by Hiroaki Sato
Perhaps. “Sorrels” is a fantasy all right—a story complete with a meeting in the prison between the warden and the convict who has voluntarily returned after talking with the boy, the release of the reformed convict a year later and so forth. But Shizue saw something different in it. Prefacing her remarks with “When I was made to read ‘Sorrels,’ I was so startled I was speechless,” she went on to recall: “When Kimitake was four or five years old, one fine autumn day, because his grandmother happened to be away, I was incited by my husband who insisted that we give him some sunbathing, and the three of us sauntered out with no particular place in mind. After we strolled awhile, suddenly houses became fewer, and we came out on a lonesome street that had a long, long wall on one side.”
The three kept walking and reached a spot with a plaza-like space. Written on a plaque on the gate there was the name of the prison. It was Ichigaya Prison, which shut down in 1937. “Kimitake, who found himself in a somewhat menacing space that was just too bleak to me, seemed deeply shocked. He started to ask me what the building was, and he grew importunate. Not knowing how to respond properly, I finally said, ‘Many bad people are put into here. We better go home and quick.’ But he wouldn’t budge.
“No, of course, there was nothing like sorrel flowers blooming anywhere,” Shizue continued. “All over the place nothing but weeds grew; there was no one in the street nor inside or outside the gate. I can easily understand Kimitake, the child, perceived it to be an utterly strange landscape. The moment I read ‘Sorrels,’ I knew it described that outing of ours.”54
Aside from the question of how the fantasy story portended Mishima’s future, there was an orthographic dimension to its writing. Ten years after its initial publication, Mishima noted that at the time he wrote the story, he was reading the Kōjirin, then the dominant dictionary of the Japanese language, as his “No. 1 favorite book.” He used “all the autumn flowers and spring flowers [he found in the dictionary] for the description of the field in the writing.” The story is “comical,” he wrote, “with the names of only the flowers unknown to me lined up.”55
Lining up all the difficult Chinese characters for the names of common plants besides, he might have added. The wildflower named in the title, sukanpō, is familiar and plebian enough, and Mishima could have written it in simple Japanese syllabary, as is customary. But he chose for it a set of two difficult Chinese characters suggesting something like “acid mold.” It was rather like calling a common wildflower by a Latin name. He did the same with all the other wildflowers he mentioned in the story.
CHAPTER THREE
“The Boy Who Writes Poems”
Mishima peeled himself one layer after another like an onion in order to find his true self, even as he covered himself up with one dress after another.
—Nosaka Akiyuki
The year 1937, when Mishima advanced to the Middle Division of the Peers School, became a turning point in modern Japanese history. In early July, the Japanese Army clashed with the Chinese near the Marco Polo Bridge, southwest of Beijing. Toward the end of the month it started a general attack in North China—territory immediately south of Manchukuo, the state Japan had established just a few years earlier. In mid-August the army opened a front in Shanghai, landing its forces in the international city.
“In order to punish the Chinese Army for its immoral violence and thereby encourage the Nanjing government to mend its ways,” Konoe Fumimaro, chosen for premiership with the expectation of reducing Japan’s military presence in China, declaimed, on August 15, loading his statement with orotund classical Chinese words, “we now cannot help taking resolute measures.” It was tantamount to a declaration of war, but the government decided to call this development an “incident.” Calling it “war” could have led the United States and other nations to stop exporting war-related goods to Japan.1 For that matter, neither China nor the United States, for each of its own reasons, called it war.2
But the situation was clear to Mishima. He at once sensed the coming of “the second Sino-Japanese War”—the first had occurred in 1894–95—“nay! the Second World War,” he wrote in a brief essay, “Our Military in China.” In impressive prose for a boy of twelve, he described an army fighting “its Holy War” near the Great Wall, then taking “the ferocious mountain battles” into Huairen. He imagined Japanese officers and soldiers drinking “muddy water” as they marched through “mountainous swamps,” grappling with “120-degree burning, cruel heat.” He thought of “the eagle’s red eyes glowering beyond the Sea of Okhotsk,” even as “the UNION JACK maintains a puzzling posture, darkly laughing.” He ended the essay “praying for the health and military fortune” of the officers and their men.3
In December, the Japanese Army occupied the Chinese capital Nanjing and went on a rampage. The occupation was reported with fanfare. The Japanese back home took it to mean the termination of the war and held celebratory lantern parades all over Japan, but it merely expanded the war. The rampage part—called the Rape of Nanjing or Nanjing Massacre—was not known to most until after their country’s defeat when “the Japanese newspapers carried, by order of the Occupation, full reports of the excesses and outrages committed by the Japanese Army and Navy” that were revealed during the proceedings of the International Tribunal for the Far East, as Elizabeth Gray Vining, Crown Prince Akihito’s English tutor, put it.4
It was also that year, in the writer Tanabe Seiko’s estimation in retrospect, that Japan’s “modern culture” reached its zenith before “the war dumped water on it, made it shrivel, and wither.” Among the writers Tanabe lists from the era, Kawabata Yasunari, whom Mishima would later choose as his mentor, published Snow Country (Yukiguni) that year.5
Earlier, in March, the government sent Azusa to tour Europe. How long his tour lasted or what the purpose was are not known, but Azusa brought back some art books, among other things.
As April, the month the new school year begins, approached, Sadatarō persuaded Natsuko to stop treating Mishima as her property separate from his two younger siblings whom she simply ignored: Mitsuko and Chiyuki. The boy was soon to be in junior high school—or the Middle Division as it was called at the Peers School—and was too old for that sort of thing, Sadatarō argued. Natsuko reluctantly agreed. Overjoyed, Shizue looked for a home for her family all over the city and finally found one in Ōyama-chō, in Shibuya: a two-story, outwardly Western-style house with a pointed, steep roof covered with red tiles, though all the rooms inside were covered with tatami flooring. The family moved in April, and would live in it for thirteen years, until the summer of 1950. Mishima was given a room on the second floor, which looked like an oversize gable, facing the street. The importance of having a room of his own, a new space, was immeasurable.
There was another significant event for the family that year: Azusa’s removal from home in October. Promoted to director-general of forestry management in Osaka, he went to the assigned city alone, without his family. For a public servant or corporate employee to take up a distant post on assignment, domestic or foreign, without his family, was standard Japanese practice until the end of the twentieth century. This was a boon to Mishima—and to Shizue as well. As Shizue put it bluntly, “He’s like my mother-in-law turned into a man exactly as she was, and I didn’t like it at all.” Both were nags; both were scolds.
There was a difference between the two, of course. If Natsuko treated Mishima like a fragile mechanical doll, though not doubting his intelligence for a moment, Azusa went in the opposite direction. “Resistance toughens a man,” he averred with unshakable conviction. “That’s why I treated him sternly.” Mishima was terrified of Azusa. One day he was fiddling with the radio set with his brother, turning the tuner this way and that, removing the board at the back to peek into the mechanisms. The tuner stopped working properly. Angered, Azusa grabbed a wooden sword and threatened the two boys. Chiyuki quickly ran away. Mishima took a correct sitting position, knees bent, and apologized.
Azusa m
ay have regretted that he had allowed his mother to bring up his son like a girl. To him, reading “literature” was an effeminate act when, to Mishima, it was the greatest salvation. Whenever Azusa caught his son reading a novel or anything of the sort, he would grab it, and toss it down on the floor. Liking cats was also “unmanly.” Irritated that his son was fond of the cat the family kept, Azusa took it away someplace and abandoned it. When his son found another cat somewhere and brought him home, Azusa mixed iron powder in what the cat ate and boasted about it. His son would give up keeping a cat if one died, Azusa obviously reasoned. That, to Azusa, was “Spartan education.”
Twenty-Year-Old and Twelve-Year-Old
Not long after Azusa left for Osaka, the literary magazine of the Peers School, Hojinkai Zasshi, accepted five of Mishima’s poems. One of them read:
Autumn: Two Pieces6
1
When by my moonlit window crickets shirr,
when from the silvery seaside beach parasols disappear,
when the mountains and fields wearing a layer of green robe
change into golden lined clothes,
autumn’s footfalls are heard.
Birds sensitive to cold, toward a land where oranges fruit,
those sensitive to heat, toward the Imperial Capital where heaters are longed for,
the sky reminiscent of an endless ocean
where small boats with red oars come and go,
the ripe persimmons are pecked at by the evil ones, the crows,
the shrikes screech their clumsy sopranos.
——Autumn at its prime.
2
From the vale
permeated with mysterious loneliness,
smoke from baking charcoal
comes up.
Columns of smoke,
unaware that they’ll be buried
in small corners of the vast empty sky,
crawl up
longing for a painter’s blue silk cloth.
A dog, one leg hurt, walks
away on the trail, limping.
The mouse a cat left unfinished
is on a mound of moist fallen leaves.
The rustle of dead leaves falling
on it
—is like a gray elegy.
A sign of a storm perhaps,
from between the mountains,
a black, giant-like cloud rises to its feet.
These poems prompted one senior student at the Peers School to seek Mishima out. He was Bōjō Toshitami, a third-year student at the Higher Division, which made him twenty years old. He had left the editorial board of the Literary Section a year earlier, but recommended publication of the poems in the Hojinkai Zasshi. Bōjō was not just Mishima’s senior by eight years; he was an earl’s son, with direct linkage to the blueblood Reizei and Irie families.
The Middle Division of the Peers School had periodic baseball games with the junior high school affiliated with a higher normal school nearby. As Bōjō recalled in the book he published a year after Mishima’s death, he decided to look for Mishima in the midst of one of those games.
“It was very easy to spot the first-year students of the Middle Division in the cheerleaders’ seats,” Bōjō recalled. They were required to take part in those games as cheerleaders, who, with cheerleaders in higher grades, were grouped in one section. “Their school hats and badges were deliberately made to look soiled for an appearance of experience, but the freshness of the golden cherry blossoms in the collar insignias remained. Above all, with their high-pitched voices, they ceaselessly flitted about like birds. The first-year students weren’t allowed to take leave from cheerleading.”
He went to the section, tapped a first-year student on the shoulder, and asked, “Isn’t there someone named Hiraoka Kōi?” Kōi was the sinified reading of the two Chinese characters for the name Kimitake, and Mishima’s mother, among others, called him Kō-chan. The student spoken to turned round and snapped to attention. “Yes, sir, there is!” In Japan’s school system in those days, the senior-junior order was as strict as the military ranks. As Bōjō noted, for the first-year students “the seniors were more intimidating than the teachers.”
The student looked around. His eyes rested on the first row of benches where a group of students were making merry, snatching each other’s hat. “There he is, sir. That pale fellow, sir.”
“Would you mind fetching him for me?” Bōjō asked.
Mishima was obviously surprised that a senior not known to him had asked for him. “Through the throngs emerged a delicate boy, readjusting his hat. He had a thin neck, and his skin appeared snowwhite,” Bōjō recollected. “I am Hiraoka Kimitake, sir,” the first-year student said.
Bōjō noticed Mishima’s hat was a little too large for his head. Its bill came down close to his large eyes, which steadily looked at him.
“I am Bōjō, of the Literary Section,” Bōjō introduced himself. Mishima apparently recognized his name. He appeared relieved, even happy. He looked so young that Bōjō did not use the masculine second person singular kisama that was standard at the Peers School, but the softer kimi. Bōjō took out a copy of Sessen, the magazine of the Literary Section.
“This one has my story in it. I’d be obliged if you read it. I have left my criticism of your poems in it, too.”
Mishima shyly accepted the magazine and, when Bōjō nodded to signal dismissal, saluted, after a moment’s hesitation. As he left, Bōjō imagined Mishima’s classmates kidding him as the upperclassman’s chigo, “lover boy.” During the Edo Period and before, older men often indulged in having chigo around. At the Peers School at the time the chigo game was popular, not necessarily between older and younger boys, Bōjō wrote, making sure to add that the relationships so born were nothing like what you might imagine from the term “homosexual love.”7
What prompted Bōjō to seek out Mishima was surely the extraordinary mastery of the Japanese language the twelve-year-old student showed in his poems. Sakai Hiroshi, one of the Hojinkai editors at the time and later a ranking official of the Bank of Japan, recalled the consternation and apprehension these and other submissions created among the editors, but especially in Toyokawa Noboru, the professor who nominally oversaw the magazine. A distinguished scholar of German philosophy and explicator of Kant and Rickert, among others, Toyokawa suspected they were plagiarisms and “set them aside”; they were too accomplished, some even too steamy for a first-year student of the Middle Division. So he told Sakai to look into the matter, and Sakai duly reported back that Mishima was in fact a first-year student, “all smiles and a little impish,” and that there were no plagiarisms involved. Thereafter each Hojinkai issue carried Mishima’s poems.8
Still, at least one such poem did not make it. A dozen years after the event, when the student newspaper of his alma mater asked him for an essay, Mishima wryly recollected how, when a student came to see him with the news of—he sensed at once—rejection, he suggested they print it using fuseji, that is, the number of characters of the offending word or phrase with an equal number of blank squares. With this practice, the reader so inclined could sometimes guess the original word or phrase. Censorship was routine at the time, and the prospect of seeing his poem in print, censored, excited him.
So he was let down when he learned the poem was rejected after all. It was an imitation of Jean Cocteau’s short poem, Mishima wrote, and had a passage: “A port-town prostitute waits for her customers, her back against an electric pole. No customers come by. And the madame watching her from deep inside the store clucks her tongue.”9
The following may well be the original, a poem in a collection with the English title, Bad Poems.
Side Alley10
Light-ink evening clouds
the sand of the striped sea
the lazy layer of the rough sea
power lines that skewer all landscapes,
under them, the nails of the woman bored of waiting
no light-pink but muddy amber
<
br /> at the door behind her
the madame
glaring
clucks her tongue
“Poems came to him with utter ease, one after another, smoothly,” Mishima wrote, when he was twenty-nine, in “The Boy Who Writes Poems” (Shi o kaku shōnen), an autobiographical story with the protagonist referred to as “the boy.” “The thirty-page notebook with the name of the Peers School printed on it was immediately exhausted. Why do two or three poems a day come into being like this, the boy wondered. When he was laid up with illness for a week, he compiled an anthology called ‘Collection of Poems for a Week.’” Mishima indeed left a collection with that title: poems written from May 12 to May 18, 1940, some days with three or more pieces, though it ends with one written on May 23, “Pastoral” (Bokka).11
“When he became ecstatic, a metaphorical world always materialized before his eyes,” Mishima wrote, explaining how images overflowed.
Caterpillars changed cherry leaves into laceworks, a thrown stone went over a bright oak to see the sea. A crane was messing up the wrinkled sheet, the sea, under a cloudy sky, looking for a drowned man under it. The peach a scarab approached wore light makeup, a running person had the disturbed, stagnant air clinging to him, like a flame on the back of a statue. The evening glow was an evil omen and had the color of thick iodine tincture. Winter trees had their artificial legs stretched into heaven. And the nude body of a girl by a fireplace looked like a burning rose but, when it walked up to the window, it was exposed to be an artificial flower, and her skin with goose pimples from the cold transformed itself into a petal of a flower made of shaggy velvet.
It is not just the ease with which poems formed in the mind of this teenager and the abundance of metaphors that came to it that astonish. The young man wrote more than five hundred poems, nearly two hundred haiku, and forty-five tanka, mostly in the four years from twelve until sixteen. These numbers alone would make anyone a respectable poet, but the poems are characterized by his early, ready mastery of syllabic patterns (comparable to metrical patterns in English versification)—a poem on a kitten he wrote when he was seven is made up of twelve lines, each line with seven syllables, the second six lines a variation of the first six, altogether a lovely lyric12—by his control and range in free verse, and, above all, by his command of language, classical and modern.