by Hiroaki Sato
Among his early poems, in fact, there are many pieces he clearly wrote just to delight in knowing rarely used, difficult Chinese names (and characters) for ordinary plants, animals, birds, and such. He even wrote a four-stanza poem in English with the rhyme scheme of aaaabbbbccccdddd, a feat, certainly, if only because he wrote it in the second year after he started learning English. It comes with a Japanese version.13 He translated Heine and Wilde. As with the case of Jean Cocteau, a great many of his poems were, it may be assumed, inspired by the wide range of readings that absorbed him. An academic investigator as well read as Mishima may have a heyday identifying the sources.
Mishima and Bōjō could meet at the school if they wanted to, and they sometimes did. Also, Bōjō occasionally invited Mishima to his spacious mansion, which was grand, as befit a noble house.14 But the principal means of communication between them was letters. “The two of them exchanged long letters every day. The boy enjoyed the daily letterwriting task. Almost every morning R’s apricot-colored Western-style envelope reached him,” he writes in “The Boy.” “R” is of course Bōjō. In this account the two correspondents are given as “a twenty-year-old youth and a fifteen-year-old boy.” Mishima correctly decided that the actual age discrepancy of eight years would be too much even in a fictionalized account.
“No matter how thick a letter, its weight can’t be much, but the lightness of the odd bulkiness of R’s letters, the feeling that something light was packed into them, made the boy happy. At the end of their letters, they almost always wrote a recent poem, a piece just made that day, or, without either, an old poem.
“The content of their letters nonetheless was inconsequential,” the boy continues to say. “They began with a criticism of the poem received in the previous letter, then moved on to endless chatter, as they wrote about the music they listened to, daily gossip about their families, the impressions of girls they thought beautiful, a report on a book read, the poetic experience in which a single word revealed the world of poetry, and detailed descriptions of last night’s dreams.”
Thus Mishima met someone to whom to convey his thoughts without worrying about anything else. Bōjō intended to be a writer and exchanged letters with a boy eight years younger because of his pride and confidence that he was the only one who recognized the boy’s poetic talent. As Mishima wryly observes in “The Boy,” the two became close because “R clearly regarded himself as a genius not treated as such and, despite the difference in age, recognized the boy as a genius, and geniuses had to become friends.”
“The Boy” in the end has to do with a literary prodigy’s awakening to the reality that “comic interventions always enter into such weighty matters as ‘love’ and ‘life,’ comic interventions without which you cannot live through ‘life’ and ‘love.’” R confesses to the much younger man his sufferings as a consequence of his affair with a married woman, which his father, the earl, had discovered and put an end to. He talks about Goethe and The Sorrows of Young Werther, the affair between Prince Genji and his stepmother Empress Fujitsubo, Pelléas and Mélisande, Tristan and Iseult, la princesse de Clèves and le duc de Nemours, and such. But then, when he says his lover tells him his forehead is “very beautiful,” the boy notices the forehead in question is too prominent to be beautiful and is struck by the dreadful but amusing thought that he himself may be living with similar illusions.
The autobiographical story was also an attempt, Mishima explained, to set down on paper how happy he was until he realized he was “a fake poet, or fake as a poet.”15 Or, as Bōjō put it with retrospective sophistication, at one point Mishima must have felt “embarrassed” because he could “excrete” any number of poems “effortlessly, naturally.” At the Peers School in those days, Bōjō reflected years later, there often were “marvelous excretions that could not possibly be called creations. Mishima alone realized this.”16
If that discovery was an embarrassment to Mishima, Bōjō had had his own a little earlier. Sometime in 1939 he visited Shiga Naoya, “the deity of fiction,”17 to ask for a preface to a collection of short stories he and his fellow student Azuma Takashi had written—Azuma using his penname, Fumihiko, probably beginning with these stories—because his father’s friend knew the famous author. Shiga declined, laconically noting, “Sentimental, I think.”18
Kabuki Enters
Four days after Mishima turned fourteen, on January 18, 1939, Natsuko died. She was sixty-four. He wrote a tanka:
Over the wisteria trellis yellow jackets languorously fly crisscross grandmother of high blood pressure having died19
The one great good Natsuko had done for Mishima before her death was to introduce him to kabuki. Natsuko was, Mishima said, “an old-fashioned daughter of a Tokugawa hatamoto and, even while liking American silent movies and kabuki actors, maintained feudalistic sentiments in daily life that are unthinkable today.”20 After agreeing to let him live with his parents, she perhaps thought she needed some explicit reason to treat him as she did. That may be why she decided to take him to kabuki, her favorite pastime. In a talk to a group of kabuki trainees at the National Theatre only a few months before his suicide, Mishima explained how kabuki-going came about in an endearing way.
“When I was a child, my parents and grandfather and grandmother were all strange people,” Mishima told the aspiring kabuki actors with lively gestures, spiritedly. “Kabuki is no good for a child’s education, don’t see it, they said. It has obscene things in it, so don’t see it. Movies are all right. Movies are healthy, so go right ahead and see them. I didn’t know what was healthy about them, but thanks to all that, after I was a second or third grader in grammar school, I saw most of the Hollywood movies. . . . The Hollywood movies weren’t as sensual as they are today, but they had kissing scenes, and those were far more direct than the lovemaking scenes of kabuki.
“When I was thirteen years old, they must have decided, Well now, now he’s in junior high school, it should be all right to show him kabuki. So my grandmother took me, for the first time. And it turned out to be Kanadehon chūshingura.”21 Kanadehon chūshingura, originally written for jōruri or puppet theater and then turned into a kabuki, is based on the famous vendetta of forty-seven samurai at the start of the eighteenth century, which, in a range of variations, went on to become the bestloved samurai narrative in Japan.
Once she started, Natsuko took Mishima to kabuki once every month, though if his first visit to kabuki took place in October 1938, as it was supposed to, Natsuko managed to take him to kabuki only a couple of times before she died. Regardless, Mishima wasn’t a reluctant companion. He loved every minute of what he saw. In fact, he would continue to see kabuki regularly, until he wrote Confessions of a Mask. Along the way he read all the major jōruri and kabuki plays, becoming a “kabuki maniac.” He developed such a deep affinity with these theatrical genres that several of the more than seventy dramas he wrote were kabuki, including the last full-length one.
Mishima developed equal affinity with the other traditional theater, nō, as a result of, shall we say, familial competition. Shizue’s mother, Tomiko, was a student of the Kanze school of nō chanting, and she started taking Mishima to nō when she saw that Natsuko was taking him to kabuki. The first nō play he thus saw was one of “the divine category,” Miwa, which centers on the argument that the two sacred shrines Miwa and Ise are one and the same. The fact that the first kabuki he saw was the Grand Introduction (daijo) of Chūshingura and the first nō was Miwa led him to realize that “I was blessed with the special favors of Japan’s deity of performing arts.”22
With Natsuko’s death, Mishima’s love of his mother lost its single obstacle and became complete—even, to a third party, “incestuous.” Yuasa Atsuko, who became a friend of his in his late twenties, recalled seeing him express unabashed concern if Shizue said something like “Kōi-san, Mommy’s foot hurts,” and lick the part of her foot where she indicated the hurt was—doing this in total disregard of other people who were there, incl
uding his father, Azusa.
What would startle anyone who was new to such a scene was Shizue’s language as much as her son’s behavior: she referred to herself as o-kā-chama, a child’s sweet, polite word for mother.23 Mishima’s love for Shizue remained intense throughout his life. This came out most clearly, in the form of public statement, when he was interviewed on TBS for its series on various people talking about their mothers. “My grandmother brought me up, she took care of me for a long time,” he said, “so I was a granny kid. Because of that, once I began living with my mother, I was ready to be spoiled by her.”
“In my junior high school days I once wrote a composition called ‘Hydrangea,’ à la Izumi Kyōka, and was scolded by my teacher,” he recalled. Kyōka wove stories about people retaining Edo mannerisms and attitudes in a sinuous, old-fashioned Japanese least affected by the Western syntax—a writer who “realized one of the supreme possibilities that lyrical and at the same time painterly Japanese prose can attain, in tone, in flavor, and in closeness.”24 Mishima read him from a very young age because Natsuko, who had urged him to “read classics and write a lot,” was partial to his writings. Natsuko also had studied German and French with private tutors.
“My story was that a pretty woman with a Japanese hairdo steps out from behind the hydrangeas in the garden,” Mishima explained. “At first I can’t tell who she is, until I realize she’s my mother.” Dated about ten days before he turned fifteen, it is not just an improbably accomplished recreation of Kyōka’s style. It elegantly evokes a languid childhood day. It is also another piece of writing in which Natsuko is described in some detail.25
“I’m her son and I shouldn’t be saying something like this perhaps, but my mother was very pretty since her youth,” Mishima added. “At school, if your mother is young and pretty, you tend to feel proud. So, comparing the mothers of any of my friends’ with mine, I often thought, ‘They deserve them.’”26
Shizue, who when young aspired to be a poet, was his secret conspirator in the matter of writing as well. Azusa ostentatiously despised literature, proclaiming it was no way to make a proper living. He would tear up his son’s writings whenever he found them. Shizue, the only one to console him, would secretly supply him with new batches of paper.
Shizue also read everything he wrote. From junior high school onward, Mishima showed her all of his writings before publishing them, a routine he kept up to the very end, except for nonfiction writings, which he stopped showing her a few years before his death.27
How was Azusa doing in Osaka? He was indulging himself with women while remaining an oddball bureaucrat. Or, as author Nosaka Akiyuki has reported, Azusa, while in the post of director-general of forest management in Japan’s second largest city, “squandered money on a Western-style dancer and had a woman with whom he was intimate at a small store in the Fukuhara Brothel Quarters in Kobe.” Nosaka adds: “He also haunted teahouses in Soemon-chō, Hanakuma, and Ponto-chō, and behaved wantonly.” The three places named here were the famous pleasure quarters in Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto. Ponto-chō, in Kyoto, still is.
Nosaka debuted with The Pornographers (Irogotoshi), in 1963, which was translated into English at Mishima’s recommendation and published by Alfred Knopf. Nosaka decided to trace the history of his own family to write about Mishima when someone claiming possession of Mishima’s unpublished diaries approached him to sell them. The result, The Brilliant Backlight (Kakuyaku-taru gyakkō), is a unique attempt to illuminate Mishima and his family against the backdrop of Nosaka’s own complicated life and family relations that included living with an adoptive grandmother.
“On his payday, [Azusa] would hand all the restaurant bills to his secretary and have them paid, leaving not a penny” of his salary, Nosaka tells us, although, typical of Japanese biographers, he does not specify where his various, vivid information came from. Government officials of Azusa’s rank in those days were paid handsomely, and “he would declaim, My parents are rich, all this is just pocket money. A government official has to be bourgeois or his wife’s family has to be terribly rich. Otherwise, you can’t work for the government.” In truth, by then Sadatarō and Natsuko were living on Sadatarō’s government pension of two hundred yen a month and were far from rich. Shizue’s parents were not rich, either.
Who, then, took care of the expenses of Azusa’s family back in Tokyo? His cousins, Hiraoka Yoshiaki and Ono Shigeru.
Back in 1933, when he was director of rice, Azusa had helped Ono Shigeru—Mume’s third son who had been adopted by another sake brewer and acquired the surname Ono—when the latter became independent in the warehousing business in Yokohama. He used his bureaucratic prerogatives to have him handle rice imported from Taiwan and Korea, both Japanese colonies, providing him with foundations for his own firm. When Shigeru made his older brother Yoshiaki the head of his Kobe branch, Azusa helped him as well.
In fact, while Azusa was stationed in Osaka, Yoshiaki was not just Azusa’s regular companion for nightly outings but he also took care of most of those pleasure expenses—and, with Shigeru, the expenses of Azusa’s family. Azusa would often stay in his house talking until the wee hours of the morning—he was a good raconteur in his own way with a fancy vocabulary and witticisms—rather than in the hotel designated for men of his rank, called in English The Pine Crest, which he favored over his official residence. (After the war, Nosaka worked awhile at The Pine Crest that the Occupation requisitioned.)
Nosaka wrote that Azusa was “timid” but “of a so-called government official’s temperament.” He could be generous and helpful when he wanted to; but he could also be intolerably arrogant to those whom he regarded as beneath him. Azusa would bluntly tell Yoshiaki that he, a son of a sake brewer without much education, wasn’t good enough to be in his company, even while shamelessly sponging on him. Yoshiaki went along because associating with a high-ranking bureaucrat gave him an air of prestige and economically benefited him.28
In his recollections of his son, Azusa quotes one of the letters he wrote during his Osaka days. Evidently, sometime earlier some writers had visited with the family and called Mishima “a genius,” “precocious,” “kind of creepy,” and “weird,” for Azusa begins by urging his son to “reflect on it,” to wit, to change his ways. He explained his incongruous mixture of baby talk by saying he called his son bōya, “baby boy,” in the letter because that was how he and his wife called him and he felt resistant to suddenly switching to Kōi, the name they used in referring to him as a third party.
Mommy wrote Poppy, angry with me, repeating many many times how wrong was the way our baby boy was brought up. But there’s no use bringing up the past at this late date. The only thing you can do is to think hard about the present and the future. Can’t you decide to leave literature for a while and, because, fortunately, you have a good brain, to use that brain in the direction of physics, machinery, or chemistry? If you thrust your dedicated training hard in that direction, I think you can be someone considerable. Think fully. Our baby boy’s present circumstances worry both Poppy and Mommy so we almost cry, though we don’t show it.
Azusa then asks: “Can’t you make up your mind about recanting? Don’t you want to grow up a fine boy in Japan at this historic turning point?”29
The word “recant” (tenkō), which Azusa used apparently without irony, pointed to a phenomenon that had marked a crucial era in Japan’s intellectual history in the first half of the twentieth century. In June 1933, Sano Manabu, chairman of the Japan Communist Party, and Nabeyama Sadachika, another Communist leader, both in jail, issued a joint statement addressed to their “defendant comrades” severely criticizing the JCP’s “1932 Thesis” that faithfully adopted the slogans of the International Comintern. The two men did not use the word “recant,” but the rejection of the official goals of USSR-led International Communism was tantamount to it, and the word “recant” soon became a popular word, with 133 out of 393 people in jail and 415 out of 1,370 people in detention following s
uit within a month.30
Behind the leaders’ change of heart that touched off the collapse of the Communist movement in Japan was the savage persecution of Communists and their sympathizers under the Public Security Maintenance Law, enacted in 1925: repeated interrogation, detention, imprisonment, and torture. The writer Kobayashi Takiji, for one, died, in February that year, as a result of torture by the police.31
In citing the letter, Azusa doesn’t give its date, but by the time he wrote it, his son certainly was doing far better than in the six-year Elementary Division of the Peers School where he had hovered in the middle of his class. There, what had stood out was that he was a weakling. His motor coordination was poor and he was a drag on his class in athletic exercises. Because he was skinny and pale, his classmates called him Aojiro, “Pale-blue”; Aobyōtan, “Pale Bottle Gourd”; Shirakko, “Albino Kid”32—although, as far as such things go, the oft-quoted story must be repeated: When a prankster once challenged him, “Hey, Pale-blue, your balls got to be pale-blue, too!” thereupon Mishima unbuttoned his pants and pulled out his stuff and pressed it on the boy, making him cringe. It was “unexpectedly large,” a bystander reported.33
Mishima’s writings, at any rate, were different. At the time of graduation, his teacher, noting his ability to write, suggested he become a “doctor of literature,” but “not anything like a novelist.” Hirohito, the Tennō, attended the graduation ceremony.