The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (9 page)

Mishima described his “first love” at the GakushÅ«in. It was an older boy, Ōmi; as
Confessions of a Mask
has it, “he surpassed us all in physique, and in the contours of his face could be seen signs of some privileged youthfulness excelling ours by far. He had an innate and lofty manner of gratuitous scorn.” Ōmi, according to a school rumor, had “a big thing”; Mishima duly reflected on this report: “It was like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me.” Mishima, who was fourteen, looked forward impatiently to summer: “Surely, I thought, summer will bring with it an opportunity to see his naked body. Also, I cherished deeply within me a still more shamefaced desire. This was to see that ‘big thing' of his.” He could not be the only admirer of Ōmi's person; the older boy filled his school uniform, a “pretentious” copy of a naval officer's uniform, “with a sensation of solid weight and a sort of sexuality.” And “surely I was not the only one who looked with envious and loving eyes at the muscles of his shoulders and chest . . . Because of him I began to love strength, an impression of overflowing blood, ignorance, rough gestures, careless speech, and the savage melancholy inherent in flesh not tainted in any way with intellect.” He worshipped all “those possessors of sheer animal flesh unspoiled by intellect—young toughs, sailors, soldiers, fishermen”—but he was doomed to “watching them from afar with impassioned indifference.”

One encounter with Ōmi led to Mishima's discovery of a fetish: white gloves. It was the custom at the GakushÅ«in to wear white gloves on ceremonial days. “Just to pull on a pair of white gloves, with mother-of-pearl buttons shining gloomily at the wrists and three meditative rows of stitching on the backs, was enough to evoke the symbols of all ceremonial days . . . the cloudless skies under which such days always seem to make brilliant sounds in midcourse and then collapse.” In the grounds of the GakushÅ«in stood a swinging log and the boys often had fights for possession of the log. One day Ōmi stood on the log waiting for someone to challenge him; he seemed “like a murderer at bay” to Mishima, rocking back and forth and wearing his white gloves. Mishima was drawn toward the log: “Two contrary forces were pulling at
me, contending for supremacy. One was the instinct of self-preservation. The second force—which was bent, even more profoundly, more intensely, upon the complete disintegration of my inner balance—was a compulsion toward suicide, that subtle and secret impulse.” He darted forward and attacked and the two boys struggled, white-gloved hands interlocked, and crashed to the ground together; during that brief struggle they exchanged a single look and Mishima felt that Ōmi had surely understood that he loved him. The two boys sat close together in the school ceremony that followed and time after time Mishima looked across at Ōmi, his eyes resting on the stains on his gloves; both boys had dirtied their white gloves on the ground. Mishima, however, after a short time, looked forward to the ending of this Platonic affair; he even felt an intense pleasure deriving from the foreknowledge that his love would be short-lived.

The end came in the late spring (of 1939). There was a gymnastics class outside, from which Mishima was excused because of ill health—he had had a touch of tuberculosis and had a continual cough. The boy went out to watch the class, in which Ōmi, a favorite of the gym instructor, was the star. He was called upon to show the class how to swing on a horizontal bar. The day was warm and Ōmi wore only a light undershirt. Mishima reflected that his strong arms were “certainly worthy of being tattooed with anchors.” A surge shot through Ōmi's body and in a moment he was suspended from the bar, on which he did a series of push-ups. There were admiring exclamations from the class and from Mishima, who had observed with astonishment that Ōmi had a plentiful growth of hair under his arms: “This was probably the first time that we had seen such an opulence of hair; it seemed almost prodigal, like some luxuriant growth of troublesome summer weeds . . . Life-force . . . it was the sheer extravagant abundance of life-force that overpowered the boys . . . Without his being aware of it some force had stolen into Ōmi's flesh and was scheming to take possession of him, to crash through him, to spill out of him, to outshine him.”

Mishima, sensing the reaction of the other boys, was filled with consuming jealousy; he told himself that he was no longer in love with Ōmi. The boy then felt the need for a Spartan course of self-discipline and became obsessed with a single motto: “Be
strong!” Riding to school by tram in the morning, he fixed other passengers with his gaze and stared them down, to prove his “strength.” And yet the spectacle of Ōmi on the bar had made a deep impression on him; the sight of armpit hair became erotic and when he took a bath the young Mishima would look for a long time in the mirror, surveying his scrawny shoulders and narrow chest and willing that one day he too would have luxuriant armpits. He was still small and undeveloped, weighing less than a hundred pounds at the age of fourteen. But slowly his armpits budded, “becoming darker and darker,” and soon became bushy enough to serve as an erotic image for the boy; when he indulged in his “bad habit” (masturbation), he would gaze fixedly on that portion of his anatomy.

Toshitami Bōjō, a senior student at the GakushÅ«in when Mishima arrived in middle school, remembered him as “a rather puny, pale boy. He already had his famous laugh. He read the classics and we were struck by his ability. Despite the difference of eight years in our ages, Mishima could follow everything that I said, and would point out weaknesses in my remarks. In a sense he has been ageless since then.” Bōjō was a member of the Bungei-bu, a literary circle at the school, and he became acquainted with Mishima when the boy submitted his first pieces for the school magazine, which the Bungei-bu controlled. Mishima's poems and short compositions won the admiration of his seniors in the Bungei-bu and he sought out their company. He was a snob and befriended boys from good families: Bōjō, whose ancestors had served at the Imperial Court for generations; Takashi Azuma, who was his closest friend at the school; and Yoshiyasu Tokugawa, a descendant of the family which had ruled Japan between 1603 and 1868, the Tokugawa era in Japanese history.

Academic brilliance—his grades had continued to improve greatly since he left the junior school—and precocious literary ability enabled Mishima to stand almost on an equal footing with these older boys, who published his work in every issue of
Hōjinkai Zasshi
, their magazine. One can see in these writings—in the short story “Sukanpo” (“Sorrel,” 1938)—the characteristics of Mishima's mature work: irony and elegance; alienation from the working class and preoccupation with the upper classes; and an insane delight
in cruelty. Bōjō was right when he said: “In a sense he has been ageless since then”; his tastes changed little after his early teens. The white gloves which he wore on the last day of his life, and which became slightly soiled with blood during the battle in General Mashita's office (one can see it in the photographs of Mishima speaking from the balcony on that day), were like those he and Ōmi wore the day of their fight on the swinging log.

The descriptions of Ōmi in
Confessions of a Mask
remind me of Masakatsu Morita, the student leader of the Tatenokai. “Something about his face,” wrote Mishima of Ōmi, “gave one the sensation of abundant blood coursing richly throughout his body; it was a round face, with haughty cheekbones rising from swarthy cheeks, lips that seemed to have been sewn into a fine line, sturdy jaws, and a broad but well-shaped and not too prominent nose.” The fate suffered by Ōmi in the book is not so different from that of Morita; he was made a human sacrifice, according to Mishima's fantasy. “Ōmi . . . had been betrayed and then executed in secret. One evening he had been stripped naked and taken to the grove on the hill . . . The first arrow had pierced the side of his chest; the second, his armpit.” The deaths of Ōmi (in the style of St. Sebastian) and Morita both offered the spectacle of blood pouring forth, and so did the hara-kiri of Mishima. Blood gave him a sexual thrill—this was one of his most important “confessions” and the core of his aesthetic. The beauty of the spilt blood of the samurai has been endlessly poeticized by the Japanese, who liken the shortlived blossom of the cherry tree to the life of the samurai. Mishima, however, romanticized death and blood in a manner foreign to the Japanese classical tradition.

The young Mishima's taste for the decadent is evident from his work “Yakata” (“Mansion,” 1939). In this story, almost the only one he left uncompleted during his life, he describes, in the setting of medieval Japan, a struggle for power between a satanic aristocrat, whose sole pleasure is murder, and his wife, who represents God. In “Yakata,” Mishima attempted to develop his idea of a “murder theater,” a fantasy that he subsequently described in
Confessions of a Mask
: “There in my murder theater, young Roman gladiators offered up their lives for my amusement; and all the deaths that took place there not only had to overflow with blood but also had
to be performed with all due ceremony. I delighted in all forms of capital punishment and all implements of execution. But I would allow no torture device nor gallows, as they would not have provided a spectacle of outpouring blood. Nor did I like explosive weapons such as pistols or guns. So far as possible I chose primitive and savage weapons—arrows, daggers, spears. And in order to prolong the agony, it was the belly that must be aimed at.”

In Mishima's aesthetic, blood was ultimately erotic. His imagination was aroused by images of blood and death: “The weapon of my imagination slaughtered many a Grecian soldier, many white slaves of Arabia, princes of savage tribes, hotel elevator boys, waiters, young toughs, army officers, circus roustabouts . . . I would kiss the lips of those who had fallen to the ground and were still moving spasmodically.” He contrived a special machine for executing his victims: “A thick board studded with scores of upright daggers, arranged in the shape of a human figure, which would come sliding down a rail upon a cross of execution.” He also had a fantasy of cannibalism; his most terrible dream was of the sacrifice of a boy—he chose an athletic contemporary from the GakushÅ«in—who was stunned, stripped, and pinned naked on a vast plate, on which he was carried into a banqueting room. There, Mishima began the feast: “ ‘This is probably a good spot to begin on.' I thrust the fork upright into the heart. A fountain of blood struck me full in the face. Holding the knife in my right hand, I began carving the flesh of the breast, gently, thinly, at first . . .”

This aesthetic owed as much to the West as to classical tradition in Japan—perhaps much more. In
Confessions of a Mask
Mishima says that he took his idea of the “murder theater” from the descriptions of the Colosseum in
Quo Vadis
. Mishima sought to incarnate a similar vision and found himself on a path that could lead only to death: to save himself, he would have had to abandon his romantic notion of beauty.

THREE

The Making of Yukio Mishima (1940–49)

I shuddered with a strange delight at the thought of my own death. I felt as if I owned the whole world.

Yukio Mishima,
Confessions of a Mask

1

Child of Ancient History

Mishima's main interests at fifteen were schoolwork and literature. He was still very much a “puny, pale” boy, as Bōjō had described him at thirteen, and he suffered from anemia—an illness which he privately attributed to his “bad habit”; but his health had improved immeasurably since his days in the junior school, and his concentration was good. He was almost at the top of his class of sixty boys, and he excelled in all subjects. But he stayed apart from his contemporaries; they had little to offer him, for his precocious intelligence put him in a different class from them. And his parents, who, pleading his ill health, insisted that he not spend the regulation two years boarding at the GakushÅ«in dormitory, encouraged his tendency to remain apart. Just as he had done when he first
entered middle school, he sought the company of older boys and teachers. Takashi Azuma, who was three years older, was already a close friend, and Fumio Shimizu, his
kokugo
(Japanese) teacher, encouraged him in both schoolwork and composition. Shimizu, who in 1938 had come to the Gakushūin from Seijō Gakuen School, was his best teacher, and the boy visited him at lunchtime and in the evenings when he had free time.

The young man's taste in literature had developed. He was reading the work of Junichiro Tanizaki, a leading Japanese novelist, and Rainer Maria Rilke, Raymond Radiguet, and Oscar Wilde. He hoped one day to emulate Radiguet, and Wilde's decadence—the play
Salomé
was a favorite of his—intrigued him. Mishima's aesthetic—the beauty of Death (the handsome youth who dies at his physical prime, as did Radiguet at twenty) and the beauty of Blood (the severed head of St. John the Baptist, kissed by Salomé)—was firmly established. And in the angels of Rainer Maria Rilke he found his Night. His “heart's longing for Death and Night and Blood” would not be denied.

His literary taste was extraordinary for a boy in Japan at that time; but then he was an exceptional schoolboy at an untypical school. No one at the GakushÅ«in forbade him to read Wilde or Radiguet because they were authors of inferior races (the official creed at that time was that the Japanese were inherently superior to all other peoples and destined to rule them). Tanizaki, of whom the militarists disapproved because of his interest in “bourgeois” life, was not criticized at the GakushÅ«in. Mishima also took instruction outside the school. His mother had obtained an introduction for him to a renowned romantic poet, RyÅ«ko Kawaji, and the boy called on him regularly to show him his compositions; he was still writing mostly poetry. Mishima liked working with Kawaji, for, as he mentions in his book
Shi o Kaku Shōnen
(“The Boy Who Wrote Poetry,” 1956), “I had feelings of rapture, of rich loneliness, of pure intoxication and of the fraternity of the external and inner worlds.” Most of his poems were cheerful little works in which the boy celebrated his enjoyment of a sensuous world of imagination. An exception was “Magagoto” (“Evil Things”), an evocation of Night: