Mishima, Yukio. Madame de Sade. Grove Press, 1967. 108 pp. First edition. [sold]

“Reading The Life of the Marquis de Sade by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa I was most intrigued as a writer, by the riddle of why Madame de Sade, after having demonstrated such absolute fidelity to her husband during his long years in prison, should have left him the moment he was at last free,” Mishima writes in the afterword to this play.

Madame de Sade (Sado Kōshaku Fujin in Japanese) was first published and performed in 1965 at Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo, and appeared in this English translation by Donald Keene in 1967. This historical play in three acts centers around an off-stage, imprisoned Marquis de Sade, and shows “de Sade through women’s eyes”, particularly those of his wife Renée—as seen of course, in his turn, through Mishima’s eyes. Through the dialogue between the women onstage, Mishima hypothesises that it is not the sexual obscenity but Renée’s reading of her husband’s book Justine that convinces her finally of his immorality. Justine, she feels, is written to humiliate her.

An interesting role in this play is reserved for the Countess de Saint-Fond, a fictional character who becomes, at the end, a heroine of the French revolution; a symbol of the street masses and the poor, for her self-chosen life as a prostitute. Madame de Saint-Fond (on the cover of this Grove Press edition, played by Miki Masaki) is in fact such an interesting character you’d wish to see her next in a play of her own.