Akiko and Akira

I now come to the actual performance of Rokumeikan, in which Akira Okudaira plays Akiko Daitokuji, the lover of Hisao Kiyohara.

Like almost all the characters in Rokumeikan, Akiko is a member of the Japanese aristocracy. As a marchioness, her mother is the wife of a marquess, the second-highest rank in the hierarchy of Japanese noble families (kazoku) established in the early Meiji era.

Akiko’s social status may thus seem far above that of Akira, but it’s worth noting that at least some of Akira’s ancestors may have been equally high-born. The family name Okudaira is shared by Nobumasa Okudaira, a feudal lord who fought with Ieyasu Tokugawa and Nobunaga Oda in the wars that established the Tokugawa shogunate. Tokugawa gave his eldest daughter in marriage to Okudaira, so Akira herself may be descended from one of the most influential figures in Japanese history.

Akiko is also the youngest character in Rokumeikan. Her age is not given in the play, but I guess that she is around sixteen or seventeen years old, or in other words, about the same age as Akira. Since the play takes place in 1886, Akiko would thus be a “Meiji girl” in the same sense that Akira is a “Heisei girl,” born in the new era and knowing nothing of life before it—in contrast to all the other characters in the play.

It’s therefore no coincidence that Akiko is the character most in tune with the new spirit of Meiji Japan, and the one who looks most to the West rather than to traditional Japan. As her mother says, “she loves radical things.” Hisao is one of those “radical things,” not “a man of the lower class, but … on the side of that class.” Akiko first meets him not at an arranged meeting but rather by chance at a performance of “Charine’s circus horses,” where Hisao picks up the imported European handbag her mother had accidentally dropped.¹

That evening at the Rokumeikan, Akiko plans to leave Japan in the morning with Hisao on a trip to Europe arranged by her mother, to return only when (or if?) her father gives her permission to marry. It’s not clear if Akiko’s mother intends to accompany the couple. If not, this would presumably be a decided breach of social norms on Akiko’s part: not only to refuse an arranged marriage and marry for love, but to travel alone with a man not her husband or father. Similarly, Akira is considering her own breach of contemporary Japanese social norms in contemplating entering into a lesbian relationship with Fumi.

In her disregard for social norms, Akiko is not condemned by her mother and her friends, but instead receives their support. They too seem to welcome “this new wonderful age,” as Akiko’s mother’s friends call it, “this age where women are able to bask in the sun for the first time in hundreds of years.” It is to help Akiko that her mother requests Asako meet with Hisao, the event that kicks off the play’s action. As her mother says, in a line quoted in Sweet Blue Flowers (SBF, 3:92), “I want my daughter to experience a full life in the new era, and have the life that I never had.”² So too will Akira’s friends support her in her own “new era,” though she initially fears they will not.

Continuing the parallels between Akira and the character she plays, even their names are similar, though with a twist: Akiko’s name has the -ko ending often used for girls’ given names in Japan, while Akira’s name is (if Wikipedia is any guide) more traditionally used for boys and men (e.g., the film director Akira Kurosawa). It’s possible that Shimura chose this name specifically to echo that of Akiko and to emphasize how Akira might go beyond Akiko in violating the strictures Japanese society has historically placed on women.³

In the end, Akiko’s hopes come to naught. Hisao is dead, and the best Asako can do is to advise Akiko to live on: “Hisao did not die for you. So it would be useless for you to follow him in death.”⁴ Consistent with the themes of Sweet Blue Flowers, there is also an implied message here for Akira and her fellow students: though there may be men in your life, don’t make your existence dependent on theirs.