My Arranged Marriage, by Yukio Mishima
"In any case, I’m shameless, but since I’m thirty-three and have received a pretty wife of twenty-one, I’m happy."
My Arranged Marriage1
Yukio Mishima
I used to think that I should do it for love, that it’s best for a writer to have a long period of bachelorhood, and that my own marriage would come at around forty. But since I entered my thirties three years ago, I for some reason gradually became anxious and came to think seriously about marriage. This is natural as the feelings of a man of thirty who is steadily approaching middle age. That’s why in my work of three years ago, A Novelist’s Holiday2, I wrote, “I too will probably get married one day.” This was the first time that I discussed my own marriage in writing.
Having decided to marry, I thought for a while about whether a love marriage or an arranged marriage would be better. If I had a love marriage, the press would rejoice, but from my standpoint it is doubtful whether I could obtain pure love. If I were a student and my partner were also a lady who is going to school, normal worldly love would be possible. That would be fine. However, I have already received the social title that is writer. So there would not be a few literary fan-crazed or fame-crazed women who would take an interest, not in me the man myself, but in the social thing called a writer. If you think that pure love is possible in that you are totally naïve. Even if it were to become like love and my partner had no ill intent, it is doubtful whether or not it would really be love.
And another thing is that my economic conditions differ from those of a regular salaryman, and consequently my living conditions also differ. I would be at a loss if a woman were to come at me thinking that she would be able to live a flamboyant and luxurious lifestyle.
I would be at a loss even if a woman raised in an economically humble environment were to come to me and think that she had become the wife of a prominent person. In the writer’s profession, one never knows when a slump (downturn)3 will come, one never knows when one will have to lie in obscurity. In which case, a flamboyant pleasure-seeking woman is totally out of the question.
After some thought, I concluded that, as far as my marriage is concerned, love marriage would not be the right choice. In my surroundings there is no shortage of people who are interesting as friends to do things with4, but there were none whom I wanted to think of as marital partners.
Is there not somewhere a woman who is “a lady of marriageable age, has absolutely no interest in literature, likes housework, is a womanly, kind, and mild person who cares about her parents, who is shorter than me even in high heels, who is moonfaced like I prefer and is cute. Someone who will manage the household without ever interfering in my work and thereby indirectly support me?” If I am to try to find such a lady, there is no way of connecting with her other than through an arranged marriage. I concluded that, as someone with the condition that we be able to know each other who cannot know each other5, I should have an arranged marriage. I then spoke to my parents, searched with those conditions, and had talks with a variety of people, but there was no mutual agreement, and I found myself in March of this year [1958].
But on March 23rd. Mrs. Yuasa, who for the longest time has had very close relations with my family and has been a good manzai6 partner of mine, brought me a photo of Yōko, saying that she is the eldest daughter of the Japanese-style painter Sugiyama Yasushi7. The topic came up because Mrs. Yuasa is friends with Mrs. Komatsu, who is Yōko’s grandmother. Two weeks later we had a marriage interview. In this seat, I prattled on with Mrs. Yuasa and completely exposed what I am before Yōko. Yōko, in exchange for not receiving the stiff and formal impression that hangs around so-called marriage interviews, probably thought me a scatterbrain.
Talks were formally settled on May 5, and because Mrs. Yuasa and Komatsu are both really speedy people, “once decided the sooner the better,” matters proceeded apace, the ceremony was set for June 1, and Yōko and I were both quite surprised. I had for a long time had doubts about how overly long engagement periods are, but I think that there are probably few examples as short as this. When we exchanged betrothal gifts, I said to Yōko, “This summer let’s do what they call a pool marriage. We’ll invite guests to come around the pool, raise some sodas, and have them throw both of us into the pool.” Then Yōko said, “I can’t swim so no,” so I gave up.
Her parents said “Yōko is, as you know, a university student, and a child who knows nothing. With that understanding, we will gladly give her to you.” She can apparently do tea, but she was about to begin learning how to cook, and my mother, who lives with us, would teach her cooking. This is better because I was raised on my mother’s cooking. Yōko has never read any of my novels, and she won’t read them now. She quit school. I felt sorry for her, but she is extremely cheerful and says it’s not like she was studying anything in particular. In any case, since both my parents and I like this bride, this is most amicable.
For a long time my mother said “I want a lady who has been raised affectionately and warmly for a daughter-in-law.” To have been loved by one’s family is, in the case of women, quite important. When they grow up being bullied and treated as a nuisance, if a man, there are cases where he takes the energy of his work from his adverse circumstances and becomes a splendid man as strong as steel, but in the case of women, I think that those traces remain in their hearts no matter what. I think that having been treated affectionately is important for a woman to always keep her feelings pure. Yōko is the eldest of two girls and two boys, and has been treated quite affectionately. In this respect also my mother’s joy is profound. When I wore flamboyant shirts, my mother would always make a fuss and say that I would run out of marriage partners, but when the talks with Yōko were concluded, she was all smiles and said that I can dress however I want.
Even though I’m married, I put my work first exactly as before. That being said, I have absolutely no desire to, for instance like Shimazaki Tōson8, make my children lick salt and malnourish them for the sake of my work, but my attitude is that I will ungrudgingly make sacrifices for the sake of my work. Work comes first. To sacrifice my work for the sake of my family, or to write a novel in order to buy a car for my wife … in other words, to work for the sake of something is something that I have not done and refuse to do. Yōko is prepared in this respect as well.
That being said, I will not become a domineering husband. I am obstinate in words, but I will not become a tyrant. I received an apt question from Yōko’s mother.
“How do you behave when your work is not proceeding smoothly, or when you are agonizing over the content of a work?” Yōko’s father Sugiyama Yasushi is a fastidious artist and never does slipshod work. She asked this question because, as his wife, she acutely feels and understands the suffering resulting from this. As a parent about to give her daughter in marriage to another artist, this was surely her greatest worry. I answered.
“Even at such times, I don’t do things like push over the dining table or behave violently. I just get a little gloomy or tell fewer jokes than usual, nothing big.” In fact it is just so. Her mother took ease.
There are also people who say “you seem like you’d make a good husband,” but I don’t know, because this is my first time. Also, if I talk too big now, I’ll be caught out later. In any case, I’m shameless, but since I’m thirty-three and have received a pretty wife of twenty-one, I’m happy.
Apparently the image of me that the press and readers have created through my works is truly strange. Naturally, there are no novels that do not at all reflect their authors. I am reflected somewhere in my works. However, that does not mean that all of that is me. For example, I write about the driver of a car. I actually can’t drive, but I am reflected in that driver. I wrote about the man who set fire to the Golden Pavilion. But I have never set fire to anything and never thought of setting fire to anything. But if I do not write by sinking into it, I can’t make that novel. Nevertheless, readers end up taking my works entirely for me.
So apparently those who don’t meet me wonder what kind of person I am. Apparently they think I am a gloomy and taciturn character, and also a nasty person who reverses everything people say, or a sickly eccentric. I have no way to change the image of the public. As long as my wife knows the truth, it’s fine.
Now, I’ll probably write more and more tragic novels. I have absolutely no intention of writing cheerful novels. Satō Haruo9 says that “happiness melts easily like ice cream, so it can’t be turned into poetry as easily as sorrow. It melts before it can be turned into poetry,” and I think so too. Happiness can’t be turned into novelistic material. Strindberg10 married three times, divorced three times, and wrote many tragedies out of his hatred for his wives and reminiscences on his hellish marital life. I refuse that kind of life, but such spouses with poor relations are in fact interesting. Unhappiness can be turned into novels.
Mauriac’s11 household is a truly peaceful and beautiful household, but one day he had a small quarrel with his son at the dining table. Of course, that is common in normal households, but Mauriac says that when he went to his study and thought about it, that small quarrel gradually grew and developed into a tragic novel of a parent and child in extreme conflict, a parent and child who cannot at all forgive each other.
Novelists are water flowers12. When placed in water, they suddenly bloom, that’s what they are. To suppress the seeds of unhappiness as much as possible and strive to let the seeds of happiness grow is the norm of human life, but novelists take the seeds of unhappiness at every opportunity and nurture and enlarge them within themselves.
In any case, we are trying to build a cheerful and pleasant household. When I say to Yōko, “Up until now I’ve always worked from midnight until four in the morning, but why don’t I change this system now,” she says, “Try to work in that rhythm, I’ll adjust to you.”
My younger sister died in Shōwa 20 [1945], and it is lonely with just my younger brother and I for siblings. That’s why Yōko and I are both hoping for many children, but only this is Heaven’s dispensation13.
For an author, the feeling of happiness when their work is progressing well, and then when that work is completed is something rare in this world. I am now working on a thousand page novel, but for the time being my goal in life is for the writer’s happiness that I gain from this novel and my marital happiness to proceed together.
My Arranged Marriage (First Appearance) The Housewife's Friend14 - July of the Thirty-Third Year of the Shōwa Era [1958]
The language used in this essay is more conversational than that in some of his other essays, which makes literal translation impossible. I have therefore taken liberties in rendering the Japanese into English that I typically strive to avoid.
『小説家の休暇』 Shōsetsuka no Kyūka. A collection of essays in the format of a diary from June 24 to August 4 published in 1955.
スランプ(沈滞) suranpu (chintai). Mishima gives the English “slump” and then adds a gloss in Japanese.
遊び友達 asobitomodachi, lit. “playmates,” also “companions,” but I have avoided these terms because of their present-day erotic connotations, connotations that are absent in the Japanese.
知り得べからざるお互いを知り得る条件 shiriubekarazaru otagai wo shiriuru jōken. The meaning of this is unclear to me.
漫才 manzai. A kind of comic dialogue involving a tsukkomi (straight man) and boke (funnyman).
杉山康 Sugiyama Yasushi (1909-1993).
島崎藤村 Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943). A Christian romantic and naturalist novelist and poet best known for his novels The Broken Commandment and Before the Dawn, which depicts the upheavals of the late Tokugawa period in a rural village.
佐藤春夫 Satō Haruo (1892-1964). A novelist, poet, and critic.
John August Strindberg, 1848-1912. Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter.
François Mauriac (1885-1970). French novelist, poet, and journalist, among other things.
水中花 suichūka. This refers to a type of artificial flower that “blooms” when placed in water.
天の配剤 Ten no haizai.
主婦の友 Shufu no Tomo. A monthly women’s magazine published from 1917 to 2008, in which Mishima also serialized his ninth novel, The Capital of Love, in 1953-4.
Thanks for this generous translation.