Lately I’ve been going through drawers upon drawers of files, deciding what to keep and what to toss.

Retirement approaches, and I need to clear out my office.

I have more than 35 years to go through covering the work I’ve done at Washington University.

Some files and folders date back even earlier: to International Christian University, where I worked for five years; and earlier still to my one-year stint at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Heck, I even have a few papers from my undergraduate years at St. Andrews College in Laurinburg, North Carolina.

Program for The Sun Behind the Eyes

My last year there I wrote a play called “The Sun Behind the Eyes.” It was based on Yukio Mishima’s tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility.

I wrote the play as a independent project.

I had spent the earlier year in Japan at Seinan Gakuin University. When I wasn’t in classes, studying dance, or tooling around town with my friends, I was holed up at home reading translations of Japanese poetry and fiction. Yukio Mishima was my favorite author then.

No doubt my fandom was inspired by Ron Bayes. He was my advisor for my undergraduate major in English and Creative Writing and a huge proponent of Mishima’s works.

For my project, I worked on adapting Mishima’s tetralogy into a play. In doing so I was also inspired by Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays, translated by Donald Keene.

St. Andrews supported creativity and independence.

Ron Bayes, decorated poet and Writer-in-Residence, encouraged me to take my adaptation further. He urged me to stage it.

We staged it during my last semester.

I had taken a class on the history of theater with Professor McDonald earlier and had landed a role in the student production of Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes,” but I hardly saw myself as theater-savvy.

Even so, I had a vision.

I asked Bill, who had directed “Little Foxes,” to guide the production. Together we held a casting. It was so much fun to have my classmates read the various parts—imagining them in the roles of Kiyoaki, Satoko, Honda, Isao and others.

The Sea of Fertility is an ambitious work that explores themes of beauty and decay by charting the traveling soul of a reincarnated individual across 20th-century Japan—with a brief foray into India and Thailand.

Imagining myself the next great Edward Albee, I selected a minimalist stage with risers establishing various levels to represent each reincarnation. The back of the stage was draped in black curtains. I borrowed a three-foot-high gold-leaf folding screen, or byobu, from Ron, and it occupied center stage. Festooned with a pine branch, the folding screen gestured towards the Noh theater.

“The Sun Behind the Eyes” was my own “modern noh.”

I still have the program we created, and the yellow rose that Dr. Bennett gave me on opening night.

He had cut it fresh from his own garden.

I pressed it between the pages of the program, and it remains with me still.

Yellow rose inside the program for The Sun Behind the Eyes

Dr. Carl Bennett passed away in 2006.

I don’t think I ever fully acknowledged how much he meant to me.

He seemed rather conservative, with his shock of silver hair and his dark rimmed glasses. He always wore a tie to class. Can you imagine? In the 1970s, the era of tie-dye!

It was Dr. Bennett who first introduced me to women writers. He included Kate Chopin and Eudora Welty in our class on Modern American Literature. And for my assignment on Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900), he allowed me to do a cartoon adaptation of the storyline.

[I haven’t been able to unearth that masterpiece. It probably floated away in the flood. If I recall, the cartoon included six panels.]

And then, it was the night of the performance, May 18, 1978.

I was nervous.

I was also excited.

Seeing my classmates on stage bringing my vision to life was thrilling!

Probably the most notable was Mike in the role of the samurai youth, Isao, who appears in book two of the tetralogy, Runaway Horses. Isao’s pure ideals cannot withstand the corruption of a modernizing Japan, and he commits ritual suicide at the end of the novel.

That’s where the title of my play comes from. As Isao draws the blade across his stomach, he sees the sun burst forth behind his eyes.

Mike, muscular and gorgeous, bravely agreed to act the scene wearing nothing but a kind of loin cloth.

He’d been perfect during rehearsals, standing alone atop the highest riser illuminated by a spot light. After he simulated the suicide, the light would suffuse the stage before descending into total darkness.

Such drama!

Only on the night of the performance, as I stood fretfully at the back of the theater,

Mike missed his cue.

Or so it seemed to me.

Damn! I had seen him earlier in the hallway flirting with a pretty blonde.

Typical.

I stormed out of the theater and marched down the hallway.

“Michael!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “Get in here now!”

I couldn’t find him anywhere.

Furious, I returned to the theater space, only to find him atop the riser in all his magnificent beauty.

I spent the remainder of the play wondering if my angry shouts had filtered into the theater.

When the final curtain fell and the stage lights came up, the applause from the nearly-packed theater was loud and energetic.

Friends from the audience rushed forward, and we took turns enacting scenes for the camera.

I have a post-production photo with Ron, seated alongside his folding screen.

Author with Ron Bayes, May 1978.

He never stopped believing in me.

He pressed me to get permission from Mrs. Mishima to allow me to publish the work.

I’m not sure we actually needed her permission for an adaptation, but he seemed to think so. While visiting my parents in Fukuoka in 1979, I managed to obtain an audience with her.

The only thing I can remember about that meeting was that the Mishima mansion, located in Minami-Magome, Ota-ku, Tokyo was very Rococo, with tall white walls and sleek marble floors.

The house felt chilly, but Mrs. M was gracious and lovely as she kindly listened to my still faltering Japanese.

She had blue enameled toenails.

I gave her a copy of my play, but I don’t think I ever succeeded in getting her permission to publish it, much to Ron’s disappointment.

Worn copy of the play (not the one given Mrs. Mishima!) Prepared on a typewriter with whiteout and handwritten corrections.

Years later, after I was settled at Washington University, Ron invited me back to St. Andrews for the annual Japan festival which he organized.

He had the drama club perform my play.

It really wasn’t the same, though.
Although the students performed their roles with sincerity and flourish, the play didn’t really make sense to me. What I had once believed was so avant-garde and magical, just seemed cryptic.

But Dr. Bennett was there, again, to congratulate me. It was too early for roses. We made do with a warm hug.

Ronald Homer Bayes left this world December 12, 2021.

I would not be here had it not been for him.