The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (14 page)

But Noda was disappointed in Mishima's next manuscripts. The young man had brought him “Misaki nite no Monogatari,” the story he had written at the Koza naval dockyard just before the surrender. “It was merely a clever professional work. I told Mishima this and he answered that he had much confidence in the
story. I asked, then, if he wanted to be an original novelist or a well-known popular writer, and he replied categorically that it would be the latter.” The literary editor expressed his disappointment and Mishima then began to look for another sponsor. He wanted to break though quickly into the postwar literary world, and he needed the help of an older man with an established reputation as a writer. By himself he would not be able to attain his ambition immediately. From Noda, Mishima obtained an introduction to Yasunari Kawabata, one of the foremost writers in Japan.

Noda remembered: “After his work had appeared in
Bungei
 . . . he came to see me only once. That was when he wanted my introduction to Kawabata.” Mishima had a way of dropping people who were no longer useful to him, and in Noda he made an enemy. “After the war he became a popular novelist, just as he had hoped he would do, but the fresh, serious young Mishima vanished. I felt that Mishima lived only in his pen name and not as Kimitaké Hiraoka. That pen name became a narcissistic shadow of the real man, something like Hong Kong flowers.” “Hong Kong flowers” were the cheap plastic flowers which used to flood into Japan, much as Japanese goods flooded America, and were regarded as imitations—as “shadows” of the real thing.

4

Kawabata's Protégé

Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize (in 1968), was forty-six when he first met the young Mishima. Born in 1899, Kawabata had first wanted to become a painter and then had established his reputation in Japan in the nineteen-twenties as a young writer with a classical background and modern tastes. He was one of the handful of eminent literati who came through the Pacific War with their names unblemished by association with the militarists. A man of independent means, married and living at Kamakura, where he did his writing—he is best known in the West for his novels
Snow Country
and
A Thousand Cranes
—Kawabata
was generous by nature and was disposed to help young writers whose work he liked. When Mishima, an almost unknown law student, brought him some manuscripts during the New Year holiday in 1946, he liked a short story about homosexual relationships at the GakushÅ«in well enough to recommend it to a magazine editor. “Tabako” (“Tobacco”) was published in
Ningen
magazine that summer, introducing the young Mishima to the postwar literary world.

Mishima was overjoyed by Kawabata's decision to sponsor him, and rightly so. In the inbred world of the Japanese Bundan, as the literary establishment is called, a young writer needed the backing of an older man, and no one could have been better suited for this role than Kawabata, who instinctively understood the formal, sensitive Mishima. But the young man's dreams of becoming famous overnight were not fulfilled. The publication of “Tabako” caused no sensation. The lack of reaction, even among the other writers he knew, gravely disappointed him, and he decided that his father was right and that he should not concentrate on a literary career.

He made plans to sit for the civil-service examination, the Kobun, and to start his working life as a government official. Obviously a writer had to be better known in the Bundan before he could hope for any real success. But, while he pursued his studies, he also tried to further his literary associations. He continued to meet with Kawabata, and the older writer made him a member of the Kamakura Bunko, an exclusive lending library Kawabata had founded with his literary friends. He also tried to meet as many of the other established writers as he could, with the aim of shifting eventually from government service to a literary career.

One of the writers he met in the early postwar years was Osamu Dazai, and his single encounter with this famous romantic writer made a deep impression. The meeting took place in 1947 when a friend of Mishima's, another young man with literary aspirations, who knew Dazai and his circle personally, took him along one evening to meet the writer at a party in the Ginza. Dazai, who was only thirty-eight, was at that time the most popular novelist with the younger generation in Japan. In his best-selling novel
The Setting Sun
he portrayed a mood of hopelessness they identified
with, and this reflected a quality in his work as a whole, for it was often dark and depressing, and had something in common with Mishima's own writing.

Mishima, however, was unnerved by the similarities between Dazai and himself, which were at that time personal, and not obviously literary. Both men were snobs; both desired to create a sensation and be heroes of the general public; and both were obsessed with suicide. Mishima, in advance of his meeting with Dazai, made up his mind to be aggressive, to be a “literary assassin,” as he once said. When he and his friend joined them, Dazai and his group of admirers were sitting in an upstairs room in their Ginza restaurant. It was a squalid room, with dirty tatami (rice-straw mats), just the kind of place Mishima disliked, and the company was drinking low-quality saké, the only alcohol that could be obtained in Japan then, unless one bought imported liquor at black-market prices. Mishima did not drink in those days; and he sat a little apart from Dazai and his disciples, listening tensely to their conversation—waiting for an opportunity to pounce. When there was a brief silence, Mishima broke in. “Mr. Dazai,” he said, “I hate your work.” The novelist, as Mishima told it, paused for a moment before replying, seemingly surprised (not unnaturally). Then he remarked to those sitting close by: “I know he loves me, though; otherwise, he wouldn't have come here.” The remark stung Mishima, presumably because it had an element of truth; and he remembered the taunt for the rest of his life. He would often tell his “Dazai story”; twenty years later he was still obsessed with the memory of the remark: “I know he loves me, though . . .” Dazai was one of the very few men who “put down” Mishima, and he never had an opportunity to retaliate, as Dazai committed suicide in 1948; he drowned himself in a river in Tokyo with his mistress.

It is interesting to contrast Mishima's relationship with Dazai and with Kawabata. He met Dazai only once and had a very strong reaction to him; the long-haired, pale-faced writer could have been close to Mishima had he lived: even his suicide seems to stress an element they had in common. Mishima's friendship with Kawabata, though it lasted for almost twenty-five years, was far less intense. Mishima kept his distance from everyone and made no exception for Kawabata; they had, in a sense, a literary alliance, based on
mutual understanding and appreciation rather than friendship. Kawabata was much less tense than Mishima—or Dazai—and seemed unlikely ever to contemplate suicide (in fact, he gassed himself eighteen months after Mishima's death).

Although his interest was in literature, Mishima read his law books with a wholehearted concentration typical of him. He studied hard, displaying stoic virtue. In the spring of 1947, “the time for preparing for the civil service examination was at hand and I had to devote all my energies to dry-as-dust study.” Mishima described in
Confessions of a Mask
how “spring came and a frantic nervousness built up behind my façade of tranquillity.” At odd moments he would go out for a walk to exercise his body a little, and “often I became aware that people were looking questioningly at my bloodshot eyes.” He was exceedingly self-conscious.

He wrote at length in
Confessions of a Mask
of an abortive love affair with a girl named Sonoko, but Sonoko was a composite character drawn from the experiences of Mishima's friends and several young women in upper-middle-class families he knew. The young law student occasionally went to a party, but found it impossible to relax with other young people. Going home alone—he was still living with his parents, who had returned to their house in Tokyo immediately after the war—he would play at mental self-torture: “You're not human. You're a being who is incapable of social intercourse. You're nothing but a creature, non-human and somehow strangely pathetic.” Was he also incapable of sexual love? It is almost certain that he had no real relationship with a woman until at least his early thirties. His Japanese biographer, Takeo Okuno, speaks of having received a call late one night, at about 2 a.m., in which Mishima enthusiastically reported that he had slept with a girl (this was 1957, many years later). He was homosexual, as is clear from
Confessions of a Mask
. Yet he certainly attempted to have relationships with women as well as men, in the early postwar years; he even made marriage proposals, at least twice. But he was an uncertain prospect, not least because of his closeness to his mother, to judge by the comments that one of the women to whom he proposed made to me: “I couldn't see myself marrying him, because he was too close to his mother. She was very nice to me and there was nothing wrong, but I feared that I
would come between mother and son if we were married. Besides, I wasn't sure that I felt a passion for him.”

Mishima took his Kobun examination in the autumn of 1947 and was accepted by the Ministry of Finance, much to his father's delight (this ministry is the power center of the Japanese bureaucracy). He worked hard in the Banking Bureau of the ministry during the day and then would sit up half the night writing short stories. He was beginning to get more of his work published. A colleague remembers him as “a stylish official who tried his utmost to combine literary work with his labors in the office.” In the ministry he had a reputation for literary knowledge, joined the group which edited the ministry magazine,
Zaisei
, and gave lectures to his colleagues on classical literature. “Once,” according to his fellow civil servant, Minoru Nagaoka, “he made a speech to junior officials on the subject of ‘Women in the Literature of the Heain Period.' ” Mishima was naturally gifted as a bureaucrat and could have risen to the top of the ministry had he chosen. He had powers of organization of a rare order and was an amusing colleague who attracted attention. “He wrote a witty speech for the Minister, and his
kacho
[section chief] had to cut out a great deal of it, as it was far too funny for the Ministry of Finance.” But Mishima did not fancy a career in government. He continued to devote himself to short-story work at home, often staying up until 2 a.m. or later, to fulfill the growing stream of requests from magazine editors. A writer establishes himself in Japan by writing short stories and then goes on to novels or plays. Mishima's output was formidable, as one may see from this representative list of his publications during 1948, up to September:

Mishima was now doing well enough as a writer to resign from the ministry. Azusa was enraged by his decision, but he no longer had the power to control his son. Mishima was earning a good income from his writing and could certainly support himself for several years, especially as he was saving money living with his parents. Shizué naturally took Mishima's side in the family quarrel over his resignation, and Azusa was no match for mother and son, so gave in with a typical remark: “All right, if you absolutely insist, you may go ahead and leave the ministry. But you'd better make yourself the best writer in the land, do you hear?”

Mishima was often melancholy. He wrote in his diary: “What does it matter to me if A-bombs rain down on us again? All I desire is beauty.” When he embarked on
Confessions of a Mask
, on November 25, 1948, his intention was to analyze his “aesthetic nihilism”; also, to purge himself of a “monster” within. Twenty-two years later, to the day, he committed suicide.

Almost half of
Confessions of a Mask
is taken up with a description of the relationship between the narrator and the young girl Sonoko, whom I have mentioned. These Sonoko scenes are not reliable as autobiography, but they are nevertheless revealing. At one point the narrator goes to his mother—just before the end of the war—and asks whether he should marry Sonoko, for the girl has concluded from his fumbling approaches that he has matrimony in mind. It seems somehow natural that the narrator of
Confessions
,
when faced with this decision, should consult his mother and accept her verdict (which is
not
to marry). The scene is greatly in character with what one knows of Mishima himself; he depended on his mother for protection.

Probably the most well-known scene in the book is the encounter between Sonoko and the narrator, with which
Confessions of a Mask
ends. It is a sweltering summer day in Tokyo and the pair have entered a cheap dance hall to while away time. The narrator sees a group of yakuza, of gangsters, who are seated close by, and he is hypnotized by the sight of a young man among them. “He was a youth of twenty-one or -two, with coarse but regular and swarthy features. He had taken off his shirt and stood there half naked, rewinding a bellyband about his middle . . . The hot mass of his smooth torso was being severely and tightly imprisoned by each succeeding turn of the soiled cotton bellyband. His bare, suntanned shoulders gleamed as though covered with oil. And black tufts stuck out from the cracks of his armpits . . .” At this point, “above all at the sight of the peony tattooed on his hard chest,” the narrator is beset by sexual desire. He forgets Sonoko's existence: “I was thinking of but one thing: of his going out onto the streets of high summer just as he was, half-naked, and getting into a fight with a rival gang. Of a sharp dagger cutting through that bellyband, piercing that torso. Of that soiled bellyband beautifully dyed with blood . . .” The book closes on a note characteristic of Mishima's writing: “It was time [to leave] . . . The group [of thugs] had apparently gone to dance, and the chairs stood empty in the blazing sunshine. Some sort of beverage had been spilled on the table top and was throwing back glittering, threatening reflections.”