Two of the most fascinating figures in literature merge in Chicago’s European Repertory Company’s latest production, Madame de Sade: the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima and the French libertine, the Marquis de Sade. Although Sade doesn’t appear in the play, his presence is writ large as Mishima’s evocative script explores his life, politics, and sexual aberrations through the eyes of several women in his life in the years before the French Revolution.
The Marquis de Sade, whose name inspired the term sadism, is a legend. Mishima, born Hiraoke Kimitake, may not be as well known, although his reputation as one the most fascinating literary figures of the twentieth century is secure. Works such as The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion thrive as modern masterpieces. The tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, is regarded as one of Mishima’s most lasting achievements. In all, Mishima’s opus includes 40 novels, poetry, essays, and modern Kabuki and Noh dramas. His work was nominated three times for Nobel Prize for literature. Madame de Sade premiered in 1965, and was given a much-ballyhooed production by Ingmar Bergman in 1989.
As a man, Mishima was torn between Eastern and Western cultures (and Madame de Sade is a great demonstration of this psychic rift, examining issues of Christian morality overlaid with Eastern sensibilities), and conflicted about his homosexuality. His death itself was a personal and philosophical statement. In November of 1970, Mishima committed ritual suicide in Japan’s Self Defense headquarters. His suicide was a plea for a return to more spiritual ideals, embodied by the Samurai.
Mishima was the offspring of a government official. His name change reflected his desire to not be recognized by his anti-literary father. Bringing deliberation into his life as well as his writing, Mishima chose his first name, Yukio, because of its import. Loosely translated, it means, ‘Man who chronicles reason.’
An examination of the writer’s life reveals his conflicted nature. He studied law and his early career was as a civil servant in Japan’s finance ministry. It wasn’t until he met Kawabata Yasunari in 1946, who recommended Mishima’s stories to well-regarded literary publications, that he began to take his talent for writing seriously. In 1949, he published Confessions of a Mask, a novel that dealt with his struggles with his own homosexuality and his efforts to hide it and to show the world a face of what he considered normality. In post-World War II Japan, this decision was not as rigid as it may seem today. Mishima’s desire to keep his sexuality hidden was a defense against social condemnation. The work also revealed his masochistic nature, which was perhaps instilled by his upbringing and own self-loathing as a gay man.
Interestingly, Mishima turned to bodybuilding a few years after the publication of Confessions of a Mask. Like everything in the writer’s life, this decision was motivated by more intellectual and philosophical concerns. Mishima believed that he could create a perfect body, one that would defy age. He also became a martial arts expert and has been depicted in guises such as Saint Sebastian shot through with arrows, a downed sailor, and most tellingly, a samurai committing ritual suicide.
Madame de Sade may be one of Mishima’s most telling works. The play comes at a point near the end of the artist’s life (his ritual suicide would occur five years after its completion). It reflects his masochism and seeks to create a world completely through women’s eyes. Among the views of Sade that are brought to life in the play are those of his wife, Renee, and his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil.
Perhaps one of the most telling examinations of Madame de Sade was written by Sadian scholar Tony Saroop. About Mishima, and the play, he opined:
‘Among the long string of successes which Mishima wrote before his suicide, (Madame de Sade) is one pearl which no one who is seriously interested in Sade can afford to overlook …. The play seems to have dropped like a stone into a bottomless abyss and to have awakened no echoes at all. The Western critical response seems to have been an absolute silence.
‘Not many people understand Sade, and it isn’t difficult to spot the ones who do. They bring fresh and original perceptions to a body of texts which just plain baffles the conventional mind. Given this, all I can think is that the West’s failure to understand and appreciate Mishima’s interpretation of Sade is simply part of that larger failure of the West (with few exceptions) to understand Sade himself. What is it that enabled a Japanese writer to understand a man most Western commentators would dismiss as ‘crazy,’ if they weren’t being polite and didn’t wrap their dismissals in circumlocutions? What did Mishima have that enabled him to penetrate to the heart of the Sadeian enterprise and lay bare its secret?
‘The Japanese sensibility … is closer to and retains elements of an archaic, pagan, ‘pre-Christian’ sensibility, a sensibility we have completely lost touch with, but which Sade seems to have tapped into and evoked out of his inner self.’
It makes sense, then, that Mishima could grasp insights about the Sade that a writer raised in Western culture may have overlooked.
Saroop continues: ‘I think this is why Western scientific scholarship, with its naive belief in the efficacy of rational discourse, a form of discourse which does little more than generate disagreement, has not and never could give us a full and satisfactory explanation of the Sadeian mystery, which is also the deep, repressed mystery of ourselves. There is something in Sade which rises above the rational, something that only poetry can comprehend, and which Mishima has attempted to evoke (with) great poetic beauty.’
That poetic beauty, and the man behind it, is on display in Madame de Sade, which opened at The Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph Jan. 10. The play is sure to provide some shocking moments, some flights of poetic fancy, and, for the discerning, insight into the lives of two of literature’s most fascinating, and conflicted, figures.