The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (42 page)

Mishima's plans entered a final stage in November, when the group met at Misty, a sauna club at Roppongi in central Tokyo. They took their baths in the grotto which is the pride of this club, and adjourned to the lounge at the top of the building, where Mishima gathered them around a table in a room usually reserved for mahjong gamblers, hidden behind smoked-glass screens. He had an announcement to make: “I appreciate your firm resolve to die, all of us together. But I must ask the two Kogas and Ogawa to ensure that the colonel does not also commit suicide following our example, and to hand him over safely to his men.” He added: “Morita must do
kaishaku
, the beheading, at the earliest possible moment. Please don't leave me in agony too long.” Thus Mishima reversed the plans for the three youngest members of the party to die; they protested vehemently and Mishima and Morita calmed them down. “It is much harder,” Mishima said, “to go on living than to die. What I am asking you to do is to take the hardest course of all.” The three students agreed to abide by his instructions. Three days later the group went to Gotemba near Mt. Fuji to say goodbye to other members of the Tatenokai, who were having a course there; the rest of the Tatenokai were not aware that this was a final farewell, when they all met at an inn in the town. Mishima poured toasts of saké for all forty people present, drinking with each student and Jieitai training officer present—and becoming very intoxicated for once in his life. On their return to Tokyo, Morita and the other three visited Ichigaya to check a parking place for the car on November 25, and made a report to Mishima. On November 12, during a meeting at a coffee shop called Parkside, a student hangout near Shinjuku, Morita asked Ogawa to do
kaishaku
for him. Ogawa agreed. On November 14 the group met again at Misty. Mishima said they would send their pictures and a copy of the
gekibun
, the last manifesto, to his two reporter friends, the NHK reporter Daté and the
Sunday Mainichi
journalist Tokuoka, on the morning of the twenty-fifth. The group also checked the
gekibun
. On the following day—meeting at a different sauna club—they discussed the timetable. It would require twenty minutes to take Colonel Miyata hostage and to get the Jieitai garrison to assemble; Mishima's speech would take thirty minutes; each of
the other four would speak for five minutes; and the meeting would end with
Tennō Heika Banzai
, “Long Live the Emperor.”

At the last moment there was a really major change of plan. On November 21 Morita visited Ichigaya to confirm that Colonel Miyata would be there on the twenty-fifth. He found that in fact the colonel would be away on maneuvers. At a meeting at a Chinese restaurant in the Ginza, Mishima decided that they would take hostage General Mashita (commander of the Eastern Army), after all. He phoned Mashita's office at Ichigaya and made an appointment with the general for 11 a.m. on November 25. That day and the following day, a Sunday, the four students bought supplies (Mishima was busy with his family): rope with which to tie up the general; wire and pincers for the barricades; cotton cloth on which to write their demands, to be hung from the balcony; and brandy and a water bottle. Mishima gave them the money for these purchases. On the evening of the twenty-second, Morita—who had been worrying that he would be unable to behead Mishima properly—asked Furu-Koga to act in his stead if he should fail. Koga, a trained swordsman, agreed.

On November 23 and 24 the group met in room 519 at the Palace Hotel. They held eight complete rehearsals of their plan, which was that Mishima would introduce the four students to the general, explaining that he was going to give them awards; he would then show the general his sword. When Mishima said: “Koga, a handkerchief”—Mishima would need it to wipe the sword before he showed it to the general—Chibi-Koga would step behind the general and pin him down. Furu-Koga and Ogawa would help him. Mishima and Morita would set up barricades at the doors. If the Jieitai officers attempted to enter, they would bar the way. Then they would read their demands to the officers. Once a large crowd of soldiers had gathered in front of the main building, Mishima would make a speech from the balcony, and the four others would also introduce themselves briefly. Thereafter, Mishima and Morita would commit hara-kiri. The others would behead them.

They cut rope into suitable lengths, wrote their demands on the cotton cloth, and also wrote farewell tanka—31-syllable poems (which were written by soldiers before going into battle in the
Second World War). Mishima rehearsed his speech with the television switched on in the room so that he could not be heard from outside; and finally the men packed up their supplies. Among these were wads of cotton wool. Morita asked Mishima what they would be used for; the latter smiled and said that the two of them must pack their anuses with cotton wool, so that they should not evacuate their bowels when committing hara-kiri. Finally, Mishima phoned his two reporter friends, telling them to have cameras ready for the morrow, and also armbands; they must be ready by 11 a.m. He told them that he would call again at ten the following morning to give them final instructions.

That evening, the twenty-fourth, the group had their farewell party at a little restaurant called Suegen in the Shimbashi quarter. Suegen is a traditional restaurant in an unusual part of central Tokyo. The surrounding bars and little restaurants face narrow streets and stand two stories high; yakuza and bar girls inhabit the quarter, where there is a famous Shinto shrine, the Karasumori Jinja. There is only one large room at Suegen and the Tatenokai party took the room for the evening. It has tatami floors and a large kakeji (calligraphy) done by Ichiro Hatoyama—“Revere the Gods and Love Mankind,” a saying of the nineteenth-century general Takamori Saigō. Mishima ordered the meal:
otsumami
(small brown beans),
tori-arai
(raw slices of chicken with ice slivers),
tori-soupni
(chicken stew with Welsh onions and Chinese cabbage), and rice and beer.

After the meal, the group drove to Mishima's home. He left them there and they went on to Morita's lodging in the Shinjuku district. After dropping Morita, the three younger men continued to Chibi-Koga's lodging, where they spent the night.

Mishima then paid a short visit to his parents. Shizué was out and Mishima found himself alone with his father. Azusa grumbled about his son's smoking habits—Mishima was chain-smoking Peace cigarettes—and then Shizué came in. Mother and son talked for a short while and then Shizué saw him out: “I watched him leaving and I couldn't help thinking how tired he looked, how stooped was his back,” she said later. In his own house, Mishima sorted through his papers until late. He signed the final installment of
The Decay of the Angel
, dating it November 25, 1970. He also sealed two
letters to foreign scholars—Ivan Morris and Donald Keene. And on his desk he put a short note: “Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever.”

P
ART
F
OUR
T
HE
D
ECAY OF THE
A
NGEL

Finishing the long novel [
The Sea of Fertility
] makes me feel as if it is the end of the world.

Yukio Mishima in a letter to the author
October 1970

Why Mishima chose November 25 as the day he would die is a matter for speculation. One view is that he chose that day because it was the anniversary of the death of the nineteenth-century hero Shōin Yoshida. During my visit to Shimoda in August 1970 I discussed Yoshida with Mishima, mentioning that there was a large statue of Yoshida in a shrine close to the inn where I was staying—the Mishima shrine (so named after a shrine in the town close to Mt. Fuji from which Mishima had derived his nom de plume almost thirty years before). In conversation, however, Mishima showed little interest in Yoshida, and I doubt whether he was deeply interested in the man.

My guess is that Mishima chose to die on November 25 because that was the day on which he was to hand over the last installment of the fourth book of his long tetralogy,
The Sea of Fertility
. It was the deadline for the manuscript, and Mishima as a rule stuck rigidly to his schedule. He had calculated that at the end of November he would deliver the final section of
The Decay of the Angel
, the fourth book in the tetralogy, to the magazine
Shinchō
. The magazine was publishing the work in installments and had been receiving each installment on or about the twenty-fifth of each month. Mishima had in fact completed the final part by August 1970, for another guest at Shimoda, Donald Keene, had seen it at that time. Thus Mishima could plan far ahead so that his death would coincide with the handing over of the conclusion of
his last book, and his literature would officially end on the same day as his life. It was typical of Mishima that he controlled his last actions to the last detail. The man who maintained a smiling face throughout his last summer holiday at Shimoda, while secretly planning his bloody end, faithfully kept his literary schedule to the last.

What kind of book was he able to write at the same time that he was planning his death? It might be seen as an attempt at justifying and explaining what he did—a last message to posterity—but that is only one aspect of a very complex book. It certainly reflects his desperate state of mind in the last year of his life: it ends with a “catastrophe,” as Mishima put it to the literary critic Takashi Furubayashi on November 18 in the last interview he ever granted. Replying to a question about his use of the theme of reincarnation in
The Sea of Fertility
, Mishima said: “One of the reasons [I used the theme] is technical. I thought the chronological novel outdated. Using [the idea of] reincarnation, it was easy to jump in time and also in space; I found that convenient. But, with the notion of reincarnation, the novel became a fairy tale. That is why I argued the philosophy of reincarnation so strongly in the early part of
The Temple of Dawn
. This was a preparation for the fourth volume. In the last book I wrote episodes only and went straight through to the catastrophe.” Mishima had written the book rapidly—once he had made up his mind to die in 1970—and it rounded off not only his view of reincarnation but his view of the course of a human life. And the catastrophe? The whole of
The Decay of the Angel
is the answer to that question.

The action of this last novel (which Knopf published in April 1974 in a translation by Edward Seidensticker) takes place in Japan in the early 1970's, starting in the early summer of 1970 and ending in the late summer of 1975. Honda is once again a main character and is again related to the chief protagonist, another boy of remarkable physical beauty—Tōru. The plot is very simple in comparison with the first three volumes of the tetralogy. Honda, the aging lawyer, adopts Tōru as his son; Honda is seventy-six and the boy is sixteen. The two live together in Tokyo, where Tōru, a highly intelligent youth, passes his entrance examinations for Tokyo University. As Honda becomes older and Tōru grows more aggressive,
the old man waits for Tōru's death at the age of twenty, for the boy has the physical mark on his body to show that he is the reincarnation of Kiyoaki and the others—three moles on the side of his chest. Tōru, however, looks forward to inheriting Honda's money. He becomes vicious and finally assaults Honda with a poker, inflicting superficial wounds. Honda can do nothing about the situation—he fears that if he makes a complaint to someone, Tōru will have him shut up in a home for the senile. At the end of
The Decay of the Angel
, Tōru and Honda both endure misfortune. The boy, tormented by Keiko, Honda's old friend and the ex-countess who in
The Temple of Dawn
was the lover of Ying Chan, tries to kill himself by drinking industrial spirits, but only succeeds in blinding himself, a symbolic incident which takes place just before his twenty-first birthday.

At twenty-one, could he be the true reincarnation? The movements of the heavenly bodies had left Honda aside. “By a small miscalculation, they had led Honda and the reincarnation of Ying Chan into separate parts of the universe. Three reincarnations had occupied Honda's life and, after drawing their paths of light across it (that too had been a most improbable accident), gone off in another burst of light to an unknown corner of the heavens. Perhaps somewhere, some time, Honda would meet the hundredth, the ten thousandth, the hundred millionth reincarnation. There was no hurry . . .” Tōru lives on miserably in his foster father's home. Honda himself is publicly disgraced. He is caught by the police after an incident in a public park where he has been peeping at lovers, and it is reported in the press: “Famous Judge Turned Peeping Tom.” He also begins to suffer from pains in the abdomen. “General debilitation and rhythmical attacks of pain brought new powers to think. His aging brain had lost all ability to concentrate, but now it returned, and pain even worked aggressively upon it, to bring certain vital faculties other than the purely rational to bear. At the age of eighty-one Honda attained to a wondrous and mysterious realm that had before been denied him. He knew now that a more comprehensive view of the world was to be had from physical depression than from intelligence, from a dull pain in the entrails than from reason, a loss of appetite than analysis.” He had by himself “reached that honing of the senses, achieved by few in
this world, to live death from within. When he looked back upon life from its far side other than as a journey over a flat surface, hoping that what had declined would revive, seeking to believe that pain was transient, clinging greedily to happiness as a thing of the moment, thinking that good fortune must be followed by bad, seeing in all the ups and downs and rises and falls the ground for his own prospects—then everything was in place, pulled tight, and the march to the end was in order . . .”