The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (26 page)

Photo: Shinchosha

Autographing copies of his books in a Tokyo bookstore in 1966. Mishima regarded Thomas Mann, who had remarked that “writers should look like bankers,” as his model.

Photo: Mainichi

Body-building in his forties. For two years he had been working at building up his body and he had transformed his physical appearance. In place of the spindly, white arms of his youth, he had strong, muscular arms and shoulders. He had turned into a healthy, suntanned specimen of Japanese manhood.

Photo: Shinchosha

Posing in front of an advertisement for the film
YÅ«koku
(“Patriotism”), in which he played the part of an army officer who commits hara-kiri. Mishima endlessly rehearsed his own death.

Photo: Shinchosha

With his literary sponsor, the Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, in 1968. Mishima smiling his big smile and Kawabata looking shy as usual: huge forehead and melancholy eyes.

Photo: Shinoyama

Mishima as St. Sebastian, in a photo taken in 1966 by Kishin Shinoyama, the leading young Japanese photographer. It shows Mishima in the pose selected by Guido Reni for the portrait of St. Sebastian which—as Mishima had described in
Confessions of a Mask
—had inspired his first ejaculation. He is standing against a thick tree trunk, the lower foliage of which is visible, acting as a canopy over the man below . . .

Photo: Kyodo

A more private Mishima, chatting over a cigarette. “He was in a curious mood,” I noted in my diary after one such occasion. “Talked in melancholy fashion about heroes in the Japanese tradition. He insisted that ‘all our heroes have failed, they have all been miserable failures.' I can't imagine what he was trying to say.”

Photo: Shinchosha

Training with the Jieitai (the Japanese Armed Forces) for the first time in May 1967. Mishima minus the famous mask: he looks childlike, quiet, sad. I suppose that was what he was really like, why he was so charming; perhaps he carried on with his buffoonery but knew that others were not deceived because it
was
buffoonery.

Photo: Shinoyama

Prime example of his clowning is another picture he sent me: shows him stripped to the waist, chest bulging like mad and beaded with sweat, he's holding a sword, that long sword I saw in his home. He has a pathological expression on his face: brows knotted, eyes popping out. He has a
hachimaki
(headband) on in the picture, on which is written a medieval samurai slogan:
Shichisho Hōkoku
(“Serve the Nation for Seven Lives”). Thank goodness this is not the real Mishima, I thought at the time. Or is it?

Photo: Shinchosha

Mishima during his debate with left-wing students at Tokyo University in May 1969. “I was as nervous as if I was going into a lions' den, but I enjoyed it very much after all. I found we have much in common—a rigorous ideology and a taste for physical violence, for example. Both they and I represent new species in Japan today. I felt friendship for them. We are friends between whom there is a barbed-wire fence.”

Photo: Shinchosha

When he gave lectures before literary societies, he dressed in three-piece suits, had his hair cut short, and looked every inch the prosperous, able young banker or Japanese industrialist.

With me on Mt. Fuji in 1969, the year before his death. I had been invited to watch training exercises of the Tatenokai, Mishima's private army, and I noted about this snapshot: “Sitting in snow, having lunch with Mishima (am trying to digest fearful dish called
sekihan
, glutinous rice with red beans). Picture shows Mishima looking a bit criminal, thuggish: he does sometimes look like that.”

(
ON FACING PAGE
) The Mishima family on one of their vacations at Shimoda. When I visited them the last time, I noted: “Two children with us: Noriko, the girl, beautiful and quiet, very feminine at eleven; Ichirō, a barbaric little boy with white teeth and very sunburned—two years younger. Only Yōko can control him. Children teased Mishima about his [swimming] trunks: ‘Won't you do a striptease, Dad?', etc. Mishima rolled on his back in sand, narcissism exposed yet again. What a funny man!” His boisterous talk of suicide seemed like an act, but behind his frivolous mask on vacation, Mishima was already plotting his death at secret meetings with members of the Tatenokai.