Mishima on Stage compiles nine new translations of Mishima Yukio's plays with a new emphasis on his work in kabuki, expanding the range of his dramatic works available in English from the previous focus on his modern noh plays and his work in the mainstream realist form of shingeki. With these plays in mind, we will be better equipped to make several points: that kabuki playwriting does not end with Meiji or even the war, that postwar theater is not only the story of shingeki versus angura (underground theater), and that a focus on his drama work may help dislodge Mishima from the jam of his performative suicide and ridiculous politics.

This new collection expands on the recent offerings from Hiroaki Sato's My Friend Hitler and Other Plays of Yukio Mishima (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), and sits more comfortably on one's desk than Sato's volume, with its swastika-emblazoned fluorescent pink cover. Some of the most important sections of My Friend Hitler are not plays but translations of short essays on shingeki and a transcription of a speech that Mishima delivered in July 1970 to the first class of students at the new kabuki actor's training school at the National Theatre (which itself dates to 1966). The speech roots Mishima's kabuki fascination in the coquettish female voice emerging from an old male actor gliding down the hanamichi on wrinkled bare feet and serves as a good introduction to Mishima's interest in kabuki as a revoltingly beautiful form.

Two of the translations in this new volume, The Black Lizard and The Blush on the White Hibiscus Blossom: Lady Fuyo and the True Account of the Ōuchi Clan, are translated by Mark Oshima (whose earphone guides many of us have heard at the Kabuki-za or the National Theatre), and the rest are translated or co-translated by Kominz, a specialist of kabuki and other classical dramatic forms and author of Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1995). All are smooth, enjoyable reads. Kominz includes a substantial sixty-page introduction to the volume, tracing Mishima's relationship to theater from his obsession with kabuki as a young man through his recruitment by Shōchiku to write new plays for its Kabuki-za theater (which is currently enjoying a resurgence thanks to plans to tear down the Ginza landmark in early 2010), and his experiences navigating the politics of shingeki troupes particularly during the 1960s. This new literary biography of Mishima told through the lens of kabuki and shingeki (an uncommon pair) is in many ways refreshing and opens up a new angle on Mishima as a “man of the theater.”

I am not a man of the theater, which perhaps explains my unease with Kominz's dramatic proclamation that the “translators of this anthology are cognizant of the fact that, for a non-Japanese-speaking audience, listening to a Mishima play being performed in English, every word uttered in the Japanese language is a small dose of poison threatening to kill the play for the audience,” which led to the replacement of “unfamiliar historical personages and literary works” with descriptive, cultural translations of the significance of those references (p. 58). This is done to create “stage ready” scripts unburdened by footnotes. The trade-off here, particularly by not documenting these elisions (if not in footnotes, then in the introduction or an appendix), is in generating uncertainty about the reliability of these texts as literary-historical artifacts.

One brief example: In the first play translated here, The Lighthouse (Tōdai, 1949), Kominz alters the text of a passage about the protagonist's wartime experience in the Japanese navy. Noboru's sister has just been teasing him about his “war crimes” binoculars (a souvenir from the navy), which he wants to use to look at the lighthouse of the play's title, after which he waxes nostalgic about the war. The original text (in my translation) reads,

However, Kominz apparently judged the island of Tsushima and the Izuhara navy base to be “poisonous” here, so they were dropped and replaced with the more familiar Taiwan: “my first assignment in Taiwan” (p. 71). The problem is that the gist of Noboru's nostalgia for the war is compromised by the omission from the original of the setting: the site of the devastating defeat Admiral Tōgō handed the Russians in 1905. From the original text, the reader may surmise that Noboru had been commissioned, probably for spiritual training more than anything else, to the very heart of Japan's greatest military victory over a Western power, the battle that made Admiral Tōgō famous throughout the world, and an intense point of pride for the Japanese navy during World War II. “Apolitical” audiences of both the Japanese and English versions of the play are welcome to ignore these references, but if Mishima is truly a genius of the first rank, as we are repeatedly assured in the introduction, then we should probably leave the choices of inclusion and exclusion up to him. Broad claims such as “for the first ten years of Mishima's theatrical career, politics had no place in his playwriting” (p. 6) might be more persuasive if the politics of history had not been translated out of these plays.

This sidelining of history is paralleled by a lack of attention to the historical embeddedness of Mishima's work in the introductory chapter. We do get a diachronic treatment of Mishima's personal development and a number of behind-the-scenes stories, but a cross-sectional view of Mishima and his times is downplayed. It may have been interesting to consider, for example, the way Shōchiku's recruitment of Mishima in 1953 (while he was still in his twenties) to write for kabuki paralleled their rival Nikkatsu's 1956 release of the film Taiyō no kisetsu (Season of the Sun), written by and starring the also twenty-something Ishihara brothers. So both entertainment corporations were injecting young talent half a decade before their contest for centrality in early 1960s New Wave film. Similarly, Mishima's reworking of Shibusawa Tatsuhiko's translations of the Marquis de Sade in his 1965 Sado kōshaku funin (Madame de Sade) is important largely for its engagement with the obscenity trial against Shibusawa at the time. And to claim that Miwa Akihiro (then Maruyama Akihiro) was made famous by performing in The Black Lizard in 1968 has things exactly backward. Miwa was a best-selling chanson singer in the 1950s, appeared in films as early as Masumura Yasuzō's Danryū (Warm Current, 1957), and played lead roles in Terayama Shūji's first two Tenjō Sajiki plays, including Kegawa no Marie (Marie in Furs, or La Marie-Vision, 1967), performed on the stage at Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka to overflow audiences who demanded (and got) immediate additional performances running late into the night. Mishima's engagement with the underground is completely erased here, despite his long friendship with butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi, his role in naming the little theater under Shinjuku Bunka “Sazori-za,” and his tapping of angura's energy in casting Miwa in the role of Black Lizard the year after Terayama had collaborated with him in the most legendary Tenjō Sajiki performance (an encore of which Miwa has been touring with again in 2009). The story of Mishima and Miwa is surely more complex than the recruitment of a promising star from the minor to the major leagues.