Death and the Emperor: Mishima, Ōe, and the Politics of Betrayal

Author(s): Susan J. Napier

Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Feb., 1989), pp. 71-89
Published by: Association for Asian Studies
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 Death and the Emperor:
Mishima, Oe, and the Politics of
Betrayal
SUSAN J . NAPIER

IN JAPAN IN THE LATE 198 Os, a society that is arguablyone of the most modern, prag-
matic, and materialist in the world, the problem of the emperorsystem initially seems
almost irrelevant. And yet the imperial house continues to excite controversyand con-
cern, as is clear in the full-scale media coveragegiven to an imperial visit or an imperial
illness, and this controversyis on a far deeper and more divisive level than would be
the case for such ostensible equivalentsas the British royal family.1The reasonsbehind
this excitement are both obvious and problematic:the emperoris of course tied to the
war and the whole complex of emotions that middle-agedJapanesefeel toward it, but
on a broaderlevel the imperial house is also tied to modernJapanesehistory as a whole
and thus to the conception that Japanese have of themselves in the postwar period.
In this article I discuss the role of the emperorin relation to the work and life of
two of Japan's major postwar writers, Oe Kenzaburo (b. 1935) and Mishima Yukio
(1925-70). I concentrateon Mishima and Oe not only because they both have written
extensively about the emperorsystem but also because they may be seen as occupying
opposite ends of the postwar Japanese ideological continuum. Mishima organized a
small private army and attempted a "Showa Restoration"in 1970; when it failed he
committed suicide, ostensibly in the emperor'sname. Oe on the other hand is a com-
mitted speaker for a variety of liberal and even radical issues, who excoriates all the
values that Mishima apparentlystood for. Of these values the most important is the
emperorsystem, which Mishima consideredthe font ofJapaneseculture and Oe believes
to be one of the most pernicious threats to a truly democratic modern Japan. Both
writers deal widely, even perhaps obsessively, with these issues in their essays and

SusanJ. Napier is Assistant Professorofjapanese Languageand Literatureat the University

of Texas at Austin.
The author would like to thank Howard Hibbett of HarvardUniversity and Asaii Kiyoshi
of Ochanomizu Joshi Daigaku for their help with this article.
'Coverage of the imperial house is both extensive and eclectic, ranging from the typical
gossip-column variety through abstruse discussions of the emperorsystem (tennosei)to Et6 Jun's
intriguing discussion with Ichimura Shin'ichi in which Eto compares the Showa and Meiji
emperors and suggests a similar sense of the passing of an age (Shokun19, no. 12 [Dec.
19871:27). Among recent works on tennoseiperhaps the most interesting in Yamaguchi and
Inose 1987, which addresses a-variety of topics including the relation between the imperial
house and certain financial empires and the surprisingly popular documentary film Yukiyukite
shingun(The emperor's naked army marches on; Shiss6 Productions, 1987), which details one
man's fanatical obsession with the emperor.

TheJournal of Asian Studies48, no. 1 (February 1989):71-89.

C) 1989 by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc.

71

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72 SUSAN J. NAPIER

fiction. And yet, as this article attempts to make clear, because they have been neither
blatantly one-sided nor simplistic, the emperor emerges in their fictional writings as
2
an ambiguous and provocative figure.
The complexity of the imperial role in Oe's and Mishima's literature can be traced
in large part to the ambiguity of the imperial system itself. H. D. Harootunian(1987)
describes the emperorin Mishima's thought as essentially a free-floating signifier, and
it is indeed because the imperial system has such an amorphousfunction that it retains
such a powerful impact in postwar Japan. Not only does it have a clear-cut and im-
portant ideological-historicalreferent, but it also has less obvious yet more important
emotional associations, connoting a lost world of tradition, communality, and beauty.
More than any other single signifier, the emperor is the ultimate Other, an object of
desire that varies depending on who desires it but is always distinctly and utterly
different from the reality of modern Japan.
Nowhere is this problematic function of the emperor more apparent than in the
fiction and essaysof Mishima and Oe. As the following quotationssuggest, the emperor
plays a complex and important role in the two writers' perspectives:
"I'llaskyousomething.Suppose... supposeHis Imperialmajestyhadoccasion
to be displeasedwith eitheryourspiritor yourbehavior.What wouldyou do then?"
. . . "Likethe men of the League,I wouldcut open my stomach."
. . . "Indeed?".. . "Wellthen, if he was pleased,what wouldyou do?"
Isaorepliedwithoutthe leasthesitation."Inthat casetoo, I wouldcut openmy
stomachat once."
(Mishima173:186-87)

"Therewas nothingmorefrighteningthan not being a Japanese,not being the

child of the emperor.It was morefrighteningthan dying. The reasonthat I'm not
afraidof death is that even if I die his ImperialHighnesswill live. As long as his
ImperialHighnesscontinuesto live, there'sno possibilitythat I will evervanishinto
nothingness.. . as long as I am a JapaneseI havenothingto fear,as long as I am the
emperor'schild I havenothingto fear."
(Oe 1966b:34)

Oe and Mishima treat the imperial system very differently, but the fundamental role
of the emperor remains fascinatingly similar in both authors' works as the ultimate
personal and suprapersonalrefuge from postwar history.
The issues discussed in this article take us into the ideological heart not only of
Mishima's and Oe's work but also of Japan's present political leaders, most of whom
were either children or adolescents during the war. They take us into the spiritual
territory of contemporaryJapan in general as the country struggles to define itself in
the postwar era. This struggle is most clear among members of the older generation,
emblematized by Mishima and Oe, who grew up with the "schizophrenic"worldview
that began in August 1945 when the emperor announced Japan's defeat.3 The im-

2Althoughboth Oe andMishimaalso wroteextensivelyaboutthe emperorsystemin non-

fictionessays,this articlestressesthe emperor'srolein theirfictionbecauseit is in the relative
freedomof the fictionalspacethat the two writers'ambivalence aboutthe emperorcomesacross
most clearly.
3Theemperor's problematic functionis largelyrestrictedto theoldergenerationasa conscious
concern.Most peoplebornin the 1950s and 1960s see the emperoras a politicallypowerless
symbol towardwhom they feel, at most, affection(shitashimi), but more likely apathy.See

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 DEATH AND THE EMPEROR 73

plementation of American-style education followed, and the attempted eradicationof

the prewar emperor-centeredorthodoxy. The schism between a "patrioticyouth" and
a "democraticyouth" (Kataoka 1973:215- 16) exists within manyJapaneseof the post-
war era and is encapsulated within the problematic function of the postwar emperor.
Although the problem of the emperor'sdivinity and the role of the imperial house
in general was apparentlysolved forty years ago when the postwar constitution made
the emperor into a figurehead without actual power, the emperor'sfunction remains
controversial. As Wakamori Taro points out in his book on the psychology of the
imperial system, there is a contradictionin the fact that the democraticpostwar con-
stitution retains the emperor(1973:24). This contradiction-the fact that the symbol
of militarism and imperialism for which millions of Japanese gave their lives exists
synchronically with the "new," democratic Japan-keeps controversy alive in both
fiction and essays; it is given a complex and often surprising embodiment in the fiction
of Oe and Mishima. Although the works examined in this article are all overtly ideo-
logical ones with strong political messages, they are far more than simple variations
of what Susan Suleiman (1983:65 - 195) has identified as romansa these,blatantly ideo-
logical novels that use such literary techniques as one-dimensionalcharacterizationand
a redundancy of imagery or values to promote one basic political "message."
Oe's work seems to oppose the emperorsystem, but on closer inspection we find
that the actions and attitudes of his tormented and driven charactersexpress an am-
bivalent attitude. Mishima's fiction seems to glorify the imperial house, but his fun-
damental fascination with aesthetics and his essential inability to believe in his own
romanticism undermine his apparenttextual message. These ambivalencesreflect both
personal and suprapersonalissues.
On the political level, especially in his essays, Oe maywish to excoriatethe imperial
system as evil, but on the personal level his image of the emperor is caught up with
memories of childhood, innocence, communality (ky6d5tai),and what one of his char-
acters calls "concentratedlife"-a life of intense experiences-and even with the ex-
citement of a war that his too-youthful charactershave missed out on. Similarly,Mishi-
ma's high-flown intellectual abstractionsconcerning the emperorand beauty carryless
emotional weight than his consistent literary association of the imperial house with
death, honor, and transcendentexperience, the other side of Oe's "concentratedlife."
It is little wonder that the four works treated in this article, Mishima's "Yukoku"
(trans. as "Patriotism")and Honba(trans. as RunawayHorses),and Oe's "Sebunchin"
(Seventeen) and "Waga namida o nuguitamau hi" (trans. as "The Day He Himself
Shall Wipe My TearsAway"),often revolvearoundissues of betrayaland abandonment.
It is also little wonder that the works, especially "Yukoku"and "Sebunchin,"had such
strong impact on many Japanese readers.
The texts discussed in this article are both "confrontationswith history" (Hashi-
kawa Bunzo on Mishima, quoted in Harootunian 1987:2) and attempts to escape
history. Mishima's works are a conscious attempt to recoverand transcend history by
rewriting it, whereas Oe's are an attempt to minimize-even change-history by
parodying it. The texts contain some of these writers' most explicit sexual prose and
grotesque depictions of violence, but both eros and violence are bounded by the ideo-
logical frameworkof the imperial house. This bizarreamalgam of private and public,
of sexual domain and political realm, that makes the works, especially the first two
to be considered, so memorable and ultimately so disturbing.

Titus 1980:550. Giventhis culturalcontext,however,the popularityof Yukiyukite

shingun(see
n. 4) is particularlyintriguing.

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74 SUSAN J. NAPIER

"Oh My Emperor!":Sexuality and the Emperor

in "Yukoku"and "Sebunchin"

Mishima's "Yuikoku"(1961) and Oe's "Sebunchin"(1961) are a matched pair of

ironies, from the timing of their publication and the similarity of their subjects to
their strikingly differenttreatmentsof these subjects. The subjects aresexuality, death,
and the emperor,or ratherdeath for the sake of the emperor,because both protagonists
end up giving their lives for him. The message of Oe's story is apparentlyanti-right
wing because the protagonist'ssuicide is shown in grotesque terms, whereasMishima's
seems to be a glorification of right-wing emperor worship and the beauties of self-
sacrificefor the imperial house. At face value the two storiesare close to classic examples
of romansa"these.But in spite of their many structural similarities with the roman an
these,the stories undermine their superficialmessages in several key ways and end up
expressing ambivalent and problematic themes.
"Yuikoku"and "Sebunchin"differ greatly in style. "Yuikoku"is an ornate romance
whose protagonists are explicitly associated with gods; the black-humored style of
"Sebunchin" might be called grotesque realism. But the works share one important
imagistic characteristic:the intensity and richness of the imagery they use to depict
sexuality and violence.
An extratextualsimilarity is the dates of publication of the two works. Both stories
came out in January 1961. The timing was not coincidental, because the events of
1960 made the publication of each very natural. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty dis-
turbances of that year combined massive demonstrations against the renewal of the
treaty betweenJapanand the United States and a resurgenceof the extreme right wing.
This resurgencecame to a head in October 1960 when a right-wing youth assassinated
Asanuma Inejiro, the chairman of the Socialist party, with a Japanese sword. The
incident was the obvious inspiration for "Sebunchin."The immediate inspiration for
"Yuikoku"is less clear because, with the exception of Kyjkono ie, (Kyoko's house,
1959), Mishima's fiction had steered entirely clear of overt political referencesuntil
1960. It seems likely that the generalinflamedatmosphereof the treatydemonstrations,
plus the unusual terrorist act of assassination, finally turned Mishima's interests away
from pure aesthetics and eroticism towardthe bizarreunion of aesthetics, politics, and
eroticism that is the world of "Yukoku."
Oe's novella "Sebunchin,"which chronicles the development of a shy seventeen-
year-old into a right-wing terrorist, was considered by many members of the right
wing to be a vicious attack on the emperor system because of its many explicit de-
scriptions of emperor-focusedautoeroticism. The story was so fiercely denounced by
them that its second half was withdrawn from publication. To this day, in fact, the
novella's second half, entitled "Seiji sh-onenshisu" (Death of a political youth), has
not been included in any of Oe's collected works.
In many ways the rightists had reason to be angry, because the story's character-
ization of the young right winger as a pathetic loser and a chronic masturbator was
hardly likely to win them converts. "Sebunchin"parodies the bildungsroman (novel
of apprenticeship)form, which, according to Suleiman (1983:64- 100) is one of the
key forms of a romana"these.In the course of a classic bildungsroman a young person
changes from a callow innocent to a seasoned reasonableadult by undergoing a variety
of learning experiences involving both helpers and enemies. "Sebunchin"shows the
opposite process: an unprepossessingyouth who is initially not harmful to anyone but
becomes an assassin and ends up hanging himself in his jail cell, apparentlybecause
of the ideological promptings of the right-wing organization he has joined. The boy

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 DEATH AND THE EMPEROR 75

is a total loser who only gets worse as the narrativecontinues, his mentors are knaves
and fools, and his end is pathetic.
This is unquestionably a bitter attack on the same ideological process that "Yu-
koku" extols in its narrationof the same end, a death on behalf of the emperor. And
yet "Sebunchin"is not quite the perfect anti-right wing novel that it first appears to
be. Although after finishing the novella readerswill probably not want to go out and
join a right-wing organization, they may experience a certain sympathy for the pro-
tagonist. Furthermorethe spokesman for the "good side," that is, the left-wing in-
tellectual who appears in the novel, is also not shown in a consistently positive light.
Part of this inconsistency lies in the literaryquality of the story. Although brutally
satiric in places, the narrativedoes not present the one-dimensional black-and-white
charactersneeded to get the message across most effectively. Even more important,
the reality that the hero flees is so utterly grim that even his bizarreemperor-centered
visions become almost appealing in comparison.
Such complexity is not a problemwith Mishima's "Yukoku,"whose two characters
step straight out of heroic myth. The handsome, pure-heartedLieutenantTakeyama,
indignant about his lack of inclusion in the proposed February26 rebellion of 1936
and not wanting to attack the rebels who were his formercomrades, chooses to commit
suicide in his home. His beautiful and equally pure-hearted wife, Reiko, asks per-
mission to accompanyhim, and, after making passionate love one last time, they kill
themselves. Their suicide note concludes with the sentence "Long live the Imperial
Forces" (Mishima 1966:93).
With its simple plot, its obvious pro-imperial ideology, and its larger-than-life
characters, "Yukoku" seems to provide an excellent example of romana thesepraising
the virtues of death for the emperor.The text does not give readersa chance to distance
themselves from the narrative. Instead they are plunged almost immediately into the
claustrophobicbut intense world of the protagonists' last passionatemoments. Textual
redundancies, particularly concerning the superiority of the protagonists, are every-
where. The charactersare consistently described in terms of their remarkablebeauty
and nobility. Even more obvious, "Yukoku"starts with a paragraph-longsummary of
the story, ending with the pointed words, "The last moments of this heroic and ded-
icated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep" (Mishima 1966:93),
which point readersin an ideologically approved direction from the very beginning.
The actual narrativebegins by showing the protagonists' superiority over reality
in their mutual willingness to leave it through suicide. Thus on their wedding night
the lieutenant's first action is to give Reiko a lecture on the duties of the soldier'swife,
particularlythe need for her to "know and accept that her husband'sdeath may come
at any moment" (Mishima 1966:94). His wife's exemplaryreaction indicates her will-
ingness to accompanyhim in death. Death and love are thus linked from the first. It
is not surprising that such intensely patrioticdevotion to duty is rewardedby an equally
passionate physical relationship. But these "soaring pleasures of the flesh" are never
"mere pleasure." As the text is careful to inform us, "Even in bed these two were
frighteningly and awesomely serious" (Mishima 1966:97).
At first glance no more enormous contrast could be imagined between two such
godlike creatures and the dreary specimen of humanity who is the narratorof "Se-
bunchin" and its central protagonist, hereinafterreferredto as Ore, the vulgar first-
person pronoun he calls himself. Ore is weak, unpopular, and considershimself ugly:
"My face was like a pig's" (Oe 1966c:266). But both Ore and Takeyamadie for the
sake of the emperor,and although their motivations are somewhat different, they both
aspire to be romantic heroes.

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76 SUSAN J. NAPIER

At first, however, Ore desires most to escape-anywhere-from his dreary ad-

olescent existence. The first half of "Sebunchin"does a superb job of skating between
dreary realism and black-humoredparody as the text delineates the problems of being
an awkwardadolescentin an apathetic family at an unfriendlyschool. The story grows
increasingly less credible as Ore first attempts to murdera left-wing writer and then,
after a "revelation"from the emperor,succeeds in assassinatinga left-wing politician.
Like "Yukoku," however, the story is framed by ordinary life. The contrast between
the everydaynormality of school and family and Ore's increasing obsessiveness gives
the work much of its alarming power.
Ore is moved to assassinationand suicide by a highly potent combination of mo-
tives-humiliation, hatred, and loneliness. It is significant that he first hears a right-
wing speech after a humiliating experiencein gym class. Hearing the speaker'shate-
filled invocation, "We'll kill them all!" (Oe 1966c:293) in referenceto anyone who
opposes the development of the true Japanesespirit, Ore's first reaction is pleasurable
empathy.Even more significant is his intense and initially unexpectedpleasurein being
taken for a rightist by a trio of female office workers. He thinks:

"That'sright. I'm a rightist."I trembled,struckby a suddenfiercejoy. I had

come in contactwith my true self. I was a rightist!
I turnedtowardthe girls and madeone step forward.Holdingonto eachother,
they raisedsmall, frightenedvoicesin protest.Standingin frontof the girls and the
men nearby,I lookedat them, my eyesfilledwith hostilityand hatredtowardthem
all. They all staredback at me. I was a rightist!I felt a new personinsideof me,
one who was not embarrassed when strangersstaredat him .... I felt as if I had
wrappedmy weak,petty self insidestrongarmorandhadisolatedmyselffromother
peopleforever.Rightist armor!
(Oe 1966c:293-94)

By donning his "rightist armor"Ore is suddenly transportedout of his adolescenthell

and into a world of power and intimidation and even, poignantly, of belonging. Soon
he is taken up by his fellow rightists as a model representativeof youth and begins
to speak at rallies, to much admiration and congratulationsfrom his new friends. At
the end of the novella's first half, his colleagues introduce him to his first sexual
experience as a reward for serving the emperor so well.
Ore obviously contrasts with Mishima's hero, who, one can assume, has never
worried about belonging. Because of his military companionship of the military he
has already escaped modern anomie and experienced a foretaste of the world of unity
with an absolute entity. Indeed, Takeyamajoyfully anticipates being reunited with his
fallen comradesafter his death. And yet a common factormotivates the efforts of both
Oe's social misfit and Mishima's sterling young warriorto serve the emperor:a desire
to be special and to participate in a transcendent, ecstatic experience.
Viewed from this angle, the textual redundanciesof "Yukoku" begin to give off
a more ironic air as they reveal the selfish and narcissistic characteristicsof Mishima's
hero. Takeyamais given a good deal of textual space to ruminate over his exceptional
destiny: "There was some special favorhere. He did not understandprecisely what it
was, but it was a domain unknown to others: a dispensation granted to no one else
had been permitted to himself" (Mishima 1966:111).
Ostensibly, Takeyamais motivated by duty, but in fact his motives can be read
as largely egotistical. The lieutenant is constantly awareof the dashing figure he cuts,
as when he lectures his wife on their wedding night or as he shaves himself before
seppuku, thinking "There must be no unsightly blemishes. There was a certain ele-
gance, he even felt, in the associationof death with his radiantlyhealthy face"(Mishima

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 DEATH AND THE EMPEROR 77

1966:112). He experiencesa "bizarreexcitement" at the idea of performing seppuku

in front of his wife: "What he was about to performwas an act in his public capacity
as a soldier.... A lonely death on the battlefield, a death beneath the eyes of his
beautiful wife. . . in the sensation that he was about to die in those two dimensions
realizing an impossible union of them both, there was sweetness beyond words"(Mish-
ima 1966:111). Despite the overt textual message that Takeyamais laying down his
life for "the Imperial Household, the Nation, the Army, the Flag" (Mishima 1966:111),
the text's subliminal message suggests less noble motivations. By his death Takeyama
is able to gratify his narcissistic and erotic desires and his unarticulated yearning for
an intense transcendent experience, which he has already approachedsexually a few
moments before. Although the text never explicitly makes the connection, it is clear
that the hero's sexual gratification is enormouslyintensified by its association with the
imperial house and with the presentiment of dying for the throne.
On a parodic level, the protagonist of "Sebunchin"experiences the same duo of
satisfactions-sexuality and death-within the frameworkof his worship of the em-
peror. Ore's ultimate escape from the wasteland of the real is foreshadowedat the end
of the novella's first half when his rightist friends take him to a tawdry Turkish bath-
house, where a prostitute masturbates him to orgasm while he sees a golden vision:
My organwas the sun'sradiance.My organwas a flower.I was overwhelmedby the
pleasureof an intenseorgasmand in the darknessof the sky I saw floatinga golden
being. Aah! Ooh! Yourimperialmajesty,my radiantsun, Aah, aah, ooh. After a
little while, my eyes, recoveredfromtheirhystericalvision, sawon the girl's cheeks
my spentand scatteredsemen, glisteninglike tears.
(Oe 1966c:301)

This exaggerated, satirical prose could almost be a parody of "Yukoku" in its coin-
cidence of sexuality, patriotic fervor,and intensity. In Oe's novella the satirical aspects
of this combination of sexuality, death, and patriotism are intensified at the story's
ending, when the hero masturbatesone last time, calling on the emperorto come and
take care of his "beloved Seventeen" (Oe 1961:42). The last line of the story reads
simply, "The officerwho dragged down the hanging body said that he smelled semen"
(Oe 1961:47).
And yet despite the tawdriness of the setting and the exaggerated quality of the
prose, this lonely yet ecstatic death is not totally satiric. Just as "Yukoku"occasionally
uses irony to undermine its apparentcelebrationof death for the emperor, so "Sebun-
chin" undermines its supposed excoriation of such patriotism by abandoning its oc-
casional use of irony at certain crucial narrativemoments. It may be that "Sebunchin"
was initially begun as a parody, but the work is far more complex than the simple
antifascist tract that the right wing pretended to see. This complexity lies largely in
Oe's characterizationof his protagonist.
Although the first half of the story, ending with the protagonist's passionate or-
gasmic vision of the emperor,betraysa heavilysatiricalhand, Ore is portrayedthrough-
out as an understandable,if not sympathetic, human being. Nevertheless, even though
we occasionallysympathize with Ore, his abjectnessand the absurd grandiosity of his
visions remind us that we are watching the developmentof a fanatic who is ultimately
not one of us. But the novella's second half, "Seiji shanen shisu," is less tightly con-
ceived and occasionally even loses its satiric bite altogether.
This change in orientation is most obvious in the portrait of the only left-wing
characterin the story, a writer named Minamiharawho is Ore's first intended assas-
sination victim. In an important scene Ore confronts Minamiharain an empty coffee
shop, wielding a knife and threatening to kill the writer if he does not retract an

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78 SUSAN J. NAPIER

insulting statement he had previously made about right-wing violence. The scene is
significant because it underlines the complexities and ambivalences in Oe's political
outlook. Confrontedby the frenziedOre, Minamiharatakes no action to defend himself
but instead breaks into a terrified sweat. Yet despite his terror the writer refuses to
retracthis statement and even induces Ore into a theoreticalargument, therebyblunting
the youth's will to kill him. Eventually, Ore is moved to reluctant admiration. He
reflects:

That bastard'sa coward.But for thirtyminutesnow,with sweatpouringdownhim

andtearsblurringhis eyes, he'sbeencrawlingsteadilyforwardthrougha darktunnel
of fearandgradually,throughhis ownperseverance, he'srecoveredhimself. So there
areactuallymen who live like that . .. withoutturninghis eyesawayfromthe horror
of reality,withoutturningawayfromthe humiliationof reality,justcrawlingforward
like a pig, dragginghis bellycoveredwith the ugly stinkingmud of reality.But me,
I'vebeen runningawayfromthe horrorof the realworldwith all possiblespeed, and
I've jumpedinto the glittering, rose-coloredravineof emperorworship.Couldit be
that that guy is the one with the right idea?
(Oe 1961:23)

This passage beautifully encapsulates both the adolescent'sview of the postwar world
in all its "stinking mud of reality" and the role of emperor worship as a false "rose-
colored"alternative in Oe's writings. Indeed, some Japanesecritics believe that Mina-
mihara'swillingness to "crawllike a pig" through reality is essentially Oe's manifesto
(e.g., Matsubara 1967:36). Although it may be, its impact is blunted by a coda to
this first meeting, a second encounter between Ore and the writer.
This occurs in a bar where Ore's rightist friends are partying on the very evening
of the youth's aborted attempt on Minamihara'slife. Happening into a back room,
Ore again confronts the writer, but this time the man is stinking of alcohol rather
than sweat. It turns out that Minamihara is also a drug addict and a pervert, as the
bar'swaitress eagerlyinforms Ore. Facing this spectacle, Ore changes his attitude from
reluctant admiration to calm superiority.He muses: "So you couldn't get rid of your
fear. Instead of crawling forwardinto fear, when night comes you escape into whisky
or drugs or homosexuality" (Oe 1966c:28).
Disgusted, Ore returns to his "rose-coloredravine"for his final escape. Thus, the
two encounters with Minamihara end with a puzzling lack of resolution in the char-
acterizationof Minamihara, whom one might have expected to be the hero of the tale.
Such a pathetic portrait of a characterwho could be considered the author's repre-
sentative severely blunts the presumed ideological message of "Sebunchin."
The problem of Minamihara'scharacterizationmay be resolved by turning once
more to the portrait of Ore. SurelyMinamiharais not the only characterin "Sebunchin"
who representsOe. From what we know of Oe through his essays and semi-autobio-
graphical fiction, it is obvious that Ore too displays certain aspects of his creator's
personality. Just as in "Yukoku" Takeyamarepresents certain aspects of Mishima in
his yearning for an intense experience, his narcissism, and his passionate nature, the
embarrassed,lonely young hero of "Sebunchin"with his burning desire to become the
emperor's "beloved Seventeen," resembles a particular side of Oe. This side is the
"patriotic youth" mentioned previously, obverse of the postwar "democratic youth"
with his Western values of liberalism and humanism. Thus, the antinomies between
an emperor who is the living manifestation of the land of the gods and an emperor
who is the figureheadof postwar democraticJapan are internalized in Oe himself and
his characters. The adult Oe, who majored in French literature at Tokyo University,
became a vehement antinuclearactivist, and passionately espoused relativistic, even

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 DEATH AND THE EMPEROR 79

anarchistic ideals, cannot completely break away from the golden imperial past of an
absolute faith in a living god. The problem is further complicated by the fact that the
emperor is the only symbol of continuity between Oe's childhood self and his adult
maturity.
This symbolic continuity comes acrossmost clearly in Oe's 1961 novel Okurete kita
seinen(The youth who came late), where the protagonist spends his time regretting
that he came "too late for the war" and rememberingthe days when he was the "child
of the emperor" (Oe 1966b:34). In a crucial early scene he also conflates his dying
father with the emperor, a scene that is echoed in Oe's 1973 novella "Waga namida
o nuguitamau hi." The Ore of "Sebunchin"is too young to realize what he has missed
out on, but he too is obviously conflating his father and the emperor when he calls
on the emperorto take his "belovedSeventeen"unto him. Ore's real father is a liberal
intellectual and a totally inadequate, unsympathetic father who can give the boy no
help in dealing with his many problems.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that despite all efforts at parody the final de-
lineation of emperorworship in "Sebunchin"is ambivalent. Oe is incapableof making
his protagonist quite as loathsome as he would like, because he understands and to
some extent sympathizes with the pitiful desires that ultimately send the protagonist
to seek solace in fanaticism and murder. In the same way Mishima's depiction of
emperorworship has an ambiguous if not ambivalent side. When he tries to make his
hero Takeyamaperfect, he ends up showing him up as a conceited egotist, more con-
cerned with creating a beautiful impression than with serving his country. Although
Takeyamaand his wife write as their final message "Long live the Imperial Forces,"
the actual text is much more concernedwith the ecstasies and pains of sex and death
than the joys of sacrifice for the emperor.
This brings me to the function of sexuality in both these stories. The very brutality
of the descriptions of masturbationin the emperor'sname in "Sebunchin"suggest that
sexuality is not merely an escape but also an attack. The critic Hirano Ken (1966:12)
has pointed out that in the Japan of the late 1950s sex and the emperorwere the last
taboos. By taking on both taboos at once, Oe is making a virulent assault on Japanese
social conventions. Within the bounds of the story, however,the equation of sexuality
and the emperor-even though pathetic-provides one of Ore's highest satisfactions,
a grotesque yet perfect symbol of his transcendenceof postwar reality.
In Mishima's case, his consistent associationof the emperorand eroticism has been
much discussed by critics who attempt to relate it to his presumed homosexuality
(Hashikawa and Noguchi 1976:136). Although the approachis an intriguing one, it
is ultimately reductive, especially because Oe, who is not a homosexual, has also
associated the emperor and sexuality. For both writers sexuality and the emperor are
part of a more amorphousobject of desire: intensity. It is intensity that offersan escape
from the reality that their fictional charactersmust otherwise face.
Ironically, it may well be that the two young protagonists of "Yuikoku"have had
the most satisfying escape from a humdrum existence. As SasakiYoshiokapoints out
(1976:173), the explicit, passionate descriptions of love and death contrast with and
are strongly accentuated by the quiet normality of life around them. But the protag-
onists escape from more thanrnormality. Although seemingly less painful than Ore's
world of humiliations, the world outside their little house is not a place for two such
godlike beings. By their suicide they escape the reality of historic time, in which the
onrushing events of the 1930s will bring their country's defeat and their own physical
decay will bring old age. More perfectly than any of Mishima's other works, "Yu-
koku"-in all its claustrophobicpassion-offers an escape from historical inevitability
and a rewriting of history the way it should have been.

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80 SUSAN J. NAPIER

From Irony to Madness:Honbaand "Waga

namida o nuguitamau hi"

"Sebunchin"and "Yukoku"were departuresfor their authors. Although Oe had

been concernedwith the emperorin a number of previous works, most notably Okurete
kita seinen, he had never lambasted the imperial house so forcefully or with such a
wealth of grotesque imagery. Mishima's work before "Yiikoku" had been apolitical.
This story marked the start of an important trend in the last decade of his life: during
the 1960s he rediscoveredJapanese tradition, at the same time that many Japanese,
especially the younger ones, were intent on negating all tradition. His final statement
concerning Japan's tradition was summed up in the tetralogy H-jo no umi (trans. as
TheSea of Fertility),his last work of fiction. The second volume of the tetralogy, Honba,
the work considered in this section, may be seen as his final fictional statement on the
role of the emperor in Japanese society.
Honbaappeared at a time in Japanesehistory when it seemed that the symbol of
the emperor had lost its ideological power. The turmoil of the 1960s was threatening
to consign it to the heap of broken images that constituted pre- 1960s history. In the
famous debates between Mishima and the TokyoUniversity students in 1969, however,
the very hostility shown by the students towardMishima's valorizationof the emperor
indicates that this broken image had the power to reconstitute itself. Mishima not
only kept the issue of the emperor alive but even regenerated it in two important
fictional works, Honbaand "Eirei no koe" (The voices of the hero spirits; 1966), in
which the spirits of kamikaze pilots return in a Shinto seance and accuse the emperor,
whom they envision as seated on a white horse weeping for his warriors, of having
betrayedthem by renouncing his divinity, and in a major nonfiction essay, "Bunka no
boie ron" (A defense of culture; 1968).
Although Mishima began the regenerationof the emperor, it was Oe who, by
taking this regenerationseriously in both essay and fiction, showed how deeply im-
portant the emperorstill was to manyJapanese. Oe's most important fictional response
is "Waga namida o nuguitamau hi." Partly a reaction to Mishima's Honbaand partly
a reaction to Mishima's suicide and the ideology he thought inspired it, the novella
is also a continuation, even an encapsulation, of themes and concerns that animated
Oe's fiction from its inception. Whereas Honbais Mishima's most sustained attempt
to rewrite history, "Waganamida"is Oe's most powerful attempt to show the dangers
of just such a rewriting.
Honbais a complicated work. It contains two mutually reinforcing stories of po-
litical terrorism: the main narrative of an attempted rebellion in the 1930s and a
chronicle of the Shinparen (League of the Divine Wind), a rebel group in the Meiji
period. Yet compared to Oe's "Waga namida," Honba'smessage is straightforward.
Even more than "Yiikoku," it is a classic example of the romana these. The novel's
plot pits good against evil, with good winning a moral if not an actual victory in the
end. The novel's hero, Isao, is a pure, virtuous young man forced to live in the sink
of corruptionthat characterizesJapan in the 1930s. A superb kendoist and charismatic
leader, Isao wants to bring together a group of like-minded souls in a coup that will
restore power to the emperor. He is caught and imprisoned before he can attempt the
coup but is pardonedand goes off on his own to murdera corrupt financier.Successful
in that endeavor,he then tries to fulfill his most precious dream of all: "At the top
of a cliff at sunrise, while paying reverenceto the sun.., while looking down upon
the si,arkl ingr sea. beneath a tall. noble Dine . .. to kill myself" (Mishima 1973:126).

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 DEATH AND THE EMPEROR 81

Although resembling "Yukoku"in structure and characterization,Honbais more

sophisticated because it suggests that wish fulfillment is only possible in the mind,
not in reality. There are other significant differences between the two works as well.
The most important is that Honba is not a work unto itself; as part of Mishima's
tetralogy, it must be seen in terms of Mishima's final vision of twentieth-centuryJapan.
The second difference is that this novel heavily foregrounds the "real"Japan of the
1930s. Whereas everydaylife simply lapped at the cornersof the little world of "Yu-
koku," Honbashows in explicit detail exactly how much the world has decayed since
the Meiji period and the delicate beauty of Haru no yuki (trans. as SpringSnow), the
first novel of the tetralogy. Corrupt financiers, venal politicians, and even cowardly
military men crowd its pages. The overt contrast-indeed, conflict-between 1930s
Japan and the romantic world of military death signified by Isao, the emperor, and
the traditional beauties and virtues surroundingthem makes Honbamuch more clearly
an ideological novel.
The narrative employs enormous numbers of redundanciesof characterizationto
point up Isao's superiority to the pathetic inhabitants of the world around him. He
has many of the characteristicsof the ideal Japanesesamurai. Isao practices kendo, the
most traditional of Japanese sports, and displays prowess with the sword. His per-
sonality is evoked in terms of samuraimasculinity. Such words as vivacity, manly force,
and above all purity, which recur virtually every ten pages, leave the readerno doubt
that Isao is an ideal hero.
The text underlines the fact that such an ideal is unlikely to exist in the real world
by having Isao realize at one point that "he had become a characterin a romance.
Perhapshe and his comradeswere on the verge of a glory that would long be remem-
bered" (Mishima 1973:260). This conscious transformationindicates that the hero of
Honbais not to be judged by the standardsof realistic fiction. It providesan intertextual
echo of another paean to romanticism, the chronicle of the Shinpuren that Mishima
inserts into the narrative. The chroniclepurports to be a genuine story of an uprising,
but its most important function is to create a redundancy:Honbadetails not one but
two doomed attempts to save the Japanese spirit.
The use of the two chronicles also emphasizes Mishima's ideological equation of
corruption and decay with Westernization. Although previous works, most notably
"Eirei no koe," hinted that the decay of Japan was associated with modernity and the
West, Honbais the longest and most explicit presentationof this theme. The equation
first appears in the section purporting to be the chronicle of the Shinp-uren,which
states the purpose of the league to "protect the gods of Japan so utterly disdained by
the new government"(Mishima 1973:73). But when the text turns to Isao, his words
and thoughts reveal the full magnitude of the Western contamination. Late in the
novel, Isao learns the connection between Japan'smoral decay and the influence of the
West:
And one cloudedstreamthat neverran dry was that chokedwith the scum of hu-
manism, the poison spewedout by the factoryat its headwaters.Thereit was, its
lights burningbrilliantlyas it workedeventhroughthe night-the factoryof Western
Europeanideals.The pollutionfromthis factorydegradedthe exaltedfervourto kill,
it witheredthe greenof the sasaki'sleaves.
(Mishima1973:292)

The text goes from such high-flown abstractionsto more concrete indications of de-
generationas Isao gives an impassionedspeech in court concerningthe decay of modern
Japan, covering everything from the LondonNaval Conferenceof 1930 to the corruption
of the zaibatsu. Indeed, Mishima is so anxious to get his ideological point across that

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82 SUSAN J. NAPIER

there are moments when the narrative reads suspiciously like a textbook of modern
history.
Honba'scombination of romantic adventure and textbook history is not always
successful in literary terms, but in ideological terms it certainly hammers the point
home. Furthermore,unlike "Yukoku"the text allows fewerpotential ironies. Isao seems
genuinely committed to serving the emperor,as his many impassionedspeeches show.
Nevertheless, the text's final impression may be subversive, as it suggests that such
perfect service and fulfillment are possible only in the imagination. Not only is Isao
a "characterin a romance," but also his final wish fulfillment of the perfect suicide
can only be achievedin his imagination. Although Isao has dreamedof dying at sunrise
by the sea next to a noble pine, the reality is quite different because his successful
assassination attempt has left him no time to create his perfect death.
Isao sat uprightupon the damp earth...."The sun will not rise for some time,"
Isao said to himself, "andI can'taffordto wait. Thereis no shining disk climbing
upward.Thereis no noblepine to shelterme. Nor is therea sparklingsea."
(Mishima1973:418)

But in his imagination Isao does achievethe perfectescape. As he rips open his stomach,
"the instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up
and exploded behind his eyelids" (Mishima 1973:419).
In many ways RunawayHorsesis the supreme example in Mishima's work of a
romantic call to arms, an insistence that reality can be destroyed or at least escaped
by using the correct ideology combined with the transformingpowers of the imagi-
nation. Mishima's last speech before his suicide contains many echoes of Isao's ex-
coriation of modernity. Like Isao, Mishima had to create his own perfect death, using
Honbaand "Yukoku" as models. In a perceptive (and angry) essay written soon after
Mishima's death, Oe suggests that the Honba'sartificiality, in particular the one-
dimensionality of Isao's character,is due to Mishima's desire to make the novel into
a fictional paradigm of his own suicide (Oe 1981a:235).
Whether Mishima ultimately believed in his own last words is subject to debate.
What is certain is that Oe took Mishima's speech, his suicide, and the text of Honba
very seriously. His first reaction was the previously mentioned essay in which he crit-
icized Honbafor its "artificiality" and accused Mishima of "insulting all those who
had lived through the postwar era" (Oe 1981a:241), especially his fellow writers who
had genuinely suffered during the war. His second reaction was to write the complex
and fascinating novella "Waga namida o nuguitamau hi."
"Waga namida" calls attention to its fictionality almost from the beginning by
indicating the textual presence of two narrators.The main narrator,who is also the
primary protagonist, seems to be a playwright or an author who may or may not be
dying of cancer but who has in any case retreated to a hospital bed where, donning
green goggles, he proceeds to dictate what he calls a "history of the age" to the
secondary narrator.The secondary narrator,the "acting executor of the will," is pre-
sumably his wife but might also be a nurse. Although the "acting executor"challenges
the primary narrator'sjudgment at times, it is not until the end of the novella, when
yet another narrator (apparently the writer's mother) appears, that we are given a
different vision of the "history of the age."
This history is the real flesh of the story: a bizarre chronicle of the narrator's
father's romantic attempt to lead an uprising on the last day of the war. The uprising,
essentially an attempt to "save the emperor from himself," would have involved the
bombing of the imperial palace by the father and his comrades in planes disguised to

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 DEATH AND THE EMPEROR 83

look like American jets. Only thus, the absurd argument runs, would the Japanese
people have awakenedto the approaching defeat and united to save their country.
Obviously such an uprising was highly unlikely, but not more unlikely than the
planned coup of Isao and his young comrades except in its degree of absurd detail.
Oe heightens its unreal quality by the manner in which the narratorrelates the story,
in jerky flashbacksthat are constantly interruptedwith alternateversions. The reader
is left with a very confused idea of what actually happened and with strong doubts
concerning the credibility or even the sanity of the narrator,who insists on referring
to the period of war just beforehis father'srebellion as his "Happy Days." The narrator
is thus attempting to escape postwar history, both his country's and his own, in every
possible way, from the action of donning goggles that allow him to see only what he
wishes, to his insane valorization of the war and, later on, of the emperor, to his
attempt to recreate history by a presumablydistorted retelling.
As both John Nathan (1977:xxii) and Michiko Wilson (1986:81) make clear, an
awarenessof Mishima, his attempted coup, and his emperor-centeredfiction dominates
"Waga namida." Another critic has even taken Oe to task for his "hysterical"reaction
to Mishima (Kawanishi 1979:154). The father'smad rebellion, which purports to save
Japan by destroying the emperor, clearly echoes what Oe considers to be Mishima's
distortion of Japanese values. And the father is not the only Mishimaesque character
in the novella. The narratorhimself resemblesMishima in his egocentricmanipulation
of reality, his erotic and narcissistic fascination with death, and, most important, his
obsession with the period of history that ended in 1945.
The valorization of the "golden" time before Japan's defeat is not restricted to
Mishima but is sharedby Oe and many of his fictional creations. The unnamed narrator
of "Waga namida" is as close to Oe as he is to Mishima. Whether or not he is an
alter ego of the real Oe, he shares a number of important characteristicswith many
of Oe's protagonists, most notably the two emotions that animate him, desire and
resentment. He desires an escape from the reality of being thirty-five with adult re-
sponsibilities. He resents the people who seek to block his escape both physically and
mentally by reminding him of his responsibilities. In particular,he resents his mother,
who he feels humiliated his father and himself. In part he aims the "history of the
age" at his mother, but he also tries in it to recoverthe past and rediscoverhis father
who, by dying in the uprising, abandonedhis child for the joy of seeking an intensely
transcendent experience. Now the son in his hospital bed uses words to search ob-
sessively for the same experience, which, when he finds it, will somehow unite him
with his father.
The climax of the story of the insurrection, as related with increasing fervor by
the narrator,is undoubtedly a grotesque parody of Mishima's bloody coup and also a
parody of Mishima's belief in the beauty of terroristviolence. The narratorrecalls his
father's last day when, bleeding horribly of bladdercancer, the father is bundled into
a cart by a group of soldiers who have come to the valley to make him the leader of
their pathetic rebellion. Ultimately they are all killed, perhaps bombed by enemy
planes. Or at least that is how the narratorremembers it. His mother, however, has
a very different version, especially in referenceto the father (referredto throughout as
a certainparty):

And those soldierstook him and cartedhim off in a ridiculouswoodenbox with

sawed-offlogs for wheels.... It was a cruelbusinessbut I didn'tgo out of my way
to interfere.... Well, if you'rewonderingwhetherthe soldierswho took a certain
party with them reallydrovethat truckonto an armyairfieldand stole fighterplanes
andflewto Tokyo,theydid no suchthing!Therewasa shootoutat the bankentrance,

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84 SUSAN J. NAPIER

and a certainparty and all the soldierswerekilled, yessir!

(Oe 1977:97)

His mother's words bring back the horrorsof the real worid, but her rational narrative
voice cannot penetratethe protagonist'sworld of happydays. In his crazedbut intensely
satisfying world, the imperial palace was indeed bombed and the emperor ultimately
ascended into heaven.
Thoughit was inevitablethat he die in a bombingonce, now trulyhe wouldrevive
as the nationalessenceitself, and more certainlythan before,more divinely,as a
ubiquitouschrysanthemum wouldcoverJapanand all her people.As a goldenchry-
santhemumilluminatedfrom behindby a vast purplelight and glittering like an
aurora,his majestywouldmanifesthimself.
(Oe 1977:99)

The narratoridentifies his father with the emperor:

And a certainparty,leapingbeyondhis limitationsas an individualat the instantof
his death, renderedmanifesta golden chrysanthemum flower675,000 kilometers
square,surmountedand surroundedby,yes, a purpleaurora,high enoughin the sky
to coverentirelythe islandsof Japan.
(Oe 1977:100)

Thus, in a prose more purple than Mishima's at its most florid, does Oe's narrator
envision his father/emperor'slast stand. The fragmentation of the defeat is replaced
by the imaginary aurorathat wraps the Japanesearchipelagoin a comforting imperial
glow.
Yet despite the many overtly satirical elements in "Waga namida," the novella
presents the same problem that confronted the readerin "Sebunchin,"an unevenness
of tone or authorial attitude. "Waga namida" is not a consistently successful parody.4
For example, in order to present a clear contrast between the insane and the rational,
the mother'snarrativeought to have been the story'srationalvoice whose clearobjective
accounts show the absurdity of her son's fevered myth making. But the mother has
her own axe to grind, an old hatred toward her husband and a contempt for her son,
which comes out clearly in the passage quoted above where she calls the boy's par-
ticipation in the insurrection a "cruel business" but adds, "I didn't go out of my way
to interfere."Thus, as in "Sebunchin"no rationalcenter offers relief from the obsessed
protagonist, whose golden vision of the happy days and of his heroic father haunts the
reader.ForOe's protagonist, his life hiding out with his father,when the boy wandered
the village with a bayonet clanking at his side, becomes the ideal alternative to reality.
The boy's ideal fantasy culminates in the narrator's"memory" of accompanying
his father to war, a period that the narratoris desperatelytrying to re-create. Not so
dissimilarly from Mishima's and Isao's active seeking of the transcendentalOtherness
of death, the narratorof "Waga namida" eagerly awaits death because, in it, he can
finally return to his happy days. As he puts it,

4Wilson (1986:74) draws on her reading of "Shishatachisaishu no bijion" and Oe's later
essays and fiction such as his 1980 novel D5jidai gemu to argue that "Waga namida" is a
"masterpiece of parody."Although I agree that much of "Waga namida" is parodic and it is
indeed brilliant, my own reading of this intense and angry text is that its very intensity, which
culminates in the final paragraph,unintentionally undermines the satire. When Oe tones down
both his anger and his intensity in D4jidai gJmuto create a more reasoned fictional attack on
emperor-centeredhistory, the text loses literary excitement, although it becomes more intel-
lectiialIv consistent.

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 DEATH AND THE EMPEROR 85

I considerthat periodin my life the firstHappyDaysin my thirty-fiveyears,alongside

thesefinalHappyDaysas I lie heredyingunhurriedly but swiftlyof cancer.... Don't
youagreethe patientshouldhavethe freedomto choosedilutedlife overa longperiod,
or concentratedlife briefly?
(Oe 1977:67)

If the idea of a concentratedexistence sounds similar to, if less histrionic than, some
of the yearnings of Mishima's characters,it is because Mishima and Oe are not so far
apart. The Oe of 1960 who was unableto satirize totally the passionateyoung adolescent
of "Sebunchin"was still incapablein 1973 of completely separating himself from the
despairing and passionatethirty-five-year-oldintellectual or the ten-year-oldchild soon
to be expelled from his "HappyDays." As Nathan says of Oe, "Thereis also a longing,
not so different in quality from Mishima's own, for the sweet certainty of unreasoning
faith in a god" (1977:xxii).
Both Mishima and Oe and their charactersstrongly identify this god with the
emperor in a glorious and often deathly vision. In Mishima's case the emperor may
have served as a convenient rationalefor what he wished to do anyway (i. e., commit
suicide), but in Oe's fiction as well a character'sfascination with the emperor often
leads to death: for example, in the suicide of Ore in "Sebunchin,"the slow "semi-
suicide" of the narratorin "Waganamida o nuguitamau hi," and the death of Shigeru
in Wareranojidai (Our era).
The question finally remains: how important is the emperor in the works of Oe
and Mishima? As I have tried to show, the emperoris importantfor a variety of literary,
historical, and psychological reasons. Certainly the fact that Mishima organized the
Tate no Kai (Shield Society) in the mid- 1960s to shield the emperor from presumed
left-wing activists and finally committed suicide in the emperor'sname suggests that
the emperor was of paramount importance to him. Mishima's treatment is abstract,
in some ways simply an elaborate excuse for his suicide. Mishima used the emperor
as a powerful cultural image to suggest what Japanese culture had lost and also to
give his own death a more impressive backdrop, but as a fictional image the emperor's
attraction is largely an aesthetic one. Thus in 1969 in his famous debate with the
Tokyo University students, Mishima explained his conception of the emperor in the
following highly abstract terms:

My conceptionof the emperor.. . is YamatoTakeruturninginto a white bird....

What I call the emperoris a single being with a doubleimage,a dualstructure,the
humanemperor,in otherwordsthe continuouslyreigningemperors,alongwith, to
put it in culturalterms,the poeticmythicalemperor:the coreof my thoughtis that
[this poetic mythicalemperor]has no relationto the personalityof any one living
emperor.
(Mishima1969:99- 100)

In Mishima's nonfiction essays on the emperor, most notably the 1968 "Bunka boei
ron," it is obvious that the aesthetic element of emperorworship is at least as important
as the personal one. Given this aesthetic valorizationit is hardly surprising that even
Mishima's fictional charactersYcommit suicide out of motives that are only tangentially
patriotic.
On the other hand the ideals Mishima had Isao espouse in Honbaand the moral
decay that he details throughout the tetralogy are issues that he again took up in his
last speech beforecommitting suicide. He may also have had the deep sense of betrayal
that the "hero spirits" in "Eirei no koe" complained of. Whatever the emperormeant
to Mishima on a personal level was probably similar to Oe's feelings, that is, as a

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86 SUSAN J. NAPIER

symbol of missed experiences, missed opportunities, missed lives, and missed "sweet
certainties," to use Nathan's expression. For Mishima these desired Others included
the seductive beauty of young death in a glorious cause, whereas for Oe they are
associatedwith the excitement, mystery,and potentialities of boyhood. It is significant
that forOe, the emperoris identifiedwith a sympatheticfatherfigure, whereasMishima
hints in Honbaat an overwhelming authority figure for whom Isao will gladly cut open
his stomach. For both authors the emperor suggests the potential for belonging to a
greater whole, a transcendent unity far from the atomizing anomies of the postwar
world.
Mishima attempted by his works, his "patriotic"activities, and his suicide to unite
with that entity and to transcend the writing on the wall of postwar history. Oe over
the last thirty years has continued to confront and criticize history in his writings, to
leave the ten-year-old boy who was blissfully content to be a "child of the emperor,"
and grow into a genuine democratichumanist. At times his struggle to liberate himself
from the emperorhas been so vehement that Japanesecritics have considered him the
quintessentialrepresentativeof the anti-emperorintelligentsia (Hashikawaand Noguchi
1976:139), and certainly his nonfiction essays have placed him squarely on the left
wing.
But in his fiction Oe has been unable to maintain this simplistic anti-emperor
attitude. Although in his later fiction, most notably the monumental Dojidai gemu
(1980), Oe does create a sustained attack on emperor-centeredhistory, he does this
by getting rid of any conventionally sympathetic or three-dimensional protagonists
with whom the reader might identify. Instead, Dojidai gemupresents an alternative
history of Japan through a number of legends concerning a hidden Shikoku village of
outsiders struggling against the "great Japanese empire." Rather than ambivalence,
Dijidai gemushows a thoroughgoing hostility toward the emperorsystem suggesting
that, by creating a "group protagonist," Oe is finally able to depict the issue in more
consistently black-and-white terms. Dojidai ganu, however,has been criticized by Jap-
anese critics for its artificiality (Yamada1984:111- 14), and it certainly lacks the emo-
tional power of "Waga namida."
Oe's centralprotagonist, like those of Mishima, is incapableof accepting his lonely
individuality and is last seen searching desperatelyfor some larger protective figure,
perhaps his father, perhaps the emperor:
His bayonetclankingat his side, he crawlstowardthe stonestepsat the bankentrance
wherea certainpartywaits, bullet-riddledand armyswordheld high in one hand,
the other outstretchedto embracehim, shot in the back and dying.... His head
nothingmorethana darkvoidnow,the bloodall drainedaway,he is no longercertain
whetherthe personawaitinghim at the top of the stone step is a certainparty,but
if he can crawljust one yardmoredigging at the hot groundwith his bullet-broken
handshe will reachthe feet of the personunmistakablyawaitinghim, whoeverhe
may be, and his bloodand his tearswill be wiped away.
(Oe 1977:109- 10)

In an article based on matched ironies it is ironically appropriatethat the avowed

left-wing humanist rather than the man who gave his life in the emperor's name,
should have the most poignant description of the need for the emperor. There can be
no question that the "democraticOe" abhorseverything that the emperorsystem stands
for, especially the kind of insane actions committed in the emperor'sname by someone
such as Mishima. Whereas Honbabuilds up a chilling logic of aesthetic fanaticism,
"The Day" exposes that fanaticism for the insanity it really is. Oe also understands
the kind of personality that is likely to become a terrorist:that personality is far more

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 DEATH AND THE EMPEROR 87

likely to be the lonely malcontent seen in "Sebunchin"than the perfect young heroes
of "Yukoku" or Honba.
And yet what remains most keenly for the readerof all these works, whether by
Mishima or by Oe, is the protagonists'agonizing fear of abandonmentby the emperor
or by history in general. Thus, the last cries of Ore are little differentfrom the outraged
cries of the voices of Mishima's hero spirits. The emperormay be used for immoral-
indeed, evil-purposes, but riding on his white horse weeping tears for his warriors
or standing at the top of the stairs waiting for a boy's bullet-ridden body to reach
him, he remains one of the most powerful and evocative symbols of the fears and
yearnings that continue to exert power in contemporaryJapan.

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