The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (47 page)

To be sure, the seventeenth-century neo-Confucian philosophy of Yōmeigaku came as a much later influence on Mishima than the other two main elements in the “gorgeous mosaic” of his death-wish—Emperor worship and homosexuality. Those two dated to Mishima's adolescence in the late 1930's and early 1940's. Yōmeigaku surfaced in Mishima's thinking a quarter of a century later, in the latter half of the 1960's. Yet there is a passionate ring to
Runaway Horses
—the second volume of
The Sea of Fertility
, where Mishima dwells upon Yōmeigaku as a source of inspiration to the right-wing assassin Isao—that impresses me now, far more than it did when I first read the book after Mishima's death, basically by its sincerity.

Historically, Japan was always prone to import new thinking from China. Yōmeigaku, the product of Wang Yang Ming, a Chinese thinker, was no exception. It burst upon some Japanese minds with the force of Reformation ideas breaking into England in the early sixteenth century, rousing men to action—not Mishima alone, of course, but also such stirring types as Heihachirō Ōshio, the early nineteenth-century magistrate of Osaka, who came out in support of rioting townspeople demanding rice from exploiting merchants, and went down in defeat. Mishima was a great admirer of Ōshio.

“The body is a vase full of empty space,” Mishima said on a visit to my home shortly before his suicide. “Ōshio touched ‘emptiness' and died.” Just so Mishima.

5

The true history of the human race is the story of human affections. In comparison with it, all other histories—even economic history—are false.

E. M. Forster

“Every individual life is also the story of Everyman,” Iris Ortigo has written, “and while it is the biographer's business to describe the passions, foibles and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work will be very thin if these individual traits are not also seen as part of a universal drama.” Probably I did not know Mishima well enough to bring out the Everyman in him, but let me try.

He moved me. He did so not only by his writing but by what he was. Ezra Pound has written that there is always a “residue” in an artist, something that is not found in his works and is ultimately more important. To me, Mishima represented that “disappearing Japan” that he alluded to in the remark he made at the end of his life. I am not thinking of the samurai world but of something that was there during wartime and has gone. Japan today has great prosperity, the fruit of decades of hard work. Yet there is no sense of where the nation stands. Mishima's close friend, the writer Kobo Abé, described the vacuum of authority in a short note that he wrote to introduce his novel
The Ruined Map
: “In this city we have a huge, drifting vessel. Let us call it the ‘Labyrinth.' Somewhere there must be a bridge, an engine room. But where? No one knows.” What Mishima and Abé had in common was a sense that Japan is adrift, out of control. Mishima abandoned himself to that motion. To that extent he was an Everyman in Japan. He sent out distress signals for years prior to his death, mainly in his writing but also in letters.

Already in the summer of 1968 he was writing to me to say that friends were telling him that suicide would be the only solution, given the straits his literary career was in. One can take that literally. One can say: Mishima that strange fellow was in trouble, his condition was pathological, etc. Yet this entire society
is in a pathological condition, some Japanese will say. He was a great artist and anticipated the impending crisis coming from deep within his society early on. Up to the mid-1960's, when the Olympic Games were held in Tokyo, this country was in creative ferment. Suddenly the Japanese froze, the eyes of the world were upon them! No more great movies, no more novels of substance, no more important art. A desert of creativity opened up before one of the most artistic people in the world. Fakers came forward. Dress designers posed as world-class artists. Architects posed as sculptors. If one goes today to see one of the great creations of the past, say the Katsura palace in Kyoto, one marvels at what the Japanese are capable of. And now? Mishima, looking ahead, sensed disaster in the offing.

Was he such an extreme right-winger as some maintain? Of course! I plead second to none as one who tracked his political fanaticism with my reportage on the Tatenokai when the Japanese press, as well as the foreign press, never bothered, yet in the end his political extremism affects me less than his friendship. In Mishima's last letter written to me on October 4, 1970, he warned that, for him, “the end of the world” was approaching (
sekai no owari
). I knew instantly that he would kill himself, and I knew how. He was a proud man who did not use words in vain. In his “terrible body-speech” Mishima clamored for an answer to the question: What does our nation represent? What he was trying to do in
The Sea of Fertility
was to draw a map—a panorama—of the modern era in Japan. If he failed, no one else has attempted it!

As I end this work, my mind goes back—I am still trying to understand his death—to the bizarre image that Mishima used to evoke his feelings in September 1970 (on the occasion of a dinner at my home, as recorded in the prologue of this work). Japan, he announced suddenly, is fated to decline. How so? The nation suffers from “the curse of the green snake.” His odd expression comes back to me. I hear him saying it now. I hear the lisp in his speech. “Green ssneeku. . . .” A hiss, a sibilant s, followed by a long e. Snakes are said to be auspicious in Japan, but not this emerald one—the image recurs and recurs in Mishima's writing as “a symbol of evil,” as the late Marguerite Yourcenar has shown.
*

“I wish that he had made the choice to ‘live on' (the verb form is
ikinokoru
). To go living was ‘the harder way,' Mishima insisted when he ordered the three members of the Tatenokai to go on with their lives and bear witness to the Shield Society's ideals after he and Morita had killed themselves on November 25, 1970. I wish he had chosen that harder way.”

H
ENRY
S
COTT
S
TOKES
Tokyo, Japan
August 1999

*
“This green snake, the symbol of an evil which has become irreversible, is evidently the snake which, visible in the pale light of dawn, escapes from Honda's burnt villa, while the survivors prudently seated at the far edge of the American-style swimming pool, whose waters reflect the barely extinguished ruins, smell the stench of burnt flesh and think of the drunken couple caught in the fire, and while the chauffeur goes down to the village to get them breakfast as if nothing had happened. It is also the snake which bites the foot of the inconsistent Chan and kills her. The image of the reptile representing Evil is as old as the world. One asks oneself, however, if this snake, more biblical perhaps than Far Eastern, does not come from Mishima's European reading. In any case, from the very first volume of the tetralogy, in the apparently simple anecdote of the lost emerald, the green of the gem already reflects the beast.” (
Mishima: A Vision of the Void
by Marguerite Yourcenar; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986; translated from the French:
Mishima ou la vision du vide
, 1980).

Glossary

A Note on Pronunciation
: Japanese is a syllabic language. All syllables are sounded and all are given approximately equal stress. Kimitaké Hiraoka, for example, is pronounced “Ki-mi-ta-ké Hi-ra-o-ka”; Shizué is pronounced “Shi-zu-é.”

AKAGAMI
The “red paper” which summoned men to serve in the Japanese Imperial Army during WW II. Equivalent to an (honorable) sentence of death in Japanese eyes.

A
NPO
The U. S.–Japan Security Treaty, the foundation of Japanese foreign policy after World War II. Came under fire from the left in 1960, when there were massive demonstrations in Tokyo.

BAISHAKU-NIN
The “go-between” at a formal Japanese wedding, who has no practical function but to sit in on the wedding, and call on guests to make speeches. He receives a small payment for these services, an honorarium.

BAKAYARŌ
The most insulting word in the Japanese language. Imprudently used, it may occasion murder. Rough equivalent in English: “mother-fucker”; but the word does not have as much force as
bakayarō
.

BU
The ethic of the sword, from which is derived Bushidō, the creed of the samurai, or the Way of the Warrior.

BUNBURYŌDO
The dual way of the literary and martial arts espoused by the proudest samurai in feudal times and by Mishima in modern times as a guide to his life.

BUNDAN
The Japanese literary “establishment,” far more inbred than comparable circles in London, New York, or Paris. Stifling, incestuous.

BUNGAKUZA
The most prestigious theatrical group in Japan, with which Mishima worked for a decade before quarreling with them in 1964.

BUNGEI
Literature. Bungei-bu means “literature circle.”

BUSHI
A word equivalent to samurai, from the root Bu.

CHŪŌ KŌRON
The leading intellectual magazine in Japan; publishers of Mishima's essay “Bunkabōeiron” (“On the Defense of Culture,” 1968). Politically hyper-cautious after attempt by right-wing terrorists in 1961 to assassinate the president of the organization.

DANNASAMA
Old-fashioned word for the head of a household, used ironically about himself by Mishima.

DEMOKURASHI
“Democracy,” used as an “amulet word” in post-war Japan.

FUNDOSHI
Loincloth of traditional cut worn by Mishima at photographic model sessions and on the last day of his life.

GAIJIN
Descriptive word meaning “foreigner”; also used in pejorative sense.

GAKUSHŪIN
The Peers School attended by Mishima between 1931 and 1944; still very much in operation, although the “aristocracy” disappeared under the American Occupation of 1945–52.

GEISHA
A female entertainer, not a prostitute; must be skilled in conversation and the arts, not only love-making.

GEKIBUN
A manifesto of the kind written by the rebel officers in the Ni Ni Roku Incident in 1936; their style was imitated by Mishima.

GENTEIBON
A luxury edition. Mishima's were expensive and some were in good taste; the best of them is
Barakei
(“Torture by Roses”).

HACHIMAKI
A headband worn by the Japanese as a sign of militancy. Originally, just a headband.

HAORI
A short jacket with short sleeves, worn with a kimono.

HARAGAKE
A bellyband, favored by yakuza, as in the last scene of
Confessions of a Mask
. Haragake I wore on Mt. Fuji was a modified version of the traditional band.

HARA-KIRI
Literally, “belly cut.” The word is not used by the Japanese, to whom it sounds ugly; but Mishima liked to use it.

HOSSO
The most intellectual of Japanese Buddhist sects; rare today. Only a few temples are Hosso.

JIEITAI
The Armed Forces in Japan, known in English as the Self-Defense Forces. Their constitutionality is in doubt, as Mishima stated.

JIKACHŪDOKU
Literally, “auto-intoxication.” However, the precise nature of Mishima's childhood illness is unclear.

KABUKI
Baroque, colorful theatrical form developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stylized; huge stage. The actors are men, and those who take female roles are known as onnagata.

KAISHAKU
The second stage of the classical hara-kiri, the decapitation.

KAMIKAZE
The “divine wind,” literally; the suicide pilots of 1944–45. The expression is derived from twelfth-century history.

KAPPUKU
The first stage of the classical hara-kiri, cutting the stomach.

KENDO
Japanese fencing in medieval armor; Mishima's sport.

KOAN
Buddhist riddle. Mishima enjoyed such Zen puzzles.

KŌBUN
The highly competitive examination for the Japanese civil service.

KOTO
A thirteen-stringed musical instrument, laid on the ground, plucked.

MEISHI
A visiting card, essential when meeting a stranger in Japan, filed for reference. Mishima refused to use one; could get away with it because he was famous.

MIKAN
The Japanese tangerine, less sweet than European and Californian varieties.

MITAMASHIRO
Small, sacred Shinto tablet carried by the leader of the Shinpuren Incident samurai.

MŌHITSU
Brush used for writing Japanese characters in black ink. Mishima planned to do this before his hara-kiri but lost interest.

NIGIRI-MESHI
Rice balls, a humble dish.

NINGEN SENGEN
The announcement made by the Emperor in a speech on New Year's Day 1946 in which he denied that he had any of the attributes of the Godhead. Infuriating to right-wingers.

NI NI ROKU INCIDENT
The most spectacular of the coups of the 1930's, during which rebel soldiers and officers occupied the center of Tokyo for a week from February 26, 1936. Personally crushed by the Emperor. The second of Hirohito's offenses, in the eyes of right-wing nationalists.

NIPPON ROMAN-HA
The Japanese romanticists, a small group of wartime intellectuals who believed in the “holy war” and whose central philosophical notion was “irony,” an idea never well defined by YojÅ«rō Yasuda, the leader of the group. Influential on the young Mishima.

NO
The noblest of the Japanese theatrical forms, reserved for the Imperial Court in feudal times.