The last section of Chapter 3, “The Prose of the Long Novel,” is short, at about 3,900 characters, but it develops the argument of Chapter 2 head-on, as a theory of the long novel. (Page numbers follow the edition described in the overview article. English renderings of the quotations are ToL translations.)
Why Japan never produced a roman
The section opens with a clear claim.
日本ではヨーロッパ的なロマーンはなかなか生れませんでした。これは序論で言ったように、日本文学の男文字と女文字の区別からもきていることは、ロマーンこそは男性の論理的世界と女性の情念の世界との一大綜合であり、男性的理念と女性的理念との完全なジュンテーゼでなければならないからです。
(In Japan, the European-style roman was slow to appear. As I said in the introduction, this comes partly from Japanese literature’s division of men’s script and women’s script — because the roman must be a great synthesis of the masculine world of logic and the feminine world of passion, a complete synthesis of the masculine idea and the feminine passion.)
As we saw in the previous section, Japanese writers have leaned to one extreme or the other — Ōgai’s or Kyōka’s. So a writer who can form a true roman rarely appears, Mishima says. In truth, he goes so far as to say, the roman in the Western sense has still not appeared in Japan.
But Mishima immediately qualifies this. Literature need not cling to genre. Apart from the notion of the roman, he says, The Tale of Genji is a splendid long novel. (The Tale of Genji is a public-domain original, and this article treats it as such.)
Length alone does not make a long novel
By length alone, great long works, beginning with newspaper serials, are written one after another even now. Serialize in a weekly magazine for a year, and an alarming quantity of novel gets written almost automatically. But that, Mishima says, is not the prose of the long novel. A long novel needs a sustaining power by which feeling and thought can flow, on and on, into the reader’s heart. A style that is too keenly sensitive, too poetically refined, with too many concentrated effects following one another, too much beautiful nature description, too much attention to detail, does not suit the long novel, he says.
Mishima says showing a quotation of long-novel prose here is not easy. Its character, he says, does not show itself in a few lines of quotation; it can only be grasped naturally, over the course of a hundred, two hundred pages. So he gives up on quoting, and hopes readers will go and try it for themselves.
Goethe, Balzac, Dostoevsky — the generous style
Among Western writers, Mishima says, those with the most novelistic of long-form styles are, to him, Goethe, Balzac, and Dostoevsky. Proust and Stendhal too wrote long works, but Proust, Mishima places, is less a novelist of the long form than a singular writer who poured all his effort into infusing his own individuality and fate into literature — he transcends the classification of “long” or “short.”
Mishima puts the ideal style of the long novel this way:
長篇小説の理想的文体というのは、筋に拘泥しない文体であります。ものにとらわれない文体であります。鷹揚な文体であります。
(The ideal style of the long novel is a style that does not cling to plot. A style not caught up in things. A generous style.)
Goethe’s style, seemingly tedious at a glance, sways like a great wave, unfolding its thought slowly. The reader enters bored at first, but as the view gradually opens, distant forests and villages, sunlit lakes and pastures appear before the eyes, and a vast fictional world is realized by his leisurely pen, Mishima says. Unlike the short-story writer’s eye, which stops at a small wayside flower or the shape of an insect, Goethe climbs the mountain road at his own pace and carries the reader all the way to a point with a great view. (The specific passage Mishima quotes from Goethe’s Elective Affinities is not reproduced in this article, out of respect for the translator’s rights as well.)
Of Balzac, Mishima cites The Duchesse de Langeais as an example: it begins with a leisurely description of a convent, then shifts to a description of the aristocratic society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and for a long time never arrives at the heart of the story. And yet, once carried on the wave of his style, one feels, as with Beethoven’s music, a great, overpowering energy moving one along. Of Dostoevsky, he says that in The Brothers Karamazov, the thick-nerved, somehow ponderous, distinctly Russian energy of the style is what makes it possible to sustain that nervous, high-strung theme.
And Mishima closes by saying that what the Japanese find hardest to possess is exactly this sustained physical energy, and a certain generous insensitivity.
What to keep in mind when reading
First, the claim that “the roman in the Western sense has not yet appeared in Japan” is the judgment of one writer in 1959. This article has not confirmed how Japanese long novels developed afterward.
Second, the foundation of this section’s argument — the division into a masculine world of logic and a feminine world of passion — rests entirely on the argument of “men’s script and women’s script” from Chapter 2. As we examined in the Chapter 2 verdict article, that premise’s validity is, in part, best read as Mishima’s own essayistic view.
Third, Mishima’s quotation from Goethe’s Elective Affinities (translated by Takahashi Kenji) is not reproduced here, out of respect for the translator’s rights as well. The gist of the argument is introduced, in summary, from Mishima’s own prose.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Condition of a roman | A complete synthesis of the masculine world of logic and the feminine world of passion |
| Japan’s situation | The roman in the Western sense has not yet appeared (Mishima’s judgment) |
| Exception | Apart from genre, The Tale of Genji is a splendid long novel |
| Ideal style | A style that does not cling to plot, is not caught up in things, is generous |
| Representative writers | Goethe, Balzac, Dostoevsky |
In a nutshell — Mishima traced Japan’s lack of a true roman to the split between men’s script and women’s script, and found, in the “generous style” of Goethe and Balzac, a model of the synthesis that split still lacked.