2023-07-15 18:30:08
Rosamund Pike and Judi Dench in ‘Madame de Sade’, by Yukio Mishima, directed by Michael Grandage, at the Wyndhams Theatre, London, in 2009. ROBBIE JACK/ CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES
“The Theater according to Mishima”, by Yukio Mishima, edited under the direction of Keiichiro Hirano, translated from Japanese by Anne Bayard-Sakai, Patrick De Vos, Thomas Garcin, Alice Hureau, Corinne Quentin and Cécile Sakai, Atelier Akatombo, two volumes under box set, 582 pages, €39.
The spectacular suicide by disembowelling of Yukio Mishima, in November 1970, at the age of 45, served his work. This seppuku (the “good death” of the samurai), which amazed the world and caused deep unease in Japan, gave rise to endless interpretations (exalted sublimation of the warrior’s ethic, fascination with the abyss, aestheticism of the extreme …) which concealed a protean work.
Mishima is one of the most prolific authors of the 20th century: his complete works number forty-three volumes, or some 20,000 pages… But, if many of his novels have been translated, it is often unknown abroad that he was also a playwright, famous and celebrated, author of about thirty plays, some of which were presented in France, and an essayist. It is this gap that the publication of the two volumes of the Theater according to Mishima comes to fill.
The ambition to introduce the French public to the richness and power of Mishima’s theatrical work through the unpublished translation of theoretical writings, commentaries on dramatic art and four plays is the result of a series of convergent initiatives.
First, that of a publisher, Frank Sylvain, who runs the Atelier Akatombo editions, the initiator of the project. But also those of five specialists and translators of contemporary Japanese literature, the Japanese novelist Keiichiro Hirano, a great admirer of Mishima, and Thomas Garcin, lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of Paris Cité, specialist in Mishima and the intellectual history of post-war Japan, who led the project with Corinne Quentin, a great connoisseur of contemporary Japanese literature.
“Mishima was an observer and a critic of his time”
“Before his ultranationalist escapades, Mishima was an observer and a critic of his time who devoted himself to in-depth reflection on theatre, art and the novel. Novelist and playwright, he was also a theoretician of his work, observes Thomas Garcin. His theoretical essays on theater also allow us to better understand his way of thinking about the novel. From the 1950s, following the publication of confession of a mask [Gallimard, 1971 ; rééd. 2019]a novel certainly admirable but badly structured, he sought to clarify his style under the double influence of Ogai Mori [1862-1922] – a writer who opened up new avenues for the novel – and classical French theatre, starting with that of Racine. »
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