Foreword to The Life and Death of Hasuda Zenmei, by Yukio Mishima
"As I neared the age at which he died, what his death, what the form of his death meant suddenly, like a revelation, threw light on my longstanding delusions."
Foreword to The Life and Death of Hasuda Zenmei1
Yukio Mishima
The joy of the man of letters is, rather than bathing in the praises of all critics, to possess after his death a single biographer full of camaraderie. And if that biographer is a poet, his joy knows no bounds. In gaining this fine book of Odakane Jirō’s2, Hasuda Zenmei3 has as a man of letters borne the enviable good fortune of having amply made up for the unjust silence of the twenty years since the war. I look upon this with great jealousy. The style with which Odakane relates the loves and death of Hasuda is limpid and elegant, does not in the slightest injure the soul of the departed, evades the conceits of the living, is true to the sources without falling into the lowliness of empiricism, clearly brings out the general human image by avoiding impolite analysis, and itself possesses a peerless grace and impact as a work of literature that touches the heart. It is the virtue of Hasuda himself as well as the power of his fate that permitted Odakane to write such a work. And when one considers that during his life Hasuda associated little with Odakane, one is persuaded that this work is utterly impartial in both the good and the bad senses and immediately perceives that Hasuda’s literary achievements and mysterious death spurred this work by a natural, internal drive.