The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (8 page)

Life at home was often difficult. The boy, as told in Mishima's autobiographical short story “Isu” (“Chair,” 1952), which describes the unhappy home life of a nine-year-old, would run crying to his mother when scolded by his severe grandmother. Ruthless scolding terrified and depressed him; but his grandmother would not let him stay with his parents and would insist that he return to her sickroom. Shizué could hardly bear the situation; on the morning of one such day she drew up her chair to a window on the second floor of the house and looked down at the sickroom where she knew her son must be sitting obediently beside his grandmother's bed. “I saw his small head for a moment while he was waiting for his grandmother and her nurse to return from the lavatory.” The boy's attitude was a little different from his mother's: her sympathy for him (he must long to run about and be active like other children) was mistaken in some ways; he liked being with his ill grandmother, who loved him so desperately. He had many of the instincts of a child, “but something within me responded to the darkened room and the sickbed—even now I work at my desk all night long and
wake up around noon.” As Mishima has it, while his mother was looking down at him and the nurse from the floor above, he was not sad; in fact, he was content. Only sometimes he felt a sudden hatred of the nurse, who “would play obscene jokes on me” (he does not say what these were); it frightened him that his mother might see. “It is hard for me to account for my hatred, for we usually want those close to us to know our pains and sorrows. I tried to hide the pleasure which I took in my pain.”

Shizué resolved to take her son back from his grandmother, who was increasingly bedridden; and one day she asked a manservant to smuggle the boy out of Natsuko's room while she was sleeping. It was late December 1934 and there was a cold wind; these were conditions under which the boy was not supposed to go outside, as he was still frail. Shizué took him to a photography studio to have his picture taken. “Afterward her hands were clammy with sweat and she spoke in an unusually pathetic voice. It seemed that she had made a plan to do something and then changed her mind on the way home.” A picture taken of the boy at nine shows a little fellow with a shaven head and the look of a wizened old man, prematurely aged; he has a sweet, sad expression.

The following year, the Hiraokas moved. The family split up. Mishima went with his grandparents to one house, and the rest of the family moved into a separate residence a few streets away. The practice in Japan is for grandparents to move out of their children's homes at a certain age; Jōtarō and Natsuko were following this tradition, known as inkyo. The time was approaching, however, when Natsuko's health would no longer permit her to care for the boy. Two years later, in March 1937, when he completed the elementary school of the GakushÅ«in, he rejoined his parents. They had moved to another house closer to the middle school of the GakushÅ«in, which is in a different part of Tokyo from the elementary school. Natsuko fought to the last. “Day and night my grandmother clasped my photograph to her bosom, weeping, and was instantly seized with a paroxysm if I violated the treaty stipulation that I should come to spend one night each week with her. At the age of twelve I had a true-love sweetheart aged sixty.”

After moving away from his grandmother, the boy honored the arrangement that he come and stay with her once a week; he
was also taken out on outings by her. Natsuko invited him to accompany her to the theater, and for the first time he went to the Kabuki, where he saw
Chūshingura
, the story of the Forty-seven Ronin who committed hara-kiri in 1704. They also went to the No. Mishima had an instinct for the theater which his family had encouraged, but until this time Natsuko had refused him permission to go to the Kabuki or to the No, on the grounds that they were unsuitable for a young boy; the scenes of bloodletting in the Kabuki may have been what she had in mind. These visits to the theater taxed Natsuko's strength; she was in her early sixties and years of illness had taken their toll. Gradually her health declined and Mishima's visits to her home became less frequent. In the autumn of 1938, her condition became serious, and she died early the following year, at the age of sixty-four.

Her influence on her grandson had been great. She had brought him up like a little Japanese girl but she had also taught him to be proud, instilling in him the samurai spirit of her ancestors. One of her sayings was: “You must be as haughty as you can be.” Mishima showed her influence in his formal manner. Even later in life he found it hard to unbend; he taught himself to smoke and trained himself to drink but he did not greatly enjoy tobacco and alcohol, which perhaps reflected Natsuko's wish to see him a paragon. But her enormously strong personality also repressed him: even as a successful adult, Mishima was vulnerable and sensitive behind his samurai mask. He was easily injured and easily influenced by others, and although apparently unable to love, he demanded love from other people; yet, when there was a response, he sheered away.

His grandmother shaped a dual personality. One Mishima had a strong character, with a capacity for making decisions; he directed his body like a machine, made plans for it, sought sexual gratification, and pursued material success. The other Mishima was in retreat from life. I knew a little of both sides of him, but nearly always it was the strong Mishima that one saw, not the shy, retreating child. On the last day of his life, he cast himself in the role of the strong samurai-like figure, but of course there was another side to his personality, or he would not have written
Confessions of a Mask
, a work which reveals weakness, a morbid
imagination, and a decadent sense of beauty in which eroticism and “blood” are joined.

Mishima's account of his aesthetic has a quality of desperate humor. He suffered in his adolescence “the anguish of a child provided with a curious toy.” At the age of twelve or thirteen he began to have erections, and Mishima's “toy increased in volume at every opportunity and hinted that, rightly used, it would be quite a delightful thing.” He was excited by muscular men, by the sight of swimming teams at Meiji pool, and by “the swarthy young man a cousin of mine married.” One is reminded of his summary of his aesthetic “Death and Night and Blood,” by many later passages in
Confessions of a Mask
, such as the series of images which excited his adolescent imagination: “Gory dueling scenes . . . pictures of young samurai cutting open their bellies, or of soldiers struck by bullets, clenching their teeth and dripping blood . . . photographs of hard-muscled
sumo
wrestlers of the third rank, and not yet grown too fat.”

The young Mishima turned his talent for drawing to strange ends when he was alone at home: “When the composition of a picture in an adventure-story magazine was defective, I would first copy it with crayons and then correct it . . . Then it would become the picture of a young circus performer dropping to his knees and clutching at a bullet wound in his breast; or a tight-rope walker who had fallen and split his skull open and now lay dying, half his face covered with blood.” The boy hid these illustrations in a drawer at home, but sometimes, as he sat in class at the GakushÅ«in, he had the horrifying idea that someone in the house might discover them; this blotted out all thought of schoolwork.

Mishima moved back into his mother's house at a delicate stage in his life. A family friend who has known the Hiraokas for thirty years described to me the effect upon the boy of being handed over to his mother at the very moment that his adolescence was beginning: “When Mishima started to live with his mother he fell in love with the poor, beautiful woman who had been so cruelly treated by her awful mother-in-law. As they had been separated for such a long time, the reunion between mother and son was scarcely normal. Mishima was at a most sensitive age, the start of his adolescence.” Later in life Shizué would refer to her son as a
“lover.” (After his suicide she said, “My lover has returned to me.”) Mishima reciprocated her feelings; he loved her deeply and probably never had a really close relationship with any other person. His mother, he said, “protected me ever since I was a child,” taking his manuscripts to established writers and giving him secret encouragement to pursue his writing. She hid her actions from her husband, as Azusa wanted his sons to follow the family tradition of government service and thoroughly disapproved of literature as a career for the boy. Shizué, the protector, aroused these feelings in her son: “My mother has been very good-looking since her youth. It may sound odd if I say so, but I was proud of her youth and beauty. I felt superior to others, when I compared my mother to those of my friends” (“Ajisai no Haha,” “Hydrangea Mother,” 1953).

After his death, Shizué wrote these impressions of her son's relationship with her after World War II:

“If ever I was in bed with flu or something, Kimitaké really worried about me, as if I were on the point of dying. He brought
hanebuton
[feather cushions] and ordered dishes from Hamasaku and Fukudaya [the best restaurants in Tokyo], proposed that I should have a Western-style lavatory or wanted to buy a new air-conditioner instead of the noisy one we had. While he was still single, he would sit by my bedside, working at his papers and taking care of me.

“Whenever flowers were sent to him, he would have the maid bring them over to me [from his house next door]. One day he admired one of my flower arrangements greatly; it was ‘Seven Flowers of Autumn.'

“If he went on a trip he would never fail to bring back
omiyage
[presents] for the family and for the maids. When he was traveling in Japan he would phone from wherever he was, on arrival, chat about the trip and say exactly when he was coming back.

“Once he proposed that we should go to Nara for the Saegusa Matsuri [a festival] saying that there would be masses of sasayuri [lily decorations]. [I could not go and] I was delighted when he brought back a single, thin, pink lily all the way from Nara, carrying it himself although he had masses of luggage that day.

“Kimitaké invited me to plays, foreign operas, interesting exhibitions
and so on, every month, and also to new restaurants. I saw all these places thanks to him.”

His mother was the first person to see his writing, which appeared regularly in the school magazine,
Hōjinkai Zasshi
, after the boy had entered middle school in 1937. He got on there much better than he had in the junior school, where his teachers had regarded his compositions as adventurous (he used rare characters and unusual constructions); and as his health improved steadily, his grades also got better. He was no longer an absentee at the Gakushūin.

His father, however, resisted Mishima's literary ambitions and thus came in conflict with the boy's mother. Azusa's ministry had sent Azusa to Osaka for two years, where he lived apart from his family, and on his return to Tokyo in 1939 he was disturbed to find how quickly his older son's interest in writing had developed. On one occasion Azusa stormed into the young Mishima's room and seized the manuscript he was working on, tearing it into pieces, which he scattered about the room. The boy wept and his mother comforted him with tea; thereafter Mishima hid his stories so that his father could not find them.

Shizué was literally her son's “protector”; it was not just a matter of encouraging him to write. Her own interest in literature stemmed from her scholarly family. She did not write herself but would have liked to, and Mishima was her proxy. Shizué did not have the pronounced character and definite literary taste of her mother-in-law (Natsuko had had a high regard for the ghostly, mysterious tales of Kyōka Izumi, a turn-of-the-century writer), but she was far more attuned to literature and the arts than was her husband. Azusa still wanted his son, who showed intellectual promise, to make a career in government. He could not imagine that anyone could make a living by literature, and in fact, before World War II, this was virtually impossible; writers needed patrons. Relations between father and son were never close, yet Azusa had an influence on the boy and exerted a steady pressure on him in his teens. As the oldest, and most gifted, child, Mishima was intended by his father to take the lead in the family; the other two children—Mitsuko, a strong, cheerful, unimaginative tomboy of a girl, and Chiyuki, a quiet, gentle boy—were supposed to follow.
Such is the role of the elder son in a traditional Japanese family.

One may only conjecture what would have been the reaction of his father had he known the thoughts and adolescent dreams of his oldest boy—who was to all appearances a normal, even exemplary, child. Ironically, Azusa played a part in Mishima's discovery of an image that haunted him all his life, St. Sebastian on the tree of martyrdom. “One day, taking advantage of having been kept from school by a slight cold, I got out some volumes of art reproductions, which my father had brought back as souvenirs of his foreign travels. [Azusa had been to Europe, to represent his ministry on fishery problems; and, like most educated middle-class Japanese, he was a sampler of Western culture.] . . . Suddenly there came into view from one corner of the next page a picture that I had to believe had been lying in wait there, for my sake.” It was a reproduction of a late Renaissance work, Guido Reni's
St. Sebastian
.

Mishima described the painting in
Confessions of a Mask
: “A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk of a tree. His crossed hands were raised high, and the thongs binding his wrists were tied to the tree. No other bonds were visible, and the only covering for the youth's nakedness was a coarse white cloth knotted loosely about his loins . . . Were it not for the arrows with their shafts deeply sunk into his left armpit and right side, he would seem more a Roman athlete resting from fatigue . . . The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh, and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy.” The boy's hands embarked on a motion of which he had no experience; he played with his “toy”: “Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication . . . Some time passed, and then, with miserable feelings I looked around the desk I was facing . . . There were cloud-white splashes about . . . Some objects were dripping lazily, leadenly, and others gleamed dully, like the eyes of a dead fish. Fortunately, a reflex motion of my hand to protect the picture had saved the book from being soiled.” This was the first occasion on which Mishima had an ejaculation. How deep an impression the image of St. Sebastian made on him! Twenty-five years later, Mishima posed for a photographer as St. Sebastian; he had “a coarse white cloth knotted loosely about
his loins” and three arrows planted in his suntanned torso, one of which was embedded in his armpit.