The story “From the Wilderness” by Yukio Mishima was written and published in Japanese in 1966, but wasn’t translated into English until now. It will be included in a new collection, “Voices of the Fallen Heroes: and Other Stories,” which comes out in January of next year. Why wasn’t it available in English earlier and how did you decide to translate it?
Mishima wrote a hundred and seventy short stories, so it’s not surprising that a number of them that merit translation remain untranslated. Looking for late Mishima to include in “Voices of the Fallen Heroes,” I happened on this story in a volume of his complete works, and found it beautifully constructed and moving. Perhaps most importantly I felt certain, reading it for the first time as a translator, that I could make it work in English.
Is Mishima hard to translate?
Walter Benjamin’s seminal (though maddeningly obscure) 1923 essay “The Translator’s Task” inspired an ongoing debate on the subject. My own commitment is to conveying in the target language the author’s voice in the original. From that point of view, Mishima’s work is, at least theoretically, amenable to translation in a way that, for example, the Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s is not. Oe considered himself a liminal figure in Japanese society and, accordingly, developed a language that constituted an assault on traditional Japanese, intentionally deforming his own sentences. Mishima conceived of himself as the ultimate insider, heir to a long tradition of Japanese beauty: his writing, reflecting this image of himself, is in harmonious accord with the inherent, unalloyed genius of the Japanese language. A wordmaster, he was also a meticulous mosaicist. The translator need only find the right verbal stones and install them in comely sentences, in cadences that mirror the author’s own, and Mishima’s voice will emerge. Needless to say, this is easier said than done.
In the story, an obsessed youth breaks into the home of a writer called Mishima. Do you know if the story was based on a real incident? If so, how much does it stray from the nonfictional reality?
The story is indeed based on an actual incident, widely reported in the press, that befell Mishima and his family in April, 1966, several months before he wrote “From the Wilderness.” As for its veracity, there is no way to know how closely it follows what actually happened, but I suspect that the rendering is a faithful one, including what Mishima had to say about himself in the final pages, which swerve into highly personal revelation. I say this with Japan’s long history of autobiographical fiction in mind. In the so-called I-novel (or Ich-Roman), the Japanese author was expected to reveal—confess—aspects of his own life with no attempt at camouflage. A prime example was Toson Shimazaki’s 1919 novel, “A New Life,” in which the author revealed in meticulous detail his incestuous affair with his brother’s daughter. The scandal the novel created obliged Shimazaki to move to France to avoid a confrontation with his own family. The work was accounted a masterpiece.
Mishima would have been aware that with this story he was evoking the I-novel tradition, and he would certainly have known that the basis for appreciating this genre of “fiction” had always been its degree of truthfulness, the more damning the better. Japanese critics were skeptical of the narrator’s closing insistence that he has told the truth, considering it gimmicky, but it seems plausible to me that “From the Wilderness” is an exceedingly rare example of Mishima putting aside his protean mask and writing something close to unvarnished autobiography, a self-portrait in the first person. The language is spare for Mishima; the narrative is relatively unembellished, almost journalistic.
The story begins with a kind of procedural description of a break-in, first as it was experienced by the narrator, and then as it was experienced by his parents and his wife. It ends as something quite different and more confessional. Do you think Mishima planned to write the story in the way he ended up writing it?
I can’t prove this, but I imagine that Mishima saw before he began to write that the disturbed young fan who broke in to his house would open the door to the highly personal material he ends the story with.
The story ends with a description of the misery and desolation that Mishima (the character, and, presumably, the author) has felt, his fundamental aloneness. Knowing that he died by suicide, four years later—after his own deluded, criminal act of defiance—makes this story even more poignant to me. Am I drawing a false parallel?
An informed Mishima reader encounters a singular challenge: dragging Mishima’s work out of the shadow of his final act, with its centripetal pull on the imagination, to assess it on its own merits. “From the Wilderness” is a case in point. Perceiving the loneliness that colors the story and being aware of Mishima’s awful demise four years later, how can the reader fail to be moved by a poignancy that transcends the text!
You knew Mishima personally and translated his work in the nineteen-sixties. What made you decide to write a biography of him?
In 1967, about to leave Japan, I angered Mishima by deciding to translate Kenzaburo Oe’s novel “A Personal Matter,” instead of Mishima’s most recent work, “Silk and Insight.” In an article in the Japanese monthly Shinchō, he described me as “an American hoodlum who has been seduced by the Japanese Left.” I am ashamed to say that I retaliated in an article for Life, in which I wrote, “Reading a novel by Yukio Mishima is like visiting an exhibition of the world’s most ornate picture frames.”
News of his ritual suicide three years later reached me as an abstraction, a concept impossible to comprehend, much less feel; and I doubt I would have embarked on a biography if I hadn’t received a phone call from my mentor at Harvard, Edwin O. Reischauer, who had been ambassador to Japan under J.F.K., suggesting that I owed it to myself to write one. He had always been fascinated by Mishima, he said, but nothing he knew about the Japanese had helped him understand Mishima as a human reality. If anyone could make him comprehensible, he insisted, it was me. Those words from a man I esteemed were all it took.
Arriving in Tokyo in the fall of 1971, I contacted Mishima’s widow, Yoko, and she agreed to meet me at Zakuro, a restaurant that had been one of her husband’s favorites. When I told her that I intended to write a biography and asked if she would help me, she sighed and said she didn’t really want a biography but if someone was going to write one it might as well be me. I spent that year interviewing people in Mishima’s diverse worlds who wouldn’t have given me the time of day if Yoko hadn’t called ahead and asked them to coöperate. On one of my visits to pick up books at the rococo house where she still lived—now preserved as a museum—I asked as off-handedly as possible, “When will I have a chance to hear Yoko-san’s story?”
