by Hiroaki Sato
In the Middle Division, Mishima began to do even better in writing, although in the first year he was far below average in the class of eighty, barely squeaking through the grade. That year, however, the teacher of Japanese was Iwata Kurō, who would establish his reputation as an authority on Edo haikai after the war. He had his own haiku and tanka group called Mokusei (Fragrant Olive) and took his class on haiku excursions. At one tanka gathering, Mishima’s pieces were singled out for praise.
In the third year, Shimizu Fumio, who would soon become Mishima’s literary guide and mentor, had his students compose haiku and wrote out good pieces on the blackboard along with their writers’ names. One of the haiku came with the name Blue-castle. The class guffawed. Even with a different set of Chinese characters, its reading was the same: Aojiro. Mishima had turned the nickname of mild ridicule to a romantic haiku penname. Haiku writers routinely adopt pennames. Still, overwhelmed by his classmates’ reaction, he kept his head down during the class.34
Here are two of his haiku that appeared in the Hojinkai Zasshi with the tag of “Blue-castle.”
In an autumn wind a sickly child points to the evening sun
In an autumn wind a man standing by the window does not move35
Through the Middle Division he gained self-confidence, even as his ranking fluctuated from year to year. In the third year he was seventh in the class of seventy; in the fourth year, sixteenth in the class of sixty-seven; in the fifth year, second in the class of sixty. His writing ability was impressive—and impressed his teachers. His paper assessing Itō Einosuke’s The Bush Warbler (Uguisu) elicited from his teacher, most likely Iwata, this comment: “I have not read The Bush Warbler yet, but this paper makes me feel I am thoroughly familiar with the whole story. It is so thoughtfully detailed.” Another paper assessing Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Yoshino Kudzu (Yoshino kuzu) prompted Iwata to write, this time his name signed: “This gives the sense of having savored the master’s skills with a perfect understanding and an artistic appreciation. It makes me feel in many ways that only this writer [i.e., Mishima] could manage this observation and expression.”36
Mishima showed his growing confidence toward Bōjō. The tall senior of high-ranking aristocratic lineage may have been great to look up to when he approached him, but in time Mishima became keenly aware of his own worth and turned deliberately assertive where he was expected to be deferential.
“In truth,” he wrote in “The Boy Who Writes Poems,” “[the boy] did not even think much of R’s talent. Among the seniors in the Literary Club”—responsible for the Hojinkai Zasshi—“R certainly had a conspicuous talent, but it wasn’t as if his words had a special weight in the boy’s mind. In the boy’s mind there was a cold spot. If R had not used all sorts of words to praise his poetic talent, the boy probably would not have recognized R’s talent.”
“Even though people’s praise pleased him, his arrogance saved him from getting drowned in it,” Mishima said of his younger self. “For example, one of his quatrains that the seniors praised extravagantly was, he thought, lightheaded and embarrassing. The poem said, in sum, ‘Because the cut section of transparent glass is so blue, your limpid eyes will be able to store many an affair of the heart.’”37
Such things were extending to matters of which he had little knowledge. Once, Bōjō showed Mishima a story he wrote, “Dance” (Mai), and asked him to critique it. It had to do with an illicit affair in which an Imperial University student has a series of assignations with a married woman in a villa in the resort town of Karuizawa. Bōjō, an earl’s heir, intended the story to embody the world of aware—a heightened sensibility to the transience of things that was thought to represent the essence of the grand court romance The Tale of Genji—and set it against the backdrop of the increasingly militaristic, regimented Japan of the day. Japan at the time was transplanting Nazi Germany’s notion of Volk, among others, renaming shōgakkō, “elementary school,” to kokumin gakkō, perhaps in imitation of Volksschule. The word kokumin, though it had existed since ancient China, may well have added the sense of Reichsbürger in the late 1930s, and it began to be applied to other things as well, which, along with kokubō, “national defense,” rightminded civilians were expected to adopt with patriotic zeal.
“Item: kokumin uniform, item: kokubō color. The battle hat. Enthusiastic boy,” Bōjō wrote in “Dance.” The original for enthusiastic boy is harikiri boy, a combination of Japanese and English words when the stress on patriotism driven by militarism was extending to a xenophobic preference for Japanese. “Kokumin ceremonials. All this series of horrible things were surely out to insult me, my literature, not to mention our ancestors, our country. And so I did not read newspapers. I simply did not want to look at such a society. I confined myself deep in my own shell, hoping to protect the world of aware single-mindedly. If I could, I thought I would fight such a society.” Bōjō was certainly going against the current.
At any rate, as he read “Dance,” Mishima would point out things such as “This kind of conversation can’t happen” and “This kind of scenery can’t happen”—observations that bewildered Bōjō. “You say these things can’t happen,” he protested. “Fact is, these things did happen. There is no way of gainsaying them. This is realism, pure and simple,” he was driven to point out. “Dance” was a scarcely veiled autobiographical account. He had written the story with Mishima as reader in mind. Reflecting on the matter years later, Bōjō realized that in “The Boy” Mishima had omitted one crucial part of the point he had made. He had told Bōjō, “In our literary world”—that is, in the literary world you and I are creating—“this kind of conversation can’t happen.” Mishima stubbornly tried to persuade him to change the conversation.38
Bōjō, by then twenty-four or five, had sexual experience. Mishima, at fifteen or sixteen, still had nothing of the sort. As he pointed out in a series of candid talks on sex during his puberty he gave for the monthly Myōjō when he was thirty-two, there were, for one thing, at the Peers School two types of students: “stiffs” and “softies.” Stiffs were stern moralists. Softies, mainly progenies of the upper crust of the aristocracy, were those who indulged in immoral or licentious conduct. Bōjō was a softie, though he was by no means an extreme type. Mishima, coming up far behind, barely knew what sex was. He was still in “a period of early boyhood when [the elements of] heterosexual and homosexual love [were] extremely mixed.”
There was a good deal of knowing, blatant sex talk among his friends at the Middle Division—such as whether or not a photo of Deanna Durbin showed her sanitary belt under her shorts—but when it came to the real thing, Mishima was naïveté itself, however precocious he may have appeared in literary matters. For example, on the evening of the day when Mishima’s family, along with relatives, went to Tokyo Station to see Azusa off to Osaka, he happened to find himself left alone with a very beautiful second cousin, sitting face to face with her in chairs, in the guest room of his house after everyone came home, “happy with the sense of liberation.” Suddenly, the cousin, who was older by five or six years, cried, “Oh, I’m so tired,” bent forward, and put her face on his lap. How “glad, fearful, and indescribably touched” he was, even though she did not keep her head on his knees for more than a minute!
So, “fragments of the sensation I received from the opposite sex may have come from my knees,” he recalled. In those days, any self-respecting junior high school boy was supposed to have a “bus romance”—“‘a girl you often see on a bus’ was an image everyone must have.” It was not difficult to spot an appropriate girl.
“I began to look forward to sitting next to a certain girl on a bus I took to school. . . . And if, by some accident, I sat next to her, the warmth of her knee that touched mine had an indescribably mysterious feeling and remained with me for a long time. And of course I didn’t speak to her, didn’t say hello to her, and we remained strangers to the end.”39
Yet, without any experience of sex, without falling in love e
ven once, “the boy” who wrote poems began to “increasingly handle love affairs as material for his poems.” And “by some illogical conviction, he was able to believe that there was not one sentiment he had not experienced in this world,” he wrote in the autobiographical story.
CHAPTER FOUR
Literary Correspondents
The writer of “The Forest in Full Bloom” is an utterly young man.
—Hasuda Zenmei
In late 1940, Mishima received a letter that said: “To be honest, as someone whose works appear in the same magazine side by side with yours, you daunted me. Simply because I’m older by a few years doesn’t mean I can behave like a big shot.”1 The writer was Azuma Takashi, the student who a year before had attempted to obtain a preface to a joint collection of stories with Bōjō from Shiga Naoya. The letter was dated November 30. Hojinkai Zasshi that month had carried Mishima’s short story, “Tinted Glass” (Damie garasu), and Azuma wrote to praise the story, with some criticism.
“Tinted Glass” describes two couples, one middle-aged, the other young: Vice Admiral, Shipbuilding (Ret.),2 Baron Munakata Teinosuke, who, while he acts young, is fearful of death in fact; his beautiful wife, Akiko; his nephew, Kennosuke, who comes to live with the couple (his father being stationed in Singapore); and the girl the nephew is in love with, Satomi Noriko, who, on her part, appears to be resentful of the fact that she is in love with the young man. The baron is aware that he is jealous of his nephew’s youth.
The story, which attempts to superimpose the bygone youth of the older couple with the present youth of the younger couple through a garter belt (the era is that of flapper dresses), may not be entirely successful, but it surely and startlingly is so mature, so sophisticated, laden as it is with aphoristic observations, that it would have been a surprise had it not grabbed the attention of another aspiring but older writer. In reprinting it in the same Hojinkai Zasshi seven years later, Mishima himself wrote, “I doubt whether this writer has made any progress since.”3
Azuma, who had graduated from the Middle Division top of his class, in 1938, was, like Bōjō, Mishima’s senior, though in his case only by five years. Like Bōjō, he was an editor of the Hojinkai Zasshi, but by the time he wrote Mishima he was in an advanced state of laryngeal tuberculosis and had been bedridden for more than a year, forcing him to write, with his doctor’s reluctant consent, while lying on his back. Mishima would correspond with him as eagerly as he did with Bōjō, but with Azuma that was practically the only means of communication. Indeed, Azuma’s disease being highly infectious, few were allowed even to enter his room. Mishima was permitted to do so probably only once before Azuma’s death on October 8, 1943, when, rushing to the Azuma house, he spent the night by his dying friend’s side. He wrote two pieces on the event, one the following night, “Aggrieved over My Older Brother Azuma Takashi,” and the other two nights later, in classical language, “A Funeral Tribute to Azuma Fumihiko.”4
It was in his letters to Azuma that Mishima’s literary precocity and his wide range of reading became evident. Indeed, the publication, in 1999, of these letters as Mishima’s letters in his teens struck the literary world as a startling revelation.5 The same must have been equally or even more evident in his letters to Bōjō, but Bōjō destroyed most of Mishima’s letters from those years. When, in the spring of 1942, Azuma’s father, concerned about his son’s illness, suggested starting a members’ magazine as a means of publishing his writings, Azuma invited Mishima, along with Tokugawa Yoshiyasu to join him,6 but not Bōjō. The magazine was named Akae, the word meaning porcelain mainly tinted red.
For a glimpse of what Mishima read, we may examine a letter he wrote on January 21, 1941, a week after he told Azuma that he turned sixteen. It was apparently a response to Azuma’s request to sum up his “literary life.”
“During my Elementary Division days,” he wrote, “I was infatuated with fairy tales by Bimei and Strindberg and loved to read collections of fairy tales from India.” Ogawa Bimei, who began by writing gloomy novels under the influence of naturalism, opened a new frontier when he turned to children’s stories, a genre being cultivated around 1920, by “starting to weave into daily life the world of fantasy,” thereby “biting into you much more deeply,” in fifteen-year-old Mishima’s judgment.7 The prolific Swedish author Johan Strindberg was known not only for his naturalistic plays and novels, but also for his children’s stories.
Since he began writing poems “seriously” in sixth grade, Mishima went on to note, he had read, “in the order of absorption,” Kitahara Hakushū, the most versatile among the prewar poets as far as poetic forms are concerned, who was accorded the title of “the national poet”; Oscar Wilde; French poets via Horiguchi Daigaku’s translations assembled in A Pack under the Moon (Gekka no ichigun), a milestone in modern poetry translation, published in 1925; contemporary Japanese poets such as Maruyama Kaoru, a lyric poet in the Shiki (Four Seasons) School, and Kusano Shinpei, an anarchist poet in the proletarian movement. At the end of his letter, Mishima added Miyazawa Kenji, saying, “I deeply felt his greatness and thought of the clarity of Japan’s Dadaism.”
Miyazawa, whose second series of collected works, in seven volumes, was slowly coming out at the time, had published just one book of poems before his death, Spring and Asura (Haru to shura), though that single book had electrified those who read it. Here was someone, the poet Satō Sōnosuke wrote, who “wrote poems with meteorology, mineralogy, botany, and geology.”8
In fiction, Mishima was “gradually absorbed by Wilde, read Tanizaki thoroughly, was moved by Le bal du Comte d’Orgel, and, before then, was infatuated with Akutagawa, came to know Morand,” and now was “on friendly terms with Swann’s Way,” Mishima wrote. “At one time I was fascinated by the setsuwa style, and at the end of the year I became a freshman in the Middle Division, I started translating Ōkagami (The Great Mirror). That was enjoyable work. It continued on to ‘Mansion’ (Yakata).”
The term setsuwa style is amorphous, but Mishima evidently referred to “oral narrative” mode. Tanizaki refined a first-person narrative in which someone who (at times) is not highly literate describes his life in plebeian language. He had written a string of stories in that mode, beginning with Mishima’s favorite at the time, The Blind’s Tale (Mōmoku monogatari), published in 1932. It is told by a non-historical blind masseur of his devotion to a historical figure, O-Ichi-no-kata (1547?–83), a beautiful woman who became a pawn in her warlord brother Oda Nobunaga’s strategic moves. Akutagawa based some of his stories on homiletic tales collected in the Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku monogatari), of the twelfth century, and other ancient tales.
The eleventh-century court chronicle The Great Mirror, which covers the period from 850 to 1025, seems unlikely to be the sort of thing a boy in his early teens, however literarily precocious, would choose for translation, albeit into the modern version of his own language. But his was not an idle boast. Mishima was enchanted by the text his father had kept from a First Higher School course—despite his injunction against his son’s literary endeavor, Azusa had been infatuated with literature when young, as Mishima noted in another letter9—and, though it was only skimpily annotated, he decided to translate it. When he was done with the first quarter or so, a fully annotated edition came out and he found his translation was riddled with errors. But there were at least two results of this endeavor: “Mansion,” which he mentions, and “Retired Emperor Kazan” (Kazan-in), a school composition that he submitted about the time he wrote Azuma the letter we are looking at.
“Mansion,” a novella the Hojinkai Zasshi had printed a year earlier, is made up of a court page’s observations of his master, a marquis in some imagined Western land. The story does not really cohere, in part because it is left unfinished, and perhaps because its protagonist’s sadistic behavior was too much for a fourteen-year-old boy to handle. Mishima himself called it “a pity, a failure.” He did so in his letter referring to his father’s infatuation with liter
ature when young—“but now his favorite books are stuff like Seven Mysteries of Europe (Sept mystères du destin de l’Europeis) and Tragedy in France (Tragédie en France) and all he talks about is “Nazis, Nazis, Nazis”!10
“Retired Emperor Kazan,” based on a passage in the chronicle The Great Mirror, shows Mishima’s sure command of classical Japanese. His teacher, noting that it would be the last time he would check Mishima’s compositions, gave it high marks, though with a warning that its content might no longer be appropriate in the time of rising militaristic fever. Mishima completed the manuscript on February 16, 1941.11
Mishima added: “I also enjoyed The Pillow Book. In spring last year, I wrote a fiction à la Radiguet’s Le Diable au corps and was at once assaulted by self-loathing.”12 Raymond Radiguet had a special place in Mishima’s mind and would remain to do so in the years that followed. Most likely some months before he wrote this letter, he had written what might be called a scholarly assessment of the French writer on the basis of all the Japanese translations available at the time.13
The war with the West engulfed Japan soon and “because the genius Radiguet died at twenty and left such a masterpiece”—Le bal du Comte d’Orgel—“I put myself, who was bound to die at twenty in the war, into Radiguet’s image and turned him into my rival by using the novel as a goal to catch up with,” Mishima wrote years later.14 Or, as he put it more innocuously: “How nice it would be if I could somehow write such a masterpiece before I turned twenty and die at twenty,” although he noted that what had mesmerized him about the story was not so much the French writer’s “psychologically penetrating eye” as “the uniquely dry elegance” of Horiguchi Daigaku’s translation.15 It was also through Horiguchi’s translation of Ouvert la nuit that Mishima came to know Paul Morand. The French diplomat and Modernist’s influence via Horiguchi is palpable in “Tinted Glass.”16