Strange flotsam
Maurice CAPITANCHIK
Thirst for Love Yukio Mishima translated by Albert H. Marks (Seeker and Warburg 30s) The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea translated by John Nathan Yukio Mishima (Penguin 5s) Phrases such as 'strangely beautiful', 'curious and elusive', 'skilful and appealing', seem to fall inevitably, like rain on a rice-field, when critics consider the work of Yukio Mishima, the Japanese novelist. He has been compared to Flaubert and Balzac, and neither compari- son is inept, but they are misleading for he lacks the latter's tendentiousness and the former's obsessive egoism. The difficulty is that there is really no standard by which we can judge him; the great novels of the West have a moral bias which is an integral part of our heritage, but Mishima, bred of the modern school of Japanese writers who have absorbed the literary culture of Europe, uses both Western insight and the psychic inherit- ance of his people to reveal the inner life of his time, without partiality, convincing us absolutely that this is how it would be if its conflicts were taken to their extreme. He is a writer of unique and terrifying imaginative power. Now only forty-five years old, Mishima has had a career of unbroken success. Awarded a special citation by the Japanese Emperor in 1944 as the outstanding honours student, since his work first appeared in 1948 he has published thirteen novels and many short stories and plays, which have appeared in fifteen countries and been made into many films. Nine of his books have now been pub- lished here; some, alas, no longer available.
At the core of Mishima's vision is an existential concept, that of transcendence through assertion. The conflicts expressed are not those between East and West but have far deeper roots, in an implacable, cultural force and an earthy, primitive power embodying both basic and aesthetic sexual attraction. 'The characters do not merely represent these
forces, they are complex, original creations, and almost every conceivable implication is drawn from their juxtaposed relationships, in an extremely subtle, often ironic way, express- ing a wide variety of oppositional themes— corruption and innocence, naivete and sophis- tication, aristocracy and peasantry.
Most of the basic themes are contained, explicitly or implicitly, in the extraordinarily accomplished first novel, Confessions of a Mask, which tells how an imaginative, tor- tuous youth, Kochan, tries to manipulate his feelings to overcome his homosexual pro- clivity. Kochan's sexual fantasy is of a beauti- ful youth pierced to death by a knife or implement. The fantasy of killing, at a moment of sexual defeat, is felt by the reader to be a transcendence so complete as virtually to immortalise Kochan. Even the blood is an assertion of life.
In Forbidden Colours, a work of great intellectual élan, the 'cultural' force is the decadent and famous writer Shunsuke, who manipulates a young homosexual into mar- riage to obtain revenge on women. This is the only one of the novels in which psycholo- gical manipulation is worsted by simple human feeling—life transcends machina- tion. It is now being filmed in this country by the producers of Women its Love. Thirst for Love contains a wonderfully compre- hensive portrayal of a young widow of aris- tocratic lineage. Etstko, who falls in love with Saburo, a gardener on her father-in- law's country estate. Surrounding this situa- tion, and within it, are the interrelated themes typical of the author, expressed in a concen- trated poetic style which has an almost physical impact.
After the death of her philandering hus- band, Etsuko wants to be rid of her all- pervasive jealousy but, unconsciously, Saburo arouses it. Due to the impossibility of under- standing, and Etsuko's relentless nature, she is driven to a murderous assertion. During a peasant festival, Etsuko pursues Saburo as he leads the frenzied dancers, but he is oblivious of her. It is the author's thesis that those who assert spontaneously are unaware and inarti- culate, and those who do so consciously are powerless to convey what they feel. In comparable Western literature there might be more communication between characters and therefore less tragedy but ours is a less intense, if slightly more civilised, way of life.
Etsuko's husband's family, of peasant origin, is spoiled by pretension; there are devastating portrayals of the passe, psuedo- intellectual in-laws, and the dessicated father, Yakichi, a tyrant now crumbling with age. Etsuko is content only in the hospital where her husband dies, where there can be no hypocrisy: 'The only people who lived here were those who made resistance to germs their reason for being. Unceasing will to live; a rough, crude will that did not care at all about appearances. A will to live beyond law and beyond morality ... here life existed only for the sake of being affirmed; no pettier desires were allowed.'
It is the creed of all Mishima's major charac- ters, which Etsuko must finally follow, even if it destroys her, and which is the logic of a beautiful sentence on the opening page: 'Life—this limitless, complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.'
The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea is the most compressed, fluent and per- versely imaginative of the novels, and the one in which Mishima's most distinctive quality, the ability to give both extraordinary and conventional views of reality equal value, receives its most pointed expression. The sailor Ryuji, a more civilised version of the author's 'primitive' type, leaves the sea, renouncing his nebulous dreams of glory for a beautiful young widow, Fusako. Fusako's thirteen-year-old son, Noboru, one of a gang of self-styled 'geniuses' who think the adult world inept and wish to destroy it, spies on their love-making, which becomes his ideal of true order. Disillusionment with his hero makes the boy take, together with his friends, one of the most fearful revenges in all litera- ture.
This marvellously constructed novel per- fectly illustrates the author's irony, method and intention. As a test of nerve, the youths kill and dissect a kitten. Noboru's disillusion- ment comes when Ryuji, discovering the boy's voyeurism, treats him ambivalently but with insight, which Noboru interprets as weakness. Although we are not shown what the boys do to Ryuji we are forced to imagine the unimaginable from the analogy with the kitten, thus we cannot avoid being taken to the limit of one possibility of life. It is the ability to master life by dominating man's most-horrible fantasies that is the secret of Mishima's power, and that of his 'implacable' characters; in this book, if we can stomach it, he passes his secret on to us. This threnody to disillusionment contains beautiful descriptive passages, blending effects of light and shade into spectacular imagery. Sartre could have provided the theme, but only Mishima pos- sesses the audacity to face such fearful truths.
The unparalleled energy of modern Japan springs from its combination of historically inherited forms with modernism. To this, Mishima adds his vision, of the invincible possibilities of the mind, of a dazzling, bizarre beauty, of the acknowledgement we owe to the horror contained in ourselves. There is perhaps a hidden fear behind his heroic struc- ture, the universal suspicion that potency is destructive, but Mishima gives even this a positive value. Together with his incompar- able gifts, this makes for psychological real- ism—the presentation of life as it is, without compulsive or ethical distortion—of a very high order. It is a profound and noble achievement.
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