The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (29 page)

Mishima had always been at odds with the critics, and at this point he became hysterically hostile toward many of them—rather like a foreign businessman who has been surrounded and outwitted by unseen competitors in Japan. In his preface to the biography of Zenmei Hasuda, he wrote: “When I got close to the age of forty, at which age Hasuda killed himself, I gradually understood the man better. Above all, I recognized the source of his anger; his fury was directed at Japanese intellectuals, the strongest enemy within the nation. It is astonishing how little the character of modern intellectuals in Japan has changed; i.e., their cowardice, sneering, “objectivity,” rootlessness, dishonesty, flunkeyism, mock gestures of resistance, self-importance, inactivity, talkativeness, and readiness to eat their words . . . Hasuda's anger has become my own.” Personally, he remained on good terms with some of the best-known critics. He also had many friends—fellow writers and theater people—on whom he could have fallen back at this time of crisis in his career and, much more so, in his private life.
It required no special powers of observation to realize that Mishima was in grave trouble; his pranks and capers had gradually assumed a more and more grotesque form, culminating in the Tatenokai.

Mishima's difficulty, however, was that he had no truly close friends to warn him of the dangers into which he was running. He had no
kokoro no tomo
or real intimates; he was too self-controlled a man to have encouraged close friendship. Among those he saw regularly for many years were some sterling individuals full of common sense. One I think of is Kobo Abé; another, in the world of the theater, is Takeo Matsuura. But Mishima had never trusted others with his innermost thoughts. Neither Abé nor Matsuura nor anyone else near to him fully understood what was on his mind. The odd thing is that they might easily have done so had they read his writing; for example,
Sun and Steel
. But no one—or scarcely anyone—took the essay seriously. Mishima suffered from a peculiar misunderstanding which he had long before described in
Confessions of a Mask:
“What people regarded as a pose on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my true nature, and . . . what people regarded as my true self was a masquerade.” The Tatenokai, while it appeared to be part of Mishima's masquerade, was in fact a reflection of his need “to assert my true nature.”

Those who had known Mishima for a long time had become so accustomed to his clowning and his endless talk of death and suicide that they did not take him seriously any more. Mishima's plight was thus ignored by his friends and his contemporaries. His family too was unable to do much for him. His mother was far too uncritical to chide her son for anything he did, and Azusa had had no influence on him for decades. Yōko, in fact, was in a better position than anyone else to chide and tease her husband back to common sense. When I saw them together, I felt that she was doing that all the time; but Mishima was too closed up in himself to respond.

Mishima at this time associated with people whose politics were to the right—a minority of critics and intellectuals in Japan. Among them were Takeshi Muramatsu, a Francophile with right-wing inclinations; Toshiro Mayuzumi, one of the leading composers of the younger generation and another Francophile with right-wing inclinations; Kinemaro Izawa, an education critic and an exact contemporary
of Mishima, perhaps the only person who retained Mishima's confidence until the very last—a nationalist of the old school with limited knowledge of the international scene; Fusao Hayashi, a much older man who had been classed as a war criminal under the Occupation, and whose record of opportunistic alternation between extreme left and extreme right speaks for itself; Kei Wakaizumi, an establishment intellectual who was closely associated with Prime Minister Eisaku Sato during Sato's long tenure of office (1964–72) and who acted as an intermediary between the Japanese and United States governments—a man of great ability, but tense and introverted; Seiji Tsutsumi, a poet and businessman with right-wing inclinations, almost the only
zaikai
member—man of high finance—with whom Mishima had much patience. There were others: Shintarō Ishihara and Wataru Hiraizumi, younger men of the right in the Liberal Democratic Party—the first a brilliant showman, the second a man of aristocratic family and of immense wealth, a member of the upper class to which Mishima aspired, not without success, to belong. The collective influence of these individuals upon Mishima, whom they tended to patronize—with the notable exception of Izawa, a humble man—was not good.

The Temple of Dawn
, which Mishima began in the late summer of 1968, took almost two years to complete, and is the most difficult of the four books of
The Sea of Fertility
. In this respect it was unlike anything that Mishima, who favored lucidity and clarity of exposition, had ever written. It is Mishima's extensive treatment of religion that makes
The Temple of Dawn
difficult to read; he incorporated his study of Hinduism and Buddhism in the volume, however, for specific and good reasons. He was afraid that the Buddhist theme running through his long novel—the idea of reincarnation—would fail. Specifically, he thought that if the reader did not believe that he, Mishima, was serious about reincarnation, then he would regard the entire novel as a kind of fairy story. In
The Temple of Dawn
Mishima presents the idea of reincarnation as fundamental, as fact. At the outset Honda, who is now a successful lawyer of forty-seven—a man with a desperately nihilistic outlook but nonchalant outward appearance—pays a visit
to Bangkok. The year is 1941 and he has been sent there by a big trading company to take care of a complicated lawsuit. Mishima describes the city of Bangkok, the history of the Thai royal family, and also the Hinayana Buddhism of the country. Hondas companion in the city is Hishikawa, a Japanese who serves as his interpreter—a strange-looking, perpetually exhausted man who has been furnished by the trading company. (In the course of a long monologue, Hishikawa compares art to a gigantic sunset. Art, he says, is like a sunset—in no way fundamental; rather, a purposeless though honest joke.) Honda has brought with him the diary of Kiyoaki, the dream diary, and he tries to see someone connected with the Thai princes, who had studied with him and Kiyoaki at the Gakushūin many years before.

Honda remembers how, before his death, in a dream, Isao had spoken of a place “far to the south. Very hot . . . in the rose sunshine of a southern land . . .” The lawyer steadfastly pursues the notion of the reincarnation of Kiyoaki into Isao and of Isao into a third person; Honda feels intuitively that he may be in this part of the world. With the help of Hishikawa, Honda obtains an audience with a mad, seven-year-old princess, the daughter of one of the two princes he had known at the GakushÅ«in, a little girl who lives in a Rose Palace. During the meeting the girl suddenly jumps up and flings herself at Honda, insisting that she is a Japanese who had died eight years before (Isao had killed himself in 1933). She answers Honda's questions about the dates of the deaths of Kiyoaki and Isao; and he concludes that in this little princess, Ying Chan (“Moonlight”), he has probably found the reincarnation of Isao—though he is unable to ascertain if Ying Chan has three moles. After a short while Honda is offered a trip to India by his trading-company client and he sets off for the subcontinent, planning to return to Bangkok. In Calcutta he witnesses the Durga Festival and watches the sacrifice of the goats. A headless kid kicks its back legs in the air as if it is having a nightmare; the youth who beheads the kids has a shirt spotted with blood, and Honda reflects that the sublime and the dirty go hand in hand in India (they are poles apart in Japan). Thereafter the lawyer travels to Benares, a city where “holiness and defilement reached an extreme.” He walks down a tiny street, passing the booth of a clairvoyant, and goes out
onto a stone-paved square facing the river. Lepers crouch there; they have come on pilgrimage from all over the country, to die on the banks of the Ganges. Flies cluster on the wounds of deformed creatures; they glow a golden green.

Honda takes a boat on the Ganges and sails toward the funeral ghats. He observes the burning of corpses. A blackened arm emerges from the fire; a corpse bends over backward, as if the man were turning his back in his sleep. The sound of boiling comes to Honda across the water. At the end, the skulls are left, and a man with a bamboo stick walks about the fire cracking the skulls. His muscles glow in the fire as he works, and the sound of cracking bone echoes off the walls of the temple close by. It is not a sad spectacle, at all. What appears to be heartlessness is joy. Karma is a plain and natural phenomenon like fruit on a tree or rice growing in a paddy. Honda believes that at Benares he has seen the ultimate truths of this world.

From Benares, Honda travels to Ajanta, where he views a beautiful waterfall, two streams cascading over a cliff face. One runs down between rocks, while the second falls like a silver rope; both are narrow, steep falls. Honda watches one of the falls, dropping down toward the Wagola River, slipping over a rock wall of yellow-green, giving an echo from the mountains all around. Behind the fall is a dark, empty, stone cave; otherwise, bright green surrounds it. Trees and vermilion flowers spread about the fall. The water gives off a glowing light in which floats a rainbow. As Honda watches the stream, he sees several yellow butterflies, precisely in a line between him and the fall. And looking farther up, he is astonished by the dazzling height from which the water tumbles. It is so high that a world of a different dimension seems to manifest itself above. The rock wall is green, with dark moss and ferns. At the top a light yellow is visible. The grass above is so bright in color, it seems to be not of this world. A single black kid is feeding on the grass there. High above float clouds and light at a dizzy height in the blue sky. As he watches, Honda remembers the words of Kiyoaki, which remain like a single drop of water in his mind: I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.” This must be the fall of which Kiyoaki spoke, not the fall under which Honda had once found Isao, after all.

Returning to Bangkok once again, Honda is forced to mingle with Japanese businessmen, seekers after gold who have nothing in common with the beautiful Kiyoaki and the stern Isao (Mishima's descriptions of the Japanese business community might be translated to the present day without a line being changed). One day Honda comes across a little book of poems written by an unsuccessful revolutionary in Thailand in 1932. He takes comfort in the poetry, which would, he believes, console the spirit of Isao: he gives the book to Ying Chan, believing that Isao has been reborn in the little girl. India, Honda has concluded, showed him that his life's work must be the observation of karma. Since his childhood, he has firmly believed that history cannot be altered by human will, but he acknowledges that the core of human will is precisely a ceaseless endeavor to influence history. He pays a last visit to Ying Chan and has to tear himself away: she clings to him, weeping desperately and asking to be taken back to Japan, as she is really Japanese. After his return home, war breaks out, and Honda spends most of his spare time in the study of karma.

Here Mishima explains in great detail the various ancient theories of karma, of Greece, Rome, India, and Thailand. There is a long discourse on Mahayana Buddhism: at the core of karma is
arayashiki
, the raison d'être of existence itself; everything in this world is to be attributed to
arayashiki
, and this is mysteriously connected with reincarnation. The first part of
The Temple of Dawn
concludes with a description of an air raid in Tokyo during the war.

In the second half of the book the mood changes. There is a sense of collapse and of failure; this is seen in Honda, who has undergone a decline. It is 1952 and Honda, fifty-eight years old, has built a country villa for himself at Gotemba; he is rich and visits the place on weekends. Between the study and a guest bedroom next door Honda has had a secret peephole constructed, so that he can peer into the bedroom at his leisure. Honda has turned into a Peeping Tom; he is no longer the observer of karma. In the house next door lives an aging lesbian, Keiko Hisamatsu, a former countess who has become the mistress of a U.S. Army colonel. Ying Chan, who is eighteen, is studying in Japan. One evening Honda invites her to a party at his house; Keiko is invited as well. Honda conceives a desire to see Ying Chan naked; he arranges for
a playboy nephew of Keiko to seduce Ying Chan in the bedroom next to Honda's study. Watching through the peephole, Honda observes Ying Chan's body. Suddenly the girl leaps up and pushes the young Japanese aside. She flees from the room and takes refuge in Keiko's house next door, declining to see Honda, whom she has identified as the author of the unsuccessful plan to seduce her. Honda is desperate to confirm that Ying Chan has the three moles on her body and decides to build a swimming pool at his home and give a swimming party. But at the party Honda is unable to see whether Ying Chan really has the moles. He puts her and Keiko in the guest room that evening and takes up watch at his spy hole; through the hole he sees the two women embracing and making love.

“At that moment Ying Chan, perhaps jealous that Keiko's thigh had freedom of movement, raised her left arm high and grasped it as though to claim it as her own. She placed it firmly over her head as if she could do without breathing. The imposing white thigh completely covered her face. Ying Chan's whole side was exposed. To the left of her bare breast, an area her arm had previously concealed, three extremely small moles appeared distinctly, like the Pleiades in the dusky sky of her brown skin that resembled the dying evening glow.”

That night a fire breaks out in Honda's home and the house is burned to the ground.
The Temple of Dawn
ends with a short meeting between Honda and the twin sister of Ying Chan in 1967, almost fifteen years after the fire at Honda's home. From the sister Honda learns that Ying Chan died at twenty in Thailand, from the bite of a cobra. (Isao had had a dream of being bitten to death by a “green snake,” much, we assume, as Ying Chan was killed.)