Chapter 3 of Bunshō Tokuhon, “The Prose of Fiction,” runs to about 21,000 characters — the second-longest chapter in the book (the overview article). Mishima Yukio begins by setting two contrasting writers side by side — Mori Ōgai and Izumi Kyōka — and moves on to a second contrast: the short story and the long novel. In this feature’s seven articles, we read that path in the original.
Three sections
| Section | Pages | Content |
|---|---|---|
| Two kinds of models | p.49–58 | Mori Ōgai’s Kanzan Jittoku and Izumi Kyōka’s Nihonbashi. Two aesthetics: simplicity and splendor |
| The prose of the short story | p.59–68 | Why Ōgai never wrote a long novel. The peculiar status of the short story in Japan |
| The prose of the long novel | p.77–84 | Why the European roman was slow to appear in Japan. Goethe, Balzac, Dostoevsky |
The three sections, in a nutshell
Two kinds of models — Mishima begins from the comparison of tasting the finest food or wine, and sets side by side, as “two utterly opposite kinds of prose,” a passage from Mori Ōgai’s Kanzan Jittoku and one from Izumi Kyōka’s Nihonbashi. This section’s contrast — calling Ōgai’s prose “Apollonian” and Kyōka’s “Dionysian” — becomes the skeleton of the whole chapter (Article 2, Close reading 1).
The prose of the short story — Ōgai, in his whole life, never wrote a great long novel. Mishima locates the reason in Ōgai’s nature and in the character of his style. At the same time, he argues that the Japanese short story has occupied a peculiar place, unlike the novelette or the conte of the West (Article 3).
The prose of the long novel — Mishima traces why the European roman was slow to appear in Japan back to the division we read in Chapter 2, “men’s script and women’s script.” A roman, he says, must be a great synthesis of the masculine world of logic and the feminine world of passion (Article 4, Close reading 2).
One thread through the chapter
Chapter 3 redraws, with the names of actual writers, the contrast we read in Chapter 2, “men’s script and women’s script.” Mishima himself states this plainly.
私がこの二つを冒頭に引用したのは、序説の男文字と女文字の伝統、論理的世界と情念の世界との対立が、同じ近代文学と言われるもののなかに、いかにも尖鋭な形で相対しているところを示したかったからであります。（近p.58, including summary）
(My reason for quoting these two at the outset was to show how the introduction’s tradition of men’s script and women’s script, the opposition between the logical world and the world of passion, faces off in a sharply pointed form even within what is called the same modern literature.)
Ōgai stands on the tradition of Chinese prose — logic and simplicity; Kyōka stands on the tradition of Japanese letters, Edo comic prose, haikai — passion and splendor. Mishima describes other writers as a “constellation” positioned somewhere between these two poles.
Both already in the public domain
The sources this chapter quotes — Mori Ōgai (d. 1922) and Izumi Kyōka (d. 1939) — are both already in the public domain under Japan’s copyright term (70 years post-mortem). This feature checks, wherever possible, the original passages Mishima cites against images of the source.
Structure of this feature
| Article | Content |
|---|---|
| 1 (this one) | The whole chapter |
| 2 | “Two Kinds of Models”: Ōgai and Kyōka |
| 3 | “The Prose of the Short Story”: why Ōgai never wrote a long novel |
| 4 | “The Prose of the Long Novel”: why Japan had no roman |
| 5 | Close reading 1: “The water came.” — reading Ōgai’s and Kyōka’s originals side by side |
| 6 | Close reading 2: how “men’s script and women’s script” was applied to the theory of the long novel |
| 7 | Verdict: does this contrast still hold in literary history today? |
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Size | About 21,000 characters. The second-longest chapter in the book |
| Three sections | Two kinds of models / the prose of the short story / the prose of the long novel |
| One thread | The pair Ōgai=Apollonian, Kyōka=Dionysian overlaps Chapter 2’s men’s/women’s script |
| Sources | Both Mori Ōgai and Izumi Kyōka are in the public domain |
In a nutshell — Chapter 3 redraws the opposition set out in Chapter 2, “men’s script and women’s script,” concretely, through the actual prose of two real writers, Ōgai and Kyōka.