Chapter 7 moves from “Characterization” through “Nature description” to “Psychological description.” In these two sections, Mishima works through techniques where, he argues, Japanese literature has particularly excelled among the literatures of the world. (Page numbers follow the edition described in the overview article.)
Landscape overwhelms the human figure
Mishima states it flatly:
When it comes to landscape description, it can be said that Japanese writers are peerless masters, unequaled anywhere in the world.
He finds the reason in the tradition of Eastern painting. As in a landscape painting where a small human figure is dotted into the scene, in an Eastern world where there is no opposition between the human and the natural, landscape description takes on a power that can overwhelm the human figure, he argues.
Foreign literature, Mishima says, apart from certain travel writing, has few examples of landscape spilling out of the novel to become a distinctive charm of its own. He notes that Stendhal’s spare nature description, and the Nordic writer Jens Peter Jacobsen’s Mogens, come closer to something resembling Japanese nature writing. (These works reach Japanese and English readers only through someone else’s rendering into that language; out of respect for that renderer’s own rights, this feature does not quote them directly.)
Nature description as symbol
Nature description, Mishima says, can sometimes function not as mere background but as a way of expressing a symbolic, erotic woman. This becomes an important element of fictional description. Characterization, too, ranges from directly pointing at a concrete person to symbolic, indirect characterization, carrying many shades of nuance. Mishima notes techniques common in drama, where characters are discussed in conversation without ever appearing onstage, or novels such as Rebecca, where the story revolves around a woman who is already dead.
Psychological description — a specialty since the Heian court
Shifting sections, Mishima turns to psychological description.
Psychological description has been one of Japanese literature’s specialties since the age of the Heian court’s women writers.
But it differs, in various ways, from what is called psychological description today, he continues. Japanese writers have described mind, feeling, mood, atmosphere — and beyond that, even the symbolic elements of nature — all synthesized together, he argues.
Nature’s stillness, and human time
Mishima then moves on to the relationship between nature description and the novel. A novel is, after all, a story of human relationships, and the very process by which it arises is inherently anti-natural. Mishima’s remark, discussed elsewhere in the book, that Japanese fiction carries more of the character of poetry than of the novel, bears on this same peculiarity of nature description.
Mishima returns to the quotation given in the article on characterization, noting that there, a character seems to be described as if she herself were nature. Japanese writers, he suggests, are still drawn more strongly to the static, symbolic elements of nature than to the dynamic elements of human life — its continuity over time, its changes, its ruptures — and this, in his view, is what gives Japanese fiction its particular character. (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.)
Worth checking as you read
First, “peerless masters, unequaled anywhere in the world” is Mishima’s subjective judgment, not something established by comparative literary scholarship. It should be read as Mishima’s own high estimation of Japanese literature.
Second, quotations from Taijun Takeda and Aya Kōda are not given here because they are likely still under copyright. The concrete examples Mishima cites from these writers in this section are ones readers will need to check against the originals themselves.
Third, the Stendhal and Jacobsen passages, reachable only through someone else’s rendering into Japanese or English, are also not reproduced here, out of respect for that renderer’s own rights.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| Nature description | A field where Japanese writers are said to excel worldwide; in the Eastern painting tradition, landscape overwhelms the human figure |
| Nature as symbol | Nature description can sometimes express a symbolic, erotic woman |
| Psychological description | A specialty of Japanese literature since the Heian-era women writers |
| Where the two meet | Psychology and nature can be synthesized, so that a character reads as though drawn like nature itself |
In short — Mishima sets landscape description that overwhelms the human figure alongside psychological description reaching back to the Heian court, as two specialties of Japanese literature, and finds their meeting point in the technique of symbol.