About Yukio Mishima’s newly translated story

History”From the Wild” by Yukio Mishima was written and published in Japanese in 1966, but has not been translated into English until now. Will be included in the new collection “Voices of fallen heroes: and other stories”, which will be released in January next year. Why wasn’t it available in English before and how did you decide to translate it?

Mishima wrote one hundred and seventy stories, so it is no wonder that many of them that deserve translation remain untranslated. While researching the late Mishima for inclusion in “Voices of Fallen Heroes,” I came across this story in a volume of his complete works and found it beautifully crafted and moving. Perhaps most importantly, reading it for the first time as a translator, I felt confident that I could translate it into English.

Is Mishima difficult to translate?

Walter Benjamin’s seminal (if wildly obscure) 1923 essay “The Translator’s Task” has inspired ongoing debate on the topic. My own commitment is to convey the author’s voice in the original in the target language. From this point of view, Mishima’s work, at least theoretically, lends itself to translation in a way that, for example, the work of Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe does not. Oe saw himself as a liminal figure in Japanese society and therefore developed a language that was an attack on traditional Japanese, deliberately distorting his own sentences. Mishima imagined himself as the ultimate connoisseur, the heir to a long tradition of Japanese beauty: his writing, reflecting this self-image, is in harmonious harmony with the innate, unadulterated genius of the Japanese language. A master of words, he was also a meticulous mosaicist. The translator just needs to find the right verbal stones and arrange them into nice sentences, with a rhythm that mirrors the author’s, and Mishima’s voice will emerge. Needless to say, this is easier said than done.

In this story, an obsessed teenager breaks into the home of a writer named Mishima. Do you know if the story was based on a real event? If so, how far does it differ from non-fiction reality?

This story is indeed based on an actual incident, widely reported in the press, that happened to Mishima and his family in April 1966, a few months before “From the Wilderness” was written. In terms of veracity, it’s impossible to say how closely it reflects actual events, but I suspect the portrayal is faithful, right down to what Mishima had to say about himself in the final pages, which turned into a very personal revelation. I say this keeping in mind the long history of autobiographical fiction in Japan. In the so-called I-novel (or Ich-Roman), the Japanese author was expected to reveal – confess – aspects of his own life, without any attempt at camouflage. A prime example is Toson Shimazaki’s 1919 novel “A New Life,” in which the author detailed his incestuous affair with his brother’s daughter. The scandal caused by the novel forced Shimazaki to move to France to avoid confrontation with his own family. The work was considered a masterpiece.

Mishima would be aware that with this story he is following the tradition of the I-novel, and he would certainly know that the basis for appreciating this genre of “fiction” has always been a degree of truthfulness, the more damning the better. Japanese critics have been skeptical of the narrator’s final insistence that he was telling the truth, considering it gimmicky, but it seems likely to me that From the Wilderness is an extremely rare example of Mishima putting aside his protean mask and writing something almost unvarnished autobiography, self-portrait in the first person. Mishima’s language is spare; the narrative is relatively modest, almost journalistic.

The story begins with a sort of procedural description of a burglary, first as experienced by the narrator, and then by his parents and wife. It ends with something completely different, more confessional. Do you think Mishima planned to write this story the way he ended up writing it?

I can’t prove it, but I imagine that Mishima, before he started writing, recognized that a disturbed young fan who had broken into his house would open the door to the very personal material with which he ends the story.

The story ends with a description of the misery and devastation that Mishima (the hero and probably the author) felt, his fundamental loneliness. Knowing that he died by suicide four years later – after his own fraudulent, criminal act of rebellion – makes this story even more moving for me. Am I drawing a false parallel?

The informed reader of Mishima faces a particular challenge: bringing Mishima’s work out of the shadow of its final act, with its centripetal emphasis on the imagination, to evaluate it on the basis of its own values. A good example is “From the Desert”. Seeing the loneliness that colors this story and knowing Mishima’s terrible death four years later, how can the reader not be moved by an emotion that goes beyond the text!

You knew Mishima personally and translated his works in the 1960s. What made you decide to write his biography?

In 1967, intending to leave Japan, I angered Mishima by deciding to translate Kenzaburo Oe’s novelpersonal matter,” instead of Mishima’s latest work “Silk and insight” In an article in a Japanese monthly magazine Shinchohe described me as “an American hooligan who was seduced by the Japanese left.” I am ashamed to admit that I took revenge in the article for Life, in which I wrote: “Reading a novel by Yukio Mishima is like visiting an exhibition of the most ornate picture frames in the world.”

The news of his ritual suicide three years later reached me as an abstraction, a concept impossible to understand, much less feel; and I doubt whether I would have undertaken writing the biography had I not received a call from my mentor at Harvard, Edwin O. Reischauer, who was ambassador to Japan under JFK, suggesting that I owed it to myself to write it. He said he had always been fascinated by Mishima, but nothing he knew about the Japanese helped him understand Mishima as a human reality. If anyone could make him understandable, he insisted, it would be me. These words from a man I respected were enough.

After arriving in Tokyo in the fall of 1971, I contacted Mishima’s widow, Yoko, and she agreed to meet me at Zakuro, a restaurant that was one of her husband’s favorites. When I told her I was going to write a biography and asked if she would help me, she sighed and replied that she didn’t really want a biography, but if anyone was going to write one, it might as well be me. I spent that year interviewing people from all over Mishima’s worlds who wouldn’t have given me the time of day if Yoko hadn’t called ahead and asked for their cooperation. On one of my visits to pick up books at the Rococo house where she still lived – now preserved as a museum – I asked as offhandedly as possible, “When will I have the opportunity to hear Yoko…Sanhistory?”