Fiction: The Union of Death and Desire

Sam Sacks

Like virtually everything Mishima wrote, the line doubled as an autobiographical clue. A gifted novelist and dramatist, Mishima (1925-70) was also a relentless exhibitionist, tailoring his public image so that he personified the themes of his writing—the decorous nihilism of postwar Japan, the union of death and desire, the operatic submission to the cruelties of fate. Somewhat like Oscar Wilde, or like today’s literary pseudo-prophet Michel Houellebecq, Mishima combined a sense of stylized disaffection with an insatiable yen for celebrity. His life was so inextricable from his art that the writer Marguerite Yourcenar, his most perceptive critic, claimed that his masterpiece was not a book at all but the extraordinary spectacle of his suicide at the age of 45, when he ceremonially disemboweled himself after a failed coup d’état in a Tokyo military base.

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Let’s face it, not many novels are going to overshadow something like that. Nevertheless, “The Frolic of the Beasts,” a morose little gem from Mishima’s middle period, boasts its share of sensuous depravity. Its self-destructive love triangle consists of Ippei, a wealthy middle-aged playboy; Yūko, his bored and neglected wife; and Kōji, a hot-blooded student who becomes Yūko’s lover and her instrument for marital vengeance. The story begins with Kōji’s return to society. Ippei was left partially paralyzed by his attack and lives under the care of his wife, who scandalously brings Kōji back to live in their house, working as a gardener.

Much writhing and brooding and elegant despairing follows. Kōji yearns to make atonement but his lust for Yūko “inevitably revive[s] his crime.” Yūko is desperately lonely but conscience-stricken, and Ippei seems to be exaggerating his disability to enmesh the lovers deeper in guilt and thereby goad them toward another act of violence. Mishima is on record saying that he drew inspiration for the novel from a Beethoven overture and the translator, Mr. Clare, notes that the plot parodies a classic work of medieval Noh theater. These influences—romantic Sturm und Drang and formalized gestures and expressions from the stage—aren’t integrated so much as piled on top of each other, like a face gaudily layered in makeup. It’s a train wreck of styles, but because the book is about moral catastrophe the collision seems fitting.

“Everything he possessed had begun to emit the stench of decay,” Mishima writes about Ippei’s decadent youth. “There was no reason to believe that Yūko had not detected this foul odor, but likely as not she had come to love its fragrance.” Such is the perfume that seems to trail after this writer and his books, a smell that repels yet holds an uneasy and undeniable attraction.

The stories in Taeko Kono’s “Toddler-Hunting” (New Directions, 274 pages, $16.95) dwell in a similar atmosphere of deviancy, taking on such subjects as sadomasochism and repressed pedophilia. But Kono (1926-2015) wrote with none of Mishima’s grandstanding excesses. Her stories are plainspoken, realistic and often pedestrian in their descriptions of day-to-day life, which make the sudden intrusions of violence and perversion both more startling and more transgressive.

The collection, in a lucid translation by Lucy North, is a reissue from 1996, but the stories themselves come from the 1960s. With the exception of “Full Tide,” which views the start of World War II through the eyes of a child, the setting is again a modernizing postwar Japan infected by a strain of spiritual malaise. Kono’s women tend to be oppressed by chronic illnesses and vivid nightmares. They harbor an inexplicable aversion to children or else, as in “Toddler-Hunting” and “Crabs,” an alarming attraction to little boys. Most of all, they crave physical pain during sex. “Akiko’s period was always regular,” Kono writes in the title story before taking a characteristically dark swerve: “except for once, when she’d made Sasaki whip her so violently that she couldn’t stand up for two days and it came two weeks late.”

Two currents are constantly crossing in the stories, the first depicting the polite forms of public interactions and the second pulsing with taboo fantasies and hallucinations. There are resonances here with Japan’s greatest midcentury writer Junichiro Tanizaki, who explored sexual fetishes in novels such as “The Key” and “Some Prefer Nettles.” But the subversions feel somehow scarier in Kono’s case, in part because of her deadpan prose and in part because she strikes at sacred paradigms of motherhood and femininity.

The scenes frequently have the feel of horror stories. In “Snow,” for instance, a woman pays her respects to her dead mother, a solemn moment shattered as “a stream of bright red blood spurted out of the corpse’s nose, running down the sides of the mouth onto the neck.” Then the housekeeper says not to worry and quietly cleans up the mess.

Yukiko Motoya’s collection “The Lonesome Bodybuilder” (Soft Skull, 209 pages, $16.95) turns its attention to the state of domesticity in present-day Japan, finding much of the same alienation and discontent. The stories are openly fantastical, inventing the sorts of feminist fairy tales that were popularized by Angela Carter and have been adapted with wit and ingenuity by writers like Han Kang and Carmen Maria Machado. Ms. Motoya’s writing falls on the quirky end of the spectrum. The voices, in Asa Yoneda’s translation, can be risibly naive. “Why did I get married to a thing like this? Why was I so happy to be married to a bunch of straw?” wonders the wife in “The Straw Husband.” They seem like reasonable questions.

The book’s centerpiece is a novella-length story called “An Exotic Marriage,” about a homemaker’s suffocating life with what may me be the most boring person in recent fiction. The narrator’s nameless husband spends his evenings watching variety shows or, for a change of pace, playing a handheld video game. The inertia brings about the kind of symbolic transformation common to the collection: Their faces begin to lose shape and slip from their bodies. Husband and wife, it turns out, were simply ill-fitting forms they had tried and failed to adapt to. The novella concludes with a final metamorphosis, one both strange and strangely hopeful.