Five Modern Japanese Novelists

by Donald Keene

  Mishima’s plays include versions of two plays by Euripides, Medea and Herakles, and an extraordinary work for the Bunraku puppet theater based on Racine’s Phèdre. In such instances, the resulting play was entirely Japanese. The Fall of the House of Suzaku (Suzaku-ke no metsubō), the play based on Herakles, is about an aristocratic family in Tokyo during and after the bombings of 1945. I think it unlikely that anyone seeing the play without prior knowledge that it was based on Herakles would guess its origins, so completely does it suit particular Japanese circumstances.

  Perhaps Mishima’s most conspicuous borrowing from the West is the plot of the novel The Sound of Waves (Shiosai). Although most readers find it typically Japanese in its theme and expression, it is fairly closely based on the ancient Greek romance Daphnis and Chloë. Mishima conscientiously followed the plot of the original, although he had no choice but to change the shepherd and shepherdess of the Greek story into a fisherboy and fishergirl, there being no sheep in Japan. Mishima thought of The Sound of Waves as being essentially an exercise in stylistics, giving new life to the familiar boy-meets-girl story by the use of artfully chosen details of life on an island off the Ise coast.

  The Sound of Waves also represented a kind of protest against the appearance and attitudes prevalent among Japanese intellectuals of that time. One day in 1955, while visiting an exhibition of photographs in Tokyo, Mishima happened to notice the face of a man near him. Suddenly, he related, “his ugliness infuriated me. I thought, ‘What an ugly thing an intellectual face is! What an unseemly spectacle an intellectual human being makes!’” This revelation, which long had been germinating, made him hate the sensitivity within himself, the kind of sensitivity that so easily expressed itself in the martyred look of the intellectual. Mishima decided he must do something drastic about his own appearance, and soon after-ward he began to lift weights, with such vigor and persistence that he was eventually able to create, from the most unpromising material, a highly muscular torso.

  Mishima’s attraction to Greece, which began with a brief visit in 1952, remained with him for the rest of his life, and the influence can be detected in many works. Mishima did not feel that this influence conflicted in any way with his love of Japanese tradition. It meant sunlit landscapes, as opposed to the shadows more commonly favored by Japanese writers. It probably also meant the uncomplicated mind of the Greek hero, a quality shared by the fisherboy of The Sound of Waves and also by the various young army officers he portrayed, men untroubled by self-doubt.

  Mishima was a classical writer not only in his love of the classics of Japan and the West, but also in his use of many of their conventions. Perhaps his best play is Madame de Sade (Sado kōshaku fujin, 1965), in which he adopted the conventions of the plays of Racine—a single setting; a limited number of characters, each of whom represents a specific quality; the absence of overt action; and a reliance on tirades, long recitations by the characters describing events and emotions. If one sees this play performed in translation—particularly in French translation—one is likely to forget that it was written by a Japanese, but there is nothing un-Japanese about it; in fact, the long-suffering Madame de Sade may seem more Japanese than French. But the point is surely not the degree of influence Mishima received from European literature but how successful he was in making it a part of himself and turning the received influence into new creations of artistic value.

  Mishima’s classicism is revealed also in his borrowings from conspicuously unclassical sources. Mishima modeled his novel The Blue Period (Ao no jidai), written in 1950, on actual events as reported in the press. The novel was faithful to the facts, telling about a Tokyo University student who lent money at usurious rates of interest, was caught, and finally committed suicide. The novel After the Banquet (Utage no ato, 1960) was so close to the facts of an unsuccessful campaign for the governorship of Tokyo that Mishima was sued for invasion of privacy and lost the case. The veteran politician Arita Hachirō, formerly a conservative, had become a socialist after the war and in 1959 ran for the post of governor of Tokyo. Not long before he began his campaign, he married the proprietress of the Hannyaen, a fashionable restaurant in Tokyo known for its magnificent garden. The new Mrs. Arita, a woman in her fifties, threw herself and her financial resources into the campaign, but disclosures about her past were instrumental in bringing about Arita’s defeat in the election. The background, known to many of the first readers of the novel, lent piquance to its revelations, real or invented.

  Mishima wrote as a classicist, using materials that were familiar to his readers and assuming that they knew the conclusion of his story even before they opened the book; but he imbued the familiar materials, whether real or fictitious, with his personality as an artist. The finest example of this kind of classicism was his novel Kinkakuji, the story of the man who burned the celebrated temple.

  The burning of the Kinkaku came as a shock not only to the people in the city of Kyoto but also to everyone who admired the traditional culture of Japan. The temple as a whole had been erected at the beginning of the fifteenth century by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu on the site of a villa. Most of the temple buildings were destroyed during the warfare of the sixteenth century, but the Kinkaku had miraculously survived the fires. It was because of the Kinkakuji and the other famous temples in Kyoto that the city escaped bombing by American airplanes during the Pacific War. This made it seem all the more deplorable when, five years after the war ended, on July 1, 1950, a priest of the temple set fire to the Kinkaku and reduced it to ashes.

  The motives that led the priest, Hayashi Yōken, to commit his act of arson remain unclear. He stated at his trial that it was to protest against the commercialization of Buddhism (the temple was a celebrated tourist attraction), but he may have been directly inspired by nothing more significant than pique over having been given a worn garment when he asked the superior of the temple for an overcoat. Neither the trial records nor the remembrances of people who knew Hayashi suggest that there were deep-reaching motives for his crime, but Mishima found in Hayashi the hero he needed for a philosophical novel. He read the newspaper reports and the trial records and also visited Hayashi in his cell. He told me, however, that the visit had added nothing to what he previously had known.

  Mishima’s use of the facts was confined to the relatively few instances when they were necessary for the framework of his book. His hero, called Mizoguchi, came, like Hayashi, from a desolate village on the Japan Sea coast, where his father was the priest of a small Zen temple. By all accounts (including his own testimony at the trial), Hayashi was painfully aware of his ugliness, and he suffered also from a paralyzing stutter that made him inarticulate. Mishima adopted these physical traits for his hero. He may have been attracted by the irony that a monument of surpassing beauty, which had withstood the ravages of warfare and the passage of the centuries, was destroyed by so unattractive and so unmemorable a man.

  The conclusion of the novel—the burning of the Kinkaku—was surely known to all Japanese readers before they looked at Mishima’s book. Mishima seems to have relished the problem of giving new life to a well-known story, transforming the facts, as he had transformed the story of Daphnis and Chloë, by giving them new meaning. Mishima consciously wrote a philosophical novel. He realized, of course, that the complicated ideas voiced by his characters, notably Mizoguchi’s disagreeable classmate Kashiwagi, might put off readers who sought nothing more from a novel than entertainment, but he took the risk, and he was brilliantly successful. Despite the difficulties involved, in both the kōan, or Zen riddles, that appear at strategic moments in the narration and Mizoguchi’s inexplicable love–hate relationship with beauty, the book was a popular success and was made into a film and later into an opera. Many readers probably could not grasp all the intended implications of the dialogue, but the story moves with relentless momentum toward the known conclusion—the burning of the Kinkaku—and this no doubt carried along even the least philosophically minded.


  Kinkakuji is a difficult book. The easiest way of interpreting it is perhaps the one adopted by the American writer who first introduced the translation of the novel: she discussed it in terms of “Mizoguchi’s sick mind” and “his mad career through a series of nihilistic, self-destructive actions.” As an objective criticism of the young man’s behavior, this opinion can hardly be disputed, but surely this was not Mishima’s intention. It is essential that the reader sympathize with Mizoguchi even when he performs socially unacceptable actions and even when he commits the unforgivable crime of destroying one of the chief monuments of Japanese architecture. The novel as a whole is a tour de force: it not only persuades the readers, against their moral judgment, that it was necessary for Mizoguchi to commit the crime but makes them rejoice when the young man at last destroys the obstacle to his happiness.

  Early in the novel Mizoguchi tells us:

  It is no exaggeration to say that the first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty. My father was only a simple country priest, deficient in vocabulary, and he taught me that “there is nothing on earth so beautiful as the Golden Temple.” At the thought that beauty should already have come into the world unknown to me, I could not help feeling a certain uneasiness and irritation. If beauty really did exist there, it meant that my own existence was a thing estranged from beauty.*

  It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to accept these words as expressing what a badly educated boy living in a remote part of the country would really have thought. It is much less difficult, however, to imagine Mishima adopting this unlikely persona and attributing to Mizoguchi what he himself had felt, identifying with him at each step leading to the final decision to set fire to the Kinkaku.

  When Mizoguchi first sees the building, he is disappointed: the reality cannot live up to his father’s praise. But after he is accepted as an acolyte and comes to live in the temple, the building takes possession of him, and he addresses it in these terms:

  “Finally I have come to live beside you, Golden Temple!” I whispered in my heart, and for a while I stopped sweeping the leaves. “It doesn’t have to be at once, but please make friends with me sometime and reveal your secret to me. I feel that your beauty is something that I am very close to seeing and yet cannot see. Please let me see the real Golden Temple more clearly than I can see the image of you in my mind. And furthermore, if you are indeed so beautiful that nothing in this world can compare with you, please tell me why you are so beautiful, why it is necessary for you to be so beautiful.”*

  This is surely more the prayer of the young Mishima than of Mizoguchi, but it is not necessary to separate the two. Mishima was able to identify fully with his creation. When Mizoguchi holds a girl in his arms, the absolute beauty of the temple appears before his eyes, preventing him from making love to the girl, who is no more than ordinarily beautiful. After reading the novel, friends of Mishima teased him with the implausibility of any man resisting natural desires under such circumstances, regardless of his conception of beauty; but Mishima told me that he had actually had this experience. The successful transference of the emotional and aesthetic reactions of a highly educated and sensitive man to a youth who might uncharitably be called a clod makes it possible for the reader to accept as genuine Mizoguchi’s thoughts and actions, despite the evidence that he is in no way capable of formulating so complicated an appreciation of beauty.

  The problem of the existence of beauty preoccupies Mizoguchi, who comes to suppose that his conception of beauty must itself be responsible for his ugliness. Once he has made this discovery, his actions become inevitable. He must destroy his enemy; as the incarnation of beauty, the Kinkaku must be destroyed by the man who loves it most.

  The Kinkakuji is a Zen temple. Mishima’s family ties were also with Zen Buddhism, but there was probably no special significance in this fact. The parishioners of a Zen temple, like most other Buddhists today, normally have little to do with the temple with which they are affiliated except immediately after there has been a death in the family.

  All the same, Zen Buddhism is present throughout the novel, from the first mention by Mizoguchi’s father of the wondrous beauty of the Kinkaku until the moment when, as he watches the building being consumed in the flames, Mizoguchi decides to go on living. One Zen kōan appears in the novel three times, each time given a different interpretation. On August 15, 1945, the day when the emperor announced the unconditional surrender of Japan, the superior of the Kinkakuji recounted the kōan known as “Nansen Kills a Cat.” This is the story of a kitten that has become the object of contention between the east and west halls of a temple in China. The chief priest, Nansen, catches the kitten and says if anyone can give reason why he should not kill it, he will spare its life. No one speaks up, so Nansen kills the kitten. Later, when his chief disciple, Jōshū, returns to the temple and learns what has happened in his absence, he removes his shoes and puts them on his head. Seeing this, Nansen laments that Jōshū was not present when he asked for reasons why he should spare the kitten; if he had been there, the kitten would have been saved.

  Of the three explanations of the kōan given by characters in the novel, the second, by Kashiwagi, Mizoguchi’s evil friend, emphasizes the beauty of the kitten that Nansen killed; indeed, it was because of its beauty that dissension had arisen between the two halls. Although Kashiwagi does not usually speak for Mishima, in this instance his explanation of the problem of beauty seems close to Mishima’s own:

  Beauty … is like a decayed tooth. It rubs against one’s tongue, it hangs there, hurting one, insisting on its own existence. Finally it gets so that one cannot stand the pain and one goes to the dentist to have the tooth extracted…. To have killed the kitten, therefore, seemed just like having extracted a painful decayed tooth, like having gouged out beauty. Yet it was uncertain whether or not this had really been a final solution. The root of the beauty had not been severed, and even though the kitten was dead, the kitten’s beauty might very well still be alive. And so, you see, it was in order to satirize the glibness of this solution that Jōshū put those shoes on his head. He knew, so to speak, that there was no possible solution other than enduring the pain of the decayed tooth.*

  This and the other explanations of the kōan are not easy to follow, and the reader who is unwilling to go on with the novel until he is satisfied that he knows exactly what the kōan means risks losing track of the story. Mishima was aware of this danger inherent in a philosophical novel but accepted it, making the burning of the temple a kōan of his own.

  Mishima continued writing almost up to the day of his spectacular suicide on November 25, 1970. He himself believed that his best work, the repository of all that he had learned as a novelist, was in the final tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. This is in every respect a major work. It seems even to trace allegorically the moods of Japanese literature from the time of The Tale of Genji to the present (and even the future). My favorite is the first volume, Spring Snow (Haru no yuki), written in a manner evocative of the Heian romances, even though it treats Japan of the twentieth century. Mishima always rejected the lyricism that would have come so easily to him, but in this novel it flowers, albeit without letting us forget that he wrote it. The second volume, Runaway Horses (Homba), represents the culmination of Mishima’s fascination with the young warrior, the hero who selflessly kills for an ideal and dies. The third volume, The Temple of Dawn (Akatsuki no tera), is set partly in Thailand, partly in postwar Japan. The emphasis here is on Buddhism, which gave reviewers in Japan, who alleged ignorance of religion, a good excuse for not discussing a work by the increasingly controversial Mishima. This novel is somewhat awkwardly divided between two different worlds, as Mishima himself recognized, but he was attempting to trace what lay behind the religious beliefs of the Japanese. It is difficult to think of any other Japanese novelist who would have attempted a work on the grandiose scale of these three novels. Unfortunately, the final volume of the tetralogy, The Decay of the Angel (Tennin Gosui)
, is marred by signs of haste and even carelessness, perhaps because Mishima, knowing exactly the day on which he would die, had difficulty concentrating on the work at hand.

  Mishima chose for his suicide the day of the month on which he regularly delivered chapters of his novel to the magazine in which it was being serialized. On this occasion, the editor telephoned to ask, as a special favor, that he give her the manuscript one day earlier. He refused, saying it would not be complete. This was not true. That summer he had put in my hands the manuscript of the final chapter. He told me he had written it “in one breath.” I did not ask to read the manuscript, supposing that without knowing what had preceded, I would be unable to understand the last chapter. But even though it had been written in August, it was essential to Mishima that he die on the day he completed his masterpiece. He dated the last page November 25.

  *Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, trans. Ivan Morris (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 21.

  *Ibid., p. 36.

  *Ibid., p. 144.

  Abe Kōbō

  (1924–1993)

  I first met Abe Kōbō in the autumn of 1964. He had come to New York in connection with the publication by Knopf of the English translation of his novel The Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna). I forget why he decided to visit Columbia University, but I distinctly remember his arrival in 407 Kent Hall. He was accompanied by Teshigahara Hiroshi, the director of the celebrated film made from this novel, which had won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year. With them came a young Japanese woman. I confess that I was rather miffed when I was informed that the young woman was their interpreter, and in order to demonstrate that I had no need of an interpreter, I studiously avoided even looking at her. It was only years later that I learned that she was Ono Yōko.