The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (28 page)

Photo: Kyodo

The public funeral. From the right: Yasunari Kawabata (who, before his own suicide in the spring of 1972, spoke of being visited by the specter of Yukio Mishima); the widow, Yōko Mishima (“I had thought he might do something but that it would be next year”); his father, Azusa Hiraoka (“I was not particularly surprised. My brain rejected the information”); and his mother, Shizué Hiraoka, who had seen him for the last time the night before (“I watched him leaving and I couldn't help thinking how tired he looked, how stooped was his back”).

Photo: Kyodo

Members of the Tatenokai at the funeral. I attended a memorial meeting for him, held in a hall at Ikebukuro, not far from the department store where his last exhibition had been staged; and in January I was present at the public funeral, which was held at the Tsukiji Honganji temple in Tokyo. The funeral was attended by over ten thousand people . . .

Photo: Shinchosha

Before he left home for the last time, Mishima put on his desk a short note: “Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever.” How would he live in people's memories? In a conversation which he recorded with the older novelist Jun Ishikawa in the autumn of 1970, Mishima said—and his death was close at hand: “I come out on the stage determined to make the audience weep and instead they burst out laughing.” Once more I hear the raucous laughter of that strange man Yukio Mishima.

Runaway Horses
concludes: “Isao drew in a deep breath and shut his eyes as he ran his left hand caressingly over his stomach. Grasping the knife with his right hand, he pressed its point against his body, and guided it to the correct place with the fingertips of his left hand. Then, with a powerful thrust of his arm, he plunged the knife into his stomach. The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.”

The book contains a brilliant picture of the manner in which right-wing terrorism functioned in Japan in the 1930's; it is a unique portrayal of the mechanism of the Uyoku (the right) in the days of greatest power of this small minority. The involvement of a member of the Imperial family in Isao's plotting of a coup d'état, although Toin no Miya is not himself a party to the affair, is especially intriguing (the role of the Imperial princes in the numerous fracases of the 1930's is still a mystery).
Runaway Horses
, however, has a kind of coldness about it; the murder by Isao of a man totally unknown to him, with whom he has no personal quarrel, is brilliantly done; but the boy's preoccupation with the act of hara-kiri reflects Mishima's own obsession with the subject, so it seems, rather than appearing as one aspect of a credible terrorist personality. Isao has a woman friend, Makiko; and he faces two possible choices. One is to have an affair with Makiko and be corrupted; the other is to commit hara-kiri—when and where does not seem to matter. Thus, the act of hara-kiri acquires a sexual meaning which rings true to the character of Mishima but not to that of Isao. The author's interest in hara-kiri—about which no other Japanese novelist of repute has written—lends a morbid air to
Runaway Horses
.

At the same time that he completed
Runaway Horses
, Mishima also finished
Sun and Steel
. In the later passages of the essay he confirmed the points he had made in the sections I have analyzed; tragedy remained the core of the work. Of his training with the Jieitai, Mishima wrote: “My life with the army could be finally endorsed only by death.” The essay is imbued with a sense of the gradual weakening and aging of his body: “I, however, had already lost the morning face that belongs to youth alone.” “My age pursued me, murmuring behind my back ‘How long will it last?' ” What he
is seeking is the “tragedy that I had once let slip.” More accurately, “what had eluded me was the tragedy of the group, or tragedy as a member of the group . . . The group was concerned with all those things that could never emerge from words—sweat, and tears, and cries of joy or pain. If one probed deeper still, it was concerned with the blood that words could never cause to flow . . . Only through the group, I realized—through sharing the suffering of the group—could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain . . . The group must be open to death—which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors . . . We were united in seeking death and glory; it was not merely my personal quest . . . I had a vision where something that, if I were alone, would have resolved back into muscles and words was held fast by the power of the group and led me away to a far land, whence there would be no return.” In an epilogue to the essay, in which Mishima described a test flight in an F-104 jet fighter, he fell back on sexual metaphor to describe his attitude to the experience which he felt awaited him. “Erect-angled, the F-104, a sharp silver phallus, pointed into the sky. Solitary, spermatozoon-like, I was installed within. Soon, I should know how the spermatozoon felt at the instant of ejaculation.”

Such was the mood in which Mishima created his Tatenokai in the autumn of 1968. That his inspiration was fundamentally personal and aesthetic (and not political) is suggested by
Sun and Steel
and also by the manner in which he described the Tatenokai in an essay written a year after its formation in October 1968 (
Queen
magazine, January 1970): “The words I value are to be found only in the pure realm of fiction. For I support the tradition of
yūga
in Japanese literature [a type of refined elegance having its origins in courtly aesthetics during the period before the samurai rose to power]. Words used for political action are soiled words. To revive the traditions of the samurai and the way of the warrior (Bushidō), which are so vital in Japanese culture, I have chosen a way without words, a way of silence . . . My aim is to revive the soul of the samurai within myself . . . I should like to describe an episode that may typify the soul of the Tatenokai. Last summer I took a group of about thirty members to the foot of Mt. Fuji. It was a mercilessly hot day and under a broiling sun all of us worked hard in combat
exercises. After a bath and supper several of the young men gathered in my room. There was the sound of thunder in the distance; from time to time lightning flashed across the deep purple fields; directly outside our window we could hear the first autumn crickets. After a long talk about how to command the attack squad, one of our members, a young man from Kyoto, brought out a flute in a beautiful damask bag. It was the type of flute used for court music ever since the ninth century, and only very few people can play it nowadays. This lad had been studying it for about a year . . . Now he began playing for us. It was a beautiful and moving melody that reminded me of the heavily bedewed autumn fields and of the Shining Prince Genji who had danced to this very music. As I listened in sheer rapture, it crossed my mind that for the first time in the postwar years the two Japanese traditions had come happily together, if only for a fleeting moment—the tradition of elegance and that of the samurai. It was this union that I had sought in the depth of my heart.”

By the autumn of 1968 the tone of Mishima's work had changed drastically. In place of the light articles that he had been writing for women's magazines two years before, he had shifted to a different type of short literature. For the magazine
Eiga Geijutsu
he wrote a piece entitled “Samurai”; for the Japanese
Playboy
for serialization there was
Inochi Urimasu
(“I Will Sell My Life”); and for the publisher Pocket Punch Oh a long series entitled
Wakaki Samurai no tame no Seishinkowa
(“A Lecture in Psychology for Young Samurai”). He also wrote an ironical work with the misspelled title
Alle Japanese Are Perverse
, and completed the play
My Friend Hitler
. His chief preoccupation, however, was the third volume of his long novel.
The Temple of Dawn
, as he called the book, is quite unlike its two predecessors,
Runaway Horses
and
Spring Snow;
those two contain lengthy stories full of drama.
The Temple of Dawn
is primarily a description of religion, both Buddhism and Hinduism. In the previous year Mishima, accompanied by his wife, had visited India at the invitation of the government; and he had then carried out research for his book, visiting Calcutta, Benares, and Ajanta (as does Honda in
The Temple of Dawn
)—having bid Yōko goodbye at Bombay airport.

Just after the appearance of the first installment of the book
in
Shinchō
, Mishima heard that, once again, he was being considered for the Nobel Prize; the previous year the rumor that he might get the prize had also been strong. A friend told me that Mishima was returning from an overseas trip in 1967 and had timed his arrival in Tokyo for the day on which the announcement of the Nobel Prize was made in Stockholm. He had fancied a hero's welcome: “He had taken a VIP room at Haneda. When the plane landed, he was the first out of the first-class compartment, laughing and smiling. But there was no one there to greet him apart from a few of us; the VIP room was empty; there were no reporters. I have never seen him so depressed.”

A Guatemalan novelist, Miguel Angel Asturias, had won the prize the previous year, and in 1968 Mishima was once again disappointed. He very nearly was awarded the Nobel Prize, according to Swedish journalists, but at the last moment the committee veered in favor of an older man, on the theory that Mishima would have his turn later. Their choice was Mishima's old friend Kawabata.

Mishima, when he heard the news, rushed to Kamakura to be the first to congratulate Kawabata; photographs were taken of the two men sitting together and smiling. Mishima was disappointed: “If Hammarskjöld had lived, I would have won,” he said afterward. The diplomat had been reputed to be an admirer of his work. But this failure to win the Nobel was not a turning point in his life, as some have said. The slow creep of age and his doubts about his writing were the dominant considerations for Mishima. Not for nothing had he remarked in
Sun and Steel
that he feared he was “on the verge of non-communication” as a writer. To all appearances, he remained unchallenged in Japan as the leading novelist of his generation, but, as he well knew, his reputation was declining steadily.

The extent to which Mishima had fallen out of favor with the critics was apparent in early 1969, when
Spring Snow
and
Runaway Horses
came out in book form. The first volume sold 200,000 copies in two months, and rights were bought by television and the theater as a matter of course.
Runaway Horses
sold less well, but this had been predicted because of its grisly subject matter. Mishima had announced that his tetralogy was to be called
The Sea of Fertility
,
after a region of the moon (close to the Sea of Tranquility). He had made this choice, he told Keene, for this reason: “The title
The Sea of Fertility
is intended to suggest the arid sea of the moon that belies its name. Or, I might go so far as to say that it superimposes the image of cosmic nihilism with that of the fertile sea.” Mishima's novel, however, though its first volumes sold well, and despite its challenging theme—this was the most ambitious literary project so far conceived in Japan in the twentieth century—received scarcely a single notice in the press. Mishima had associated himself with the right in politics since 1966 and had alienated the Bundan, the literary establishment, which is inclined to the left; his work had become taboo. The only man to speak out strongly in favor of
The Sea of Fertility
was Yasunari Kawabata. Kawabata told a foreign interviewer, Philip Shabecoff of
The New York Times
: “A writer of Mishima's caliber appears only once every two or three hundred years in our history”;
The Sea of Fertility
, he added, was Mishima's masterpiece. With the exception of this lone voice, no one of importance praised the work. Mishima found himself in a peculiarly Japanese situation; he had alienated the Bundan, but there was not one hostile squeak from the critics, just silence—a characteristic Japanese method of criticism.