The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (21 page)

Curiously, he was subject at this time to extraordinary threats
of violence. They were issued by Uyoku (rightist) extremists, who warned him that they would burn down his house and kill him because he had supported a fellow writer who had published a short story describing a dream in which leftists attacked the Imperial family. For two months Mishima had a bodyguard. During this time—early 1961—there were threats against other literary figures; and an attack was made on the house of Mr. Shimanaka of
Chūō Kōron
, publisher of the magazine which had carried the story offensive to the Uyoku. A maid was killed in the attack, and Mrs. Shimanaka was injured. Mishima himself was not assaulted, however.

Suicide, it is clear from Mishima's writing, had been a theoretical option for him for many years. It was still no more than that; he was fairly young and had many literary projects in mind—particularly in the theater—and he also had a family. Mishima's second child, his son Ichirō, was born in 1961. (Like many Japanese parents, the Mishimas would seem to have decided to have no more children.)

What was the nature of his relationship with Yōko? She is still alive, of course; this is one subject on which I cannot write without inhibition. The evidence, however, is that Mishima treated Yōko with a consideration that far exceeded the kindness shown to their wives by most Japanese husbands of his generation. For example, he took Yōko with him on his foreign travels. She had never been abroad, and when Mishima embarked on a long journey around the world in late 1960, she accompanied him. They were in New York, where they saw the première of Mishima's modern No plays, in an Off-Broadway production. And from America they went on to Europe, where Mishima met publishers. One of the results of his visit was a French translation of
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
, brought out by Gallimard. The Mishimas went to Greece, to Egypt, where they saw the pyramids, and then returned to Japan via Hong Kong. It must have been a refreshing experience for Yōko to travel freely about the world like this in the company of her husband, leaving the little girl in Tokyo in the care of her family. Life in Tokyo, certainly, was not easy for Yōko; she was very young, just twenty-four on their return from abroad in 1961; but her days were full. She had the house to care for—and Mishima had become
very social, giving dinner parties for diplomats, for foreign friends, and for Japanese friends from well-known families. His standards were high and he expected the dinner parties—for which he issued invitations on printed, embossed cards in English—to run smoothly. Yōko also had her child to care for. And in addition she was a kind of secretary to Mishima, taking phone calls, running errands, going out on combined shopping and secretarial missions in the family car (only Yōko drove; Mishima qualified for a license in 1962 but never took up driving a car). Her life was a busy one.

Things were not made easier by her mother-in-law. Shizué as a daughter-in-law had suffered greatly at the hands of Natsuko; and having experienced such treatment, she was able to dispense not a little herself. Shizué was jealous of Yōko. Yōko's response was to adopt a policy of not complaining, at a fairly early stage in her married life. She would be criticized at the slightest opportunity and would not complain; she would do her best. She is a most competent person and her best was more than adequate by her husband's standards. The house ran smoothly, he could concentrate on his work undisturbed, and his one absolute requirement—that his daily program of appointments and physical training in the afternoon, dinner in the evening, and writing at night not be interfered with—was met. Yōko Mishima must be a remarkable person to have been able to live for so many years so close to a man of Mishima's energy, yet show no signs of strain at all. I feel all the more admiration for her, in that there can be no gainsaying Mishima's dark, romantic pessimism, epitomized by his statement: “Man gives his seed to woman. Then commences his long, long nondescript journey toward nihilism.”

I do not believe that marriage put Mishima under great strain. His literary career, however, was another matter. His books did not sell well in the early 1960's. He continued to write an enormous amount; some of it was trash, intended purely for the commercial market, the women's slush magazines—I am not concerned with that. He also wrote a succession of serious novels:
Utsukushii Hoshi
(“Beautiful Star,” 1962),
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
(1963), and
Kinu to Meisatsu
(“Silk and Insight,” 1964). John Nathan, who has made a study of this period in Mishima's work, and who translated the second of these novels, has remarked: “His
books were selling only 20,000 or 30,000 copies in some cases, as compared with 200,000 copies or so in the 1950's. At one point he even felt obliged to go to his publishers to make a formal apology.” As Mishima's reputation in the West was soaring, he was actually losing ground in Japan, not only in terms of sales but in critical reputation. It is ironical that, while he was regarded overseas as a future Nobel Prize winner, he was being outsold ten times over by many Japanese novelists whom the West has still not heard of. Any novelist, Mishima not excluded, must have lean years; but he did not see it this way. He was deeply concerned; otherwise, I cannot imagine anyone with his pride going cap in hand to his publisher to apologize. But one does not have to look this far for evidence of his uncertainty. The tone of his pronouncements over the years became increasingly pessimistic; Mishima, as always, was his own best guide to himself. In an article written for
Fukei
magazine in 1962, he remarked: “Within two or three years I shall be forty-five years old and will have to make a plan for the rest of my life. I feel better when I think that I have lived longer than RyÅ«nosuke Akutagawa, but then I'll have to make a great effort to live as long as possible. The average life for men in the Bronze Age was eighteen, and in the Roman era twenty-two. Heaven must then have been filled with beautiful youths. Recently, it must look dreadful. When a man reaches the age of forty, he has no chance to die beautifully. No matter how he tries, he will die in an ugly way. He has to force himself to live.”

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, to whom Mishima refers in this article, was the most brilliant of the many Japanese writers who have committed suicide in modern times. The high incidence of suicide among writers may be attributed in part to the extraordinary tension and stress of life in modern Japan. A nation cannot evolve from feudalism to an ultra-modern way of life in the short space of time granted to the Japanese and not place great stresses on individuals—not least on writers. The well-known novelists who have taken their lives in the twentieth century are Bizan Kawakami (1908), Takeo Arishima (1923), Akutagawa (1927), Shinichi Makino (1936), Osamu Dazai (1948), Tamiki Hara (1951), Michio Katō (1953), Sakae Kubo (1958), and Ashihei Hino (1960).

By the mid-1960's, Mishima was already toying with the idea
of adding his name to this doleful list. His obsession was “to make a plan for the rest of my life”; and certain developments—his difficulty with his literary career, among them—were pushing him along the path to suicide.

P
ART
T
HREE
1964–70

Among my incurable convictions is the belief that the old are eternally ugly, the young eternally beautiful. The wisdom of the old is eternally murky, the actions of the young eternally transparent. The longer people live, the worse they become. Human life, in other words, is an upside-down process of decline and fall.

Yukio Mishima, Postscript to the Ni Ni Roku Incident trilogy

Mishima did not find his “plan for life” for some time. In the summer of 1964 he made a ten-day visit to New York, the purpose of which was described by Faubion Bowers in an article published in
The Village Voice
(December 3, 1970): “One night Mishima flew over to America just for sex. He came up and had dinner with me and described quite bluntly what he wanted and asked could I steer him to the right place. I should have been the hospitable host and taken him on a tour of the gay bars downtown, but I didn't, and didn't want to, and really didn't feel qualified. Maybe I was flat broke or something of the sort. At any rate I took him around the neighborhood, introduced him to anyone we ran into, straight, gay, or in-between. But it was one of those nights. Nothing happened. Nobody around here was interested in ‘Japan's greatest novelist.' Even his meticulously expensive suit and tie didn't impress anyone. Finally, I put him in a taxi and I felt both stupid and remiss that I hadn't helped a friend in need. His need for a white man that night was very great, and his specifications were detailed. Afterward, it flashed into my mind that Mishima was impotent.” (As other friends of Mishima's pointed out in a letter to
The Village Voice
, published two weeks later, Bowers's article contained many errors. Yet Mishima may have been impotent.)

New York certainly evoked odd moods in Mishima. In pictures
taken of him during his stay in the summer of 1964 he looks particularly old and ill at ease. Usually he seemed about a decade younger than his real age, and in these photographs he seemed older than he was. His face is lined and haggard. It may have been the jet lag—the journey by air from Tokyo to New York is a long one; but I think that New York distressed Mishima and left him feeling unusually tense. In his article “Touching New York with Both Hands” (
Mainichi Shimbun
, January 1966), he described his reaction to the city: “In New York there is no direct contact between man and man or man and object. This huge city has lost its instinctive life and turned into a colossal machine. New York is further and further away from being able to be ‘touched' by man. I like such a place, though. People there gather together and part. And one cannot be sure that someone who appears on TV actually listens to what he says. You can touch New York with your hands if you visit the gym I used off Times Square . . . This was a big-city gymnasium. The worlds of body building are much the same in Tokyo and in New York. People cracked jokes in Brooklyn accents and were most friendly.” There is something pathetic about his discovery that he felt at home only in the gym. As someone who met him in New York remarked to me: “He couldn't get on with foreigners really, or he was confused by Americans.” It is well known that Mishima felt that American writers whom he had entertained royally in Japan (Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams) did not reciprocate properly when he visited
their
city.

He had a huge number of friends and acquaintances in America, especially in New York. Among them were scholars whom he had met in Japan and who had translated his works; for example, the leading academics in the field of Japanese literature, Donald Keene and Ivan Morris (for whom he was to leave letters at his death). He also knew a great many people in the arts and in literature in America. His difficulty was that he was very well known in Japan and sure of attention, but not overseas. Mishima liked to be the center of the stage, and his inability to dominate social gatherings outside his homeland troubled him. He would be invited to parties in New York but he would not be the focus of all eyes. In Japan, where he was sure of himself, he developed close friendships with many foreigners. Meredith Weatherby, the American
publisher, was a friend of Mishima's for more than twenty years in Tokyo; and he regularly associated with a number of other foreign residents of the city. Abroad, however, the streak of chauvinism that colors his writing—in many of his books foreigners are described as gaudy, strange creatures, and the male foreign characters are often weak-minded homosexuals—gained the upper hand at times; he would return to Japan with very mixed impressions of life in the West.

Back in Japan he had many diversions. In the autumn of 1964 he immersed himself in the task of reporting the Tokyo Olympic Games for the Japanese press and wrote enthusiastic articles about sports “from my own experience.” He donned a blazer, put on a press armband, and watched the many events of the Olympics with childlike enthusiasm. He described in his articles how he trained at sports and at body building, “so that today I can move the muscles of my chest in time to music.”

Later that year he edited the
Collected Works
of Shintarō Ishihara, a younger and more glamorous novelist friend whose first work,
Taiyō no Kisetsu
(“Season of the Sun,” 1955)—a “shocking” après-guerre novel—had made him famous at the age of twenty-three. Mishima admired Ishihara's talent and was at the same time envious of this polished, sophisticated, handsome person, whom he was to criticize harshly toward the end of his life, as a political opportunist. (Ishihara later went into politics, winning a seat in the Upper House as a Liberal Democratic Party member, after gaining the largest number of votes ever won by a candidate for parliament.)

Early in 1965 Mishima accepted an invitation from the British Council to visit England. It was his only long stay in England, and he did not find a great deal to please him—although he liked the Brighton Pavilion. Among those he met were Margot Fonteyn, Edna O'Brien, Ivan Morris, Angus Wilson, and Peter Owen. He wrote: “I was glad to find Dr. and Mrs. Morris in London . . . The soft side of Japanese culture has been introduced to the British public by the late Arthur Waley and now by Dr. Morris, mainly for the benefit of upper-class intellectuals; and the tough side of Japanese culture has been shown to mass audiences in films in which Toshirō Mifune plays the hero . . . During a walk on the
bank of the Thames I was given the interesting information that all swans belong to the Queen.”

On his return to Japan, Mishima was caustic about the quality of the reception he had been accorded in England. The British Council, he complained, had put him up in second-rate hotels. He also complained that the British were mean, citing the example of a Scottish publisher whom he traveled to Edinburgh to meet and who had “poured himself a glass of whisky without offering me a drop.” Paris, where he was received by literary members of the Rothschild family—Philippe and Pauline de Rothschild, to whom he dedicated a collection of translated short stories,
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
—had been more to his taste.