Andrew Clare 
(Book cover, courtesy of Penguin Classics)
2025 sees the centenary of Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima (1925 – 1970). To mark the occasion, Penguin UK has brought out a new collection of the author's short stories: Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories.
An undeniable literary genius, Mishima maintained throughout his career a prodigious output publishing in his short life span. He penned more than thirty novels, nearly two hundred short stories, fifty plays, and dozens of essays, as well as an impressive collection of haiku poems. (Several of Mishima's haiku were elegantly translated by Hiroaki Sato in the 2018 book, On Haiku.) Nominated three times for the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature (ultimately losing out in 1968 to his one-time mentor and sponsor, Yasunari Kawabata), Mishima was, to put it bluntly, a literary icon whose lodestar was destined to burn out prematurely in a blazing arc of brilliance.
The last few years have witnessed something of a Mishima boom with several new translations making their debut in bookstores. The Frolic of the Beasts (Kemono no tawamure); Star (Sutaa), Life for Sale (Inochi urimasu), and Beautiful Star (Utsukushii hoshi) are among them. In addition, Andrew Rankin's percipient analysis Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist was published to critical acclaim. (And there is the tantalizing prospect of David Vernon's book Exquisite Nothingness: the Novels of Yukio Mishima to look forward to in the autumn.)
New Mishima Short Stories Collection
Though better known for his full-length novels, Mishima was an accomplished short story-teller. A literary prodigy, at the age of fifteen, while attending the elite Peers' School in Tokyo, he became the youngest ever member of the literary club's editorial board. Soon after he graduated, he penned the short story The Cigarette (Tabako), the novel that first brought him to the attention of the literati following its publication in the journal Ningen in 1946.
On the whole, Mishima's short stories, particularly those written during his later years, are well-wrought and populated by believable characters. (His novella, Acts of Worship (Mikumanomōde) is perhaps one of the best short stories written by any author. In its ineffably moving depiction, the two protagonists are thrown together on a pilgrimage, unwittingly satisfying one another's emotional needs despite their markedly different social statuses.
Many of his contemporaries' short stories were marred by a certain thinness of characterization. That is due in part to the way the Japanese language itself acts to discourage the creation of rounded individuals through its archaic use of honorifics, its seemingly impenetrable written system, and the sanctity of silence that pervaded Japanese culture. Not so with most of Mishima's stories.
The 14 works assembled in this collection, all taken from his later years when he was at the zenith of his creative powers, are certainly no exception.
Several are particularly worthy of note.
'A Flower Hat'
The Flower Hat (Hana no bōshi): the first person narrator, sitting on a sun-drenched park bench in San Francisco's Union Square, overhears a passerby remark to his colleague that Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations Secretary General, died the previous day in an unexplained plane crash. (A later CIA report claimed the KGB was responsible.) The narrator has a vision of mankind's annihilation as he watches Union Square "suddenly acquire a mantle of death."
People around him in this seemingly idyllic setting – a woman knitting, her infant son, nearby, swinging his feet about in a baby walker, a young man reading a paperback novel, irritably preoccupied with the lint on his suit, a man with a walking stick, are suddenly picked out in precise detail, stilled in the moment as if an atomic explosion has stopped time in its tracks.
It's a nod to the tension evident during the Berlin Crisis. (The day Mishima departed for his voyage to San Francisco in August 1966, the US had resumed its nuclear arms testing program and he wrote that the end of the world might come before the year is up.)
'From the Wilderness'
From the Wilderness (Kōya yori): the plot of this short story appears to be based on an actual break-in by an unhinged fan at Mishima's Tokyo residence. Following the intruder's arrest, the police report that he "lived a considerable distance away from his parents and was working for a newspaper, leading a lonely life in Tokyo."
The narrator reflects on where the man had come from: "He came from me. From the world of my ideas...from the vast wilderness surrounding the metropolis of my being." Tellingly, the narrator is depicted as a novelist called "Mishima," and the incident is related in the first person. It is reminiscent, as John Nathan (Mishima's biographer and one of the translators) points out in the introduction, of the peculiarly Japanese first-person "I-novel."
Details of the real incident are sketchy (despite being widely reported in the press at the time). However, the story, economically written in a reportorial style, opens an unexpected window into the author's reflections on life and loneliness.
'Love at Dawn'
True Love at Dawn (Asa no Junai): an affluent, good-looking married couple is discovered murdered on the balcony of their home. A college student is apprehended, and without any coercion confesses to the killing. Much of the rest of the story consists of an interrogation of the culprit by a police detective.
It transpires that the student had been lured, together with his girlfriend, both inebriated, to the house to have sex with the couple (he with the wife and his girlfriend with the husband, on opposite sides of the same room). The following morning, realizing what has happened, he murders the couple with his knife when he sees them locked in a passionate embrace kissing on the balcony, seemingly "younger and more beautiful than any beautiful young lovers."
It seems the couple wished to revive their youth and relive their blissful courtship of long ago. The student kills them in a frenzied mood of yearning and anger.
'Voices of the Fallen Heroes'
Perhaps the most important, and certainly the longest, of the stories is the title piece itself, Voices of the Fallen Heroes (Eirei no koe).
Presaging the form and direction his own patriotism would take, this short story is an oneiric account of a Shinto séance. In it, the spirits of the young officers who instigated the February 26 1936 incident (an aborted coup against the government that the emperor refused to endorse) and the kamikaze pilots who perished in the Pacific War rebuke the emperor for proclaiming that he was not, and never had been, a deity. Mishima argued that the emperor's proclamation effectively rendered the soldiers' self-sacrifice meaningless. And, as a result, Japan ultimately fell into a state of moral degeneracy.
Mishima claimed that he heard the voices of the spirits, via a medium, when he settled down in his room to write the story. He felt compelled to record the account. When he showed the story to his mother, Shizue, she reportedly said she felt the blood chill throughout her body.
According to Andrew Rankin, Takeo Okuno, the influential literary critic, recounted his sense of horror when he first read the work. He wondered whether Mishima had been possessed by something and taken leave of his sanity.
Mishima's Inner Conflict
A requiem for the war dead, at the same time this troubling story hints at Mishima's inner conflict concerning the way he conducted his own life during and in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War. It is a conflict that played itself out on that final, shocking morning of November 25, 1970, at the Ichigaya Ground Self-Defense Force base when he exhorted the assembled garrison of some two thousand soldiers to rise up and reinstate the emperor as a de facto sovereign, moments before committing seppuku, ritual suicide by disembowelment.
Was he really wracked with guilt and regret for avoiding the wartime draft and the beautiful death he had yearned for? Did he really believe, or even intend, that his call to arms would result in a coup d'etat? The evidence suggests otherwise.
Rather, it seems more likely that this was his final act in a dazzling performance where art mattered more than political conviction. Where Mishima finally found his Proustian self.
The stage, once the venue for a very different kind of show involving the prosecution of war crimes, provided for Mishima the setting where a "glittering, special-order kind of destiny no ordinary man would be permitted" awaited him.
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Author: Andrew Clare
Andrew Clare translated Yukio Mishima's "The Frolic of the Beasts" (Vintage International/Penguin Modern Classics)
