The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (17 page)

Back in Japan in May 1952, Mishima felt that “one part of my career was coming to an end, and I was entering a new phase of my life.” The transition period lasted for a year; he had a backlog of plays, novels, and short stories to write, works which he had already planned in his mind. In the summer he published “Death in Midsummer,” a haunting (but misogynist) story about a woman whose two young children are drowned. And early in 1953 he completed a sequel to
Forbidden Colors
. In the second volume of
Forbidden Colors
—both volumes were later published as one novel—the story of Shunsuké, the aging author, and YÅ«ichi, the beautiful boy, winds to a conclusion. Shunsuké takes an overdose of drugs after giving YÅ«ichi a long and meaningless lecture. YÅ«ichi remains precisely the same person throughout this long novel: a “doll” . . . “YÅ«ichi was a doll.” Asked by his wife to be present at the birth of their first child, he witnesses the Caesarean delivery: “ ‘I must look. No matter what, I must look,' he told himself, attempting to control his nausea. ‘That system of countless, gleaming, wet red jewels; those soft things under the skin, soaked in blood . . .' ” YÅ«ichi attempts to persuade himself that the insides of his wife are “just so much pottery,” and he fails. For once, he has been moved.

In the summer of 1953, Shinchōsha, his main publishers, brought out Mishima's
Collected Works
, in six volumes. It was an honor for one so young. The publishers gave a party, to which Mishima escorted his mother; Kawabata was a guest of honor. “Young Mishima,” as he was known, looked about eighteen—a bright child whom his mother had brought along to a school prize-giving ceremony. He was recognized, however, as the ablest of the postwar writers—his collected works were published much earlier than those of his contemporaries: Kobo Abé, Yoshie Hotta, and Shōhei Ooka. His forte was style.

Edward Seidensticker, the translator of Kawabata (and of Mishima's last novel,
The Decay of the Angel
), wrote in the magazine
Pacific Community
(1971): “So decorated as sometimes to seem mannered and contrived [his language] shows a concern which the rest of the nation seemed to be abandoning for the beauties of the Japanese language. A language that lends itself generously to the uses of mannerism and decoration, it is rather
like English in its way of enriching a native essence with imported sauces and spices.” Mishima was “delighted” with the richness of Japanese vocabulary: “Of numbers of writers of Mishima's age and younger it may be said that the style is difficult . . . Only of Mishima can it be said that the subtlety and richness of vocabulary and phrase and allusion force even the fairly erudite reader to keep a reference shelf at hand.” Professor Seidensticker compared Mishima to Joyce: “He was master of a variety of styles, and was perhaps unique among his peers in being able to use the classical literary language . . . with ease, confidence and indeed elegance. In this respect he might be called Joycean.” Joyce “could be many different people, and so could Mishima.”

In 1954 Mishima's
The Sound of Waves
was published, a novel which indeed revealed a “different” person. The book was written under the influence of his visit to Greece two years before. It was a classical idyl of love, for which Mishima transported Daphnis and Chloë to the island of Uta-jima (Kamishima, in reality) and reincarnated them as a simple fisherman and a young girl who dives for abalone. The novel, which was translated by Meredith Weatherby and published by Alfred A. Knopf, begins: “Uta-jima—Song Island—has only about fourteen hundred inhabitants and a coastline of something under three miles. The island has two spots with surpassingly beautiful views. One is Yashirō Shrine, which faces northwest and stands near the crest of the island. The shrine commands an uninterrupted view of the wide expanse of the Gulf of Ise, and the island lies directly in the straits connecting the gulf with the Pacific Ocean . . . By climbing the two hundred stone steps that lead up to the shrine and looking back from the spot where there is a
torii
guarded by a pair of stone temple-dogs, you can see how these distant shores cradle within their arms the . . . Gulf of Ise, unchanged through the centuries.” The hero and heroine of the story are almost children. The boy wears the same clothes every day, “a pair of trousers inherited from his dead father, and a cheap jersey”; and the girl works on the beach wearing the cotton-padded jacket and baggy trousers of fishing folk. Jealous rivals keep the lovers apart, but the story ends happily. The morbid sexuality of
Forbidden Colors
and
Thirst for Love
is quite absent in
The Sound of Waves
.

The book was a best seller in Japan in 1954, and Shinchōsha gave Mishima a prize for the work; it was adopted by the Ministry of Education as a standard text, and made into a film by Tōhō, the production company, whose team Mishima accompanied to Kamishima for the filming on location. The critics paid little attention to the novel, however, and Mishima had doubts about the book. “Its success cooled my passion for Greece,” he said. The descriptions of nature in
The Sound of Waves
were somewhat artificial, “in the style of the Trianon” at Versailles. A common criticism of the work was that Mishima did not know the mood of rustic spots. He had difficulty, in fact, in distinguishing the most elementary forms of natural life; he could not remember the names of trees, confusing pines and cedars.

Donald Keene has described to me a journey through the countryside with Mishima in 1966 in the course of which Mishima's ignorance of country life was revealed. One evening the travelers, while resting at an inn, heard a noise from a nearby valley—a chorus of frogs in a river bed.

MISHIMA
:
What can that dreadful racket be?

KEENE
:
Oh, there are some frogs, surely?

MISHIMA
:
Ah, yes, I see.
(A dog barks.)

KEENE
:
That would probably be a dog barking, you know.
(Mishima chuckles ruefully.)

Classicism was a major influence on Mishima. Keene—in
Landscapes and Portraits
—has described the “shift of emphasis in his works to structure, theme and intellectual content, as opposed to the baroque lushness of, say,
Forbidden Colors
. His style had already shifted from the archaisms of the early period and the heavy influence of translated literature, particularly the works of Radiguet and Stendhal, in his first novels, to the leanness of style of Ōgai Mori (1862–1922). Ōgai's masculine, intellectual diction often suggests a translation from the Chinese; the favored tense is the historical present, and there is a rigorous insistence on purity of language . . . He followed Ōgai in the unhesitant use of rare characters and words when they corresponded exactly with the
desired nuance of meaning . . . The use of the Japanese language for intellectual rather than emotional expression is an aspect of his classicism.” He was nonetheless still the decadent romantic, to judge by his short story “Kagi no Kakaru Heya” (“The Room with the Locked Door,” 1954). An Ōkurashō official has a love affair with a married woman, who dies in bed; he leaves the room, locking the door behind him, and outside in the passage meets the nine-year-old daughter of the woman. The two play together for a while, and the man dreams of ripping the frail body of the little girl to shreds, to make himself a “free inhabitant of this disorderly world.”

Looking back on the early 1950's, Mishima commented, from the vantage point of the 1960's, that he “felt like destroying everything, as soon as possible.” He did not, he stated in
Watakushi no Henreki Jidai
, believe in the “classicism” for which he had had so great a passion at the age of twenty-six. “It may sound merely clever if I say so, but I exploited and used up my sensitivity entirely; I know that my sensitivity dried up.” He thought of youth and the period of youth as foolishness: at the same time he felt no attachment to age and experience. “Thus,” he wrote, “in a sudden flash, the idea of Death is born within me. This is the only truly vivid and erotic idea for me.” He had suffered, he concluded, from “an incurable romantic illness” since the day of his birth. “I, twenty-six years old, I, the classicist, I, the one closest to life—all of these ‘I's' may have been fakes.”

P
ART
T
WO
    1955–63

Man gives his seed to woman. Then commences his long, long, non-descript journey toward nihilism.

Yukio Mishima,
Han-Teijo Daigaku

(“The Book of Anti-chaste Wisdom,” 1966)

Like Etsuko, the protagonist of
Thirst for Love
, Mishima had a compulsion to love, but when he gained the attention of another person, he would take flight. A rare exception was his friendship with Utaemon, the well-known
onnagata
(the actor in the Kabuki
theater who takes the female roles). The experiences and insights he gained from this friendship are reflected in his short story “Onnagata,” published in 1957. In the story, Mangiku, a famous
onnagata
, falls in love with a young man of the contemporary theater. The development of their relationship is jealously observed by Masuyama, a member of the Kabuki theater staff. Masuyama's tribute to Mangiku begins the story (which was translated by Donald Keene and published in the collection
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
in 1966): Mangiku Sanokawa “was a true
onnagata
, a species seldom encountered nowadays. Unlike most contemporary
onnagata
, he was quite incapable of performing successfully in male roles. His stage presence was colorful, but with dark overtones; his every gesture was the essence of delicacy. Mangiku never expressed anything—not even strength, authority, endurance or courage—except through the single medium open to him, feminine expression, but through this medium he could filter every variety of human emotion. That is the way of the true
onnagata
, but in recent years this breed has become rare indeed.”

Mishima had been a visitor to Utaemon's dressing room at the Kabukiza since 1951 and knew the off-stage
onnagata
: “Mangiku faithfully maintained the injunctions of the eighteenth-century
onnagata
's manual
Ayamegusa
, ‘An
onnagata
, even in the dressing room, must preserve the attitudes of an
onnagata
. He should be careful when he eats to face away from other people, so that they cannot see him.' Whenever Mangiku was obliged to eat in the presence of visitors, not having the time to leave his dressing room, he would turn toward his table with a word of apology and race through his meal so skillfully that the visitors could not even guess from behind that he was eating.” Mangiku's body, when he had removed his costume, “was delicate but unmistakably a man's. Masuyama found it rather unnerving when Mangiku, seated at his dressing table, too scantily clad to be anything but a man, directed polite, feminine greetings toward some visitor, all the while applying a heavy coating of powder to his shoulders.” The make-believe of his daily life “supported the make-believe of his stage performances. This, Masuyama was convinced, marked the true
onnagata
. An
onnagata
is the child born of the illicit union between dream and reality.”

The world of the
onnagata
was totally different from that of women, in Mishima's experience: “Anyone pushing apart the door curtains dyed with the crest of the Sanokawa family and entering Mangiku's dressing room was certain to be struck by a strange sensation; this charming sanctuary contained not a single man. Even members of the same troupe felt inside this room that they were in the presence of the opposite sex. Whenever Masuyama went to Mangiku's dressing room on some errand, he had only to brush aside the door curtains to feel—even before setting foot inside—a curiously vivid, carnal sensation of being a male. Sometimes Masuyama had gone on company business to the dressing rooms of chorus girls backstage at revues. The rooms were filled with an almost suffocating femininity and the rough-skinned girls, sprawled about like animals in the zoo, threw bored glances at him . . .”

“Onnagata” threw light on Mishima's private life.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
(1956), regarded by some as the best of his novels, illuminated his values.
Kinkakuji
—as the book is entitled in Japanese—is the story of a young monk, Mizoguchi, who serves at the renowned Kyoto temple of Kinkakuji (the Golden Pavilion), a fifteenth-century Zen temple. The young acolyte is the son of a priest and has a chronic stutter which “placed an obstacle between me and the outside world.” He believes that the whole of Kyoto—its citizens, its 1,500 temples and shrines, and its many treasures—will be destroyed at the end of the war (he has taken up residence at Kinkakuji in the closing year of the war). As did Mishima, living in Tokyo in 1945, Mizoguchi regards this wholesale destruction as inevitable and desirable; he has no compunction about dying. The novel is a parable. Mizoguchi, unable to accept the continued existence of Kinkakuji, his ideal of beauty, burns the ancient pavilion to the ground one night; so Mishima, having created his own temple of beauty, his “Greek” body, was to destroy that temple. Mizoguchi says: “Beauty, beautiful things, those are now my most deadly enemies”; and he speaks with the voice of Mishima. The destruction of beauty is more beautiful than beauty itself.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
contains a wealth of philosophical discussion, which Mishima described in
Watakushi no
Henreki Jidai
(in a section translated by Donald Keene in
Landscapes and Portraits
): “With respect to the conversations in my novels, I believe I have already freed myself to a considerable extent from Japanese fastidiousness. Japanese writers enjoy displaying their delicate skill at revealing in an indirect manner, by means of conversations, the personalities, temperaments and outlook on life of their characters; but conversations that are unrelated to the personalities and temperaments of the characters, conversations that are read for their content alone, and, finally, long conversations that fuse into the same tempo with the descriptive passages, are the special quality of the novels of Goethe, and of the German novel in general.” Mann, he said, had inherited from Goethe “the epic flow of conversation”; and the style of
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
he characterized as “Ōgai plus Mann.”