Though he is most famous as a novelist, Yukio Mishima was also a prolific dramatist. From 1949, when his first play was published, to 1969, the year before his death, he wrote more than 60 such works, nearly all of them staged in his lifetime.
Writing plays seems to have come to him with conspicuous ease. "I started writing drama just as water flows toward a lower place," he noted in "The Temptation of Drama," one of the three essays included along with the five plays translated in this book. "In me, the topography of drama seemed to be situated far below that of novels. It seems to be in a place which is more instinctive, closer to child's play."
Indeed, Mishima used to express astonishment that Tennessee Williams found playwriting so difficult that he could sometimes manage only a line or two a day. For Mishima, a play was simply based upon structural logic, "and once a structure is built . . . you write it in one stretch."
Perhaps because of this, Mishima's plays were once considered to have less permanent value than his novels and stories. More recently, however, there has been a critical move to reassess them in terms of theatrical language, and today some critics rank them higher than the novels.
They are, in some ways, products more typical of the author. Mishima's life was itself a drama, carefully molded in the shape he desired with a real coup-de-theatre as the finale. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the drama of his life should be reflected in his plays, particularly the later ones.
It is from these later works that Hiroaki Sato has selected four of the five plays here translated: "The Decline and Fall of the Suzaku," "My Friend Hitler," "The Terrace of the Leper King" and the kabuki play "A Wonder Tale: The Moonbow." (The one early play is the 1956 "Rokumeikan," Mishima's most well-known drama in Japan.) All were written in the last three years of Mishima's life, and three of them saw production in 1969. Though he says he did not deliberately set out to translate later works, Sato notes that the four plays "may be viewed in relation to what some critics have called Mishima's theology, an amalgamation of the 'politics of death' with the notion of what Mishima himself called 'the Emperor as a cultural concept.' "
Like all Mishima's later work, the plays are also purposely sententious -- both moralistic and didactic. There is certainly a place in the theater for such qualities (as attendance at any noh, kabuki or shimpa performance will attest), and to this extent Mishima joins -- and intensifies -- a major stream of Japanese drama.
In "My Friend Hitler," for example, he not only tells us about the plot's machinations, but also how he felt about them. A result is that he interiorizes all of the emotions in his drama. We are not shown four real men and asked to understand their problems; we are shown segments of the author's psyche and forced to choose sides. The play, as such, is psychodrama and all the lines are loaded.
This is particularly evident on the level of metaphor and rhetoric. One of the principle metaphors is that of iron -- one fittingly Hitlerian. We can examine its metamorphosis throughout the play in these three (nonconsecutive) speeches:
Roehm: "The only thing that can hurt me is a bullet. Or rather, when the steel of my body happens to betray me and attract into it the small iron lump of my comrade's -- yes, when iron and iron, to be intimate, draw together and kiss, that's the only time I'll fall . . ."
Strasser: "The pot that once swallowed a stray bullet put out blue flowers, but it puts out only insipid pansies now that the fertilizing bullet is gone . . ."
Krupp: "For the guns . . . they've shot the real human flesh to their fill for the first time in a long while, and should be able to sleep, satisfied . . . like the soldiers who've been to brothels. . . . Iron . . . by going through the storm of 3,000-degree flames, iron ore turns into pig iron . . ."
The rhetoric states not that iron must be put to a practical use (that ideals must give way to material considerations), but that this unavoidable process is bad, that the way of compromise (Krupp's) is impure.
Since Mishima indicates a very real unwillingness to consider the world as it happens to be, we must interest ourselves in his psyche. Otherwise, the characters in this play might seem lifeless and their conversations ploys, their personae appearing to spout rather than to speak. Since they are all one-dimensional and obviously constructed for a purpose, they would fail to gain our sympathy.
But this is perhaps what Mishima intended. He did not want them to gain our sympathy; he wanted his great idea to gain our sympathy. Didactic, he is laying down the law -- and so, on this level, the play offers no interpretation of the world as it is, but rather a condemnation of this world. We are not given the world; we are given Mishima's opinion of the world.
It is just this narrow and closed aspect, however, that can be admired. And here Mishima would enter the company of playwrights who thought likewise: Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and -- yes -- Bertold Brecht.
This quality is seen most strongly in the Hitler play and in the drama about the Suzaku family (based however loosely on Euripides), as well as in "Madame de Sade," not here included but widely available in Donald Keene's translation. The play about the leper king and the three-act "A Wonder Tale: The Moonbow" (staged for the first time in 33 years by the Kabuki-za last December) seem perhaps less didactic because of their more fantastic nature, but here too the concern is with ideas rather than character.
One then understands that Mishima was speaking precisely when he said that writing drama was like water flowing toward a lower place. Indeed, the level of the drama is basic. It floats upon the forged character of the Mishima persona.
The plays themselves have been most elegantly translated by Sato and I feel certain that Mishima, whose English was extraordinarily good, would have been delighted with the results. In addition, Sato has done both his subject and us a great favor by including the three essays, in which Mishima writes about his dramaturgy. This includes an important and lengthy piece about the kabuki, "Flower of Evil."
In these we can see the thoughtful, stubborn dramatist at work, creating the very impressions that blossom forth so impressively in these plays.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.