The prime minister in 1941, Fumimaro Konoe, had published a translation of Wilde while at Kyoto Imperial University; the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki schooled himself in the works of the renegade aesthetician from Dublin. Soon after the war, Japan’s most assertive novelist, Yukio Mishima, published a book whose title—Confessions of a Mask—was pure Wilde, as were its sentiments: “It is precisely what people regard as my true self that is a masquerade.” If you want to understand Japan, I grew tempted to tell friends, fling this book aside and spend time instead with ten precepts from the
...more
