Bunburying and the Art of Kabuki; or, Wilde, Mishima, and the Importance of Being a Sardine Seller

TLDR: Musolf compares Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest with Mishima's The Sardine Seller, focusing on the belief these writers shared in the sovereignty of illusion over fact and their consequent conviction that life is to be lived as if it were a dramatic fiction.

Abstract: In this period of politically correct regard for cultural difference it is easy to overlook the unifying effect on human experience of modernity's cultural boundary-jumping. In the following essay Peter Musolf compares Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest with Yukio Mishima's 1954 kabuki play Iwashiuri Koi no Hikiami (The Sardine Seller), focusing on the belief these writers shared in the sovereignty of illusion over fact and their consequent conviction that life is to be lived as if it were a dramatic fiction. Taken together with Mishima's novel Confessions of a Mask, the plays comprise a remarkable ironic commentary on the nature and construction of being in the modern world. Peter Musolf is a teacher and writer living in Yokohama. Gozira to wa nani ka, his book on the science fiction screen monster Godzilla in US-Japanese mass psychology, appeared earlier this year, and he is currently writing a play.