Following on from “Two Kinds of Models,” Mishima discusses why Ōgai never wrote a great long novel, and from there widens the discussion to the peculiar character of the Japanese short story as a form itself. (Page numbers follow the edition described in the overview article. English renderings of the quotations are ToL translations.)
Clear-minded people cannot write great works
Mishima begins with a bold hypothesis.
非常に知的な明晰な人はあまり大作を書けないのではないかと疑われるふしがあります。
(There is reason to suspect that a very intellectual, very clear-minded person cannot write great works very well.)
Neither Paul Valéry nor Ōgai has a great multi-volume work. If the world is compressed, within such a person’s mind, into a form too lucid and too simple, then spending many pages is wasted, and the words themselves become wasted. Not unlike Zen’s “no dependence on words,” Ōgai’s style, sparing as the old Chinese saying “sparing of words as one is sparing of gold,” is not suited to a broad, sustained flow, Mishima says.
Shibue Chūsai — the outermost edge of the long novel
Even so, Ōgai has a long work. Mishima assesses Shibue Chūsai thus:
鷗外の作品でもっとも長いものの一つである『澀江抽斎』はこのような簡潔な文体で書かれたぎりぎりの長篇であります。
(Shibue Chūsai, one of the longest of Ōgai’s works, is a novel written right at the outer edge of what this spare style can sustain.)
Shibue Chūsai is, Mishima says, so condensed, the turbulence of a life packed so tightly into it, that for the ordinary reader it is like drinking a strong concentrate — a bitter drink. If you dropped a single line of it into water to dilute it, the concentrate would spread at once into a mild, pleasant drink anyone could enjoy. But Ōgai diluted that way would no longer be Ōgai. So, Mishima concludes, Ōgai’s prose was, after all, a style built for the short story and the short piece, resting on complete simplicity.
Mishima adds that Shiga Naoya’s style is much the same. Shiga wrote only one true long novel, An’ya Kōro, and even that took years of painstaking labor.
Kyōka’s style, by contrast, is, Mishima says, exactly suited to the long novel. It sustains a flow, calls to mind a procession advancing colorfully, as if scattering petals along the way; the author himself seems to entrust himself to the flow of his own prose, as if half tipsy.
The peculiar standing of the Japanese short story
From here Mishima moves to the character of the Japanese short story as a form. The Japanese short story, he says, is a special thing even by world standards. Of course, the intellectual short-story tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, and the realist short-story tradition of Maupassant, have also been imported into Japan. But, as he had said was a feature of Japanese literature in Chapter 2, the fact that prose and verse never split cleanly into separate genres produced a major peculiarity in the formation of the modern Japanese short story, Mishima says.
What European modern poets tried to express in poetry, Japanese modern writers expressed in the short story. So the finest Japanese short stories, Mishima says, are close to what, in Europe, would have been written as prose poems.
Japanese people demand high art from short things
Mishima explains this as a Japanese tendency. Starting with the tanka and the haiku, the Japanese are a people who give highly artistic qualities to short things. In modern literature too, they found in the short story a fitting form, and poured into it the highest artistic desire and demand for literary substance, Mishima says.
As a result, the Japanese short story naturally came to approach the standing poetry holds in the West. In Japan, a country lacking meter, writers with a poet’s talent, unable to find satisfaction in modern free verse in the colloquial language, not infrequently became novelists and realized their poetic crystallization in the short story, Mishima says. So among Japan’s so-called novelists there are many pure poets, and quite a few of them would be better introduced abroad as “poets” than as “novelists.”
As representatives, Mishima names Kawabata Yasunari, Hori Tatsuo, and Kajii Motojirō. Kawabata’s linked trilogy Sorimashi, Shigure, and Sumiyoshi, he says, are a single, pure poem, with a story faintly woven into a medieval-style poetic sentiment. Of Kajii Motojirō, he says: influenced by Shiga Naoya, yet actively casting off Shiga’s concern with reality, Kajii showed his poetic side strongly, in works such as Sōkyū (“The Blue Sky”). Kajii, Mishima judges, originated a rare, poetic style in Japanese literature that synthesizes the sensory and the intellectual.
What to keep in mind when reading
First, Mishima’s hypothesis that “clear-minded people cannot write great works” is generalized from just two examples, Ōgai and Valéry. It cannot be read as a proven law.
Second, the claim that “the Japanese short story has occupied a place close to Western poetry” presupposes the argument of “prose and verse” from Chapter 2. That premise itself — that Japanese never drew a clear line between verse and prose — is, as we confirmed in the Chapter 2 feature, Mishima’s own particular view.
Third, this article does not quote the texts of Kawabata Yasunari, Hori Tatsuo, Shiga Naoya, or Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. Because these writers’ copyright may still be in force, only Mishima’s judgments of them are introduced, in summary.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Hypothesis | A very intellectual, clear-minded person may not be able to write great works (Ōgai, Valéry) |
| Shibue Chūsai | A spare-style novel written “right at the outer edge.” Diluted, it would no longer be Ōgai |
| Contrast with Kyōka | Kyōka’s style is a sustained one, suited to the long novel |
| The Japanese short story | Occupied a place close to Western poetry, because prose and verse never split |
| Representative writers | Kawabata Yasunari, Hori Tatsuo, Kajii Motojirō — novelists close to “poets” |
In a nutshell — Mishima placed Ōgai’s simplicity as a style for the short story and short piece, and from there drew a large picture: that the Japanese short story came to take on the role poetry held in the West.