Yukio Mishima and Donald Keene, Together Again

We are in the midst of a Yukio Mishima renaissance. As we approach the centennial of his birth next year, Vintage makes ready to bring out a new collection of the short fiction of this strange, intense, often misunderstood writer, who died by his own hand at age forty-five in November 1970. Last October, the New Yorker published his long-neglected short story, “From the Wilderness.” 

A new exhibition at Gakushuin Women’s College in Tokyo presents photos, texts, and manuscripts that illuminate Mishima’s relationship with Donald Keene, the American translator who introduced many of Japan’s authors to the world. The exhibit will run until Dec. 20, with an extension possible if not likely given the wide interest it has aroused. 

Mishima attended a predecessor of the college as a boy and young man. Students at the school have assembled documents and photos for this exhibit as part of a curation course, under the oversight of Motonori Makino, a professor of museology.  

The remarkable exhibit these young people have put together provides an in-depth look at the friendship between Mishima and Keene. According to the Japan News, the two met at a Tokyo theater one day in 1954, when Keene was a student at Kyoto University and Mishima’s literary reputation had already taken off, with the publication of novels such as Confessions of a Mask and Thirst for Love and the story collection Death in Midsummer. 

Among the items on display are photos of Mishima and Keene in conversation, manuscripts, and pages from Hojinkai, the school’s literary magazine, featuring tales and essays by the precocious boy. 

As it happens, Makino himself was friends with Keene, who acted as an advisor to the Toyo Bunko Museum in Tokyo, where Makino today works on the planning side. 

In this age of the iPad, Netflix, and Bluesky, not everyone in Japan has much time for a neurotic, enigmatic, self-destructive writer dead for more than half a century. That is sad, given Mishima’s deep, not to say obsessive, concern with issues of Japan’s character and identity that are of the utmost timeliness in 2024.

“Young people today do not know about Yukio Mishima and Donald Keene, and some students had never read their works. Making them aware that they are two great writers and literary figures was the first obstacle,” Makino told Book and Film Globe. 

In Makino’s view, Mishima today would be still more obscure, particularly in America and Europe, without the dedicated efforts of Keene.

“There was no scholar in the West, and perhaps not even in Japan, who was as well versed in Japanese literature as Professor Donald Keene. I believe that Keene was the only person who could accurately translate the delicate and glittering vocabularies found in Mishima’s works into English,” Makino said. 

Makino called the exhibition a hit with the public and said he expects visitors to return again and again as their resurgent or newfound interest in the subject grows. It owes its success largely to the efforts of Keene’s adopted son, Seiki, the Donald Keene Memorial Foundation, and the students and staff of Gakushuin University, he noted.

One of the benefits of the show, Makino said, is to have helped soften the reputation of Mishima among people who knew little about him and had concerns about what they did know. After all, this is the guy who tried to abduct a senior member of the Japanese military, in order to make a political statement, and then committed seppuku, or ritual suicide.

Here is where the exhibit comes in. Recently, a high school classmate of Makino’s who said she had long thought of Mishima as a “scary person” came to see the show, he recalled. The experience deeply altered that image for her.

“Her impression seemed to have changed after viewing the short stories and poems from his time as a student at Gakushuin, his correspondence with Donald Keene, and the peaceful expressions on their faces that can be seen in the photographs,” said Makino. 

Everyone involved with the show deserves credit for helping keep Mishima alive in the public mind and for correcting misperceptions of him as some kind of monster. 

Nonetheless, as we applaud the success of the Tokyo exhibit and look forward to wide discussion of Mishima and his legacy next year, it is well not to lose sight of just how deeply conflicted this writer was or to forget the nuances of his work and thought. Let’s be realistic. Not everyone is ready to accept Mishima.

It is laudable that the exhibit has helped bring out Mishima’s friendly and personable side. But anyone who really wants to understand the writer should read The Life & Death of Yukio Mishima, by Henry Scott Stokes, who spent time in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was part of the same circle of literary men as Keene and Mishima himself.

Amid Stokes’s diary entries recording encounters with Mishima in theaters and restaurants, we find accounts of a writer who was often irritable, egotistical, depressed, and gave hints of suicidal urges. 

Stokes reprints a diary passage from November 12, 1970, just weeks before the author did commit seppuku: “Dinner with Mishima. He was in a most aggressive mood. Charming as usual but flashes of great aggression. Implied that I might as well pack my bags and go home, as ‘no foreigner can ever understand Japan.’” 

We should be grateful that Mishima got on well with Keene, at least in the photos to which Makino refers. However, it is clear from Stokes’s account that the blind spots of western scholars with regard to Japan could be a source of acute frustration. 

Stokes recalls what he terms a “strange” conversation that Mishima had with an Irish friend named Janie whom Stokes took to meet the celebrity. In this account, Mishima seems taken with her “white skin, red hair.” That is not all. He even says kind things about Janie’s writing.

Yet he just cannot get his disdain for those with a superficial knowledge of Japan or its literature, customs, culture out of his system. According to Stokes, Mishima insisted “that the scholars ignore the ‘dark’ side of the Japanese tradition and concentrate upon the ‘soft’ aspects of Japanese culture.” 

This may remind you a bit of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, spending his time in Tokyo making whiskey ads, visiting a video arcade, appearing on a moronic game show, flirting with a much younger American girl. 

Stokes writes that Mishima was also an arrogant man who believed his literary style to be far superior to that of any of his contemporaries in Japan. To illustrate this point, Stokes quotes Keene saying, “He wanted to conquer the world with his books.”

But what was Mishima about? “From the Wilderness,” the New Yorker story published in October, describes a family thrown into alarm when they come to believe that a crazed interloper is trying to break into their house. Then it turns out that the source of all their fear is a shell-shocked young man who just come out of a literal wilderness, and also, as the narrator of the story explains, a spiritual one. Something has been missing from his inner life. He just can’t figure out what that thing is. 

Our task is to identify that element without which Mishima found contemporary life to be hollow and pointless. To be sure, the answer will not comfort today’s readers. 

While seeking to pursue a literary conquest of the planet, Mishima did not condemn the strains of Japanese nationalism and expansionism that helped drag much of the world into a conflagration in the 1930s and 1940s. Stokes may have provided us with the most detailed account of the influence of what came to be known as the Ni Ni Roku Incident of February 1936 on Mishima’s thought and writing.

The issues involved were complex, but in essence, a faction of the Japanese Army that wanted to launch hostilities against Britain and other western powers had a bitter quarrel with another faction that wanted to attack the Soviet Union instead. All the officers of both factions were nationalists, Stokes explains, but their goals were mutually exclusive, especially when the government called for the dispatch of members of the second faction to Manchuria, which would have radically diminished their strength and influence in Tokyo. Members of the Kodo-ha faction protested this decision with a doomed anti-government revolt. 

Stokes quotes a lengthy excerpt from a November 1966 interview with the Sunday Mainichi magazine, in which Mishima discusses the effect that this event had on him. “This incident occurred when I was eleven and had a big spiritual influence on me. My hero worship and feeling of collapse, which I experience now, are both derived from the incident,” Mishima states. 

Here is the inspiration for one of Mishima’s most powerful stories, “Patriotism.” 

Some western readers, steeped in an ideology that instils hatred of their own civilization and history, will have trouble with all this for one or another reason. They may not be able to accept that a nonwestern writer had such a fierce and unremitting belief in his nation’s military, political, and spiritual destiny, to the point of justifying invasion, war, and subjugation of other peoples. Or, if they do recognize this reality, they may end up wanting to cancel Yukio Mishima as anathema to contemporary values and beliefs. To be sure, Mishima could have done far more to condemn racist, militarist Imperial Japan’s atrocious actions and the death, torture, degradation, and sexual slavery it unleashed on so much of the world. 

The strange case of Yukio Mishima will force a reckoning, as it reminds readers everywhere of the challenge of separating the art from the artist.

(Images courtesy of Motonori Makino.)