The Changing Image of Henry Miller

English translation

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 2021-01-12

This material was published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices in the text reflect the original publication.

The Changing Image of Henry Miller

本田　康典

Introduction

The translation and introduction of the works of Henry Miller (1891–1980) in Japan began in 1953 (Shōwa 28). The Korean War was then drawing to a close, and the National Police Reserve, established three years earlier, had become the National Safety Force, reviving the issue of national defense. It was a time when Japan's conservative mainstream could be said to be moving somewhat to the right. Appearing in this setting, Miller's undisguised sexual descriptions were considered rebellious in intent and viewed as heretical.

In 1961 (given in the source as Shōwa 35),¹ I encountered English-language works by Miller, published by 啓明社 in Kamakura, at a secondhand bookshop in Takadanobaba. This drew me to his outlook. A conservative spirit of the age, as though the whole world were intoxicated with Americanism, was pervasive, and his emergence stood out sharply. Amid the fashion for the erotic, grotesque and nonsensical, Miller was treated as what would later be called a “pornographic writer.” Yet I felt that he was making language explode in an attempt to transcend the twentieth century as an age and America as a place. This also had something in common with the rise of Japanese Romanticism, beginning with 東京新詩社: after the Meiji Restoration, despite the slogans of leaving Asia for Europe and combining a Japanese spirit with Western techniques, society could not free itself from conventional ideas, and frustration grew with this impasse. My discussion of Miller may therefore be understood as also sharing the editor's intention in treating him as a paradigm of this.

1. Responses in Japan and the United States in the 1960s

In 1963 (Shōwa 38), Kate Millett (1934–2017), then a part-time lecturer at Waseda University, contributed an essay entitled Henry Miller to 『英文学』, No. 23, published by the university's English literary society, sharply criticizing Miller. According to people associated with Waseda, Millett was quiet in the staffroom and devoted herself to reading; she would later become a fighter for women's rights. At the time she was observing from Japan the storm surrounding 『北回帰線』 in America. After returning home, she published Sexual Politics (1970), examining the subject from a feminist perspective.

『北回帰線』 was published in June 1961, twenty-seven years after its Paris publication, and two million paperback copies were printed that autumn. Publishers who judged that the novel was not protected by the United States Constitution signaled that they intended to issue pirated editions, prompting Grove Press to rush out a paperback in response. The question of whether publication was permissible developed into as many as sixty court battles. Backed by a group of lawyers, Grove Press owner Barney Rosset (1922–2012) boldly challenged American society, and the matter was settled in the Supreme Court in 1964.

In 1965, perhaps spurred by the American storm over 『北回帰線』, 新潮社 planned a thirteen-volume complete works of Henry Miller with a group of translators centered on 大久保康雄 and 飛田茂雄. In the August 1966 Henry Miller special issue of 『本の手帳』, Rikkyo University professor 細入藤太郎 stated that he had read the first edition of 『北回帰線』 in the Danish capital in September 1939. He was its first Japanese reader.

When Miller married ホキ徳田 in 1967, he appeared in weekly magazines and became an increasingly popular topic of discussion. Yet it could not be said that the image of Miller had undergone a dramatic change.

In 1980, 大久保 and 飛田, having translated representative essays by European and American critics and scholars, published 『ヘンリー・ミラー』 with 早川書房. In the preface, 大久保 declared: “In Japan, far too few scholars have discussed the essence of Miller's literature.” He was attempting to discern a transition in work on Henry Miller from an age of translation and introduction to an age of research.

2. Is the Image of Miller Changing?

The image of Miller has not become fixed; it changes continually, though slowly. When a new reader reads his work, Miller becomes new. When thinkers, philosophers and literary figures encounter his work and communicate their responses, Miller reveals different faces.

Miller is a difficult writer to grapple with. Yet if scholars uncover new biographical facts and turn to close readings of his texts, his image will inevitably change. Some glimpses of this follow.

(1) 上野霄里 — A Philosopher of Tōhoku

In 1969 (Shōwa 44), 行動社 published 『単細胞的思考』 by the thinker 上野霄里, whose real given name was 賢一 and who lived in Ichinoseki, Iwate Prefecture. Henry Miller wrote the preface. After reading 『ネクサス』, 上野 thought that if it was permissible to write like this, he too could write, and began setting down his thoughts on the backs of leaflets and on wrapping paper cut to manuscript-paper size. 『単細胞的思考』 had the power to draw some students from the All-Campus Joint Struggle movement and fighters from 三島由紀夫's 楯の会 to Ichinoseki. Critics, however, avoided 上野, perhaps put off by his unconventional arguments and his denunciations of 川端康成.

In 1970, 三島由紀夫's ritual suicide occurred, and the correspondence between Miller and 上野 intensified. Miller's 「三島由紀夫の死」, translated by 飛田茂雄, was serialized in 『週刊ポスト』 in October 1971; there the image of Henry Miller as a “writer of sex” was shattered. 上野 was a vigorous writer who published more than ten books. Miller's character and works seem to possess a latent impact capable of releasing a person of genius. In recent years, American scholar Wayne Arnold, a faculty member at the University of Kitakyushu researching “Henry Miller and Japan,” has begun to portray an unknown Miller through the enormous correspondence exchanged between the two men.

(2) ファム・コン・ティエン — A Vietnamese Philosopher

In the summer of 1965, the twenty-four-year-old ファム・コン・ティエン (1941–2011) visited Miller's home and declared: “Henry Miller, I am going to kill you.” Miller is said to have embraced his visitor and told him to write “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha” on the wall. 野平宗弘, a faculty member at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, has recounted this episode repeatedly in books he has written and translated. Since ティエン read Miller's works and studied Zen in 1959, he came to know Miller at the age of nineteen, according to the source. Miller is said to have described him as “Vietnam's Rimbaud.”

ティエン was a poet, novelist, translator, thinker and more—in short, a philosopher of genius. Reading 野平's 『新しい意識』 (岩波書店, 2009) makes clear how ティエン established Miller as a firm bridgehead for himself. A translation of 『深淵の沈黙』, which ティエン began writing in Paris at twenty-five, was published by Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Press in 2018. Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Heidegger and Henry Miller appear frequently, but the work is an expression of the devastation of the Vietnam War and of Vietnam's groans.

(3) Norman Mailer's 『天才と肉欲』

In 1940, when he was only seventeen, Norman Mailer read an underground edition of 『北回帰線』. He went on to read widely among American writers, returned to Henry Miller, and published his study 『天才と肉欲』 in 1976. In that work Mailer wrote: “There is a mystery about Henry Miller that has not yet been made clear, and it tells us how monstrous a great writer can be.” Miller himself, in 『南回帰線』, is eager to write “a powerful work, a work that will never be understood.” It therefore seems natural that parts of his work remain unexplained. Yet Miller's overwhelming influence will, as though filling in the outer moat, bring a new image of him into view.

Conclusion

In the age in which Miller lived, world war, militarism, extreme colonialism and nationalism were taken for granted. In other words, it was an age in which individual dignity and happiness in life were naturally rendered powerless and insignificant within the state and the great ideologies that sustained it. Mailer was sent to the world war and had experience as an ordinary soldier. During the postwar Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, he regarded ordinary people, still submerged as zero signs, as square or organization man. He sympathized with the young people of the beat generation, who, though white, were constantly trampled under organizations, and wrote an essay calling the Americans of the time, broadly, white negro. Mailer's sensibility in approaching Miller by this standard of value also applies to today's situation, in which nuclear armament and missile attacks have become habitual. In other words, among people who have lost sight of a way forward in a stifling situation, free love, drinking in pursuit of momentary ecstasy, and unconventional relations between men and women are acts of living for the moment, a kind of short-circuited existence. Miller may be seen as having already foreseen this contemporary vitalism or existential philosophy.

(Professor Emeritus, Miyagi Gakuin Women's University)

1. Translation note: the source pairs “1961” with “Shōwa 35.” Both are recorded here without silently reconciling the date. The ages and publication claims elsewhere likewise follow the source.