but a consistent view running across several chapters. This consistency is worth confirming as a feature of Mishima’s view of prose. At the same time, it is worth noting that consistency does not, by itself, make a view correct.
Limits of this feature
One, due to the quality of the original scan, some sections (especially “The Habit of Savoring Prose”) were hard to quote word for word with accuracy. In this group of articles, only sentences confirmed with confidence are given as quotations; everything else is treated as summary. It cannot be ruled out that important points of Mishima’s remain in the parts that could not be read.
Two, quotations from public-domain classics (the Man’yōshū, the Tale of Genji, the Tale of the Heike, Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko, and so on) pass through Mishima’s interpretation, and have not been checked against specialist commentary in Japanese literary studies. How these classics’ standard interpretations compare has not been confirmed in this feature.
Three, the way of reading that connects two passages, shown in the close-reading article, is ToL’s own arrangement. Mishima himself does not explicitly tie these two passages together as one argument.
Summary
| Point | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Survival of the 7-5 meter | Easy to confirm. Verifiable in today’s slogans |
| The Man’yōshū’s pillow words | Easy to confirm. Shown with concrete original text |
| The break after Futabatei Shimei | Easy to confirm, as the difficulty of reading the classics today |
| The seeping of translated style | Easy to confirm. Concrete examples from Mori Ōgai and Yokomitsu Riichi |
| Abstract concepts as foreign | The etymological observation is sound. The “cannot achieve clarity” conclusion is essayistic |
| The men’s/women’s script generalization | The historical naming is confirmable; the essentializing generalization is Mishima’s view |
In a nutshell — Chapter 2 is a chapter in which observations about the history of language, verifiable through concrete example, are inseparably woven together with Mishima’s own personal essay on the Japanese language. The two need to be read apart.