Chapter 1.8: A Public Figure

Mr Shintaro Ishihara was the Goethe of Japan. I was his pupil, a person in the same profession, and his escort runner. In this chapter, I have woven together my private recollections and understandings spanning as long as twenty-plus years, and "my unfulfilled promise" to him. ー Shin Ushijima

Chapter 1.8: A Public Figure

Read other chapters in My Mentor, Shintaro Ishihara

Trying to recall it now, I probably had a talk with Mr Ishihara about the short novel titled A Public Figure (公人, included in the 1992 collection published by Shinchosha). Ishihara and no one else could write such a story. Therefore, as a matter of course, I must have brought it up as a topic of importance when I met him for the first time.

A Public Figure is such a rare, pure love story:

The storyline revolves around a lifelong platonic love relationship between Okinori Kaya and his beautiful female classmate from elementary school. After graduating from elementary school, the two did not see each other ー not even once ー for many years. Yet, the woman kept track of him as a Ministry of Finance bureaucrat through the official gazette, which her husband, also a civil servant, brought home from time to time. He was a teacher at an old-style public high school. Meanwhile, Okinori Kaya coincidentally became aware that her husband was a public servant and likewise kept track of information about her, including her husband's death, through the official gazette.

I just wonder if such a miracle could ever really happen?

However, in his book, My Favorite Japanese People (私の好きな日本人, Gentosha, 2014), Mr Ishihara quotes a passage from Okinori Kaya's biography, which he had contributed to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun's personal history section. In it, he briefly states, "As a 10-year-old boy, I developed romantic feelings for a girl, a classmate." He continues, "I was seriously thinking of marrying her, but for the life of me, I couldn't bring myself to tell her so."

Telling Their Story

An elementary school boy encounters a beautiful girl. The girl grows up and marries someone else. But when her husband dies, Okinori Kaya, the boy who grew up to be a finance ministry bureaucrat, learns of her husband's death through the official gazette and sends her a condolence telegram. Later, he becomes the finance minister, but then ends up in prison as a war criminal. He spends the next 10 years in prison and is then paroled. Later, he is elected to the Lower House, and immediately after that, he loses his wife. Mr Ishihara develops such episodes beautifully and elaborately.

In the end, the woman, now advanced in age, is dying of cancer. The man, who has become a government minister, visits her in her sickbed and confirms her statue-like figure as she sleeps. She wakes up, and he tries desperately to feel the warmth of her soul from her outstretched hand. They share a farewell, lovingly gazing into each other's eyes without saying a word. Furthermore, the man, a public official, sets aside his official duties to appear at her funeral, sitting in a chair in silence until her coffin is carried out.

It is a masterpiece with a slight dose of restraint and serenity, so beautifully written that the intense yet contained emotions flowing quietly through the book captivate the readers' hearts.

Mr Ishihara has passed away.

About Dying

There is a conversation between Mr Ishihara and Okinori Kaya in My Favorite Japanese People. Ishihara was forty-five, while Okinori Kaya was then eighty-eight.

Mr Ishihara asks him, "…What are you most concerned about these days?..."

Kaya answers, "Well, it's about dying…"

"…What does dying mean to you?" Mr Ishihara asks as if pressing him, and Okinori Kaya replies, "Well, it's dismal, dying is." And he continues, "I've given it some serious thought, and now I think I'm beginning to understand. When man dies, he walks down a long, dark tunnel-like path, all alone…"

"…Walking alone endlessly, eventually my family who grieve my death forgets me. And going further, I'll even forget myself. In other words, everything vanishes. So, it's really pointless, dying is."

Kaya says so and adds, "…Therefore, I don't want to die." He laughed dryly and quietly, wrote Mr Ishihara in his book.

In the end, Mr Ishihara concludes, "Little did I imagine at this stage that I would encounter such strong nihilism hidden within him."

But there is more that I have to tell you.

The short story Dialogue with the Dead (Bungakukai, 2019), included in the earlier-mentioned book, was written by Mr Ishihara and published in Literary World (Bungakukai) in July 2019.

In it, there is a man who appears to be Ishihara himself, "a rather well-known composer in his mid-sixties" with "gray hair and a fine-featured face." He fairly spits out, "Now that I no longer have important things to do, the only thing left for me is dying. But this is difficult."

He adds, "I'm thinking this and that, but how can you understand it? Death is our last unknown. But I'm beginning to understand it now. Dying is a perfectly solitary journey." (P 73)

An Alter Ego

Ishihara was 86 years old when he wrote it, three years before his death. Earlier, in 2013, he had suffered a stroke at the age of eighty.

Much to my surprise, Ishihara's reflections on his own death in the persona of the composer are remarkably similar to those of Okinori Kaya, as quoted in My Favorite Japanese People.

As the composer, he continues: "When I die, I'll trudge along a dark road, probably a long road, and those who mourn my death and miss me ー even my own relatives ー will forget me and stop talking about me. And in time, I'll forget myself, too.

Then he concludes, "So, it's quite pointless, dying is."

Surprisingly, this is exactly what Okinori Kaya poured out, "laughing dryly and quietly."

I suppose that Okinori Kaya's thoughts carried great weight with Mr Ishihara. So, does that mean that Mr Ishihara also had a strong sense of nihilism?

Further ahead in the book, Mr Ishihara connects this to a verse chanted by Oda Nobunaga. "Shinou wa ichijo, shinobigusa niwa nani wo shiyozo, ichijo katari wo kosuyono" (死のうは一定、しのび草には何をしよぞ、一定かたりをこすよの). Translated, it means: "Death is certain. What can we do to assuage our fear? Will our story left behind be passed down and fondly remembered?"

After the epigram, come Mr Ishihara's true feelings. It is not fear, he says, but "disgusting impatience and irritation" that he feels for what he cannot understand. I think that is how Mr Ishihara thought of death.

Reflecting, I'm still surprised that two writers were featured in "Mr Dandy" by the light-hearted young men's magazine, Heibon Punch. It was a sign of the times, 1967, when baby boomers were about to turn 20, and Japan's economy was in its eighth year of rapid growth.

In the Long View

Going back to the beginning, I wonder why Mr Ishihara was blessed with such popularity during his lifetime.

It is difficult to fathom how much time and energy he exerted while playing the role of a politician. But who will history judge as the more important of the two, Shintaro Ishihara or Okinori Kaya?

I would venture that it's Okinori Kaya.

Then, what, after all, was Mr Ishihara?

"'My occupation is Shintaro Ishihara,' as he himself would often say. Being out-of-the-box, he did not fit into any category," said his fourth son, Nobuhiro Ishihara. He wrote this in "My Father Remained True to Himself Until the End," published in the April 2022 issue of Bungeishunju.

Then, will the departed Mr Ishihara continue to be popular?

Yes, for the time being. But by what yardstick will historians in 50 years or 100 years measure Shintaro Ishihara other than as the writer who wrote Season of the Sun in his youth?

Will historians in the future be capable of perceiving the warmth, kindness, sensitivity, and familiarity of Mr Ishihara that I have come to know?

Scholars of literature ignore the army surgeon part of Ogai Mori's life, the great Meiji-era author, translator, and poet, because it is beyond their understanding. It would be more difficult for historians to understand the entire being of Shintaro Ishihara than Thebes, the great "City of a Hundred Gates."

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(To read the book in Japanese, please visit the publisher's website.)