Extremes and reality
Yukio Mishima
Mitsuharu Inoue's 'The Flock of Earth' is the most interesting novel I have read since his 'The Double-Headed Eagle.' It is filled with the extreme situation of the present age. From 1945 until recently, conveniently for writers, the whole of Japan was completely enveloped in an extreme situation, and they could write a tremendous novel no matter what part of the things they touched. I could write a novel like Inoue's and say that this is "the reality of Japan" and be done with it. However, we are now in an era of equalisation of the peaceful mood.
The fact that he is a novelist is not a surprise to me, as it is to many people. Mr Inoue collects and weaves together the atomic bomb survivors, the special tribes, rape, undersea coal mines, juvenile delinquents, the killing of MPs, the white twisted intestines of pigs, the blackened purple heart, the head of Mary, the knowledge of the reclusive, the "human stone," and the urine of old women, which he seems to have created, like a bouquet of flowers. The "relationship" between the elements is inescapable, and each element is carefully placed in opposition to the other, leading to a situation in which misery curses misery.
The line "If we're idiots, you're the ones who can't stop bleeding" forms the final, hammer-like phrase of the tragedy, where one misery is carefully orchestrated to symbolize the misery of another. The author's eye or skill is such that we can read it with pleasure, free from the remorse of wondering if we are allowed to enjoy such things. In other words, the atomic bomb is usually thought of as an irreversible and inescapable reality, but the author's eye or skill creates a situation in which even the Hibakusha can be cursed in a different vocabulary, as in the poignant line on the right.
The author's technique may clearly have been intended to synergise the realism, but in some cases the two kinds of misery are counterbalanced by this, creating instead a dark humour that is not quite humanly permissible to utter.
Have you guessed what I'm thinking of? 'The Flock of Earth' is a work reminiscent of Tsuruya Nanboku. In the world of Nanboku, evil, death, betrayal, and corpse mutilation are so commonplace that we enter their world with ease and breath. The synergy of Nanboku is so beyond our daily experience, the frequency with which evil meets evil, sin meets sin, death meets death is so far beyond mathematical probability, that even if we trip over a coffin three times in the space of an hour, we feel no more than we do over a pebble.
But I am not trying to say that Mitsuharu Inoue and the world of Nanboku lacks reality. Rather, I am suggesting that there is a situation where one misery envelops another, where one misery and another symbolise each other to the point of annihilating their social, economic, and political causes, and where only the blackest of humour emerges, where the elusive reality of today is elusive.
The "ground swarm" is a manifestation of the (in)reality of today's elusive reality, of the extreme and reality. If one reads 'The Flock of Earth' as a kind of problem novel (as the author himself intended it to be), then the question of Chikao Unami's human conscience after such a tragic culmination of events is not only a problem for the author, but also for the readers of the book. On the contrary, the damage is diluted, and at the same time, the appearance of the hundred demons surrounding St Antoine is just terrifying. It is designed to bring out the vague yet bizarre reality of all contemporary events. What I read with interest was actually on that point.
I regret to say that Junnosuke Yoshiyuki was first to mention a novel I thought I had unearthed in a survey of the best novels in the 'Bungei' magazine survey, but it was Akiyuki Nosaka's novel 'Ero-jishi-shi' that appeared in the November and December issues of 'Chuo Kōron' Novels. This is a tremendous novel, not like the "well-crafted middle-grade novels" that the sensible people of the literary world sometimes pat on the head with a smile. It is a novel of the ugly, the cruel, the incorrigible, and yet it is as bright as the midday sky in a rubbish dump, a novel that the bigwigs would sniff at and avoid. It is interesting to note that Mr Nosaka, who blathered on and on about "playboi," was such a bitter man.
The three main characters are a tough middle-aged man who makes it his business to provide erotic shows, a beautiful woman who is willing to play the role of his partner, and a young man who plays the role of a seducer but is only interested in his own self-flagellation. The author's writing is reminiscent of the writings of Shofu Muramatsu in his later years, and his unrefined brushwork seems to reflect directly the irrefutability of his writing, and the vulgarity of his writing. The writing has a transparent effect. The supreme beauty of a woman resides in the expression of a woman who is debating whether or not she will come to the invitation.
The young man who has learned to accept that he is just another month's work, has nothing to do with people or life except to think of that moment with a woman and to debase himself. The middle-aged man who, in the course of giving an erotic show to others, comes to feel satisfaction only in the faces of the enraptured customers, abandons the pleasure of his own direct action. Although Nosaka did not intend to write such a grandiose novel, his point of view that the lewdness of the sexual attitude of modern society can be replaced by the symbolism of artistic activities even in its lowest form, is very realistic. The view of society of the unreliable, in which even the lowest of the low meets even the highest of the high, has a certain insight into social structures such as our own recirculating fountains, and so whether these eroticists are the only "beholders," they, too, play a role in that they are forced to adopt a distressed attitude towards their sexuality. They, too, are burdened with a role in forcing themselves into their sexual predicament. This is a kind of ruffian novel, but it is a horrifyingly stagnant and driven picaresque, and unlike Tanizaki's 'The Key' or 'Diary of a Mad Old Man,' the sex life of a leisurely old man was once a profession, which is significant. There is meaning in it being an (illegal) report.
This novel has an alarming ending, in which the author writes of a middle-aged man who dies in a car accident and continues to have an erection after his death because of a bad stroke, which, had he been born in Saikaku's time, he would have concluded, "I don't know, which is his head." Neither Namboku nor Saikaku is that far removed from 1964.