The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (22 page)

In Tokyo he and Yōko busied themselves with alterations to their house in Magome; they added a top floor which gave both husband and wife comfortable sitting rooms where each could receive friends privately. The workmen were in the house for three months, during which time the Mishimas and their two children lived in the Hotel New Japan. Mishima amused himself by designing book covers; he had always been interested in the covers of his books, especially in the
genteibon
, the luxury-edition, covers. He designed two covers with the help of experts, one for
St. Sebastian no Junkyō
(“The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian”), a translation of the work by Gabriele D'Annunzio, which Mishima had supervised, and one for
Kurotokage
(“Black Lizard”), a play. For the latter he chose a design which incorporated frontal views of male nudes. Early in 1965 Mishima published one of his strangest short stories, “Kujaku” (“Peacocks”), the story of a man who beats a flock of peacocks to death. He also filmed his short story “Patriotism,” acting as producer, director, and chief star—he played the part of the army lieutenant who commits hara-kiri. In his customary whirl of activity, Mishima found time to produce one of his short “modern No plays,”
Yuya
, in which his friend Utaemon took the lead.

In the summer of 1965 Mishima implemented one of the major decisions of his literary career—to begin a long novel, in four volumes, a work which he expected would take him about six years, into the early 1970's. The novel would cover a span of sixty years in modern Japan, beginning in the early Taisho period, about 1912. Each volume would have a protagonist who would be a reincarnation
of the hero of the previous book, starting with Kiyoaki, a peerlessly handsome boy from an aristocratic family. Kiyoaki would be the main character of the first volume, and his closest friend would be Honda, a fellow student at the Gakushūin school. Only one character, Honda, the friend of the protagonists of all four books, would know the secret of their reincarnations. A physical feature common to all four would be three moles under the left arm; by these moles Honda would recognize the reincarnations. The lives of Honda's four friends would also be linked by dreams. Through chance remarks and diary entries Honda would be informed of the dreams and would gain additional clues to the future existences of Kiyoaki. The protagonists of the first three books would die young, at the age of twenty.

For the design of his new, long novel Mishima drew on a Heian romance of the eleventh century, the
Hamamatsu Chunagon Monogatari
(“The Tale of Hamamatsu”), a not very well-known work in which the Buddhist idea of reincarnation appears and in which there are prophetic dreams. As a religious background to the novel, Mishima used the teaching of the small Buddhist sect known as Hosso, whose
yūishiki ron
, or theory of consciousness only, affirms that all experience is subjective and that existence cannot be verified. Mishima gave a twist of his own to the teaching of this ancient Buddhist sect, which came to Japan in the seventh century and lost most of its hold in the country in the succeeding five hundred years. As only consciousness existed, there was no telling reality from illusion. This was a favorite theme of Mishima's, as he explained in the speech he gave at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo in 1966, which I quoted in the prologue and from which I repeat the last two sentences: “It might be our . . . my basic subject and my basic romantic idea of literature. It is death memory . . . and the problem of illusion.”

Mishima, most of whose novels appeared in installments in magazines before they were issued in book form, gave the first part of the first volume
(Spring Snow)
of his long novel to
Shinchō
magazine in the late summer of 1965. In the early autumn, following reports from Stockholm that he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize that year, he set off on a world trip with Yōko, traveling to Cambodia, where he visited Angkor Wat—he was to write a play
about the temple of Bayon at Angkor—and thereafter on to Western Europe. Following the death of the elderly novelist Junichiro Tanizaki in June 1965, Mishima was considered the leading Japanese contender for the Nobel Prize, and agency dispatches stated that he was among about ninety candidates for the prize. He regarded himself, rightly, as an outsider—the winner in 1965 was to be the Russian, Sholokhov—as he was still comparatively young (forty). But he had faith that he would eventually win the prize and wanted to gauge how soon he would have a serious chance. He made delicate inquiries at Japanese embassies in Europe, to find out if anyone had an inkling when the Swedish Academy would eventually turn to Japan. His conclusion was that it could not be many years before the Nobel Prize for Literature would go to a Japanese for the first time. Unwisely, he shared this information with friends in Japan and he was repeatedly mentioned in the press thereafter as a candidate. Mishima's concern was in part an indication of his excessive self-regard; but it was also a reflection of the extraordinary interest taken by the Japanese in international distinctions, particularly the Nobel Prize.

Returning to Japan, he made a journey to the nunnery of Enshoji, close to Nara. He had decided to use this small, isolated nunnery in a later section of
Spring Snow
. Enshoji was a Rinzai Zen temple, but he converted it, in the book, to Hosso and gave it a different name, Gesshuji. In the autumn of the following year, 1966, Mishima completed
Spring Snow
. It is a love story whose heroine, Satoko, exemplifies what he called
tawoyameburi
, “ ‘the way of the graceful young maiden,' an archaic term referring to the traditional beauty and charm of the Japanese girl,” according to Donald Keene. Satoko and Kiyoaki, her lover, are the children of aristocratic, powerful families in Tokyo; their passion is inflamed after the betrothal of Satoko to a member of the Imperial family (some Japanese saw in this tale an evocation of Mishima's relationship with Michiko Shōda before her marriage to the Crown Prince, a romantic but slightly far-fetched idea). Satoko is the daughter of a very old family with a long tradition of service at court; Kiyoaki has also been brought up in this tradition, having been sent to the household of the Ayakuras, Satoko's parents, by a proud father who wishes his only son to learn the manners of the aristocracy. Keene
has written: “Mishima's long association with the aristocracy, ever since his childhood days at the Peers' School, had led him repeatedly to choose for his characters members of this tiny fraction of Japanese society, and he wrote with a unique knowledge of their speech and attitudes. His account in
Spring Snow
of the aristocrats who built the Victorian mansions still standing here and there in Tokyo is curiously affecting . . . The billiard room, the well-stocked wine cellar, the racks of suits tailored in London, the cut-glass chandeliers and the freshly starched tablecloths obviously attracted Mishima himself, but he did not neglect to describe the Japanese aspects of their lives as well—the spacious garden with its pond and artificial hill, the servants in kimonos eternally dusting and, above all, the elaborate etiquette that revealed itself most conspicuously in the distinctive language”
(Landscapes and Portraits)
.

One night Kiyoaki, tormented by his feelings for Satoko, tosses and turns on his bed; at last he throws off the bedclothes and lies naked on his stomach. This is how Mishima describes him, in Michael Gallaghers translation, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1972: “He lay with his face buried in his pillow, his naked back to the moon and the hot blood still throbbing in his temples. And so he lay, the moonlight washing over the incomparable smooth white of his back, its brilliance highlighting the graceful lines of his body to reveal the subtle but pervasive hint of firm masculinity that made it clear that this was the flesh not of a woman but of a still immature young man. The moon shone with dazzling brightness on Kiyoaki's left side, where the pale flesh pulsed softly in rhythm with his heartbeat. Here there were three small, almost invisible moles. And much as the three stars in Orion's belt fade in strong moonlight, so too these three small moles were almost blotted out by its rays.”

Kiyoaki is of two minds about Satoko, who is in love with him. When he compares her charms to those of merely beautiful women, however, as in a scene in which he scrutinizes a crowd of geisha in his father's park, on the occasion of a party given for an Imperial prince, he is sure that Satoko is greatly superior to the professional beauties. He wondered “how these women could laugh and play as happily as if they were bathing in water warmed to their liking. He observed them closely—the way they gestured as they told
stories, the way they all nodded alike, as though each had a finely wrought gold hinge in her smooth white neck . . . and of all these many devices, the one that interested him most was their manner of letting their eyes rove incessantly.” Kiyoaki finds them “tasteless.”

Satoko and Kiyoaki quarrel on the occasion of this garden party, and during the long period which ensues before their next meeting, Kiyoaki will not respond to a series of letters and calls from Satoko; the girl becomes engaged to a young prince. The arranged marriage is not one she would have chosen, and she finds means of meeting Kiyoaki secretly. These encounters lead to a love affair which is connived at and arranged by a scheming lady companion of Satoko's. While the gentlewoman waits discreetly out of sight in the isolated inn to which she has brought the lovers, Kiyoaki wrestles with Satoko's clothing: “He had no idea whatever how to unfasten a woman's
obi
. Its tightly fastened flared bow at her back defied the efforts of his fingers. But as he groped blindly, trying to undo it by force, she reached behind her and while giving every sign that she was trying desperately to check his fumbling efforts, she subtly guided them in a more profitable direction. Their fingers lay tangled for a few moments in its folds, and then as its clip suddenly fell away, the
obi
uncoiled in a rustle of silk and sprang from her body as though it had a life of its own. It was the beginning of a confused riot of uncontrollable movements. Her entire kimono swirled in revolt as he tore frantically at the folds of silk that bound her breasts, rebuffed at every turn by a whole network of straps that tightened as others came loose. But then right before his eyes, he saw the tiny, well-guarded triangle of white below her throat spread into a rich and fragrant expanse of skin.”

Satoko becomes pregnant by Kiyoaki shortly before her marriage is to take place, and the parents of the two lovers desperately hustle her off to Osaka for an abortion. The operation is performed, but Satoko, instead of returning to Tokyo as planned by the parents, takes refuge in a nunnery close to Nara, Gesshuji. Kiyoaki goes to see her and is refused admittance by the abbess. He makes repeated journeys to the nunnery in cold weather, when spring snow is on the ground, and his health begins to suffer. Honda, Kiyoaki's best friend at school (the Gakushūin), comes down from Tokyo too,
and pleads with the abbess to allow Kiyoaki to see Satoko. “ ‘It's a frightening thing to say, but I somehow feel that he's not going to recover. So I am really giving you his dying request. Would letting him see Satoko for just a moment or two be quite outside the scope of the Lord Buddha's compassion? Won't you please permit it?' ” At that moment Honda thinks he hears something. “It sounded like a muffled laugh, as faint as the opening of plum blossom. But then, after a moment's reflection, he was sure that unless his ears had deceived him, the sound that had carried to him through the chill convent atmosphere on this spring morning was not a muffled laugh, as he had thought, but a young woman's stifled sob.” The abbess remains firm in her refusal to let Kiyoaki see Satoko. To Honda she gives a lecture on the precepts of the Hosso sect: “The Abbess referred to the net of Indra. Indra was an Indian God, and once he cast his net, every man, every living thing without exception was inextricably caught in its meshes. And so it was that all creatures in existence were inescapably bound by it. Indra's net symbolized the Chain of Causation or, in Sanskrit,
pratitya-samutpada. Yuishiki
(
Vijnaptimatrata
or Consciousness), the fundamental doctrine of the Hosso sect, to which Gesshuji belonged, was celebrated in
The Thirty Verses of Yuishiki
, the canonical text attributed to Vasubandhu, whom the sect regarded as its founder. According to the Verses,
Alaya
is the origin of the Chain of Causation. This was a Sanskirt word that denoted a storehouse. For within the
Alaya
were contained the karmic ‘seeds' that held the consequential effects of all deeds, both good and evil.” After the lecture—only a section of which is given here—Honda returns to the inn where Kiyoaki is staying and then accompanies his friend, now desperately ill, back to Tokyo. In the train Kiyoaki tells Honda a snatch of a dream: “Just now I had a dream. I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.” Two days later Kiyoaki dies; the first volume ends there.

Spring Snow
is beautifully written; the romantic lovers—and the lackeys who surround them—are marvelously described. Once the love affair has begun, however, the interest of the book declines, and its ending, the death of Kiyoaki, is not moving. A second difficulty is Mishima's description of religion. He was not a religious man (so Taijun Takeda, a poet and the son of a Buddhist priest,
and one who liked Mishima's work, has also testified), and his description of Hosso teaching reads like a doctoral thesis; yet reincarnation is central to the novel. Here was a major problem for the writer: how to make an idea convincing when he did not believe it himself. In later volumes of the novel Mishima was forced to confront this problem.

There is no space here to describe all of Mishima's private and literary activities (I have already bypassed the less interesting novels which he wrote in the early 1960's). He was perpetually in motion; in addition to family matters and an enormous amount of entertaining, he continued to train several times a week at kendo and at body building. And he was also involved in any number of special events ancillary to his main task of committing pen to paper. A review of his schedule during a single year, 1966, gives an idea of his pace through life. In January he was awarded a prize by the Ministry of Education for his play
Madame de Sade
. In the same month he was made a member of the committee which awards the Akutagawa Prize for young novelists—a high award and an important position demanding a good deal of effort, as committee members must read many manuscripts; Mishima's presence on the committee is said to have completely changed the atmosphere there, which had been stuffy. In April the film
Patriotism
, which had made its way to Tours for a festival, received an award; it was also released in Japan and was a colossal success. During the summer Mishima had his holidays as usual, and he found time to be in Tokyo and to rehearse for a cabaret organized by his friend, Akihiro Maruyama, the female impersonator; he composed a ballad for the occasion and himself sang “The Sailor Who Was Killed by Paper Roses.” The following month he was off on a tour with Donald Keene, visiting Kyoto, Omiwa Shrine, Hiroshima, and Kumamoto, gathering material for
Runaway Horses
, the second volume of his long novel, and making a donation to the shrine at Omiwa so large that the priests were quite taken aback. In the autumn he finally achieved a reconciliation with the Arita family.