The previous article showed how Yukio Mishima treated onomatopoeia as carrying two opposing effects. On one side stands the onomatopoeia of popular fiction, pouring out sensation without restraint. On the other stands Ōgai’s onomatopoeia, held back, sparse. This article rereads the passage from Sakunosuke Oda’s Meoto Zenzai that Mishima quotes, and connects it to the thread of sight and sound running from Chapter 2.
The onomatopoeia in Meoto Zenzai
The passage Mishima quotes ran as follows.
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)
The rattling clatter belongs to the Nokogiriyama, a movie theater; the shrill snap belongs to the voice of a character named Katsuyo. Two pieces of onomatopoeia overlap within a single sentence, then land in a simile appealing to bodily sensation: “a dull-witted pig being jabbed with an awl and driven into its pen.”
Onomatopoeia reaching beyond the ear, into touch
What stands out here is that these onomatopoeic words, which appeal to the ear, end up landing in “jabbed with an awl” — a tactile image. The sound does not stay sound; it is converted, in the end, into a bodily sensation. This shows onomatopoeia being used not as a mere device for copying sound but as a mechanism that compresses and conveys an entire sensory experience at once.
Mishima’s own assessment of onomatopoeia — that it “carries no abstraction” and “conveys a sensory, concrete world” — can be checked concretely against this passage. Neither the rattling clatter nor the shrill snap carries much dictionary meaning; they are close to pure imitations of sound. And yet the reader is left with a vivid sense of the theater’s mechanical noise and Katsuyo’s grating voice.
Ōgai’s restrained onomatopoeia
By contrast, the example Mishima gives from Ōgai is something very brief and held back — “the doorbell rang with a tinkle” (this feature has not identified which of Ōgai’s works this particular passage comes from, given the poor quality of the source scan). “It rang with a tinkle” does not pile up sensation the way “clatter” and “shrill snap” do; it stays a single, simple description of a sound, given once.
As seen in Chapter 2, Mishima repeatedly holds up Ōgai’s prose as the model of a spare, restrained style. The stance behind Ōgai’s four-syllable line, “The water came” — praised for its economy — shows through consistently in how this chapter handles onomatopoeia as well.
The character of sight, and the character of sound — once more
In Chapter 2, Mishima drew a contrast between “men’s script” (visual, symbolic writing) and “women’s script” (phonetic, bodily writing). Onomatopoeia is, in a sense, an extreme form of “the character of sound.” It does not convey meaning so much as it tries to imitate sound itself, through the written character.
That Ōgai held back on onomatopoeia matches his taste for a visual, symbolic style. That popular fiction leaned heavily on onomatopoeia can be read as an extension of a tendency, closer to “women’s script,” to appeal directly and bodily to the reader’s senses. This, however, is a bridge ToL is drawing between Chapter 2 and Chapter 7; Mishima himself does not connect the two this explicitly.
Worth checking as you read
First, the source of Ōgai’s “it rang with a tinkle” is not identified in this article. It is treated only as the brief example Mishima gives.
Second, connecting Chapter 2’s “men’s script and women’s script” to this chapter’s onomatopoeia is a bridge drawn by ToL, not Mishima’s own argument. Readers can also take these two chapters as independent points, read on their own terms.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| Onomatopoeia in Meoto Zenzai | “Clatter” and “shrill snap” overlap, with sound landing in a tactile image |
| Ōgai’s onomatopoeia | “Rang with a tinkle” — a single, restrained use |
| The two contrasted | Popular fiction piles up sensation; Ōgai’s style holds it back |
| Link to Chapter 2 | Readable as an extension of the men’s-script (visual/symbolic) vs. women’s-script (aural/bodily) contrast (a bridge drawn by ToL) |
In short — where the onomatopoeia in Meoto Zenzai piles up sensation, Ōgai’s onomatopoeia is single and restrained. This contrast is one more appearance of the theme of economy versus excess that runs through this book.