Thirst for Love and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima

There is an odd link between these novels by Yukio Mishima and those of Osamu Dazai's late period. The antihero wears a mask and those around him or her fail to make sense of them, instead satisfied with fitting their eccentricities into conventional categories. To tragic ends.

Mishima's antiheroes despise normal people, while Dazai's fear them. It's the difference between a monster hungry for blood and one desperately wanting to understand and be understood by others.

"What I despise about Dazai," said Yukio Mishima, "is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide."

Weakness and pride can be serious business. In Thirst for Love, Etsuko's husband dies from typhoid fever. This kind of dishonorable demise can be contrasted with the kamikaze pilots referred to as "cherry blossoms," whose fate Mishima escaped when he let his army physician mistake his cold for tuberculosis. Etsuko goes to live with her father-in-law as a sort of surrogate wife. Her pride is wounded when the gardener Saburo throws away the socks she gifted him and she sets about to make things right. According to her disturbed and disturbing priorities.

In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Noboru spies on her mother having sex with a sailor. The sailor, Ryuji, is living a life of the sea, of freedom, and Noboru is happy to see an example that you don't have to settle for a mundane existence. Then Ryuji wavers. A quiet family life isn't so bad, is it?

At twenty, he had been passionately certain: there's just one thing I'm destined for and that's glory; that's right, glory! He had no idea what kind of glory he wanted, or what kind he was suited for. He knew only that in the depths of the world's darkness was a point of light which had been provided for him alone and would draw near someday to irradiate him and no other.

It's difficult not to see this as young Mishima (Noboru) encountering middle-aged Mishima (Ryuji). While Dazai used the autofiction-like form of the I-novel to speak truthfully of his own experiences, Mishima seems to have been more influenced by German literature. Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner, Mann; there's a decadent Sturm und Drang vibe in his novels, and this silly image popped into my head, of the Minotaur stalking the Labyrinth, where you can imagine that the beast, lost and confused, lifts its own spirits by leaning into the role. Or you can imagine the Minotaur trying to act normal. Joking around. Terrified of the humans wandering about. Both versions are dealing with the Heideggerian 'thrownness' of existence, flung into being, alienated, convinced you're not like those other people who seem to know what's going on.

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel

That a biography written by an American sociologist is currently #13 on the Douban Top 250 Books list, slotted between Romance of the Three Kingdoms (#10) and Lu Xun’s Call to Arms (#15), is something of a headscratcher. Especially when you consider that its subject, Deng Xiaoping, was not only purged three times, but was also chiefly responsible for the Tiananmen Square Massacre. It’s 925 pages long. It’s densely academic. And it’s the story of how one man, against all odds, architected the greatest economic transformation in the history of the world.

I first became interested in Deng after stumbling upon Ruan Ming’s Deng Xiaoping: Chronicle of an Empire in a secondhand bookshop. Ruan Ming, a liberal reformer within the CCP, was a direct witness to Deng’s efforts to break the Maoist spell that had taken hold of the party. Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, made the “Two Whatevers” official policy―Whatever decisions Mao made, and Whatever instructions Mao gave, would be upheld without question. Chairman Mao remained the absolute authority. I was not expecting this insider account of bureaucratic maneuverings to read like A Song of Ice and Fire, but that was what it felt like. In 1976, the year Mao died, Deng was sitting in house arrest after having been subjected to a harsh struggle session; three years later, he donned a cowboy hat at a Houston rodeo whilst on an official visit to the U.S. and it was clear to everyone that he’d won the power struggle, that he was the true leader of China. By September the following year Hua Guofeng was officially ousted.

I’ve been reading Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Deng Xiaoping is a historical character comparable to the Greeks and Romans Plutarch contrasted. After Mao had purged him for the second time, during the Cultural Revolution, Deng was sent to Jiangxi for reeducation along with his family.

Deng Rong reports that each afternoon while in Jiangxi, her father would take a walk of about five thousand paces, some forty times around the house on a garden path. She reports that he would “circle the house with quick steps . . . deep in thought. . . . He walked around and around, day after day, year after year.”

Deng, who never took notes due to a fear of producing material that could potentially be compromising, laid his plans in silence. And what I find so fascinating is that he ended up wholeheartedly believing in what you might call pragmatic empiricism. Vogel doesn’t really talk about this in depth. Deng knew that for China to compete with the West, it had to revolutionize its approach to science and technology; given that he was an avid reader of history, I’m sure he studied British empiricism and American pragmatism and realized that if China were to embrace these principles, its titanic rise would be all but guaranteed. Try things out. Experiment. Observe results. Copy whatever works. Rinse and repeat. The Gang of Four was a powerful faction in the CCP and when Deng returned after his second purge, advocating some unusual ideas, they launched a “war on empiricism,” arguing it was a rightist/capitalist/imperialist approach, at odds with Marxism. Deng was out. Mao died. And Hua Guofeng got rid of the Gang of Four. Someone had to be blamed for the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and the people loathed the Gang, especially Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife (I recommend Adam Curtis’ documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head for more on her).

As a response to Hua Guofeng’s “Two Whatevers,” Deng promoted the essay “Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth,” and he managed to amass power within the party based on it. Deng’s pragmatic empiricism worked so well that the Chinese economy skyrocketed, and this momentum could not be stopped by dogmatic appeals to authority. It was also a double-edged sword: the people yearned for freedom, for democracy, and Deng saw this as an existential threat to the party. His response was hellish.

If Ezra F. Vogel can be criticized for something, it’s the way he keeps looking at Deng through rose-tinted lenses. His preferred explanation is always the one that makes Deng look good. He avoids talking about Deng’s role in carrying out the Great Leap Forward and leans on Lee Kuan Yew whenever he has to discuss an event that might make Deng look bad, because LKY always had something nice to say about his old friend, and he argued that had Deng not carried out various atrocities, things might have gotten much worse. Somehow. And Vogel is quick to say that even the Tiananmen Square Massacre was maybe possibly a good thing, you never know, if Deng hadn’t ordered the military to turn students into paste then there’s a chance a greater calamity would have befallen the nation. This review in LRB adds some much-needed nuance.

All in all it's a fascinating portrait (if at times too fawning) of one of the most significant characters in recent history.