Rokumeikan

Now that a new school year has begun at Fujugaya, it’s time for the school’s drama club to choose a new play to put on. This year they decide to put on Rokumeikan, a 1956 play by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima.¹ I’ll defer talking about the play’s plot and characters and how they integrate with the themes of Sweet Blue Flowers; that will have to wait until the next volume when the drama club will perform the play. For now, I’ll concentrate on its author and setting.

Any discussion of Rokumeikan inevitably starts with its author. Non-Japanese readers are far more likely to know the name “Yukio Mishima” than they are to know the play itself. Mishima is most famous for the way he died, committing seppuku in 1970 at the age of 45 after an unsuccessful attempt to rally the soldiers at a Japan Self-Defense Forces base to revolt in the name of the emperor.

Non-Japanese readers are also likely to know that Mishima was allegedly a closeted gay man (though his widow strenuously denied this). This constitutes subtext for Sweet Blue Flowers, but I don’t think it’s the most relevant aspect of the choice of Rokumeikan. (Among other things, I think one of the themes of Sweet Blue Flowers is the rejection of subtext.)

Instead, I think we can best understand the significance of Rokumeikan to Sweet Blue Flowers by looking not at its author but at the play itself.

Although Mishima is best known outside Japan as a novelist, he was also a major playwright with several dozen plays to his credit. He occupied a position in 1950s and 60s Japan comparable to that of his contemporaries Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller in America. Far from being a Takurazuka-style fantasy, Rokumeikan is a serious literary work. Fujigaya putting on a production would be like an American high school putting on a production of A Streetcar Named Desire or Death of a Salesman.

Like those plays, Rokumeikan caught the imagination of audiences. After its initial production in 1956, the play went on tour to thirty-five cities. It was produced again in 1962 and 1963, and then in 2006 was revived to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the premiere.² A television adaptation aired in January 2008 while Takako Shimura was writing Sweet Blue Flowers. This TV movie would likely have been the form in which Akira encountered it, hence her comment to Ryoko Ueda: “Oh, right! It was originally a play” (SBF, 2:230).

Unlike a typical Takurazuka production, Rokumeikan is not set in a foreign land but in Japan itself, during one of the most critical eras of its history, and touches on key issues still relevant in Japan today. Before Rokumeikan was a play, it was a building (“Deer-cry Hall”) constructed in the 1880s as a guest house cum meeting center for foreign diplomats visiting Japan. The Rokumeikan was designed by a British architect working in the French style and featured balls and banquets attended by Japanese nobles and bureaucrats dressed in Western suits and gowns.

The Rokumeikan could thus be seen as either a sign of Japan’s emergence as a recognized equal to Britain, France, and other Western powers or an attempt by Japan to mimic Western ways to the detriment of native Japanese traditions.

This harks back to the chapter contrasting Fujigaya and Matsuoka. How should modernity and tradition be balanced? Should one be bound to tradition? Celebrate it but move on? Actively repudiate it? What is lost, and what is gained, with each approach? Over the years, Fujigaya itself has gone from an emblem of modernity in the Meiji era—established by representatives of a foreign religion and based on a Western model—to a bastion of tradition in twenty-first-century Japan.

These tensions display themselves in the setting of Rokumeikan, the characters’ actions within the play, and the lives of the girls who portray those characters. I’ll discuss this topic in more depth when we get to volume 3.