The elegance of Mr Ōoka
Yukio Mishima
I have long thought I could write another Ōoka essay on his elegant taste in 'Hanakage' and 'Lady Musashino.' Although this unruly master of mystification does not show a glimpse of such elegant taste when I see him in person, I have suspected that there is a stubborn aesthetic taste behind Mr Ōoka's tantalisingly exacting choices as a critic. Criticism, in general, is the exposition of the intolerance of one's senses aroused by an object at the cost of ten million words of logic. In this sense, even after all this time, the basis of art criticism is aesthetic judgement and nothing else. The worst thing that can happen to a writer-critic, then, is to reveal a secret glimpse of his aesthetic taste somewhere in his work as a writer. Yoriko Segawa in 'Oxygen' has shades of the elegance of the salon ladies of French fiction that she must have dreamt of in her youth, but in Michiko in 'Lady Musashino,' this archetype has been digested into the Japanese climate and has lost its highbrow quality. Although the two novels were produced in opposite years, it is not surprising that the picture of his youthful dream appears more strongly in 'Oxygen,' since he seems to have had the idea for 'Oxygen' before 'Lady Musashino.' It is interesting to note that his novels are less successful when he depicts a female protagonist who is close to the archetype of this yearning, as can be seen in the juxtaposition of 'Oxygen,' 'Lady Musashino,' and 'Hanakage.'
As the degree of her success increases, the female protagonist can be seen to be moving further and further away from the salon of her illusions.
The female protagonist Yoko in 'Hanakage,' the best of the three, is a bad woman. I was not joking when I described 'Hanakage' as a parody of French salon-style psychological novels. In the transitions of the female protagonists in the three stories, the archetype of the dream that a writer who studied French literature as a young man once had in his mind, the way it was digested into the Japanese climate, and the worldly wisdom of how to fully express a dream that is still unfulfilled as the writer becomes more and more of a realist, are all clearly expressed. I know of no other writer who has succeeded so skillfully and successfully in realising this dream of the impossible as Mr Ōoka.
There are no salons in Japan. There is no way to establish one. The Countess Curial, Stendhal's lover at the age of forty, is also not in Japan. In modern Japan, there is not a single noblewoman who combines culture, elegance, weariness, and beauty. And as long as a novelist has even the slightest dream of such a thing, his novels will be nothing more than the novels of a greedy country bachelor. What, then, can he express with the refinement of his aesthetic taste and his chic intelligence? Ōoka, who had come to that conclusion, made a great discovery. Against the backdrop of bar life, which is the most written about in genre fiction, he thought of the rickety salons as Japanese salons, and turned the illiterate but fearlessly attractive female protagonists into caricatures of noblewomen.
"I can write caricatures."
Stendhal taught us to write tragedies by means of caricature and ridicule. The heroine, Yoko, is a witless Ginza bar girl, but she has the elegance of a perfect shadow painting, a Mme Dorcel, a brilliantly revitalised modern Japanese version of herself.
In the elegance of the scene of the suicide, Mr Ōoka's dream came to fruition for the first time.
However, elegance as a feminine idea did not always occupy Ōoka's greatest interest. In the end, Ōoka would hurry back to Stendhal's following passage. "......... It is only extreme power that can possess extreme elegance. It seems to me that simplicity is the sublime beauty of everyday life."
Ōoka-san's Elegance (First published in: Nihon Bungaku Zenshu 3 Ōoka Shohei Shu, Getsuppo, Shinchosha, October 1968) (First published in: The Complete Works of Yukio Mishima's Criticism, Shinchosha, August 1969)