The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (43 page)

He makes an appointment at the Cancer Research Institute, and on the day before takes one of his rare looks at television. There is a shot of a swimming pool with young people splashing about in it. “Honda would end his life without having known the feelings of the owner of beautiful flesh. If for a single month he could live in it! He should have had a try . . . When admiration passed the gentle and docile and became lunatic worship, it would become torment for the possessor. In the delirium and the torment were true holiness. What Honda had missed had been the dark, narrow path through the flesh to holiness. To travel it was of course the privilege of few . . .”

After being examined for a week, Honda is told the result. “There seems to be no more than a benign growth on the pancreas.” The doctor adds: “All we have to do is cut it away.” Honda does not believe him; he fears it is malignant. He asks for “a week's reprieve” before going in the hospital.

He visits Tōru. Earlier in the novel, we have been given the five signs of the decay of an angel, the five marks that death has come. According to
The Life of the Buddha
, fifth fascicle: “The flowers in the hair fade, a fetid sweat comes from under the arms, the robes are soiled, the body ceases to give off light, it loses awareness of itself.” He seems to discover all these signs in Tōru. “There was no smell of flowers”; “the dirt and oil on the kimono had mixed with the sweat into the smell as of a dank canal that young men put out in the summer”; “the smile had left him”; “Tōru had abdicated control of the regions above his neck” . . . We see the decay of the angel. And we also see the decay of Honda, but it has taken much longer. (“He who had had no such awareness to begin with lived on. For he was no angel.”)

He also decides to fulfill a lifetime's ambition, for there may
be little time left—to see again Satoko Ayakura, Kiyoaki's mistress in
Spring Snow
, who has become abbess of the nunnery in which she sought refuge from the world sixty years before. Satoko is now eighty-three. In July 1975 Honda obtains an appointment with her and travels down from Tokyo to Kyoto, where he books into a hotel. The following day he sets off for Gesshuji, the nunnery. It is a fine summer day and Honda is driven by a chauffeur. He refuses the chauffeurs suggestion that he should be taken right up to the front gate of Gesshuji; his intention is to suffer the pains which Kiyoaki experienced sixty years earlier. Countless cicadas are singing in the woods. Honda goes slowly up a long flight of stone steps with his stick, sometimes stopping to fight the pain in his body; finally he reaches the door, covered in sweat. He clearly remembers the scene sixty years before; the years seem no more than a moment. He feels as if he were young once more and Kiyoaki were waiting for him, back at their hotel, with a high temperature and a dangerous fever. At the nunnery he is allowed to enter and is guided to a guest room. He expresses his profound gratitude to the nun who has escorted him and experiences great happiness as he reflects that the scandal about him in Tokyo has proved no obstacle to this meeting. At the same time he thinks to himself that if he did not feel shame and a consciousness of his evil and of death, he would not have come to the nunnery.

An aged nun enters the room, escorted by a younger nun who holds her hand. The old nun wears a white kimono and over this a deep violet robe (a
hifu
, or mid-length gown). This must be Satoko. For a while Honda cannot look directly at her; he feels tears welling in his eyes. She must really be Satoko, Honda thinks, looking at her face finally—at her nose and the shape of her mouth; she has even kept her beauty. Age has purified Satoko; her eyes are clear. The old abbess has the quality of a precious stone, crystallized in old age.

She admits she has seen his letter. It seemed “almost too earnest.” She thought “there must be some holy bond between us.”

Honda reminds her that, sixty years before, he had not been allowed to see her. He had been angry. “ ‘Kiyoaki Matsugae was after all my dearest friend.'

“ ‘Kiyoaki Matsugae. Who might he have been?' ” she replies.

“Honda looked at her in astonishment.

“She might be hard of hearing, but she could not have failed to hear him.”

She repeats her question, “ ‘Who might he have been?' ”

Scrupulously polite, he recounts his memories of Kiyoaki's love and its sad conclusion. When he has finished, the abbess says coolly: “ ‘It has been a most interesting story, but unfortunately I did not know Mr. Matsugae. I fear you have confused me with someone else.'

“ ‘But I believe that your name is Satoko Ayakura?'

“ ‘That was my lay name.'

“ ‘Then you must have known Kiyoaki.' ” He is angry. It had to be not forgetfulness but unabashed prevarication.

His persistence “passed a reasonable limit.” But she did not seem to resent it. “For all the heat, her purple cloak was cool. Her eyes and her always beautiful voice were serene.”

“ ‘No, Mr. Honda, I have forgotten none of the blessings that were mine in the other world. But I fear I have never heard the name Kiyoaki Matsugae. Don't you suppose, Mr. Honda, that there never was such a person? You seem convinced that there was; but don't you suppose that there was no such person from the beginning, anywhere? I couldn't help thinking so as I listened to you.'

“ ‘Why then do we know each other? And the Ayakuras and the Matsugaes must still have family registers.'

“ ‘Yes, such documents might solve problems in the other world. But did you really know a person called Kiyoaki? And can you say definitely that the two of us have met before?'

“ ‘I came here sixty years ago.'

“ ‘Memory is like a phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too distant to be seen, and sometimes it shows them as if they were here.'

“ ‘But if there was no Kiyoaki from the beginning—' ” Honda “was groping through a fog. His meeting here with the abbess seemed half a dream. He spoke loudly, as if to retrieve the self that receded like traces of breath vanishing from a lacquer tray.” Honda tells her: “ ‘If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no Isao.
There was no Ying Chan, and who knows, perhaps there has been no I.' ”

For the first time there was strength in her eyes. “ ‘That too is as it is in each heart.' ”

After a long silence, the abbess calls her novice. She wishes to show Honda the south garden. “It was a bright, quiet garden, without striking features. Like a rosary rubbed between the hands, the shrilling of cicadas held sway.

“There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had came, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing.

“The noontide sun of summer flowed over the still garden”—that is the last we know of Honda and the last line of
The Sea of Fertility
.

This is presumably the “catastrophe” Mishima referred to. Reincarnation is thrown into doubt; so is Hondas whole life. “Who knows, perhaps there has been no I.” The tetralogy has been dependent on the idea of reincarnation exemplified by the lives of Kiyoaki, Isao, Ying Chan, and, finally, Tōru. And then, at the close of the 1,400-page novel, Mishima seems to explode the notion that the three successors of the beautiful youth Kiyoaki are reincarnations; the theme which links the four books of
The Sea of Fertility
is questioned with classical irony. Such is my interpretation of the ending and of Mishima's use of the word “catastrophe” in reference to it.

It is an appropriate ending. Mishima himself did not believe in reincarnation and his writing on the subject in
The Sea of Fertility
is lacking in conviction; it was reasonable that he should doubt and even discard the idea at the end of his work. Through his emphasis on reincarnation in the earlier parts of the tetralogy, he works up to a climax in which he questions the entire structure of the story. He leaves his chief character at the very end of his long life doubting that it had any meaning. And yet nothing in the novel is that simple. Honda, it seems, has entered Nirvana, or extinction, in Buddhist terms—a cold and comfortless place “that had no memories,” a place akin to the surface of the moon. This is the ironic ending of the ironically titled
The Sea of Fertility
, and no doubt the exact interpretation will long be argued over. How like Yukio Mishima
to leave his last work of literature—and his last comment on life—this way. One can almost hear his familiar laughter behind the last pages: Huh-huh-huh.

After Mishima's suicide, events conspired to give me a privileged view of all that took place in Tokyo. I found myself the only foreign reporter at the press conference held by the Jieitai at the Ichigaya headquarters some fifteen minutes after Mishima's death there. On the following day I visited Mishima's home to leave a note for his widow, and to my surprise—I had expected the family would not want visitors—I was invited in. The Mishima home was full of white chrysanthemums and elegant women in black silk kimono, family or very close friends. I was the only non-Japanese person there and I stayed only a short time to chat with a friend of Mishima's. The private funeral service took place half an hour later, followed by cremation.

In December, in my capacity as a reporter, I attended a memorial meeting held in a hall at Ikebukuro, not far from the department store where Mishima's last exhibition had been staged; and in January I was present at the public funeral at the Tsukiji Honganji temple in Tokyo. The funeral was attended by over ten thousand people and was the largest of its kind ever held in Japan. Before the general public was allowed to look into the temple (no one from the public was admitted inside the building itself), there was a short service for about three hundred people. The altar was a beautiful sight—huge spheres made up of small white chrysanthemums, by which flickered tall candles. Members of the family were seated at the front with Yasunari Kawabata, who acted as principal mourner; behind them were the Tatenokai, all eighty members, in uniform. After the service, Kawabata, looking old and frail in his black suit, made a short, very restrained speech, asking those present to do everything they could to help the widow and children.

I was apparently the only non-Japanese invited to the funeral (if there were others, they did not come); and I was also the only Westerner on hand when the trial of the three survivors of the action at Ichigaya opened in the Tokyo District Court in March 1971. The authorities would not admit more than one foreign reporter
to the court, and he had to be someone with a better command of Japanese than I, as he was to take notes for the entire foreign press. (Takeshi Oka of
The New York Times
, a Japanese, accepted this responsibility.) To get into the court, I lined up with about five hundred other people at seven in the morning, taking my chances in the ballot that determined who would be admitted. The odds were ten to one against success, but I was one of those who received a piece of paper with a cross on it: I would be allowed in to the Mishima trial.

The beginning, as it happened, was the only interesting part of the trial, which lasted until April 1972 (and ended with sentences of four years' imprisonment for the Tatenokai students). For the first time, the two Kogas and Ogawa made a public appearance; they wore Western suits and open-neck shirts or polo jerseys and looked neat and alert. What amazed me was their size—they looked so
small
—and their seeming frailty and youth. The two Kogas had fresh, boyish faces and were quite short; Ogawa, the standard-bearer of the Tatenokai, was taller and had a toothbrush moustache that made him appear slightly older; but, beside my memory of Mishima, they all seemed very young and undeveloped. The three were asked to make speeches at the opening session. Furu-Koga, a youth with a sensitive face, proved to be the most eloquent: chauvinism, imperialism, and loyalty to Mishima were his themes. A change had taken place after Mishima's death: the chauvinistic tone of Furu-Koga's speech was in contrast to much that Mishima had stood for as a writer and as a man. I sensed that Mishima's occasional anti-foreign sallies in his novels and in his conversation had been blown up out of all proportion by his self-appointed right-wing allies. As I listened to the evidence in court, it seemed as ironic an ending to the life story of Yukio Mishima as
The Sea of Fertility
had seemed to his writing.

EPILOGUE

(1995–99)

1

The ceaseless labor of a man's whole life is to build the house of death.

Montaigne, Essays

Yukio Mishima died twenty-five years ago, but he is still, and perhaps always will be, the most widely translated Japanese author, thanks to his versatility and his energy. He is the only writer in Japanese history who expressed himself with equal ease in the four main prose forms: the novel, the short story, the essay, and the play—he wrote plays, in both modern and classical idioms, that were widely performed overseas. Was he, then, facile? New translations of his works keep coming forward, as if to belie any such judgment. At times he has seemed to be primarily a cult figure, full of bravura, a show-off. Then one rereads him and rediscovers a mind with a sharp edge and an unexpected capacity to move the reader. One of his elders in Japan gave Mishima phenomenally high marks. Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, told
The New York Times
two years later: “Mishima has extraordinary talent, and it is not just a Japanese talent but a talent of world scale. He is the kind of genius that comes along perhaps once every three hundred years.” The comment reminds one that even when Mishima was struggling as a writer—he had enormous trouble with
The Sea of Fertility
, his last novel, and couldn't avoid being “heavy-handed” at times, as
Marguerite Yourcenar noted—he seemed uniquely gifted to his admirers.

But a “genius”? Few Japanese critics would agree with that verdict today, and some would violently disagree, not least those to whom Mishima's politics were anathema, a non-literary argument, but one that is keenly felt. The consensus in Tokyo is that Junichiro Tanizaki (author of
The Makioka Sisters
), who died in 1965, was Mishima's superior, as were several other writers, and that Mishima himself was a minor artist. A similar opinion was voiced in the West twenty-five years ago by Gore Vidal, and, more recently, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Yet Mishima communicates to me an urgency appropriate to a world at risk, which no other Japanese writer has matched, with the exception of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the author of
Rashomon
, seventy years ago—Akutagawa also committed suicide. Not that there is intense debate over literary reputations in Japan at this time. Demand for works by Mishima and Kawabata flagged twenty years ago, so bookshop managers assert.
Manga
—strip cartoons—and video games are all the rage now. This
société sans litérature
is what Mishima surely had in mind when he predicted, late in life, that “Japan will disappear. It will become inorganic, empty, neutral-tinted; it will be wealthy and astute, a large economic power in a corner of the Far East.”