by Hiroaki Sato
The Nihilist faces the collapse of the world. The world loses its meaning for him. Here the psychology of despair comes to the fore, and the despairer hopes to preserve as best he could the meaninglessness he has grasped. The Nihilist becomes a thorough hypocrite. Because his whole premise is meaninglessness, he has the supreme freedom to act as if he had meaning, and becomes, as it were, a versatile man.
So analyzed, nothing is as remote from Fascism as the Japanese rightwing’s “optimism.”
Mishima concludes this tract with his “favorite theory”: “‘Beauty’ always exists as a symbol of relativistic salvation lest the Nihilist fall into absolutist politics”—or try to work out absolutist government. “Beauty works to bring back the eyes of the Nihilist, who tends to make nothingness absolute, to contemplate on the abyss of relativism. And that is the urgent task of today’s art.”10
Without reference to Mishima’s analysis of Fascism or the fictional antecedent as “a study of Nihilism,” Etō Jun wrote, almost two years later, a full review of Kyōko’s House. He first judges that Kyōko’s House “fails as a full-length novel” and that “you rarely get a novel so static, so devoid of conflicts among the human beings” depicted.
But Etō has a second judgment to make. The novel is “nothing but a brilliant success,” he asserts, if it is read not as an attempt to describe realistically a particular period of postwar Japan but as an effort to project Mishima’s view that postwar Japan was just “a giant ‘blank.’” Indeed, “What lives in ‘Kyōko’s house’ is the spirit of the era called ‘postwar,’” he goes on to note. “This spirit is entirely alien to what popular historians of thought call social reformism, democracy, new education, what the revolutionary intellectuals of the late 1930s called ‘the second youth,’ and all other fragments of Zeitgeist, and yet it is what lurks at the bottom of it all.”
Kyōko’s House ends with seeming abruptness. After the four young men have left Kyōko’s salon in one way or another, her divorced husband returns with the very reason that prompted her divorce of him intact: the dogs. “The seven shepherds and the Great Dane, unchained almost at once, came dashing in through the door. The air resounded with their roars and the large guestroom in no time filled with the canine smell.” In plotting the novel, Mishima meant to bring down the curtain on the “disorder” Kyōko brought on through her salon—she “feared” it—but does this man represent or symbolize anything? After all, he remains unnamed and hidden throughout the narrative only to reappear at the end, with an improbably large pack of dogs. Is he “a symbol of habit and dailiness,” though designed to shatter Kyōko’s poise instantly, as Etō suggests?11
Here let us suppose that the husband who comes back represents Kishi Nobusuke, whose postwar political comeback began with a mystery.
Reemergence of Kishi Nobusuke
On December 24, 1948, the day after Tōjō Hideki and six others were hanged as a result of the decisions made by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, a shabby-looking man shuffled out of the front gate of the Sugamo Prison: head closely cropped, forehead wide, eyes enormous, and front teeth protruding, he was in US-issue military fatigue, complete with field cap and laced boots, all too large for him. He was taken by US army jeep to the official residence of Yoshida Shigeru’s cabinet secretary Satō Eisaku, in Nagata-chō. The guard did not recognize him and would not let him in for a while, even though he was Satō’s older brother and until only a few years earlier one of the most powerful bureaucrat-politicians: Kishi Nobusuke.12
Three years earlier, on September 15, 1945, Kishi was arrested on charges of Class A war crimes by the victorious nations for the upcoming military tribunal, and on December 8, the fourth anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, sent to the Sugamo Prison. As noted earlier, following the Second World War, the victors categorized war crimes into three classes A, B, and C: Class A for “crimes against peace,” Class B for “crimes against humanity,” and Class C for “conventional war crimes.” The seven men who were hanged were all from among Class A suspects.13
Most of those concerned, including Kishi’s daughter, thought that the arrest spelled the end of his life. Yet, detained though he was for three years, no indictment came, and he was released instead—the day after the hanging of the seven. This outcome prompted a range of speculations. Was it because he brought down Tōjō in the midst of war or was it because the United States decided on the need for highly capable men as its policy toward Japan changed with the worsening of the Cold War? His return to political power, at any rate, was “rough and straight,” one biographer put it.14
There were some detours on the way. Kishi was not indicted after he was taken in custody, but he was among those “purged” from public office, until Japan gained independence as the Peace Treaty took effect, in April 1952. A few days before that, however, he established the Association for Rebuilding Japan with three goals: writing Japan’s own Constitution (to replace the one the Occupation had given), establishing Japan’s own military (not a detachment of the US forces), and pursuing Japan’s own diplomacy (rather than as an US subsidiary). In the general election that October, all the candidates from the association lost.
In March of the following year Kishi joined Yoshida’s Liberal Party15 and the next month ran for the House of Representatives and was elected. In December he became chairman of the party’s committee to look into the possibility of rewriting the Constitution. Less than a year later, in November 1954, Kishi was expelled from the Liberal Party. A great schism had developed among the conservatives. Those gathered under Yoshida Shigeru, prime minister since May 1946 except for the period from May 1947 to October 1948, believed in light armament—some remilitarization couldn’t be avoided because of the United States, but Japan’s economy was too weak to support full armament—and favored a pursuit of international trade.
But there were also those who argued that Japan ought to seek a “true independence” and recover its glory days before the war. Kishi was at the forefront of the latter group; hence his ejection from the party.16 They coalesced around Hatoyama Ichirō—who had established the Liberal Party following Japan’s defeat but then was “purged”—and formed the Democratic Party, and Kishi became the new party’s secretary-general. The following month the Yoshida cabinet fell.
However, the two parties merged in less than a year, in November 1955, to form the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and Kishi became its secretary-general. A year on, in December 1956, Kishi lost out to Ishibashi Tanzan to be the party head, namely, prime minister, getting the post of foreign minister instead. But Ishibashi, the farsighted journalistturned-politician, promptly became ill, and in two months, Kishi succeeded him. This turn of events would lead at least one commentator half a century later to wonder how different a path Japan might have taken had Ishibashi run the nation for several years.17 There was ample ground for the wonderment.
In 1912, when the Mayor of Tokyo—at the time, Tokyo was a city (shi), hence “mayor” (shichō)—made a “mob-like” effort to raise funds for a building to commemorate the Meiji Emperor, Ishibashi, a young journalist, had objected, arguing that such a large sum should not be wasted on “a shrine of wood and stone.” Instead, a “Meiji Prize,” akin to the Nobel Prize, ought to be set up to magnify the great democratization that had occurred during the emperor’s reign. In 1922, when territorial expansion was fast becoming the de rigueur national goal, Ishibashi demonstrated statistically how international trade would help the nation far better than colonization through force and advised abandonment of Korea, Taiwan, and Sakhalin, not to mention “national interests” in Manchuria and elsewhere.
And, in 1970, a few months before Mishima killed himself, Ishibashi lamented that it was none other than the succession of conservative administrations that had turned into “dead law” the no-war “peace Constitution” that the conservative Prime Minister Shidehara Kijūrō had helped to write. The Constitution by then had become the model for the world, he
pointed out.18
The formation of the LDP, in any event, would create what was later called “the 1955 Regime”: the conservative party’s hegemony of Japanese politics for the next forty years. Long-term, ironically, the LDP’s policy was not too different from Yoshida’s: to strengthen Japan’s economy while relying on the US military under the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty. Still, Kishi pushed his policy for “a new era for US-Japanese relations” and his seeming stress on the military alliance had generated such an animosity that the first nationwide group for a “unified action” against the treaty had formed by the time Mishima started work on Kyōko’s House. The opposition to Kishi would soon lead to the greatest political movement in postwar Japan. And Mishima would become more than a third-party observer of it.
The critical failure of Kyōko’s House was a blow to Mishima. Okuno remembered Mishima telling him, “You praise my work first and other critics stop praising it. From now on I don’t want you to be the first to praise me too much.”19 But the effect was far worse and far-reaching than the somewhat jocular remark suggested, Mishima said three years before his death.
In late 1967, as his seemingly rightwing political activities were becoming overt, he had a taidan with the leftist film director Ōshima Nagisa. Ogawa Tōru, the editor of Eiga Geijutsu, arranged it at Mishima’s request. Ōshima, who was making a series of outlandish movies, would startle the moviegoers of the world a decade later with In the Realm of Senses.20 As it turned out, the two men did not have much to disagree on. When Ōshima mentioned Kyōko’s House was one of two Mishima novels he wanted to turn into a film, Mishima recalled critics’ negative reactions to the novel and compared himself at that point to a despairing mother on a bridge ready to throw her baby into the river. But none of the people watching tried to stop her and, after she dumped her baby into the river, arrested her.
Mishima’s metaphor, conjured eight years after the fact, is too obscure to make much of, and Ōshima did not ask him to clarify. It is notable nonetheless because Mishima ended by saying that critics’ failure to understand what he was trying to do in Kyōko’s House “must have put me out of whack, I’m sure.” It may well be that, as Ogawa, the moderator of the taidan, observed, the reviewers are so concerned with the “technicalities” of the novel—the fact that Mishima broke himself up into four characters and made them act themselves out—that they failed or refused to see the whole personal struggle.21
Etō Jun ended his commentary with a prediction: “Mishima will never write about his generation, especially after the failure that is Kyōko’s House.” It would prove largely correct.
Translatese and The Constitution
While working on his longest novel, Mishima managed to write, among other things, a weekly column for a period of sixteen months, from July 1958 to November 1959. Titled Lectures on Unethical Education (Fudōtoku kyōiku kōza), it was a series of lighthearted essays on how not to behave as society expects. The idea was provocative enough to be turned into a film even as he was continuing the column, in December 1958.
In the film Mishima was given the role of playing himself as author. His family had not opposed his writing the column, but to them appearing in a movie was a different matter; they objected. Mishima ignored them and played the prescribed role, to say a few words in “the prologue” and “the epilogue” of the film. The single night’s filming experience taught him the difficulty of being natural on camera, he wrote in his “diary.”22 Tsukioka Yumeji, who had played the protagonist in the film version of Virtue Falters, was among the actresses who appeared in the film.
In September and October of that year, in four Saturday sessions, each lasting for two hours, Mishima dictated what amounted to a whole book. The act, which was done at the request of Fujin Kōron, would be a feat in itself, but he did it in a genre that requires much thinking and reading: an established author citing exemplary writings and commenting on them to impart to the reader an idea of what he thinks admirable writing ought to be like. The result, titled Bunshō tokuhon, which is the standard nomenclature for the genre,23 begins with the French critic Albert Thibaudet’s distinction between lecteurs and liseurs and ends with a list of neologisms in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, with citations in between not just of prose, usually the focus in books of this genre, but also of poetry, drama, criticism, and translations, classical and modern, Japanese and European.
On translation, indeed, Mishima had some important points to make. Hon’yaku-bun or language resulting from the act of translation, though not necessarily translatese, has exerted “the most profound influence” on the language that modern Japanese writers employ, that is, kōgo-bun, writing in spoken language, he explained. The development of kōgo-bun has been an integral aspect of modern Japanese. It was, Mishima noted, “what linked Japanese history to the world history of the West, what attempted to reform Japanese language to keep in step with [advanced] materialistic civilization.”
There have been several consequences of this. Some early translators felt it necessary to create belles-lettres. The most famous among them is Mori Ōgai, whose translation, from 1892 to 1901, of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Improvisatore as Sokkyō shijin was done in such an elegant, classical language that it has since been accepted as a masterpiece on its own; whether Andersen’s original was written in comparable language was scarcely an issue. Mishima cites two translations in similar vein—of the last two stanzas of what Poe incorporates into The Fall of the House of Usher as one of Roderick Usher’s “rhymed verbal improvisations.” One of the translations is by the English professor and poet Hinatsu Kōnosuke and the other by Tanizaki Seiji, Jun’ichirō’s younger brother and a professor of English. Reading them one would be hard put to imagine the original as a simple, balladlike composition.
Yokomitsu Riichi, of the New Sensibility School, represents another extreme; he sometimes wrote in “a deliberate translation-style” in order to “stimulate and refresh our sensibility,” Mishima observed. Some of his writings may strike the reader as translatese even today, though they were Yokomitsu’s own writings, not translations at all. Similarly, “who would doubt when told that Mr. Ōe Kenzaburō’s writing, as it is, is a translation of Sartre?” Nonetheless, “though in prewar days his writing would have been regarded as translatese, now, we don’t feel it’s that much of translatese.”
Mishima knew fully the ever-shifting nature of Japanese language and gave illuminating, convincing examples. Nevertheless, he could not help taking a stab at the language of the Constitution then a dozen years old.
“I think you will remember that Constitution that was a mysterious literal translation of English after the war’s ending, that literal translation of the MacArthur Constitution,” he said. “It was composed, yes, with something resembling prose in spoken language in Japanese, but it was a truly monstrous, hideous prose, and not a few people must have felt the sorrow of the Occupied over the fact that it became the Japanese Constitution. If Japan had been occupied during the Meiji Era” and given a Constitution, he added, its “translation must have been composed in far more fluid belles-lettres.”24
The Meiji Constitution, promulgated in 1889, is written in simple, Chinese-influenced bungo,“literary language.”
Given Mishima’s knowledge and understanding, it would be redundant to add words on the language of “the MacArthur Constitution,” but by the time he gave his judgment, not many Japanese would have noticed the particular linguistic aspect of the document Mishima condemned, even though the team assembled to write the constitution, led by the Harvard-trained lawyer Lt. Col. Charles L. Kades, drafted it and took care to have it translated faithfully, without much addition or subtraction. (Shidehara Kijūrō, the prime minister mentioned earlier, denied in his memoirs that the Constitution was imposed upon Japan, pointing out that he agreed with the idea of abandoning the military altogether and that of calling the Tennō “a symbol.”)25
The result was far ahead of the US Constitution in many
ways. The leaders of the drafting team were New Dealers eager to lay down ideal legal principles for a backward, immature nation. And a backward, immature nation Japan was, at least in the eyes of the Occupiers. “Measured by the standards of modern civilization, [Japan] would be like a boy of twelve as compared with [the Anglo-Saxon] development of forty-five years,” MacArthur summed up his assessment of the country he had ruled until President Truman fired him.26 The former SCAP’s observation “delighted” Mishima very much. “Legally speaking, by criminal law no one under the age of fourteen is liable for criminal responsibility.” That would mean, among others, Japan’s “so-called war criminals should be free of responsibilities,” Mishima wrote with sarcasm a year after MacArthur’s testimony in the US Senate.27
In any event, the great majority of the Japanese have liked the document. All attempts to revise it since, including those by Kishi and Mishima, have gotten nowhere, although interpretations of certain articles, most notably the no-war clause, are a different matter.
October 24, 1958, was a busy day, even for Mishima. An editor of Bungei Shunjū came to visit and told him that he was assigned the role of Ikyū of the Beard in the classical kabuki Sukeroku—a contemptible figure in the glorious play—in the publisher’s annual yearend bunshigeki, in which popular writers play all the figures in the drama. In the evening he went to the Kabuki-za to discuss the upcoming production of a one-act kabuki comedy he wrote, Fond of Young Women: The Sash-Taking Pond (Musume-gonomi obitori-no-ike). The stage contraption devised for the play “will astonish the audience,” Mishima happily noted in his “diary.” The kabuki was staged from the first to the twenty-sixth of November with Utaemon playing the lead role of Princess Kiku and Kubota Mantarō directing.