SOURCE: "Death and the Emperor: Mishima, Ōe, and the Politics of Betrayal," in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1, February, 1989, pp. 71-89.

In the essay below, Napier analyzes the contrasting roles that the Japanese Emperor plays in the works of Ōe and Yukio Mishima. While Ōe is severely critical of the imperial system, Mishima, who came of age during the 1930s, supports the Emperor for patriotic reasons.

In Japan in the late 1980s, a society that is arguably one of the most modern, pragmatic, and materialist in the world, the problem of the emperor system initially seems almost irrelevant. And yet the imperial house continues to excite controversy and concern, as is clear in the full-scale media coverage given to an imperial visit or an imperial illness, and this controversy is on a far deeper and more divisive level than would be the case for such ostensible...