The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (30 page)

A judgment of
The Temple of Dawn
must rest on the passages in the first part of the book in which Mishima describes Honda's study of karma and reincarnation. This, however, is a telling criticism of the book. For the great majority of Japanese and Western readers, certainly, the religious passages are hard going. (Finding a translator for the book proved a headache to the U.S. publisher, largely on account of the section on Buddhism.) By and large, Mishima must be deemed to have failed in his effort to convince the reader that he takes reincarnation seriously.

The letdown at the end of
The Temple of Dawn
, however, is a prelude of what is to come in
The Decay of the Angel
, the fourth and final volume of
The Sea of Fertility
—a much more striking book, which Mishima wrote in its entirety after his decision to kill himself and which was published after his death.

3

The River of Theater

Once the theater was like a jolly party I enjoyed attending after a hard day's work. There I could find another world—a world of glittering lights and colors, where the characters of my own creation, clad in alluring costumes, stood in front of a handsome set, laughed, screamed, wept, and danced. And to think that I, as a playwright, governed and manipulated all these theatrical worlds from behind the scenes!

Yet such delights gradually turned bitter. The magic of the theater—to give people the illusion of life's noblest moments and the apparition of beauty on earth—began to corrupt my heart. Or was it that I grudged being an alienated playwright? Theater, where a false blood runs in the floodlights, can perhaps move and enrich people with much more forceful and profound experiences than anything in real life. As in music and architecture, I find the beauty of the theater in its abstract and theoretical structure, and this particular beauty never ceases to be the very image of what I have always held in the depth of my heart as Ideal in Art.

Yukio Mishima, Catalogue to the Tōbu Exhibition

The modern theater had a slow start in Japan. Whereas Japanese writers were attracted to the Western novel in the decades that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and the first “modern” novels were written in Japan in the late nineteenth century, Western-style theater did not become established until after the Pacific War. Valiant attempts were made by small groups of actors and actresses to create a modern theater long before the war; the beginning of Shingeki (literally, “New Theater”) is customarily traced to 1906, when a society for the promotion of the arts, the Bungei Kyōkai, which specialized in drama, was founded. But the
theater suffered cruelly from official censorship and, after a brief flowering in the 1920's, succumbed to government control. There were always small, politically radical groups ready to brave the authorities' disapproval—but scarcely any permanent achievements were made before the onset of the Pacific War. (An exception is the establishment of the Bungakuza—“Literary Theater”—in 1938. It survived the war, taking as its slogan “Art for art's sake.”) In addition to all this, modern theater had strong competition from both the traditional Japanese theater, the Kabuki, a form established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the successful low-brow theater known as Shinpa, which had none of the intellectual appeal of Shingeki and drew large audiences, catering to a popular taste for Western-style, sentimental drama.

After the war, Shingeki benefited from a relaxation of censorship. The radical character of modern theater in Japan was apparent in the choice of plays made by the leading theatrical groups: works by Ibsen, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and a number of Japanese writers who drew on the Russian tradition. The prestige of Western writers was great. Among the most popular Shingeki productions in the 1950's were Tennessee Williams's
A Streetcar Named Desire
and John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger
. The Western classical repertoire was also drawn upon; in 1955 the Bungakuza played
Hamlet
with great success. For the first time, good translations of the plays of Shakespeare were available and Shakespeare was for a time the height of fashion; veteran Kabuki actors vied for the honor of playing Hamlet. Few Japanese writers of the older generation rose to the challenge of the Shingeki in the late 1940's. It was left to the young men—among them Yukio Mishima and Kobo Abé—to respond. Abé did so in a manner consonant with the tradition of Shingeki, in which radical, proletarian protest had played so large a part before the war. In one of his early plays,
Dorei Gari
(“Slave Hunt,” 1952), he satirized the business world in Japan—describing a particularly bizarre form of postwar commerce (a trade in the remains of the war dead). Mishima, by contrast, showed no taste for ideology; his forte was style. These two young playwrights, the most successful newcomers to Shingeki after the war, were far apart in politics, which was equally apparent in their novels and in the translations of their works (Abé was taken
up by the Soviet literary world; Mishima was translated exclusively in the West). Mishima showed a taste for the Western classical tradition—he was to write plays modeled on works by Racine and Euripides; Abé had a taste for Brecht.

Mishima's first work for the Shingeki was the one-act play
Kataku
(“Fire House,” 1949). This was performed by the Haiyuza, one of the two leading Shingeki groups, and he was gratified to hear well-known actors and actresses speaking his lines. His first major success came the following year, in a genre which he made his own, the modern No play. Since its establishment in the fifteenth century as the theatrical form of the feudal aristocracy and the Imperial Court, No has attracted many writers, even in modern times. According to Keene's preface to
Five Modern Nō Plays
, published by Alfred A. Knopf: “Some have fashioned pastiches on the traditional themes, others have tried to fit modern conceptions into the old forms. The hysteria of wartime propaganda even led to the composition of a No play about life on a submarine. Some modern works have enjoyed temporary popularity, but they were essentially curiosities, having neither the beauty of language and mood of the old plays, nor the complexity of character delineation we expect of a modern work. The first genuinely successful modern No plays have been those by Yukio Mishima.” As an example of Mishima's success, Keene takes
Kantan
, the first of his modern No plays, written in 1950; he compares the classical original with Mishima's work. In the classical No, “a traveler naps on a magic pillow, and during the brief time that it takes his hostess at the inn to cook a bowl of gruel, he dreams of a glorious life as Emperor of China. He awakens to the realization that life is but a dream. In Mishima's play, instead of a traveler, we have a spoiled young man of today who sleeps on the magic pillow while his old nurse prepares the breakfast. His dreams are not of ancient China but of riches and power as a financial tycoon and a dictator.”

Mishima wrote many modern No plays. The second book of his to be translated was a collection of these plays, which had a great success overseas. They were performed in many European countries and in Australia and Mexico as well as in North America, eventually being staged Off-Broadway late in 1960; that production
ran for two months and had good notices. It was partly through these short plays—all are one-act dramas—that Mishima first acquired a measure of fame in the West; the dialogue is taut and the playwright retains sufficient of the ghostly quality of the classical No to give his works a unique character. Their appeal was considerable in Japan itself. The plays were produced by Shingeki companies and also appeared on the classical No stage. One play,
The Lady Aoi
, was sung as a Western-style opera. Translations of the classical No plays were long ago done by Arthur Waley, but they can scarcely be performed without the settings of the genuine No—the uniquely shaped stage, the gorgeous costumes and masks, and the musicians and chorus—often compared to classical Greek drama. Mishima's modern No plays gave the West a taste for No some time before it was possible for No companies to travel to foreign cities to perform the superb repertoire of the classical Japanese theater.

Some insight into Mishima's character is afforded by his attitude toward the classical No. While he was in Tokyo he would go “once a month without fail” to see a No play. But his attitude toward the No was peculiar; I do not believe that he really enjoyed No performances—during which he often fell asleep. A month before his suicide, he sent me a copy of an article on the No published in
This Is Japan
for 1971: “There [at the No] one may see in its original form a classical stage art that dates back to the fifteenth century, an art that, complete and perfect in itself, admits of no meddling by contemporary man . . . The No theater is a temple of beauty, the place above all wherein is realized the supreme union of religious solemnity and sensuous beauty. In no other theatrical tradition has such an exquisite refinement been achieved . . . True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys. It was because he knew this violent quality of beauty that Thomas Mann wrote
Death in Venice
 . . . The No cannot begin until after the drama is ended and beauty lies in ruins. One might liken this . . . ‘necrophilous' aesthetic of the No to that of works by Edgar Allan Poe, such as
Ligeia
or
Berenice
 . . . In No lies the only type of beauty that has the power to wrest ‘my' time away from the ‘exterior' Japan of today . . . and
to impose on it another regime . . . And beneath its mask that beauty must conceal death, for some day, just as surely, it will finally lead me away to destruction and to silence.”

Mishima also wrote plays for the Kabuki theater in the early 1950's—before he had established himself as a Shingeki playwright. He had a unique advantage over his contemporaries: he alone had mastered classical Japanese and knew sufficient of the difficult language used in Kabuki to write plays in this genre. A photograph taken in 1953 shows him seated with Mantarō Kubota, a grand old man of the Japanese theater with a special affection for Kabuki. Mishima is going over a draft of a play, perspicaciously racing through the script. Kubota looks over one shoulder with a perplexed expression of admiration on his face, while an acolyte of the old man regards the youthful prodigy between them from the other side. Mishima loved the Kabuki; the baroque bloodletting and fierce swordplay appealed to his instincts. So, too, did the theme of many a Kabuki play—that true love may end in a shinju, or double suicide. His attitude toward the No was reverent and a little constricted, even ridiculous; his admiration for Kabuki was unrestrained. Many of the great actors of the day were his friends and he spent long hours backstage conversing with them (his friendship with Utaemon has already been described). Mishima's Kabuki plays are of no great importance; during his life, however, they attracted much attention. In some ways the most successful was his last work for the theater,
Chinsetsu Yumiharizuki
(whose title is untranslatable). He wrote it in 1969 and himself produced it at the National Theater. Mishima was a good mimic and an able Kabuki actor. After this production, he made a record of the play in which he took all forty parts.

Mishima defined his approach to Shingeki, for which he wrote most of his forty plays, in his essay “The Play and I” (1951): “The modern play is far, far removed from the chaotic world of the novel, as I see it. It must look like a paper cathedral floating in the sky. No matter how naturalistic a play may be, the theme which makes for dramatic tension is such that it never suits the novel form. Strong emotion bears down upon the details and marches forward, treading the details underfoot.”

His first successful long play was
Shiro Ari no Su
(“The Nest
of the White Ant,” 1955), set on a Brazilian coffee plantation where an aristocratic Japanese couple have taken refuge with two servants—a chauffeur and his wife—after the war. The structure of the play, a tale of adultery and suicide attempts, is excellent, and
Shiro Ari no Su
—the hollow nest of a white-ant colony is the symbol of the empty lives of the Japanese émigrés—established Mishima's reputation as a Shingeki dramatist. Not long after completing this work, for which he won a dramatic award, Mishima declared: “My ideal life would be to write one long novel a year and no short stories at all. Or, if I have to, then nothing longer than twenty pages. Otherwise, I would devote my time to plays.” And on the relationship between his novels and his plays he commented: “Plays awaken a different part of my desire, that part which is unsatisfied by writing novels. Now, when I write a novel, I want to write a play next. Plays occupy one of the two magnetic poles of my work.”

Mishima never achieved his ideal. He continued to write two or three novels a year, and some of his most striking works—for example, “Patriotism,” the tale of hara-kiri—were to be longish short stories. For the remainder of his life, however, with the exception of the last year, he alternated continually between writing plays and novels. In 1956, for instance, he wrote
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
in the early part of the year and followed it with a play, which he completed in time for the autumn season—
Rokumeikan
. This drama, the most frequently performed of Mishima's plays, is not an interesting play, in my opinion.

Tōka no Kiku
(“Tenth-Day Chrysanthemums,” 1961) was the great triumph of Mishima's career as a dramatist. September 9 is a day of festival in Japan, on which exhibitions of chrysanthemums are staged. Tenth-day flowers would be too late for the show—they would be wasted. The chrysanthemum is a symbol of loyalty in Japan (the Imperial crest is composed of a thirty-two-petaled chrysanthemum). Thus, Mishima's play has as its theme wasted loyalty.