The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (46 page)

I now come to a third aspect of Mishima's involvement in politics. Powerful members of the Establishment—the police, the armed forces, the politicians—have not been unhappy to let the homosexual
shinjū
theory of Mishima's motivation take center-stage. The more it has done so, the less scope there has been for public interest in what one may loosely call Mishima's ideology. He never defined his positions clearly, to my knowledge, on the central questions raised by Japan's defeat: the extent of the Emperor's personal involvement in the direction of the war effort, which was minimal; the precise roles of military and civilians in
the various war cabinets; and the minuet of the army and the navy ministers around the fateful decision to surrender on August 15, 1945—a decision that was left up to the Emperor to make, in the absence of an agreement among his advisers. If Mishima explored these matters in any depth, I am unaware of it. However, there was no doubt about his core position: it was that the Emperor and those advising him had some responsibility, however ill defined and hazy, for the course of Japanese military adventures in the 1931–45 period. That Mishima took this position is transparently clear from the most passionate writing of his career: his short story, “Patriotism,” his strange work
The Voices of the Heroic Dead
—and his off-the-cuff remarks (“Deep down at the core of my aesthetic is a huge hard rock, the Emperor”).

It is
de rigeur
in Tokyo today, among older officials, to say that Mishima had no understanding of the Emperor and was a marginal character of dubious morals—references are made to his homosexuality, especially when foreigners are spoken to. Yet his last “terrible body-speech,” to cite a term invented by the distinguished Japanese academic Masao Miyoshi, had as its focus the Emperor. Mishima's act was at root a classic act of remonstrance to his monarch and to Hirohito's advisers. There is a rule of conduct in Japan: if a disaster occurs, the top person in sight, for all that his actual responsibility may be minimal or merely nominal, must take responsibility. Not a few Japanese of Mishima's generation—and the Emperor himself is sometimes said to have taken this position three times (in 1945–6, in 1948, and in 1951)—believed that the Emperor should have abdicated in favor of his eldest son, Crown Prince Akihito, the present Emperor. Mishima never indicated, so far as I know, that he felt the Emperor should have abdicated. His criticism was quite different. It was that the Emperor should not have renounced his and his ancestors' claim to divinity, as he did in a historic address on New Year's Day 1946, in response to American pressure. “
Nadote Sumerogi wa hito to naritamashi
,” wrote Mishima in
The Voices of the Heroic Dead
(“Why did the Emperor have to become a human being?”), thereby disavowing the sacrifices of millions who had died, at least nominally, in his name.

A full and open discussion of these issues is still, to this day,
no easy matter in Japan. Fukashiro, the Asahi journalist I have mentioned, who counseled me in the writing of this book, once told me: “The Emperor is the ultimate taboo.” He meant that he could not write freely on the subject of the monarchy, nor could his newspaper. Hirohito was the world's, as well as Japan's last priest-king. Even after his death in 1989 and his son's succession to the throne, it is still not customary among Japanese to write about the Emperor. Mishima touched a taboo and thereby became taboo himself, and that is one main reason, I believe, why his case will intrigue his countrymen for centuries to come.

4

Suicide is always to be had without expense of thought.

Dr. Samuel Johnson

Most human beings see others clearly enough, but not themselves. With Mishima, it was the other way round. He was his own major subject, and he well knew what would befall him in life. Not long before he died, Mishima used these prophetic words in speaking to the older writer Jun Ishikawa, a gentle person as unlike Mishima as possible and yet his friend: “I (will) come out on the stage expecting the audience to weep, and instead they (will) burst out laughing.” That indeed was how the soldiers who heard his last speech would behave. Alvin E. Cullison, a veteran newspaperman living in Tokyo, once remarked to me that if ever another movie is made of Mishima's life “then it must end with the laughter of the soldiers, the final fade must show their laughing mouths.” Mishima had somehow intuited that he would be mocked and made a buffoon.

That
got Mishima going at the end—how he worried about posterity! He was busy sending off notes up to the very last moment. John Nathan, his other English-language biographer (Nathan has included much more material on Mishima's early life and his
early literature in his book—our two biographies are complementary), recorded that Mishima wrote last notes to his friends and to his family to say that he would die “as a soldier,” not as a writer. Mishima also wrote last letters, which were posted by his widow, to two Columbia University professors, Ivan Morris and Donald Keene. Short quotations from the letter to Ivan Morris appeared in the press, with references to the neo-Confucian philosophy Yōmeigaku and to Mishima's Bunburyōdō, his samurai-style simultaneous pursuit of the martial and the literary arts. Mishima worked hard at the end to bring in the Columbia academics, two leaders in the field of Japanese literary studies, on his side.

Rich, elegant, many times married Ivan was a natural object of Mishima's attentions on the former's visits to Tokyo in the 1960's—early on, Morris had translated what he considered to be Mishima's best novel,
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
. I can imagine Ivan's reaction—though he never described it to me—to the arrival of Mishima's “suicide letter” at the Morrises' flat on Riverside Drive in New York a couple of days after the event. Total consternation! His considered response came four years later, when he dedicated a long book he worked on in the early 1970's,
The Nobility of Failure
, a study of Japanese heroes down the ages, to Mishima. In his introduction Morris stated that Mishima's case fell four-square within the Japanese heroic tradition, as one who had struggled against Fate only to fail “ignominiously.” Morris distinguished Japanese heroes from Western ones. Our heroes had a measure of vulgar success,
something
had to go right for them, even if they died. The Japanese hero lost everything—family, friends, fortune, reputation; he didn't just die. Recognition would come long afterwards, decades or centuries later.

Decades, at least, have passed. Mishima has never received recognition within Japan, nor anywhere else, as a hero, except from Ivan Morris, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 1976, while he was traveling in Italy that summer. If Mishima has overt recognition in Japan today, it is from an embarassing quarter. Extreme rightists (or cranks, both perhaps) put up posters every year in unsalubrious spots, on the walls of subway entrances in Tokyo—always the same poster, Mishima making his last speech from
the Ichigaya balcony. He is not accepted by my Japanese family (I am married to a Japanese) nor by my friends as a hero. He is seen as a perplexing man, hard to forget, impossible to ignore, but absolutely not as a hero.

Long before Morris had completed his book, and while I was working on my 1974 biography, I had to face the question of Mishima's status—hero or not?—and to do so, I consulted others, older than I, with more experience of Japan, whose careers had spanned the 1930's in Japan as well as the post-war era. The prewar and post-war periods were so totally different! Mishima's life spanned both eras and had been “cut in two,” he once said, by the imperial surrender that ended the war. Without direct knowledge of the 1930's—without the experience that men like Richard Storry and Hugh Byas had—was it possible to get a fix on Mishima? I hardly thought so. Ivan Morris had not known that period at first hand, but a mutual friend of ours, then living in Tokyo, had. His name was Sir John Pilcher and he was British ambassador to Japan at the time.

Pilcher acquainted me with the pre-war period as seen through the eyes of a Tokyo resident living in the luxury of the British embassy compound at Hanzomon at the back of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. He told me how the servants of the crown would fan out in the streets along a route that Emperor Hirohito was due to travel and would spread white sand on the ground, lest the wheels of the vehicle carrying his august majesty should be polluted by a touch of common dust. Plainclothes agents, policemen, went out ahead of the Emperor, to ensure that all upper windows, including those in the embassy, were closed. No one should look down on the imperial head. That Mishima had opted to place himself in any relationship to the Emperor struck Pilcher as sheer foolishness, or
lèse majesté
, or a combination of the two—he wouldn't keep up a conversation on the subject. He had liked one of Mishima's books a lot, his novel
After the Banquet;
as for the rest, no.
After the Banquet
appealed to Pilcher because it showed a sense of humor, which most of Mishima's writing lacked. Such was a traditionalist's view, and I listened. I didn't necessarily agree with his judgments on Mishima's literature or on his suicide. Pilcher thereupon came up with an idea: why
not go down to Kyoto, where I could meet a friend of his, a Zen priest of high rank, who would give me a different perspective on Mishima?

That seemed a good idea. It would, among other things, give me a chance to inquire about Yōmeigaku, the neo-Confucian philosophy that Mishima touched on at considerable length in
Runaway Horses
, and which he alluded to in his last letter to Morris. Yōmeigaku was something I had to consider from a perspective other than Mishima's, if only because Mishima, I knew, had made no profound study of philosophy, and yet my friend Fukashiro had convincingly mentioned Yōmeigaku as one of the three keys with which to unlock Mishima's mind. Pilcher kindly sent a letter to his friend in Kyoto and, in short order, a date was set for me to pay a call.

It was a beautiful spring afternoon in 1972, when I arrived at the historic temple, a small part of a sprawling compound of moss gardens, walls that ran for hundreds of meters, half-glimpsed tile roofs, and old gates that did not open. Tiny ponds were tucked away everywhere.

As I got close to my destination, I realized that the whole nightmare of Mishima's death was locked up in me somewhere. If I needed a key to his mind, it was a matter of self-help. I
had
to know better how this disaster had come about.

“So you knew him?” The Zen master was a man of medium height. He had come into the tatami room where I waited, gliding in on bare feet, like a No player, but without
tabi
. “What did you think of him? You had letters?”

A handsome young bonze entered. He carried a tray with two old, mottled bowls, dark black-brown, heavy-looking, gnarled almost like old tree trunks.

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, facing the bowl put before me. “I know that I have to turn this bowl three times before sipping the tea. Is it to the left or to the right?” I asked helplessly.

“Just don't
drop
it,” cut in the master.

Crack!
His was the verbal staff, the rod that crashes down on the back of the dozing acolyte supposedly in rapt contemplation but actually asleep.

We drank our frothy green tea.

“Hm, I feel very sorry for him, very very sorry,” said the master. He spoke English with only the faintest of accents. He might have studied at Cambridge.

“I wish he had come to me,” he continued, “I could have helped him—only he hurried.

“He hurried so,” he repeated with slightly more emphasis.

There was silence in the room. The tatami stretched out for a hundred miles in every direction. We were seated on a plain, as it were, with a gentle breeze sweeping across a steppe. Green tea of the ceremonial variety makes one slightly drunk, taken on an empty stomach.

So, Mishima had “hurried.”

It was a severe judgment. I had not expected it. I had not known what to expect, but I had not expected the criticism. To “hurry” is the worst thing that you can do in Japan. “So-and-so hurried” means that So-and-so was careless, didn't prepare, wasn't considerate. And Mishima had “hurried.”

Silence. The master sat opposite me, with only the tatami between us. His kimono lapped down over his knees. Somewhere within earshot, perhaps only two feet away, the young bonze waited, unseen, for orders. Just so the army and police officers had been within feet of Mishima when he died. He had hurried, they had had no will to stop him.

But had he
needed
to hurry? I kept that thought to myself. This silence . . .

“You mentioned Yōmeigaku?”

The master's eyes stayed on my face as he raised the question. Impassive face, fine brown eyes. The kimono lapped round his knees; into it he tucked his hands . . .

“Yōmeigaku is very close to Zen,” he resumed. “ ‘Knowledge is action'; that's it, you may say.”

“To know and not to act is not to know”—the words Mishima had used to sum up Yōmeigaku came back to me. A creed for a bonze. It was not enough to know that the floor needed sweeping in the morning; you had to stir your stumps at 5 a.m. and
sweep
it.

Then it was time to take my leave of the priest. The one item of greatest importance that emerged from my meeting with him
was that the monk took Mishima seriously. He found fault with the way Mishima had “hurried”; Mishima had never really studied Buddhism very intensively, even when he needed to have done so most ardently, when working on
The Sea of Fertility
. Yet the Zen master had not dismissed Mishima as a “madman” or discounted him as a buffoon, as not a few in Tokyo were wont to do. I felt justified, as I rode the bullet train home to Tokyo, in taking Mishima seriously myself.