SOURCE: "Death and the Emperor: Mishima, Ōe, and the Politics of Betrayal," in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1, February, 1989, pp. 71-89.

[In the essay below, Napier analyzes the contrasting roles that the Japanese Emperor plays in the works of Ōe and Yukio Mishima. While Ōe is severely critical of the imperial system, Mishima, who came of age during the 1930s, supports the Emperor for patriotic reasons.]

In Japan in the late 1980s, a society that is arguably one of the most modern, pragmatic, and materialist in the world, the problem of the emperor system initially seems almost irrelevant. And yet the imperial house continues to excite controversy and concern, as is clear in the full-scale media coverage given to an imperial visit or an imperial illness, and this controversy is on a far deeper and more divisive level than would be the case for such ostensible equivalents as the British royal family. The reasons behind this excitement are both obvious and problematic: the emperor is of course tied to the war and the whole complex of emotions that middle-aged Japanese feel toward it, but on a broader level the imperial house is also tied to modern Japanese history as a whole and thus to the conception that Japanese have of themselves in the postwar period.

In this [essay] I discuss the role of the emperor in relation to the work and life of two of Japan's major postwar writers, Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935) and Mishima Yukio (1925-70). I concentrate on Mishima and Ōe not only because they both have written extensively about the emperor system but also because they may be seen as occupying opposite ends of the postwar Japanese ideological continuum. Mishima organized a small private army and attempted a "Shōwa Restoration" in 1970; when it failed he committed suicide, ostensibly in the emperor's name. Ōe on the other hand is a committed speaker for a variety of liberal and even radical issues, who excoriates all the values that Mishima apparently stood for. Of these values the most important is the emperor system, which Mishima considered the font of Japanese culture and Ōe believes to be one of the most pernicious threats to a truly democratic modern Japan. Both writers deal widely, even perhaps obsessively, with these issues in their essays and fiction. And yet, as this [essay] attempts to make clear, because they have been neither blatantly one-sided nor simplistic, the emperor emerges in their fictional writings as an ambiguous and provocative figure.

The complexity of the imperial role in Ōe's and Mishima's literature can be traced in large part to the ambiguity of the imperial system itself. H. D. Harootunian [in his unpublished paper "The Ideology of Cultural Totalism' in Mishima," 1987] describes the emperor in Mishima's thought as essentially a free-floating signifier, and it is indeed because the imperial system has such an amorphous function that it retains such a powerful impact in postwar Japan. Not only dŌes it have a clear-cut and important ideological-historical referent, but it also has less obvious yet more important emotional associations, connoting a lost world of tradition, communality, and beauty. More than any other single signifier, the emperor is the ultimate Other, an object of desire that varies depending on who desires it but is always distinctly and utterly different from the reality of modern Japan.

Nowhere is this problematic function of the emperor more apparent than in the fiction and essays of Mishima and Ōe. As the following quotations suggest, the emperor plays a complex and important role in the two writers' perspectives:

"I'll ask you something. Suppose . . . suppose His Imperial majesty had occasion to be displeased with either your spirit or your behavior. What would you do then?"

. . . "Like the men of the League, I would cut open my stomach."

. . . "Indeed?" . . . "Well then, if he was pleased, what would you do?"

Isao replied without the least hesitation. "In that case too, I would cut open my stomach at once."

(Mishima [Runaway Horses])

"There was nothing more frightening than not being a Japanese, not being the child of the emperor. It was more frightening than dying. The reason that I'm not afraid of death is that even if I die his Imperial Highness will live. As long as his Imperial Highness continues to live, there's no possibility that I will ever vanish into nothingness .. . as long as I am a Japanese I have nothing to fear, as long as I am the emperor's child I have nothing to fear." (Ōe [Okurete kita seinen])

Ōe and Mishima treat the imperial system very differently, but the fundamental role of the emperor remains fascinatingly similar in both authors' works as the ultimate personal and suprapersonal refuge from postwar history.

The issues discussed in this [essay] take us into the ideological heart not only of Mishima's and Ōe's work but also of Japan's present political leaders, most of whom were either children or adolescents during the war. They take us into the spiritual territory of contemporary Japan in general as the country struggles to define itself in the postwar era. This struggle is most clear among members of the older generation, emblematized by Mishima and Ōe, who grew up with the "schizophrenic" worldview that began in August 1945 when the emperor announced Japan's defeat. The implementation of American-style education followed, and the attempted eradication of the prewar emperor-centered orthodoxy. The schism between a "patriotic youth" and a "democratic youth" exists within many Japanese of the postwar era and is encapsulated within the problematic function of the postwar emperor.

Although the problem of the emperor's divinity and the role of the imperial house in general was apparently solved forty years ago when the postwar constitution made the emperor into a figurehead without actual power, the emperor's function remains controversial. As Wakamori Tar points out in his book on the psychology of the imperial system [Tennōsei no rekishi shinri, 1973], there is a contradiction in the fact that the democratic postwar constitution retains the emperor. This contradiction—the fact that the symbol of militarism and imperialism for which millions of Japanese gave their lives exists synchronically with the "new," democratic Japan—keeps controversy alive in both fiction and essays; it is given a complex and often surprising embodiment in the fiction of Ōe and Mishima. Although the works examined in this [essay] are all overtly ideological ones with strong political messages, they are far more than simple variations of what Susan Suleiman [in Authoritarian Fictions, 1983] has identified as romans à thèse, blatantly ideological novels that use such literary techniques as one-dimensional characterization and a redundancy of imagery or values to promote one basic political "message."

Ōe's work seems to oppose the emperor system, but on closer inspection we find that the actions and attitudes of his tormented and driven characters express an ambivalent attitude. Mishima's fiction seems to glorify the imperial house, but his fundamental fascination with aesthetics and his essential inability to believe in his own romanticism undermine his apparent textual message. These ambivalences reflect both personal and suprapersonal issues.

On the political level, especially in his essays, Ōe may wish to excoriate the imperial system as evil, but on the personal level his image of the emperor is caught up with memories of childhood, innocence, communality (kyōdōtai), and what one of his characters calls "concentrated life"—a life of intense experiences—and even with the excitement of a war that his too-youthful characters have missed out on. Similarly, Mishima's high-flown intellectual abstractions concerning the emperor and beauty carry less emotional weight than his consistent literary association of the imperial house with death, honor, and transcendent experience, the other side of Ōe's "concentrated life." It is little wonder that the four works treated in this article, Mishima's "Yūkoku" (trans. as "Patriotism") and Honba (trans. as Runaway Horses), and Ōe's "Sebunchin" ("Seventeen") and "Waga namida o nuguitamau hi" (trans. as "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away"), often revolve around issues of betrayal and abandonment. It is also little wonder that the works, especially "Yūkoku" and "Sebunchin," had such strong impact on many Japanese readers.

The texts discussed in this [essay] are both "confrontations with history" (Hashikawa Bunzō on Mishima, quoted in Harootunian) and attempts to escape history. Mishima's works are a conscious attempt to recover and transcend history by rewriting it, whereas Ōe's are an attempt to minimize—even change—history by parodying it. The texts contain some of these writers' most explicit sexual prose and grotesque depictions of violence, but both eros and violence are bounded by the ideological framework of the imperial house. This bizarre amalgam of private and public, of sexual domain and political realm, that makes the works, especially the first two to be considered, so memorable and ultimately so disturbing.

"OH MY EMPEROR!": SEXUALITY AND THE EMPEROR IN "YUKOKU" AND "SEBUNCHIN"

Mishima's "Yūkoku" (1961) and Ōe's "Sebunchin" (1961) are a matched pair of ironies, from the timing of their publication and the similarity of their subjects to their strikingly different treatments of these subjects. The subjects are sexuality, death, and the emperor, or rather death for the sake of the emperor, because both protagonists end up giving their lives for him. The message of Ōe's story is apparently anti-right wing because the protagonist's suicide is shown in grotesque terms, whereas Mishima's seems to be a glorification of right-wing emperor worship and the beauties of self-sacrifice for the imperial house. At face value the two stories are close to classic examples of romans à thèse. But in spite of their many structural similarities with the roman à thèse, the stories undermine their superficial messages in several key ways and end up expressing ambivalent and problematic themes.

"Yūkoku" and "Sebunchin" differ greatly in style. "Yūkoku" is an ornate romance whose protagonists are explicitly associated with gods; the black-humored style of "Sebunchin" might be called grotesque realism. But the works share one important imagistic characteristic: the intensity and richness of the imagery they use to depict sexuality and violence.

An extratextual similarity is the dates of publication of the two works. Both stories came out in January 1961. The timing was not coincident, because the events of 1960 made the publication of each very natural. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty disturbances of that year combined massive demonstrations against the renewal of the treaty between Japan and the United States and a resurgence of the extreme right wing. This resurgence came to a head in October 1960 when a right-wing youth assassinated Asanuma Inejirō, the chairman of the Socialist party, with a Japanese sword. The incident was the obvious inspiration for "Sebunchin." The immediate inspiration for "Yūkoku" is less clear because, with the exception of Kyūko no ie, (Kyoko's house, 1959), Mishima's fiction had steered entirely clear of overt political references until 1960. It seems likely that the general inflamed atmosphere of the treaty demonstrations, plus the unusual terrorist act of assassination, finally turned Mishima's interests away from pure aesthetics and eroticism toward the bizarre union of aesthetics, politics, and eroticism that is the world of "Yükoku."

Ōe's novella "Sebunchin," which chronicles the development of a shy seventeen-year-old into a right-wing terrorist, was considered by many members of the right wing to be a vicious attack on the emperor system because of its many explicit descriptions of emperor-focused autŌeroti-cism. The story was so fiercely denounced by them that its second half was withdrawn from publication. To this day, in fact, the novella's second half, entitled "Seiji shōnen shisu" ("Death of a political youth"), has not been included in any of Ōe's collected works.

In many ways the rightists had reason to be angry, because the story's characterization of the young right winger as a pathetic loser and a chronic masturbator was hardly likely to win them converts. "Sebunchin" parodies the bildungsroman (novel of apprenticeship) form, which, according to Suleiman is one of the key forms of a roman à thèse. In the course of a classic bildungsroman a young person changes from a callow innocent to a seasoned reasonable adult by undergoing a variety of learning experiences involving both helpers and enemies. "Sebunchin" shows the opposite process: an unprepossessing youth who is initially not harmful to anyone but becomes an assassin and ends up hanging himself in his jail cell, apparently because of the ideological promptings of the right-wing organization he has joined. The boy is a total loser who only gets worse as the narrative continues, his mentors are knaves and fools, and his end is pathetic.

This is unquestionably a bitter attack on the same ideological process that "Yūkoku" extols in its narration of the same end, a death on behalf of the emperor. And yet "Sebunchin" is not quite the perfect anti-right wing novel that it first appears to be. Although after finishing the novella readers will probably not want to go out and join a rightwing organization, they may experience a certain sympathy for the protagonist. Furthermore the spokesman for the "good side," that is, the left-wing intellectual who appears in the novel, is also not shown in a consistently positive light.

Part of this inconsistency lies in the literary quality of the story. Although brutally satiric in places, the narrative dŌes not present the one-dimensional black-and-white characters needed to get the message across most effectively. Even more important, the reality that the hero flees is so utterly grim that even his bizarre emperor-centered visions become almost appealing in comparison.

Such complexity is not a problem with Mishima's "Yūkoku," whose two characters step straight out of heroic myth. The handsome, pure-hearted Lieutenant Takeyama, indignant about his lack of inclusion in the proposed February 26 rebellion of 1936 and not wanting to attack the rebels who were his former comrades, chooses to commit suicide in his home. His beautiful and equally pure-hearted wife, Reiko, asks permission to accompany him, and, after making passionate love one last time, they kill themselves. Their suicide note concludes with the sentence "Long live the Imperial Forces."

With its simple plot, its obvious pro-imperial ideology, and its larger-than-life characters, "Yūkoku" seems to provide an excellent example of roman à thèse praising the virtues of death for the emperor. The text does not give readers a chance to distance themselves from the narrative. Instead they are plunged almost immediately into the claustrophobic but intense world of the protagonists' last passionate moments. Textual redundancies, particularly concerning the superiority of the protagonists, are everywhere. The characters are consistently described in terms of their remarkable beauty and nobility. Even more obvious, "Yükoku" starts with a paragraph-long summary of the story, ending with the pointed words, "The last moments of this heroic and dedicated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep," which point readers in an ideologically approved direction from the very beginning.

The actual narrative begins by showing the protagonists' superiority over reality in their mutual willingness to leave it through suicide. Thus on their wedding night the lieutenant's first action is to give Reiko a lecture on the duties of the soldier's wife, particularly the need for her to "know and accept that her husband's death may come at any moment." His wife's exemplary reaction indicates her willingness to accompany him in death. Death and love are thus linked from the first. It is not surprising that such intensely patriotic devotion to duty is rewarded by an equally passionate physical relationship. But these "soaring pleasures of the flesh" are never "mere pleasure." As the text is careful to inform us, "Even in bed these two were frighteningly and awesomely serious."

At first glance no more enormous contrast could be imagined between two such godlike creatures and the dreary specimen of humanity who is the narrator of "Sebunchin" and its central protagonist, hereinafter referred to as Ore, the vulgar first-person pronoun he calls himself. Ore is weak, unpopular, and considers himself ugly: "My face was like a pig's." But both Ore and Takeyama die for the sake of the emperor, and although their motivations are somewhat different, they both aspire to be romantic herŌes.

At first, however, Ore desires most to escape—anywhere—from his dreary adolescent existence. The first half of "Sebunchin" does a superb job of skating between dreary realism and black-humored parody as the text delineates the problems of being an awkward adolescent in an apathetic family at an unfriendly school. The story grows increasingly less credible as Ore first attempts to murder a left-wing writer and then, after a "revelation" from the emperor, succeeds in assassinating a left-wing politician. Like "Yükoku," however, the story is framed by ordinary life. The contrast between the everyday normality of school and family and Ore's increasing obsessiveness gives the work much of its alarming power.

Ore is moved to assassination and suicide by a highly potent combination of motives—humiliation, hatred, and loneliness. It is significant that he first hears a right-wing speech after a humiliating experience in gym class. Hearing the speaker's hate-filled invocation, "We'll kill them all!" in reference to anyone who opposes the development of the true Japanese spirit, Ore's first reaction is pleasurable empathy. Even more significant is his intense and initially unexpected pleasure in being taken for a rightist by a trio of female office workers. He thinks:

"That's right. I'm a rightist." I trembled, struck by a sudden fierce joy. I had come in contact with my true self. I was a rightist!

I turned toward the girls and made one step forward. Holding onto each other, they raised small, frightened voices in protest. Standing in front of the girls and the men nearby, I looked at them, my eyes filled with hostility and hatred toward them all. They all stared back at me. I was a rightist! I felt a new person inside of me, one who was not embarrassed when strangers stared at him. .. . I felt as if I had wrapped my weak, petty self inside strong armor and had isolated myself from other people forever. Rightist armor!

By donning his "rightist armor" Ore is suddenly transported out of his adolescent hell and into a world of power and intimidation and even, poignantly, of belonging. Soon he is taken up by his fellow rightists as a model representative of youth and begins to speak at rallies, to much admiration and congratulations from his new friends. At the end of the novella's first half, his colleagues introduce him to his first sexual experience as a reward for serving the emperor so well.

Ore obviously contrasts with Mishima's hero, who, one can assume, has never worried about belonging. Because of his military companionship of the military he has already escaped modern anomie and experienced a foretaste of the world of unity with an absolute entity. Indeed, Takeyama joyfully anticipates being reunited with his fallen comrades after his death. And yet a common factor motivates the efforts of both Ōe's social misfit and Mishima's sterling young warrior to serve the emperor: a desire to be special and to participate in a transcendent, ecstatic experience.

Viewed from this angle, the textual redundancies of "Yükoku" begin to give off a more ironic air as they reveal the selfish and narcissistic characteristics of Mishima's hero. Takeyama is given a good deal of textual space to ruminate over his exceptional destiny: "There was some special favor here. He did not understand precisely what it was, but it was a domain unknown to others: a dispensation granted to no one else had been permitted to himself."

Ostensibly, Takeyama is motivated by duty, but in fact his motives can be read as largely egotistical. The lieutenant is constantly aware of the dashing figure he cuts, as when he lectures his wife on their wedding night or as he shaves himself before seppuku, thinking "There must be no unsightly blemishes. There was a certain elegance, he even felt, in the association of death with his radiantly healthy face." He experiences a "bizarre excitement" at the idea of performing seppuku in front of his wife: "What he was about to perform was an act in his public capacity as a soldier. . . . A lonely death on the battlefield, a death beneath the eyes of his beautiful wife .. . in the sensation that he was about to die in those two dimensions realizing an impossible union of them both, there was sweetness beyond words." Despite the overt textual message that Takeyama is laying down his life for "the Imperial Household, the Nation, the Army, the Flag," the text's subliminal message suggests less noble motivations. By his death Takeyama is able to gratify his narcissistic and erotic desires and his unarticulated yearning for an intense transcendent experience, which he has already approached sexually a few moments before. Although the text never explicitly makes the connection, it is clear that the hero's sexual gratification is enormously intensified by its association with the imperial house and with the presentiment of dying for the throne.

On a parodic level, the protagonist of "Sebunchin" experiences the same duo of satisfactions—sexuality and death—within the framework of his worship of the emperor. Ore's ultimate escape from the wasteland of the real is foreshadowed at the end of the novella's first half when his rightist friends take him to a tawdry Turkish bathhouse, where a prostitute masturbates him to orgasm while he sees a golden vision:

My organ was the sun's radiance. My organ was a flower. I was overwhelmed by the pleasure of an intense orgasm and in the darkness of the sky I saw floating a golden being. Aah! Ooh! Your imperial majesty, my radiant sun, Aah, aah, ooh. After a little while, my eyes, recovered from their hysterical vision, saw on the girl's cheeks my spent and scattered semen, glistening like tears.

This exaggerated, satirical prose could almost be a parody of "Yükoku" in its coincidence of sexuality, patriotic fervor, and intensity. In Ōe's novella the satirical aspects of this combination of sexuality, death, and patriotism are intensified at the story's ending, when the hero masturbates one last time, calling on the emperor to come and take care of his "beloved Seventeen." The last line of the story reads simply, "The officer who dragged down the hanging body said that he smelled semen."

And yet despite the tawdriness of the setting and the exaggerated quality of the prose, this lonely yet ecstatic death is not totally satiric. Just as "Yükoku" occasionally uses irony to undermine its apparent celebration of death for the emperor, so "Sebunchin" undermines its supposed excoriation of such patriotism by abandoning its occasional use of irony at certain crucial narrative moments. It may be that "Sebunchin" was initially begun as a parody, but the work is far more complex than the simple antifascist tract that the right wing pretended to see. This complexity lies largely in Ōe's characterization of his protagonist.

Although the first half of the story, ending with the protagonist's passionate orgasmic vision of the emperor, betrays a heavily satirical hand, Ore is portrayed throughout as an understandable, if not sympathetic, human being. Nevertheless, even though we occasionally sympathize with Ore, his abjectness and the absurd grandiosity of his visions remind us that we are watching the development of a fanatic who is ultimately not one of us. But the novella's second half, "Seiji shönen shisu," is less tightly conceived and occasionally even loses its satiric bite altogether.

This change in orientation is most obvious in the portrait of the only left-wing character in the story, a writer named Minamihara who is Ore's first intended assassination victim. In an important scene Ore confronts Minamihara in an empty coffee shop, wielding a knife and threatening to kill the writer if he does not retract an insulting statement he had previously made about right-wing violence. The scene is significant because it underlines the complexities and ambivalences in Ōe's political outlook. Confronted by the frenzied Ore, Minamihara takes no action to defend himself but instead breaks into a terrified sweat. Yet despite his terror the writer refuses to retract his statement and even induces Ore into a theoretical argument, thereby blunting the youth's will to kill him. Eventually, Ore is moved to reluctant admiration. He reflects:

That bastard's a coward. But for thirty minutes now, with sweat pouring down him and tears blurring his eyes, he's been crawling steadily forward through a dark tunnel of fear and gradually, through his own perseverance, he's recovered himself. So there are actually men who live like that. . . without turning his eyes away from the horror of reality, without turning away from the humiliation of reality, just crawling forward like a pig, dragging his belly covered with the ugly stinking mud of reality. But me, I've been running away from the horror of the real world with all possible speed, and I've jumped into the glittering, rose-colored ravine of emperor worship. Could it be that that guy is the one with the right idea?

This passage beautifully encapsulates both the adolescent's view of the postwar world in all its "stinking mud of reality" and the role of emperor worship as a false "rosecolored" alternative in Oe's writings. Indeed, some Japanese critics believe that Minamihara's willingness to "crawl like a pig" through reality is essentially Ōe's manifesto. Although it may be, its impact is blunted by a coda to this first meeting, a second encounter between Ore and the writer.

This occurs in a bar where Ore's rightist friends are partying on the very evening of the youth's aborted attempt on Minamihara's life. Happening into a back room, Ore again confronts the writer, but this time the man is stinking of alcohol rather than sweat. It turns out that Minamihara is also a drug addict and a pervert, as the bar's waitress eagerly informs Ore. Facing this spectacle, Ore changes his attitude from reluctant admiration to calm superiority. He muses: "So you couldn't get rid of your fear. Instead of crawling forward into fear, when night comes you escape into whisky or drugs or homosexuality."

Disgusted, Ore returns to his "rose-colored ravine" for his final escape. Thus, the two encounters with Minamihara end with a puzzling lack of resolution in the characterization of Minamihara, whom one might have expected to be the hero of the tale. Such a pathetic portrait of a character who could be considered the author's representative severely blunts the presumed ideological message of "Sebunchin."

The problem of Minamihara's characterization may be resolved by turning once more to the portrait of Ore. Surely Minamihara is not the only character in "Sebunchin" who represents Ōe. From what we know of Ōe through his essays and semi-autobiographical fiction, it is obvious that Ore too displays certain aspects of his creator's personality. Just as in "Yükoku" Takeyama represents certain aspects of Mishima in his yearning for an intense experience, his narcissism, and his passionate nature, the embarrassed, lonely young hero of "Sebunchin" with his burning desire to become the emperor's "beloved Seventeen," resembles a particular side of Ōe. This side is the "patriotic youth" mentioned previously, obverse of the postwar "democratic youth" with his Western values of liberalism and humanism. Thus, the antinomies between an emperor who is the living manifestation of the land of the gods and an emperor who is the figurehead of postwar democratic Japan are internalized in Ōe himself and his characters. The adult Ōe, who majored in French literature at Tokyo University, became a vehement antinuclear activist, and passionately espoused relativistic, even anarchistic ideals, cannot completely break away from the golden imperial past of an absolute faith in a living god. The problem is further complicated by the fact that the emperor is the only symbol of continuity between Ōe's childhood self and his adult maturity.

This symbolic continuity comes across most clearly in Ōe's 1961 novel Okurete kita seinen (The youth who came late), where the protagonist spends his time regretting that he came "too late for the war" and remembering the days when he was the "child of the emperor." In a crucial early scene he also conflates his dying father with the emperor, a scene that is echoed in Ōe's 1973 novella "Waga namida o nuguitamau hi." The Ore of "Sebunchin" is too young to realize what he has missed out on, but he too is obviously conflating his father and the emperor when he calls on the emperor to take his "beloved Seventeen" unto him. Ore's real father is a liberal intellectual and a totally inadequate, unsympathetic father who can give the boy no help in dealing with his many problems.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that despite all efforts at parody the final delineation of emperor worship in "Sebunchin" is ambivalent. Ōe is incapable of making his protagonist quite as loathsome as he would like, because he understands and to some extent sympathizes with the pitiful desires that ultimately send the protagonist to seek solace in fanaticism and murder. In the same way Mishima's depiction of emperor worship has an ambiguous if not ambivalent side. When he tries to make his hero Takeyama perfect, he ends up showing him up as a conceited egotist, more concerned with creating a beautiful impression than with serving his country. Although Takeyama and his wife write as their final message "Long live the Imperial Forces," the actual text is much more concerned with the ecstasies and pains of sex and death than the joys of sacrifice for the emperor.

This brings me to the function of sexuality in both these stories. The very brutality of the descriptions of masturbation in the emperor's name in "Sebunchin" suggest that sexuality is not merely an escape but also an attack. The critic Hirano Ken [in the supplement to Ōe Kenzaburö zenshakuhin, Vol. 4, 1966] has pointed out that in the Japan of the late 1950s sex and the emperor were the last taboos. By taking on both taboos at once, Ōe is making a virulent assault on Japanese social conventions. Within the bounds of the story, however, the equation of sexuality and the emperor—even though pathetic—provides one of Ore's highest satisfactions, a grotesque yet perfect symbol of his transcendence of postwar reality.

In Mishima's case, his consistent association of the emperor and eroticism has been much discussed by critics who attempt to relate it to his presumed homosexuality [Hashikawa Bunzö and Noguchi Takehiko, "Dojidai to shite no Shöwa," Yuriika, Vol. 8, 1976]. Although the approach is an intriguing one, it is ultimately reductive, especially because Ōe, who is not a homosexual, has also associated the emperor and sexuality. For both writers sexuality and the emperor are part of a more amorphous object of desire: intensity. It is intensity that offers an escape from the reality that their fictional characters must otherwise face.

Ironically, it may well be that the two young protagonists of "Yükoku" have had the most satisfying escape from a humdrum existence. As Sasaki Yoshioka points out [in "Aru hazu no nai zattai e," Eureka, Vol. 8, 1976], the explicit, passionate descriptions of love and death contrast with and are strongly accentuated by the quiet normality of life around them. But the protagonists escape from more than normality. Although seemingly less painful than Ore's world of humiliations, the world outside their little house is not a place for two such godlike beings. By their suicide they escape the reality of historic time, in which the onrushing events of the 1930s will bring their country's defeat and their own physical decay will bring old age. More perfectly than any of Mishima's other works, "Yükoku"—in all its claustrophobic passion—offers an escape from historical inevitability and a rewriting of history the way it should have been.

FROM IRONY TO MADNESS: HONBA AND "WAGA NAMIDA O NUGUITAMAU HI"

"Sebunchin" and "Yükoku" were departures for their authors. Although Ōe had been concerned with the emperor in a number of previous works, most notably Okurete kita seinen, he had never lambasted the imperial house so forcefully or with such a wealth of grotesque imagery. Mishima's work before "Yükoku" had been apolitical. This story marked the start of an important trend in the last decade of his life: during the 1960s he rediscovered Japanese tradition, at the same time that many Japanese, especially the younger ones, were intent on negating all tradition. His final statement concerning Japan's tradition was summed up in the tetralogy Höjo no umi (trans. as The Sea of Fertility), his last work of fiction. The second volume of the tetralogy, Honba, the work considered in this section, may be seen as his final fictional statement on the role of the emperor in Japanese society.

Honba appeared at a time in Japanese history when it seemed that the symbol of the emperor had lost its ideological power. The turmoil of the 1960s was threatening to consign it to the heap of broken images that constituted pre-1960s history. In the famous debates between Mishima and the Tokyo University students in 1969, however, the very hostility shown by the students toward Mishima's valorization of the emperor indicates that this broken image had the power to reconstitute itself. Mishima not only kept the issue of the emperor alive but even regenerated it in two important fictional works, Honba and "Eirei no koe" ("The voices of the hero spirits"; 1966), in which the spirits of kamikaze pilots return in a Shinto seance and accuse the emperor, whom they envision as seated on a white horse weeping for his warriors, of having betrayed them by renouncing his divinity, and in a major nonfiction essay, "Bunka no böie ron" ("A defense of culture"; 1968).

Although Mishima began the regeneration of the emperor, it was Ōe who, by taking this regeneration seriously in both essay and fiction, showed how deeply important the emperor still was to many Japanese. Ōe's most important fictional response is "Waga namida o nuguitamau hi." Partly a reaction to Mishima's Honba and partly a reaction to Mishima's suicide and the ideology he thought inspired it, the novella is also a continuation, even an encapsulation, of themes and concerns that animated Ōe's fiction from its inception. Whereas Honba is Mishima's most sustained attempt to rewrite history, "Waga namida" is Ōe's most powerful attempt to show the dangers of just such a rewriting.

Honba is a complicated work. It contains two mutually reinforcing stories of political terrorism: the main narrative of an attempted rebellion in the 1930s and a chronicle of the Shinpüren (League of the Divine Wind), a rebel group in the Meiji period. Yet compared to Ōe's "Waga namida," Honba''s message is straightforward. Even more than "Yükoku," it is a classic example of the roman à thèse. The novel's plot pits good against evil, with good winning a moral if not an actual victory in the end. The novel's hero, Isao, is a pure, virtuous young man forced to live in the sink of corruption that characterizes Japan in the 1930s. A superb kendoist and charismatic leader, Isao wants to bring together a group of like-minded souls in a coup that will restore power to the emperor. He is caught and imprisoned before he can attempt the coup but is pardoned and goes off on his own to murder a corrupt financier. Successful in that endeavor, he then tries to fulfill his most precious dream of all: "At the top of a cliff at sunrise, while paying reverence to the sun . . . while looking down upon the sparkling sea, beneath a tall, noble pine .. . to kill myself."

Although resembling "Yükoku" in structure and characterization, Honba is more sophisticated because it suggests that wish fulfillment is only possible in the mind, not in reality. There are other significant differences between the two works as well. The most important is that Honba is not a work unto itself; as part of Mishima's tetralogy, it must be seen in terms of Mishima's final vision of twentieth-century Japan. The second difference is that this novel heavily foregrounds the "real" Japan of the 1930s. Whereas everyday life simply lapped at the corners of the little world of "Yükoku," Honba shows in explicit detail exactly how much the world has decayed since the Meiji period and the delicate beauty of Haru no yuki (trans. as Spring Snow), the first novel of the tetralogy. Corrupt financiers, venal politicians, and even cowardly military men crowd its pages. The overt contrast—indeed, conflict—between 1930s Japan and the romantic world of military death signified by Isao, the emperor, and the traditional beauties and virtues surrounding them makes Honba much more clearly an ideological novel.

The narrative employs enormous numbers of redundancies of characterization to point up Isao's superiority to the pathetic inhabitants of the world around him. He has many of the characteristics of the ideal Japanese samurai. Isao practices kendo, the most traditional of Japanese sports, and displays prowess with the sword. His personality is evoked in terms of samurai masculinity. Such words as vivacity, manly force, and above all purity, which recur virtually every ten pages, leave the reader no doubt that Isao is an ideal hero.

The text underlines the fact that such an ideal is unlikely to exist in the real world by having Isao realize at one point that "he had become a character in a romance. Perhaps he and his comrades were on the verge of a glory that would long be remembered." This conscious transformation indicates that the hero of Honba is not to be judged by the standards of realistic fiction. It provides an intertextual echo of another paean to romanticism, the chronicle of the Shinpüren that Mishima inserts into the narrative. The chronicle purports to be a genuine story of an uprising, but its most important function is to create a redundancy: Honba details not one but two doomed attempts to save the Japanese spirit.

The use of the two chronicles also emphasizes Mishima's ideological equation of corruption and decay with Westernization. Although previous works, most notably "Eirei no koe," hinted that the decay of Japan was associated with modernity and the West, Honba is the longest and most explicit presentation of this theme. The equation first appears in the section purporting to be the chronicle of the Shinpüren, which states the purpose of the league to "protect the gods of Japan so utterly disdained by the new government." But when the text turns to Isao, his words and thoughts reveal the full magnitude of the Western contamination. Late in the novel, Isao learns the connection between Japan's moral decay and the influence of the West:

And one clouded stream that never ran dry was that choked with the scum of humanism, the poison spewed out by the factory at its headwaters. There it was, its lights burning brilliantly as it worked even through the night—the factory of Western European ideals. The pollution from this factory degraded the exalted fervour to kill, it withered the green of the sasaki's leaves.

The text goes from such high-flown abstractions to more concrete indications of degeneration as Isao gives an impassioned speech in court concerning the decay of modern Japan, covering everything from the London Naval Conference of 1930 to the corruption of the zaibatsu. Indeed, Mishima is so anxious to get his ideological point across that there are moments when the narrative reads suspiciously like a textbook of modern history.

Honba's combination of romantic adventure and textbook history is not always successful in literary terms, but in ideological terms it certainly hammers the point home. Furthermore, unlike "Yükoku" the text allows fewer potential ironies. Isao seems genuinely committed to serving the emperor, as his many impassioned speeches show. Nevertheless, the text's final impression may be subversive, as it suggests that such perfect service and fulfillment are possible only in the imagination. Not only is Isao a "character in a romance," but also his final wish fulfillment of the perfect suicide can only be achieved in his imagination. Although Isao has dreamed of dying at sunrise by the sea next to a noble pine, the reality is quite different because his successful assassination attempt has left him no time to create his perfect death.

Isao sat upright upon the damp earth. . . . "The sun will not rise for some time," Isao said to himself, "and I can't afford to wait. There is no shining disk climbing upward. There is no noble pine to shelter me. Nor is there a sparkling sea."

But in his imagination Isao does achieve the perfect escape. As he rips open his stomach, "the instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids."

In many ways Runaway Horses is the supreme example in Mishima's work of a romantic call to arms, an insistence that reality can be destroyed or at least escaped by using the correct ideology combined with the transforming powers of the imagination. Mishima's last speech before his suicide contains many echoes of Isao's excoriation of modernity. Like Isao, Mishima had to create his own perfect death, using Honba and "Yükoku" as models. In a perceptive (and angry) essay written soon after Mishima's death, Ōe suggests that the Honba's artificiality, in particular the one-dimensionality of Isao's character, is due to Mishima's desire to make the novel into a fictional paradigm of his own suicide ["Shishatachi no saishüteki na vijion to warera ikinobitsuzukeru mono," in Ōe Kenzaburö dôjidai ronshû, Vol. 6, 1981].

Whether Mishima ultimately believed in his own last words is subject to debate. What is certain is that Ōe took Mishima's speech, his suicide, and the text of Honba very seriously. His first reaction was the previously mentioned essay in which he criticized Honba for its "artificiality" and accused Mishima of "insulting all those who had lived through the postwar era," especially his fellow writers who had genuinely suffered during the war. His second reaction was to write the complex and fascinating novella "Waga namida o nuguitamau hi."

"Waga namida" calls attention to its fictionality almost from the beginning by indicating the textual presence of two narrators. The main narrator, who is also the primary protagonist, seems to be a playwright or an author who may or may not be dying of cancer but who has in any case retreated to a hospital bed where, donning green goggles, he proceeds to dictate what he calls a "history of the age" to the secondary narrator. The secondary narrator, the "acting executor of the will," is presumably his wife but might also be a nurse. Although the "acting executor" challenges the primary narrator's judgment at times, it is not until the end of the novella, when yet another narrator (apparently the writer's mother) appears, that we are given a different vision of the "history of the age."

This history is the real flesh of the story: a bizarre chronicle of the narrator's father's romantic attempt to lead an uprising on the last day of the war. The uprising, essentially an attempt to "save the emperor from himself," would have involved the bombing of the imperial palace by the father and his comrades in planes disguised to look like American jets. Only thus, the absurd argument runs, would the Japanese people have awakened to the approaching defeat and united to save their country.

Obviously such an uprising was highly unlikely, but not more unlikely than the planned coup of Isao and his young comrades except in its degree of absurd detail. Ōe heightens its unreal quality by the manner in which the narrator relates the story, in jerky flashbacks that are constantly interrupted with alternate versions. The reader is left with a very confused idea of what actually happened and with strong doubts concerning the credibility or even the sanity of the narrator, who insists on referring to the period of war just before his father's rebellion as his "Happy Days." The narrator is thus attempting to escape postwar history, both his country's and his own, in every possible way, from the action of donning goggles that allow him to see only what he wishes, to his insane valorization of the war and, later on, of the emperor, to his attempt to recreate history by a presumably distorted retelling.

As both John Nathan [in his introduction to Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness] and Michiko Wilson [in The Marginal World of Ōe Kenzaburö, 1986] make clear, an awareness of Mishima, his attempted coup, and his emperor-centered fiction dominates "Waga namida." Another critic has even taken Ōe to task for his "hysterical" reaction to Mishima [Kawanishi Masaaki, in Ōe Kenzaburö ron: Misei no yume, 1979]. The father's mad rebellion, which purports to save Japan by destroying the emperor, clearly echoes what Ōe considers to be Mishima's distortion of Japanese values. And the father is not the only Mishimaesque character in the novella. The narrator himself resembles Mishima in his egocentric manipulation of reality, his erotic and narcissistic fascination with death, and, most important, his obsession with the period of history that ended in 1945.

The valorization of the "golden" time before Japan's defeat is not restricted to Mishima but is shared by Ōe and many of his fictional creations. The unnamed narrator of "Waga namida" is as close to Ōe as he is to Mishima. Whether or not he is an alter ego of the real Ōe, he shares a number of important characteristics with many of Ōe's protagonists, most notably the two emotions that animate him, desire and resentment. He desires an escape from the reality of being thirty-five with adult responsibilities. He resents the people who seek to block his escape both physically and mentally by reminding him of his responsibilities. In particular, he resents his mother, who he feels humiliated his father and himself. In part he aims the "history of the age" at his mother, but he also tries in it to recover the past and rediscover his father who, by dying in the uprising, abandoned his child for the joy of seeking an intensely transcendent experience. Now the son in his hospital bed uses words to search obsessively for the same experience, which, when he finds it, will somehow unite him with his father.

The climax of the story of the insurrection, as related with increasing fervor by the narrator, is undoubtedly a grotesque parody of Mishima's bloody coup and also a parody of Mishima's belief in the beauty of terrorist violence. The narrator recalls his father's last day when, bleeding horribly of bladder cancer, the father is bundled into a cart by a group of soldiers who have come to the valley to make him the leader of their pathetic rebellion. Ultimately they are all killed, perhaps bombed by enemy planes. Or at least that is how the narrator remembers it. His mother, however, has a very different version, especially in reference to the father (referred to throughout as a certain party):

And those soldiers took him and carted him off in a ridiculous wooden box with sawed-off logs for wheels. .. . It was a cruel business but I didn't go out of my way to interfere. . . . Well, if you're wondering whether the soldiers who took a certain party with them really drove that truck onto an army airfield and stole fighter planes and flew to Tokyo, they did no such thing! There was a shootout at the bank entrance, and a certain party and all the soldiers were killed, yessir!

His mother's words bring back the horrors of the real world, but her rational narrative voice cannot penetrate the protagonist's world of happy days. In his crazed but intensely satisfying world, the imperial palace was indeed bombed and the emperor ultimately ascended into heaven.

Though it was inevitable that he die in a bombing once, now truly he would revive as the national essence itself, and more certainly than before, more divinely, as a ubiquitous chrysanthemum would cover Japan and all her people. As a golden chrysanthemum illuminated from behind by a vast purple light and glittering like an aurora, his majesty would manifest himself.

The narrator identifies his father with the emperor:

And a certain party, leaping beyond his limitations as an individual at the instant of his death, rendered manifest a golden chrysanthemum flower 675,000 kilometers square, surmounted and surrounded by, yes, a purple aurora, high enough in the sky to cover entirely the islands of Japan.

Thus, in a prose more purple than Mishima's at its most florid, does Ōe's narrator envision his father/emperor's last stand. The fragmentation of the defeat is replaced by the imaginary aurora that wraps the Japanese archipelago in a comforting imperial glow.

Yet despite the many overtly satirical elements in "Waga namida," the novella presents the same problem that confronted the reader in "Sebunchin," an unevenness of tone or authorial attitude. "Waga namida" is not a consistently successful parody. For example, in order to present a clear contrast between the insane and the rational, the mother's narrative ought to have been the story's rational voice whose clear objective accounts show the absurdity of her son's fevered myth making. But the mother has her own axe to grind, an old hatred toward her husband and a contempt for her son, which comes out clearly in the passage quoted above where she calls the boy's participation in the insurrection a "cruel business" but adds, "I didn't go out of my way to interfere." Thus, as in "Sebunchin" no rational center offers relief from the obsessed protagonist, whose golden vision of the happy days and of his heroic father haunts the reader. For Oe's protagonist, his life hiding out with his father, when the boy wandered the village with a bayonet clanking at his side, becomes the ideal alternative to reality.

The boy's ideal fantasy culminates in the narrator's "memory" of accompanying his father to war, a period that the narrator is desperately trying to re-create. Not so dissimilarly from Mishima's and Isao's active seeking of the transcendental Otherness of death, the narrator of "Waga namida" eagerly awaits death because, in it, he can finally return to his happy days. As he puts it,

I consider that period in my life the first Happy Days in my thirty-five years, alongside these final Happy Days as I lie here dying unhurriedly but swiftly of cancer. . . . Don't you agree the patient should have the freedom to choose diluted life over a long period, or concentrated life briefly?

If the idea of a concentrated existence sounds similar to, if less histrionic than, some of the yearnings of Mishima's characters, it is because Mishima and Ōe are not so far apart. The Ōe of 1960 who was unable to satirize totally the passionate young adolescent of "Sebunchin" was still incapable in 1973 of completely separating himself from the despairing and passionate thirty-five-yearold intellectual or the ten-year-old child soon to be expelled from his "Happy Days." As Nathan says of Ōe, "There is also a longing, not so different in quality from Mishima's own, for the sweet certainty of unreasoning faith in a god."

Both Mishima and Ōe and their characters strongly identify this god with the emperor in a glorious and often deathly vision. In Mishima's case the emperor may have served as a convenient rationale for what he wished to do anyway (i.e., commit suicide), but in Ōe's fiction as well a character's fascination with the emperor often leads to death: for example, in the suicide of Ore in "Sebunchin," the slow "semisuicide" of the narrator in "Waga namida o nuguitamau hi," and the death of Shigeru in Warera no jidai (Our era).

The question finally remains: how important is the emperor in the works of Ōe and Mishima? As I have tried to show, the emperor is important for a variety of literary, historical, and psychological reasons. Certainly the fact that Mishima organized the Tate no Kai (Shield Society) in the mid-1960s to shield the emperor from presumed left-wing activists and finally committed suicide in the emperor's name suggests that the emperor was of paramount importance to him. Mishima's treatment is abstract, in some ways simply an elaborate excuse for his suicide. Mishima used the emperor as a powerful cultural image to suggest what Japanese culture had lost and also to give his own death a more impressive backdrop, but as a fictional image the emperor's attraction is largely an aesthetic one. Thus in 1969 in his famous debate with the Tokyo University students [published as Mishima Yukio vs. Tôdai Zenkyôto, 1969], Mishima explained his conception of the emperor in the following highly abstract terms:

My conception of the emperor .. . is Yamato Takeru turning into a white bird. . . . What I call the emperor is a single being with a double image, a dual structure, the human emperor, in other words the continuously reigning emperors, along with, to put it in cultural terms, the poetic mythical emperor: the core of my thought is that [this poetic mythical emperor] has no relation to the personality of any one living emperor.

In Mishima's nonfiction essays on the emperor, most notably the 1968 "Bunka bôei ron," it is obvious that the aesthetic element of emperor worship is at least as important as the personal one. Given this aesthetic valorization it is hardly surprising that even Mishima's fictional characters commit suicide out of motives that are only tangentially patriotic.

On the other hand the ideals Mishima had Isao espouse in Honba and the moral decay that he details throughout the tetralogy are issues that he again took up in his last speech before committing suicide. He may also have had the deep sense of betrayal that the "hero spirits" in "Eirei no koe" complained of. Whatever the emperor meant to Mishima on a personal level was probably similar to Ōe's feelings, that is, as a symbol of missed experiences, missed opportunities, missed lives, and missed "sweet certainties," to use Nathan's expression. For Mishima these desired Others included the seductive beauty of young death in a glorious cause, whereas for Ōe they are associated with the excitement, mystery, and potentialities of boyhood. It is significant that for Ōe, the emperor is identified with a sympathetic father figure, whereas Mishima hints in Honba at an overwhelming authority figure for whom Isao will gladly cut open his stomach. For both authors the emperor suggests the potential for belonging to a greater whole, a transcendent unity far from the atomizing anomies of the postwar world.

Mishima attempted by his works, his "patriotic" activities, and his suicide to unite with that entity and to transcend the writing on the wall of postwar history. Ōe over the last thirty years has continued to confront and criticize history in his writings, to leave the ten-year-old boy who was blissfully content to be a "child of the emperor," and grow into a genuine democratic humanist. At times his struggle to liberate himself from the emperor has been so vehement that Japanese critics have considered him the quintessential representative of the anti-emperor intelligentsia (Hashikawa and Noguchi), and certainly his nonfiction essays have placed him squarely on the left wing.

But in his fiction Ōe has been unable to maintain this simplistic anti-emperor attitude. Although in his later fiction, most notably the monumental Dôjidai gçmu (1980), Ōe does create a sustained attack on emperor-centered history, he does this by getting rid of any conventionally sympathetic or three-dimensional protagonists with whom the reader might identify. Instead, Dôjidai gçmu presents an alternative history of Japan through a number of legends concerning a hidden Shikoku village of outsiders struggling against the "great Japanese empire." Rather than ambivalence, Dôjidai gçmu shows a thoroughgoing hostility toward the emperor system suggesting that, by creating a "group protagonist," Ōe is finally able to depict the issue in more consistently black-and-white terms. Dôjidai gçmu, however, has been criticized by Japanese critics for its artificiality [Yamada Yûsaku, "Dôjidai gçmu," Kokubungaku, Vol. 6, 1983], and it certainly lacks the emotional power of "Waga namida."

Ōe's central protagonist, like those of Mishima, is incapable of accepting his lonely individuality and is last seen searching desperately for some larger protective figure, perhaps his father, perhaps the emperor:

His bayonet clanking at his side, he crawls toward the stone steps at the bank entrance where a certain party waits, bullet-riddled and army sword held high in one hand, the other outstretched to embrace him, shot in the back and dying. . . . His head nothing more than a dark void now, the blood all drained away, he is no longer certain whether the person awaiting him at the top of the stone step is a certain party, but if he can crawl just one yard more digging at the hot ground with his bullet-broken hands he will reach the feet of the person unmistakably awaiting him, whoever he may be, and his blood and his tears will be wiped away.

In an article based on matched ironies it is ironically appropriate that the avowed left-wing humanist rather than the man who gave his life in the emperor's name, should have the most poignant description of the need for the emperor. There can be no question that the "democratic Ōe" abhors everything that the emperor system stands for, especially the kind of insane actions committed in the emperor's name by someone such as Mishima. Whereas Honba builds up a chilling logic of aesthetic fanaticism, "The Day" exposes that fanaticism for the insanity it really is. Ōe also understands the kind of personality that is likely to become a terrorist: that personality is far more likely to be the lonely malcontent seen in "Sebunchin" than the perfect young heroes of "Yükoku" or Honba.

And yet what remains most keenly for the reader of all these works, whether by Mishima or by Ōe, is the protagonists' agonizing fear of abandonment by the emperor or by history in general. Thus, the last cries of Ore are little different from the outraged cries of the voices of Mishima's hero spirits. The emperor may be used for immoral—indeed, evil—purposes, but riding on his white horse weeping tears for his warriors or standing at the top of the stairs waiting for a boy's bullet-ridden body to reach him, he remains one of the most powerful and evocative symbols of the fears and yearnings that continue to exert power in contemporary Japan.