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Giles |
Tokyo |
Date: 21.10.2008
Time: 19:32:31
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Brandon
I was just thinking of you a few days ago when I read the notice that Ken Ogata, the star of Paul Schrader's Mishima, had died. I must buy the film from that website you pointed me too.
I first came across General Nogi myself when I was translating a book related to the Battle of Iwo Jima. I decided to add a gloss, explaining who he was, as while every Japanese knows what he did and what he represents, foreign readers wouldn't have had a clue.
Here's an interesting piece of trivia. Did you know that you can visit General Nogi's house and see the actual room in which he so famously committed suicide in the center of Tokyo? The house is quite simple, but well located between the HQ of Honda and Tokyo Midtown, a very swish development by Mitsui Fudosan. There is a certain irony in the house of this symbol of old-fashioned Japanese austerity having been engulfed by the gaijin sleaze of Roppongi. Nearest stations are Nogizaka, Roppongi and Aoyama Ichome.
I have the Patriotism film, but I tend to agree with the person who said that it would all have somehow rung truer had the lieutenant's wife been ... male!
Presumably hero-worshipping General Nogi was part of the pre-WWII national curriculum and so part of Mishima's early education. Many people were exposed to this example, but few, at least after the war, chose to follow it.
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Brandon |
South Carolina |
Date: 19.10.2008
Time: 08:00:34
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I'd like to share a passage from Mishima's "Spring Snow," as translated by Michael Gallagher:
"It was hardly surprising, then, that by the time Kiyoaki turned eighteen, his preoccupations had served to isolate him more and more from his surroundings. He had grown apart from more than just his family. The teachers at the Peers School had instilled in their pupils the supremely noble example of the principal, General Nogi, who had committed suicide to follow his Emperor in death; and ever since they had started to emphasize the significance of his act, suggesting that their educational tradition would have been the poorer had the General died on a sickbed, an atmospere of Spartan simplicity had come to permeate the school. Kiyoaki, who had an aversion to anything smacking of militarism, had come to loathe school for this reason."
My primary criticism of "Patriotism" is that the same "Spartan simplicity" that Mishima condemns as distasteful (or at least distasteful to his protagonist) in "Spring Snow" is present to such a great extent in the former. The characters are certainly one-dimensional; in fact, they seem in their perfection to be more god than man. Nevertheless, as you, Giles, have noted, "Patriotism" possesses an incredible intensity. We cannot help but read it voraciously, in terrible suspense--and then the act of seppuku itself is presented in such painful detail that we simply cannot avert our eyes.
The film version suffers from the same lack of character development, but it is, in many ways, just as riveting as the short story. Mishima made the brilliant decision of filming the entire thing on the Noh stage; the elegance of the set was very striking. The choice of filming in black and white was another example of superior aesthetic judgment; the blood stands out so starkly against that pure white background. The music is, in my opinion, a bit overpowering, though I don't think it compromises the mood. If you get a chance, Giles, you should check it out.
Oh, and what do you think of the quote as it relates to Mishima's own decision to committ seppuku?
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Giles Murray |
Tokyo |
Date: 22.09.2008
Time: 14:52:00
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SOMMELIERS OF SWEAT
Male sweat is a recurring motif in Mishima's work. Consider this sentence in "Patriotism" (164-165). "A sweet but melancholy smell rose from the clumps of hair in the armpits, where the sides of the well-muscled chest cast deep shadows, and the sweetness of this smell seemed somehow heavy with the reality of young death."
While not linking the smell of sweat with death or melancholy, T.E.Lawrence (see below) seems to have been acutely aware of it too. Look at this passage in which he analyzes the difference between English and Arab body odor.
"...I learned to pick between their smells: the heavy, standing, curdled sourness of dried sweat in cotton, over the Arab crowds; and the feral smell of Engllish soldiers: that hot pissy aura of thronged men in woollen clothes: a tart pungency, breath-catching, ammoniacal; a fervent fermenting naptha-smell." 
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Giles Murray |
London |
Date: 03.09.2008
Time: 15:49:09
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LITERARY MASOCHISTS: A RARE BREED
When translating “Patriotism,” one problem I faced was the seeming absence of any English author who shared Mishima’s visceral relish for self-inflicted pain. I thus found myself without any English-language archetype to cannabalise for style. Recently, however, I chanced upon another practising masochist with a penchant for florid prose who did write in English: T.E.Lawrence. “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” his account of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, includes an episode in which Lawrence is whipped, possibly raped. (Doubt has been cast on the authenticity of this episode, in part because Lawrence was a recreational masochist who hired boys to flog him. While this may detract from his hero image, I think it actually brings him closer to Mishima.)
Lawrence is in Deraa on a spying mission. He is arrested by the Turks and taken before the local Bey (chief), who “began to fawn on me, saying how white and fresh I was, how fine my hands and feet, and how he would let me off drills and duties, make me his orderly, even pay me wages, if I would love him.”
When the Bey starts to fondle him, Lawrence knees him in the groin whereupon the Bey has him flogged with “a whip of the Circassian sort, a thong of supple black hide, rounded and tapering from the thickness of a thumb at the grip … down to a hard point finer than a pencil.”
Here is the description of the flogging (from chapter LXXX). I think it is remarkably Mishima-like in both image and style.
...........To keep my mind in control I numbered the blows, but after twenty lost count, and could feel only the shapeless weight of pain, not tearing claws, for which I had prepared, but a gradual cracking apart of my whole being by some too-great force whose waves rolled up my spine till they were pent within my brain, to clash terribly together.
Somewhere in the place a cheap clock ticked loudly, and it distressed me that their beating was not in its time. I writhed and twisted, but was held so tightly that my struggles were useless. After the corporal ceased, the men took up, very deliberately, giving me so many, and then an interval during which they would squabble for the next turn, ease themselves, and play unspeakably with me. This was repeated often, for what may have been no more than ten minutes. Always for the first of every new series, my head would be pulled round, to see how a hard white ridge, like a railway, darkening slowly into crimson, leaped over my skin at the instant of each stroke, with a bead of blood where two ridges crossed. As the punishment proceeded the whip fell more and more upon existing weals, biting blacker or more wet, till my flesh quivered with accumulated pain, and with terror of the next blow coming. They soon conquered my determination not to cry, but while my will ruled my lips I used only Arabic, and before the end a merciful sickness choked my utterance.
The first sentence of that passage could have been written by Mishima himself, especially the part about “a gradual cracking apart of my whole being by some too-great force whose waves rolled up my spine till they were pent within my brain, to clash terribly together.”
Continuing with descriptions of pain in literature, George Orwell famously described what it was like to be hit by a bullet in chapter XII of “Homage to Catalonia,” his account of fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. (Of course, being shot is a far less lingering—and therefore harder to savour—pain than the more drawn-out flogging or disembowelment!)
…………Suddenly, in the very middle of saying something, I felt-it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with the utmost vividness.
Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock-no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing. The sand-bags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were hit by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.
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Giles Murray |
Edinburgh |
Date: 31.08.2008
Time: 18:27:24
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I am reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom about the Arab revolt against the Turks. It includes a famous passage about Lawrence being flogged and possibly raped in Deraa, a scene that appears in the film Lawrence of Arabia. Although this episode is apparently now discredited and regarded as just a figment of the author's imagination, it is an interesting literary exploration of extreme pain (albeit not resulting in death), so I shall post it up here when I get the time to type it in. 
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Giles Murray |
Thailand |
Date: 27.06.2008
Time: 13:26:53
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I watched the film "Cloverfield" last night, in which a grey and barely-glimpsed monster obliterates New York City and kills all the central characters, as well as plenty of other people. Rather like "Patriotism" the story is wholly linear, but somehow the premise is so powerful that it grips you throughout. Am I a chinpootler to think so?
NOTE: Derived from the Japanese adjective "chinpu," Chinpootler is a neologism that denotes "a person who is irredeemably trivial."
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Giles Murray |
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Date: 15.04.2008
Time: 07:49:29
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Brandon, recently "plush" is my favorite adjective to describe Tanizaki's prose in the "The Secret," as it evokes both luxuriance . . . and the material used for cinema seats!
I strongly recommend <cheating> when reading the Tanizaki story, gliding through the first 2/3rds of the story in English and only switching into Japanese for the last 1/3rd.
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Brandon |
South Carolina |
Date: 14.04.2008
Time: 23:13:56
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Good news! Michael Staley and I earlier were somewhat perplexed by Mishima's use of kamoshirenu at the end of a sentence instead of kamoshirezu, but I've found the answer.
Here's the explanation for this from Haruo Shirane's "Classical Japanese":
Zu continued to be used as a negative auxiliary verb throughout the Kamakura period, but in the Muromachi period it was gradually replaced by the negative auxiliary verb nu, which evolved from the rentaikei form of negative zu...This negative auxiliary verb nu and its sound change variation n, both of which follow the mizenkei, lasted into the modern period.
I would like also to take this opportunity to qualify the statement I made to Michael earlier about the use of the historical present in "Patriotism". I should have said that Mishima uses the past forms consistently in the first two parts of the story. After that, the historical present is present () in abundance.
Nice contest, Giles. I don't know when I'll be up to that challenge, though. I think you used the word "luxurious" to describe Tanizaki's prose, but after taking a quick look at "The Secret", I may have to call that an understatement. Perhaps "labyrinthine"
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Giles Murray |
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Date: 14.04.2008
Time: 14:32:30
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Anyone interested in winning an audio version of one of the stories, please visit "The Secret" page in GroupThink. 
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43 »
Giles |
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Date: 27.03.2008
Time: 09:20:13
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There are some interesting anecdotes and observations about Mishima in Donald Richie's "Japan Journals 1947-2004." (Richie worked as "musical director" for the film of "Patriotism, helping Mishima select the right piece of Wagner.) The passage below is from pp.136~7 of the Stone Bridge Press hardcover edition, and the reflections are inspired by a discussion about Hemingway that Richie had with Mishima over dinner.
..."And as we ate and talked I again wondered why it was that, like Hemingway's, Mishima's best work is found in the stories and not in the novels. Hemingway's novels are as flaccid as his stories are terse. Mishima's novels are as verbose as his stories are laconic.
Maybe this is because in the short story the author is under no compulsion to "make" character. Ten pages is too short a span to fully characterize, but it is just right for the telling observation. Here both authors may sketch from life in their best impressionistic styles. And here both they and we [the readers] are spared the hours of sheer toil with which "characters" are compulsively constructed.
Also, Mishima is the kind of author who prefers to tell rather than to show. The major points of any Mishima work are always related by the author, not by the characters. Here I will look up an example: "Kagawa felt an immense irritation at seeing what should have been a simple, unclouded decision to leave Jiro prey in this way to a moment's clever calculations." Kagawa shows us nothing because Mishima tells us everything...."
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