The Goddess

Name: The Goddess
ISBN: 9787532774845

Yukio Mishima / 陈德文Shanghai Translation Publishing House · ChinaJan 2021

3.8

Word count: 107K words
Chapters: 25
ISBN: 9787532774845

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Summary

*The Goddess* is a novel by Yukio Mishima. Under the careful cultivation of her husband, Kimiya Shūgo, Ikuko becomes a society beauty. At forty-five, half her face is burned in an air raid. Raised by her husband on the idea that "a woman is worthless if she is not beautiful," Ikuko sinks into despair and resentment toward him. Her husband redirects his pursuit of female beauty to their daughter, Asako. In a traffic accident, young and beautiful Asako meets the painter Madarame and cannot forget him. The accident leaves Madarame disabled and increasingly withdrawn and sullen. Meanwhile, through her father Shūgo's introduction, Asako becomes acquainted with the handsome Shunji. On one hand, Shūgo gradually grows jealous of Shunji for making his daughter ever more "femininely beautiful"; on the other, Ikuko develops complicated feelings toward her daughter—anxiety, and even more, jealousy. Asako still goes to see Madarame from time to time. After Asako and Shunji formalize their relationship, Madarame, in a fit of rage, digs up the fact that Shunji already has an illegitimate child. Madarame conspires with Asako's mother, Ikuko, to tell Asako's father, Shūgo, about Shunji's past. Shūgo cannot bear the desecration and collapses. In the end, Asako returns to being single, and she and her father each say, meaningfully, one after the other, "We've gone back to a life with just the two of us..." The book also includes ten short stories by the same author. With his singular eye and command of language, Yukio Mishima probes human emotion and desire. Each is a powerful work in which Mishima's imagination and brilliance can be savored.

Editor's review

One of the representative works of Mishima Yukio's late creative career, *The Goddess* was first published in *Bungei Shunju* in 1960. This novella continues Mishima's extreme exploration of beauty, death, and spiritual predicament, yet employs a more everyday domestic narrative as its vehicle. Through the perspective of middle-aged man Kitami Shin'ichi, the novel tells how his wife Kyoko, after witnessing an intimate scene between an American soldier and a Japanese woman, suddenly develops aphasia and thereafter becomes a silent "goddess," throwing the family relationship into a subtle disequilibrium. Here Mishima displays his delicate psychological portraiture, condensing the cultural conflicts, identity anxiety, and gender power structures of postwar Japanese society into the enclosed space of a middle-class family. Kyoko's aphasia is not merely a pathological phenomenon but a metaphor for unspeakable trauma and a passive resistance to the male gaze and domination. The recurring image of the "goddess" carries both a classical sense of sanctity and a modern aura of alienation and estrangement, embodying the contradictory quality of the sacred and the decadent coexisting in Mishima's aesthetics. Compared with the intensity of *The Temple of the Golden Pavilion* or the grandeur of *The Sea of Fertility*, *The Goddess* is more restrained and understated in its narrative, yet it cuts just as sharply into the isolated island state of the modern spiritual world. This work is an indispensable link in Mishima's literary universe and offers a key entry point for understanding the ideological turn in his late writings.

Who it's for

A good fit for

For readers drawn to Mishima's literary world who wish to understand the shift in his late style
For readers who prefer psychological realism and insight into the undercurrents of human nature within domestic life
For readers interested in postwar Japanese social and cultural psychology, gender issues, and identity
For readers who appreciate nuanced, delicate prose and can immerse themselves in a slow pace and atmospheric buildup

Not a good fit for

For readers expecting strong dramatic conflict or fast-paced plotting
For readers sensitive to the sense of repression and ambiguity in Mishima's aesthetics

Reading tips

Read alongside Mishima's contemporary essay Sun and Steel to understand the philosophical backdrop of his mind-body dichotomy
Pay attention to the network of images around silence and watching, and appreciate the central role of nonverbal communication in the narrative
After reading, compare with Kawabata's Sleeping Beauty or Abe's The Woman in the Dunes to consider the different ways the female body serves as metaphor in postwar Japanese literature

About the publisher

Shanghai Translation Publishing House China · Founded in 1978

Shanghai Translation Publishing House is a Chinese publisher oriented mainly toward translation and publishing. Its publications cover foreign literature, world classics and classic works, as well as social culture, folk literature and classical poetry. The database contains 2,618 titles, including Never Let Me Go, Les Misérables (2 volumes), Don Quixote (illustrated collector's edition), The Complete Comedies of Molière (4 volumes), The Complete Novels of Kafka (3 volumes), The Collected Works of Dostoevsky (9-volume set), Reason and Persons, and Oedipus Rex (Translation Classics). Its author resources include foreign writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Victor Hugo, Cervantes and Molière, as well as translators such as Zheng Kelu, Sun Jiameng, Li Jianwu and Zhang Kun. The publisher has brands such as "Translation Classics Selections" and "Translation Documentary," and emphasizes translated works in foreign literature and the humanities and social sciences, while also publishing bilingual dictionaries and foreign-language educational books. Public information is limited; the above is based on the book information in the database.

版权信息
女神
第一章
第二章
第三章
第四章
第五章
第六章
第七章
第八章
接吻
传说
天鹅
哲学
蝴蝶
一
二
三
恋重荷
侍童
鸳鸯
偶人之家
早晨的纯爱
上
下

FAQ

Where does The Goddess stand in Mishima Yukio's body of work?

The Goddess was written in 1960 and belongs to Mishima's late period (late 1950s to 1970). During this time his style gradually moved from early aesthetic romanticism toward colder psychological analysis and social observation; this work, together with The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Patriotism, embodies that shift, though its narrative is more everyday, and it can be seen as a chamber-music variation on his grand tragic aesthetic.

What exactly does the goddess in the novel refer to?

The goddess has multiple layers of symbolism: on the surface it refers to the wife Kyoko, who seems sacred and aloof because of her aphasia; more deeply it is a metaphor for postwar Japanese culture's aphasia and passive goddess-ification (being gazed at and idealized while losing its own voice) in the face of dominant American culture; it is also another incarnation of Mishima's absolute beauty, but this beauty comes at the cost of self-enclosure and refusal to communicate, revealing the two sides of the sacred and the inhuman in his aesthetics.

How is the translation quality of this Shanghai Translation Publishing House edition?

This edition is translated by the veteran Japanese literature translator Zhu Jiarong; the translation is accurate and fluent and preserves well the original's concise, austere language and complex psychological layers. The volume includes a translator's afterword offering valuable guidance on Mishima's creative background and the novel's themes, making it one of the more authoritative Chinese editions.

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About the author

Yukio Mishima Author · Japan · 1925–1970

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) was a Japanese novelist and playwright, born Hiraoka Kimitake in Tokyo and a graduate of the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo. He established his literary standing with Confessions of a Mask in 1949, and went on to explore beauty, desire and death in a coolly refined and intensely aesthetic style. His major works include The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sound of Waves and the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, whose volumes Spring Snow, Runaway Horses and The Decay of the Angel are available in Chinese. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. On 25 November 1970 he committed seppuku at a Self-Defense Forces base, and his life and writing have remained a subject of public discussion. The library holds 84 of his works, mostly under foreign literature, young adult literature and classics.

陈德文 Author

Chen Dewen is a Chinese translator known chiefly for rendering Japanese literature into Chinese, though his personal details are limited: his birth year, native place and educational background are not clearly documented. Judging from the sixty-eight titles held in the collection, his work centers on introducing foreign literature and classic works, with representative translations including Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow, The Decay of the Angel, Runaway Horses and Forbidden Colors in the Zitu Classic Library series, as well as Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country and The Old Capital. These translations mainly serve Chinese readers of modern and contemporary Japanese fiction, focusing on major works by writers of high literary standing. Available materials do not systematically record his translation style or views on translation, and the repeated appearance of Snow Country may reflect different editions or reprints, a point that requires further verification. Overall, Chen Dewen's translations offer Chinese-language readers a readable channel into classic Japanese literature.