Yukio Mishima—controversial militarism, emasculated masochistic romanticism of violence and tradition taken into account—still takes a place as one of the more important post-war Japanese authors. The author is most renowned for his Sea of Fertility (named after the lunar sea Mare Fecunditatis) tetralogy; Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel, which as whole constitute one of the most praised literary works of the 20th Century, and among fans of Mishima there is a near unanimous agreement that these are his finest works. When I first encountered the author, I had the idea of trying to approach him from a different angle—instead of, like with so many other authors, going straight for his magnum opus, I decided to try and read all of his other works before tackling his “greatest” books. I felt this offered a great potential to more fully appreciate and understand them, as well as to offer a different perspective than the normal author-hoping nitpicking.
Thus I’ve read Confessions of a Mask, attempted The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, (which was awful because it felt like listening to the exact same protagonist as ‘Mask’, but this time even more long-winded and disorganized), The Sound of Waves (which I enthusiastically reviewed a while back), and now After the Banquet.
What immediately struck me in this latest work was the sensation that Mishima had grown up; there was a maturity in the writing, the characters, and the themes that was apparent in the first chapter, by the time he writes “But, as Kazu her realized better than anyone, her romantic stories were a thing of the past, her poem was dead (Pg 7).” This book contained considerably less chunky, and awkward writing than I’d come to expect from Mishima, and its considerable vocabulary (the translator Donald Keene was obviously struggling to find English equivalents to the obscure Kanji and traditional Chinese characters that Mishima used) and grammatical complexity were all a notch higher. More than anything, I appreciated the greater sense of organization that marked ‘Banquet’ and the better characterizations.
This is a book about politics and love, in its most distinct and subdued Japanese form. The protagonist is Kazu, a woman in her early fifties (though still remarkably youthful) who owns an extravagant restaurant called the Setsuogan, frequented by politicians of the ruling party who have made it quite successful. Its large, beautiful traditional Japanese Garden serves as a recurring motif in the book, exemplified by the last lines of the Chapter 1: “Kazu looked on people and society as she now looked on this garden. And that was not all. She owned it (Pg. 10).”
At a party for retired foreign diplomats, she becomes stricken with Noguchi Yuken, a former diplomat and a member of the Cabinet during the last months of World War II. Though as a reader I found the attraction Kazu—an outgoing, vivacious woman of warmth and easy-going formality—holds for Noguchi—a stiff, strenuously formal man who displays very little emotion and dedicates himself to acting as his archaic notions dictate him, listening little to others—inexplicable. But fall in love they do, and soon she sacrifices her life’s wealth and even her restaurant to fund his campaign for Governor of Tokyo’s province, as the candidate of the weak minority party.
This is not a story about a woman falling in love and with her passion helping a stonewalled man open himself, winning an important election and becoming a national leader in the limelight of his years. After the Banquet is more mature, and more cynical; therein lies its appeal for me. It is fundamentally a novel about how we delude even ourselves, even though Kazu thinks she understands both herself and the people around her, even though Kazu thinks she is beyond the lazy ageist delusions that others have about themselves and the world (she compares the experience of age to the dirt and dust that piles up on an unused road), but she is the most deluded person of all—it reminds me of an excellent quote from an Akutagawa short story that goes “It is important—even necessary—for us to become acutely aware of the fact that we can’t trust ourselves. The only people you can trust to some extent are people that really know that.”
The morbid imagery of their relationship and her passions creates an atmosphere—seemingly unnoticed by Kazu herself—that is both stifling and dreary, “It was obvious at any rate that Noguchi thought of this marriage as his final abode, and Kazu, for her part, felt she had found her tomb. But people cannot go on living inside a tomb (Pg. 77).” Of course to understand this, one has to approach the text knowledgeable in Confucian ideals. They make Kazu’s fear of being buried in a small, unvisited, uncared for grave seem truly meaningful.
However, Kazu eventually makes the decision to live her life in the company of the restaurant and the happiness of being busy with work and gentle friendships—choosing loneliness in death over loneliness in life, in a beautiful passage and stunning writing that I’d like to quote in it’s entirety in order to drive home the effect and sense of this theme within the novel:
There flash before Kazu’s eyes an unvisited grave in some desolate cemetery, belonging to someone who died without a family. This vision of the end of a life of solitary activity—a lonely, abandoned grave covered with weeds, leaning over, beginning to rot—sent a fathomless dark fear stabbing into Kazu’s heart. If Kazu were no long a member of the Noguchi family, she would assuredly travel a straight road leading to that desolate grave. This intuition of the future was insolently precise.
But something was calling Kazu from the distance. An animated life, every day wildly busy, many people coming and going—something like a perpetually blazing fire called her. The world held no resignation or abandoned hopes, no complicated principles; it was insincere and all its inhabitants fickle, but in return, drink and laughter bubbled up lightheartedly. That world seen from here looked like the torchlight of dancers scorching the night sky on a hilltop beyond the dark meadows. (Pg 184-185)
And with that last-line, itself a shining, exuberant sentence that cuts through the dark and oppressive airs of the tomb Kazu had constructed for herself with her marriage and relationship with Noguchi, she is freed. It is the cathartic moment, so well and subtlety executed, that it gave me new respect for Yukio Mishima, and single-handedly made up for the way which some of his past chunkiness and poor craftsmanship had lowered his writing-ability in my eyes.
The entire novel is a short but brilliant masterpiece about politics and the nature of our lives, our ideals and passions. To say it’s about love is a misnomer—After the Banquet is about delusion, and rings with a crisp trueness, a universal truth that speaks to all of us, speaking thoughts that all of us who have immersed ourselves in politics feel at times. But, strangely enough, at its very end it also contains, in the form of a letter to Kazu from their campaign manager, one of the greatest and most interesting defenses of politics (the pure electoral beast, not the actual manner of policy and governance), and the passion invested therein (and it is the type of statement I feel touches why people like Karl Rove do what they do):
I have been wallowing in the bog of politics for a long time, and I have come to be quite fond of it. In it corruption cleanses people, hypocrisy reveals human character more than half-hearted honesty, and vice may, at least for a moment, revive a helpless trust…Just as when you throw laundry into a centrifugal dryer, it rotates so fast that the shirt or underwear you’ve just thrown in vanishes before your eyes, what we normally call human nature instantly disappears in the whirlpool of politics. I like its fierce operation. It doesn’t necessarily purify, but it makes you overlook what should be overlooked. It works a kind of inorganic intoxication. That is why, no matter how badly I fail, no matter what disastrous experience I encounter, I shall never leave politics as long as I live. (Pg. 186)
Cynical, but to me it somehow rings deeply and verily. For those who have passion and love in following politics, for those who ever seen a delusion about themselves and their actions, for those who have ever tried to reach out, and, as the book puts in one place, sum up the world and control it, and even for those who haven’t, this is a must-read book. Its intelligence and sharp explorations of human character make it unforgettable and enlightening.
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