by Hiroaki Sato
Meeting Kawabata Yasunari
On January 27, Sunday, Mishima went to visit Kawabata, in Kamakura. At the time Kawabata lived in Nikaidō, northeast of the Kamakura (also, Ōtō or Daitō) Shrine, renting Kanbara Ariake’s house, “cohabiting, as it were, with his landlord.” Kanbara, a well-known poet who had stopped writing poetry in the early part of the century after establishing his reputation as a Symbolist, had been burnt out of his house in Tokyo during an air raid near the end of the war and was living in a room of his old house rented to Kawabata. Recalling the visit seventeen years later in his literary memoir, My Pilgrimage Days (Watashi no henreki jidai), serialized in the Tokyo Shinbun, Mishima wrote that, when he reached the house, “the guestroom was full of visitors” and these visitors provided someone who “had known only a monotonous school and family life” with the first opportunity to witness “the furious vitality of the postwar literary world.”
“Publishers that had sprouted like bamboo shoots after rain had rushed to [Kawabata] to beg for permission to reprint his old works.” Among the visitors were people he would later recognize as Kawasaki Chōtarō, Ishizuka Tomoji, and Kawakami Yasuko. “As I saw Mr. Kawasaki paddle away in his rubber boots, ignorant as I was of the literary world, I thought he was a real fishmonger.” Kawasaki, noted for his writings about the women in the red-light district Makkō-chō, lived in poverty much of his life, at the time probably in a zinc-roofed shed. Kawabata “sat in their midst in silence, no different from what he looks today, in 1963, calm, neither amused nor funny.”6
In truth, this was a case of memory prettifying what actually happened. Mishima no doubt met these people in his later, frequent visits with Kawabata; Kawabata was known for having constant visitors. But a description he jotted down evidently soon after his first encounter with a writer for whom he would maintain, at least outwardly, a respectful relationship to the end of his life tells a different story.
That particular day, Kawabata wasn’t even up when Mishima arrived past eleven. Mishima had to wait in a kotatsu or foot warmer, a covered brazier under a low table draped with a quilt. The conversation after Kawabata showed up was desultory at best. He was, Mishima thought, utterly unlike Satō Haruo who would “lead a conversation by providing one topic after another.” One of the few things Kawabata volunteered was the coming war between the United States and the USSR. Barely five months since the world war ended, it was on everyone’s mind. The only topic on which he was “insistent” to any degree was the “habit” of staying up late to write. “If you write that way, you can put up with anything, be it democracy or socialism”—only to add, “but if you are like that, you are no good in a democracy, you are no good in the age of socialism even if it comes.”
What left an indelible impression on Mishima was Kawabata’s eyes. “His eyes were a go player’s which, though they may appear restless at first glance, see the bull’s eye.” Mishima likely had read Kawabata’s popular newspaper reportage on the grand go match between Hon’inbō Shūsai and Kitani Minoru that took six months to complete, in 1938, as well as his attempt, starting in 1942, to turn it into a somewhat fictionalized account that would eventually become The Master (Meijin).7 (Unlike today, go matches were leisurely at the time, and for this grand match, each player was given forty hours to make his moves, as opposed to today’s ten. Still, the match took nearly six months, from June 24 to December 4, in 1938, because the ailing master was too sick to play for three months.) Kawabata’s eyes were “also a kendō master’s,” Mishima wrote, “the eyes that move with a moving sword. Theirs was not the dead sharpness of someone staring at you.”
There was one thing Mishima said that “startled and troubled” Kawabata. That was when he made a “paradoxical” statement: “Hani Gorō”—a Marxist historian persecuted before and during the war—“is accusing the Tennō by citing the cruelties of [the twenty-first Tennō], but who would be happy to exalt anyone unless he is a descendant of a monarch who committed cruelties?” The account of Yūryaku, which appears in the History of Japan (Nihon Shoki), written originally in Chinese, in 720, presents him as a ruler of monstrous deeds of the kinds usually attributed to evil Chinese rulers.
Kawabata had a single visitor while Mishima was there that day: the poet and novelist Kawakami Kikuko who came to discuss a book. Her arrival made the conversation between the two men even more halting. Mishima says that when he left, the rain that had been occasional sprinkles when he reached Kawabata’s house was steadily falling. Three days later he wrote Noda Utarō that he had stayed with Kawabata “until past three.”8
Two Forms of Censorship
Kawabata at the time was managing director of the Kamakura Bunko. It had started out, in May 1945, as a lending library that he and some of his fellow writers who did not evacuate out of the ancient city had set up by pooling their books and renting a toy store to supplement their incomes. Following Japan’s defeat a mere three months later, a paper manufacturer offered to provide paper, and Kawabata quickly turned the library into a publishing house, with a monthly, Ningen, to go with it.9 And he had chosen Kimura Tokuzō to edit the magazine by plucking him out of Kyoto.
Kimura, then thirty-four, had, as with most editors, experienced a severe form of censorship firsthand and would experience another form of censorship soon enough. The one he experienced was from the Japanese, and it was intended for outright suppression; the one he would soon experience was from the Americans, and it was for democracy, or so he was told.
Censorship in Japan, which became law in the early twentieth century, reached its brutal peak with the militarist takeover of governance. By the time Kimura was employed by Kaizōsha, in 1937, the days for the editors to be able to use fuseji were virtually over. The most infamous censorship action against his publisher would begin in early 1942. Later called the Yokohama Incident, it would see sixty people rounded up and tortured, leaving four dead.10 Kaizōsha, during its heyday, had invited foreign luminaries such as the birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger for speaking tours in Japan.
Then came the Occupation. Its declared aim was to plant democracy in Japan. Freedom of speech was essential. But anything “undemocratic” must be eradicated. For that goal, every substantive tool of communication, be it film, theater, or print, had to be approved in advance. In other words, this freedom was conditional. Kimura filed, as required, the proofread galley of its inaugural issue of Ningen with the Occupation’s Civil Information and Education Section. It included a translation of Thomas Mann’s 1938 lectures in the United States, “The Coming Victory of Democracy.” A few days later, he was summoned. The two Nisei officers who met him told him he could not publish two articles in the issue. Why?
One article, by Kon Hidemi, had the word teki, “enemy,” as applied to the US forces. The article concerned Satomura Kinzō, who, along with Kon and others, had been sent to the Philippines by the military as a reporter at the end of 1944 and was killed a few months later during the Japanese retreat north from Manila.11 The US military could not be referred to as “enemy,” even though the war was over.
The reasons for the rejection of the other essay not only were indicative of the military mindset, Japanese or American, but also, as Kimura would find out, foretold the International Military Tribunals for the Far East that the Occupation would convene in half a year. The essay’s writer, Komiya Toyotaka, was a feisty scholar of German literature and Japan’s traditional arts, such as haiku. He had written several essays on the carpet bombings of Tokyo, mentioning the prospect of the landing of US forces in Japan. His focus was on the Japanese military that could not prevent such things from happening. The Asahi Shinbun had rejected all. The daily knew printing any such criticism of the military would be suicidal. The war was over, but the US military still did not want it to be known that there had been conjecture on its expected landing in Japan, Kimura was told. It was a “top military secret.”
More important, the United States wanted no references to the air raids. That, as
it would turn out, was no caprice on the part of individual censors. In planning military tribunals, for both Germany and Japan, the prosecuting nations had decided to pre-exonerate themselves of any war crimes, let alone the new categories of “crime against peace” and “crime against humanity.”12
When the first issue of his magazine was ready and filed with the CIE, Kimura was summoned again. This time a middle-aged female officer with two Nisei aides met him. What was wrong? Kimura had left as blanks the several places in Kon’s article where the word teki had appeared. As to Komiya’s article, he had simply blacked it out. The officer’s stern “guidance”: No “traces of censorship” are allowed to show. She also objected to the drawing used for the cover. It was by the painter Suda Kunitarō and depicted a man and a woman, both nude, turning the other way. To Kimura the two figures looked like Adam and Eve as they were expelled from the Garden of Eden, and that was why he chose the drawing. But to the censor they looked liked “prisoners,” suggesting that Japan was imprisoned by the Occupation.13
Nearly four decades later when he published a collection of his essays as editor in those days, Kimura used the same painting for the cover of his book.
Editorial Collaboration
One day not long after Ningen started coming out, Kawabata passed two stories by Mishima to Kimura, “A Tale at the Cape” and “A Cigarette” (Tabako). The latter has to do with a boy who, forced to have the first taste of smoking that is forbidden at school, develops a yearning for the older, athletic boy who had pushed a cigarette on him. Kimura found both stories very good, but thought the former a bit “too stiff with Romantic nihilism and too contrived” and the latter straightforward and tightly constructed. Unable to make up his mind which to take, he told Kawabata so. Kawabata’s response was: “You think that, too. Well then, print ‘Cigarette’ in Ningen when you have a chance. I’ll return ‘Cape’ to him.”
Kimura printed the story in the June 1946 issue of the magazine. Later, after he came to know Mishima, he reflected he would have taken “Cape” as more “Mishima-esque” had he known him at the time. Apart from that, he was impressed by the clean manuscripts, Mishima’s handwriting more “appropriate for a brush,” with few corrections, something all the editors who dealt with Mishima would note.
Kimura met Mishima in person soon enough. Kawabata said to him, “Mishima has brought me this fiction. He can apparently write something like this, too.” It was “The Medieval Period.” “I told him to come to see you.” The Mishima Yukio who showed up at the Kamakura Bunko was “a young man neatly wearing his college uniform, with an oblong face of dull complexion, who you could tell at a glance was hypersensitive,” Kimura recalled in his memoirs of men-of-letters with whom he associated. “He spoke courteously like the son of a good family in Yamanote, Tokyo, that he was, responding to my questions tidily, concisely. He listened and responded, without a smile, his eyes always on my face. I was impressed by the monomaniacal glint of his eyes more than anything else.”
Kimura was straightforward with Mishima. He would suggest deleting several lines here, several lines there, pointing out that too much conversation would vulgarize a story. Mishima would react to each such editorial comment strongly, crossing out the offensive passage on the spot, or declaring he’d trash the whole story as he snatched up the manuscript to go home. The next time he came to visit he would thrust a revised version at Kimura triumphantly and, sure enough, the revisions had made the story much better.
“How many times did I repeat such a life-or-death fight with Mishima? Once a woman writer, whose manuscript I’d just rejected, happened to witness our ferocious exchange; she just stood there, glued to the spot, appalled. I never met a new writer like Mishima, before or after, whom I found it so worthwhile to advise.”
Mishima later said of his early work published in Ningen that it would be “no exaggeration to say they were collaborations with Kimura.” Comparing the relationship between new writer and literary editor to that of fresh boxer and experienced, wily trainer, he said he was fortunate to have Kimura as editor at that early stage. He added that for a while he was known as “the Mishima who’ s published fiction in Ningen,” as though the accomplishment were part of his calling card.14
For all the intense, fruitful work with Kimura and the editor’s obvious confidence in his talent—Kimura once told the writer, “I’d be happy to see a new story any time you finish one”—Mishima was far from satisfied. He was at a crucial point, and the need he felt to make his name as a writer was not being met fast enough. “Cigarette” was accepted in February but was not published until June. He pleaded with Kimura for an early publication. “Your kind decision to carry my clumsy ‘Cigarette’ was to me the largest of the ‘rescuing hands,’” he wrote in a long letter to him in May. “Anyone would be shocked if someone, overjoyed by being rescued, shook the hand that he’d put out with no thought whatsoever. Worse, that person would surely be troubled if the wet, cold hand of someone who is drowning suddenly clung to it and blindly pulled it this way and that. I am afraid that this letter of mine, which is somewhat confessional, is giving you such a feeling.”15
And when “Cigarette” finally appeared after keeping Mishima in a state of exasperation—he would check the newspaper ads of the magazine every month only to find his story not listed in its table of contents—it did not elicit any response. He decided to focus on the preparations for the higher civil service examination, which he would take in July 1947.
Kimura had occasion to observe Mishima as a serious student. One day they met in front of the library of the Imperial University of Tokyo. After talking about various matters for about an hour, Mishima excused himself for the next lecture he had to attend. Out of curiosity Kimura followed him into the building. “I peeked into Classroom No. 26 that Mishima had walked into. As many serious top students would, he appeared to have reserved his seat in advance. I saw him seat himself in the second row, right in front of the lectern. To me, indifferent as I was when a student, it was something unthinkable.”16
The Great Listener Who Wanted a Kiss
Mitani Kuniko was married on May 5, 1946. About a month later, Sassa Teiko came to see Mishima’s sister Mitsuko. She did not know her best friend at the College of the Sacred Heart had died half a year earlier. Her father, Hiro’o, chief editorialist at the Asahi Shinbun, had evacuated her, along with her older brother, Katsuaki, first to Niigata after the great air raid in March 1945, then, upon learning that the city on the Japan Sea might be among those targeted for the “special bomb,” to a village in inland Saitama. He had done so, explaining that warriors during Japan’s Age of Warring States used to split their families, even arranging to have one group side with the potential enemy, lest their bloodline end. He descended from a famous warrior-commander who had to disembowel himself.17 Teiko had come back to Tokyo well into September but in a struggle for survival in the devastated metropolis had not had time to be in touch with her friends.
Teiko’s visit prompted Mishima to ask her to go out with him—to cafés, to dance, to take a walk, to movies. Teiko in time found there was a subtle difference between what Mishima sought in her and what she wanted in him. Mishima was a good listener who gave thoughtful answers to whatever questions she threw at him, and that was good for a young woman who had a variety of weighty, however youthful, topics she wanted to talk about: love, suffering, and such. He was always neatly dressed (at a time the majority were unable to do so), punctual, and, most important, gentlemanly, except for his enthusiasm for dancing—with a preference for cheek-to-cheek dancing. He was a clumsy dancer, Teiko thought, and she did not like body contact.
Whether to dance better with her or not, Mishima took lessons from the novelist Kunieda Shirō’s widow toward the end of the year.18 Western-style dancing, which, along with jazz, had been suppressed since the latter half of the 1930s, had revived in full force following Japan’s defeat—just as dancing and jazz had become all the rage in Germany following its
defeat.19
Dancing, as a matter of fact, would become Mishima’s passion for much of his life, although most people who danced with him, as Sassa did, or saw him dance, would aver he could not dance. The Flamenco dancer-turned-writer Itasaka Gō was blunt. He observed that anyone unable to keep time with the simple music for “monkey dance,” as Mishima was, had no right to want to study Flamenco, as Mishima fervently did at one time, though not with Itasaka but the famous dancer Katori Kiyoko.20 Itasaka’s book on Mishima, written a quarter century after his death, is built on the curious conjecture that Mishima’s desire to learn Flamenco dance—the dance of the Gypsies—derived from his stark but suppressed knowledge of the humble background of one branch of his paternal ancestor.
Mishima was a good letter writer. It was in one of his many letters to Teiko that Mishima talked about Mitani Kuniko. “Miss K, now someone else’s wife, was quite an ignorant, innocent, and passionate young lady, but she had no understanding whatsoever of what I would call an ‘autonomous independent life,’” he wrote on July 5, 1947. “Her husband, a diplomat’s son, already thirty-some years old, lives with his parents; as a result, she is constantly bullied by her frightening mother-in-law, but she isn’t critical at all that her husband lives in the same house with his parents, depending on them.”
Mishima’s conclusion on what happened between Miss K and himself: “She was just simply too eager to marry someone, the sooner the better.” In saying this, he thought of his own situation. “I at times think I am a fool, yearning for such a swallow-like autonomous independent life myself,” he added.21