Love’s Modernization in ‘Three Million Yen’
Love is not a stranger to literature. Many authors have long sought to give their works a humane feeling. Being one of the strongest in someone’s heart, it was evident that love should be a subject that many wanted their story to revolve around. Love itself might be commonly associated with the connection between two people. Still, it is not always the case when it comes to the art of literature. Every author would want their works to be deemed original. Therefore love must also be something authentic instead of terminological. They are going back as far as the Greeks themselves. It can be argued that the work of poet Homer with the Illiad is a form of love directed to the heroes that are believed have paved the way for their civilization to prosper. Augustine’s Confessions is a pious expression of love between a man and his god. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray is a rebellious expression of love meant to celebrate and warn against youthful hedonism. And Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a celebration to love men’s masculinity and its imperfections. These are only several examples of how many authors have explored the subject of love from Greece, North Africa, Ireland, to the USA. However, all of those authors came from the West; the East also did not spare great authors who wrote variations of love. One of those Eastern authors is Yukio Mishima, one of the most magnificent post-war Japanese authors. They wrote the short story, Three Million Yen.
Three Million Yen follows the story of a young married couple walking through a department store, killing time before having to meet someone. The story starts with them browsing the toy store, wondering whether their child will be a boy or a girl. Playing with his wife, the husband threw a saucer which landed on a pack of biscuits carrying the words ‘One Million Yen’. Believing that it was a good sign, Kenzo took Kiyoko to an indoor amusement park to waste their time until nine. At their meeting, it is revealed that an old rich woman has paid them to give sexual performances for her and her friends. The story skipped time and ended with the couple humoring their experience. Kenzo took the last piece of the biscuit, and it did not break on his hands.
The peculiar story follows similarities to Haibun. Traditional Japanese poetry and prose writing intend to speak of life’s present dwelling in sparse and imaginative storytelling. The readers’ connection to the characters is most strongly found in the banality of their stroll through the department store. A department store is nowhere noteworthy, but it is much more important how the couple comforts each other in that null of noteworthiness. Furthermore, through the narrator, the readers can sympathize with the couple’s goal of waiting for their first child, something very relatable to most who have just married. In the end, their decision to sell their body could be understandable with how in the awakening of a postmodern society, money is more than anything. Three Million Yen is not a romanticization; it is a realization.
Love’s modernization realizes the hardship for those who strive for a family-oriented love within how much the modern and post-modern society has changed to favor them. The department store is a metaphor for the emerging hyper-capitalism, which commodifies not only human-made products but also human-made products. The ‘One Million Yen’ biscuits symbolize the struggle of climbing the socio-economic ladders. The buying of sexual performance is the normalized perversion of ethics and moralities. Yet, on the other hand, the young couple is a beacon of hope of gratefulness to love and live what you would not have entirely loved.
Their love should have been, in requisite, traditional, but the present that they face forced them to adapt to the modern. The mask they donned to pass what they must do for their children is a carried self-idealization. It is optimistic as it is bleak; not everyone in love would necessarily want to be in their position for one reason. But as Voltaire once satirized, “All is for the best in the best of possible worlds”.
In the end, the causation of my argument to mirror the story into a critic against modernity comes from Yukio Mishima himself. He has often been cited to be an author who is very cynical with the progression of modernity. That happened to Japan who has abandoned most of its pre-World War II ideals. With most damning to Mishima being the abandonment of the traditional codes of Bushido and other pro-Imperial supremacy’s ideologies.
Though, in the end, it is safe to say that what I believe the story to speak about love cannot be the same for other readers. That is it for literature, and it should not be viewed objectively. Therefore, I recommend to anyone interested in coming up with interpretations of Three Million Yen to pick up the Death in Midsummer anthology and other works from Yukio Mishima.
Editor: Handiko Wijaya & Nadia Salsabila