The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (11 page)

He also scored straight A's for calligraphy, English, history, geography, math (geometry and algebra), and chemistry. Only in sports was he lower down the class, scoring A – in
taisō
(physical education),
kyōren
(drill), and
budō
(martial arts). His record of attendance was good, by comparison with that of his early years in the school. Ill health rarely kept him from his studies any more.

He experienced a disappointment when he entered the senior school in April 1942. “With the beginning of the war”—he remembered in
Confessions of a Mask
—“a wave of hypocritical stoicism swept the entire country. Even the higher schools did not escape: all during middle school we had longed for that happy day of graduation to higher school when we could let our hair grow long, but now, when the day arrived, we were no longer allowed
to gratify our ambition—we still had to shave our heads.” Mishima, however, was treated as a star pupil by his senior teacher, Ryōzō Niizeki, under whose direction he began German studies (literature and law). He was made a member of the committee of the Bungei-bu, the literary club, and was soon to be its chairman; he was also to be a monitor. The exemplary student published patriotic poems, tanka (thirty-one-syllable poems), in the school magazine. In “Omikotonori” (“Imperial Edict”), which appeared in April, Mishima dedicated himself to the Sun Goddess and to service of the Emperor. His interest in the classics increased. He studied the
Kojiki
(“The Record of Ancient Matters”), and he read the
Manyōshu
(“Journal of a Myriad Leaves”), the eighth-century-poetry anthology, for which there was a vogue in wartime. In the summer he published a study of the
Kokinshū
, the tenth-century anthology whose reflective, melancholy poems were more to his taste than the robust
Manyōshu
lyrics. Also, Mishima and Takashi Azuma started a little magazine of their own,
Akae
(“Red Picture”), in which they published their own work.

Meanwhile, the war was developing—in the Emperor's famous words—“not necessarily to Japan's advantage.” The first American bombers appeared over Tokyo in April 1942: the raid was a small one, but it was clear that the homeland would be threatened if Japanese military momentum was lost. In June the sea battle of Midway took place. By good fortune, the U.S. Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers, destroying a large fighter force in the process; this was a blow from which the Japanese Navy did not recover. Plans for advancing across New Guinea and invading northern Australia were aborted; after Midway, in effect, the war was lost. It continued for another three years, with immense loss of life and destruction of property, but after the Guadalcanal campaign of late 1942 the Japanese were on the defensive in the Pacific.

Mishima associated at this time with a group of writers who believed that the war was holy. Hasuda, the leading spirit in the Bungei Bunka group, and twenty-one years Mishima's senior, encouraged the boy to believe in the ideal of death in the service of the Emperor. A scholar with an exceptional capacity for interpreting the Japanese classics in contemporary terms, Hasuda wrote a study of Ōtsu-no-Miko, a tragic prince of the seventh century.
The moral was, in Hasuda's words: “I believe one should die young in this age. To die young, I am sure, is the culture of my country.” Hasuda had a great regard for the young Mishima; a friend, Masaharu Fuji, recorded this impression (in an article in
Shinchō
magazine, February 1971) of Hasuda saying good-bye to the boy: “When we visited Hasuda he went out to see Mishima off at the station, and he stared after the departing train for a long time. His attachment to the boy was obvious; he regarded Mishima the prodigy as his own precious jewel.”

Hasuda was a slim, tense schoolteacher from Kyushu, the traditional home of priests in Japan. He had served in China and been invalided back to Japan, but in 1943 he was to be drafted again—to Malaya. In 1970 Mishima wrote a preface to a biography of Hasuda in which he remarked: “His enemies [in Japan] had not tried to understand nor wanted to know the source of Hasuda's fierce anger and uncompromising conduct. They were the pure product of his stern tenderness . . . I received Hasuda's tenderness and affection when I was a boy. I saw the grand spectacle of his anger, suddenly coming and then evaporating . . . For me Hasuda was a poet who had a scholarly knowledge of Japanese literature. He loved classical lyrical poetry and injected the quality of the classics into his own work. I could not understand his anger . . . Hasuda placed his confidence in me when he was drafted for the second time [in 1943] and set out on his journey to
shishi
[death granted by the favor of the Emperor], but, naïve as I was, I could not understand his feeling even after I heard of his death . . .” Though as a schoolboy Mishima did not fully understand Hasuda, he did sympathize deeply with his ideals.

The Bungei Bunka was a small, little-known band of literary nationalists. Hasuda encouraged Mishima to get in touch with the leading intellectuals, who believed in the holiness of the war their country had embarked on. They had formed a movement known as the Nippon Roman-ha (Japanese Romanticists), led by Yōjurō Yasuda, a critic with a rhetorical gift, a highbrow agitator for the “sacred” war. In 1942 Mishima collected Roman-ha works, including the poetry of Shizuo Itō, the best artist in the Roman-ha, with whom he corresponded. Itō's work was more to his taste than
Yasuda's, but this did not keep him from visiting Yasuda in 1943. Yasuda's ideas, however, were too extreme for the young Mishima, and his language obscure—a characteristic of Roman-ha writers with the exception of Itō. Jun Etō, a scholar with an interest in the Roman-ha, summed up the ideals of the movement in conversation with me: “They believed in the value of destruction and ultimately in self-destruction. They valued ‘purity of sentiment,' though they never defined this; and they called for ‘preservation of the nation' by purging selfish party politicians and
zaibatsu
[business] leaders. They believed that self-destruction would be followed by reincarnation, linked mysteriously with the benevolence of the Emperor. The Japanese, they considered, were superior to all other peoples.”

The young Mishima was intrigued by the Roman-ha. The movement, which derived its name from
Nippon Roman
, a magazine edited by Yasuda from 1935 to 1938, took its ideas from the nineteenth-century German romantic movement. (Hence Roman;
ha
in Japanese means “group.”) It had great influence in Japan during the war, incorporating elements of the traditional
kokugaku
(the nationalistic thought of the great eighteenth-century thinker, Norinaga Motōori), and also Marxism; it was eclectic, in a peculiarly Japanese way. The Roman-ha was encouraged by the military leaders of Japan, and Yasuda gave the movement an inspired leadership. His statements now seem unintelligible, however, and even at the time his notion of irony, a key Roman-ha concept, was vague. His well-known, ironic prewar comments include: “I am saying this purely as an observer. I think it would be more
interesting
if Germany were to win the war, I want her to win. I look at culture from a historical point of view, and it seems to me that the Gods seek to make history more interesting and amusing as one epoch succeeds another.” “Even if this war [the Sino-Japanese War] should end with defeat, Japan will have succeeded in accomplishing the greatest step forward in world history. From an ideological point of view, to imagine defeat is the greatest romance.” Yasuda held that historical reality was unimportant and that the emotion aroused by events was more “interesting” than the events themselves. He argued that it was irrelevant whether a hero was righteous
or not. The enlightened man would not commit himself. For such a being, there could be neither decisive defeat nor complete victory; he would be both winner and loser in any game.

Mishima was attracted by the Roman-ha emphasis on death and destruction. The conclusion of “irony” was that death—the world's destruction—was the ultimate value. His own fantasies had run on similar lines since childhood. However, he was not influenced solely by the Roman-ha in his thinking. The young Mishima had a highly rational side to him—and an ideology tailor-made for a nation plunging toward catastrophe was insufficient for him. He was attracted at this time not only by the Roman-ha but also by a stoic moral tradition, that of the early twentieth-century Japanese writer, Ōgai Mori.

Mishima imitated Ōgai Mori as a man and as a writer, especially after 1950, as he recounted in his essay
Sun and Steel
(published by Kodansha International in a translation by John Bester). This book-length essay was finished in 1968, and Mishima, discussing his literary style, then clarified his debt to Mori: “In my style, as hardly needs pointing out, I progressively turned my back on the preferences of the age. Abounding in antitheses, clothed in an old-fashioned weighty solemnity, it did not lack nobility of a kind; but it maintained the same ceremonial, grave pace wherever it went, marching through other people's bedrooms with precisely the same tread as elsewhere. Like some military gentleman, it went about with chest out and shoulders back, despising other men's styles for the way they stooped, sagged at the knees, even—heaven forbid!—swayed at the hips.”

That the young Mishima had an inclination toward the Roman-ha is suggested by some passages in
Confessions of a Mask
: “During this time [the early war years] I learned to smoke and drink. That is to say, I learned to make a pretense at smoking and drinking. The war had produced a strangely sentimental maturity in us. It arose from our thinking of life as something that would end abruptly in our twenties; we never even considered the possibility of there being anything beyond those few remaining years.” This was a state of affairs with which Mishima was perfectly “happy”: “My journey into life was postponed day after day, and the war years were going by without the slightest sign of my departure.
Was this not a unique period of happiness for me? Though I still felt an uneasiness, it was only faint; still having hope, I looked forward to the unknown blue skies of each tomorrow. Fanciful dreams of the journey to come . . . the mental picture of the somebody I would one day become in the world and of the lovely bride I had not yet seen, my hopes of fame . . .” And he thoroughly approved of the war, from the safety of the GakushÅ«in: “I found childish delight in war, and despite the presence of death and destruction all around me, there was no abatement of the daydream in which I believed myself beyond the reach of harm by any bullet. I even shuddered with a strange delight at the thought of my own death. I felt as though I owned the whole world.”

Mishima's “hopes of fame” depended on publication of
Hanazakari no Mori
. He sought out literary men. From Shizuo Itō, the poet of the Roman-ha, he obtained an introduction to a literary editor, Masaharu Fuji of Shichijō Shōin, a small but influential publishing house in Tokyo. Fuji later recalled their meeting in 1943: “Mishima was a very polite young man with dead pale skin. He had a large head and dark eyebrows. I introduced him to Fujima Hayashi [a poet] and Hayashi took an instant liking to him when Mishima rejected his offer of a beer in a polite but stiff way.” Mishima hoped that Fuji would publish his book; but this proved impossible. Censorship, which was handled by the military authorities, was not the problem—though many leading Japanese writers were running into trouble at that time; Mishima had backing from the establishment. The difficulty was shortage of paper. All resources were devoted to the war effort and there was no paper to spare for
Hanazakari no Mori
.

In October 1943 Mishima had bad news. His friend, Azuma, with whom he was publishing the little magazine
Akae
, had died. Mishima closed the magazine and published an obituary in the Gakushūin quarterly. His own future was unpredictable; the authorities were drafting university students and he had only a year left at the Gakushūin.

At nineteen, Mishima remained a romantic. And yet his fantasies had become more grandiose and narcissistic. As Hashikawa later remarked: “He thought of himself as a genius, he believed that he could become whatever he liked—the Emperor of Japan,
a literary genius, even the kamikaze of beauty. He thought his potential unlimited.” The reality was somewhat different, however. Mishima was a frail youth, “ashamed of my thin chest, of my bony, pallid arms,” and he only just passed his army medical in May 1944. He was still at the GakushÅ«in at the time and took his medical at Shikata, the home town of Jōtarō, where the Hiraokas had retained a
honseki
, a registered place of residence, though they no longer owned land there. The army doctors laughed when Mishima failed to lift a hay bale in a test of strength (the local farm boys easily lifted it above their heads any number of times), but they classified him 2-B, just qualifying him for service. He would eventually be drafted into a rough local regiment and serve in the ranks. (Had he volunteered in Tokyo, he would have become an officer in a unit there, but Azusa hoped, by registering the boy at Shikata, to delay the time when he would be called to active military service. With luck, the war would be over before Mishima was drafted.) In July 1944, Mishima and the rest of the class were sent to a naval engineering school at Maizuru on the Japan Sea, to train for a fortnight. This was his first experience of military life, and in the next month he was mobilized again for thirty days, to serve at a naval dockyard at Numazu near Tokyo. The Japanese were steadying themselves for a final assault against the Allies, and every schoolboy had duties. The resignation of the Tojo Cabinet in July 1944 signaled that the leaders of Japan, including the Emperor, believed the war was lost; but there was no thought of surrender. In June, proposals had been put forth for kamikaze attacks on U.S. naval vessels; these proposals were secretly being considered in the late summer of 1944.