My Arranged Marriage
Yukio Mishima
I used to think that I should do it for love, that it’s best for a writer to have a long period of bachelorhood, and that my own marriage would come at around forty. But since I entered my thirties three years ago, I for some reason gradually became anxious and came to think seriously about marriage. This is natural as the feelings of a man of thirty who is steadily approaching middle age. That’s why in my work of three years ago, A Novelist’s Holiday, I wrote, “I too will probably get married one day.” This was the first time that I discussed my own marriage in writing.
Having decided to marry, I thought for a while about whether a love marriage or an arranged marriage would be better. If I had a love marriage, the press would rejoice, but from my standpoint it is doubtful whether I could obtain pure love. If I were a student and my partner were also a lady who is going to school, normal worldly love would be possible. That would be fine. However, I have already received the social title that is writer. So there would not be a few literary fan-crazed or fame-crazed women who would take an interest, not in me the man myself, but in the social thing called a writer. If you think that pure love is possible in that you are totally naïve. Even if it were to become like love and my partner had no ill intent, it is doubtful whether or not it would really be love.
And another thing is that my economic conditions differ from those of a regular salaryman, and consequently my living conditions also differ. I would be at a loss if a woman were to come at me thinking that she would be able to live a flamboyant and luxurious lifestyle.
I would be at a loss even if a woman raised in an economically humble environment were to come to me and think that she had become the wife of a prominent person. In the writer’s profession, one never knows when a slump (downturn) will come, one never knows when one will have to lie in obscurity. In which case, a flamboyant pleasure-seeking woman is totally out of the question.
After some thought, I concluded that, as far as my marriage is concerned, love marriage would not be the right choice. In my surroundings there is no shortage of people who are interesting as friends to do things with, but there were none whom I wanted to think of as marital partners.
Is there not somewhere a woman who is “a lady of marriageable age, has absolutely no interest in literature, likes housework, is a womanly, kind, and mild person who cares about her parents, who is shorter than me even in high heels, who is moonfaced like I prefer and is cute. Someone who will manage the household without ever interfering in my work and thereby indirectly support me?” If I am to try to find such a lady, there is no way of connecting with her other than through an arranged marriage. I concluded that, as someone with the condition that we be able to know each other who cannot know each other, I should have an arranged marriage. I then spoke to my parents, searched with those conditions, and had talks with a variety of people, but there was no mutual agreement, and I found myself in March of this year [1958].
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