This Year’s Star
Although Akira is one of the most important characters in Sweet Blue Flowers, the character Akiko that she plays in Rokumeikan is of lesser importance—not exactly a bit part, but not a major role by any means. With Ryoko Ueda we have the reverse: the character she plays, Einosuke Kiyohara, is arguably the second or third most important in Rokumeikan (after Asako and comparable to Count Kageyama), but Ueda herself is one of the lesser characters in Sweet Blue Flowers.
First, a bit about Kiyohara. In the play, he is described as “the leader of the opposition group,” a group described as “the remnants of the Liberal Party.”1 One of the first political parties in Japan, the Liberal Party (Jiyūtō) was formed in 1881 as an outgrowth of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (Jiyū Minken Undō), one of Japan’s first mass political and social movements. Both the movement and the party advocated for democratically-elected legislatures, though with the electorate restricted to the former samurai and nobility. The Liberal Party was disbanded in 1884 (hence “the remnants of ….”).
Kiyohara’s son Hisao describes him as “An impeccable idealist. A figure like a leader of the French Revolution. A genuine liberal. … A believer in Rousseau, a Japanese Jacobin, a man who doesn’t give a damn about his life for liberty and equality ….”2 Mishima may have modeled the character of Kiyohara on Taisuke Itagaki, one of the founders of the real-life Liberal Party. With his colleagues, Itagaki wrote a manifesto modeled on the U.S. Declaration of Independence (“We, the thirty millions of people in Japan are all equally endowed with certain definite rights ….”). Like Kiyohara, Itagaki was the victim of an assassination attempt, in his case unsuccessful, after which he allegedly cried, “Itagaki may die, but liberty never!”
In the play, Kiyohara is less successful in his personal life: he neglects Hisao in favor of his legitimate children and does not speak to Asako in the twenty years after their affair. Though the meeting with Asako rekindles her love for him, Hisao’s resentment continues and drives him first to plan to kill his father and then die by his father’s hand in a perverse act of revenge upon him.
Unlike the case of Akiko and Akira, there are no real parallels between Ueda and Kiyohara. To the extent Ueda is characterized at all (which is not much compared to even secondary characters like Kyoko or Haruka), it is by explicit and implicit comparisons to Yasuko Sugimoto.
Like Yasuko, Ueda is tall and handsome, and like Yasuko eminently suitable for playing the part of a leading man. Also, like Yasuko (whom Mr. Kagami nicknamed the “library maiden”), Ueda spends her time reading in Fujigaya’s library and was discovered there by Haruka acting out the parts of Kiyohara and Asako from Rokumeikan (SBF, 2:260). Unlike Yasuko, Ueda has long hair, but then Yasuko had longer hair too (though not as long as Ueda’s) before she cut it off in an attempt to emulate her sister Kazusa’s “tough personality” (2:112).
As Kiyohara, Ueda also speaks a line, “a helpless child resides within me” (SBF, 3:102), that Yasuko had previously used in her letter to Mr. Kagami (1:164). Presumably, the drama club was considering Rokumeikan for the following year’s theater festival, and Yasuko had read the play in preparation for playing Kiyohara. In any case, Mr. Kagami caught the reference, as shown in his thoughts after the play (3:107).
I suspect Takako Shimura introduced the character of Ueda primarily to fill the slot left open by the departure of Yasuko as the “prince” of Fujigaya. She acts opposite Kyoko as Yasuko did opposite Kawasaki in volume 1 and, like Yasuko, inspires admiration and crushes in the younger girls. She is this year’s star, as Yasuko was “last year’s star” (SBF, 3:18). However, unlike Yasuko, Ueda doesn’t appear to have any significant hang-ups, other than a bit of shyness. That makes her a better friend for Akira, Kyoko, and Fumi, but it does tend to make her somewhat bland and underdeveloped as a character.