Chapter 7 moves through “Action description” to the chapter’s final section, “Grammar and technique.” Here Mishima addresses the one field — action — where Japanese literature, so skilled at psychological description, is at its weakest, and then turns to devices closer to actual practice: person and onomatopoeia. (Page numbers follow the edition described in the overview article.)
Action is not literature’s specialty
Mishima states it plainly. If psychological description is literature’s forte, action description is not. Film arrived and completed the medium best suited to depicting human action. In the age of epic poetry, literature did depict action, but that action was dressed in poetic meter, decorative expression, and typecast technique — it could paint the grand tapestry of an action as a whole, but it never reached for the inner essence of the action itself, Mishima argues.
The javelin-throw analogy
Mishima describes the relation between action and expression through the analogy of a javelin throw. An observer watching a javelin thrower’s form, and trying to put it into words, still cannot capture the experience of the very instant the javelin leaves the hand — not even the thrower themself knows it. The actor, while acting, cannot simultaneously express what they are doing. Epic poetry became possible, Mishima says, at the point where act and expression split into a division of labor.
Only a third party sees the action
Mishima puts the core of action description this way: action is grasped from the outside. The actor themself knows nothing of it. It is always a third party who observes it.
Mishima demonstrates the point with a passage from the Taiheiki.
“Whoever thinks themself a match, come together and see the measure of my strength” — and at that, scattering here and there, running back and forth across the bridge, two or three of the fallen sakamogi atop the moat trodden underfoot, raising the right foot, thrusting an eight- or nine-inch crossbar spanning two lengths against the side of the gate. Both men went running swiftly back across the bridge… (Taiheiki, Scroll 15)
Action is grasped from outside, and what the actor themself knows nothing of is caught by a third party — this, Mishima says, is the essence of action description. In throwing the javelin, the thrower is acting through will and nervous tension alone; they cannot, at the same moment, watch their own action and put it into words. The experience of an action vanishes into time the instant it happens. What sees it, records it, and turns it into words is always someone else — an observer, an expressive agent. Epic poetry became possible, Mishima says, at the point where action and the expression of action split from the start into a division of labor. (This passage is rendered here as paraphrase, within this general sense, because the source scan’s image quality made the finer details hard to reconstruct with confidence.)
Grammar and technique — the problem of person
In the chapter’s final section, “Grammar and technique,” Mishima first takes up the problem of grammatical person. A novel, it has been fixed, is written in either first or third person. French “anti-novels” produced examples in the second person, but these are special cases; the novel, Mishima says, remains fixed as something written in first or third person.
The Japanese shishōsetsu (I-novel) is sometimes compared to the German Ich-Roman, but the two are, in fact, entirely different things, Mishima argues. Japanese is a language in which person can easily be blurred; it tacitly conflates “he” with “I,” and there is a distinctly Japanese grammatical technique by which, even once the third person has been dropped, the reader can tell that person has been omitted, almost without limit.
Mishima cites The Tale of Genji as one example. Once a person has been established, virtually any number of further references to person can be dropped, and the reader still knows who is meant. Mishima also touches on the tradition of the shishōsetsu, noting that even when an author is narrating their own experience, the strict conventions of fictional person paradoxically lend the handling of person a peculiar tension. (This passage is rendered here as paraphrase, within this general sense, because the source scan’s image quality made the finer details hard to reconstruct with confidence.)
Onomatopoeia, a small device
Near the end of the section, Mishima discusses the use of onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia brings ordinary conversation to life and lends it expressive power, but it can also typecast that expression and cheapen it, he says. In popular fiction, onomatopoeia is often overused, degenerating into a stock, typecast device, he writes — while Ōgai’s prose, too, makes use of onomatopoeia, in a restrained way, as in the example “The doorbell rang with a tinkle” (he also touches on children’s particular sensitivity to onomatopoeia).
Onomatopoeia’s first characteristic, Mishima says, is that it carries no abstraction. Where the abstraction proper to language corrupts its own function, and overuse corrupts the independence of a work’s world, he writes — but where it carries only an abstract effect reaching a child’s ear, language can instead perform the function of conveying a sensory, concrete world that lies outside its ordinary abstract function. (This passage, too, is rendered here as paraphrase, within this general sense, because the source scan’s image quality made the finer details hard to reconstruct with confidence.)
Mishima quotes a passage that uses onomatopoeia effectively from Sakunosuke Oda’s Meoto Zenzai.
Between the rattling clatter of the Nokogiriyama theater and the sharp, shrill snap of Katsuyo’s voice cutting in, it feels like a dull-witted pig being jabbed with an awl and driven into its pen. (Sakunosuke Oda, Meoto Zenzai)
Mishima also cites, as an example — much as with Aya Kōda — a kind of violent device women resort to in order to convey their own sensory truth to others; onomatopoeia of this kind is one such technique. (Kōda’s own text is likely still under copyright and is not quoted in this article.)
Worth checking as you read
First, part of the “Grammar and technique” section proved hard to reconstruct in detail, given the poor quality of the source scan. This article limits direct quotation to the Taiheiki and Meoto Zenzai passages that could be verified against page images, and paraphrases the rest, within the general sense conveyed.
Second, the Taiheiki is treated here as a public-domain primary source. Sakunosuke Oda (d. 1947), too, has passed out of copyright under Japan’s copyright term.
Third, Mishima’s argument that “action is grasped from the outside” is examined further in the next close-reading article, returning to the Taiheiki quotation in more detail.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| The nature of action description | Action is grasped from outside; the actor themself knows nothing of it |
| The Taiheiki example | Action and the expression of it, observed by a third party, form a division of labor |
| The device of person | Japanese blurs person easily; even the third person can be dropped and readers still follow |
| Onomatopoeia | Carries no abstraction; conveys a sensory, concrete world. Ōgai disliked its overuse |
In short — Mishima shows, through the Taiheiki passage, that action can only be observed by a third party, and closes the chapter by turning to two small grammatical devices distinctive to Japanese: person, and onomatopoeia.