Ango, Mishima, war, and nuclear power

In an essay published on the 11th of August 1967, the well-known writer Yukio Mishima 三島由紀夫 surprisingly yielded a confession about why he had never mentioned the trauma that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exerted on his psyche – and if we are to take his statement literally, his literature as well. The essay is titled “Hiroshima inside me” (Watashi no naka no hiroshima. In it, Mishima describes the extent of the moral and psychic trauma that this event extolled on him as a youngster. The dead body of the juvenile trauma inflicted by this event is perhaps exhumed here by a mature Mishima as a harbinger of what would be his intellectual legacy in terms of poetics. It is undeniable that in his novels Mishima fostered, or at least indirectly provided, a model for the reversion of the kokutai (国体, national body) wartime rhetoric into the private obsession with the individual body that characterised much of postwar literature’s involvement with the salacious and carnal (nikutai no bungaku 肉体の文学). The transfiguration of the traumas related to war and nuclear bombing can be related to a collective memory that postwar writers had already touched upon. In particular, Ango Sakaguchi 坂口安吾(1906-1955), a writer that Mishima claims to be amongst the literary giants that he reveres in a 1956 foreword to a collection of his work, mentions the subject repeatedly in several essays dating from 1946-1948. Being another major literary figure who openly and earnestly delivered his rather unconventional views concerning the discovery of nuclear power technology, Ango offers a comparison with Mishima’s professed poetics on the very same topic. Ango’s literature has become the object of ever-increasing attention, yet due to its eclectic nature, the true significance of his literary output is not easy to determine. In 2016, an attempt to highlight his value as a non-systematic thinker was carried out by Shū Fujisawa, a prominent critic, in his selection of highlights from Ango’s fiction and essays, Ango no kotoba (The words of Ango Sakaguchi), published by Shūeisha shinsho. In presenting Sensōron (A Theory of War, October 1948), one of several essays dealing with the Second World War, and the atomic bombing in particular, Fujisawa proposes to have Ango’s essay read by the government and TEPCO. In fact, Ango in this essay tackles the whole set of problems solicited by the discovery of nuclear power, marking what the true essence of war really is, to him, by clearly stating that political, social, but most of all, economic concerns are always the hidden agenda behind any war declaration. It also needs to be emphasized that within the first two decades after the discovery of nuclear-powered bombing technology, Ango and Mishima both insisted that the discovery of the nuclear power - a discovery that could potentially wipe away the humankind - goes beyond any power of the human imagination itself. Conceptually, the discovery of nuclear power is the supernova that not even the worst of humans could have conceived of beforehand, and the new, unlimited boundary of human imagination, which is the pulsating heart of literature. These two writers, Mishima and Ango, happen to take two polarized stances toward this discovery. It is remarkable that Ango would overtly predict and measure the very extent of the trauma that Mishima, a writer of another generation, and amongst the best-known outside Japan, would desperately try to convey indirectly in his literature up to his death in 1970. The fundamental questions that these two writers raise in their complementary approaches to the problem of war after the discovery of nuclear power have not, in fact, been thoroughly investigated nor properly addressed up to this point. Whether it be the need to gain insight on the trauma that nuclear power still perpetrates upon us, or to examine the economic reasons that are behind our ruthless misuse of it, these two writers still embody the two faces of the task we need to address as postwar generations dealing with such a newly found dimension of horror.