Chapter 4 is the chapter on the prose of drama, where Mishima stops off before discussing the prose of fiction. About 12,000 characters, of middling length in this book, but packed with clues for thinking about “what a style is.” (Page numbers follow the edition described in the overview article.)
Starting with a contradiction
Mishima first raises a contradiction. Readers say fiction without dialogue is stiff and cramped, and demand dialogue. Yet plays made only of dialogue they find hard to read and avoid. What is this contradiction (p. 85–86)?
Waves and spray
Mishima relays the words of a critic — whose name he has forgotten — heard from an American writer.
小説の会話というものは、大きな波が崩れるときに白いしぶきが泡立つ、そのしぶきのようなものでなければならない。（p.86）
(Dialogue in a novel must be like the white spray that foams up when a great wave breaks.)
The narrative is the wave, and dialogue enters where the wave breaks on the shore. Mishima says he finds this image very beautiful.
But novel-writing is not absolute, Mishima goes on. German novels tend to overuse dialogue for argument, and the dialogue of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov has an independent dramatic effect of its own. Japanese fiction, he says, had no such tradition of dialogue. Dialogue in Japanese fiction was mostly realistic, dropped in like a drop or two of sweetness into the bitterness of the narrative, and Mishima touches on the skill in dialogue of Satomi Ton, Kubota Mantarō, and Funahashi Seiichi (p. 86–92).
Dialogue in fiction, and dialogue in drama
Next, Mishima comes to the core. The “yes” and “no” in a novel and the “yes” and “no” in a play are, even as the same fragments, entirely different in meaning. In a novel, description of the psychology or scene that prepares that dialogue comes before or after. So the reader can read at ease. In a play, there is no such explanation at all. The reader must supply everything by imagination (p. 93–94).
So Mishima makes up an example. In a farmhouse deep in the countryside live a father and two half-sisters. A novel could explain this situation briskly, in Ōgai’s manner. In a play, everything must be explained through dialogue. Just by the sisters saying “What time is it now?” “I don’t know,” the play hints at their bad relations, and by then talking about the father and their mother, hints that they are half-sisters (p. 94–96).
So Mishima considers the audience member who arrives late at the curtain-rise “the one who knows least about theater.” The ten or twenty minutes of dialogue at the opening are the most important as an explanation of the situation. And that must not sound explanatory. Lines like “Hey, you, a mere clerk, dare say that to me, the president?” seen in immature plays are, Mishima says, a bad example (p. 96–97).
Does drama have a style?
Another problem is the style of drama. In a play that looks like a sequence of ordinary conversation, is there such a thing as prose? Mishima answers that it “must exist.” In the age of jōruri and of Kawatake Mokuami, prose written in a 7-5 meter was valued (p. 97–98).
Here Mishima carries out an experiment. He divides a passage of Goethe’s Elective Affinities forcibly into a conversation among three people. Then there is continuity as prose, but one cannot call it the style of a play. Why?
戯曲の文体とは、それぞれのキャラクターを持ちながら、しかもその底に、作者の一貫したリズムが脈うっているものをいうのであります。（p.100）
(The style of a play means one in which, while each character is kept, a consistent rhythm of the author beats beneath them.)
Dialogue in drama is not a continuous flow as in a novel, Mishima says; each character’s manifestation is an instant, like a dolphin swimming in the sea that shows its back and leaps up, now and then (p. 100).
Moreover, in even the most refined play there enters ordinary conversation that looks trivial, like “Maid: Shall I bring the tea?” The style of a play, Mishima says, is prose in which, taking in such demands of everyday trivia and all manner of impurities, the author’s inner rhythm nonetheless runs like lightning from character to character (p. 101–102).
Kishida Kunio and Fukuda Tsuneari
As an example of one who established a style in Japanese drama, Mishima names Kishida Kunio. The lines of Kishida’s Tirol no Aki were ones no one had written before; they established the first psychological style of drama in Japan and influenced the later “playwright school,” he says. Fukuda Tsuneari’s Kitty Taifū, he says, seems influenced by Kishida but goes beyond psychological drama to collect the dregs of thought that appear over the everyday sense of life, a critical and ironic work (p. 103–107).
Walking and dancing
Chapter 4 ends with this closing.
つまり小説の文章を歩行の文章とすれば、戯曲の文章は舞踏する文章なのであります。（p.108）
(That is, if the prose of fiction is prose that walks, then the prose of drama is prose that dances.)
Before this sentence, Mishima calls the prose of drama, at times, an abuse of dazzling inversion, or the highest exercise of the expressive power of Japanese conversation, bent to the extreme, and a peculiar style that leaves the firm form of prose — “supple, free, flowing, dancing.”
What to keep in mind when reading
First, the “waves and spray” is not Mishima’s own theory. It is words of a critic that Mishima relayed, with the name forgotten. Mishima agrees with the image, and himself limits it by noting that the craft of fiction differs by country.
Second, this chapter’s theory of drama presupposes Japanese modern theater (shingeki) of 1959. The examples (Kishida Kunio, Fukuda Tsuneari, Kubota Mantarō, etc.) are Japanese dramatists of the time. Later changes in theater are outside this chapter.
Third, the contrast of “walking” and “dancing” is a figure, not a definition. It is best read as a clue to how Mishima grasped the style of drama.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Contradiction | Fiction without dialogue is dull; plays made only of dialogue are avoided |
| Dialogue in fiction | Waves and spray. Dialogue is inserted in the narrative. Explanation before and after |
| Dialogue in drama | No explanation at all; dialogue carries the explanation and the action. The opening matters |
| Style of drama | Under each character, the author’s consistent rhythm beats |
| Closing | The prose of fiction is walking; the prose of drama is dancing |
In a nutshell — Mishima grasped dialogue in drama as a thing of a different kind from dialogue in fiction, carrying both explanation and action, and called its style prose that dances, in which each character’s back shows and hides on the water.