【雅思精读】三岛由纪夫：一位日本作家的奇闻
又到了给大家分享外刊精读内容的时候啦，本文就和上名校小编一起来看看【雅思精读】三岛由纪夫：一位日本作家的奇闻，*注：本文选自11月25日BBC News
Yukio Mishima: The strange tale of Japan’s infamous novelist
三岛由纪夫：一位日本作家的奇闻
1. Standing on a balcony, as if on stage, the small, immaculate figure appeals to the army assembled below. The figure is Yukio Mishima, real name Kimitake Hiraoka. He was Japan’s most famous living novelist when, on 25 November 1970, he went to an army base in Tokyo, kidnapped the commander, had him assemble the garrison, then tried to start a coup. He railed against the US-backed state and constitution, berated the soldiers for their submissiveness and challenged them to return the Emperor to his pre-war position as living god and national leader. The audience, at first politely quiet, or just stunned into silence, soon drowned him out withjeers. Mishima stepped back inside and said: “I don’t think they heard me.” Then he knelt down and killed himself by seppuku, the Samurai’s ritual suicide.
三岛由纪夫身材矮小，温文尔雅，他站在阳台上，就像在舞台上一样，吸引了集合的卫士军官。三岛由纪夫原名平冈松威。1970年代，他是日本最有名的小说家。1970年11月25日，他来到东京的一个军事基地，绑架了他们的指挥官，召集军队，想要发动军变。他谴责当时以北国为后盾的政府和制度，斥责士兵的卑躬屈膝，想要恢复天皇战前作为国家领袖的地位。起初，士兵们都没有说话，或者说他们被吓到了，但是很快，此起彼伏的哄笑淹没了三岛由纪夫的声音，他退回屋里，说：“他们都没听懂我在说什么。”紧接着，跪下来，以武士的方式切腹自杀了。
2. Mishima’s death shocked the Japanese public. He was a literary celebrity, a macho and provocative but also rather ridiculous character, perhapsakin to Norman Mailer in the US, or Michel Houellebecq in today’s France. But what had seemed to be posturing had suddenly become very real. It was the morning of the opening of the 64th session of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, and the Emperor himself was present. The prime minister’s speech on the government agenda for the coming year was somewhatovershadowed. No one had died by seppuku since the last days of World War Two.
三岛由纪夫之死轰动了日本。当时，他是日本文坛明星，他男性气概十足，敢于挑战但同时也有点荒谬，就像美国作家诺曼·梅勒和当代法国作家米歇尔•维勒贝那样。但那些看起来很是荒诞的一切突然成为了现实。那天早上，日本第64届国会正在召开，天皇本人也出席了会议。他的自杀使得人们无暇关注日本首相关于明年政府议程的讲话。自二战结束之后，还没有人以切腹的形式自杀。
3. “Some thought he had gone mad, others that this was the last in a series of exhibitionistic acts, one more expression of the desire to shock for which he had become notorious,” wrote the Japanese philosopher Hide Ishiguro in a 1975 essay for The New York Review. “A few people on the political right saw his death as a patriotic gesture of protest against present-day Japan. Others believed that it was a despairing, gruesomefarce contrived by a talented man who had been an enfant terrible and who could not bear to live on into middle age and mediocrity.” For his part, Mishima once told his wife that “even if I am not immediately understood, it’s OK, because I’ll be understood by the Japan of 50 or 100 years’ time.”
日本哲学家石黑浩1975年为《纽约时报》撰写的一篇评论文章中说，“有的人觉得他疯了，有的人则认为这是他一系列行为艺术的结尾，这是他想要引起轰动的举措，没想到却让他臭名远扬。少数右翼人士将他的自杀视为一种爱国行为，视为是对当今日本的一种抗议。有些人则认为这是一场令人绝望的可怕闹剧，一场由一个无法忍受中年生活的平庸的天才导演的闹剧。”三岛由纪夫曾对妻子说：“人们现在不明白我，这没关系，50或者100年以后，他们会明白的。”
4. In 1949, Mishima arrived on Japan’s literary scene with Confessions of a Mask, a kind of autobiography, thinly veiled as a novel, that made him famous in his early twenties. It tells the story of a delicate, sensitive boy who is all but held captive by his grandmother. She is ill and he is made to nurse her. Rather than playing outside with other boys, he is confined with her for years in the sickly-sweet smelling darkness of her bedroom.
1949年，三岛由纪夫凭借自传体小说《假面自白》确定其在日本文坛地位，这本小说让他在二十多岁时就蜚声文坛。小说讲述了一个脆弱敏感的男孩被自己祖母监禁的故事。她病了，男孩被安排去照顾她。多年来，他没法像其他男孩一样出去玩耍，而是被关在她那黑黢黢的卧室里。
5. The boy’s mind develops in that room. Fantasy and reality are never quite separated; fantasy, the stronger twin, grows dominant. By the time the grandmother dies and the boy emerges, he has developed a fixation withroleplaying, with life as theatre. He cannot resist layering fantasies over life around him. Men and boys, especially muscular, straightforward ones, are assigned roles in his vivid, often violent daydreams. Meanwhile he obsesses over his own deviance and appearing normal. He learns how to play his own role: “The reluctant masquerade had begun.”
男孩的心智是在那个小房间里成长的。幻想和现实像孪生兄弟一样，从来没能分开。幻想甚至变得更加强大，占据了主导地位。祖母去世之后，男孩终于从小房间走出来，但是那时候，他已经爱上了这种角色扮演的游戏，生活对他来说，就像戏剧一样。他忍不住对周遭的生活加上种种幻想的色彩，男人尤其是那些肌肉发达，耿直坦率的男人是他白日梦里经常扮演的角色。他痴迷于自己的与众不同的同时，也让自己看起来与常人无二。他学会了如何演好自己的角色：“假面舞会开始了。”
Beauty and destruction
美丽与毁灭
6. Confessions of a Mask continues up to the end of the boy’s adolescence, detailing the entwined evolution of his internal and external lives and his homosexual awakening. In many ways, it is the key to understanding Mishima’s later life and works. It reveals the roots of the aesthetic sensibility, so tied to his sexuality, which proved to be Mishima’s steering obsession. The narrator writes that he “sensuously accepted the creed of death that was popular during the war”, when conscription and self-sacrifice seemed certain and imminent, and indeed Mishima was forever fixated on the idea that beauty is most beautiful when it is transient – and above all on the cusp of destruction. This creed mingles with admiration for the male form, a form the frail narrator lacks, to produce fantasies of brave warriors and their bloody demises. This private world of “Night and Blood and Death” was filled with the “most sophisticated of cruelties and the most exquisite of crimes”, all recounted with a cool detachment.
小说《假面自白》也讲述了男孩的青春期，详细描述了男孩内心世界和外部世界的交织演变，也讲述了他同性恋意识的觉醒。总的来说，这部小说是理解三岛由纪夫晚期生活和作品的关键。这部小说揭示了三岛由纪夫审美的起源，三岛由纪夫的审美和性密切相关，他对此有一种很深的痴迷。《假面自白》中，叙述者写道，他“接受了战争期间流行的死亡信条。”当时，征兵和自我牺牲就在眼前。事实上，三岛由纪夫认为，消逝之时即为美，在他看来，毁灭即为美。他的这一美学观点和他的男性崇拜交织在一起，而男性气质正式小说叙述者所缺乏的。这种交织，引起了对英勇战士及其以身殉死的幻想。这个“暗夜，血腥和死亡”交织的世界里充满了“残忍和罪恶，”而小说所有的叙述却都带着一种超然。
7. But then Confessions of a Mask also suggests the slippery interplay between performance and reality that characterised everything Mishima did and wrote. It gave the impression of revealing the author locked in some dark struggle with himself – while also suggesting it may just be a masterful manipulation of media and publicity. Mishima had it both ways, scandalising society while retaining a wisp of deniability.
同时，《假面自白》也暗含了现实和表演之间微妙而又难以捉摸的联系，而这正是三岛由纪夫自己的写作和生活。小说让人觉得，三岛由纪夫自己在黑暗中苦苦挣扎，同时也让人觉得这一切都只是媒体和宣传的操纵。三岛由纪夫在抨击社会的同时，也对其保留一点肯定的态度。
8. The formula worked. It turned Mishima into the enfant terrible of postwar Japanese literature and won him a broad readership at home. He was, though decadent, a disciplined and prolific writer, churning out reams of popular fiction alongside high literature and dozens of Noh plays. He worked himself into Tokyo high society with the same focus, cultivating adandyish image. His face, with its rugged bones and soft eyes, photographed well. And he was a friend to foreign bureaux and their correspondents, ingratiating himself and doing what he could to extend his celebrity across the Pacific – with some success. “If Sony’s Akio Morita was the most famous Japanese abroad,” wrote John Nathan, a translator and later a biographer of Mishima’s, “Mishima ran a close second.”
这是三岛由纪夫的写作原则，这让他成为战后日本文学的天才，在国内吸引了广泛的关注。虽然三岛由纪夫看上去很颓废，但是他是一位自律而又多产的作家，除了各种文学作品和戏剧，他还写作了大量流行小说。他自己也是以同样的面目走进了东京上流社会，把自己打造成了时下流行的形象。一张照片中，他棱角分明的脸和柔和的眼睛都很好表现了出来。他是国外驻日本媒体的宠儿，他竭尽所能在太平洋彼岸扩大自己的影响了，他成功了。三岛由纪夫的传记作家约翰·内森写道，“如果说索尼的森田昭夫是海外最知名的日本人，那么三岛由纪夫就排第二。”
9. Mishima’s novels during the 50s mostly mined the same suggestivelyautobiographical vein as Confessions of a Mask. In Forbidden Colours (1951), an ageing writer manipulates a young gay man who has become engaged for convenience and financial security. In Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), an acolyte at the temple is transfixed by its beauty in the belief that it will be destroyed by the bombing raids – and when it survives the war, he takes it on himself to destroy it. And in Kyoko’s House (1959), a boxer takes up right-wing politics, while an actor becomes involved in asado-masochistic sexual relationship that ends in a double suicide.
三岛由纪夫在50年代创作的小说大多采用了自传体风格，就像《假面自白》一样。在《禁色》(1951)讲述的是一名老作家利用一个同性恋男子，以金钱为诱饵让其订婚的故事。在《金阁寺》(1956年)中，庙里的一名侍从为金阁寺的美所震撼，深信其会被战争所毁，而战争过后，金阁寺仍在，侍从却自己将寺庙毁掉了。《恭子的家》(1959)中，一名持右翼观点的拳击手和一名演员卷入了一场性虐待丑闻，最终双双自杀。
