Star
By Yukio Mishima
New Directions, 94 pp
Celebrity is a hall of mirrors, and Rikio can't escape. But then again, maybe he doesn't want to. He's been disconnected from reality so long that the surreal world of movie sets and screaming fans has become real life.
He seems to have everything -- looks, fame -- but he's not fooled. He knows it's just surface. Beauty has come to mean nothing, so empty that he seeks out its crude opposite, feeling life ripple through him again only when artifice slides away.
The one person who sees him as he is is his assistant Kayo, but don't mistake this for a story of a pampered star redeemed through the love of an ordinary girl. Kayo taunts and mocks, entertaining him with vicious impersonations of beautiful actresses he is rumored to be engaged to. She is described as ugly and doing nothing to hide it, but in a world of exquisite beauty, where everyone is fawning over him, Kayo's rawness is a kind of lifeline for Rikio. Their affair has "quenched him of his thirst for love," he says, already jaded at the age of 23.
A short but intense psychological ride, "Star" was written by author and celebrity Yukio Mishima after he appeared in the 1960 film "Karakkaze Yaro" (Afraid to Die). He depicts the exhausting conveyor belt of moviemaking when you're a young commodity contracted to a major studio -- early mornings, late-night shoots, interviews and autograph signings squeezed into every spare minute, tightly controlled PR to give it all a gloss. Long after Mishima's 1970 death, Sam Bett has given the book a colloquial translation (for which he won the 2019-2020 Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize) that powerfully evokes a mood of Hollywood's Golden Age.
As a study in celebrity, the novella is bitterly ironic. Rikio hates the way people treat him differently but is cuttingly dismissive of the rookie actresses who tremble in his presence and the desperate fans. Exhausted, he fantasizes about murdering those same fans, yet still he smiles and waves as they crush against the barriers to get a glimpse of him.
In one scene, an actress who has had a breakdown forces her way onto the movie set, then tries to kill herself. The PR office gives Rikio some noble words to say when reporters ask about the incident, but the real Rikio is coldly fascinated. He replays in his mind the spectacle of the woman being painfully revived with saline, almost jealous of her pure expression of feeling while semi-conscious: "She had managed to attain the sublime state that actors always dream of … that two-bit actress had really pulled it off."
It's clear Rikio is fracturing, but the cracks are carefully covered over. It's a trim depiction of the type of self-destructive young man having an existential crisis that Mishima wrote so well. His observations on how a star's existence depends on the public gaze, no matter what it demands, are as true today as they were when he published this novella in the 1960s.
"The very thing that makes a star spectacular is the same thing that strikes him from the world at large and makes him an outsider," Rikio muses.
After this account, fame never seemed less appealing.
-- By Kiri Falls
Japan News Staff Writer
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