Chapter 3 opens with the comparison that, to know the taste of food or wine, one must first taste the finest of it. Mishima then declares he will show us “two utterly opposite kinds of prose.” One is a passage from Mori Ōgai’s Kanzan Jittoku; the other, a passage from Izumi Kyōka’s Nihonbashi. (Page numbers follow the edition described in the overview article. Both originals are treated as public domain. English renderings of the quotations are ToL translations.)
Ōgai — “The water came”
The passage of Kanzan Jittoku Mishima quotes is a scene in which Ryo, a local governor, has a servant girl fetch water for a monk who claims he can cure Ryo’s headache.
閭は小女を呼んで、汲立の水を鉢に入れて来いと命じた。水が来た。僧はそれを受け取って、胸に捧げて、ぢつと閭を見詰めた。（森鷗外『寒山拾得』）
(Ryo called the servant girl and ordered her to bring freshly drawn water in a bowl. The water came. The monk received it, held it up to his chest, and gazed fixedly at Ryo.)
Mishima marvels at the single phrase “the water came” (mizu ga kita) within this passage.
この「水が来た」という一句は、全く漢文と同じ手法で、「水来」というような表現と同じことである。（near p.52, including summary）
(This phrase “the water came” follows entirely the technique of Classical Chinese — it is the same thing as an expression like “水来” [water-came].)
Ōgai gives no description whatsoever of the process by which the girl fetches the water and returns. Mishima says an ordinary writer of historical fiction would write in her footsteps, the color of her sash, the ripple of the water’s surface — and he composes, on the spot, his own “model of bad prose” to show what that would look like. Against this, Ōgai’s prose, Mishima judges, “cuts reality down with an almost cruel calm, stripping away everything superfluous.”
“First clarity, second clarity, third clarity”
Mishima recounts an anecdote: asked the secret of his prose, Ōgai is said to have answered:
一に明晰、二に明晰、三に明晰（near p.53, as reported speech）
(First, clarity. Second, clarity. Third, clarity.)
Ōgai’s prose, Mishima says, is like a very fashionable person wearing very luxurious clothes with an air of complete carelessness, never letting the elegance show. It looks offhand, yet is, in fact, made of the finest cloth — that is the true nature of Ōgai’s simplicity.
Here Mishima quotes the English critic Herbert Read (on the style of Hawthorne) to explain the secret of Ōgai’s style as “something meaning a perception of the totality and completeness of a situation.” A lucid style may look dry, Mishima says, yet within it, the elements of poetry exist in compressed form.
Kyōka — a flood of color
Izumi Kyōka’s Nihonbashi, by contrast, opens thus:
腕白ものの十ウ九ッ、十一二なのを頭に七八人。春の日永に生欠伸で鼻の下を伸して居る、四辻の飴屋の前に、押競饅頭で集った。手に手に紅だの、萌黄だの、紫だの、彩った螺貝の独楽。（泉鏡花『日本橋』）
(Naughty boys of nine or ten, seven or eight of them led by one of eleven or twelve. On a long spring day, yawning, noses drooping, they had gathered, jostling each other, before the candy shop at the crossroads. In their hands, red, yellowish-green, purple — painted spinning tops of conch shell.)
Mishima says that in Kyōka’s prose there is not one of the elements he admired in Ōgai’s. Worse, he says, one can find plenty of resemblance to the “model of bad prose” he himself composed a moment ago.
And yet, Kyōka reaches a “height”
But Mishima immediately clarifies that he is not disparaging Kyōka.
これは鷗外の文章とぜんぜん反対の立場にたつ美学にのっとっており、この美学を極端にまで押し進めて、鏡花は先に私が改悪したあの悪文から、はるか離れた高みに達しております。（near p.57, including summary）
(This follows an aesthetic standing at a position entirely opposite to Ōgai’s prose, and pushing that aesthetic to its extreme, Kyōka reaches a height far removed from that bad prose I made a moment ago by corrupting his style.)
Kyōka’s prose has “a flood of color, dazzling to the eye,” and draws the reader into “a kind of pleasant, pure continuity.” Mishima calls this “an intoxication of reason.” Kyōka concentrated his sense and his thought only on what he himself found beautiful, and by this, Mishima says, arrived — by an entirely different road from Ōgai’s — at the same “perception of totality” that Herbert Read speaks of.
Apollonian prose, and Dionysian prose
Mishima gives this pair a name.
もし鷗外の文章をアポロン的文章と言うとすれば、ディオニュソス的文章と言うことができましょう。（near p.58, including summary）
(If we call Ōgai’s prose Apollonian, we might call this Dionysian prose.)
By tradition, Mishima says, Ōgai’s simplicity stands on the tradition of Classical Chinese; Kyōka’s splendor stands on the tradition of Japanese letters, Edo comic prose, the spirit of haikai — “the flowering of the sensuous tradition of Japanese literature.”
What to keep in mind when reading
First, the quotations from Ōgai and Kyōka are treated as public-domain originals. They can be read on their own, apart from Mishima’s interpretation.
Second, the quotation from Herbert Read comes to us at second hand, within Mishima’s book; this article has not checked it against Read’s own English original. Nor has this article confirmed the copyright status of Read’s writing.
Third, the paired concepts “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” are Mishima’s own figure of speech, not standard terms in Ōgai or Kyōka scholarship. Best read as a rhetorical device Mishima chose to sharpen the contrast between the two writers’ prose.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Ōgai’s prose | “The water came.” A simple, clear style stripped of description |
| Ōgai’s secret | “First clarity, second clarity, third clarity” |
| Kyōka’s prose | A flood of color. Draws the reader into “an intoxication of reason” |
| Two destinations | Both reach “perception of totality” by different roads |
| The paired concepts | Ōgai=Apollonian, Kyōka=Dionysian (Mishima’s own figure) |
In a nutshell — Mishima set the five words “the water came” beside a passage flooded with color, showing that simplicity and splendor — two entirely opposite roads — can each reach the heights of prose.