The Salome Within

English translation

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

Seishu Hamano, author of 『白亜館の幽霊』 (The Ghost of the White Mansion)

More than a hundred years after its publication, Wilde's Salome remains a demon that possesses its readers. It has possessed me on two occasions. The first was during my first year at university, when I was still a boy who had only recently come to Tokyo from Osaka. Salome kissing a man's freshly severed head, with blood dripping from it, seemed the very embodiment of sadism. It was also the ultimate grotesque. I saw it as a longing for death of the kind Mishima favoured, or as the epitome of sadistic love.

At that time I was possessed by Aeschylus's Agamemnon, by Electra and Oedipus the King. Viewing the family of the Jewish king Herod as an extension of the Greek tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and others, I marvelled at the terrible extremes that conflict within a family could reach.

This time, however, my attention focused on why the author Oscar Wilde, who lived in America at the end of the nineteenth century, felt impelled to write this work at the century's close. By chance it also relates to my own full-length novel, 『白亜館の幽霊』, which is due to be published soon. I was rereading Wilde closely while portraying the wanderings of a young woman of our own time, whose origins are uncertain and who suffers because she cannot discover them, confronting head-on the spirit she carries within her. My interpretation was therefore startlingly different. Quite unintentionally, the heroine I was writing also worries and loses her way over her origins, just as Salome does.

Salome is descended from nobility, but she is the child of Herodias and her former husband. Her mother appears to have killed that husband, who was Herod's brother, in order to marry Herod.

This situation is the same as that of Gertrude, Hamlet's mother in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Her origins are disreputable. The prophet Jokanaan, who regards Salome as a Jewish girl with polluted, corrupted blood in her veins, scorns her as the “woman of Babylon” and prophesies that her destination will be Sodom, the place of destruction.

Salome curses Jokanaan, yet is attracted to him.

She, too, is drawn to his skin and declares her love for him.

Meanwhile, King Herod, who has married her mother, is a man of base origins. By now he is more captivated by Salome than by Herodias, pressing her to dance, dance, and promising her any reward she wants.

This is the sin of incest.

The entire family of King Herod thus becomes an extraordinarily sinful presence. Jokanaan, who knows this, is killed; Salome, who will not be dissuaded from demanding his head, embraces the freshly severed head.

Jokanaan does not appear in my work, but the water dungeon in which this prophet is said to have been confined does in fact exist at Kinugasa Castle. What I mean is this: whether or not it is because I read Wilde in my student days, all my characters carry their own burdens of karma and wander in delusion.

My heroine does not crave a severed head as Salome does. But she does not know what to do with the accursed blood running within her.

That is Wilde himself, and it is also myself.