by Hiroaki Sato
“Mr. Seidensticker seems to be carrying forward his translation of Snow Country. It must be because of the good will of Mr. Kirpal and others of UNESCO HQ that such a work has been selected, but I am concerned how it may be received in America and Europe. It may not be appropriate for English translation. But once it leaves the author’s hands, a work has its own destiny. In Japan,” he added, “it was read by many during the war as well. It was a work that provoked homesickness especially among the soldiers who were in foreign lands.” He was honest to a publisher of the country that had militarily overwhelmed his country just a decade earlier.9
Apprehensions among the Japanese about the Westerners’ ability to understand their culture and literature were common in those days and for years to come. In 1959, Donald Keene, then in New York, indignantly reported to Mishima that all the Japanese who came to see him expressed the same misapprehensions.10 Not that there was no ground for such concern.
On November 10 the Asahi Shinbun carried a dispatch from New York. “Translations of Japanese novels are throwing their considerable weight around in the recent American publishing world,” it said, and listed, among those already published, The Sound of Waves, Noma Hiroshi’s Zone of Emptiness (Shinkū chitai), translated by Bernard Frechtman from French (1956), and Dazai Osamu’s The Setting Sun, translated by Donald Keene (1956), and among those scheduled for publication Snow Country and Ōoka Shōhei’s Fire on the Plain (Nobi), translated by Ivan Morris (1957).
Of these, “The Sound of Waves has seen nearly ten thousand copies printed and for a time made a bestseller list, the publisher said,” the dispatch reported. Mishima already knew that his book, which Knopf published in August, had made the New York Times bestseller list, for just one week. He also probably knew that Time magazine called him a “patriotic aesthete.”
Japanese novels are, the correspondent went on, by no means as fashionable as “Japanese design” which has become highly popular in American architecture and interior decoration in the past several years. Still, American critics’ reviews of Japanese novels of late are “more serious than you might expect” and their comments no longer strike the Japanese reader as “too odd.”
This contrasts with the situation more than thirty years ago, the correspondent went on, in what most likely was his Tokyo editor’s aside: In the November issue of Chūō Kōron Masamune Hakuchō recalls how an American commentator marveled, “So the Japanese, too, suffer,” when he reviewed the English translation of Futabatei Shimei’s story for the New York Times, “or something.” Told this, Kuriyagawa Hakuson, an outstanding professor of English and thinker, could only grimace: “That’s supremely insulting.”11 Futabatei was Japan’s pioneer student of Russian literature.
The Asahi dispatch was a follow-up on the weekly Asahi’s earlier notice (September 18) on the “overseas” popularity of The Sound of Waves. But there obviously was a time lag between the dispatch and its publication or a gap in the information the correspondent had gathered.
For one thing, Kawabata had received his copy of Snow Country in the previous month. For another, even though the correspondent did not list it, among those already published was Osaragi Jirō’s Homecoming (Kikyō), translated by Brewster Horwitz (1955), the first in a series of translations of Japanese novels put out under the aegis of Harold Strauss. In his letter to Strauss, Kawabata had expressed the hope that the publication of Snow Country would “not hurt the successes of Homecoming and Some Prefer Nettles.” This last, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Tade kū mushi, also translated by Seidensticker, was not published until ten years later, however.
Confessions
One arresting note in Mishima’s letter to Kawabata that fall is what may be just a throwaway remark of a writer of rising fame and self-confidence: “I have cut all my ties with the translator Weatherby because he has made too much fuss over money. The next thing to do is to find a new translator.”
Did Meredith Weatherby make a fuss about money? Perhaps. But if Mishima indeed cut him off as a translator, that did not affect their relationship. Mishima often went out with him, visited his famous residence in Roppongi, a large nineteenth-century farmhouse that was moved to the midst of Tokyo, and included him in a small group he invited to dinner a few weeks before his death.
It was in the garden of the Weatherby residence, indeed, that Mishima had Yatō Tamotsu take a series of photographs of him playing a naked samurai in the snow. Donald Richie watched the session from the window of what was once his room. “The photographer is bundled up with scarf and sweater, the author is naked except for a white loincloth. He also brandishes a sword and tries various poses. All these gestures illustrate some samurai extreme. Kneeling, sword in hand, he is expressing dedication. On his back in a drift, he is still valiantly defending himself. . . .”12
On August 25, 1958, the day he received his first copy of Confessions, Mishima penned his appreciation of Weatherby as a translator in The Nude and the Costume. The tribute, here for public consumption, is worth quoting at length because it also speaks of the difficulties the book had encountered in finding a publisher in the United States for all the recommendations from various well-known authors.
Came home and found the English version of Confessions of a Mask sent by Mr. Weatherby the translator. For the moment this is the only copy in Japan, and I must share this one copy with him until the two more sent by sea mail arrive.
The jacket is tastefully done: a photograph of the face of a haniwa expanded [to fill the front cover] with Confessions of a Mask in black and the author’s name in white against the khaki ground below. This is the first book I have out from New Directions, but the publisher having already issued two novels of Mr. Dazai Osamu, whom I hate, this is an unexpected case of “Wu and Yueh on the same boat.” When I first met its editor-in-chief, Mr. [Robert] McGregor, in the United States, he asked me what I thought of Dazai. I said, “I hate him.” He opened his eyes wide.
“Wu and Yueh in the same boat” is a Chinese idiom based on a statement in “The Nine Varieties of Ground” of Sun Tzu: “The peoples of Wu and Yueh hate each other, but if they meet a wind while making a crossing on the same boat, they will help each other as the right hand does with the left.” The mention here of New Directions and Robert McGregor is chronologically a year ahead, but Mishima—at the time known to be the only Japanese writer who would welcome American or foreign writers, editors, and such with open arms when they came to Japan—had sent earlier, on June 3, some early Meiji “civilization and enlightenment” paintings to McGregor, as well as to James Merrill. In the spring of the following year, indeed, when McGregor came to Japan, he would go to welcome him at the Haneda Airport, take him to kabuki, invite him, along with Weatherby, to dinner, then on to a Rockabilly café Keyboard. McGregor would return the favor by inviting him to kabuki, then to dinner afterward at a restaurant called Hungary. When McGregor left Japan, on April 11, after a stay lasting longer than a month, Mishima saw him off at Haneda. But back to his tribute:
Both Mr. Weatherby and I can only sigh in relief that the publication of this book has finally been realized. The original was published in July 1949. It was in the following year perhaps that Mr. Weatherby, who had fallen ill while staying in Korea, wrote me to ask for translation rights to the book, having almost finished translating it while laid up ill. At the time an Englishman had made the same request of me, but in the end I gave the rights to Mr. Weatherby.
But for eight years after that it did not see the light of day. Neither Mr. Weatherby nor I wanted to have a sensational publisher put it out just for the sake of curiosity. So we asked our agent to find a first-class literary house for it, but all the publishers declined, fearful that both the house and the author would become a social scandal. This novel, though read in Japan with equanimity, was regarded as a terrifying book of moral turpitude in the United States.
In time, though, the incomparable beauty of Mr. Weatherby’s translation gradually attracted attention among those wh
o read the manuscript. The first to recommend it enthusiastically was Mr. Donald Keene. He pushed it strongly to a couple of publishers, but, with no one accepting it, he carried excerpts from it under the title of “Omi” in Modern Japanese Literature, which he edited.13 Some of the men-of-letters who came to Japan—Messrs. Angus Wilson, Christopher Isherwood, and James Merrill—all read the translation manuscript and regretted that it remained buried. Among them, Mr. Wilson, I heard, even said, I’ll publish it in London at my own expense if no one in the United States does.
Still, it continued to be shunned. Most of the rejection letters were similar: “We regret to inform you that we should not publish it, though we think it is a brilliant book.” In fact, even at New Directions, its publication was thought difficult despite Mr. McGregor’s enthusiasm.
But in America all succor comes from a woman’s hand. The first female enthusiast of this book appeared: it was the wife of Mr. Laughlin, president of New Directions. Mr. Laughlin is one of the top steelmakers of the United States who manages this highbrow literary publishing house on the side. Mrs. Laughlin read the manuscript and, with her “crane’s single call,” the publication was soon decided. At the end of last year I signed the contract in New York and wrote Mr. Weatherby a letter of joy. Mr. Keene was very happy for me, too. But, though the publication has been decided, there still remains the danger of scandal.
James Laughlin, who established New Directions, in 1936, was heir to a steelmaker’s fortune but never ran a steel company.
Mishima concluded: “I think it was the greatest of luck for my book to have a woman reader like Mrs. Laughlin who loved it. It is women who should wipe out prejudices to this kind of book.”14 Homosexuality was still taboo in America, even though or because Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar had been published ten years earlier. Strauss, of Knopf, while gladly publishing The Sound of Waves, was among those who rejected Confessions of a Mask.
The Rokumeikan
From November 27 to December 7 the Bungaku-za staged Mishima’s four-act play, The Rokumeikan, a “melodrama,” as he categorized it, with political intrigues and family complications set against a historical event: a government-sponsored grand ball held at the height of the initial phase of Japan’s Westernization, in 1886.
Previewing it, Yamamoto Kenkichi, an erstwhile Marxist critic who went on to become a renowned explicator of haiku, said the play “realizes formal perfection in accordance with classical principles” such as had “never been written in Japan.” Or, as the tanka poet and drama critic Ishii Tatsuhiko observed thirty years on, it is “a masterpiece that ought to be counted among the very best plays our generation has been able to have,” notable for “its superb juxtaposition of artistry and plebeian quality.”15 The play was a great success. It won the Mainichi Drama Award while it was being staged in Tokyo, moved to Osaka and Kobe, and, from October 1957 to the fall of 1959, toured the country.
Mishima wrote The Rokumeikan at the Bungaku-za’s request to commemorate its twentieth anniversary, with the role of Countess Asako specifically designed for the theater company’s lead actress Sugimura Haruko. He admired Sugimura and had already written a one-act play for her, The Puissance Wall (Daishōgai), which had as its protagonist the mother of a college student who failed to clear the highest jumping hurdle in an equestrian contest and was killed. Mishima had a friend who met a similar fate, though we do not know if the friend’s mother tried to seduce her dead son’s classmate as the heroine of the play does.
The Rokumeikan, Deer Cry Hall, in the title of the play, was an actual building—a grand Italianate two-story hall the Japanese government built for an unconscionable amount of tax money in 1883 for the sole purpose of encouraging socialization between foreign dignitaries and members of the Japanese peerage. Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru, the instigator of the enterprise, unabashedly proclaimed in his speech at the opening ceremony of the building, on November 28: “We have decided to make the Rokumeikan a place where from now on high officials and gentlemen in and outside Japan may meet and socialize, unaware that longitudes and latitudes ever existed, where they may form friendships and fellowships unlimited by national borders.”
The building’s name, rokumei, indeed, came from a poem in the Confucian Odes, which, in James Legge’s fanciful translation, begins:
With sounds of happiness the deer
Browse on the celery of the meads.
A nobler feast is furnished here,
With guests renowned for noble deeds.16
In the notes he took to write the play, highly detailed for all his avowed “historical carelessness,” Mishima quoted not just Inoue’s speech in full but also a fairly lengthy article in the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun that fully described the giant ball on November 3, 1886, with sixteen hundred to seventeen hundred guests invited, that forms the climactic scene of the play.17 As a boy, he had entertained nostalgic thoughts about the Rokumeikan and its glamorous Western atmosphere, although its glory days were long gone: the building, designed by the British architect Josiah Conder, then barely thirty years old, was “rented,” in 1890, to the Peerage Society, which used it until the mid-1920s, then turned it over to commercial interests.18 In 1940, when the building was taken apart, some newspapers ran mourning notices. That may have been one reason Mishima wrote these haiku the following year.
Here’s a stain of perfume on this old dance dress
Airing clothes only the dance dress is elegant
In distant thunder horse carriages gather for the ball
Numerous fireflies released in the garden then the ball
At the ball a souvenir from Russia a fan19
Not that Mishima was unaware of the obvious absurdity of the enterprise. In one program note to this play, he wrote: “The Age of the Rokumeikan, according to contemporary paintings and senryū, was truly ridiculous and grotesque, a kind of monkeys’ theater for enlightenment,” in which “bucktoothed midget Japanese men wearing ill-suited swallowtails bobbed their heads to foreigners and dwarflike women wearing dance dresses like wolves’ clothes danced in the clutches of foreigners twice as tall.” Here Mishima may well have been referring to the satiric cartoons the French painter Georges Bigot had a ball turning out. One report says there were perhaps not many more than three Japanese noblewomen who could dance Western-style dances, and the three were all educated in the United States.20
As to the ball of 1886, in which two murders, one a parricide, occur as the culmination of a political intrigue as his play has it, Mishima had this to say, deploying a paradox: “During the ball on the Emperor’s Birthday, on November 3, of the nineteenth year of Meiji, nothing remotely resembling the incidents seen here happened. However, the flaw of history is that what is written is about things that happened, but not about things that did not. That’s the crack through which novelists, playwrights, poets, and other frauds slip in.”
The Rokumeikan was also Mishima’s wry, amused reinterpretation of the French writer Pierre Loti’s contemptuous description of the grand ball, which he, as a naval officer, had attended at the Japanese government’s invitation. Partly on the basis of the description, Un bal à Yeddo, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke wrote, in 1919, a short story entitled “The Ball” (Butōkai), which presents the event as a dazzling evening in the memory of a Japanese woman who in her teens had attended the ball and danced with a courteous French officer—and who, even when she recalls the evening three decades later for a young man, does not realize that the officer who introduced himself to her as Julien Viaud was Loti. With Madame Chrysanthème and such, Loti by then had become well-known as a depicter of Japan, although, for some curious reason, not for his propensity to call the Japanese monkeys, apes, and crows or for his supercilious, albeit amused, attitude overall to a backward nation far from Europe.
The Rokumeikan had another literary layer: Lucrèce Borgia, Victor Hugo’s play of “motherhood purifying moral deformity” that famously ends with Lucretia crying out, “Ah! You have killed me! Gennaro! I am y
our mother!”21 Mishima, who admired and wanted to stage it himself, retained in this play only the mother-son relationship and homicide. In Hugo’s drama, the son kills his mother—unknowingly.22 In Mishima’s, the son is killed by his father—knowingly.
In his program notes Mishima did not forget to mention the Age of the Rokumeikan as resembling the Occupation Period. There was, however, a difference: Following Japan’s defeat, ladies of the former nobility “appeared to debase themselves partly because of the fall of the [peerage] class”—abolished by the Occupation. In contrast, the Japanese in the earlier times, “even as they offered flattery to foreigners,” were “equipped both with the energy of a newly rising nation and the old feudal dignity.”23 That same “dignity” was, one might add, one thing Mishima maintained throughout his life.
Mishima played the walk-on role of the carpenter during the Tokyo production and wrote an essay about it and another on recent changes in acting. He began the latter, “A Small Scar on a Left Kneecap,” this way: “During a rehearsal of The Rokumeikan, a question came up in the scene where Asako, played by Miss Sugimura Haruko, while talking to Hisao, the son whom she hadn’t seen for twenty years, reveals their mother-son relationship by saying, ‘I know . . . that you have a small, thin scar on your left kneecap. . . . One summer afternoon, after you fell asleep, I began to doze despite myself. But then you woke, crawled away, and stabbed your knee on a pair of scissors.’”
In this scene, Nakatani Noboru, playing Hisao, at first just listened intently to Asako’s words, “without even turning his eyes toward his knee, let alone touching it with his hand.” That was because, Mishima wrote, it was the mode of Shingeki acting. Nakamura Nobuo, watching this, offered: “The previous generation Ganjirō”—probably the kabuki actor Nakamura Ganjirō I—“would have made a big deal of this.” Nakamura then showed what he meant: “Looking startled, he stiffened his body, put his hand on his knee, and exaggeratedly let it slide until it touched the floor.”