The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (12 page)

Mishima's outstanding ability was recognized at the end of his years at the Gakushūin. He passed out of the school in September 1944 at the top of his class and was awarded a
gindokei
, a silver watch, by the Emperor. Accompanied by the principal of the school, “a cheerless old man with mucus clotted in the corners of his eyes,” Mishima went by limousine to the palace to receive the prize. Years later he remarked, in debate with Tokyo University students in 1969: “I watched the Emperor sitting there without moving for three hours. This was at my graduation ceremony. I received a watch from him . . . My personal experience was that
the image of the Emperor is fundamental. I cannot set this aside. The Emperor is the absolute.” After the presentation ceremony at the palace, Mishima returned home to celebrate. Photographs taken with his family show him with a shaven head, the rule for schoolboys and students during wartime. His appearance had changed in the war years; he was no longer the cheeky boy of fifteen with shining eyes, heavy black eyebrows, and pallid face, but a mature-looking youth with a thickened and rounded jaw and a look of assurance. The rest of the family sat beside Mishima for the photograph. Chiyuki, his younger brother, dressed in shorts, was at fourteen in the early stage of adolescence, a spotty child. Next to him sat Mitsuko, sixteen; she had a strong face and broad cheeks—not a beauty. Azusa was the most handsome member of the family. His hair, cut short in military style, had turned silver. Shizué had aged greatly. At thirty-nine she was a thin matron with a sharp expression. The main worries of the family—including the provision of food, which had become difficult at this stage of the war—were hers. She bore the family burdens, while Azusa enjoyed his retirement.

Mishima's father had a special reason for looking pleased with himself. He had won a victory. For the first time in his life he had compelled the young Mishima to do something against his will; he had obliged the boy to enlist in the law department at Tokyo Imperial University, where he was to study German law. Mishima had wanted to study literature, but Azusa insisted that for his career it was essential that he study law; his father wanted Mishima to join the civil service. Mishima later commented: “The only thing I have to be grateful to my father for is that he compelled me to study law at the university.” Azusa's choice was correct, not for the reasons he thought but because Mishima found law intellectually stimulating.

University uniforms were in short supply, and following a custom of the time, Mishima borrowed a uniform from a senior student, promising to return it. The university was in danger of disruption, however. “The air raids were becoming more frequent. I was uncommonly afraid of them, and yet at the same time I somehow looked forward to death impatiently, with a sweet expectation”
(Confessions)
. Mishima “sensuously accepted the creed
of death that was popular during the war” but with reservations. “I thought that if by any chance I should attain ‘glorious death in battle' (how ill it would have become me!), this would be a truly ironical end for my life, and I could laugh sarcastically at it forever from the grave . . . And when the sirens sounded, that same me would dash for the air-raid shelters faster than anyone.”

The university was the best in the land. The GakushÅ«in had not been a first-class school academically. It had been chosen by Jōtarō because it was attended by children of the aristocracy, to which Mishima's grandmother aspired to belong; but the Tokyo Kaisei school, which Shizué's father ran, would have been a better choice, academically. So too would the Tokyo First School, another secondary school with high academic standards. To pass out of the GakushÅ«in into Tōdai, Tokyo University, was an achievement. Since its establishment in the late nineteenth century, Tōdai had produced a majority of the leaders of the nation; its prestige had been enhanced by its being named an Imperial University in 1886 under an ordinance Article I of which stated that the function of the university was “to master the secrets of and to teach the arts and sciences in accordance with the needs of the state.” Tōdai was a state university and a passport to the civil service and thence to politics or the upper reaches of the world of business. It had drawbacks as an institution of higher education, however. Close links with the state prevented Tōdai from serving as a center of the arts and of liberal thought; Tōdai had led the way in the early twentieth century in terminating the practice of employing professors from overseas. Despite these drawbacks, it was the leading university in Japan, and other universities, including private ones, were mostly smaller versions of Tōdai.

Mishima started at Tōdai in October 1944. Normally he would have left the Gakushūin in March the following year and entered the university in April, but the war had disrupted university administration. The war also interrupted Mishima's university career. As soon as he entered Tōdai, he was drafted to work in an aircraft factory in the Tokyo region, the Koizumi plant of Nakajima Aircraft Company. The plant was situated in Gumma prefecture, fifty miles north of the capital. Mishima had been drafted twice before, while at the Gakushūin. These had been brief assignments, however,
and the posting to Nakajima Aircraft Company was for an indefinite period of time. Like other universities, Tōdai had virtually ceased to function in deference to the government's demand that everyone participate in the war effort.

Mishima described the factory at Koizumi, which manufactured kamikaze planes—the kamikaze strategy, a last, desperate move, had been initiated in October—in
Confessions of a Mask
. The factory was a strange one. The management might have been Roman-ha purists: “This great factory worked on a mysterious system of production costs: taking no account of the economic dictum that capital investment should produce a return, it was dedicated to a monstrous nothingness. No wonder then that each morning the workers had to recite a mystic oath.” This was a vow to the Emperor. “I have never seen such a strange factory. In it all the techniques of modern science and management, together with the exact and rational thinking of many superior brains, were dedicated to a single end—Death. Producing the Zero-model combat plane used by the suicide squadrons, this great factory resembled a secret cult that operated thunderously—groaning, shrieking, roaring.”

The factory was a possible target for American bombers, and when the air-raid sirens sounded, everyone would rush to the shelters in a nearby pine grove. As he hurried with the others, Mishima clutched a manuscript. He was working on a new book,
Chūsei
(“The Middle Ages”). He had finally succeeded in having
Hanazakari no Mori
, his first book, published. It was brought out in October 1944 by Shichijō Shōin, the publishing house for which his friend Fuji worked. Four thousand copies were printed, with an elegant cover showing a fan with blossoms, and the first edition had sold out in a week. A party had been held at a restaurant in Ueno (Tokyo) to celebrate publication. To have published a book in the last year of the war was a phenomenal achievement, and Yukio Mishima won fame among his contemporaries.

In his autobiographical work,
Watakushi no Henreki Jidai
(“My Wandering Years,” 1964)—like so many of his books, it remains untranslated—Mishima said that he expected to be drafted and not live very long thereafter; he wanted to have a book published as a “memorial” to himself. “I admit,” he said, referring to
criticisms made against him, “that I was an opportunist then and I feel disgusted when I see the opportunism of the introduction of my first publication.”
Hanazakari no Mori
sold rapidly: this “meant that I could die at any moment.” Nonetheless, Mishima still felt that he had work to do. “I decided to write a very last novel—I might be drafted at any moment”; this was
Chūsei
(“The Middle Ages,” 1946). His choice of Yoshihisa (1465–89) as the subject of his “very last” book was intriguing; Yoshihisa was the son of a ruler of Japan, the Shogun Yoshimasa, who built the Silver Pavilion at Kyoto—and ignored problems of government, bequeathing countless problems to his successors. Yoshihisa attempted to seize power from his uncle, an appointee of his father, but the coup misfired and he was killed in battle at twenty-four. The civil wars which followed, the Ōnin Wars, were the most destructive in the history of warfare in Japan. Kyoto was razed to the ground in the course of this Japanese version of the Hundred Years' War in Europe. It was typical of Mishima that he chose to write about an earlier period of Japanese history in which the capital had been reduced to ashes, at a time when the process was being repeated in Tokyo; he had an eye for striking parallels.

Mishima felt that a disaster comparable to the Ōnin Wars was about to overtake Japan once more. Whether he received his
akagami
, the “red paper,” or conscription summons, or not, he felt sure that disaster—
ichiokugyokusai
(“Death to the hundred million! No surrender!”), as the wartime slogan had it—waited the entire nation. “The reason I now feel that total nuclear warfare is certain,” he wrote in
Watakushi no Henreki Jidai
, “probably goes back to the emotional experiences I had at that time. Now, seventeen years after the end of the war, I cannot be sure of reality; it is temporary and fleeting. Perhaps I have an inherent inclination to think that way, but it may be that the war, during which things were there one day and gone the next, influenced me a great deal.” Mishima's way of dealing with the situation was “to cling to my sensitivity”; in retrospect, he could see that he had been foolish, but at the time it had been unavoidable.

From the factory Mishima wrote a card to Fumio Shimizu. He was hard at work translating a one-act play by Yeats, he said, and was rendering it into a No play. But he gave up the project;
his English was not up to the task of translating
At the Hawk's Well
, the Yeats play in question. “It is not easy to relate Yeats to the end of the war period,” he wrote. “Now I would say that I was not trying to relate these two things. I wanted to put reality aside and wrap myself up in my own world, the world of my tiny, lonely, aesthetic hobby.”

3

Fearful Days

Early in 1945, the fighting crept closer to Japan. American naval forces bombarded Leyte in the Philippines and a landing was effected; the U.S. Armed Forces overran the country. The Emperor's advisers made secret preparations for surrender, while the Imperial Armies struggled on against overwhelming Allied forces, suffering heavy casualties. Waiting for his draft call, Mishima continued working at the kamikaze factory in Gumma prefecture, and he continued writing. In February 1945 he published part of
Chūsei
in a magazine. “I was probably happy at that time,” he wrote in
Watakushi no Henreki Jidai
; he had no worries about examinations or employment. “I had a little food—not much—and no responsibilities. I was happy in my daily life and in my writing. I had neither critics nor competitors to contend with . . . I felt no slightest responsibility for myself. I was in an anti-gravity environment.”

Late in the evening of February 15, 1945, when Mishima, on leave from the factory, was visiting his parents in Tokyo, his
akagami
(the “red paper”) arrived. He was to report for duty at Shikata, and prepared to leave the following morning. He composed a traditional
isho
, a farewell note for his family:

Father, Mother, Mr. Shimizu, and my other teachers at the Gakushūin and at Tokyo Imperial University, who were so kind to me, I thank you for your blessings bestowed upon me.

Also, I shall never forget the friendship of my classmates and seniors at the Gakushūin. May you have a bright future!

You, my younger sister Mitsuko and younger brother Chiyuki, must discharge your duties to our parents in my place. Above all, Chiyuki, follow me and join the Imperial Army as soon as possible. Serve the Emperor!

Tennō Heika Banzai!

When he left the next morning, his mother wept bitterly at the gate of their home as she saw him off, accompanied by his father. The youth boarded a train for the Kansai (the Osaka-Kobe area), and during the long ride, three hundred miles, a cold he had caught at the factory became much worse. By the time he reached the home of close family friends in the village of Shikata, their legal residence, he had such a high fever that he was unable to stand. After a night's rest, dosed with medicine, he made his way to the barracks the following morning. “My fever, which had only been checked by the medicines, now returned. During the physical examination that preceded final enlistment I had to stand around waiting stark naked, like a wild beast, and I sneezed constantly. The stripling of an army doctor who examined me mistook the wheezing of my bronchial tubes for a chest rattle, and then my haphazard answers concerning my medical history further confirmed him in his error. Hence I was given a blood test, the results of which, influenced by the high fever of my cold, led to a mistaken diagnosis of incipient tuberculosis. I was ordered home the same day as unfit for service.” Once beyond the barracks gates, he broke into a run down the bleak and wintry slope that descended to the village.

Mishima paid a short visit to Shizuo Itō, the poet who had helped him achieve publication of
Hanazakari no Mori
, who lived in Osaka; and that night he got on a train for Tokyo. He recorded this journey in
Confessions
: “Shrinking from the wind that blew in through a broken window glass, I suffered with fever chills and a headache. Where shall I go now? I asked myself. Thanks to my father's inherent inability to make a final decision about anything, my family still remained unevacuated from our Tokyo house. Shall I go there, to that house where everyone is cowering with suspense? To that city hemming the house in with its dark uneasiness? Into the midst of those crowds where all the people have eyes like
cattle and seem always to be wanting to ask each other: ‘Are you all right? Are you all right?' ” Mishima also reflected on his medical: “What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky . . . If such were the case, wasn't the army ideal for my purpose? Why had I looked so frank as I lied to the army doctor? Why had I said that I'd been having a slight fever for over half a year, that my shoulder was painfully stiff, that I spit blood, that even last night I had been soaked by a night sweat? . . . Why had I run so when I was through the barracks gate?”