The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (34 page)

To this day, the role of the Emperor in Japan is a mystery. According to the law—the postwar Constitution drafted by General MacArthur and his advisers in 1946 and ratified the following year—the Emperor has no temporal authority. He is the symbolic head of state; and his functions are limited to opening sessions of parliament and to making occasional public appearances. His powers were drastically cut back under the Allied Occupation of 1945–52—first, by the declaration called the ningen sengen, in which he formally disclaimed the cardinal beliefs of twentieth-century Japanese imperialism; and second—implicitly—by the treatment accorded him by the U.S. authorities. The Emperor was not consulted by the occupying administration on matters of state, nor was he treated as a figure with anything more than nominal power. His children, also, were subject to unprecedented treatment; his eldest son, the Crown Prince, had an American governess. This was all in accordance with the United States understanding of
demokurashi
in Japan. The marriage of the Crown Prince to a commoner in 1959—this was the first occasion on which a future Emperor or even an Imperial prince had married outside the traditional aristocracy—seemed to mark Japanese acceptance of the system of government introduced to the nation during the Occupation. There has in fact been a considerable change in the position of the Emperor from pre-World War II to postwar Japan. The postwar Emperor has been a popular figure rather than a divine symbol of authority. The prewar practice of keeping the Emperor hidden within his palace except for rare occasions on which he emerged as a man on a white horse has been abandoned. The change might be compared to that which took place in the seventeenth century in England between the reigns of Charles I and Charles II; the Emperor of Japan still has a very special atmosphere about him, but he is no longer a figure of ultimate authority armed with divine right.

The change, however, has not been a complete one. Many aspects of the Imperial system are still not open to the public; for example, the Emperor's position cannot be discussed in the press. Mishima's attitude toward this taboo was aggressive. He was in fact
more outspoken on the subject of the Emperor than any other Japanese since the end of the Pacific War. Sometimes he lauded the Imperial system; sometimes he castigated the incumbent, Hirohito. At times he appeared to be an out-and-out nationalist; on other occasions he seemed to deliver a deadly assault on the Emperor. My impression is that Mishima's imperialism—contradictory as it was—had its roots both in a genuinely felt worship of the Emperor system and in his personal aesthetic. His aesthetic, I believe, was the strongest influence on Mishima, and the well-springs of his decision to commit hara-kiri—traditionally, an action undertaken by a samurai wishing to demonstrate his loyalty to his lord (who could be the Emperor)—were individual and were connected to his long-held aesthetic: “My heart's longing for Death and Night and Blood.” Mishima was an imperialist, of course, but he was a great deal more than that—a cold and self-obsessed creature given to fits of passion; a novelist, a playwright, a sportsman. He was a man with many sides to his character, and his imperialism cannot be regarded as uniquely central; Emperor-worship was only one facet of Yukio Mishima.

The River of Body, Mishima remarked, flowed into the River of Action. The best illustration of what he meant by this is to be found in his practice of the martial art of kendo, fencing with a blunt Japanese lance, a
shinai
. He took up kendo in 1959, and this sport, he asserted in an article published in
Sports Illustrated
in December 1970, just after his death, “makes me what I am.” As a child at the GakushÅ«in school he had hated kendo, which had been compulsory. He had been embarrassed by the “rude, barbaric, threatening cries” which the combatants emit, yelling at the tops of their voices, as they circle one another, clad in medieval armor. “Now, thirty years later,” he wrote, “I feel quite otherwise.” The kendo cries had become pleasant to him; he had fallen in love with them. “This sound is the cry of Nippon itself buried deep within me . . . a cry that present-day Nippon is ashamed of and desperately tries to suppress, but it breaks out, shattering all presence. It is something bound up with memories that are dark, something that recalls the flow of new-shed blood.” The cries of kendo men, Mishima said, called up “the ghost of Nippon Past,” which
had been long confined in chains. (His support of the martial art earned him the gratitude of the experts in Japan, and he was duly awarded a very high rank in kendo. His fifth
dan
was bestowed on him in August 1968, much as an eminent statesman receives a doctorate and tasseled hat from an ancient university—his kendo form was not good, he insisted.)

Mishima's nostalgia for Nippon Past—a romantic ideal—was catalyzed by the political events of the year 1960. His father, Azusa Hiraoka, said after Mishima's death that the riots and disorders of the summer of 1960 played a part in turning Mishima's mind toward romantic imperialism. The evidence is impressive. Mishima took a keen interest in political events for the first time in the postwar years after the onset of the Anpo (U.S.–Japan Security Treaty) demonstrations in the spring of 1960—the worst civil disturbances in postwar Japan; up to this time he had shown no response to political developments in Japan the country, not even to the spectacular changes of the early 1950's when the Occupation ended and the Japanese Communist Party made an abortive effort to prepare the way for violent revolution. During the Anpo riots, Mishima went out into the streets, observed at first hand, and reported for the national press. Commenting on the position of Nobusuké Kishi, the unpopular right-wing Prime Minister who was thrown out of office as a result of the Anpo disturbances, he recounted in the
Mainichi Shimbun
how he had spent an entire night on a balcony of the building next to the Prime Minister's office looking down on the place while crowds surged about it. He thought of “the thin, lonely old man [Mr. Kishi] who must have been sitting in the darkness of the official residence, all windows of which were shrouded by night. Kishi is a tiny, tiny nihilist whom people instinctively dislike because they can identify themselves with such a person . . . How easily the psychology that ‘somehow I don't like Kishi' could be transformed into the psychology that ‘I like somebody somehow.' While one hates a tiny nihilist, one may accept a nihilist on the grand scale such as Hitler.”

Shortly after the Anpo disturbances ended, Mishima wrote the short story “Patriotism.” Mishima was an excellent critic and a fair judge of his own writing. He remarked of “Patriotism” that it contained “both the best and the worst features of my writing”;
it may also be regarded as representative of his entire oeuvre. “Patriotism,” which Mishima wrote in the early autumn of 1960, is the story of a young Imperial Army lieutenant at the time of the Ni Ni Roku Incident of February 1936. The two principal factions in the Japanese Armed Forces at the time were both expansionist, wanting Japan to pursue a policy of foreign conquest. The Kōdō-ha, the Imperial Way faction, favored a strike north against the Soviet Union; and the Tōsei-ha, the Control faction, favored a strike south against Britain and other European colonial powers. The conflict came to a head with the Ni Ni Roku Incident, which was triggered by Kōdō-ha officers seeking to forestall seizure of power by their Tosei-ha rivals. The action was spurred on by a plan for the dispatch of the First Division, many of whose officers were Kōdō-ha members, to Manchuria—this would have greatly reduced the strength of the Kōdō-ha in Tokyo. The Kōdō-ha adherents, led by a few young officers—Takatsugu Muranaka, Asaichi Isobe, Teruzo Ando, Yasuhide Kurihara, and others—decided to strike against the authorities before that happened. Early on the morning of February 26, with the capital under a fresh fall of snow, the officers mobilized 1,400 men and seized control of the center of Tokyo after assassinating three leading members of the government. The action, they declared, was carried out on behalf of the Emperor and was aimed at his evil advisers. After a brief hesitation Hirohito himself ordered them to surrender. The revolt collapsed in four days.

The protagonist of Mishima's story, Lieutenant Takeyama, is an officer in a regiment stationed in Tokyo. He is a friend of the rebel officers and sympathizes with their aims, but he is left out of the plans because he is newly married. After the outbreak of the Ni Ni Roku, he is ordered to lead an attack on the rebels. His way out of the moral dilemma created for him by this order is to commit hara-kiri. His wife, Reiko, must also kill herself. In “Patriotism” (one of the short stories collected in
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
, published by New Directions, with the translation of “Patriotism” by Geoffrey W. Sargent), Mishima described the hara-kiri of the young man in extraordinary detail. This is probably the most elaborate account of the samurai rite in the whole of Japanese literature, and it is all the more striking in that the
author appears to endorse the ideology of Lieutenant Takeyama and his associates. The hara-kiri, subtly idealized by Mishima in the story, appears as a grisly act justified by a high ideal:

“By the time the lieutenant had at last drawn the sword across to the right side of his stomach, the blade was already cutting shallow and had revealed its naked tip, slippery with blood and grease. But, suddenly stricken by a fit of vomiting, the lieutenant cried out hoarsely. The vomiting made the fierce pain fiercer still, and the stomach, which had thus far remained firm and compact, now abruptly heaved, opening wide its wound, and the entrails burst through, as if the wound too were vomiting. Seemingly ignorant of their master's suffering, the entrails gave an impression of robust health and almost disagreeable vitality as they slipped smoothly out and spilled over into the crotch. The lieutenant's head drooped, his shoulders heaved, his eyes opened to narrow slits, and a thin trickle of saliva dribbled from his mouth. The gold markings on his epaulettes caught the light and glinted.

“Blood was scattered everywhere. The lieutenant was soaked in it to his knees, and he sat now in a crumpled and listless posture, one hand on the floor. A raw smell filled the room. The lieutenant, his head drooping, retched repeatedly, and the movement showed repeatedly in his shoulders. The blade of the sword, now pushed back by the entrails and exposed to its tip, was still in the lieutenant's right hand.

“It would be difficult to imagine a more heroic sight than that of the lieutenant at this moment, as he mustered his strength and flung back his head.”

One other remarkable feature of the story is that Lieutenant Takeyama kills himself first, leaving Reiko to follow him in death afterward. She stabs herself in the throat with a knife, having firmly secured her skirts so that she shall not be found dead in an indecorous posture. The reason given for the husband taking precedence instead of the wife dying first, as would have been normal, is that “it was vital for the lieutenant, whatever else might happen, that there should be no irregularity in his death.” The point is not easy to follow. What is clear is that the officer wants to be
watched
as he performs hara-kiri. “Patriotism” emerges, from this detail alone, as a work by an abnormal man.

Mishima wrote twice more about the Ni Ni Roku affair. In his play
Tōka no Kiku
, and in his unclassifiable work
Eirei no Koe
(“The Voices of the Heroic Dead,” 1966), an elegy for the war dead, and also an assault upon Emperor Hirohito for deserting the souls of the departed by intervening in the Ni Ni Roku Incident and by announcing his ningen sengen in 1946, Mishima endorsed the ideology of the rebel officers of 1936. He put the three works—“Patriotism,”
Tōka no Kiku
, and
Eirei no Koe
—together in one volume, which he called his Ni Ni Roku trilogy. In a postscript to the trilogy he described his conclusion, which I condense a little here:

I wrote “Patriotism” from the point of view of the young officer who could not help choosing suicide because he could not take part in the Ni Ni Roku Incident. This is neither a comedy nor a tragedy but simply a story of happiness . . . If they [husband and wife] had waited one more night, the attack on the Imperial Army [the rebels] would have been called off and the need for their deaths would have decreased, although the legal authorities would have caught up with him [Takeyama]. To choose the place where one dies is also the greatest joy in life. And such a night as the couple had was their happiest. Moreover, there was no shadow of a lost battle over them; the love of these two reaches to an extremity of purity, and the painful suicide of the soldier is equivalent to an honorable death on the field of battle. Somewhere I obtained the conviction that if one misses one's night one will never have another opportunity to achieve a peak of happiness in life. Instrumental in this conviction were my experiences during the war, my reading of Nietzsche during the war, and my fellow feeling for the philosopher Georges Bataille, the “Nietzsche of eroticism . . .”

Surely some great God died when the Ni Ni Roku Incident failed. I was only eleven at the time and felt little of it. But when the war ended, when I was twenty, a most sensitive age, I felt something of the terrible cruelty of the death of that God, and this was somehow linked with my intuition of what had happened when I was eleven. For a long time I was unable to understand the connection, but when I wrote
Tōka
no Kiku
and “Patriotism” there appeared a dark shadow in my consciousness as I wrote—and then it disappeared again without taking definite shape. This was a “negative” picture of the Ni Ni Roku Incident; the positive picture was my boyhood impression of the heroism of the rebel officers. Their purity, bravery, youth, and death qualified them as mythical heroes; and their failures and deaths made them true heroes in this world . . .