Even ‘minor’ Mishima is major entertainment..
When I say ‘entertainment’, I’m using the term in sort of the same way that Graham Greene used to refer to the not-as-literary-minded-thrillers he pumped out in between his more ‘serious’ works, or how, in modern times, the Irish, Booker-prize winning author John Banville began to publish thrillers under the name ‘Benjamin Black’ — a categorization that doesn’t perfectly parallel Yukio Mishima’s habit of serializing some of his ‘lesser’ works in popular magazines of the day, but encapsulating these stories as ‘entertainment’ is at least a handy, albeit reductive, way of zeroing in on works of this Japanese master that have not received the same aesthetic appreciation of his more well-known achievements.
Yet a novel like 純白の夜 (‘Pure White Nights’), published in 1950, and not yet translated into English, is nevertheless worthy of a wider audience, if only because it implants a rather timeless — and, some might declare, timeworn — tale of upper-class jealousy and despair onto a postwar Japan milieu, thereby highlighting the how even the perpetually wealthy Tokyo businesspeople and socialites from elite, enduring families, their riches seemingly unaffected by the ravages leading to their country’s reconstruction, can nevertheless find their own emotional lives torn asunder by the same savage sutures of the heart that can’t ever quite stay stitched together in the rest of us plebes.
In the afterward to this paperback edition, author Mariko Koike details how this novel was serialized in the magazine 婦人口論 — a magazine for women, focusing on feminist themes — from January to October of 1950, before being assembled into book-form in December. Mishima had published CONFESSIONS OF A MASK, his first novel, the previous year; this book, according to Koike, marked the first time that Mishima had serialized one of his works.
Perhaps it is somewhat appropriate, that the novel seems to have been initially aimed at a primarily female audience, since its appreciation and sympathy for the inner agony of a woman caught in an unhappy marriage seems to be particularly insightful, and remarkably broad-minded, for a male Japanese writer of that era — all the more so considering that Mishima was barely in his mid-twenties when he wrote it.
Here we bear witness to the ongoing inner turmoil of Ikuko Muramatsu and her husband Tsunehiko, long-standing members of Tokyo’s enriched environs. Ikuko is twenty-two; Tsunehiko is thirty-six, but both are often, throughout the text, compared by Mishima, their creator, to children, physically and emotionally.
Yes, they live in the kind of prewar posh house in Kamiyacho in central Tokyo that still bears the nameplate it wielded before any battles began, and most certainly, Tsunehiko’s job as a banker provides them with the kind of wealth that affords them the opportunities to vacation in countryside cottages and hobnob with longstanding American friends — quite the rarity for Japanese in 1948, only three years after the war’s end — but there is certainly something inherently childlike, even childish, about their mutual attitudes towards love, marriage and the possibility and portent of infidelity.
All their internal thoughts (as sketched out by Mishima) revolve around their own unending assessments as to their own abiding unhappiness. In a Japan still only beginning to collectively recover from its own atomic devastation, and still under the managerial sway of a United States-led occupation that maintains strict societal control, these two miserable folks are entirely caught up in the romantical ornamental whims typical of their own social set of the times. It’s therefore not surprising that these fleeting and fervent emotional fluctuations eventually rip them apart.
Of course, as mentioned above, Mishima was writing for a popular women’s periodical of the times, for upper-class consumers, I’m assuming, who presumably had enough disposable income to afford leisure-time reading material, so it’s no wonder that he zeroes in here on the kind of characters who these readers would, if not know personally, at least recognize here and there as they themselves bopped around Tokyo, taking note of the rather-rich folks around them rushing to and fro.
For part of the delight of this book is the means by which Mishima underscores an inbuilt social commentary into the subtext of this ostensibly straightforward account of an inadvertent menage-a-trois.
And while the plot is quite simple (even trite some might say) — Ikuko finds herself enraptured one night when she meets her husband’s old college friend at a party, after which the two of them gradually work their way up to surreptitious meetings and illicit rendezvous — there is, beneath these woe-is-me laments about matrimony and the true intentions of hidden paramours, a kind of ongoing subtle sharp jab at the circumstances which allow them to both prosper and suffer.
As both a banker’s daughter and the wife of a banker, Ikuko, barely into her twenties, is already bored by her marriage, as her days seem mostly to revolve around shopping expeditions and lunches with her sisters; her husband, Tsunehiko, is busy at work and barely can fathom what his wife might be thinking at any given time. (Indeed, throughout the novel Mishima lets us into their inner thoughts via bracketed proclamations that usually highlight their romantic anxieties, all-those-dangerous-ideas-that-they–dare-utter-to-each-other.) Their life together consists primarily of parties amongst other wealthy folk, who also all seem utterly immune, if not indifferent, to the rebuilding-Japan of their times.
In fact, the war, and its aftermath, rarely come up, at least explicitly. There are a few stray mentions of pre-or-postwar domiciles that evaded bombings, as well as one particularly fascinating scene at in a secret club in Kamakura in which wealthy Japanese mingle, and perhaps hook up, with the occasional Americans who frequent the joint, but otherwise the Tokyo environs of this novel reflect the cloistered economic cocoon of its characters.
Which makes the eventual ‘tragedy’ all the more palpable and pathetic.
The novel painstakingly paints a cumulative kind of romantic angst and ennui that is only accentuated and undercut by the shallowness of these lives and the formality and beauty of the language Mishima uses to depict these unhappy and immature characters. (Whether male or female, young or old, everybody here seems to be depressed debutantes.)
Ikuko’s thrill of opening a letter slipped to her by a handsome stranger, or the joy she feels at getting slightly drunk for the first time in her life, or the novelty of taking a taxi by herself, all highlight how profoundly young she truly is, yet she is already possessed of a despair beyond the short span of her years. A new love offers new hope, but to what end? How can she realistically leave her husband? How could she ever run off with his old buddy from university? What havoc that would cause in the rarefied world they all continually co-exist in, all of their rich peers roaming around that realm of endless banking trips and weekend driving excursions and bubbly booze slightly sipped a elongated dinner parties.
We can’t help but feel Ikuko’s pain, to be sure, as well as that of her husband, and their whole sordid saga — which, I should point out, does not end all that well — reminded me in many ways of the works of Edith Wharton, which I’ve getting into a little bit over the past couple of years. I’ve read THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and her collected short stories, and Mishima’s dissection of the miserable life-status of those-with-a-shitload-of-money reminded me very much of Wharton’s own delineation of high-falutin’ traumas.
In other words, Mishima here is kind of working in a couple of literary traditions that are as much western as they are Japanese — romantic tragedy and social realism, I’m sensing. (In her afterward, Mariko Koike brings up Balzac as another of Mishima’s influences.) He mentions both OTHELLO and Melville at various points, indicating both his own storytelling reference points as well, as the sort of famous works of literature that people in these character’s intellectual strata would undoubtedly themselves recognize, and there is something timeless and familiar for readers of all national stripes about this sad tale of star-crossed lovers who can never quite make it all work.
There’s nothing exactly narratively ‘new’ here — not even for 1950 — but the striking details that Mishima highlights, and his own use of the Japanese language, make the novel stand out and shine. Mishima constantly uses similes or metaphors (which Japanese authors, in my experience, don’t often do) to express his characters’ outer and inner states. (One savage observation is the sight of Ikuko, wearing a dark mourning dress given to her by her husband’s old friend just before they make love, in which the redness of her tongue looks just like a spot of blood on a black bird. What a very odd, very Mishima observation!) The distant sound of a horse drawn carriage, the prevalence of inner monologues, the droll observation at a dance of how the disdain for the Charleston had now given way to contempt for the Jitterbug — all combine to create a vividly tart reading experience, albeit a difficult one, linguistically speaking. Almost seventy-five years down the temporal and literary line, the Japanese language Mishima uses here remains ornate, even obtuse; on every page, in virtually every sentence, vocabulary in kanji is rendered via furigana, indicating that even readers of his era would not be familiar with how to pronounce many of the words. (It’s illuminating to notice how much the language itself has changed, to in the intervening years; I was rather startled to see ‘Paris’ rendered here as 巴里, since famous foreign place names these days are inevitably written using katakana alone.) Mishima’s prose, always elegant, even when written for popular magazines, seems somewhat like a well-constructed trap here, ensnaring his characters within the kind of gorgeous linguistic accoutrements that only accentuate the surface-level lives that suffocate them from within.
This novel might not reach the grand philosophical heights of his SEA OF FERTILITY tetralogy, or the startingly blunt psychological truths of CONFESSIONS OF A MASK or TEMPLE OF THE DAWN, but as with one of his other ‘lesser’ works, A COMPLICATED BOYFRIEND, which I recently reviewed (linked to at the bottom of this post), it remains a tellingly intimate, potent portrait of people who feel like they should love one another but are not truly sure why, embossed with a mythic substrata of ‘forbidden love’ that adds a slightly mythic twang to a postwar tale of upper-class Japanese angst.
That’s quite a literary combination, come to think of it.
Only somebody as gifted as Mishima would have attempted such an artistic act, let alone pulled it off.
That he did so at the very beginning of his career, with such nonchalant, periodically-intended aplomb, is solid proof that the commercial intention of providing mere ‘entertainment’ for the masses can often result in a kind of ‘contemporary’ commentary that not only delineates the times, but, inadvertently, also transcends them and endures, ultimately speaking to readers decades hence with the kind of cynicism and sympathy of a young author that only distance itself can make truly audible. Not pitch-perfect, no, but what tones that are struck!
nihongobookreview 
One thought on “純白の夜 (‘Pure White Nights’)”