Letter to Eiichi Yamanishi
A 15 March 1961 letter from Mailer to his Japanese translator Eiichi Yamanishi, advising on which pieces to keep in the Japanese abridgment of Advertisements for Myself and recounting a 1945 conversation in Onahama with a young ex-kamikaze that, Mailer says, shaped the humanity of The Naked and the Dead. Publication source to confirm.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
Writing to his Japanese translator Eiichi Yamanishi on 15 March 1961, Mailer notes that he and Adele “are together again” (months after the November 1960 stabbing), advises on the cuts for the Japanese abridgment of Advertisements for Myself — pleading to keep the “Fifth Advertisement” and trim “Sixty-Nine Questions and Answers” or the poems instead — and confirms that the night river-attack in The Naked and the Dead is “imaginary.”
The heart of the letter is an autobiographical anecdote: stationed in Onahama after the war, Mailer met a short, bowlegged young ex-kamikaze who spoke of the war’s end with “exquisite … shock,” asking “Why, why was I going to die?” The conversation, Mailer writes, “shattered for me the last of the dull layers of propaganda” and made the Japanese real to him — so that The Naked and the Dead, then forming in his mind, “lost … any taint it might have had of propaganda.” The full text is on the full-text page.
A note on publication: the source of this transcription is not yet established (it may appear in the 2014 Selected Letters of Norman Mailer, or it may be archive material); first-published is left blank pending confirmation.