by Hiroaki Sato
As to Mishima’s writings as a whole, Noda detected “an influence of the stiff formalism of the Japan Romantic School”—the name that directly came from Nihon Rōman-ha, the magazine Yasuda Yojūrō founded in 1935. The magazine lasted for only three years, but its name became synonymous with a literary movement because of Yasuda’s considerable influence as a Japanist for about a decade before Japan’s defeat. Overall, Noda decided that Mishima, talented writer as he may be, was largely no more than a literary “epigone”—the English word is Noda’s—which he thought he confirmed later when Mishima became famous. Like Fuji Masaharu, he was put off by Mishima, rather than drawn to him.41
A year earlier Mishima had asked Noda to introduce him to Kawabata Yasunari and Noda had passed Mishima’s wishes to Kawabata. This time, perhaps with a copy of The Forest delivered via another writer, it worked quickly. Mishima received a letter from Kawabata, dated March 8, thanking him, saying that he had been interested in “your manner of writing since I read part of the story in Bungei Bunka.” Thus the two started corresponding.42
On March 3, 1945, in his “Saturday communication” to Mitani Makoto—the regular correspondence he had started with the officer candidate four months earlier—Mishima noted that there had been no air raids for five consecutive days, calling it “an eerie peace.” By then air raids by B-29s had become routine. In fact, Mishima had written an unforgettable essay on one of them—the one on January 19 that threatened Ōta-chō, Gunma, where the Nakajima aircraft factory to which he was assigned for wartime labor since early January was located––though in the essay he depicted as more terrifying than the actual bombings the members of the militia. Ultra-rightwing thugs in reality, they were employed to goad the workers as they moved back and forth between factory and shelter by brandishing wooden swords.43
Azusa himself reported to his son, with his disconcerting airiness, one air raid in Tokyo on January 27 that killed about one thousand people on the Ginza alone, with corpses piled up in Hibiya Park and people going there to see if they included missing family members.44 In February, with air raids growing ever more frequent, the Metropolitan Police Department issued an order to kill all dogs to avoid “confusion” following bombings. Part of the reason was likely to prevent the spectacle of dogs eating corpses. Muramatsu Takeshi, later Mishima’s literary associate who would write his literary biography, remembered his family following the ordinance and killing their dog, a Spitz, with an injection, on February 7, 1945.45
For almost every “Saturday communication” Mishima used a postcard, packing it with a disproportionate volume of message written in small handwriting, which marveled Mitani. He used the rationed government-issue postcards evidently to avoid the trouble of censors opening his letters, but the recipient in the military school often wondered if he was going to be summoned for questioning.46 It was at a time when English was condemned as an “enemy language” and reading European authors made you automatically suspect. Mishima’s message on March 3, which is Girls’ Day, managed to pack all of the following in the cramped space, beginning with the required seasonal observations:
Monotonous everyday, days when I must irrigate my surroundings with water myself, stir ripples, plant waterweeds, and dream of a seascape more resplendent than the Mediterranean. I have grown somewhat used to such a life. Today is the fifth day we’ve had no air raids whatsoever. An eerier peace. Even in its midst the serene spring day has pushed itself close to my window. The remaining snow still feels hard to my feet stepping on it, but the young buds on the garden trees are growing with the kind of softness that makes me suspect they might melt more easily than the light snow. From now on I’ll be able to do a lot of work. While wanting to embark on a full-length work, I am ducking the issue by writing an essay on Marcel Proust’s “The Death of Baldassare Silvande.” Speaking of such things, I’m tempted to write, with resolve, the essay on the Chuci that I once told you about, despite a shortage of material. For the moment, I am enjoying Nerval’s novel, Valéry’s essay on Mallarmé, plays of Yeats and Singe, and Karel Čapek’s Insect Play. How long will this kind of carefree life of reading last? I don’t know when the university is going to summon me back with “We don’t care whether you have amyloid infiltration of the lungs or what, just show up.” Whatever may happen will, then.
From now on we must rigorously train the spirit of “supporting the tragedy,” rather than “bearing the tragedy,” I think. We don’t have to seek our model in ancient Greece; the Genroku Era of Sōrinshi [Chikamatsu Monzaemon] that is close to us tells us in unadorned fashion what a renaissance is. The Yasuda Yojūrō–style optimistic theory of National Learning is remotest from me now.
—I’ve talked only about myself. Please take good care of yourself.
Mishima did finish the essay on the first story in Proust’s Les Plaisirs et les Jours and published it a year and a half later, which is to say, nine months after Japan’s defeat. In it he wrote, “I dare say, with sneers fully expected, that in the excellent final chapter of ‘La Mort de Baldassare’ I have a whiff of the remaining fragrance of the Orientalism of decadent Romanticism,” pointing to Alexis’ “genuine curiosity, terror, and love concerning [his uncle’s] death, as well as Baldassare’s identification with the boy Alexis”47—“a kindred feeling that, gradually spreading, turned into an immense stupefaction at the universal scandal of these existences, his own included, walking backward into death with their gaze still fixed on life.”48
The Chuci (Soji in Japanese) is an anthology of poems attributed to the Chu Dynasty statesman Qu Yuan (third to fourth centuries b.c.). Mishima had cited a few lines from it for Mitani in January in reporting his progress on “The Medieval Period” (Chūsei), saying that images in some of the poems bested those in “ancient poems of Ikhnaton, of Egypt.” For that matter, he had told his parents, in a letter he wrote the same day, January 20: “Last night I borrowed the Chuci from a friend and read it; China is a great country. Something like ‘Nine Songs’ is several times superior to Song of Solomon in the Old Testament.”49
Had the military or civilian police censor been as well read as Mishima, he certainly would have confiscated this card or questioned its recipient Mitani—as he would have blocked the publication of The Forest. If the decadence and aestheticism of the stories in The Forest went totally against the militarism of the day,50 Proust and “The Death of Baldassare Silvande” carried as much of the same qualities as the next writer Mishima mentioned, Karel Čapek, and The Insect Play carried Socialism.
Not just that the Czech writer’s play, first produced in 1923, was an overtly socialist work, but the Čapek Brothers—Karel often worked with his brother Josef, as in the case of The Insect Play—were anti-Hitler to the core. Karel’s last plays, before his death in 1938, were “written just before the entry of Hitler into Czechoslovakia, deal with the rise of dictatorship and the terrible consequences of war,” whereas Josef was sent to a German concentration camp and would die in Belsen in April 1945.51 Even Mishima would not have dared to try to publish a list of aphoristic assertions he penned in January 1944 wherein he expressed his loathing of Nazism, predicting that “the various ideas of German Nazism [would be] the worst harm and poison for tomorrow’s Japan.”52
Mishima at times indulged in cultural chauvinism. In his missive in early January, he asked Mitani if he read Ōshima Masamitsu’s The Autumn at the Shūgakuin (Shūgakuin no aki). The biologist, who had studied with David Starr Jordan at Stanford, had written about an American boy who had laughed at Shiobara Tasuke’s horse but who nevertheless understood “the true import of Japan’s sublime beauty,” Mishima told Mitani, when he picked up a single maple leaf at the Shūgakuin Detached Palace. Mishima then wrote: “If Americans had made an effort to appreciate [Onoe Kikugorō] VI’s ‘Lion Dance’—or rather, if they had had a great people’s flexibility, this war would not have happened.”53
The Japan Romantic School
One thing notable in the March 3 “communication
” is that Mishima by the spring of 1945 was distancing himself from Yasuda Yojūrō, the founder of the Japan Romantic School, because Yasuda would go on to be invoked for Mishima, not just during his life but after his death. One recent American scholar, Alan Tansman, for example, has called Mishima “Yasuda’s most famous epigone.”54 Somewhat earlier a Japanese scholar, Konishi Jin’ichi, had spoken of Yasuda’s influence on Mishima before his “disappearance,” as Yasuda was drafted into the army in 1945.55 Perhaps more important, a few decades before Konishi, when Mishima’s fame was spreading fast and wide, another Japanese scholar had described Yasuda in terms that eerily adumbrated what Mishima would be thought of: “Yasuda was something indefinable, one ultimate form of Japanese-style universalist from which you cannot escape.” That scholar was the Asianist and student of Chinese literature Takeuchi Yoshimi.
“The philosophical role Yasuda played was to annihilate thought by destroying every categorization,” Takeuchi wrote. “In this respect he was more advanced than the Kyoto School that subordinated the arbitrariness of concepts to categories.” The Kyoto School refers to a group of scholars in the humanities at the Imperial University of Kyoto who were establishing their own views, theories, and philosophies on the basis of their knowledge of a range of developments in the rest of the world. The group included the prominent philosopher Nishida Kitarō who “synthesize[d] insights from the Japanese tradition with those of the European philosophical tradition,” in the end founding his argument on “the logic of nothingness.”56
Takeuchi continued: “[Yasuda] advocated total abnegation of Civilization and Enlightenment”—the slogan the Meiji government employed in urging the Japanese populace to catch up with the West— “but the Civilization and Enlightenment he meant was neither a trend, nor a fashion, nor a logic, but something that was at once a trend, a fashion, and a logic, that is, modern Japan in its entirety. Accordingly, it included himself as a matter of course. In him, it is to theticize himself.” In other words, “his thought was ‘a blank thought.’”57 Takeuchi, Yasuda’s high-school classmate, wrote these words as he became the first to reassess him following a round of his demonization after the war as “an ultranationalist, reactionary, and cultural fascist” and as “an extoller of a war of invasion.”58
Yasuda, in any case, had a magnetic hold on young readers, Mishima among them. One question then is: How did such a swing occur in Yasuda’s reputation before and after the war—from “a spiritual gem” (Takeuchi) to “a spiritual demon” (Tansman)? Yasuda went through three stages or layers of intellectual influence. In high school he was nicknamed a “Marx Boy.” As a student of aesthetics at the Imperial University of Tokyo he absorbed German Romanticism and National Learning. After he won a prize for his aesthetic meditation titled Japanese Bridges (Nihon no hashi), he became a Japanist with his understanding of National Learning at the fore, albeit colored by a heavy dose of “irony” (romantische Ironie) and Nihilism. Given the times and circumstances, his aestheticism had the danger of being easily misconstrued because of its stress on Japanese tradition and “the Japanese spirit” (Yamato damashii) or “the Japanese heart” (Yamato gokoro).
A typical enunciation of Yasuda’s may be one that appears in his 1943 essay, “The Great East Asia War and Japanese Literature.” Citing a phrase from an ancient military vow that Ōtomo no Yakamochi (718?-85) incorporated in his poem in the Man’yōshū, Yasuda said:
As far as arguments on the war in cultural and literary arts are concerned, everything ends in our resolve in going to the battlefield. In addition, today’s loyal and brave officers and men are living exactly what the ancients sang of, “Our wish is to die by our Sovereign’s side.” The ancients’ desire, “Our wish is to die by our Sovereign’s side,” was simply that we want to die near our Sovereign. We think of nothing else. We don’t talk about it. That was it. In the event, where is the cause of our having to discuss the meaning of dying on a battlefield (uchijini) with thoughts among Western barbarians (Seijū) such as world history and worldview?59
The phrase in question appears in the aforementioned When Seagoing. But Yasuda’s use of encrusted, orotund words such as uchijini and Seijū makes it easy to overlook the fact that here he was taking on the day’s grandiose talk of putting Japan on the world map through the Greater East Asian War and the challenge to European hegemony. There would be little wonder if the militarists, growing ever more sensitive as Japan began to lose one battle after another, found such atavistic thought subversive—or so thought Oketani Hideaki, a student of Japan’s intellectual history, Geistesgeschichte. They placed Yasuda under surveillance of the Military Police, Kenpeitai, after July 1944, then suddenly drafted him, a man in his mid-thirties and ailing, in March 1945, and sent him directly to the front.60
Mishima’s apparent rejection of Yasuda-style classicism at that juncture may seem abrupt. But Mitani was right in speculating—as he did in compiling Mishima’s “Saturday communications” with commentaries after his death—that Mishima by then was beginning to find the Japanist’s “dreamy” single-mindedness too simplistic. His deep interest in world literature obviously would not accommodate such a narrowing focus. But his skepticism of Yasuda also had to do with his disappointment with the man when he went to see him, in late 1943. He asked what he thought of the rhetorical style of nō plays. Yasuda’s response was: “Well, it’s been said since the old days to be like hand-woven brocade. You might say those sentences are like an encyclopedia of the day.”
The verse sections of nō plays weave together parts of famous poems and well-known phrases through the punning devise called kakekotoba. So Yasuda most likely meant that those who composed the plays had to have an encyclopedic command of belles-lettres. Mishima, who half a year earlier had written an essay exalting the literary device, saying that kakekotoba are “the most beautiful bridges Mr. Yasuda has mentioned in Japanese Bridges,”61 had expected the avowed Romantic classicist to come up with some sort of witticism, not what was usually said. “The resplendent style of nō plays is an ultimate aesthetic resistance in language, with eschatological thoughts hidden behind it,” Mishima thought. “A ready deployment of such an extremely artificial, gorgeous language must necessarily require an underpinning of a sense of despair.”62
The Greatest Air Raid
The greatest air raid in Japan struck the night before the next “Saturday communication” was due. On the night of March 9, wave after wave of B-29s bombed Tokyo. In the end a total of three hundred “flying fortresses” dropped two thousand tons of incendiaries. By concentrating on one section of the city known as Shitamachi—in size, the equivalent of seven-tenths of Manhattan—the 2.2-hour bombings, which began a little after midnight, created the kind of firestorm seen in Dresden, “scorched and boiled and baked to death” more than eighty-nine thousand people, and deprived one million people of their homes. The catastrophe destroyed more lives than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later, according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey. But it was quickly laid aside because the atomic bomb was thought to have put “the continuity of life into question,” as Mary McCarthy put it.63
That night Mishima was in Maebashi, staying at an inn. Some days earlier Mitani’s mother had telephoned to invite him to join the family going to see Mitani at his school. The officer candidates were occasionally allowed to see their families, and the next date for such meetings was set for the following Saturday, March 10. Kuniko was going, too, the mother said. Mishima agreed to go with them. Leaving Ueno on March 9, the group stayed in Maebashi overnight before visiting Mitani the next day.
On March 10, Army Day, Mitani’s family, like many other visitors, had a picnic-style lunch on the wind-swept, withered lawns outside the soldier’s quarters, which were halfway up Mt. Shiina. The day must have been cold. The night of the great Tokyo air raid is known to have been one of the coldest on record. Mitani pointed toward Tokyo and said, “Last night it looked scarlet over there; it must have been horrible.
You can’t tell what may have happened to your house. During none of the air raids in the past did the sky above it look red like that.” The previous night a friend of his who was up during the night to go to the latrine had seen columns of fire rising in Tokyo.64 The metropolis is about sixty miles southeast of Maebashi.
On the way back to Tokyo, the Mitanis and Mishima ran into a tip of the terrifying consequences of the air raid. Ōmiya, Saitama’s railway junction close to Tokyo, was overflowing with refugees from the devastated parts of Tokyo.
“Wrapped up in blankets, they revealed only unseeing, unthinking eyes or rather simply their eyeballs,” Mishima wrote. “There was a mother who seemed to intend to rock her child on her lap eternally with the same width swing. A young woman lay collapsed against a long wicker chest, asleep, a half-scorched artificial flower in her hair.” Mishima and the Mitanis were dressed up for a weekend visit, “bourgeois style.” But here were people “who had seen all the various things that had defined their lives engulfed in the fire. They had seen human relations, love and hate, reason, assets engulfed in the fire before their own eyes.
“As our group passed through them, we weren’t even rewarded with a reproachful glance. We were completely ignored. For the simple reason that we did not share their misfortune, our raison d’être was obliterated, and we were regarded as a shadowy existence.”