by Hiroaki Sato
Mishima’s story imagining Radiguet’s death, written in 1953 and called just that, takes the form of Jean Cocteau remembering the shortlived novelist’s last days with him—the young man unable to focus on the proofs of Le bal du Compte d’Orgel, because of the typhus he contracted.
The World of Sexual Perversion
Among Mishima’s other remarks on his literary odyssey as a young man, one deserves special mention. In his letter to Azuma toward the end of the year, he brought up Inagaki Taruho. “Having read Inagaki Taruho’s Sanpūko,” Mishima wrote, “I can’t help thinking, just the way you, sir, feel about Miyazawa Kenji and Makino Shin’ichi: Wow, if only I could write such dandy, madcap dreams!”
Born in 1900 and moonstruck by the advent of the aeroplane and cinema, Inagaki debuted, in the early 1920s, as a combination of “astronomer of fairy tales, aesthetist of celluloid, and spring-driven mechanical engineer,” as Satō Haruo, the first to recognize the writer, aptly put it. He was an oddball artist who emerged in the maelstrom of the onrush into Japan of “Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism, and Precisionism,” which, among other things, prompted a group of writers, including Kawabata Yasunari and Yokomitsu Riichi, to speak of the creation of “a new sensibility.” The group was later so labeled, the New Sensibility School.17
Partly as a result, Inagaki spelled his name, in Roman alphabet, as Inaguaqui Taroupho (here we will retain the standard spelling). Makino Shin’ichi, who had hung himself, in 1936, was “rather close to Taruho,” Mishima would write thirty years later, “in his fantasy of Western Europe transmuted to Japanese clime and land, his intellectual humor, his escape from the I-novel by way of a flight in his spiritual life.”18
“Things Mr. Inagaki has been publishing in magazines of late have much dulled in color when compared with his old works (although they are so unique as to defy any comparison with the usual stories we find around us),” the sixteen-year-old literary assessor continued. “But he is someone who has failed to mature into a great writer, always badly treated as he was with foolish Confucian-style criticisms from the outset.”
Mishima then quoted the critic Hisano Toyohiko as saying, “Mr. Inagaki Taruho’s literature is not, to exaggerate somewhat, the sort of literature that can grow up in a literary world as boorish as that of Japan. How could his works be correctly understood by Japanese literary critics who are like brainless sankaku?”—the word, meaning triangle, here used in the sense of fool, rather like the English word square—“There is something that at first blush is terribly kindlich in his works. But that is an excessively superficial view. If his literature were nurtured in the literary world of France, for example, it would have managed an extraordinary development because of his genius.”
Indeed, Inagaki’s debut work, in 1922, One Thousand and One-Second Stories (Issen ichibyō monogatari), was a collection of “dandy, madcap dreams,” short-shorts that are casual mixtures of the fantastic and the real. In contrast, the eight stories collected in Sanpūko are much more realistic as they are largely autobiographical. As a matter of fact, the word sanpūko is a yijing term referring to the time of year, Inagaki explained, when “worms germinate as the winds are pressed down at the base of mountains. In such an autumn, a man of honor determines to undertake a great reform and sees to it that he carries it out to the end.” Reform aside, the title story depicts a disintegrating family with its narrator a perpetual, excessive drunkard.19
Mishima ended his comment on Sanpūko by noting that “the work such as ‘Favorite’”—one of the stories in the selection, with the title given in English—“reminds me of Les Enfants terribles.”20 “Favorite” describes an adolescent boy’s indirect and, shall we say, perverse sexual fascinations, including those of homosexual varieties. The opening paragraph typifies them.
In the guest room hung a framed painting. It is a picture of a girl and her kid brother crossing a field in full bloom. She’s got a briar thorn in her thigh. So she has tucked up her skirt and, revealing her snow-white part, is having her brother remove the thorn, her face expressing what appears to be painful, ticklish, and at any rate agreeable. . . . Watching the painting like that every day, the boy in time began to wish to savor the kind of feeling such as that within the girl of the picture. And, fearful of becoming sunburned, he would never go out; it was his wont to be absently looking out the window, with light makeup secretly put on. One such day, a sailor with a skinny belly, with a white hat perched askew on his head, passed by and, startled to notice the beautiful boy in the room, stopped, and beckoned him, smiling. The boy went to an inn with the sailor. It was the first time he became so embarrassed, but it was at the same time the first time he was so happy.
Inagaki’s narrator tells the reader that what he has just said comes from a book and that the book also contains a description of a retired French sergeant who was found dead by hanging in his bachelor flat, his outlandish getup clearly indicating a botched attempt to satisfy his sadomasochistic impulses. He does not say what the book is but does say, parenthetically, that it often refers to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Austro-German sexologist and psychiatrist. Then, before moving on to describe his own experiences of varying sexual shade as a boy about to turn twelve, he confides: “Other than these stories, the several episodes he found in the same book, Tari”—the protagonist—“felt, offered the key to the problems entangled at the bottom of his heart.”21
This stirred Mishima. In a letter a month and a half later, he reported to Azuma that he was reading Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character and finding it “extremely interesting,” adding that he regretted the volume covering the second half was missing.
That letter also gives another example of Mishima as a close, astute reader at age sixteen. Commenting on the two short stories Azuma sent with his letter, “Tree-searing Wind” (Kogarashi), which concerns a small group of young people at a riding arena, and “Winterscape” (Fuyugeshiki), which concerns a young man prone to fevers inadvertently put in a mental hospital, Mishima praised the former as “a fine wash drawing” and the latter as “an appropriate dessin”—the French word often used in the sense of vignette in Japan. Especially in “Winterscape,” both form (description) and content (scenes described) perfectly “matched,” he observed.
Still, if he were allowed to “wish for something better when you already have a good thing”—here he used an ancient Chinese idiom—what is missing might be “a poetic touch,” the sixteen-year old told the writer, his senior by five years. Also, “The Dharma suddenly started laughing,” a simile for the “ugly smile” of an idiot girl in the hospital, might be unexpected, but not “eerie” enough, though that may be because of his “‘House of Usher’ fantasy,” and so forth.22
Assuming that in his letter Mishima was quoting the Dharma passage verbatim, Azuma took Mishima’s comments on the Dharma simile seriously, for in the final version of “Winterscape,” which he noted he completed in November 1942, a year after Mishima’s letter, the passage reads: “Besides, because [the idiot girl] had her face brimming with an ugly smile and had her red cape rolled up to her head, her figure had an unworldly eeriness as if Dharma the Great Teacher in the picture had removed his jaw and suddenly started laughing.”23
“Winterscape” was accepted by the Mita Bungaku, the magazine of Keiō University that had started in 1910, with Nagai Kafū as editor-in-chief, and saw print in its February 1943 issue. The magazine had accepted and printed another of Azuma’s stories a year earlier.24
Hasuda Zenmei and National Learning
Hiraoka Azusa returned from Osaka to Tokyo in October. By then Mishima’s literary prowess had impressed people other than the editors of a school magazine. “The Forest in Full Bloom,” which he had completed during the summer, had begun to be serialized in the September issue of Bungei Bunka, the magazine of his teacher Shimizu Fumio and his associates.
Shimizu, who had become an instructor of Japanese grammar and composition at the Peers
School, in 1938, was soon afterward struck by a thirteen-year-old student’s story, “Sorrels.” The student was Hiraoka Kimitake. Four years later, in May 1941, the same student brought him a seventy-page manuscript. It was “The Forest in Full Bloom.” “That night,” Shimizu wrote, “after the dorm students went to sleep, I read it in one sitting. As I read, I savored the sensation of something asleep inside me being violently awakened.”
At the time he was serving as one of the two superintendents of the school’s Seiun (Constellation) Dormitory. Although Mishima never became a boarder at any of the dorms—his parents feared that he might acquire “the bad habit” if allowed to live with boys—it was while Shimizu was dorm superintendent there that Mishima developed what he called a “teacher-disciple” relationship with him. Recalling much later the days when Mishima used to visit him at the dorm, Shimizu wrote: “I often saw, through the window of my superintendent’s room, the palefaced, skinny figure of Mr. Hiraoka approach, holding a school bag by one hand, through the stand of zelkova trees between the drill hall and the gymnasium.”25
Shimizu strongly recommended the novella for publication in Bungei Bunka, the group magazine of which he was one of the four founders. In a meeting held in July, the three others—Hasuda Zenmei, Ikeda Tsutomu, and Kuriyama Riichi—were equally impressed by Mishima’s story. The four, all graduates of the Hiroshima University of Literature and Science, had started the magazine for “literary arts and culture,” in 1938, to restore “the authority of tradition,” illuminate “classics,” and uphold “the Japanese spirit,” as its statement of purpose announced. That may sound like inane bombast of narcissistic nationalists typical of the day; in fact, the group magazine was intended to counter the mindless chauvinism that was gaining the upper hand in politics and in other fields.
Early that year, on February 1, the government arrested a total of thirty-eight prominent scholars and leaders on suspicion of setting up the People’s Front in Japan. That followed a mass arrest of four hundred and forty-six people in December. Their books were banned. In the Diet, nationalist politicians had a heyday accusing anyone they didn’t like of contravening the notion of kokutai, “national polity.”26 Hasuda Zenmei, for one, fumed over these developments, noting in his diary that the rampant fear of “freedom” or “liberty”—as in liberalism; in Japanese, the word jiyū represent both “liberty” and “freedom”—as something akin to “a typhoid virus” would “endanger,” rather than “defend,” Japan.
Hasuda was an ardent nationalist himself and would become even “stubbornly” so in a few years, fixated on what he understood to be “the ancient” via the kokugaku, “national learning,” that Moto’ori Norinaga (1730–1801) advocated, especially the ideal of devotion to the Tennō.27 National Learning is a historico-literary movement that tried to eliminate Chinese, Confucian, and Buddhist influences in the Japanese language and literature and recover and establish what were thought to be things purely Japanese. As Norinaga put it in his introduction to kokugaku, “First, it is vital to wash away the Chinese mind and Confucian mind cleanly so you may firm up your Yamato spirit.”28
Linguistically, National Learning may have had some resemblance to the Anglo-Saxon revival that George Orwell, for one, desired. But like it, National Learning was a tall task.29 It held sway over much of Japan’s nationalist thinking nonetheless. In particular, the tanka in which Norinaga thought he expressed best the essence of the “Yamato spirit,” Yamato damashii, or “Yamato heart,” Yamato gokoro, became exceedingly popular among militarists during the 1930s and 1940s. It reads:
Shikishima no Yamato gokoro o hito towaba asahi ni niou yamazakurabana
If someone inquires of the Yamato heart, it is the wild cherry flowers abloom in the morning sun
Its popularity reached its crest when the devisers of the flying suicide missions, in the second half of the 1944, took advantage of the tradition that equates the scattering of cherry flowers with death after a fleeting glorious peak, and used some of the words in the tanka to name the initial units of “the special attack force.”30
Hasuda, among the four founders of Bungei Bunka, would leave an indelible imprint on Mishima in this and other ways, but with a caveat: Mishima’s perspective and readings were much broader than Hasuda’s. Mishima, for example, surely knew that Ueda Akinari (1734–1809), another favorite writer of his, mocked his contemporary Moto’ori Norinaga’s quest for nationalist purity. When Norinaga had his portrait with the poem quoted above written atop prepared and distributed to his disciples to celebrate his sixtieth year, Akinari condemned both that act and the notion of “Yamato spirit.” He said that stuff like “Yamato spirit” is what constitutes the “odor,” or the flaw, of each country, and that by sending his disciples a portrait with such a poem Norinaga turned himself into “the boss of self-aggrandizement.” He also wrote a tanka dismissing Norinaga’s composition and sent it to him.31
In the summer of 1943, Hasuda, who by then had created some disquiet among the literati for “roaring against” those he deemed not patriotic enough, would raise an unreasonable, incoherent fracas over Niwa Fumio’s novel Naval Battle (Kaisen). Like a number of other writers, Niwa had been lined up and sent to the front to report on various battles. Naval Battle was his realistic account of the First Battle of the Solomon Sea, on August 8 and 9, 1942, aboard Vice Adm. Mikawa Gun’ichi’s flagship, the heavy cruiser Chōkai. Niwa becomes unnerved and confounded when guns start blazing, but he struggles to record what he sees and hears, taking his writerly duty to heart. At the climax of the battle, Chōkai is hit by a salvo fired by the USS Quincy (or Astoria), itself heavily damaged and burning but dashing toward the Japanese cruiser, and Niwa is seriously wounded. He closely records that as well, to describe what war is like.
Yet, commenting on this novel, Hasuda condemned Niwa for not abandoning his pen in the midst of battle to help the crew by carrying shells, for example, as Niwa himself wrote that was what he should have done.
“It is a mistake to think that by carrying shells he would have interrupted battle observation or literature,” Hasuda wrote indignantly. “By carrying shells he might have lost track of certain scenes, but had he carried shells, what he would have seen doing that would have been true war.”
In truth, as his biographer, Odakane Jirō, guessed, Hasuda had probably been offended by what Niwa had written about his relationship to his pitiless mother as it was, not by Naval Battle. In short, his salvo against him was misdirected. Toward the end of 1967, that is, three years before his death, however, Mishima took up this matter to argue that literature cannot be a cog, a function in the division of labor, in a total war.32
By the time the four editors of Bunka Bungei met and decided to accept Mishima’s story, Hasuda had served in the army and fought in central China, near Lake Dongting, as second lieutenant. Called up in 1938 at the age of thirty-four, two years later he returned home wounded, his right forearm shot through. In late 1943 he was called back to duty, this time as first lieutenant, and fought in various parts of Indonesia. But four days after Japan’s surrender, in Johor Bahru, just north of Singapore, where three and a half years earlier Gen. Yamashita Tomoyuki had demanded and received surrender from Gen. Arthur Percival, he shot dead his regimental commander and then killed himself with the same gun.
This happened the day Maj. Gen. Prince Kan’in arrived in Saigon to convey the imperial message to regional regiments to accept Japan’s surrender. The Japanese government, fearful that many of the military units overseas would not surrender but fight on, had dispatched the Tennō’s relatives to tell them that the decision to surrender was His Majesty’s. Prince Kan’in was one of them.
The reason for Hasuda’s act, testimony of witnesses suggested, was that he was disturbed—deeply aggrieved—that the commander, Col. Nakajō Toyoma, had committed lèse majesté in his “farewell to the colors” speech two days earlier. He had spoken, Hasuda felt, in such a way as to “ascribe the responsibility for Japan’s defea
t to the Tennō, denigrate the future of the Imperial Army, and predict the collapse of the Japanese spirit.” Nakajō, who had taken up the position of regimental commander just before Japan’s defeat in a routine personnel transfer, gave the speech, it was said, because he sensed a revolt was afoot. A full complement of soldiers wanted to fight on and Hasuda was to be a battalion commander.33
Mishima would be deeply affected by Hasuda’s violent action and death. In a gathering of friends for Hasuda in November 1946, Shimizu recalled Mishima writing in a memorial book for Hasuda’s family, in classical Japanese: “You, who loved the clouds of ancient times, embodied the ancient times in yourself and hid yourself behind the clouds, whereas I, left in modern times, long in vain for the darkling clouds, myself about to be buried in bleak dusty earth.”34 Aside from his manner of death, however, Mishima had reason to remember Hasuda in a special way.
“The writer of ‘The Forest in Full Bloom’ is an utterly young man,” Hasuda had written when the first installment of the story appeared, in the September 1941 issue of Bungei Bunka.
What kind of person he is I’d like to keep in secrecy for the time being. This is because I believe that would be best. If someone were to truly want to know, I would simply reply that he is a young version of ourselves. That a young man like this is emerging in Japan is a joy I can hardly express in words, and would come as a surprise hardly believable to those with little confidence in Japanese literature. This young writer, however, is a God-send of Japan with its eternal history. This is the birth of someone who is far less than us in the number of years lived but already mature.35
The Forest in Full Bloom
As written by a sixteen-year-old boy, “The Forest” certainly has something about it that would impress anyone, but especially men like Shimizu and Hasuda who pursued what they believed to be the essences of classical Japanese literature and tradition. An overtly literary attempt to bring back some of the narrator’s “many ancestors” that include, “as seldom happens, both samurai and aristocrats,” the tale is imbued with an uncanny command of language.