Twelve Views from the Distance

Afterword to the English Translation

231 x afterword to the english Translation MOre than FOrty years later . . . I wrote Twelve Views from the Distance in 1969, when I was thirty-two years old. Using that year as my vantage point, I gazed across the distance of time onto the panoramas of my childhood, examining the years between 1937 and 1952 through twelve different windows. That was what I had in mind when I gave the work this title. Since I first wrote the book, more than forty years have gone by, depositing us in the year 2012. The events that transpired in and around the year I wrote this book have also retreated into the past, becoming two-dimensional panoramas in the distance, rather like the past events I describe in this book. Perhaps it would make some sense for me to say a few words about that distant twodimensional landscape—in other words, the events that surrounded the writing of this book. The inspiration for this book came when I was sharing my memories of my youth with the head of the advertising agency where I worked at the time. My boss was an excellent editor who had experience ushering a number of aspiring authors to maturity. He had always shown a great deal of interest in my stories,and one day he told me,“It would be a shame if all you did was talk about these things. You ought to write this down and serialize it in a magazine.” He even made arrangements for me to publish my reminiscences.He had recently become a consulting editor for a cooking magazine called My Cook (Mai kukku) and thought that might be a perfect place to start.“You can have twelve installments. What will you do for a title?” he asked. Twelve Views from the Distance was the first thing that leapt from my mouth. I decided, however, that I would not be too closely bound by that title. Each time I sat down to write an installment , I wrote rather freely. 232 afterword I was right in trying this relatively free approach. I was able to write smoothly, without any difficulty. It was amazing to me how easily the old memories from my youth came flooding back, one after another, as soon as I had decided on the theme for the month’s installment. Later, an elderly friend of mine asked me,“Why is it that you are able to remember your infancy in so much detail?” I told her that perhaps it was because they were such unhappy years. Later, however, I reconsidered, realizing that it was just a commonplace notion that we were all unhappy during the years surrounding World War II. In fact, I realized that I was probably happier than many of my contemporaries who had lived in relative security. Before I published the book, I had the novelist Mishima Yukio look it over for me. I still find his reaction interesting. He told me,“My goodness, I didn’t realize that you grew up in such a terrible environment. I thought that you grew up in some happy household, the apple of your parents’ eyes. In any case, the suffering of your youth doesn’t seem to have stayed with you in any way.” As everyone knows, later that same year, on November 25, Mishima killed himself in a dramatic public act of suicide. One of the strongest reactions to this book came from my own mother. When I wrote it, I never intended to make her look bad, but she seemed to receive quite a shock when she read it. She realized that, even though I was no more than a little boy, I had managed to figure out the secrets she had tried to keep from me, and to make matters worse, I had written them all down as an adult. She telephoned my sister Miyuki, who had moved from Kita-Kyūshū to Gotō, Nagasaki prefecture where she lived with her husband, and said,“I want to sue Mutsuo for slander, but what do you think? This month, he sent me double the amount of money he used to send in the past, so maybe I should just sit back and wait and see what happens.” My sister immediately called and pleaded with me, telling me how much she would hate for there to be a lawsuit in the family.“If it’s true that you sent her twice the money this month, then please...