Pathway to Japanese Literature

1

“Just as women do not have beards, he did not have age.” —a characteristic aphorism from Yukio Mishima.
This remark about Jackie, the homosexual character appearing in Forbidden Colors, seemed to fit the author himself perfectly.
Just as women completely lack beards, Yukio Mishima lacked age.

Of course, when I say “age,” I do not mean the innate—or rather, the civil registry kind.
It was not mere gossip about appearing delicate or strangely mature-looking.
What I meant—though this may sound somewhat affected—was what one might call “the growth rings of beauty.”
In other words, this concerned the embryogenesis of his literature.

I don't know what twist of fate brought it about, but I knew Yukio Mishima's works since the war.
There exists a book titled The Forest in Full Bloom.
It collects his earliest works.
I happened upon it at a cramped bookstore near Toranomon and read it beneath blackout curtains.
The air raids had begun, yellowish gunpowder smoke drifting through Tokyo's streets.
This was undoubtedly near year's end before the war's conclusion.
The book contained five short stories.
Though called short stories, some approached a hundred pages.
Even now I remember works like To Leave Through Ages and Oto and Maya being formidable achievements.
When I began reading, I immediately thought Akutagawa Ryūnosuke had been reborn.

However, I soon had to correct this impression.
It was not merely a case of the student surpassing the master, but rather that there was clearly something fundamentally different at play.
Akutagawa’s court tales often tend to show conspicuous traces of labor, making them difficult to fully resonate with readers.
Pseudo-classical writing is no easy feat.
Even Arakida Reijo—a literary prodigy of the mid-Edo period—reportedly produced historical narratives based on the imperial court that abound with stylistic anomalies despite her formidable literary prowess.
Of course, the various pieces in 『花ざかりの森』 are not written in pseudo-classical language.
They are works that revitalize the Heian-era literary style for the modern age.
Yet not only was its Japanese literary style vividly alive, but its poetic sentiment also exuded a noble fragrance.
I marveled.
For in this precocious youth, I had glimpsed the rightful successor to our aristocratic literary tradition.

I was by no means indulging in mere reminiscence.
First of all, if one were to speak of something like the aristocratic literary tradition in this day and age, those who wouldn’t burst out laughing were probably limited to the British.
I was fully aware of that.
What I wanted to emphasize was that the young Yukio Mishima had already masterfully grasped both the emotional depth and literary style of court literature.
In other words, his starting point was our court literature.
When compared to contemporary literary youths—or rather, those of not-so-recent times—who took as their starting points at best late Meiji naturalism, or more commonly Shiga literature, perhaps Kasai Zenzo, or among newer trends the American works mass-produced by translation factories, this stood as something terrifyingly singular.
Half the reason Yukio Mishima was called a child prodigy undoubtedly lay hidden there as well.
To be a child prodigy essentially means that one's growth rings remain obscure.

That being said, needless to mention, this does not mean he was exclusively devoted to Japanese classics during that period. The influences of Radiguet and Wilde could already be clearly discerned; indeed, had they been absent, one would have had to declare it utterly unnatural for a literary-minded youth in modern Japan. These elements were gradually crystallizing into the very marrow of this young man's literary thought. Beauty had attained its aesthetic system.

During the height of the Pacific War, there were clear signs that his aesthetic preferences had shifted remarkably toward the Muromachi period. The death drama *Medieval*—featuring beautiful Noh youths and a shrine maiden surrounding the aged Yoshimasa—was written in the year of Japan’s surrender. A twill weave of gloom and splendor. This inclination toward Noh theater, sublimated through Wilde’s aesthetics, likely stands as a milestone marking the young Mishima’s maturation. Two years prior, there existed a work bearing the terrifyingly long title *Excerpts from the Philosophical Diary Left by a Habitual Murderer in the Medieval Period*. This too was a Muromachi fantasy. Within its pages, the murderer wrote:

"Murder is my growth.
The act of killing is my discovery.
A means to approach the life that had been forgotten.
I dream—how beautiful murder is within great chaos.
'The murderer is the inverse of the Creator—their greatness shared, their joys and sorrows one and the same.'"

This phrase crystallized into an aphorism.
For Yukio Mishima emerged with Japan’s surrender as a merciless 'murderer.'
However, society required considerable time to recognize this true nature.
At first, people saw in him only a seasonally displaced prodigal son.
They saw a terrifyingly generous waster of talent.
Moreover, his age remained unknown.

2

But does Yukio Mishima truly have no age?
That is absolutely not the case.
The war undoubtedly accelerated the rapid establishment of his aesthetics.
In that sense, he was unmistakably a child of the war.
Not only that, but the war exposed his growth rings—previously hidden beneath the bark—by striking a blow to the trunk.
In that sense, he too was a "direct victim" of the war.
For the devotee of beauty had now unmistakably become an agent of beauty.

About two years after the war’s end, he wrote a short essay titled *The Weapon of a Critically Ill Patient*.
I didn’t know under what circumstances this had been written, but it was a remarkably vehement essay, practically spoiling for a fight.
When people become angry, their true feelings emerge.
Words that are bought and sold tend to be exaggerated, but when amplified, one’s true feelings will only become all the clearer.

“We members of this generation are everywhere gazed upon with the sort of looks one might give a rare beast.” —this served as the essay’s opening line.
"I take pride in the fact that the majority of you fellow bandits emerge from my generation, but this peculiar brand of pride—stubborn yet modest—seems incomprehensible to those of other generations."
He then stated that while young generations had traditionally made their entrance by brandishing their era’s distinctive maladies as banners—and though they would inevitably heal over their lifetimes—this merely amounted to hardening the lesions through calcium intake,

“However, if a generation bearing an incurable illness were to emerge here, the situation would likely not be resolved through mere repetition of the past.”
“The name of that incurable illness is none other than ‘health’,” he declared defiantly.

“Does anguish kill man?
—No.

“Does ideological anguish kill man?
—No.”

“Does sorrow kill man?
—No.”

This he felt was the logic of “health.”
“Therefore, it is a mistake to call our generation the ‘wounded generation.’”
“For a wound that leaks ‘the pitch-black pus of nihilism’ to be inflicted upon the spirit, a slightly more tedious era is required.”
“Without boredom, mental wounds do not exist.”
“In other words, the war never inflicted wounds upon our spirits.”
“On the contrary, it toughened our skin—outer layer and all.”
“A soul impervious to wounding is sheathed in resilient skin.”
“They possessed a kind of invincibility.”
“Yet people who bleed from the slightest wounds—while cursing themselves as heartless beings—refuse to consider the misfortune of us invincible ones who can never commit suicide.”
“They do not acknowledge this soul’s peculiar misfortune—bereft even of the consolation called ‘existential anxiety.’…”

The above constituted roughly the first half of that essay’s gist.
As could be seen, this was an “explanation” of the generation to which he himself belonged.
No—rather than an explanation, it was a declaration; or more precisely, a desperate challenge.
“Or perhaps I should say ‘lethal’,” one might rephrase.
For immediately afterward, the narrative veered abruptly and plunged headlong into the problem of the “Weapon.”
What was this Weapon?

He declared: —From the wartime era we spent our formative years in, we had forged our own Weapon modeled after the age.
Just as you young fellow bandits stole the pistols—the capital of your current trade—from the military, we too had no choice but to entrust our own literature to this unlawful Weapon… (gist).

At this point, whether we liked it or not, we could not help but recall that earlier work with its interminable title—*The Philosophical Diary of a Habitual Murderer*.
“Killing is my discovery—a means to approach life that had been forgotten.”
And now Yukio Mishima had discovered that this lethal “Weapon” was no longer merely an aesthetic concept but a real armament possessing concrete weight and sharpness—clutched firmly in his palm with full utility and purposefulness.
That Weapon—needless to say—was the dagger called beauty that he had diligently honed throughout the wartime years.
Yet even he must have been unable to suppress his astonishment when this sharply whetted instrument suddenly transformed into a murderous weapon.
Indeed, he writes thus: “The saying ‘even a thief has three parts reason’ signifies the thief’s desperate effort to cloak seven parts absurdity with three parts reason—a poignant endeavor unknown to those who inherently possess full reason from the outset.
It also signifies the thief’s fierce yet sorrowful yearning for order, for ethics, for tranquility.”
(In the latter part of *The Weapon of a Critically Ill Patient*), one could perceive how the refrain from Baudelaire’s *L’Invitation au Voyage* continued resonating nostalgically even in this young bandit’s ears.
To the man himself it might have been poignant—but from our perspective, it was grievous.
For us it carried even a certain sense of culpability.

In any case, from what has been discussed above, I believe one cannot deny that Yukio Mishima has come to possess a clear awareness regarding the fate and mission of the generation to which he belongs.
That generation refers to people in their twenties (I don’t know if there exists a slang term like ‘twenty-agers’—).
The generation that suffered the most devastating blows from the war—the so-called Lost Generation.
Because theirs was a critical illness beyond remedy, this generation found itself abandoned by society’s “common sense.”
As the standard-bearer of such a troublesome generation—as its ideologue, nay more than that, as the vanguard of slaughter, as a man of action fighting to survive—it would now be fair to say that Yukio Mishima has fully embraced both complete self-awareness and resolve.
Though he is of indeterminate age—or perhaps ageless—his generational affiliation is made all too clear.
There are those in society who speak of Yukio Mishima’s political or social indifference, but this is somewhat of a misjudgment.
If one adopts a broader perspective, one could even say there exists no writer as resolutely *engagé* with his own generation as he.
His literature is splendidly *engagé* literature.
How I wish our literary world possessed such breadth of vision as to entertain that perspective.

To be sure, the passage quoted above is undoubtedly his *engagé* declaration, but it would be dull indeed if it were mere bluster or manifesto.
However, that concern appears to be unfounded.
This declaration was written in 1948, but around that time, marked changes began to appear in his short stories.
For some time after the war’s end, his works remained in a period of experimentation—where luxurious aestheticism and a kind of beautiful malady born from excessive talent had predominated—yet rapidly their form tightened as the resolute visage of a challenger came clearly into view.
The martyr of beauty abruptly transformed into a slaughterer through beauty.
He brandished the weapon called beauty and leapt upon every enemy.
Postwar mores; the vulgarity of the declining aristocracy; sentimentality; anxiety; the folly of women—and above all, the impurity of what is called the spirit.
There is no need to enumerate each work individually.
“『Haruko』,” “『Monster』,” “『Lion』,” “『The Kindly Machine』,” “『Filial Piety』,” “『Initials』”… To list them would prove endless—one might say his works overflowed with glittering satire and vivid murderous beauty.
Meanwhile, works such as *Tobacco* and *Martyrdom*—which chronicle adolescence’s homosexual awakenings—formed an undercurrent throughout.

To speak of "murderous beauty" might unfortunately evoke associations with someone like Tsuruya Nanboku (though it must be said he was not entirely without such proclivities), but the dominant current was by no means one of decadent grotesquery. A ruthless elegance processed through lucid psychologism—that was its distinguishing feature. "On one hand lies an attachment to the tradition of psychological novels from seventeenth-century France." There was another ideal of Hellenism like Wilde’s. He ambitiously declared that 'the expression of beauty akin to sparks produced the instant these two collide and come to rest' constituted his ideal. That could not be all there was to it. Within him dwelled Lautréamont as well as Loredan—the latter rigorously controlling the former. Even Huysmans-esque neologism (affection for new words) and archaism (affection for old words) stood fully arrayed. With their elaborate designs, society remained largely oblivious to the slaughterer within him—perhaps even now they still do not realize it. But the essence of his short stories lay in being, as the conscience of his own twenties, unwaveringly the literature of a revenger—or perhaps we might say a demobilized soldier.

No—far from it. Indeed, in his third full-length work *The Blue Age*, he would ultimately thrust that mercilessly cruel weapon even at a representative of his own generation—under the name of Kōji Yamazaki of the Kōshi Club.
In his review of this novel, Mr. Takeda Taijun expressed disappointment at the president of the Kōshi Club lacking Raskolnikov-like gravitas—but expecting such consideration from Yukio Mishima was simply unreasonable.

Masculine Literature.
I even feel compelled to call it that.
There is something faintly reminiscent of François Villon about him.

3

However, the revenger must be prepared to be hunted by the demon god of vengeance.
While he was intoxicated by the icy pleasure of slaughter, the demon god’s trap had been steadily encroaching upon his body.
That was narcissism.
It seems to me that narcissism must be an inevitable fate for masculine literature.
He rather willingly—or so it seems to me—surrendered himself to that trap.
It was then that he wrote his first full-length work, *Confessions of a Mask*.

Because women use mirrors so excessively, narcissism seems to be taking on the appearance of becoming women’s exclusive domain; however, for women, a mirror is essentially nothing more than an aspect of their makeup. On the back lies pasted tin foil; on the front lies applied white powder. That they did not confuse the sexes of the beautiful youth Narcissus and the water nymph stands as testament to ancient Greece’s wisdom—where male homosexuality flourished. “Narcissus was a flawless beautiful youth.” Precisely therefore was he pure. He gave no glance to the nymphs. Because he was enamored with himself alone. “Neither breeze nor spring disturbed; bent over its edge, he gazed throughout daylight hours at his own reflection....” Indeed does Gide’s *Narcissus Treatise* commence with such phrases. It remains an age-old myth. However many times retold, narcissism’s essence cannot alter beyond this. Eternal purity and eternal solitude constitute its indispensable requisites. To state plainly: he can but transform into a single narcissus stalk. A flower cannot shift its form. Nor may one kiss one’s own reflection upon water’s surface. For should one attempt capture, the shadow would merely shatter. “Then what should one do?” “Gide poses and answers: —only to gaze.”

The pure form of narcissism may indeed be considered exactly that.
Purity, solitude, and gazing.
—That resembled none other than the death of physical existence itself.
If one were to forcibly translate "narcissism" into Japanese, it might become something like self-admiration or conceit—but in its original sense, it was ultimately doomed to revert to self-contemplation by fate.
A pristine yet sterile state bearing close resemblance to death indeed existed there.

Let us consider Yukio Mishima’s case.
As I had written before, this unruly murderer who had piled slaughter upon slaughter—though he never ceased preparing to conceal his identity as the author behind the weapon of beauty—could not, in the end, escape the fate of falling into a state of death (or perhaps more accurately, suspended animation).
Truly, this exemplified heaven’s vast net.
Of course he possessed not a shred of sentimentality.
He bore not even a guilt complex—that saccharine armor relic of bygone eras.
He was immortal.
Nevertheless, he still could not escape death.
In the midst of a field strewn with countless corpses, he found only his own form of incomparable physical strength.
He alone had escaped death.
This was only natural.
His weapon was ultimately never directed at himself.
He could now do nothing but gaze at himself.
Purity, solitude, and gazing—the conditions for perfect narcissism had now been fulfilled.
Therefore, he fell into a state of suspended animation.

"This book is the testament I intend to leave behind in the realm of death where I had dwelled until now."
"To write this book constitutes an inverted suicide for me."
"If you were to reverse footage of a suicide leap—the jumper would hurtle upward from the valley floor at ferocious speed and return to life."
"What I attempted through writing this book was precisely such a technique for resurrecting life," Yukio Mishima declares in his annotation to *Confessions of a Mask*.
This statement—which at first glance might appear somewhat affected—loses all strangeness when measured against narcissism's true essence.
During his roundtable discussion with Ōoka Shōhei, he had flatly asserted: "Ultimately it's just an easily comprehensible confessional novel."
That assessment remains indisputable.
What truly unsettles lies in that qualifying phrase—"of a mask."

When asked about this by Ōoka Shōhei, he stated that it meant “a confession by a man who can only think in such inherently relative terms”—where the inability to distinguish truth from falsehood stems “partly from sexual relations but also from the inescapable psychology of male homosexuals.” In another instance, he writes that the essence of confession is “the fact that confession is impossible.” At last, his signature theory on male homosexuality had emerged—but now that matters had reached this point, for a layperson like myself, the discussion became increasingly incomprehensible. So I, in my own way, settled for my own interpretation: that this confessor (let us provisionally assume it to be Yukio Mishima himself) was fundamentally both a denier and a slayer. Narcissism might remain narcissism, but this was a narcissism cursed by negation—in other words, a narcissism denied self-admiration. One could call it negative narcissism. If absolutist narcissism constituted the Japanese-style I-novel, then this was relativist narcissism. I believe we can manage without resorting to specialized terms like “male homosexuality,” using the more general term “modern” instead. Division was a fate even for narcissism in the modern age.

When I read *Confessions of a Mask*, I could not help but feel an intense sense of strangeness.
The first half and the second half were completely heterogeneous in nature.
It appeared as if marble and wood had been grafted together.
In stark contrast to the first half—where the pederastic sexual life of the protagonist “I” unfolded with robust health, brimming with authentically masculine, lush *erectio* and *ejaculation*—the latter half, after “I” ventured into the world of women, seemed to demonstrate an inexplicable powerlessness and decline as a work of literature. This occurred despite the narrative inevitability of his sexual life being cursed with impotence.
In the aforementioned roundtable discussion, the author himself acknowledged this and confessed that he had become too exhausted to muster the same fervor as in the first half.
But was this truly an issue that could be reduced merely to fatigue or the cooling of passion?
After all, wasn’t the fundamental cause rooted in this fate of split-type narcissism inherent to male homosexuality?

Of course, that in itself was acceptable.
If modern narcissism could not ultimately avoid taking the form of an opposition between life and death, then a work's vitality as literature should have resided in bringing that very opposition into sharp relief.
It appeared the author had somehow miscalculated this point.
What I mean to say is that there had been a methodological error in the author's decision to oppose the pederasty of the first half with the strangely stoic Platonic love of the latter half.
It was regrettable that this long-awaited ambitious work consequently ended up resembling an artificial miscarriage.

To state it with some exaggeration, that work was as if slain by his own hand—a punishment perhaps for having committed too many literary murders. Yet Yukio Mishima remained indestructible. With brilliant resilience, he launched into creating a monumental novel of "male homosexuality." That this became *Forbidden Colors* requires no elaboration.

4

The defining characteristics of *Forbidden Colors* lay in its non-compromising nature and symphonic monumental composition.
In other words, it possessed the structural framework of an authentic romance.
With only Part 1 having just concluded, while the first theme had already been sufficiently presented and developed, the second theme remained merely introduced with minimal expansion.
This second theme constituted precisely those portions concerning women.
Therefore, apprehending solely this first installment while fearing we might repeat *Confessions of a Mask*'s missteps likely amounted to baseless apprehension.

While reading this first part, I was reminded of Montherlant’s tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles.
Of course, that work was not a novel about male homosexuality.
It was a heterosexual novel.
No—rather, it was a novel that disparaged women, or perhaps even a cautionary tale.
He had listed five grave maladies of modern Western Europe in the appendix to this novel.
Non-realism, Torment-ism, Obedience-ism, Gregariousness-ism, and Sentimentalism.
And it was said that within these five lesions afflicting the flesh of society, countless bacilli shaped like vulvas were found.
In other words, all such diseases were essentially women's—so stated Montherlant.
The Les Jeunes Filles tetralogy was, so to speak, nothing less than a living exhibition room for those bacilli.

One might say that *Forbidden Colors* begins precisely where Montherlant’s tetralogy had ended.
In other words, the work of Montherlant—a heterosexual (though I believe him to be one)—had already concluded and could progress no further.
After all, he remained fundamentally an affirmer of women.
At this juncture, the baton had absolutely to be passed to pederasts.
Here Yukio Mishima commenced his charge.
The purpose was healing from feminine culture.
It was an extremely constructive and monumental plan.
In other words, it became a kind of utopian novel that resembled in this sense the inverse utopian novel *Lady Chatterley’s Lover*.
In terms of cleanliness and pastoral qualities as well, they proved remarkably similar.
In terms of the concept of Phallos reborn too, they showed striking parallels.

Examining reviews that had appeared across various outlets, there was criticism that the human characters were poorly rendered. The censure particularly focused on the female portrayals. This amounted to the same tired Naturalist arguments. Of course, this novel's purpose lay in sculpting a grand colossus of male homosexualism (though after completion, the author might well reduce it to rubble with some explosive device—), yet despite this ambition, the author remained entirely free from ideological posturing. It was simply that he maintained scrupulous purity of intent through strict adherence to sculptural techniques befitting such themes—a veritable new form of novelistic architecture. Japanese readers proved utterly unaccustomed to such chiseled styles. They valued painterly qualities instead. Single-mindedly convinced novels must be daubed like canvases, they grew enamored with viscous pigments. They remained ignorant of desiccated, pitiless three-dimensional narratives carved from literary marble—that depicting male homosexualism through conventional methods would itself constitute an absurdity. Greek sculpture had preferentially treated youths' physiques while resolutely concealing female forms—for male beauty achieves triumph through statuary while feminine corporeality suits chromatic harmonies (that is to say, painting). Gide had proclaimed such truths long past. Women's so-called substitute allure extends far beyond sartorial fripperies. The clinging power of scarlet-crepe sentiment exerts terrifying force—even were it contrarily some luxurious masculine invention—particularly within Japan's humid climes. No—escaping Japan's grasp truly proves no simple feat.

There is also criticism that the old man Shunsuke acts with peculiar hesitation and remains inadequately portrayed.
In other words, the charge is that he fails to fulfill Mephisto's role from Faust.
This too constitutes misguided critique.

The relationship between Yūichi and Shunsuke bears no resemblance whatsoever to that of Faust and Mephisto.
That this should be evident becomes clear when observing how Yūichi himself never desired such a dynamic.
Their connection rather parallels that of Hadaly and Edison in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's *The Future Eve*.
Yūichi embodies the artificial beauty Hadaly.
He fundamentally lacks autonomous agency.
"Spiritual father"
Shunsuke represents the inventor Edison.
And regarding Part One specifically, its climax resides in the dialogue between these two within Chapter 1: "Commonplace Matters."

Yūichi was shocked by Yasuko’s pregnancy—his wife whom he had married under Shunsuke’s instigation as part of his vengeful crusade against women.
“A child comes despite having no desire,” he uttered.
A child born purely from desire might bear some rebellious beauty—but what visage could emerge from conception without craving?
"Even artificial insemination uses sperm from men who desired women."
Resolving on abortion, he approached Shunsuke for counsel.
Shunsuke reacted with surprise and anger—vehemently opposing termination.

“I told you this,”
“You must think of women as material.”
“You must never acknowledge that women possess a spirit.”
“It never occurred to me that you would stumble in the same way as I have.”
“You who don’t love women!”
“Beauty hasn’t the leisure to account for every unforeseen consequence of its power.”
“Beauty hasn’t the leisure to think about happiness or such things…But precisely because of that, Beauty possesses the power to make even those who suffer and die for it happy.”

Yūichi, discerning Shunsuke’s hidden intention—that even a solution like abortion wouldn’t make Yasuko suffer enough—cried out like this: ――

“I want to be free.”
“To tell the truth，I myself don’t really understand why I’ve ended up exactly as you instructed.”
“When I think I might be a person without will，it makes me lonesome.”

Furthermore—“I want to become.
“I want to become a real existence.”

Will Yūichi, this artificial paragon of male beauty, ultimately betray his spiritual father? A masterful foreshadowing for Part Two's development appeared to have been laid here. Moreover, the future actions of Lady Kadobayashi—who had witnessed the scene of male love between her current husband and Yūichi—were anticipated to form a pivotal element in developing the second thematic strand. In any event, it promised rich developments.

Yukio Mishima said that what he looked forward to most upon embarking on this overseas trip was galloping across the South American pampas on horseback to his heart’s content.
By now, his earnest wish may already have been fulfilled.
Yes, gallop across them to your heart’s content.
And may you accumulate the physical strength to further enrich our nation’s masculine literature.
The fate of narcissism rests upon your shoulders.

(March 1952, “Bungeikai”)