The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (19 page)

After the wedding the couple left for Hakone in the mountains near Mt. Fuji, spending their first night at the old-fashioned Fujiya Hotel. From the hotel Mishima made phone calls to his home to
check on Shizué's condition. They continued on their honeymoon to Kyoto and then sailed through the Inland Sea to Beppu. At the end of their honeymoon Mishima and Yōko came back to Tokyo to live with his parents for a short time, until their new houses were ready. Mishima had bought land in Magome, some miles north of the airport, and decided to build two houses, one for him and Yōko, and the other for his parents next door. Shizué, it had been discovered, was no longer in danger—and had never had cancer at all.

Most Japanese homes are small and unpretentious, a mixture of Japanese and Western styles; and the Japanese do not invite friends home. In Japan there is no tradition of entertaining at home, as there is in the West. Mishima, however, decided to be thoroughly Western. He built as large a house as he could afford—he borrowed money from his publishers, Shinchōsha. It had a reception room with a high ceiling, and also had a rectangular Western garden with a lawn. In his travels in the West Indies he had been attracted by the sight of decaying colonial mansions, and the design of his house was “colonial,” with thick, white, painted walls, the antithesis of Japanese taste. It was, Mishima said, an “anti-Zen house.” But the architect had a problem: how to realize Mishima's idea of a “colonial” house on a plot of land sufficient only for a house of normal size. To make room for a garage on one side of the house, a drive, and a garden, he was compelled to cut down the size of the house; the reception room, for example, had a high ceiling level with the second floor but was nonetheless a small room.

Mishima's aim—his fundamental aim in life, it might be said—was to shock. He was determined to create an effect with his new house: unable to build on a grand scale, he fell back on unusual décor. He decorated the reception room of the new house in Victorian style; and he filled it with copies of nineteenth-century furniture. On the walls he put oil paintings with “classical” themes; and he hung the large window which faced the garden with heavy, ornate curtains. “This,” he said, “is my dream—or nightmare—of Victorian opulence.” To a Western eye the effect was a little unusual; to a Japanese eye it was grotesque. In the garden he placed
an outsize statue of Apollo on a plinth: “my despicable symbol of the rational.”

This desire to shock others was evident in the articles Mishima wrote for Japanese magazines: “Now I am a
dannasama
[a family head, a traditional term, here used ironically]. I rule my wife at home, act according to common sense, build a house, am fairly cheerful, love speaking ill of others, rejoice when people remark on my youthful appearance, pursue the latest fashions and favor all manner of things in bad taste. I say nothing serious . . . and do my utmost to live to the age of Methuselah.” (He wrote this article in response to criticism by his architect, Hayao Hokonohara, who had condemned Mishima's taste as “ghastly.”)

Statements by Mishima about his family were, however, rare. He divided his life into distinct compartments: his family life, and his public career. He had something of the Confucian within him, for all his exhibitionism; in certain circumstances, he regarded his duty to his family as his prime consideration. Photographers who came to his home were not allowed to take pictures of Yōko; nor, later, when the Mishimas had children, could they film them. Mishima's parents were also kept out of the glare of publicity. Mishima the public figure was Mishima the novelist, playwright, and exhibitionist; he was never Mishima the son, husband, and father. The separation between public and private life was complete; he never used any other name than Mishima. Very few members of the public knew him as Kimitaké Hiraoka; nor did I know his real name until after his death.

At home to reporters Mishima assumed a pose of insouciance: “My ideal is to live in a house where I sit on a rococo chair wearing an aloha shirt and blue jeans.” He was, however, a relentless self-disciplinarian. Early in 1959, six months after his marriage, he embarked on a heroic program of physical exercise. On Mondays and Fridays he trained at kendo, and on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays he did body building. He also kept up his writing, working every night until dawn and sleeping in the morning. He commented gloomily that his aim sometimes was a day divided into sleep, work, and physical exercise, twenty-four hours of “solitude and leisure.” People would think that he was always busy,
and there would be “no more personal associations.” But this was only Mishima in a certain mood.

His longing to shock others was apparent in his writing as well as in his daily life. “He would never write two novels in the same style,” Keene says. “He would always try to find something new, to surprise his readers.” The book which he wrote shortly after his marriage,
Kyōko no Ie
(“Kyōko's House”), reflected this urge; it was his “study of nihilism.” “The characters run about in one direction or another as their personalities, their professions and their sexual tendencies command them, but in the end all roads, no matter how roundabout, flow back into nihilism”
(Landscapes and Portraits)
. In this novel, Mishima represented himself by four “I's”: “When I am developing a single character in one of my novels, I sometimes feel him quite close to my own thinking, but at other times I drive the same character away from myself and let him wander into independent action. The attitudes of the hero change convulsively, as the course of composition dictates. In
Kyōko no Ie
, in order to resolve this contradiction which has always appeared in my novels (and was most extreme in
Forbidden Colors
), I have avoided having a single hero, but have represented various aspects of myself through four different heroes.”

The four heroes are:

Shunkichi, a boxer. His principle is “to think about nothing.” Through “disorderly” and “free” anarchism he hopes to destroy the social order of postwar Japan. He believes in “might,” which he associates with beauty and with death—not with justice and order. He envies his older brother, who died in the war; his brother had sped through life “without fear of boredom and without thinking at all.” Shunkichi lives in a hateful epoch of “normality,” and in such an era he cannot maintain his “purity.” Believing in “might,” he sets about making himself a boxing champion. However, his career ends after a beating by some thugs, who break his fingers. Shunkichi believes that his future will be boring and insignificant; he joins a Uyoku (rightist) group, “to oppose the future.” In such a group he is “close to death, even in this age of normality.” Shunkichi meets his death in a street brawl.

Osamu, a narcissistic actor, who practices body building. Osamu is racked with anxiety: “Do I really exist or not?” He is constantly
peering at himself in a mirror. He has a mistress, an elderly usurer, who has bought Osamu's services. The woman loves Osamu, and expresses her love by torturing him. The handsome actor wonders whether the shedding of his blood will prove his existence. He desires to perform in “a complete drama.” He and his mistress commit a bloody shinju (double love suicide).

Natsuo, a traditional Japanese painter. He believes that he is an angel, whose pure and gentle existence is protected by a special deity. He has no troubles in life. However, on a trip to Mt. Fuji he has a vision of the destruction of the world. He reflects on his situation; he is well known and successful, but he is the subject of jealous gossip among his contemporaries. He suggests to his friends that one should kill himself while one's body is still beautiful. Natsuo is captured by a strange world of “reality” and “nihilism.” In the end he has an existential experience: “what I see and I that see belong to one world.” He is saved.

Seiichirō, a capable businessman. He is a
shōshain
, a trading-company executive. The world, he considers, is doomed; total destruction is inevitable. He is outwardly cheerful and competent, however, and he is successful at work. His motto is to play the role of “somebody else” and to lead a “conventional life.” He marries the daughter of a senior director. His company later sends him to New York, where he continues as before. Seiichirō suffers from “an incurable illness”—health.

Kyōko no Ie
revealed more about Mishima than any other work of his in the 1950's. Each of the four heroes of the novel suggests aspects of the author's character which had been largely hidden, and which were to emerge clearly in the 1960's. His right-wing inclination, exemplified in the character of the boxer Shunkichi, became conspicuous after 1965. His notion that one must commit suicide while one still has a beautiful, muscular body was another idea that emerged in Mishima's life in the late 1960's. The same may be said of Osamu's desire to prove his existence by shedding his blood, and his wish to perform in “a complete drama.” The most interesting feature of
Kyōko no Ie
, however, is the conviction of three of the four heroes that the destruction of the world is inevitable; Mishima's nihilism bore a close resemblance to that of the Roman-ha. A literary critic, Jun Etō, pointed out in an essay
published in
The Journal of Asian Studies
that Mishima was “the only possible spokesman for the lost Roman-ha cause.
Expectation of the world's destruction
, the theme that has appeared almost obsessively in his postwar works, is one of the most typical ideas of the Roman-ha group. This theme is clearly recognized in his novels,
Bitoku no Yoromeki
[“Tottering Virtue,” 1957],
Kyōko no Ie
, and
Utsukushii Hoshi
[“Beautiful Star,” 1962].”

But the novel failed with the public—it was Mishima's first major critical failure as well. He wrote: “The painter represents sensitivity, the boxer action, the actor self-awareness, and the businessman knowing how to get along with the world. It is naturally to be expected that the personalities of these characters will become abstract and purified. I have for the time being given up any attempt to create characters as single, coordinated, organic entities”
(Landscapes and Portraits)
. Perhaps it was this intellectual attitude that undermined his “study of nihilism”—without character, what could he do? Mishima may have reflected thus, for his next book,
After the Banquet
, was a triumph of characterization.

Mishima once remarked: “All my works can be divided into two categories,
pièces roses
and
pièces noires
, as Anouilh used those terms.”
After the Banquet
was the best of his
pièces roses
. Kazu, the proprietress of a fashionable Japanese-style restaurant in Tokyo, the Setsugoan (in real life, the Hannya-en), is the protagonist of the novel, which satirizes political life and the mores of the upper class. Kazu, Angus Wilson has remarked, “is a woman of Balzacian dimensions and Flaubertian truth.” Mishima described her thus (in the translation by Donald Keene, published by Alfred A. Knopf): “A streak of rustic simplicity in Kazu's plump, attractive figure, always bursting with energy and enthusiasm, made people with complicated motives who came before her feel ashamed of their complexity. People with drooping spirits, when they saw Kazu, were either considerably heartened or else completely overpowered. Some curious blessing of heaven had joined in one body a man's resolution with a woman's reckless enthusiasm. This combination carried Kazu to heights no man could reach.”

Mishima described her taking a stroll in the garden of her restaurant: “This morning stroll was the poem of Kazu's security. She was over fifty, but no one seeing this carefully groomed woman,
whose complexion and sparkling eyes had lost none of their loveliness, as she sauntered through the huge garden could help but be struck and moved to romantic conjectures. But, as Kazu herself realized better than anyone, for her romantic stories were a thing of the past, her poem was dead.” Her conviction is disproved. She falls in love with a politician, Noguchi, and they get married. Noguchi stands for election to the governorship of Tokyo, and Kazu throws all her energy, and finally all her money, into the campaign. Noguchi, a liberal candidate, loses the election, however, as the conservatives have far more cash than he. Mishima knew a great deal about the functioning of party machines in Tokyo and here he describes party politics to perfection. His knowledge of the nuances of behavior in upper-class society is also evident in
After the Banquet
. After the elections, Kazu runs into a woman she dislikes, Mrs. Tamaki, the widow of a diplomat. The two women meet by chance in a fruit shop, where Kazu discovers Mrs. Tamaki rummaging in a bin of Sunkist oranges:

“Mrs. Tamaki, after much deliberation, selected three oranges. ‘Even oranges have become expensive these days. And just think, in America they practically give them away!' Mrs. Tamaki, as part of her brave display of inverse snobbery, deliberately ordered the salesgirl to wrap just three oranges . . .

“ ‘My husband liked oranges,' Mrs. Tamaki went on. ‘Sometimes I offer them at the family altar. That's why I bought them today . . . You know, it suddenly occurred to me that my husband, without realizing it, of course, played the part of cupid for you and Mr. Noguchi.' ” (By falling ill in Kazu's restaurant, Tamaki had by chance brought together Kazu and Noguchi.)

“ ‘In that case I suppose I'll have to offer him some oranges myself.'

“ ‘I didn't mean it that way.'

“Kazu did not herself understand why she was behaving so rudely. On a sudden impulse she motioned to the salesgirl with the sandalwood fan she had been using, and ordered her to make up a gift box of two dozen oranges.” (Presents must be neither too large nor too small, in Japan. By flouting this convention, knowing that Mrs. Tamaki will not have the courage to refuse the offer of the gift, Kazu crushes her enemy.)