After the Banquet
by Yukio Mishima
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Book Summary Information
Author: Yukio MishimaEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-02-22
ISBN: 0375705155
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of After the Banquet
Book Review: Mishima's strongest writing outside The Sea Of Fertility.
Summary: 5 Stars
Mishima wrote After The Banquet well into the second half of his career. It was one of his last books before The Sea Of Fertility. So, his worldview was surely fully formed by this point. Yet, the book breaks quite a few of the stereotypes that surround Mishima's work.
First of all, the main character is a woman. This is rare for Mishima, who had quite a reputation for manliness. The last time he had a female protagonist was in Thirst For Love, his second novel. But there, the woman was obviously a cardboard cut-out more than a character, a hysterical "repressed housewife" type who lost her head over a strong, manly young man. Not in After The Banquet, though. Dig this quote: "Kazu...realized that for all her headstrong temperament, she had never loved a man younger than herself. A young man has such a surplus of spiritual and physical gifts that he is likely to be cocksure of himself, particularly when dealing with an older woman, and there is no telling how swelled up with self-importance he may become. Besides, Kazu felt a physical repugnance for youth. A woman is more keenly aware than a man of the shocking disharmony between a young man's spiritual and physical qualities, and Kazu had never met a young man who wore his youth well. She was moreover repelled by the sleekness of a young man's skin." (31-2)
This is a strange statement, coming from a man who allegedly worshipped youth and physical fitness, to the extent that he voiced a desire to die before he ever grew old. Not only is Mishima disparaging young men, he's doing so from the perspective of a woman over fifty. And this woman is not a decrepit and bitter shell like, say, the old Honda in the last two volumes of The Sea Of Fertility, but a vivacious, energetic hell-raiser. Well, then.
So anyway, in After The Banquet, the strong and lively older woman falls in love with a sixty-year-old politician who professes radical views. This happens when she is present at a dinner attended by various old politicians, and she sees that this particular man was the only one at the gathering who still expressed some passion for the present, instead of constantly reliving past glories. This part is well in line with Mishima's supposed views. After all, Mishima was also widely considered to be an old-school nationalist radical.
But, interestingly enough, he never explains Noguchi's political views in the novel. It is stated that Noguchi is a member of the Radical Party, but that's all. There is no way to tell if this party is liberal or conservative. Mishima states that Noguchi likes to lecture his wife on socialism, but not whether he is for or against it. The one scene that depicts a political speech given by Noguchi is full of deliberate comedy. Mishima portrays Noguchi as a terrible public speaker, and the only one of his positions that the book reveals is something silly about banning bicycles in public places. In other words, Mishima is quite consciously poking fun at this principled radical.
Mishima does generally speak with admiration about Noguchi's sense of honour, but within limits. For instance, Noguchi does not allow his wife to buy him a new suit, and prefers to go about dressed in clothes that he bought decades ago. Mishima shows his approval through the wife's eyes, but nonetheless describes Noguchi's behaviour as follows: "Such childish drivel, as anyone could see, covered an undercurrent of narrow-minded dread." (170) In another chapter, Noguchi gets angry at his wife when she tells him about how his friends talk about them behind his back. Mishima's commentary: "This was Kazu's first intimation that her husband's noble mind lacked sufficient powers of discernment." (94)
There's another line of thought regarding Mishima that holds that he didn't really care about politics, he only cared about dying a glorious death when he was still in his prime as a man. This explanation can be plausible, and the book's mild mockery of Noguchi, even as it praises him, may appear to support it. But that still doesn't explain the protagonist, quite old by Mishima's standard. Kazu does think about death, like many of Mishima's characters, but there's a refreshingly convincing materialistic streak to these thoughts. She wants to die as a part of a respected family, and to be buried among dignified people. This objective is more suitable to highly motivated people who build their fortune from nothing on their own than to radical dreamers with some abstract idea of honour or national greatness. And by the end of the book, she rethinks even this position. This is quite different from, say, Mizoguchi's dreams of beauty and fire in The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion -- even though, it must be noted, Mizoguchi ends up deciding that he wants to live.
Perhaps the only aspect in which Kazu might be a "typical" Mishima character is that she never thinks about having a family. It's a bit strange that a woman of fifty would appear to feel no regret about having no children. It may be that she is too cynical to believe that she might want to have children with any man, but nonetheless, in her private moments, she might still wish that she had had children, even abstractly. However, there is a passage in the book that may imply that her thoughts about death are caused in part by her lack of family.
There's a common image of Mishima as a "philosophical" writer, interested in big ideas more than the lives of individuals. But when he had a mind to, he could write about real life with exceptional humour and attention to detail. Kazu's worldliness annoys and upsets her husband. And it seems that Mishima likes her more than him.
Summary of After the Banquet
When the shrewd and charming Kazu falls in love with one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, she renounces her fashionable restaurant in order to become his wife. But soon she determines to hunch him back into office, with results that will force her to choose between her marriage and the demands of her irrepressible vitality.Japanese Books
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