Chapter 7 opens with “Characterization — appearance.” Mishima starts from a very ordinary observation about how people recognize one another, then moves into technique. (Page numbers follow the edition described in the overview article.)
“That guy, you know” — when a name won’t come
After touching on the French classical portrait — a genre that sketches a person’s looks and character in a few spare strokes — Mishima gives a familiar example. When a name won’t come, we say something like:
That guy, you know, the fat one with the eyes like an elephant, bald on top — that guy.
If that still doesn’t land, we move to their inner life or character: “You know, he came round to your place once, going on loudly about Beethoven…” Only if that fails, too, do we finally spell out, in detail, the person’s relation to ourselves.
What ties all of this together, Mishima says, is the proper name. In real life, we first sort people into “types” — by occupation, by title — and only dig deeper where we need to discover an individual underneath.
In fiction, the order is reversed
But in fiction, Mishima says, the situation is reversed. In real life, relationships accumulate first, and only then does a proper name take on meaning. In a novel, the name comes first, and the relationships behind it have to be built up afterward. A reader has to keep company, from page one, with a murderer they would never meet in life — through nothing but a proper name.
A story works even without a face in mind
Mishima tells an interesting anecdote. Riichi Yokomitsu once told Tatsuo Hori that he could never picture the face of Mahaut, the heroine of Le Bal du comte d’Orgel — “her voice I can more or less hear, but the face just won’t come.” And yet that heroine of Raymond Radiguet’s masterpiece has taken firm hold in readers’ minds as an image. This, Mishima says, is where “the secret of the novel” lies.
If appearance were everything, nothing could rival film. But film locks the viewer’s imagination into a single fixed shape. What matters in a literary description of a character’s looks, and what film cannot offer, is the reader’s own imagination, Mishima argues.
The more detail, the less clarity
Mishima demonstrates the paradox concretely. Write, “She had two eyes, one nose, and one mouth,” and unless it’s a comic novel, readers will burst out laughing. So a novelist writes something like, “Her eyes were beautiful. Her nose was well-shaped…” But, Mishima points out, a reader who reads this feels they now know what she looks like — and in fact knows almost nothing. Try to draw the face from the description, and you would have no idea what to put on the page.
The advantage of fiction lies in this: it stimulates the reader’s imagination, always leaving room for it to work, and uses that room to lead the reader wherever the author intends, Mishima concludes.
Clothing — from the Meiji style to the age of Western dress
Mishima then turns to clothing. A person’s impression comes not only from the face but from dress, small habits, the way someone walks. Women’s clothing mattered especially: novels up through the Meiji era always had to display the novelist’s own eye for feminine costume, Mishima says. He quotes Kōyō Ozaki’s Konjiki Yasha as an example.
Taking her seat by the pillar of the sitting room where the family had gathered, a pale purple ribbon set into her heavily piled formal coiffure, wearing a crêpe haori the color of reddish-grey azuki bean… (Kōyō Ozaki, Konjiki Yasha)
The same taste appears in a passage from Riichi Yokomitsu’s Shien, describing an elaborate attachment to kimono.
When it comes to kimono, it’s no ordinary matter — she would have the maid hastily stitch up, into a single-layer garment, something just cut and brought from the draper’s, and that very night turn it straight into a nightgown… (Riichi Yokomitsu, Shien)
But, Mishima says, once women’s fashion moved fully into Western dress, katakana loanwords like “sack dress” and “tight skirt” flooded in, and if a modern novel packed in costume description the way Meiji fiction did, whole pages would fill up with katakana. That is why the contemporary novelist tends to avoid describing Western clothing, Mishima writes.
Worth checking as you read
First, the quotations from Kōyō Ozaki and Riichi Yokomitsu are both treated as public-domain source text. Ozaki died in 1903 and Yokomitsu in 1947; both have passed out of copyright under Japan’s term of life-plus-70-years.
Second, Mishima’s observation that “the novelist tends to avoid describing Western clothing” reflects a 1959 vantage point. This feature has not checked how costume description in Japanese fiction has actually changed since then.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| Proper names | Unlike real life, in fiction the name comes first and relationships are set afterward |
| The paradox of appearance | More detail only makes readers feel they know — the image itself stays unformed |
| The technique of fiction | Stimulate the reader’s imagination, leave room for it, and lead them where the author intends |
| Clothing description | Central in the Meiji, kimono-era style; losing its point in the age of Western dress |
In short — through the paradox of the proper name and physical description, Mishima shows that a novel’s power lies not in detailed explanation but in how it stirs the reader’s own imagination.