Yukio Mishima’s Shiosai (The Sound of Waves, 1954) opens not with a person but with the description of a place — like an entry in a gazetteer.
Uta-jima has a population of fourteen hundred and a circumference of less than one ri. There are two places on Uta-jima where the view is at its most beautiful. One is Yashiro Shrine, built near the island’s summit, facing northwest.
— Yukio Mishima, Shiosai, chapter 1 (working translation; one ri ≈ 4 km)
Three sentences — but between them they display most of the machinery of Japanese narration, the work of stating things about the world. Here is that skeleton, piece by piece.
1. Topic and existence — wa and ga
The three sentences cycle: topic-comment → existential → topic-comment.
- The wa of ① is the topic marker: “as for Uta-jima — it is a small island.” It takes something already in the reader’s field of view and characterises it. This is the most basic sentence type of Japanese expository narration.
- In ②, “on Uta-jima” drops back to an adjunct, and new information — “two places ga” — is introduced with ga. This is neutral description: presenting existence with aru.
- The wa of ③ picks one of ②’s “two” and makes it the topic again.
This wa → ga → wa shuttle is the engine by which Japanese narration handles given vs. new, topic vs. assertion. It is what lets prose run on without restating the subject each time. As with the idea of value as difference, wa and ga work less through their own content than through their opposition.
2. The nominal predicate de aru — the mode of definition
Both ① and ③ close on a noun + de aru (“a small island de aru” / “Yashiro Shrine de aru”). Against da / desu, de aru is the written, objective, expository copula; it erases the speaker’s body and creates a surveying gaze. Together with ②’s aru (existence), every predicate in the paragraph is non-past. Not one event-narrating -ta has appeared in a main clause yet. The opening is scene before story — description with time held still.
3. Pre-nominal modification — description is piled up before the noun
The third sentence is the clearest specimen.
Before the head noun “Yashiro Shrine” comes a long adnominal clause: “built near the island’s summit, facing northwest.” Place, orientation and the event of building are all folded into a modifier of the noun; only then do the head and copula arrive. Where English uses a relative clause after the noun (“the shrine, which was built…”), Japanese piles the description in front (left-branching, head-final).
So in Japanese narration the weight of description is carried not by the main predicate but, often, by the noun phrase itself. The sentence’s job is only to state an equation: “one is X, de aru.” Sentence ① has the same shape — “a small island of less than one ri around” — with the modifier limiting “small island” from the front.
4. Head-finality and the structure of waiting
Because Japanese is head-final, the resolution — the predicate — always comes last.
Sentence ① works the same way: “Uta-jima wa / a population of fourteen hundred, / a circumference of less than one ri / — is a small island.” “Uta-jima wa…” is held in suspense through two descriptive phrases until “is a small island” lands.
5. Tense — non-past scenery, and the adnominal -ta
The one -ta form is “built” (taterareta), but it is a -ta inside an adnominal clause: it expresses a perfect / resultant state (“having been built → now standing”), not a past relative to the moment of speaking.
- Matrix tense: all non-past (de aru, aru) — timeless description
- Adnominal -ta: tense relative to the main clause — here, perfect / state
Japanese tense is relative, and the adnominal -ta is frequently perfect/stative rather than past. So the opening does not narrate “long ago they built it this way”; it describes “it stands this way” — a scene in the present.
6. Ellipsis and anaphora — carrying the topic across sentences
The topic “Uta-jima” is stated in ①, repeated in ② (“on Uta-jima”), and dropped in ③ (“one is…”). Japanese narration assumes the reader will carry the topic across sentence boundaries without its being re-marked. The anaphora “two” → “one is…” likewise depends on the previous sentence’s “two.” One can predict from the structure that the fourth sentence (cut off in the page image) continues “the other is…”.
7. Asyndetic parallelism, and the floating quantifier
- Sentence ①: “a population of fourteen hundred, / a circumference of less than one ri” — two nominal descriptive phrases simply juxtaposed, with a comma and no conjunction (asyndeton).
- Sentence ③: “near the summit, / facing northwest” — two circumstantial phrases modifying “built,” again set side by side by a comma.
- Sentence ②: “two places ga aru” — the quantifier “two” detaches from the noun and floats before the verb. “Two places exist” and “places, two of them, exist” differ in focus: the latter asserts the number as new information.
8. Perspective — the surveyor’s camera
The narration moves from macro to micro, like a controlled camera. “Facing northwest” is absolute, geographic deixis, not the speaker-relative kind. “Near the summit” uses “near” as a quasi-postposition. This choice of vantage point is itself part of the narrative stance.
In sum — the skeleton of Japanese narration this passage shows
| Feature | In the text |
|---|---|
| Head-final order; modifier before the noun | “Yashiro Shrine, built facing northwest” — description piled before the noun |
| The wa / ga alternation of topic-comment and existence | ①③ (wa · de aru) / ② (ni · ga · aru) |
| Nominal predicate de aru = the default mode of definition, objective register | “is a small island” / “is Yashiro Shrine” |
| Existential aru = introducing a referent | “there are two places” |
| Non-past base + adnominal -ta = static description, relative tense | de aru / aru / taterareta |
| Ellipsis and anaphora carry the topic across sentences | Uta-jima → on Uta-jima → (dropped) / two → one |
| Asyndetic juxtaposition; the floating quantifier | “population 1,400, circumference…” / “places, two” |
Mishima deliberately foregrounds the very structure of expository Japanese — the overview, the definition, the stillness, the front-loaded modifier — and opens the novel in the style of a gazetteer, with not a single human in it. Read for its skeleton, this opening is a worked example of almost every point in Japanese narrative grammar. Style is the use one makes of structure.
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