My Itinerant Era

Yukio Mishima

My Itinerant Era

Yukio Mishima

Now that I am living as a novelist, I realise that when I was a boy, my desire to become a novelist, no matter what, was a truly bizarre desire. Such a desire was neither beautiful nor romantic, but was in fact due to the social maladjustment of my own existence, which my boyish mind dimly foresaw and feared. Unlike today, there was no such fantasy that I would become rich if I became a novelist.

Now, where should I begin to talk about my literary journey? I think it would be best to put aside for a moment my literary activities at school and begin with my connection with the Nihon Romanists during the war. I am certain that I was on the periphery of Nihon Romanticism, and at that time two threads connected me to it. One thread was my teacher at the Gakushūin, Fumio Shimizu, and the other was the poet Fujima Hayashi. It was Mr Shimizu who first introduced my novels to society outside the school, and who gave me my current pseudonym.

It was also he who opened my eyes to Japanese classical literature. He is a well-known scholar of Izumi Shikibu, and the Izumi Shikibu Diary in the Iwanami Bunko collection was revised by him.

At the time, a group of disciples of Dr Kiyoe Saito published a magazine called Bungei Bunka (Literary Culture), in which Yoshiaki Hasuda, Riichi Kuriyama, Tsutomu Ikeda, and Dr Shimizu were among its members. There was a view of the Nouvelle Vague. My 'Hanazakari no Mori' was published in this magazine through his introduction, and I was invited to gather with his coterie.

The literary culture was a fortress that defended the vague classical beauty of Japan against the war's aggressive leadership theories and the utilitarian aims of total war. But at the same time, its contradictions in its criticism, which fastidiously excluded Western reason, made its arguments somewhat dogmatic. Reading it now, however, it is a magazine with a surprisingly tranquil, quiet tone, not unlike a wartime magazine, and if we turn to the July 1943 issue at random now, we will find the following table of contents.

Cover and cuttings by Shiko Munakata

Dedicated to the loyal spirit * Yoshiaki Hasuda

Mahoroba of Ryoba ・Ikeda Tsutomu

Shizuo Ito

Kimonohime's style Fumio Shimizu Sotohorihime

Bodhidharma Song - Teika's Legend, Riichi Kuriyama

Yukio Mishima Willow of Dead Branches

Of these, 'Chūrei ni tamemasu' is a preface quoting from Shoku-nihongi, 'Nachi' is a poem, 'Kuji-no-Marohonro-ba' is an etymological study of an ancient word, 'Itsuhime no Ryu' is an essay against the times that "literature is originally another name for a soft and gentle body.' 'Daruma-uta' is the most literary biography of Teika, and 'Karega no yanagi' is a short essay mourning the crushing of the island of Atta Island. It was strange that a magazine with such content was published at such a leisurely pace in such an era, and of course this was due to the self-preservation efforts of the coterie, but among the coterie, Hasuda was the most right-wing, while Kuriyama was the most cynical, even showing a superficial attitude to the current trends. Mr Hasuda later carried out his ideology by committing suicide following the defeat in the war. For more information on Mr Hasuda's death, see 'Yoshiaki Hasuda and his death,' which appeared serially in the poetry magazine Kajuen published by Jiro Kodakane.

These people admired the work of Haruo Satō, Yôjurô Yasuda, and Shizuo Ito, and their names came up frequently at meetings. I began to collect Yasuda's books and still consider books such as 'The Crowned Poet,' 'Japanese Bridges,' and 'Izumi Shikibu's Private Essays’ to be among the most beautiful books I have ever seen. The writing is somewhat confused and difficult to understand, but I have a feeling that this was the style that most faithfully conveyed the spiritual conditions of that era.

I was surprised by the 'Romanist Criticism,' which was a very militant critique, but when I actually examined each of the works that he so absurdly praised, I was astonished to find them to be the most boring works of art in the world. It was a book that seriously confused my literary ambitions. Eventually, I finally had the chance to meet the mysterious Mr Yasuda.

2.

I believe that I visited Mr Yôjurô Yasuda to ask him to give a lecture at my school. In hindsight, it is strange to think that my impression of Mr Yasuda and that of Yasunari Kawabata were very similar: the manner of living as a host when receiving guests in the tatami room, the Kamigata accent that lingered faintly in his low voice, the quietness of his face, which did not change much and was not greatly frightened by anything. The two men left an oddly similar impression, perhaps due to the commonality of their hometowns, but also because they were both dressed in kimono when we first met. In Kawabata's case, I did not get the impression that he was so different from his literature, but in Yasuda's case, it was very unexpected. From his literature, I tried to imagine a lion who could speak and argue.

In Shugo Honda's 'History of Postwar Literature,' a dialogue from a magazine called Vulcanon is quoted, in which Yasuda talks about a story I told him about a lunch box thief at the women's Gakushūin. Mr Yasuda said, I have no recollection of this incident. In general, I'm the kind of person who talks about selfish things and forgets everything.

Since it was between the two, I think that they had a lot of frivolous chatter.

The only thing I remember is, "How do you feel about the style of the Noh song, Mr Yasuda?"

He replied: "Well, it's like what has been called tsuzure nishiki for a long time, a text like an encyclopaedia of the time."

This answer was a source of great disappointment to me as a young man, and it seems to have stayed in my memory because of that disappointment, which was a nuisance to Mr Yasuda. I was beginning to be interested in medieval literature at the time, and the glamorous style of the Noh chants, in particular, was an aesthetic resistance using language at the very edge, with a hidden consciousness of the last days of the world. I was expecting an alarming comment from Yasuda on this subject, as is typical of the Romantics. But of course, he was under no obligation to give such a serious reply to a young guest who was so eager to talk about lunch-box thieves and the like.

I remember that I had visited Yôjurô Yasuda, Haruo Satō, Sakutarō Hagiwara, and Shizuo Ito only once each, because I was a spoilt brat who was more pleased to be loved than to approach people he respected with a sense of awe.

In junior high school, I exchanged thick literary letters every day with Toshitami Boshiro, a senior student, and started a coterie magazine called Aka-e with Fumihiko Azuma and Yoshiyasu Tokugawa, also senior students, but perhaps my first external literary friend through Bungei Bunka was the poet Fujima Hayashi.

It was through Mr Hayashi that, I am sorry to say, I came to know for the first time the epitome of a true literary youth. He was of course a unique poet, a Romanist like the character in Gautier's memoirs, but for the first time I realised that literature and the literary world could be so much food for dreams. Until then, in the lukewarm literary atmosphere of my alma mater, the literary world was nothing more than a direct connection to the splendid drawing rooms of the Shirakaba-ha writers.

Hayashi was a symbol of everything: his feverish yearning for literature, the legendary daily lounging of Haruo Satō and other Romantic writers, his avid collection of gossip, his longing for the dandyism of artists in food-starved Tokyo. Some young poets gathered around him. Among them were, as usual, lunatics, who gave off a beautiful but vivid, Romantic atmosphere. This was something I had never experienced in the literary circles of my alma mater.

Mr Hayashi spoke in a way like, "It's nice, isn't it? It's kind of like Mr Satō, isn't it?" I was a literary critic, but I had never met anyone like him before. Until then, I had never known such a physical way of describing a literary figure.

The reason why I was able to associate so easily with poets seems to be based on a misunderstanding or illusion of self and others, as I had written poor poems as a boy and studied under Ryūkō Kawaji, believing myself to be a poet and others half believing it. The story of how I woke up from this dream is described in detail in the short story 'The Boy Who Wrote Poetry,' so I will refrain from recounting it here.

3.

After leading such a literary life, it is human nature to want to publish a book one day, and since I could not expect to return alive if I was sent to the army, my desire to leave a memorial of my short life of twenty years grew even stronger. This may sound tragic, but the mood of the students at the time was a lighthearted, cheerful, but nihilistic one.

I was filled with something that could be called a rhythm, and I admit that at nineteen I was not only naïve, but also quite opportunistic in my literary ambitions. I am not saying that all of me in the preface to the first edition of 'Hanazakari no Mori' is like that, but I find in some of them the shadow of a small, small opportunist. My first collection of short stories, 'Hanazakari no Mori' (A Forest in Full Bloom), was published by a publisher called Shichijo Shoin in the late autumn of 1942. It was probably the last publication by Shichijo Shoin before it was merged with Chikuma Shobo. The fact that a collection of short stories by such an unknown author was made available to the world is entirely due to the efforts of the Bungei Bunka coterie and, directly, to Mr Masaharu Fuji.

Masaharu Fuji is still a master at introducing newcomers to the world one after another. His kindness in giving me, a person with whom he had no connection, a sudden and unexpected opportunity, has since left me without any ties of friendship. It will forever remain in my heart as a bright, pleasant, and mysterious memory.

In hindsight, during the war, I could already see the germ of a post-war spirit in him. For some reason or another, this small young man got in touch with a few small publishers, took me on a business-like leisurely stroll through Tokyo in the final days of the war. Unlike Fujima Hayashi, he did not engage in much literary discussion, but rather teased people with his fast-talking Osaka dialect, and lived the spirit of endless joking that blossomed later in the Viking magazine. He was extremely energetic, but he did not specify the direction of his energy, and he never forgot to keep his self-effacement to himself with a fearless glint in his eye. I sense in Fuji the most natural bridge between the wartime Japanese romanticism and the vibrant post-war spirit of the Kansai style.

How could a collection of novels as urgently needed as 'Hanazakari no Mori' be published in Tokyo when the air raids had already begun? I had to secure an allotment of paper, so I remember making a number of outrageous complaints, something about "upholding the literary traditions of the Empire" and so on. Anyway, permission was granted for the allocation of paper, and Shichijo Shoin published 'Hanazakari no Mori,' perhaps in desperation, using a rather fine yellow paper of cotton imitation, with a beautiful cover printed in the original colours of Yoshiyasu Tokugawa's copy of 'Korin.' As there were no other books available at the time, 4,000 copies were sold out within a week. With this, I was ready to die at any time.

Of course, the reaction of the literary world at the time was unthinkable, but the fact that there were many people who later bought and read the book at the end of the war shows how extraordinary the publication of such a book was under the circumstances of the time.

At the time, I was going to university and didn't know when the red paper would come.

I can say that it was a rare time when my own view of the apocalypse and that of the times and society as a whole were in perfect harmony. I have never been a skier, but I suspect that the strange pleasure of a sudden descent may have been similar in some way to that feeling.

The narcissism of the border between boyhood and adolescence exploits everything for its own sake. It will even take advantage of the destruction of the world. The bigger the mirror, the better. As a twenty-year-old, I could dream myself into anything. I could have dreamt of myself as a thin and short-lived genius. Or the last young man of the Japanese aesthetic tradition. Or the last of the decadent of the decadents, the last emperor of the Tang dynasty. And also with the suicide squads of beauty.

These crazy thoughts eventually led me to identify myself with Muromachi shogun Ashikaga Yoshihisa and to write my "last" novel, 'The Middle Ages,' which might be interrupted by a red paper at any moment.

The novel 'The Middle Ages' was an aestheticisation of the apocalypse that had been nagging in my mind since I had asked Mr Yôjurô Yasuda about the style of yokyō Noh songs, and I continued writing it at the Nakajima Aircraft factory, where I was then working as a mobilised university worker. The banquet music and the names of the young men used in the work were revised in later years with the advice of the medievalist Yushi Tada, so there are a few differences from the first draft.

Around the same time, my short story 'The Hunt for Esgai' appeared in the Bungei magazine, courtesy of Mr Yoichi Nakagawa, and I wrote 'Ayame-mae' at the request of Gendai, and my literary world expanded little by little in the course of the intensification of the air raids.

When the red paper finally arrived in the early spring of 1945, I was suffering from bronchitis and had a high fever, which was mistaken for pleurisy and I was sent home the same day. I would omit this, but I felt that, regardless of whether or not the red paper came, it was inevitable that I would be able to win 100,000,000. 'The Story at the Cape,' which I continued to write until the end of the war, was one such work. Such a feeling must have had a very strong impact on my growing mind, and even now I still see nuclear war as inevitable.

4.

The fact that we still tend to think of nuclear war as inevitable may be due to the fact that we project our emotional experiences of a period in the past into the future. Seventeen years have passed since the end of the war, and yet, for me, reality still seems unshakeable, and I feel as if I am in a tentative state.

During the war, I lived my life relying solely on my own sensitivity, which may seem foolish in retrospect, but at the time, it was an inevitable way of life.

However, human memory is unreliable. According to a postcard of mine from those days published by Dr Fumio Shimizu in the monthly bulletin of a literature anthology last year, in May 1945, I was at the Naval Kōza Arsenal in Kōza District, Kanagawa Prefecture. At my desk, I had the Diary of Izumi Shikibu, the complete works of Akinari Ueda, the Kojiki, a collection of Japanese songs, a collection of Muromachi period novels, and five or six volumes of Kyoka. I reported to my teacher that I was translating Yeats's one-act plays in the style of Noh chants.

It is my nature to tend to look to the temporal, but the powerful impression of an era that could be destroyed by air raids tomorrow, and in fact, thanks to air raids, what existed yesterday may not exist today, is not easily erased in seventeen years.

I would never lie about such a thing, so I must have really translated it, but it seems to have been wiped from my memory. If I had tried to translate it, it would have been 'At the Hawk's Fountain.' But my language skills were then, and still are today, so poor that I could not possibly have done a good translation, and I must have given it up halfway through.

As this example shows, it is not easy to make the connection between Yeats and the period at the end of the war. Rather than trying to connect these unconnected things, I was working hard to abstract the reality of the time. Literary associations had ceased to exist and I was absorbed in as small and solitary an aesthetic hobby as possible. I was a daring friend who, although he thought he would eventually die, spared his life and went to bed every time the alarm sounded.

I always ran into the dank air-raid shelter with my unfinished manuscript in my arms, even though I knew I would eventually die. Leaning my head back through the hole, I could see the beauty of the air raids on the distant metropolis. The flames shone in different colours, and beyond the night plains of Kōza County, it was as if one could see the distant bonfire light of a lavish banquet of death and destruction.

It is probably certain that I was happy in those days. I was not only happy in life, but also in literature, because I had no worries about finding a job, no worries about examinations, was provided with food, albeit in a meagre way, and had no responsibility for my future. No critics, no competitors, just my own literary pleasure. To call such a state of affairs happiness now would be to deny the beautification of the past, but even so, when I think back as accurately as possible, there was no other time when I did not feel so burdened by who I was. I was weightless, my education was that of a second-hand bookshop (in fact, at the end of the war, the only books that money could honestly buy were second-hand), and I lived in a small, fortified castle.

--Then, with the end of the war, I was suddenly attacked by misfortune.

5.

After the war, I could not give up my dream of becoming a novelist, but I did not have the confidence to stand on my own feet, and as anyone would think, I tried to lead a double life, with both schoolwork and creative writing. For me, when I was weighing the scales, the life of an ordinary law student was lacking.

The world outside was in the grip of a storm, and the literary world was in the grip of a storm. Soon after school was over, I had no choice but to go straight home.

I was secretly eager to ride the wave, but my reputation within my small wartime group had faded away, and at the end of the war, my dream of being a symbol of the times had vanished, and I found myself, at the age of twenty, already behind the times. This left me at a loss. Radiguet, Wilde, Yeats, and the Japanese classics, which I had loved, had all fallen out of favour with the times. In fact, it is an exaggeration to say that during the war, secret personal tastes were permitted, and post-war society quickly resumed a free market in wild ideas and artistic concepts. However, we have entered an era in which people are willing to throw away everything that does not suit their constitution. The boy who had been a prodigy in his small group during the war was, after the war, just a helpless student who was not treated as a full-fledged member of the group.

Around that time, I learned that Chikuma Shobo, which had been merged with Shichijo Shoin, had moved to the second floor of an old building facing the train street between Suidobashi and Ochanomizu. I brought in a large number of manuscripts, including 'Hanazakari no Mori,' 'Chuzei,' and 'Misaki de nani no Monogatari.'

This was a funny story that I only found out about ten years later, but later an elderly friend of mine, Mitsuo Nakamura, who was then an advisor to Chikuma Shobo, read these manuscripts and gave them 120 minus points. It seemed that I had made a point, and the manuscript had never seen the light of day. In dealing with this situation, I am confident that I, at the age of twenty, had a very calm and aristocratic attitude, which I had learned at my alma mater. At the same time, I couldn't help but think that I had no choice but to study hard and become a government official.

I was not able to do this.

At the time, new magazines were appearing one after another, but most were eager to collect manuscripts from the great masters, and the times were not so settled that newcomers were eagerly awaited. The works of great writers such as Kafū and Shiratori had a fresh appeal, as if people were being served a feast of pure white rice for the first time in many years.

Returning to Radiguet's literary beginnings, I wrote my first long story, 'The Thief,' a manuscript that would later annoy Yasunari Kawabata many times, and when I visited him on New Year's Day of 1946, I brought with me 'The Middle Ages' and 'The Cigarette.' Since the publication of Bungei Seiki had ceased to exist, only the first part of 'The Middle Ages' had been in print until then. My memory is a little hazy as to why I had the courage to visit Mr Kawabata, but as I did not have the courage to visit a famous writer without a letter of introduction, there must have been something that gave me the strength to do so. I was certain that he had read 'Hanazakari no Mori' or 'The Middle Ages' in Bungei Seiki and had heard someone express praise for it, and that this had reached my ears, which I took as a source of support.

At the time, he was renting a house in the back of the Great Tower of Kamakura from Mr Ariake Kambara, and was living with the landlord. There were no buses in those days, so I had no choice but to walk from the station, but when I went there, it was full of customers. I had only known monotonous school life and home life until then, and this was the first time I came into contact with the vitality of the post-war literary world. Publishers appeared like mushrooms after the rain, flooded with requests for reprints of his old works, and moreover, the faces of Chotaro Kawasaki, Yuji Ishizuka, and Yasuko Kawakami, among others.

Not being familiar with the literary world, I looked at Mr Kawasaki as if he were a real fishmonger. He was sitting silently in the middle of the room, looking as calm and unaffected, neither funny nor amusing, as he does today in 1963.

6.

It was not long afterwards that I received the good news that 'The Cigarette' had been recommended by Yasunari Kawabata for publication in Ningen. I flew to Kamakura to thank him, and even now I cannot forget how happy I was at that moment. It was the first time my work had been introduced to the "post-war," or rather orthodox, literary world.

I flipped through the pages and read only one line: "You are a learned man, aren't you?"

At that time, I was told that 'The Middle Ages' would be published in due course, and an unexpected joy came over me. I decided to ask him to return the manuscript of the 'The Middle Ages' to me for re-examination, and as I was turning it over in my lap, Mr Masao Kume, who had just arrived, received the manuscript from me at the suggestion of Mr Kawabata.

He must have had a "wry smile" when I quoted Chinese poetry and the like as a student who had grown up in wartime. I was no longer allowed to go to the Kamakura Bunko, but instead used the office on the second floor of the department store as my home office after returning home from university.

Since I was on the road, I came to visit him frequently, even though I had no business with him. Kimura was the editor-in-chief of Ningen.

I was also introduced to Mr Tokuzo Kitai, and I cannot tell you how much I was strengthened by the technical attention I received from this rare 'reader' of fiction. My early works in Ningen, such as 'Yoru no Shikkō' and 'Haruko', were rewritten and revised under Mr Kimura's careful attention, to the extent that it is no exaggeration to say that most of them were co-written with him. The works were rewritten and revised according to his meticulous care.

The relationship between a budding writer and an editor of a literary magazine should be like the relationship between a new boxer and an experienced trainer. Even now, there remains a tradition of this kind of cross-interest relationship between editors of literary magazines and young writers, and if this spirit were to disappear, a loss-making business such as a literary magazine would instantly lose the reason for its existence. With the development of the mass media, I would like to warn newcomers that if they become unduly obsequious to editors or try to negotiate with them solely on the basis of political interests, this will only serve to undermine their own literature.

From this time onwards, I have come to realise that the hardship of being a newcomer is the hardship of being made to wait. Even if there was a manuscript by a newcomer that had been decided to be published, it was often put aside as a pinch-hitter, and if a manuscript by a major or popular writer came in just before the monthly deadline, the newcomer's work would have to wait until next month. Until 'The Cigarette,' which I had expected to appear in the March issue, finally appeared in the June issue, I did not utter a word of demand. I was disappointed when I saw the monthly newspaper advertisements for Ningen, and my feet naturally led me to the Kamakura Bunko, where I would go for a long time because they knew what I wanted. I was forced to wait in the waiting room for a long time.

After an afternoon lecture at the university, I came to the Nihonbashi area, and in this waiting room I had a look at the booming post-war literary scene.

It was interesting to see the people of the city. I also saw Kan Kikuchi here. He brought a very beautiful Chinese woman in a fur cloak, a rarity in those days, and said to her: "You know, this man's novels are very good. The one he just wrote is a masterpiece."

She was highly praised. People were busy on their feet, and in their busyness, the new era was clearly in full swing. Although we had lost the war, there was no longer any fear of bombs falling, free speech and corporate success had come together, and each and every employee seemed to be engaged in the most rewarding work. However, I was sometimes struck with a sense of dismay. Is this really reality? Where had my reality gone? I had thought until recently that I would never see such a peaceful view of my office again, but now it had happened in six months! At such times, I found some small comfort in gazing out of the waiting room window at the vast expanse of burnt ruins. When 'The Cigarette' appeared in the June issue, I was somewhat less than thrilled, having waited so long. As for the reputation, it's fair to say that it didn't matter at all. Disappointed again, I started studying law.

I must also record my brief encounter with Osamu Dazai, although this may be somewhat back and forth in time.

I had some literary friends after the war, though they were not as ardent as my wartime friends. "Mishima, who wrote a novel on Ningen."

At the time, my title was "Laerutsu." With such a title, it would have been easy to become one of the Bohemians, but I was too timid to do so. My boyhood teacher Michiaki Kawaji, son of Ryuko Kawaji, who now runs the Matsuo Ballet, was at the time a poet for boys with a strong, headstrong temperament; Yoshikata Aso, now a member of the Socialist Party, was a delinquent with a brilliant pair of eyes and the author of a poetry collection called 'The Black Rose'; the playwright Seiichi Yashiro was the first to express his youthful enthusiasm for Osamu Dazai. There were many other strange characters, including a buxom thirty-year-old poetess, but all had lost their wartime dreaminess, so what was realistically miserable was just that - miserable, and there was no atmosphere of youth or vibrancy. After publishing various famous short stories, he began to serialise 'Shayo' in Shinchō from the summer of 1947. I had previously bought a copy of 'Fictional Wanderings' at a second-hand bookshop and read the trilogy and 'Das Gemeine,' which was probably the worst choice I could have made to begin reading Dazai's work. This self-caricature has always been the most frightening thing for me, and the literary world consciousness behind his works, as well as the provincial ambition of a boy who came to Tokyo with a saddle on his shoulders, were the most unbearable things to me.

Of course, I recognise his rare talent, but it is rare for a writer to make me feel such a physiological repulsion from the very beginning, and in some cases, due to the law of love and hate, I think it was because of this that he was able to hide a part of me that he also wanted to hide.

Perhaps it was because he was a writer of a type that was deliberately exposed. Thus, at the same point where many literary youths were delighted to find their own portraits in his literature, I may have rushed to turn my face away. To this day, however, I have the prejudice of a city-bred person and cannot help but snub my nose at the slightest hint of the "provincial ambition of a boy who came to Tokyo with a saddle." This is the same attitude that I have held towards many of the up-and-coming, seemingly urbanist writers who have emerged since then. I was the first to smell it, and I couldn't stand it.

The fever for Dazai among the young people around me was growing, and at the time of the publication of 'Shayo,' it seemed to have reached its peak. I therefore became more and more obsessed, and began to advocate Dazai's criticisms.

When 'Shayo' was published, the public and the literary world were extremely excited, and as there was no television at the time and entertainment in general was scarce, the public's attention was focused on the literary incident. Today, this kind of literary fervour is very hard to imagine in the world at large. Readers have also become frighteningly cool compared to those days.

I immediately started to read the book, but got stuck in the first chapter. The aristocrats in the novel are of course the author's allegory and do not have to be real aristocrats, but as long as it is a novel, some "authenticity" is necessary, and when I was shown a description of language and lifestyle that differed so much from the old pre-war aristocracy I had seen and heard, that alone made me feel uncomfortable. I was disgusted by that alone. A noblewoman's daughter refers to the kitchen as "the kitchen," "the way my mother eats," and "the way she eats her meals." The mother herself thinks that it is enough if she can use honorifics for everything.

Then, he would use honorifics to himself and say things like, "Kazuko, guess what your mother is doing right now." And then he urinated standing up in the garden! My criticism of Dazai's literature was becoming so loud that my friends were interested in having me meet him. It seemed Mr Yashiro and his friends were already frequenting Mr Dazai's place, and it was no trouble to take me there.

8.

I can't remember the season in which I visited Dazai, but it must have been autumn, around the time the serialisation of 'Shayo' began. I think the friends who took me there were Seiichi Yashiro and his literary colleague Harada, who later died prematurely, but I can't be sure. I was probably dressed in a kasuri kimono and hakama, and I had never worn kimono before, but the reason I was dressed like that was fully in consideration of Dazai, and to exaggerate, I went out with a spoon in my pocket. I ascended the dark stairs and opened the karakami, and found a large number of people sitting in a twelve-tatami mat room under a dark electric light. It seemed to be an eel restaurant. The light may have been quite bright at one time, but in my mind, when I think of the atmosphere of "praise of despair" in my memory was, inevitably, that of a somewhat tattered tatami mat and a terrorist-like state of mind with dark electric lights.

Mr Dazai and Mr Katsuichiro Kamei were seated side by side in the upper section, and the young men were stationed around the room from the front. I was introduced by a friend and immediately invited to sit in front of Dazai, where I was given a saké cup. The atmosphere in the room seemed to me to be somewhat sweet, like that of a believing priest and congregation, all moved by his every word, sharing their excitement in secret and waiting for the next revelation. This may have been partly due to my own bad preconceptions, but I am sure there was also an atmosphere of naivety in the air. The "pampered" atmosphere was different from the pampering of today's young people, but it was very peculiar to that era, very pathetic, and on the other hand, it was dark and lyrical, filled with pride that they were representing the zeitgeist. ……In other words, it was too "Dazai-like." On my way here, I was looking for an opportunity to say the one thing I had made up my mind to say out loud. If I did not say it, I would have lost the meaning of my coming here, and my literary life would have been lost forever.

I am ashamed to admit, however, that I said it in a rather unprofessional, smirking tone. In other words, I said this to the real Mr Dazai right in front of me.

"I don't like Dazai's literature."

At that moment, he suddenly stared at me, pulled back lightly, and looked as if he had been caught red-handed. However, he immediately collapsed, turned halfway towards Kamei and said, without saying a word to anyone: "Even though you said that, you've come all this way, so I guess you still love me, don't you? You know that?"

Yes, yes, my memory of Dazai is suddenly cut off. I had left some time ago, but Dazai's face, from the depths of the post-war darkness, suddenly approached me, and then quickly slipped away again into the darkness. His stricken face, his Christ-like countenance, his face that was in every sense the "victim," disappears once more, never to be seen by me again. Now that I am the same age as Mr Dazai, I do not regret my own youthfulness, but at that time, I will never be a young man,

I can imagine how he felt when he was told to his face by a young man he had just met, "Your literature is brilliant." I myself have had many encounters with this kind of thing.

In an unexpected place, at an unexpected moment, an unknown young man approaches, his mouth twisted into a smile, his face pale with nervousness, and in order not to miss the opportunity to prove his sincerity, he suddenly says: "Your literature is beautiful." It is like the fate of a literary person to meet such a literary assassin. Of course I don't love such young men. I don't tolerate all this youthfulness. I will either smile like an adult and let it slip through or pretend not to hear it.

However, the only difference between me and Dazai, and by extension between the two of us in literature, is that I will never say, "I like him because he's so similar to me."

6.

Compared to the newcomers of today, I was very fortunate in my rookie days (and this is partly because I did not make a spectacular debut) in that I was able to proceed with my work in a very slow-moving manner. It was a time when the Akutagawa Prize was not immediately ostracized like it is today, two or three weekly magazines were still outside the literary world, middle-grade novels were not yet flourishing, mystery novels and television were not yet a shadow of their former selves......... In place of all this, there were a number of literary magazines, which were in a state of flux, and which allowed the study of short stories in what was known as "pure literature" to be carried out slowly and to order. Magazine editing was also more leisurely than it is today, and certain magazines that are now specialising in middle-grade fiction were at that time places where literary work could be done at leisure. The length of time between a newcomer's debut and the time when they could be used commercially was also significant.

―Well, at that time, I was only once invited to join the Communist Party. The person who made this suggestion, Mr Hideo Odagiri, must have forgotten it, and he himself may have said it lightheartedly, but it remains a strangely vivid memory for me.

I first met Mr Odagiri at a round-table discussion, and after the meeting, as we were going home in the same direction, we went down to the Ginza underground station together and waited for the train.

The subway station was still dingy and dim. It may have happened in passing, but Mr Odagiri asked casually and in a gentle tone, "Would you like to join the party?"

I remember that I was so completely taken aback by this tone of voice that I could hardly speak. Overwhelmed by my astonishment, the incoming train roared by, and the conversation was cut short as the train was again very crowded and the two of us were pushed apart by the crowd.

I said to him, "I'm sorry." The words had the sincerity of a pastor's invitation to join the church.

Nowadays no one would ever come to me to invite me to join the Communist Party, but I still have a strange memory of having once received such a sincere invitation, even if it was in jest. It is nothing more than a small episode when placed in the context of the times, but what if I had said yes at that time? When I think of this, it seems to me that the shaping of a person's political position is not only a matter of solid thought and serious life experience, but also a matter of chance and coincidence. My current political position is, when I think about it, a rather loose one, but it is more likely to have come about spontaneously by some arbitrary force than by any position of my own choosing. On the other hand, I can't get rid of the idea that politics is nothing more than that. Together with Dazai, I am reminded of his loyal servant, Hidemitsu Tanaka, but I cannot help but think of him as a man who was also a politician.

Tanaka's figure remains in my memory, together with the strong wind blowing at the streetcar stop in front of the new building of Kamakura Bunko, which had already been moved to Kayabacho.

At that time, his Philopon addiction and drunkenness had already been touted, and on top of that, he was over six feet tall, so I met him at least once, but out of caution, I bowed to him from afar. He returned the bow, but it was a very hot day and he had taken off his jacket and was holding it up, the wind blowing against his white shirt. We didn't speak to each other because I kept my distance, but I couldn't help feeling that such a man, so absorbed in literature and politics and so lost in sentimentality and decadence, had somehow misplaced his role in life. If he had rowed the boat like a man, nothing would have happened to him. Even if he had become a novelist, surely he would have had a stronger character than Dazai, and what would have happened if he had dragged Dazai along and forced him to row the boat? Why did God give such a weak heart to a six-foot tall man? While I was thinking about this, Tanaka, as lonely and unsteady on his feet as the village fire watchtower, eventually got on the train and left, and that was the last I saw of him.

10.

The first and final issue of the pamphlet Overture came out in December 1948, but before the publication of this magazine, which brought together all the writers of the post-war school, the post-war factions had gradually become acquainted with each other. This round-table discussion attended by all the members of Overture was a rare one, in which the participants had no idea what was being said. The typeface itself was vividly reminiscent of the chaos, but it was already possible that it would be like that.

Whether or not I myself was a "post-war" writer is none of my business, but the atmosphere at the time was such that if I did not have a "post-war" label attached to my work, I would be regarded as a writer of outmoded, old-fashioned literature. Any intermediate form, or even its unique existence, was not recognized, at least among emerging writers. In the midst of this storm, I could not get enough of the old literature, and I was not satisfied with the new literature, and that was my true feeling. "I'm not tired of old literature, and I'm not satisfied with new literature."

I had been chanting the ancient prayers in my heart. That is why I have never been in a state of mind like "the spring of my life."

In retrospect, it was not so much a period of great creative endeavour as it was a period of unprecedented criticism in the history of modern literature. Rather, it was only natural that I, as a young man without a critical brain, should have been unable to understand everything as I said things and made judgments based on my senses. The post-war literary era was, in a sense, the era of those who believed in "the spring of life," even though there were signs of mutual conflict between the various factions.

Among these schools, the one with which I first felt a comparative affinity was the school of Matinee Poetique. I felt as if the aesthetic culture I had carefully preserved during the war had been lost with the defeat and my wealth frozen by the new yen, so I could not help but applaud these people who had come out of the woodwork, proudly flaunting an aesthetic and poetic culture of "anachronism" that was not even considered valid today. I was so grateful to see them. I felt as if even my old yen notes had a value thanks to them.

As I watched, however, the movements of these people became quite political. I was surprised to learn that they were all disciples of Tatsuo Hori, and I thought to myself, "Well, I guess that even Mr Hori himself, although he ended up as a solitary poet thanks to his illness, had this element latent in him." If he had no worldly ambitions, he could never have written a novel, but it is undeniable that a certain disharmony was felt between the poetic costumes of the people of Matinee Poetique and the literary world. The first time I met Shuichi Kato and Shinichiro Nakamura was at a round-table discussion in a magazine called Hikari, where I was a reader.

It was not a very literary round-table discussion, as there were a number of women who represented the magazine. I met Mr Kato as if he were a prosecutor.

I was scared out of my wits by his eyes, and every time he said something, I felt as if I were a naughty boy being scolded in the teacher's room.

In comparison, Mr Nakamura seemed more relaxed and approachable. When we happened to touch on the issue of double suicide, which was obviously before the Osamu Dazai double suicide incident, I spat out such expletives as "If it's between two young people, it's beautiful and fine, isn't it?" revealing my wartime Romanticist instincts.

"That's a problem, isn't it? That kind of thinking is a problem."

Nakamura looked genuinely troubled, and made various rebuttals, but they sounded like a self-serving, generalised humanist sermon, and I decided: "These people don't see dangerous beauty. How could they understand the Noh plays and the Shin-Kokinshu?"

I am not criticising Nakamura today and saying that he is a writer who "doesn't appreciate dangerous beauty," but am simply trying to express my impressions as they were at the time.

I was then in the unenviable illogical habit of asserting everything intuitively, categorically, and without formalities.

11.

In Matinee Poetique's work, I particularly liked the work of Takehiko Fukunaga and Keisaku Kubota, but I was repulsed by the overtly French flavour of a magazine called Ark. Such a French flavour would have been nice if it had become a self-help item, as in the work of Tatsuo Hori, but the Matinee Poetique has a tricolour at the tip of its spear of sharp critical activity, which seems to have intensified the stench. In other words, I was firmly of the opinion that France was France and Japan was Japan, no matter how much they praised the political interest of French novelists.

Still, when I think back to those days, I sometimes wish I had grown up enough to have a more mature conversation with these people. I was aware of my own logical deficiencies as a bachelor of law, and I chided myself for becoming more, more, more logical, not only in my discourse, but also in the production of my novels. In this respect, I may have been influenced, perhaps subconsciously, to a certain extent by these impertinent and pretentious older brothers.

It was about this time that Daishi Iwaya began editing a lively literary journal called Bungei Orai (Literature and Art) at the Kamakura Bunko, in which he began to treat up-and-coming writers in the manner of the old literary circles, and my surroundings gradually became more and more lively.

I was often invited to go to bars where writers gathered, but I did not want to get involved in the foul-mouthed debates that took place at the bar. I don't remember many bars from that time, but one particular one was a coffee shop and bar in Kanda.

Post-war literature and this bar had an inseparable connection. There were flowerpots here and there on the uneven brick floor, and inside the store, which was dark even in the daytime, there was a beautiful girl with a reputation. At the time, a film called 'Tragic Love,' scripted by Jean Cocteau, was released, and its mysterious lead actress, Madeleine Sologne, looked a lot like this beautiful girl, albeit with a difference between blond hair and black hair. It is strange that the impressions of post-war literary writers are so closely associated with this restaurant that it now seems as if they all happened here, even if they happened somewhere else. For example, an inebriated Rinzo Shiina said: "Oh, no, I've already been wounded to the bone. If there is a revolution, I will be the first one to be hanged." He said this at a bar in Shibuya. But even now, it seems appropriate to think of it as the words spoken in "Rambo."

Or, as Hiroshi Noma said in his usual relaxed and casual tone, "It's not a question of when the revolution will occur. The revolution has already begun. We are already in the process of revolution."

These were said in a calm tone of voice elsewhere, in a dark corner of Rambo, to be sure, even if it was not in the same place. I think it would have been more appropriate if he had said it from a chair in a dark corner of the Rambo.

Mr Yutaka Kusudani is probably drinking in a different bar now, but there is no doubt that he looks even more like the man he was in those days at Rambo. The same is true of the post-war sect's high priest, the famous Taijun Takeda.

The reason why Overture disappeared after only one issue, as mentioned above, was not so much the decline of postwar literature as the fact that the authors had already become full-fledged writers and had too many opportunities to write for other magazines. In other words, years after I was regarded as a strange, outmoded aestheticist, as soon as I was finally accepted into the post-war camp, the stronghold disintegrated. If Overture had continued in its original spirit today (an impossible dream, of course), the state of post-war literature might be somewhat different from what we see today. Although I felt somewhat uncomfortable at the time, I now long for that period of explosive, esoteric literary flourishing. The age of today's horrendous vulgarisation was still a little less than pleasant back then. Nor was it foreseen.

12.

I checked my notes from that time and found that the Overture round-table discussion was held on October 6, 1948, the night the bell rang in the street announcing the resignation of the Ashida Cabinet in the wake of the Shoden scandal. In retrospect, we have been in the habit of being startled by the sound of the outside bell ever since the advent of television.

Unfortunately, it was decided that the occasional bell sound in the town would be included in the extra issue of the phoney newspaper. I feel the need to wash myself a little more carefully, as daunting as it may seem to the reader, in order to retrace my literary feelings at the time I wrote my first "novel," 'Confessions of a Mask.' Because with this "novel" and my first trip around the world a few years later, my itinerant period was almost over.

Of course, in the Kichiemon style, "Yes, to be an actor is a lifetime of training."

If I were to say so humbly, even now, at the age of thirty-eight, I would be no different from my itinerant days. It was in the summer of 1948 that I decided to quit the Ministry of Finance.

On 22 September, "Request exemption official."

On the second day, I received a letter of resignation as a "commissioned officer."

However, my life as a writer was beginning to take a similar shape to that of today, and after submitting my letter of resignation and greeting everyone, I went to a lecture and a round-table discussion, and that night, as now, I spent all night writing a novel. Even so, I was worried about whether I would be able to make a living after quitting the government service, but I was very happy to be able to do so.

I thought about it very rationally. I thought, "At least for now I'll be all right."

"I don't know what will happen five or six years from now."

"However, in order to be okay five or six years from now, I must devote all of my energy to proper basic work."

To do so, I thought I had to exercise and keep my body strong, so in October I joined the Palace Riding Club at the old stables, and it was around this time that I received an offer from Kawade Shobo to write a new novel. This was a very timely and opportune offer for me. Writing this, it sounds as if I was being rational and constructive, but at the same time I felt the strain of finally becoming a professional writer, and at the same time I felt a crisis of mental and physical decline. Death and illness were sweeping over my literary friends at that time. Suicides and insanity were on the rise, deaths from disease followed one after another, and not a few of them fell into rapid poverty, and my brief literary youth was fading with frightening speed. It was also the time when the verdicts of the war tribunals were beginning to be handed down. Political corruption was also going on, and when I visited the Public Prosecutor's Office, I saw Mr Ashida's son-in-law coming. There were also many stories of corruption in the Occupation Forces, and it was widely reported that if you went to the office of a high-ranking Occupation Forces official, you would be asked for a bribe in the tens of thousands if you opened the top drawer and grinned, in the hundreds of thousands if you opened the second drawer and grinned, and in the millions if the third drawer was opened. Socially, too, those were strange times. It was a time when one of the great conglomerates of the past would rush to borrow money and buy meat himself on the way back when he had a client for the next day.

In such a state of affairs, I had secretly written such epigrams as "It doesn't matter to me what happens if the atomic bomb falls again. What matters to me is whether it makes the earth a little more beautiful."

I had to analyse the basis of the nihilistic aestheticism of the Yake no Yampachi thoroughly by myself.

As I feverishly wrote short stories, I felt as if I really had no reason to live. A terrible sense of helplessness gripped me. My deep melancholy alternated precariously with a wonderful exuberance, and in the course of a day I could be the happiest or the unhappiest man in the world. I was plagued with questions such as: "Does my youth have any meaning?" or indeed, "Am I really young?"

13.

The privilege of youth is, in a word, the privilege of ignorance. In the words of Goethe: "What a man does not know is useful to him, and what he knows is of no use." Every man has his own drama, his own unspoken secrets, his own special circumstances, as the adults believe, but the young man considers his special circumstances as if they were the only example in the world.

Usually, this kind of thinking is suitable for writing poetry, but not for writing novels. 'Confessions of a Mask' is an attempt to force this into the form of a novel. So in that novel, sensory truth and half-knowledge are everywhere connected. It is a novel that, together with the courage to expose what people were reluctant to say about humanity, mingled with the impatience of trying to bring everything to a logical conclusion. But in the end, it was only now that I have come to realise that that novel is the only novel that I have been able to write thanks to the power of the times.

Therefore, when I wrote this novel, my enthusiasm was so great that I wrote eighteen different prefaces, nine at the longest and one at the shortest, and finally decided not to include a preface. The same was the case with my first long novel prototype, 'The Thieves,' in which I was so enthusiastic that I miscalculated the allocation of my stamina. When the predecessor Kōshirō performed 'Kanjinchō' at the age of seventy-plus, he sat down for a moment on the hanamichi on his way out and built up his stamina so that he showed no decline in strength from the Ennen no Mai to the Hikkomi in the Tobiroppō, but when his young sons performed the role of Benkei at the age when they were full of energy, they seemed to lose their breath in the second half. This was due to such a difference in power distribution technique. This episode from 'Kanjinchō' is one that always comes back to me when I write a long novel.

Mr Kiyoshi Nishi gave a very favorable interpretation of the sharp contrast between the density of the first half and the roughness of the second half of 'Confessions of a Mask,' but I know that it was a simple technical failure, and that the roughness of the second half was due to my becoming breathless and tired, and also because I was too concerned about the deadline.

Finally, I managed to finish it and, with sleepless eyes, handed the manuscript of 340 pages to Mr Ikki Sakamoto of Kawade Shobo on April 24, 1949. The venue was, without exception, "Rambo" in Kanda.

Writing this had greatly lightened my mood and also strangely boosted my self-confidence.

In the following month, I was so moved by Minoru Kita's 'Sumidagawa' that I said to myself: "It's been a long time since I heard a flute, and the ancient sad tone of the ancient times, it pierces my lungs. The endless fluttering of that quiet despair. The despair of the appelé is a thing of the past."

I wrote this in secret. After writing a novel like 'Confessions of a Mask,' in which I managed to conquer my inner monster, two conflicting orientations were clearly born in my twenty-four-year-old mind. One was the feeling that I had to live, at any cost, and the other was a clear, logical inclination towards a bright classicism. I felt as if I was finally discovering the essence of poetry. It had thrilled me so much as a boy.

The poetry that had thrilled me so much as a boy, and later tormented me so much, was in fact a false poetry, a lyrical drunkenness. I came to realise that recognition is the substance of poetry. At the same time, I became fed up with my sensory talent, which I had somehow been spoiled by, and I began to think of myself as a poet absolutely emptied of the senses.

I decided to absolutely emancipate myself from the senses. To do so, I would read more Ōgai than ever before. I was resolved to read more Ōgai with that correct and restrained style of writing, to read his cold works.

"Let's try to discipline ourselves with the cold logic and wisdom of Ōgai, with the passion that he suppressed." I also thought: "It is strange for a novelist to look like a representative of suffering."

Novelists are always in a good mood. Whether you read Stendhal or Balzac, even behind the pages of sorrow, you can see the author's superiority. As long as I am a novelist, I must always be in a good mood.

14.

Thus, I finally became a novelist, a professional writer, which I had wanted to be since I was a boy.

The way the world treated newcomers was not as bad as it is now, but becoming a novelist doesn't mean I've had a particularly positive experience. To put it in extreme terms, I understood the calmness and comfort felt when a man who certainly thought something was wrong with him was told the proper name of his illness and given a bed in a hospital room. I was relieved to escape the stifling pressures of society and settle down in a tribe full of outsiders, taking a deep breath of relief.

It was around this time that I began to work in the theatre, which had always been another of my dreams. This was my first one-act play, 'Firehouse,' which I wrote in the autumn of 1948.

There are two types of people who enter the theatre: those who enter from an intellectual interest and those who enter with their whole body. Since I was a child, my grandmother was always talking about theatre and gave me souvenirs from the Kabuki-za theatre, and I longed to see such wonderful things in the world. They told me it was bad for my education, so I didn't ask them to take me to the Kabuki-za theatre until I graduated from elementary school. It is strange that I developed a yearning for the theatre, but was also free to watch films, which were also supposed to be bad for my education. I was interested in films starring Chaplin.

'Don Quixote,' 'The Ballroom Handbook,' and the operetta film by Ufa of the Kusagusa were all seen at the Imperial Theatre.

When I was in the first year of junior high school, I saw my first Kabuki performance, a relatively unmanned 'Chūshingura' at the Kabuki-za theatre, with the troupe of Hazaemon, Kikugorō, Sojuro, Mitsugorō, Nizaemon, and Tomoemon, and from the moment the curtain opened, I was completely hooked on Kabuki. I have watched Kabuki almost every month since then, but it was during my junior and senior high school years that I first saw Kabuki plays with a voracious and passionate interest, and I can still remember the various forms, key points and lines of the Takemoto plays that I wrote down at the time.

On the other hand, my grandmother on my mother's side had learned the Kanze school of chanting and took me to see a Noh performance in a competition, and the first thing I saw was the relatively plain 'Miwa.' Perhaps it was a coincidental choice, but the fact that the first Kabuki play I ever saw in my life was the majestic and solemn Daijo, and the first Noh play I ever saw in my life was the divine play of Amano-Iwato, is evidence that I was favoured by the gods of the Japanese performing arts. I read foreign scripts at random, but had no desire to see them translated, and was absorbed in plays by Torahiko Kōri, which were out of season. However, the longing to one day work on the stage never left me, and I was given the opportunity by the magazine Ningen to do so.

I was given the opportunity by the magazine Ningen to write my first one-act play. When I started writing, I was surprised by the sheer size of the manuscript paper. It looked as empty and dreary as an after-school playground, and I had no idea how to fill it with words.

It was not until I tried to write a play that I realised how easy it is to write a novel with description and narrative, and how difficult it is to bring everything to life and express it through dialogue alone. First of all, in novels the dialogue is rather unnecessary (there are exceptions, of course, such as Dostoevsky's), and even if it is not unnecessary, it is often only for the purpose of showing realistic techniques, whereas in plays the dialogue is everything and, as I had already learned from Noh and Kabuki, the dialogue must have a style. I wrote more than thirty pieces of small plays in a painstaking effort, while the calligraphy was decorated with beautiful sentences in the literary style, like that of Torahiko Kōri, and when I published them in Ningen, I unexpectedly received an offer from the Haiyu-za theatre to perform them. I was elated to learn that they wanted to perform it at the Creative Drama Study Group at the Mainichi Hall at the time.

15.

I can still vividly remember the excitement I felt at the first performance of 'Firehouse' in February of 1949. Of course, it was a small group, so the set-up was poor, and things like the crimson flames at the end of the play were far from my image. But among the plays performed by the group were some interesting little plays, such as 'The Capture of the Angel' by Masamune Shiratori. In addition, even for a play by a newcomer like myself, the production was directed by Sugisaku Aoyama, and Koreya Senda and Sachiko Murase played the roles of a married couple, which was a splendid line-up.

I was honestly wondering at the time whether it was possible to have such fun, which was my honest impression at the time. There is no limit to the anxiety that comes after entrusting one's work to the hands of another, and the despair and anger on the first day can be unmanageable. In fact, I have known some very angry playwrights. In contrast, I have always been irresponsible, amateurish, optimistic, lax, I don't know what it is, but I have generally enjoyed the happiness of the first day. It wasn't until much later, when I started writing plays for the commercial theatre, that I became aware of the first-day writers' frustration and anger at their inability to get anywhere.

And now, I half regret having become a playwright, because I have almost lost one of life's most important pleasures, watching a play as a pure spectator. On the other hand, writing two or three plays is a fairly easy way to satisfy my lust for power, which is almost unattainable in the literary world, but this is a trivial matter when you think about it. It's worth having the power to move people, but there's no point in having such a small power. If that were the case, I wouldn't have any power or interpersonal relations at all.

However, the tragedy of theatrical work is that the purest and most innocent heart in the world can only be found once it is directed towards the ideal of theatre.

What comes to mind for me is Michio Kato. The following episode is actually much later than my first trip to the world between 1951 and 1952, which I intend to conclude this article with, but a few months after my first trip abroad, in October of 1952, Michio Kato's 'Rags and Jewels' was performed by the Haiyu-za theatre company at the Mitsukoshi Theatre. It was always a terrible experience.

To be honest, I do not think of Mr Kato as a great playwright or poet, but I can say without exaggeration that of the many artists I have come into contact with since the war, I have never seen a personality as pure and sincere as that of Mr Kato, a pearl. This may have been the main reason why he did not become a great playwright.

Aside from that, even his representative work, 'Nayotake,' which he had been waiting for so long, was completely performed by Bungaku-za only after his death. He was always anxious and dissatisfied, but he was a young man with a pure longing for Giro Odo and a dream of a theatre like a jewel in his heart. On the opening night of 'Rags and Jewels,' young literary figures with an interest in theatre gathered as if to see the play, but they were disappointed to find that the play, which was deliberately labelled as entertainment, was neither enjoyable nor amusing. The play presented the damaged heart of an innocent young man in a clear-cut manner, which was visible to all. However, the laughter and amusement intended by the author was not apparent, but rather only the inexpressible sadness of the author's heart.

A wounded young man appeared and said, "Please, everyone, laugh, please, please, please."

A minor incident occurred after the curtain had fallen on the first day, which will remain unforgettable for a long time to come.

16.

On the first day of 'Rags and Jewels,' many of the author's close friends were there, but their attitudes during the interval were distant, and because the author's excitement and anxiety were clearly visible, the surroundings became cold without knowing it.

In those days, unlike today, the first day of each play was celebrated with great care, so after the opening night, friends and acquaintances often gathered to go drinking, with the author taking the lead.

When it was decided where to go, one of us took the lead and we went to Sushi-ya Yokocho in Yurakucho, but the number of people accompanying us gradually grew and when we arrived at the other end, there were too many to fit in one sushi restaurant. We split into two groups and settled down on the second floor of the sushi restaurants opposite each other, and I went up to the second floor of one of them with the author.

There were also about ten people on the second floor across the street, both with their windows open for a while, yelling and joking with each other, as if they were setting the scene for a play, but later I realised that such joking around was a form of empty talk to avoid falling into serious theatrical discussion. Even though they were only across the street, they couldn't hear the normal conversation going on in the other direction. It was to the extent that you could reach them if you shouted.

It was all well and good until the beer was poured and everyone raised a toast to Michio Kato, but then the window shoji on the second floor opposite was slid shut. I remember thinking, "Oh, no!" The whiteness of the shoji looked so crisp. It was still October, so it couldn't have been that cold. Unexpectedly, everyone saw Kato's face. His colour had changed.

I purposely said something like, "Damn, you closed the shoji because you thought I was going to speak ill of you,'' but it was all the worse. Behind the shoji across from him were some of Mr Kato's most trusted friends. Until this happened, I had intended to express my honest opinion about tonight's first day to Mr Kato, but from this moment on, I could no longer do so. I could see too vividly the mind of the author on that unfortunate first day. If he himself knew that much, who would need to do anything more to put their hands on his wounds?

I remember trying to cheer up the author by picking up on his strong points, such as "Teruko Kishi's off-the-wall lines about the old beggar woman were interesting." Afterwards, I accompanied him to a bar in Shibuya, where he was joined by the people on the other side of the shoji screens, but Mr Kato was unable to hide his pleasant, joyless expression for the end of the evening, despite his best efforts to restrain himself.

Compared to Mr Kato, I, for example, am an impure person, but an impure person can be hurt in his own impure way, and for that reason he must wear armour in his heart.

Mr Kato committed suicide in December, one year after this tragic first day, and it is thought that the wounds he sustained from this incident did not heal over the course of that year, and may have been one of the remote causes of his suicide.

Since that time, I have been more and more convinced that I must not just get my heart set on a play.

The world of the theatre is fascinating, but it also has a terrible toxin. You think you're the only one who can avoid being raped, but before you know it, you've been raped by this toxin. If you believe in absolute sincerity in this world, you are in for a world of hurt. An American said that he really liked to see plays in New York, but disliked the theatre people because they were corrupt people, which told a side of the truth.

However, just like nicotine in cigarettes, the poison is also the attraction. There's nothing we can do about it. Compliments such as "clean and trustworthy" may be the greatest insults in a play.

17.

In 1950, at the age of twenty-five, I was still shuttling back and forth between the peaks of happiness and the deep valleys of melancholy. From then until I left for a trip abroad at the end of 1951, my sense of life and emotions seem to have had the most severe bumps and bruises. And I was always frightened by loneliness. I was jealous of the world's ordinary youth and often thought of myself as a "strange, grinning old man of twenty-five." I suffered from frequent stomach pains. I wanted to go to the Southern Ocean on a whaling ship, and even asked the newspaper people about it, but the chances of that happening were slim.

From then on, I had the idea that I had to divide my energies between my work and my real life, and not let my mind be distracted by the Japanese "Ihayu-support" in the in-between zone, but I was not able to put this idea into practice until later, when exercise became part of my life. There is an interesting lurking paradox here, because man so desperately needs a middle ground. And from there, he draws nourishment from both his life and his work. As I later found out, the ideal middle ground is really is, in fact, "aimless physical activity," i.e. exercise.

In the early autumn of 1950, I think, I went to a large bookshop to buy a book.

I was eating an ice cream on the terrace of the coffee shop in front of the bookshop. I saw a noticeboard at the entrance of the bookshop, and people were swarming there. I thought it was a news bulletin, but when I looked closer, I saw that it was a picture of the Chuson-ji mummy. Suddenly, the faces of the people walking in and out of the bookstore and standing in front of the photo suddenly looked like mummies. I was offended by this ugliness. How ugly the faces of intellectuals are! My longing for Greece is no doubt original, but perhaps I can't resist a moment like this!

It emanated from an evil. This was, of course, a kind of self-loathing, an aversion to disharmony and exaggeration and an insatiable desire for harmony, which of course arose from a crisis within myself.

In hindsight, I probably misunderstood. My aversion to the intellectual was in fact an aversion to the enormous, monstrous sensitivity within me. Otherwise, I would have gradually become a classicist.

My consolation at this time was travelling, often to Oshima and to Hokkaido for research. I felt a sensual fascination with the landscape. Even now, I would say that my descriptions of the landscape in my novels carry the same weight as the love scenes in the stories of other writers.

Looking at my work in the years 1950 and 1951, I can say that I was completing 'Thirst for Love' in a mad frenzy, and then I wrote 'The Devil's Worship,' a badly designed failure, and 'The Age of Blue,' a stylistically disorganised novelisation of the president of Hikari Club that neglected both research and structure. In 1956, I wrote the extravagantly elaborate 'Forbidden Colours,' and during that period I also wrote 'The Lavrai Golden Festival,’ which was published in 1957.

I have written several strange short stories. From the outside, it may have looked like a rich production, but in fact, it has deviated from a steady pace and is in disarray. I don't like that kind of work. I'm not the type of artist who "rises to the occasion and immediately succeeds." I may appear flamboyant because I'm always making a lot of noise, but I'm more or less a banker-type novelist. Imagine a bank these days, with its showy windows and its flamboyant buildings.

Speaking of bankers, Thomas Mann's literature, which taught me that "a novelist must look like a banker," was becoming my ideal literature from that time onwards. The German snobbishness and unnecessary elaboration of Mann's literature were far removed from my own qualities, but what struck me as most appealing at the time was the dramatic duality of Mann's literature, the tragedy characteristic of German literature, and the perfect harmony between the highest artistic qualities and snobbishness.

18.

I was fortunate that Ryūichi Kaji, then head of the Asahi Shimbun's publishing bureau, was an old friend of my father's, who encouraged and took care of me,

He asked me, "Why don't you go and see a foreign country?"

This was an unexpected offer, as I had failed in my attempt to go abroad a couple of years earlier.

I was recommended by someone to take an interview test for a conference for young artists to be held in the United States. I met an American in the cultural and educational office of the US military, which was part of the NHK building, and was asked various questions to test my conversation skills. I had no English conversation skills and could not understand what the examiner asked me,

In Japan, which was still under occupation, traveling abroad was more difficult than I could have ever imagined. It was impossible to leave Japan without good connections, and today, when someone from the literary world is always abroad, it is truly a world apart.

When asked, "What school does your novel belong to?" I mistook the meaning of school for "school."

I replied, "No, I studied law at university," so it would have been strange if I had been accepted.

In the midst of the kind of crisis I described in the previous article, a trip abroad seemed to me to be a dire necessity. I was eager to get away from Japan, to overcome myself and discover a new side of me. I was always grateful for the kindness of Mr Kaji, who was a very kind and gentle man, and he was always kind to me when I was writing 'The Rokumeikan.'

"The secret to longevity as a novelist is first and foremost study, and secondly, study. It is important to look broadly and deeply, and to read the classics or original books habitually, even if only a little each day."

It is not easy to read the classics or original books, but it is thanks to Kaji's advice that no matter how busy I get as a novelist, I keep up the habit of tackling a little bit of a difficult book every day. And this is advice that, surprisingly, my seniors in the same profession are too shy to give me. Thanks to his efforts, I was qualified as a special correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper and was sponsored by Asahi to go on a round-the-world trip. At that time, the physical examination of travellers was very strict, and I was made to jump on one leg fifty times at St. Luke's Hospital, and at the American Embassy I was unnecessarily intimidated by the Nisei at the counter, and I had many other unpleasant experiences.

There were pleasant memories, but the joy of going abroad didn't bother me. In 1951, I was twenty-six years old, old enough to be on my own. In retrospect, however, it seems that the occupation period placed certain timid and opaque restrictions on a young man's spiritual development.

A few days before my departure on December 25, Mr and Mrs Yasunari Kawabata took the trouble to visit my home and encourage me on my "way." I still remember the sight of Mr Mitsuo Nakamura seeing me off at Yokohama Wharf in the drizzling rain.

I had advocated literary solitude and scorned the world, so it is no surprise that I was somewhat more open-minded when I became a passenger on the President Wilson, protected by the generosity of so many people.

Thanks to working all night until just before departure, I was able to put on my tuxedo for the first time in my life and, after attending a Christmas feast, I slept soundly through the night and felt refreshed and free of seasickness every day from the following day onwards.

As we approached Hawaii, the sun became more and more intense, and I began sunbathing on the deck. This was the start of my sunbathing habit for the next twelve years. It was as if I had come out of a dark cave and discovered the sun for the first time. For the first time in my life, I shook hands with the sun. How long have I been in love with the sun?

I have kept the feeling of closeness to the sun to myself. And as I basked in the sun all day long, I began to think about my own transformation. In what am I superfluous and in what am I lacking?

19.

If I had anything in excess, it was obviously sensitivity, and if I lacked something, it was something that could be called physical presence. I had already learnt to despise the mere cold intellect, so I recognised only an intellect with an unquestionable physical presence, like a statue, and that was all I wanted. To obtain this, I could not remain in my cave-like study or laboratory; I needed the mediation of the sun.

And the sensitivity? It had to be worn out like a shoe, worn out and used up on the next trip, so that it no longer torments its owner. My itinerary included South America, Italy, Greece, and other countries of the sun.

After passing through North America and staying one night in Puerto Rico, I could already smell the sun-scorched countries. A month's stay in Brazil and the carnival season intoxicated me with tropical light. Just looking at the rows of palm trees under the blue sky made me feel as if I had returned to the home I had been searching for so long, and I felt helpless.

I may sound like a romantic traveller when I write this, but in fact it was a series of comical red blanket stumbles, especially in Paris, where I was tricked by street dollar buyers and had all my money stolen by the art of sleight of hand.

There was a terrible interlude in which I spent a month almost penniless. In the meantime, there was first class worry.

I was worried about whether I would be able to go to Greece. After the stolen cheques have been reissued, I said goodbye to gloomy Paris and decided to go to Greece in the late spring. I spent the whole time longing to be in Greece, and I felt like I was just getting drunk.

In ancient Greece there was no "spirit," only an equilibrium between body and intellect, and I thought that "spirit" was the current invention of Christianity. Of course, this equilibrium is easily broken, but there is beauty in the tension to avoid breaking it, and I thought that the Greek tragedies, in which the arrogance of the human will is always punished, were a lesson to this equilibrium. The Greek city-states were themselves a kind of religious state, but the gods were always on the lookout for a breach in the human equilibrium, so faith was not a "human problem" there, as in Christianity. Human problems were only on this shore.

This is not necessarily an accurate interpretation of ancient Greek thought, but it is exactly the kind of Greece I saw at the time, and this is the kind of Greece I needed. This is where I found the consequence of my classicist tendencies. It was, in other words, to create a beautiful work of art.

It was the discovery of the same ethical standards for self-beauty, and the ancient Greeks seemed to hold the key. The post-modern Romantic divergence between art and artist and the solitude of the artist were, from this point of view, far more peripheral events.

I wrote 'Shiosai' after my return to Japan in the wake of this excitement, but the popular success of 'Shiosai' and its popular acceptance threw cold water on me again, and afterwards the Greek fever began to take hold.

At the very least, however, Greece soothed my self-loathing and loneliness and awakened a Nietzschean "will to health." I felt that I was no longer a person who could be hurt by slightest thing. I returned to Japan with a clear mind.

I also had a chance to cool down, but this is a story for later.

As I mentioned earlier, it was customary for writers to write "souvenir novels" when they went abroad, but I was determined not to write such a thing, so I turned down most of the manuscripts and spent a few months preparing myself for a novel about a purely Japanese event, called 'Death in Midsummer.'

As I wrote, I sensed that one phase of my work had completely ended and the next was beginning. The second part of 'Forbidden Colours,' which I wrote after returning to Japan, is markedly different from the first part. My work became slower and slower, and as it became slower, I felt as if I were maturing.

20.

The ten years between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, I did not go to war, nor did I become a lumpen, but I still have relatively vivid memories of those ten years, which means that there were plenty of bumps and bruises that remain in my mind. Compared to these ten years, the ten years between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-seven were not so eventful. Time passed much faster in the following ten years. Boys grow old easily and learn hard.

Thus, my itinerant times are long.

When I first came out in the literary world, there was a great deal of talk about the "old man," but now we are no longer Shōwa children, but rather children of the end of the war, and people who were born in the Taishō era are regarded as "hirai" (moldy).

Now the Taishō children are finally appearing in the literary world.

Many magazines disappeared and many people died. Various literary ideals flashed before my eyes and disappeared. It is arrogant to think that I alone am unchanged in the midst of all this. The fact that I have written these self-indulgent memoirs is also a reminder to myself to check that I have changed. Recently, in a hotel lobby, I saw a stranger smile from a distance and raise his hand. I turned around to see if he was signalling to someone else, but no one was there. When I eventually saw someone approaching, it was a classmate whom I had not seen for nearly twenty years. I did not recognise him because his hair had completely changed to silver.

I was astonished. And then, without thinking, I said, "Is that you?"

I said, "No way, you've got grey hair," and then stopped talking.

My friend smiled and gave no answer. Perhaps he, too, was suffering from some unspoken affliction, or had a wandering mind.

The shock I received was quite selfish.

I even had the uncharacteristically inappropriate thought, "I'm going to have to get ready for old age soon." But this shock was soon forgotten. In this oblivion, the speed and the lack of feeling for anything serious are the first signs of ageing in human beings.

In literature, however, as in many of the Japanese performing arts, there is a blessing that artistic youth begins when the body is old and decrepit. In my twenties, I was unable to depict youth, but now that I am nearing my thirties, I can say that I have reached the age when I can depict youth. One day, Mitsuo Nakamura will be able to draw young people.

"When I'm thirty, I don't think I'm young anymore, but when I'm forty, I think I'm still young."

As he said, this is a truism. In retrospect, during my itinerant period, there were rapid changes in time and society, but there was no single, steady, organic formation. There was no maturation of a single idea that spread and grew with a great extension. The Japanese novelist thinks that what he gains from the various mental tribulations and the passage of time is only a technical purification.

It is sad to think that what Japanese novelists gain from their various mental tribulations and the passage of time is only technical training.

So, as early as possible, I want to destroy everything. I want to bring up my children until they are fifty or sixty years old, and then, instead of abandoning them after having brought them up to that age, I want to destroy them again immediately, halfway through. I no longer believe in such ideals as classicism, which I was so passionate about at the age of twenty-six, from the bottom of my heart.

It may sound like I have worn out my sensibilities and abandoned them, but that is only because I have become a dried-up old man.

And I am already beginning to think that youth and adolescence are vain things. So, is this a reason to look forward to growing old?

What arises there is the idea of present, instantaneous, moment-by-moment death. This may be the only conception that is truly vivid and truly erotic for me. In this sense, I may be suffering from a romantic malady, which is by nature incurable. The me of twenty-six years old, the me of the classicist, the me who felt closer to life, may have been false. In this light, my "itinerant age," which I have written about so extensively, seems to be somewhat questionable.

My itinerant era <first appearance> Tokyo Shimbun (evening edition), January 1, 1963 to May 23 (once a week)