Translated by Sam Bett. New York, NY: New Directions, 2019. 94 Pages. $11.95.
Rare is the writer who knows what it’s like to be a star first-hand. Yukio Mishima, a Japanese novelist whose work straddles tradition and the psychological possibilities of being a citizen in the post-war world, was one of the most widely read writers of the 1950s and the 1960s in his home country. He had an observer’s eye for international popular culture and an ingrained sense of the drama of imperial Japan—his first published short story, written when he was sixteen, centers around a boy convinced that his ancestors live on within him. He was also a natural performer with a taste for self-presentation, and it was from this side of his barbed-wire-and-precious-metal-strewn persona that he developed his beautifully vapid 1961 novella Star.
Mishima wrote the novella while he was starring in a movie, Yasuzo Masumura’s 1960 Yakuza flick Afraid to Die. In the film, Mishima, as a lover of mine likes to say, “Sucks up the camera.” His surly, leather-jacket-clad figure, evoking a mixture of Alain Delon in his gangster mode and James Dean (the Japanese writer was fascinated with Dean and wrote an appreciation of him a year after his death), is at points the only thing worth looking at in Masumura’s uneven, moody, sporadically wonderful film. Relatedly, Mishima’s novella from the period is a reflection on being seen.
Available for the first time in English, the book follows a twenty-three-year-old actor, Rikio, while he stars as a Yakuza in a movie; carries on a relationship with his female assistant, Kayo; and fields the fascination of his many fans, who include “perverts, like the guy who desperately wanted me to send him my underwear.” Mishima was a gay man, and his breakout novel, Confessions of a Mask (1949), is one of the finest gay coming-of-age stories ever written. Yet Star, like much of his work after his debut, locates him in a closet full of fire-and-brimstone. In many of his books, he fills this closet with an awareness of his Japanese heritage, but here he fills it with largely surface-level thoughts about his immediate surroundings.
The surface, luckily, is a beautiful one. The first-person narrator compares “the whir of silent film” to “vapor hissing from a leak.” When a fan accosts Rikio on set and the director decides to insert her into a scene, the narrator notes that her body “would not regain the fluid liberty of that moment. That sense of living realness, felt only once, was gone for good.” In an appropriate sense for a star, never is Rikio’s knack for description applied more passionately than when he applies it to himself. Considering the advertising campaign for his films, Rikio notes:
The format was always the same: I stood alone against a white background. Theaters everywhere would paste these onto sheets of plywood, cut around my body with a jigsaw and stand me up outside the entrance. On windy days, there was nothing worse than passing a movie theater on the edge of town and seeing myself knocked face down on the pavement.
At a mere ninety pages, Star is as thin as the ego of its main character, who makes light of the “lonely expanse” in which actors feel “adrift” whenever they receive criticism. Writers may recognize this feeling: Mishima melds his own writerly analytical skill with Rikio’s experience, elucidating aspects of the film world one rarely sees in literature. Rikio’s intelligence is both grounded and balloon-like with self-regard. “No matter how serious the obligation, a star is more of a star if he never arrives,” Rikio tells us. The event he missed was his own twenty-fourth birthday party. “Habitually deferring to efficiency and economy can make life start to seem less consequential,” he narrates at another point, effectively highlighting the form of the novel about him. Star is an efficient, economical book in which ordinary life concerns are muted in favor of fashionable appearances.
The translator, Sam Bett, manages to preserve a difficult balance of precision and lyricism that captures Mishima’s coldly ecstatic voice. Mishima’s mood is particular, both passionate and uncaring at once, which might be why he is capable of an extended narrative in which the drama centers around the orientation of his protagonist to the camera. In an admirably technical passage that exemplifies the perspective of Star, Mishima illustrates the strange experience of filming a movie in which scenes are shot in an order based not on narrative sequence, but instead the placement of the camera.
Let’s say somebody’s just cut me up and I’m in serious pain. In the next shot, without moving an inch, I’m miraculously healed, but in the shot after that, I’ll have to start wincing again from the freshness of the wound.
For Mishima, unlike most writers, life was a performance. Marriage and the heterosexual relationship he animates in the novel—which is often misogynistic—is a “ruse” that consists of his constant criticism of the appearance of his lover Kayo. The remarkable physique Mishima honed led him to pose shirtless as a model, working with the homoerotic photographer Tamotsu Yato. And Mishima’s suicide was planned as a political statement, an orchestrated end that connected him to James Dean, who he has described as “perfect for the role” of an early death at 24—the same age Rikio turns midway through the book. Mishima himself waited until he was 45 before he and a group of students staged a coup d’état at a military headquarters in Tokyo, their desire to restore Japan to the rule of divine emperors it had known until the end of World War II. The idea was that Mishima and one of the students would commit ritualistic seppuku after the coup inevitably failed. The coup failed; the suicide worked. In Star, we already see the collusion of death and nationalism. “The flag spasmed in the breeze,” Mishima writes near the end, “. . . watching it infused me with a sadness that ran down to the deepest limits of my soul and made me think of suicide. There are so many ways to die.”
There are few ways to live, though, particularly when a person believes not only in literary perfection, but also in faultlessness as a physical being. For Mishima, the only way to live was to be a star, and Star is unusually lucid in its encapsulation of the experience of this rarest occupation. We can only hope to be so unlucky.