Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #6

I read this book for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

After the Banquet – Yukio Mishima

The main character of this novel is Kazu Fukuzawa. She grew up during Japan’s early 20^th century when her native snow county was desperately impoverished.

Kazu herself beat the odds against her survival being born poor, female, and rural by sidestepping an early death due to malnutrition, infections, and injuries or wounds. She also avoided the occupational hazard of the water trade, shinjū  心中 suicide of two (or more, see Quicksand) individuals bound by love and unfortunate karma. Not so lucky were the men who went down in the world, pissed away their fortunes or did away with themselves all because of Kazu.

Along with an indomitable will, boundless energy, and a child-like honesty, Kazu has no illusions about herself, her customers, or ordinary people. She became the shrewd and street-wise owner-operator of a high-class Tokyo restaurant called the Setsugoan, where she entertains bigwigs in politics, government, and industry. Taking a daily stroll in her garden (which Mishima describes masterfully) keeps clean her moral compass, simple and practical as it is.

In her fifties in about Showa 35 (1960), Kazu is concerned about that old mortality. Not for the sake of creature comforts in old age (she’s set for those), but she worries about what’s in store for her in the afterlife, given those silly paramours doing away with themselves in her early career and given the torments of Buddhistic Hell. When she meets ex-diplomat Noguchi, she realizes how lonely she’s feeling and they fall in love like giddy teenagers. Kazu also figures being connected to an upright family will count for much come the Judgement Day. She wants to ensure that a Noguchi descendent will tend her tomb so that she doesn’t end up in Hamlet’s “little, little grave, an obscure grave.”

Noguchi and Kazu marry. Only to prove that while opposites will attract, they ought not marry each other, especially not in the flashbang of romantic love. An intellectual with rigid morals, tired and listless Noguchi is the worst kind of clueless male: the man who’s positive he’s got a good bead on things. On the other hand, Kazu remains a cauldron of activity, boiling over with initiative and practical sense. She supports her husband in his bid for the governorship of Tokyo by bankrolling and aggressively working in the campaign. She is supported by political professional Yamazaki, who is her link to party big wheels. Yamazaki also acts as a go-between assigned the task of balancing the opposite styles of the two spouses.

But despite Kazu's hefty expenditures of money, time and energy, the snake pit of politics proves too much even for her. Mishima satirizes political campaigning, noting that Kazu’s terrible speechifying on the hustings is still tolerated by average Japanese voters, who have an amused affection for “inept speakers.”  Calling Orange’s babbling and playacting to mind, Kazu’s transparent attempts to be “just folks” takes in no sensible adult, but voters still feel tender toward a suffering savior who’s willing to act the goat for them.

Mishima is great at description of sensory experience though sometimes the minute details of Kazu’s kimono colors and obi patterns went right over my head. But his eye for nature is up there with Hudson, Tomlinson, and Turgenev, awakening that old sense of wonder. His plotting is near perfect with pace and rhythm. His sense of comedy runs from gross to droll. And he can set a scene: incredible are the set pieces about the Omizutori (the water-drawing festival at Tōdaiji in Nara) and the ghastly rally when Kazu realizes that people are just staring at her as if they believed she were a fiend from hell.