After the Banquet by Yukio Mishima

First published:Utage no ato, 1960 (English translation, 1963)

Type of work: Satire

Time of work: The late 1950’s

Locale: Tokyo, Japan

Principal Characters:

• Kazu Fukuzawa, the proprietress of a famous Tokyo restaurant
• Yuken Noguchi, her husband, a retired foreign minister
• Soichi Yamazaki, Noguchi’s campaign manager
• Genki Nagayama, a politician of the conservative party

The Novel

After the Banquet is a political and social satire. Yuken Noguchi, the elderly politician in the novel, was based on an actual public figure, while the central character of interest in the narrative is Kazu Fukuzawa, the middle-aged proprietress of the Setsugoan restaurant, which was based on the famous Hannya-en restaurant in Tokyo. Although the work is written in the third person and the story is often told in a tongue-in-cheek style, the focus is on Kazu, who is treated more sympathetically than her elderly lover-statesman.

The novel begins with Kazu having arrived at a point in her life when her love affairs are past and when everything seems quite clear to her; she has divided human psychology into firmly defined compartments and is confident of her point of view and her position. Indeed, it is just this prideful confidence and certainty that the action of the novel serves to undermine. The narrative development of After the Banquet begins when Kazu finds herself attracted to the retired politician Yuken Noguchi.

Although many of Noguchi’s gestures and comments make her think that he is an old man, Kazu is primarily fascinated by his dignified and stately manner. Furthermore, he seems to represent a world of the intellect, a realm of books and ideas and principles—all of which are alien to her rustic and intuitive nature. She develops an ideal image of the man, seeing him as one who has no self but the dignified, if somewhat stilted, aura that he presents to her. After their wedding ceremony Kazu believes that she has realized the goal of a lifetime: She has become the wife of a distinguished man.

Married life, however, is not without its difficulties—primarily resulting from the clash of Kazu’s independence and masculine thinking with her husband’s old-fashioned views on the propriety of woman’s submissive role. Kazu, however, endures Noguchi’s overbearing and misplaced sense of superiority and his formal aloofness, because she takes pride in now belonging to a noble family with a long lineage and dreams of being buried in the family temple; in this way, she believes that she has tricked eternity.

Noguchi’s belief that the marriage is a refuge and a final home and Kazu’s sense that she has found her rightful and secure tomb do not last. The pace of the novel shifts abruptly when Noguchi is asked to run for the governorship of Tokyo as a candidate for the radical party in Japan. Kazu’s restaurant has been a favorite haunt for members of the conservative party; thus she has some ideas about the behind-the-scenes nature of politics. She feels quite confident in her political abilities, especially with the common people, and she is immediately obsessed with becoming directly involved in her husband’s campaign.

Making Soichi Yamazaki, a master of campaign strategy, her coconspirator, Kazu begins her schemes to get her husband elected. She is possessed by a dream fantasy of using her knowledge of the ordinary Japanese people to sway their votes to the reserved and intellectual Noguchi. She meets secretly with Yamazaki to plan the campaign, throwing all of her resources and her time into the effort. At one point she has printed five million calendars with Noguchi’s photograph on them. She even mortgages her restaurant to raise funds to pay for such campaign extravagances. Kazu believes that the election is her Heaven-appointed task. When Noguchi discovers what she has done and, out of pride and a sense of political decorum, beats her, his denunciations delight Kazu, because they embody the old moral virtues.

The election campaign, marred by Kazu’s emotionalism and Noguchi’s coldness, culminates with last-minute political tricks by the conservative party, including a scurrilous pamphlet about Kazu’s past, promiscuous life, which guarantee Noguchi’s defeat. Although Noguchi is reconciled to grow old peacefully after the frenzy of the campaign, Kazu discovers that she can never again tolerate emptiness and inactivity. She knows now that even if circumstances were to be tragic, she prefers a life of action to a void.

Torn between her comfortable image of being buried in the Noguchi family temple and the possibility of an animated life without resignation and abandoned hopes, Kazu is finally pulled toward the latter. When Noguchi, who cannot tolerate such aggressive behavior on the part of his wife, starts divorce proceedings against her, she returns to the Setsugoan and, with great joy, decides to reopen it.

The Characters

This is primarily a two-character novel based on the tension between the intuitive warmth and vitality of Kazu Fukuzawa and the cold and lofty ideals and principles of Yuken Noguchi. Secondary characters such as Soichi Yamazaki and Genki Nagayama are merely representatives of political positions of the Japanese radical and conservative parties respectively. Both are primarily defined in the novel by their relationships with Kazu, for she conspires with Yamazaki for Noguchi’s election and consults with Nagayama, an old ally who ultimately betrays her. Both men understand her better than her husband does. Precisely because Kazu does not become sexually involved with either man, she can be comfortable with them. At the conclusion of the novel, there is some indication that Yamazaki will begin to play a more involved role in her life, with her divorce from Noguchi and the reopening of her restaurant.

Noguchi is representative of the old moral virtues; yet he is more European in his ideals than he is Japanese, filling his library with German books and his head with Western ideas. As a former ambassador and a member of a noble family, he condescends to Kazu and patronizes her, as he does the common people in general. He is driven mainly by logic and by principle and very little by human emotions. His old-fashioned view of the passive role of woman makes his marriage to Kazu an obvious mismatch which generates the basic conflict in the novel.

Kazu, on the other hand, is a romantic, filled with dreams and fantasies. Her plump, attractive figure is described by Yukio Mishima as bursting with energy and enthusiasm; her simplicity makes people with complex motives feel sheepish about their complexity. Combining a man’s sense of resolution with a woman’s reckless enthusiasm, she has powers that exceed those of most men. Although during her youth she has sold her favors to men, now as the owner of an influential restaurant where powerful politicians share confidences with her, she has reached a position in her life at which her confidence makes her see that all things have sharp outlines and are easy for her to understand; as Mishima says of her, it has been many years since she has been blind.

Her enthusiasm, energy, and considerable abilities make it difficult to understand why she is so in awe of the stodgy and safe Noguchi, who she allows to condescend to her and even to beat her. Kazu is a curious combination; she is the liberated woman proud of her freedom, but she still yearns for, or at least temporarily thinks she yearns for, the old moral codes and formalities that Noguchi represents. She thinks that she needs the static security that his dignity and his name promise. Although in some ways content to bask in the victories of her husband, at the same time she cannot simply hide in the shadows. Moreover, although she is extremely shrewd in her knowledge of the people with whom she comes in contact, there is also an element of naivete about her that gives her a childlike quality.

Kazu’s experience with the excitement of the election campaign is sufficient proof that she is not as content to slip quietly into death as she thought she was, in spite of the appeal of the nobility that Noguchi represents. The novel thus appropriately ends as it began, with Kazu once again bursting with energy, enthusiasm, and ambition, in her own way a much more able and wise politician than Yuken Noguchi ever was. Although she has seemingly come full circle, she has gained new knowledge and what Yamazaki calls a “peaceful uncertainty.”

Critical Context

One of the most striking features of Mishima’s work is its variety; he adopted a style as if donning a mask. With its broad canvas and its political concerns, After the Banquet marked a new departure for Mishima; in this work, Donald Keene observes, “Mishima demonstrated that he was capable of writing a novel in the manner of nineteenth-century French fiction.” On its publication, After the Banquet was both successful and controversial: As noted above, Mishima’s plot was based in part on a scandal then very much in the news in Japan, involving prominent political figure Hachiro Arita, who sued Mishima and won a judgment against him. Despite the novel’s political themes, there is no indication in After the Banquet of the commitment to a radical right-wing stance that was to lead to Mishima’s suicide in 1970.

Bibliography

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era. Vol. 1, Fiction, 1984.

Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel, 1974.

Nathan, John. Mishima: A Biography, 1974.

Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, 1979.

Scott-Stokes, Henry. The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, 1974.