The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (6 page)

2

Birth

Yukio Mishima was born Kimitaké Hiraoka on January 14, 1925, in the Tokyo home of his grandparents, Jōtarō and Natsuko Hiraoka, with whom his parents lived. The Hiraokas were an upper-middle-class family—Jōtarō had been a senior civil servant, and his only child, Azusa, Mishima's father, was also a government official; and in Japan, which has a Confucian tradition, government service is considered the most honorable employment. The high social standing of the Hiraokas had been underwritten by Jōtarō's marriage to Natsuko, who came from an old family; Kimitaké's grandfather was the son of a farmer, but his humble origin had not counted against him in the late nineteenth century, when there had been great social mobility following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The Meiji Restoration, in which Japan opened her doors to the West (as the cliché has it), had ushered in a period of social instability and great commercial and industrial progress. In this new era, men of ability had been promoted regardless of birth, and Jōtarō had attained a high rank, serving as a provincial governor in Japan and as the first civilian governor of Karafuto (Sakhalin), the island to the north of Japan which has since reverted to the Soviet Union.

A week after the birth of Kimitaké, the first child of Azusa and Shizué Hiraoka—Mishima's mother was the twenty-year-old daughter of a Tokyo school principal—the family held the traditional naming ceremony, the Oshichiya. “On the evening of the seventh day,” Mishima recorded in
Confessions of a Mask
, “the infant was clothed in undergarments of flannel and cream-colored silk and a kimono of silk crepe with a splashed pattern. In the presence of the assembled household my grandfather drew my name on a strip of ceremonial paper and placed it on an offertory stand in the tokonoma.” (The tokonoma is the alcove in the traditional Japanese room and is reserved for precious objects.) Almost all of Mishima's childhood memories, however, were unhappy. He did not like the house where he was born, which was in the Yotsuya district of Tokyo: “There were two stories on the upper slope and three on the lower, numerous gloomy rooms and six housemaids.” He blamed his grandfather. Jōtarō had resigned from his post as governor of Karafuto, taking responsibility for a scandal in the administration, and “thereafter my family had begun sliding down an incline with a speed so happy-go-lucky that I could almost say that they hummed merrily as they went—huge debts, foreclosure, sale of the family estate, and then, as financial difficulties multiplied, a morbid vanity blazing higher and higher like some evil impulse.”

THE HIRAOKA FAMILY

Mishima's grandfather attempted to be a businessman after his return to Japan, but he was not successful; he was obliged to sell his ancestral estates at Shikata, near Kobe, where his forefathers had farmed since the seventeenth century. By the time of Mishima's birth in 1925, the Hiraokas had been reduced to living “in not too good a part of Tokyo, in an old rented house.” Mishima described this residence, which no longer stands, as “a pretentious house on a corner, with a rather jumbled appearance and a dingy, charred feeling. It had an imposing iron gate, an entry garden, and a Western-style reception room as large as the interior of a suburban church.”

Mishima was undoubtedly gloomy about his childhood. The causes of his unhappiness were not limited to Jōtarō's failures and the decline in the Hiraoka fortunes. The fundamental problem was the tension in the family home, which is to be attributed to Natsuko, Mishima's grandmother; she “hated and scorned my grandfather. Hers was a narrow-minded, indomitable and rather wildly poetic spirit.” Natsuko was much the strongest personality in the Hiraoka family and she overrode not only Jōtarō but her son Azusa. Her hate of her husband was generated by scorn for his lack of pride; he lacked the samurai spirit of her ancestors; he was a jolly man with a frivolous streak, which Mishima inherited. Natsuko had a second reason for detesting Mishima's grandfather: “A chronic case of cranial neuralgia was indirectly but steadily gnawing away her nerves and at the same time adding an unavailing sharpness to her intellect. Who knows but what those fits of depression she continued having until her death were a memento of vices in which my grandfather had indulged in his prime?” Natsuko, according to Takeo Okuno, a Japanese biographer of Mishima, had contracted syphilis from Jōtarō; her brain was affected by the disease. The unfortunate woman also had a gouty hip and had to use a stick to walk.

The birth of Kimitaké galvanized Natsuko. Disappointed by the commonplace success of her son—Mishima's father had obtained a post in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and was nothing more than a highly competent civil servant—she pinned
all her hopes on her first grandson. She resolved to take personal responsibility for his upbringing and virtually kidnapped the little boy from his mother: “My parents lived on the second floor of the house. On the pretext that it was dangerous to bring up a child on an upper floor, my grandmother snatched me from my mother's arms on my forty-ninth day.” In a traditional Japanese family, a mother-in-law had powers of life and death over her son's wife; and Shizué, only twenty years of age and frail in health, could not rescue the baby, whose bed was placed in his grandmother's sickroom, “perpetually closed and stifling with odors of sickness and old age, and I was reared there beside her sickbed.” A nursemaid changed his linen and saw to his needs during the night.

Shizué's position had not been entirely usurped. She still fed the child, but Natsuko kept her in her place, as Mishima's mother recalled after his death (in
Segare Mishima Yukio
, “My Son Yukio Mishima,” a memoir by his parents published in
Shokun
magazine in 1972). “We lived upstairs, while Mother [Natsuko] kept Kimitaké with her all the time, ringing an alarm every four hours, loud enough for me to hear upstairs. Kimitaké's feeding times had to be precisely every four hours; and the duration of the feeding sessions was exactly fixed in advance.” Then Shizué was sent upstairs again. This situation existed for a year and her hopes of winning back the child were dashed when an accident of precisely the kind her mother-in-law had predicted actually happened.

“One day,” according to Shizué, “Mother was out at the Kabuki and Kimitaké fell down the stairs, banging his head and losing a good deal of blood. We took him to the hospital and called Mother on the telephone. When she returned home, she shouted out: ‘Is he past help?' Still to this day I cannot forget the terrifying look on her face.” Mishima describes the scene only a little differently in
Confessions of a Mask
:

“When she arrived my grandfather went out to meet her. She stood in the hallway without taking her shoes off, leaning on the cane she carried in her right hand, and stared fixedly at my grandfather. When she spoke it was in a strangely calm tone of voice, as though carving out each word:

“ ‘Is he dead?'

“ ‘No.'

“Then, taking off her shoes and stepping up from the hallway, she walked down the corridor with steps as confident as those of a priestess . . .”

Natsuko had occult powers and thereafter she frustrated all Shizué's plans for regaining possession of her child. Curiously, she brought up Kimitaké as a little girl, not as a boy. He was always attended by a nursemaid, although this annoyed him greatly; he was not allowed to run about in the house, but he was forbidden to go out; and he must stay on the ground floor all the time, usually with his grandmother or the maid. He was not permitted to play as he wanted. “Kimitaké liked to brandish rulers and other long things [as we read in his mother's account], but Mother always confiscated these on the grounds that they were dangerous. Kimitaké would obey her meekly. I felt so sorry for him.”

These restrictions were imposed for Natsuko's sake: “Mother's hip made her very nervous of sounds, especially when the pain started. Toys like cars, guns which clicked metallically, and so on, were all banned.” But she countered with hostility any threat to her control of the child: “When it was bright outside, I would try to take him out. But it was always in vain. Mother would wake up like a bolt and forbid it. So Kimitaké was kept inside in her dark, gloomy room, full of sickness and ill health.”

In February 1928, Mishima's mother had a second child, a girl whom they named Mitsuko. Natsuko made no attempt to take over the girl and it was nonsensical that one child should be confined to the ground floor and the other to the second floor; that, however, is what happened.

If Shizué had hopes of recovering Kimitaké, they were destroyed by the onset of a grave illness. On New Year's Day 1929 the little boy had a sudden collapse. According to his mother, “Kimitaké became ill with ‘auto-intoxication'
[jikachudoku]
 . . . The illness was critical and all our relatives gathered at the house. I put together his toys and clothing, ready to go into the coffin. My brother, a doctor at Chiba Medical University, came in at that moment; and he suddenly exclaimed: ‘Look! He's urinating; maybe he'll be all right.' And after a while he urinated a lot more and my
brother said: ‘He will live now.' ” “Auto-intoxication” is not a Western term, only a direct translation of
jikachudoku
. Kimitaké's symptoms and treatment were these: “I vomited something the color of coffee. The family doctor was called. After examining me he said that he was not sure I would recover. I was given injections of camphor and glucose until I was like a pincushion. The pulses of both my wrist and my upper arm became imperceptible.” According to a Japanese pediatrician, Dr. Kiyoshi Nakamura, “the illness is usually found in children who are sensitive, intelligent, and overprotected, who have been trained by their mothers to be ‘good' boys or girls.” The cause of Kimitaké's illness is unknown, but my guess is that Natsuko, who had a violent temper, was responsible for the attacks, which the child suffered thereafter at regular intervals.

He grew into an unusually delicate child, as one may see from a photograph of him in the summer of 1929. Kimitaké has been taken for a rare treat, an outing to a park. He is seated on a donkey and appears strangely absent, and collapsed, like a balloon running out of air; he lolls forward, dressed in a sailor suit, his chin on his chest. The child looks as if he will topple off his perch any second.

3

Fairy Tales and Fantasies

Mishima described how his illness “struck about once a month, now lightly, now seriously.” There were many crises. “By the sound of the disease's footsteps as it drew near I came to be able to sense whether an attack was likely to approach death or not.” Natsuko rarely allowed him out of the house; and his brief encounters with the world beyond the iron gates of the Hiraoka home assumed great importance. The tiny, pale boy was preternaturally sensitive and he endowed anyone he met, however briefly, with significance. “My earliest memory, an unquestionable one, haunting me with
a strangely vivid image, dates from about that time [when he was four] . . . It was a young man who was coming down toward us, with handsome, ruddy cheeks and shining eyes, wearing a dirty roll of cloth around his head for a sweatband. He came down the slope carrying a yoke of night-soil buckets over one shoulder . . . He was a night-soil man, a ladler of excrement. He was dressed as a laborer, wearing split-toed shoes with rubber soles and black canvas tops, and dark-blue cotton trousers of the close-fitting kind called ‘thigh-pullers' . . . The close-fitting jeans plainly outlined the lower half of his body, which moved lithely and seemed to be walking directly toward me. An inexpressible adoration for those trousers was born in me . . . His occupation gave me the feeling of ‘tragedy' in the most sensuous meaning of the word.”

The “tragedy” was Kimitaké's. He was eternally excluded from the lives of ordinary men and women—for example, the drivers of
hanadensha
(trams decorated with flowers) and the ticket collectors with rows of gold buttons on their tunics, whom he saw on his rare excursions. His grief for the night-soil man was, in reality, profound concern about himself. “The so-called ‘tragic things' of which I was becoming aware were probably only shadows cast by a flashing presentiment of grief still greater in the future, of a lonelier exclusion still to come.” Later in life, Mishima was to struggle against his alienation; he would identify with ordinary Japanese men—taxi drivers, bartenders, soldiers. But he could not escape his upbringing; as a Japanese proverb has it: “A man's character is determined by the age of three.” Mishima was brought up with a false impression of Japanese society; being much influenced by Natsuko's talk of her “old family” and by the snobbishness of other members of the household, he did not know how egalitarian Japan was. He had a picture of Japanese society in which families such as the Matsudairas, from which Natsuko's mother was descended, and the Tokugawas, who had ruled Japan for 250 years, were pinnacles surrounding the Emperor, the highest being.