by Hiroaki Sato
It was some time after the Hiraoka family moved to a less grand house, in 1919, that the uncontrollable aspects of Natsuko’s nature and behavior began to surface.
“It was none other than my father who brazenly gave my mother fierce, ferocious hits,” Azusa wrote, using an odd baseball metaphor. “Mother’s sisters gave birth to numerous children, one after another, but she had only one, me. It didn’t take long for her dark speculations to reach the thought that Father must have been afflicted with Tripper”—German for gonorrhea—“in view of his routine behavior. Not just that, she herself came down with ferocious sciatic gout, which tormented her for the rest of her life. I remember hearing her whisper to her doctor that Father was to blame for that one, too.”27
One outlet Natsuko found for her frustrations was her uncle Yoriyasu while he was alive. “I suffer so much because of Hiraoka, I think of this, think of that, sleep less all night, and you don’t mean to make fun of me on that, do you?” she would tearfully remonstrate with him. “I’m not suffering like this because I like it. Who’d like to do anything like this . . . ?” That’s how Mishima recreated Natsuko’s words in “The Lecher.”
“Her status as the oldest daughter in a large family, her excessive pride in family lineage, my father’s transcendental conduct, her sciatic gout—with all these combined, her spiritual and physical pains drove her to terrible hysterics,” Azusa adds after speaking of Sadatarō imparting gonorrhea to Natsuko. Or, as Mishima wrote in Confessions: “She was stubborn, indomitable, a maddening sort of poetic soul. A chronic brain neuralgia ate into her nerves in a roundabout, steady manner. At the same time, it added useless clarity to her intellect. Who knew that these paroxysms of insanity that continued until her death were the memento of my grandfather’s sins in his prime?”
“This large-scale typhoon” that was Natsuko “blew into every corner of our house, creating a disaster whose damage you could only imagine,” Azusa recalled. “Well, it was in such family circumstances that my son grew up. You could say that was my son’s destiny.” It was odd for him to talk about his son as if he had no part in his growth, but he was right. The one affected the most by Natsuko’s conditions was the young Mishima Yukio.
The Birth of Kimitake, Mishima Yukio
In April 1924 Azusa married Hashi Shizue. The bride’s father, Kenzō, was the principal of the Kaisei Middle School. Born to a samurai of the Kaga (Maeda) fiefdom, he was adopted by Hashi Kendō, a professor of Chinese classics at the Kaga fief school Sōyūkan set up in 1853 to teach Western military tactics, English, and Chinese classics. Kendō’s father, Ippa, was a Chinese scholar and calligrapher who was permitted to take a surname and carry swords; he was, in other words, given samurai status.28 Shizue was a quiet woman who loved to read.
The marriage was arranged. But the go-between naturally did not tell Shizue and her family about the turmoil and difficulties of the Hiraoka household. After the marriage, her mother-in-law’s behavior in particular would come to the nineteen-year-old woman as a great shock.
At nine on the evening of January 14, 1925, a small boy weighing less than 5.3 pounds was born and named Kimitake. It was the fourteenth year of the Taishō Era, but on December 25 of the following year the Tennō, Yoshihito, died. Crown Prince Hirohito ascended the throne, and the era name was changed to Shōwa. As a result, even though the first year of Shōwa lasted only for seven days, Mishima would feel, and say, that his life began with the new era. (The era name Taishō, “broad justice,” comes from a passage in The Book of Changes: “In proceeding broadly, take up justice as a means for doing so. That is the way of the subcelestial realms,” and Shōwa, “bright harmony,” from a passage in The Book of Documents: “All people illuminated, cooperation and harmony for all countries.” As has been pointed out by many, the Shōwa Era would utterly fail to live up to what those who selected the name meant it to be.)
“On the seventh night, my grandfather, before the assembled family, wrote my name on votive paper, put the paper on a dedicatory tray, and placed the tray in the alcove,” Mishima wrote in Confessions. The house “had many dark rooms and there were six maids. Along with grandfather, grandmother, father, and mother, a total of ten people walked about and slept in this house, which creaked like an old cabinet.” Mishima could have added that four of the six maids were dedicated to Natsuko.29 Sadatarō and Natsuko took up the first floor, Azusa and Shizue the second.
It was an old, rented two-story house in Yotsuya—in those days one of the thirty-five “wards” (ku) of Tokyo, later subsumed into Shinjuku Ward. To leap a decade forward, on May 21, 1935, the man-of-letters Nagai Kafū, Natsuko’s distant relative who lived not very far away, had some errand to run and walked through the Yochō-machi street where Shizue and her son would take a walk from time to time. Kafū had lived in Kalamazoo, New York, Lyon, and Paris, from 1904 to 1908, and despised everything Japanese for a few years after his return to his country, as was the wont of many Japanese with similar experiences. Then he made an about-face and became an extoller of Japanese traditions, professing dislike for anything Western.
That day in Yochō-machi, he saw that his former residence, which he had moved out of, back in 1918, and had subsequently become the residence of the late novelist and Shakespearean translator Dr. Tsubouchi Shōyō, was still standing after the great earthquake of 1923. “The road remains as it was in the past,” he wrote in his diary. But the area had totally declined in the preceding two decades.
Automobiles cannot go back and forth. It’s so narrow you must make way each time a bicycle comes by. The filth of the shops that continue on. There are a couple of dubious bars. I look at shopping women; some in dubious western clothes with both legs exposed; some in lined kimono with Tang wrinkle finish with a sloppy narrow sash, hair unkempt, only white powder painted thick on their faces. The town looks somehow obscene, and couples who come and go all strike me as illicitly married.30
Kafū noted it was near where Ichigaya Prison used to be. He might have added that the street was lined with cheap inns where male prostitutes plied their trade. Mishima would take it to go to school until his parents moved.
On the forty-ninth day after the child was born, Natsuko took him away from Shizue “with the pretext that it was dangerous to raise a baby on the second floor.” The period of forty-nine days after death is Buddhist postmortem limbo in which the dead soul’s fate remains undecided. Whether this had anything to do with Natsuko’s action is not clear, but with that act began Mishima’s days of incarceration as a child. “In grandmother’s sickroom that was always closed up, suffocating with illness and the odor of old age,” Mishima wrote, “I was raised with my bed laid next to her sickbed.”
Grandmothers taking care of their grandchildren were common, but Natsuko was different because of her illness, hysteria, and willfulness. In his school composition “The Shrine Officiator,” Mishima noted that those around her accepted this last trait.31 There probably was no other choice as regards the other manifestations of her being. In “The Forest in Full Bloom,” the sophisticated tale of dreams and ancestral longings he began at age fifteen and completed a year later and that became the title story of Mishima’s debut collection, Mishima described Natsuko’s disease.
Grandmother suffered neuralgia and had spasms constantly. As if she were possessed, her unavoidable spasms would start. As her low moans began, invisible waves of spasms would fill the space above the small pieces of equipage of the sickroom such as the tobacco tray, the medicine cabinet, and the incense burner. Then, a brief moment, the whole room would be enclosed by a tension as if paralyzed, and as it swiftly receded like a mountain mist, the whole room—the incense burner, the small box, the medicine bottle—was uniformly filled with the low, painful, monotonous groans. Such moans and groans, as if they were the room’s own, must be something someone else could never imagine. But as the spasms continued a whole day or, in some cases, for many nights in a row, a more obvious sign would appear. That is, The Disease
had spread throughout the whole house as if he owned it.
In an autobiography he wrote in classical language when he was nineteen, Mishima hinted that Natsuko decided to make her physical problems more pronounced as she took him away from his mother. “The neuralgia that would become her chronic illness just surfaced about that time and, unable to do anything as she pleased, began to take to bed.”32 Whether she feigned her illness to some degree or not, there is no question Natsuko behaved in a manner so tyrannically willful as to be comical were it not for the fact that it entailed an unweaned baby—until the child grew to be an adolescent—and a defenseless young mother. And neither her husband, Sadatarō, nor her son, Azusa, would intervene.
The situation was made worse by her refusal to allow the child to be exposed to sun and air.
“My mother-in-law wouldn’t let Kimitake stay far from her pillow,” Shizue wrote in what may be called her joint remembrances of Mishima with her husband. “She always carried a pocket watch with her and every four hours, punctually, would come to the second floor and ring the bell. Breastfeeding Kimitake had to be done every four hours, and the time for it was also set. As the hour grew close, my breasts would become full and painful. At such times, I would worry that Kimitake must be very hungry, and I wept many a time, anxious to hold him in my arms and allow him to drink his fill.”
Natsuko would come up to Shizue’s room on the second floor with a maid carrying the baby in her arms. While Shizue nursed him, she timed it, watch in hand, standing over the mother and child. And as soon as the time was up, she would snatch the baby from her and take him to her room downstairs.
When Mishima grew old enough to play with other children, the rule Natsuko laid down was “no boys.”
“It was dangerous to have boys for his playmates, mother said, and she would call together in her room three older girls she handpicked,” Shizue continues. “As a result, the games were naturally limited to playing at housekeeping, origami, and wood blocks. Any other games that boys might like were out of the question.” Shizue sometimes even tried to “steal” her own baby. “When it was bright outside but dark and damp in the house, I would quietly try to take him out for some air and to expose him to some sunlight. Mother would suddenly wake and forbid me to move outside, forcing me back to the dark, gloomy room, its sliding doors closed up, where her sickbed lay.”33
It was a trying period for Shizue, to state the obvious. “If Kimitake said he wanted me to do something for him or indicated that he did, mother would harshly scold him and me. If for any reason he put ‘Mother,’ which is the way he addressed me, before ‘Grandmother,’ which is the way he addressed my mother, that would immediately put her in a foul mood. This was because, it seemed to me, she thought she was the central figure in everything in the household and everyone had to obey her orders.”
Natsuko’s irascible, pettifogging, sickly demands that extended to the kinds of food that should be fed to the infant Mishima, not to mention the enforced female companionship, girls and maids, took their toll. By his own assessment at age nineteen, Mishima, born prematurely and feeble, “suffered from autointoxication just about twenty times,” from the time he was four or five to eleven and twelve. “Once I barely escaped death after an asphyxia that lasted for one and a half hours.” That happened when he was five, and everyone expected him to die.34 The upshot: “I ended up acquiring an odd personality: working myself into a fury at the drop of a hat or into uncontrollable excitement at the most trivially happy thing.”
Natsuko also instilled into the prepubescent Mishima not just the sense that he was from distinguished samurai families, but perchance something more, which, along with her contempt for her husband, may well have been the very source of Mishima’s overt disregard of Sadatarō. In “The Forest in Full Bloom,” the narrator says, almost insouciantly: “It’s a rare thing, but I have both samurai and aristocratic families among my ancestors.” Historically, marriages between members of samurai and aristocratic families were not rare. But because there apparently was no aristocratic blood in Mishima’s genealogy, this narrative aside led Nosaka Akiyuki to speculate, in his book on Mishima, that Natsuko may well have fallen in love with Arisugawa Taruhito’s adopted, unusually good-looking son, Takehito, while serving with the princely family. It was an affair that had to end tragically, Natsuko knew, and it did, but she nonetheless intimated to Mishima that he had that blood in him, Nosaka imagined.35
Natsuko’s Influence
Still, it may not do to simply dismiss Natsuko as a monstrosity, a psychologically warped product whose sense of class was damaged by a marriage to one of the peasant class, aggravated by the gonorrhea she suspected her husband had given her and the financial ruin he had brought to the family. After all, it was Natsuko who without any fuss—utterly ignoring the usual considerations of whether this or that is appropriate for a child of this age or that age—took Mishima deeply into the world of literature and theater. And it was Shizue who had a sympathetic understanding of her mother-in-law, however overbearing and petty her conduct, for all the pain and anxiety she had to go through for a dozen years.
It was obvious to Shizue that Natsuko wanted to instill in her grandson as much as she could the upperclass elegance she believed she had inherited and acquired. Many of her son’s social virtues came straight from Natsuko, Shizue judged: his “speech, etiquette, and courtesy, his habit of returning obligations and favors, his insistence on being punctual, and his punctiliousness.” The words the child Mishima used for “mother” and “grandmother” in Shizue’s account above, for example, are o-kā-sama and o-bā-sama, both formal and courteous. Such politesse in speech would create some awkward situations for Mishima after he became part of the more plebian world at large.36 It would also win awe and admiration from some of those with whom he associated.
There is no question that Mishima favored Natsuko over Sadatarō. Take a short essay he wrote for the Asahi Shinbun in 1962, when he was thirty-seven. Entitled “Meiji and Bureaucrats—Meiji in the Middle of Tokyo,” it’s a gem by a writer who knows how to make a point in a limited space. He begins by noting that his father still pronounces certain words in the way Tokyo people used to during the Meiji Era. He then says: “My late grandmother”—Natsuko had died nearly a quarter century earlier—“as befits a daughter of a shogunate aide-de-camp was stern in training me on diction.” As a matter of fact, “the trope of [my] plays greatly owes to the conversations that are mannerly, precise, and entertaining besides of the Meiji people that I have heard since infancy.”
But in the concluding paragraph Mishima turns against his grandfather, the quintessential Meiji man, albeit indirectly. “The one thing I dislike about Meiji is that it was an era in which the ‘bureaucrats’ and the ‘bureaucratic odor’ came into being that have continued to this day,” he writes. “Meiji bureaucrats thought so little of culture, in essence because they were rustics and could not comprehend cultural refinement. And the spirit that approves of that incomprehension casts its shadow even now.”37 Was Natsuko an embodiment of cultural refinement?
We may also ask: Is it possible that Sadatarō’s imperturbable, quietly masculine presence like that of an “ancient samurai” (despite his ancestry)—once Natsuko in her fits slapped him on the cheek but he didn’t even change his expression—is it possible that living with such a “strangely fascinating figure” left no imprint on Mishima? Mishima may have grown up as an unlikely, if not to say tragic, “grandmother kid” treated like a girl, a doll, but Sadatarō lived until Mishima was over seventeen—as a ubiquitous household presence until he was twelve. He was the kind of man whose admirers built a large statue for him while he was alive. Mishima attended the unveiling ceremony though he was only five years old.
As soon as he started to write about his notions of literature, Mishima put forward the coexistence of masculinity and femininity as the crucial feature of Japanese tradition. His peals of “strongman laughter” that everyone who spent any time with him
would remember as distinctly Mishima’s were, in fact, Sadatarō’s.38
The Bureaucrats Hiraoka Azusa and Kishi Nobusuke
What about Mishima’s father, Azusa—he who wrote about the chaos of his household as if it were none of his business?
He said about himself, with a dose of sarcasm: “No one has to tell me that I am just an ordinary man with no talent whatsoever. So, as years pass, people will begin to bypass me in lineage and character, overlooking me, obliterating me, in the Hiraoka genealogy, and our posterity will assume that my son came directly from his grandfather, then wonder, This is odd, there’s too much age difference between father and son. I think that’s what may happen.”39
His self-assessment may not be too far off the mark, especially as it relates to his reputation as a bureaucrat. Among those who entered the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce with him in 1920, two years after the First World War, was Kishi Nobusuke, a future prime minister who would play, however indirectly, an important role in Mishima’s life. Kishi had followed the same educational track as Azusa: from the First Higher School to the Imperial University of Tokyo. But, aside from the fact that Azusa was older by two years because he had flunked the entrance exams for the First Higher School for two years in a row, the two were a study in contrast. Azusa was amorphous and self-deprecating, though arbitrary and ruthless to his subordinate. Kishi was ambitious, aggressive, and supremely self-confident.