by Hiroaki Sato
Mishima later wrote he had prayed there be no terrible air raids, lest the printer burn, until the book appeared, though in truth the bombing of Tokyo did not begin until after the book came out.
Kishi Nobusuke and Tōjō’s Fall
In June the US forces of 775 ships, with 15 aircraft carriers, began assaults on the Mariana Islands, Japan’s mandate territory since 1919. On the 15th, they landed on Saipan, in the southern part of the island chain, just about eighty miles north-northeast of Guam. On July 7, the last remnants of the thirty thousand Japanese soldiers garrisoned on the island were annihilated, with only about one thousand of them captured alive.
As the details came out, though greatly distorted to Japan’s advantage no doubt, Mishima wrote with sarcasm about “the sacrilege of the abuse of ‘uchiteshi yamamu’”—a phrase that occurs in the Kojiki and means “We won’t stop until we’ve destroyed the enemy” that the military adopted as one of the war slogans.25 Earlier in the same month, the operation to take Imphal, in eastern British India, had ended in an even greater disaster: thirty-two thousand soldiers dead (mostly from disease and starvation) and an additional forty thousand wounded or ill.26
Tōjō Hideki, who had insisted that Saipan was “hard to attack and impregnable,” was shaken. By then the anti-Tōjō sentiments were widespread because of his power grab, which provoked cries of “constitutional violation,” and his blatant use of the Kenpeitai. The political leadership was moving to end the war, and a separate political group was plotting to bring Tōjō down, with some contemplating his assassination.
In that milieu, Kishi refused to resign when Tōjō tried to reshuffle his cabinet. Earlier he had argued that with Saipan’s fall, Japan would soon be within the US bombing range and that would make continued armament production difficult. After Saipan fell, he insisted that Tōjō had lost his ability to deal with the war situation and should go.27
The Tōjō cabinet collapsed, on July 18. On August 2, Tinian, an island three miles southwest of Saipan, fell. The Japanese archipelago was now indeed within the striking distance of B-29s; Tokyo lay eight hundred miles north. Tinian was more suited for an air base, and the United States set out to build what would then be the largest air base in the world and accommodate one thousand B-29s. Most of the heavy bombings of Japan were carried out from that base. It was from there, too, that the B-29s carrying “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” flew to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On August 1, Mishima finished the proofreading of his book on schedule. Facing graduation from the Higher Division, he did not take exams for any officer-candidate course, but his classmate Mitani Makoto, like many others, had, passed, and was waiting for induction. It was during that summer that Mishima fell in love. The woman with whom he fell in love was Mitani’s younger sister, Kuniko.
In Confessions of a Mask, Mitani appears as Kusano and Kuniko as Sonoko. The Mitanis lived in a house built on an estate more than four times larger than the Mishimas’. It was a wooden, three-storied structure, elegantly designed. Makoto’s father, Takanobu, was a diplomat, at the time of Mishima’s encounter with Kuniko ambassador serving in Vichy France preparing to evacuate to Sigmaringen, in southern Germany, along with Marshal Pétain’s government, as a result of the Allied invasion of France.
Mitani Takanobu was just two years older than Mishima’s father and followed the same elite course of the First Higher School and the Imperial University of Tokyo where he studied German Law. He first entered the Home Ministry. He recalled citing a variation of Frederick the Great’s statement, “The prince is the first servant of his state,” during the ministry’s interview.
In two years, however, he was scouted into the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and, from the end of 1921 and early 1922, was a member of the Japanese delegation in the disarmament conference in Washington. Reviewing his diplomatic career, a great part of it spent in France, he would muse that the chain reactions caused by the decision by the United States and the United Kingdom to hem in Japan’s power during the conference led to Japan’s part in the disaster that was the Second World War.28 After the war he went on to serve the Tennō as grand chamberlain for seventeen years, from 1948 to 1965.
While visiting Mitani Makoto, Mishima heard the sound of a piano. “Is that good? Seems to stumble from time to time,” he asked, according to Confessions. Mitani replied, “She’s my sister. Her teacher left just a while ago, and she’s going over what she learned today.” The piano was an expensive foreign instrument to own, but Takanobu, a Christian, was a well-traveled diplomat, and his wife, Rieko, née Nagao, was related to a prince. Though the Mitanis did not belong to the peerage by Meiji classification, the family was considered to be in the sphere where Europeans influences were taken for granted.
We stopped our dialogue and again listened. Kusano’s induction was coming up soon, and I guessed that what was ringing in his ears was not simply the sound of the piano in the next room, but the “dailiness” from which he would soon be pulled away, a kind of clumsy, frustrating beauty. The tone of the piano had the sort of familiarity of clumsy cookies someone made while looking at a [recipe] note.
Mitani had three younger sisters. Kuniko, who was playing the piano at that time, was the oldest of the three. She was eighteen, two years younger than Mitani. Mishima was sure he had seen the three girls before, but in Mitani’s “Puritan” household, the girls hid themselves with bashful smiles as soon as they saw him.
The sound of the piano turned me into an awkward human being toward his sister. After I listened to it, I somehow felt like someone who had heard about her secrets and no longer was able to look her in the eye or talk to her. When she happened to bring us tea, I saw only her agile legs that moved lightly in front of my eyes. Perhaps because the monpe and trousers were in fashion then and I wasn’t used to seeing women’s legs as they were, the beauty of her legs moved me.
The monpe is a baggy, pantaloon-like work garment used by farming women that was adopted by the government for women as a whole during the war for its alleged practicality and for a regimentation that favored drabness and little glamour.29 Some in high society openly defied the regimentation as well as the drabness part of it. “In fashion” is Mishima’s sarcasm.
Mishima spoke of the same encounter in My Puberty (Waga shishunki), an oral account serialized in Myōjō, in 1957. After recalling his flashily dressed and aggressive cousin who forced “frantic kissing” on him one night and how the experience stimulated him to “yearn for a more beautiful, innocent love affair,” he goes on to say: His friend’s sister “would never join us in the debate between my friend and me. But as I listened to her piano, I felt that she, for some reason, wanted us to listen to the sound of her piano. . . . In the savage air of wartime, I felt, in that sound of the piano, the warm, soft, and quiet world of women that I surely had forgotten.”30
Years later when asked what she was playing at that fateful moment, Mitani Kuniko replied, “It was Chopin’s ‘Puppy Waltz.’”
On September 9, the Peers School held its commencement, half a year earlier than normal. On October 1, Mishima entered the Faculty of Law (German Law) of the Imperial University of Tokyo. That year the university did not hold its customary entrance examinations. Mishima was accepted on recommendation. He had wanted to go to the Faculty of Literature, but Azusa would not allow it. Ever a filial son, Mishima would later say that it was a good thing that he had studied law. “The art of writing a story and law have some odd linkage in the process.” He liked “lawsuit procedures,” in particular, which his father also had. The complex “logic” required for building a lawsuit resembles that of constructing a story. “Studying literature wouldn’t have worked, adding nothing to fiction writing.”31 His avowed interest in lawsuit procedures evidently was true. He told his friend Mitani Makoto that he liked them because they reminded him of Scholasticism.32
The Forest in Full Bloom came out on October 15; two days later he received a single advance copy. He took it to Ueno St
ation from which Mitani was to leave for Maebashi, Gunma, where the Army Reserve Officers School was located. He wanted to present it to his departing friend. For the occasion, he borrowed an Imperial University of Tokyo uniform, black with gold buttons, from an older student to be sent to the front soon. The understanding was that he would return the uniform to the student’s family when he was sent to the front. Mitani’s family, including Kuniko, came to the station.
There was a glitch, however. The note about the author Mishima Yukio had a typo: “The real name: Hiraoka Kimitake. Born in 1915. Still a student at the Higher Division of the Peers School.” That made him twenty-nine, not nineteen! He asked the publisher to make the correction at once, but when six more copies arrived in early November, they still carried the typo. Shichijō Shoin promised to deliver at least twenty corrected copies Mishima wanted for the publication party which was set for November 10 and to which he had invited his teacher, Shimizu Fumio, among others. But the publisher could not deliver them—this time with the typo covered with a small piece of paper with a correct year of birth pasted on it—until one day after the party, on the 11th.
What saved the day was that Azusa, who had professed such hatred for literature, arranged a suitable place for the party: a famous restaurant at Ikenohata, Ueno, called Ugetsu-sō (Rain and Moon Mansion). His excuse was that his son was bound to be sent to the front and killed. Shizue remembered the occasion in her joint memoir with Azusa. “It was an astonishingly spacious banquet room that was almost dark, with black curtains tightly put up around it for the anti-air-raid blackout.” The first fleet of B-29s based in Saipan would not appear in the sky of Tokyo and bomb the city until two weeks later, but the blackout had been in effect for some time by then. “The owner of the restaurant, though, had kindly scraped together a good deal of foodstuff to create an excellent banquet that belied the difficulties of the time. All of us were overjoyed.”33
Late in his life, when asked for an essay in praise of Ueno, Mishima chose to write about the evening in the innermost part of the Ugetsu-sō to say that “the memory of it was so beautiful all the publication parties since have seemed fake,” and that was why he had firmly declined all the offers for gatherings for his books.34
The Forest contained the title story and four others. “A Moon on the Surface of the Water” (Minomo no tsuki) is a narrative woven from letters among three lovers, a woman and two men, in Heian Japan. “To Be Left for the Generations to Come” (Yoyo ni nokosan) is another love story with three lovers, two men and a woman, again set in the Heian Period, though here in its declining phase. A novella more than twice as long as “The Forest,” it is inspired by the poetic autobiography left by Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu (born 1157?), one woman who wrote about the effects of the five-year war waged by the two dominant military clans of the day, the Taira and Minamoto, from 1180 to 1185; she lost her lover, Taira no Sukemori, in the final battle of the war. These stories, along with “The Forest,” again demonstrate Mishima’s absorption in Heian literature and his mastery of classical style and themes.
“Otto and Maya” (Ottō to Maya), yet another love story but set in imagined Germany, is notable for its fanciful deployment of translatese—a style almost unavoidable to anyone attempting to transfer faithfully any of the European languages into Japanese.
“Prayer Diary” (Inori no nikki) is the only one in the group with no stylistic attempt to imitate classical Japanese or a translation from a Western language. Narrated by a young woman in her puberty in contemporary Japan, the “diary” has a psychological immediacy and persuasiveness that the other stories lack, especially “Otto and Maya,” which may be, as Mishima admitted to Azuma, “foppish, giddy, and empty,” though it fully shows Mishima’s chameleon-like ability to switch from one style to another.35
The Nawate Incident
When it comes to Mishima’s writerly versatility, a short story he completed five days after The Forest came out cannot pass unmentioned: “The Nawate Incident” (Nawate jiken).
The story is based on an actual incident that occurred in Kyoto, March 23, 1868 (the 29th of Second Month by the lunar calendar). Two samurai assaulted the British legation as it headed from their temporary abode, the Buddhist temple Chion’in, toward the Imperial Palace for an audience with the Mikado in a long procession appropriate for Great Britain’s status as the dominant power of the day. Because the two assailants merely meant to kill foreigners, any foreigners, and did not target anyone in particular, they left unharmed Minister Sir Parkes and others on his staff, including Sir Ernest Satow, who would write a famous account of Japan during that period of great political transition, A Diplomat in Japan. But they did manage to wound nine British soldiers and three Japanese attendants before one of them was killed—by the two samurai accompanying the British, Gotō Shōjirō and Nakai Kōzō—and the other severely wounded and captured.
The story, which was discovered among Mishima’s papers years after his death, makes a fine contrast to the stories in The Forest. It weaves a few vivid, gory details into what appears to be a matter-of-fact description in a series of staccato, masculine sentences. It concludes:
Thus the incident more or less came to an end. The Minister [Parkes] and his entourage returned to the Chion’in. It was only after they walked in the main gate that they felt relieved enough to start talking to one another. Then there was another commotion at the main gate and a man soaked in blood ran in from there. Sir Harry, excited, rushed toward him, repeatedly calling out, “Nakai! Nakai!” But people restrained him; Nakai was carrying a head in his left hand. The head was placed in front of Sir Harry. A heathen joy revived among the people. The brain was visible in the triangular wound on the left side of the head. A wound was incised into the right jaw as well. Nakai had carried it by its hair so its facial features had become eerily lopsided. The neck was cut off straight so the head was suited to be placed as it was. Only the neck bone, muddy white, showed a somewhat uneven section. The head as a whole, because it was wet with blood plasma, seemed to soften its ghastly impression.
Parkes’ legs twitched as if he had a persistent fear even as he felt a childish satisfaction. That was because he was seeing a decapitated head for the first time.
Harry Parkes described the assault in his letter to his wife, and his secretary, A. M. Mitford (Lord Redesdale), wrote an article about it that saw print in The London Times on May 20.36 Mishima evidently based his story on some account, but which account is not clear.
Equally unclear is why he did not have a chance to publish it—except perhaps that the idea of samurai guarding a British legation was not quite right while the war continued. One thing to be noted is that Mishima apparently thought that “Sir Harry” and Parkes were two different persons. He perhaps did not realize that the title “sir” normally was followed by a personal name, not by a family name.
In later writing about the publication of The Forest, Mishima noted several times that the book sold out quickly—all four thousand copies of the first printing. He explained that there weren’t many first editions being issued at that time and that there was a strong appetite for new books. Apparently his book sold well, but some think not to the extent Mishima suggested. A few have even averred that Mishima took unsold copies to secondhand book dealers himself. Whatever the case, the confidence gained from having published a book, combined with the unusual access to paper, may have given Mishima an attitude that would rub at least one editor the wrong way.
“Circus” (Zirkus)
With Kuriyama Riichi’s recommendation, Noda Utarō, the editor of Bungei, by then the only literary magazine by a regular publishing house still standing, wrote Mishima toward the end of January to invite him to bring some fiction. In response, Mishima took “Circus” (Sākasu)37 to Noda on February 22, 1945, the day Tokyo was struck by heavy snow in the continuing severely cold winter that was “dark, jittery, and oppressed” by constant US bombings.
Noda accepted and published one of Mishima’
s stories in the end, and he did a few other things for him, but he apparently did not get along with the young writer from the outset. Probably because he was used to dealing with established authors, he found Mishima to be too “impudent,” too “self-confident,” and too argumentative, to his taste, a youth more eager to get his stuff published than anything else; worse, he flaunted his access to paper. “Once he kindly asked if I needed paper,” Noda recalled. “I declined the offer by saying, though I edit, I’m not a printer, so even if you gave me paper, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” Another reason for his dislike of Mishima may well have been a preconception. Shiga Naoya, whom he had met a few weeks before Mishima showed up, had dismissed Mishima’s fiction as all “fantasy” with little “sense of reality.” (Shiga was another writer Mishima admired who did not reciprocate his sentiments.38)
As he recalled, Noda took care to tell Mishima that Shiga’s opinion itself did not mean much; Mishima could push his talent in a different direction. He believed that “Yisugei’s Hunt” (Esugai no kari), the story he accepted, was a result of that suggestion. It describes a young Yisugei, Genghis Khan’s father, robbing a bridegroom of his beautiful bride by murdering him. Evidently Mishima read a Japanese translation of The Secret History of the Mongols and turned a passage from it into a story.39 It is another stylistic marvel, with short, image-packed sentences strung together.
In his memoir of his wartime work as editor, appropriately called The Season of Ashes (Hai no kisetsu), Noda wrote Mishima brought two stories that snowy day, suggesting that the other was “Yisugei’s Hunt,” which Mishima had yet to write. For that matter, he did not take “Circus,” the story Mishima brought. He rather liked it, but “a single kissing scene” in it made it “totally unpublishable at the time.” It is an innocuous story of a circus manager’s masochistic fascination with a young couple in his troupe, a female tightrope artist and a male acrobatic horse rider. Stylistically, it showed Mishima’s preference for paradoxes. It was a story to which Mishima would develop a great attachment. He revised it a number of times, included it in a number of selections, and even recorded it, himself reading it, in 1966, with the music composed for it.40