by Hiroaki Sato
The friendship between the two effectively ended, at least for Teiko, on January 4, 1948, with “an incident.” That day she was invited to Mishima’s house for the New Year. She went dressed up, in kimono, and enjoyed chatting with Shizue. When the time for her to leave came and she stepped out of the house, Mishima, who had remained more or less silent while the two women chatted, came out and asked for a goodbye kiss; she refused. (In her memoir, she referred to what Mishima asked for as “a novelistic gesture of love,” in the demure language of the day.)
Mishima then walked her to the station, and the two stayed in touch. But Sassa evidently felt whatever easygoing relationship she had with him was lost. So she was surprised to see him among those who came to her father’s funeral that fall, properly dressed.22
Sassa Teiko would start working for the longtime advocate of women’s rights, Ichikawa Fusae, in 1949, the year she married and assumed the family name Kihira. It is one of the many ironies of the Occupation that Ichikawa was “purged from public service”—in her case, because she did not get along with a woman lieutenant on the staff of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.23 Teiko became a member of the Diet herself late in her life, in 1989.
Whether Teiko was conscious of it or not, her father, Hiro’o, was Azusa’s classmate at the Law Faculty of the Imperial University of Tokyo. So was Hiro’o’s colleague on the editorial board of the Asahi Shinbun, Kaji Ryūichi, who would enable Mishima to make his first extended overseas trip beginning at the end of 1951. By then Teiko’s older brother Katsuaki was a journalist with the Asahi. Many years later, her younger brother, “the fiercely patriotic boy” Atsuyuki,24 would get involved with Mishima, however briefly, at the height of the student movement in 1968, as de facto field commander of the riot police. Both Katsuaki and Atsuyuki studied law at the University of Tokyo.
Reunion with Kuniko
It was a delicate period for Mishima. Not just that he was studying law with the aim of gaining employment at the top bureaucracy of the Japanese government while trying to make a go of it as a writer. He was also entangled with Kuniko, now married.
On September 16, 1946, when Mishima was out in Azabu, someone called his name. It was Kuniko. Mishima’s description of the encounter in Confessions of a Mask is different in detail from the diary-like description he left of it.
In the novel the unplanned reunion happens “one cloudy day during the rainy season,” but the timing is off by two, three months. When Sonoko mentions Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles (Tade kū mushi) in response to his query on what kind of book she’s been reading lately, Mishima asks if she also read a novel “in vogue.” It was in fact his own short story “Cigarette” that had appeared in Ningen, and that was why she responded, “Of that naked woman?” referring to the drawing on the cover of the magazine. In real life, Mishima was startled and said, “What have you said? I haven’t written anything of the sort!” To which Kuniko said, “No way. . . . I am talking about the picture on the cover.”
The gist of the impression with which Mishima came away from the brief encounter may have been true to fact, however: he distinctly felt Kuniko was no longer “genuine and pure,” that is, a virgin. Before the marriage, she would not have read anything like Tanizaki’s “immodest” book or openly admitted she did, although in his diary-like entry he was careful to note that the unthinking way she mentioned it, she “may have barely read it.” The 1930 novel has to do with a well-to-do man who has lost sexual interest in his wife and allows her to have a lover while he indulges in outside sex, including frequent visits to a foreign prostitute named Louise.25
One thing that a reader of the English translation of Confessions by Meredith Weatherby may overlook is the reference to konnyaku, which Sonoko and her old maid each is carrying in a bucket as they have just been to a rationing center. Konnyaku is made from a certain species of potato and has little dietary value. It is not despised as food but not something eaten in any quantity, either.26 This is worth pointing out because Mishima seldom, if ever, emphasized food shortages and other economic difficulties of the time in his writings. He does suggest, in Confessions, that the large Mitani house (in real life) escaped requisition for Occupation use because of the family’s powerful government connections. Many well-to-do families were not that lucky.
Learning that Kuniko would be visiting the Mitani family the following Saturday, September 21, Mishima went to visit with the pretext of meeting his friend, Makoto. (For some reason, on May 11, 1946, he started a detailed “accounting diary” mainly to note all the incomes and outgoes but also to note all the comings and goings of the day, and continued it until November 13, 1947. The encounter with Kuniko and the visit with Mitani Makoto are curtly noted in it.27)
While chatting with Makoto, Mishima heard the sound of the piano. “It no longer had a childish tone, but had a sound that was ample, seemed to spurt, was full and brilliant,” he wrote in Confessions. Sonoko finishes playing the piano and her brother fetches her. In the tête-àtête conversation that follows, she says, “I have something I thought and thought of asking you but couldn’t. I’ve been wondering why we couldn’t get married. After receiving your response through my brother I no longer understood anything about the world. Every day I thought about it. Still I couldn’t understand it. Even now, I don’t understand why I couldn’t marry you.” This perturbs Mishima at once with joy and pain, and leads him to ask her to meet him again.
There was, in any event, one important thing Mishima completely left out of Confessions, as far as Kuniko was concerned: her husband, Nagai Kunio, and what happened to him. In the novel, the narrator and Sonoko continue to meet for a year until suddenly they are “awakened.” Then comes the final parting. What happened in real life?
In May 1946, the month Kuniko was married, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East was convened for those charged with Class A crimes—“crimes against peace.” Half a year after their marriage, Nagai Kunio, a bank employee, was arrested on accusations of POW abuse and sent to Hong Kong for detainment before trial. More than a year had passed since the war ended, but former Japanese soldiers as well as those involved with military-related activities continued to be indicted and tried on charges of various war crimes classed B (“crimes against humanity”) and C (“conventional war crimes”), in the end a total of 5,700. Nagai Kunio was one of them. His arrest prompted Kuniko to send Mishima a telegram, on November 6.
Trials for the indicted were conducted locally, often outside Japan, in former colonies and occupied areas, and in the end a total of 920 of the accused were executed.28 It was because of her husband’s indeterminate detention overseas that Mishima and Kuniko could meet from time to time. He might be sentenced for life or executed. Or he might be cleared of charges and return to Japan, as he indeed was, and did, toward the end of 1947.
Mishima omitted this background in the novel. So the relationship between the narrator and Sonoko—“the friendship only of such a degree as to make me hesitate to call it a connection, not to mention a relationship,” as the narrator circumspectly puts it—that had resumed after a chance encounter could only be half-hearted. “After a year passed, we were awakened,” the narrator says. “We were not in a children’s room but were inhabitants of an adults’ room where the door that could open only halfway had to be repaired at once. The relationship between us, like a door that did not open beyond a certain point, had to be repaired sooner or later.” What the “repair” was is left unexplained.
“I was Rimbaud’s so-called ‘child who never loves women,’” Mishima announced in “A Letter of Challenge to Those I Love,” an aphoristic piece undated but probably written about the time Sassa Teiko decided to break with him. Presenting himself as a highly sensitive combination of a “genius” and a “clown,” Mishima followed the Rimbaud reference with a non sequitur: “I learned that my women never get nearer to me beyond a certain demarcation point.” The self-analysis, which is not really challenging anyone, mal
e or female, ends with a statement: “A genius is a slaughterer of youth.”29
The Encounter with Dazai
In December 1946, what Mishima would later present as a dramatic literary encounter occurred. Or did it?
“My memory of the season of my visit with Mr. Dazai [Osamu] is also uncertain now, but if it was about the time his serialization of The Setting Sun (Shayō) ended, I would think it was in the autumn,” he wrote in My Pilgrimage Days. “When it comes to my friends who took me [to the meeting], I think they were Mr. Yashiro Seiichi and his literary buddy who later died young, Mr. Harada [Ryūki] , but I am not certain about that either.”
Dazai Osamu, born in 1909, was a novelist of considerable repute, a demigod among many a young reader in fact. But Mishima had developed an intense “physiological antipathy” toward the author after reading some of his works. The kind of “self-caricaturization” evident in such works as “The Wandering of Fiction” (Kyokō no hōkō) and “Das Gemeine,” two of Dazai’s works published under one cover in 1937, was what he “disliked the most,” Mishima wrote, and “the consciousness of the literary establishment that flickered behind his works and the stuff like the rustic ambition of a boy who came up to Tokyo with a packing case on his back” what he “could not stand the most.”
Dazai was, indeed, from Aomori, the northernmost prefecture of Japan’s mainland, Honshū, and the country-boy-in-the-city theme was one undercurrent of modern Japanese literature well into the second half of the twentieth century. Dazai remained financially dependent on his well-to-do landowner-family back home for much of his life as a writer living in Tokyo. Then, the US Occupation’s farmland reform had decimated his family’s 620-acre land. The Setting Sun, the story Mishima mentioned, had to do with “the tragedy of the fallen class” or, as its author put it, “a Japanese version of The Cherry Orchard.”30 With this novella, “the Dazai fever has appeared to peak,” Mishima had thought. But, again, it had put him off, from page one, this time because of Dazai’s ignorance and mangling of the language of the aristocratic class Mishima had known from before the war.
Offered a chance to meet the famous author whose works he disliked, Mishima decked himself out in somewhat formal Japanese attire, “probably in an ikat kimono and hakama.” He did not normally wear Japanese clothes, but he was dressed like that because he was “sufficiently conscious of Mr. Dazai. To exaggerate, I felt like a terrorist sallying forth with an assassin’s knife hidden in his chest.” The room he was taken to was appropriately foreboding.
The place may have been the second floor of an eel restaurant; when I climbed the dark stairs and opened the karakami sliding door, I saw, in the guestroom of about twelve tatami, many people sitting under a dark electric lamp.
Or the electric lamp may have been pretty bright, but as I conjure up in my memory the air of “adoration of despair” of a certain period after the war, it absolutely has to have somewhat frazzled tatami and a dark electric lamp.
The gathering was no highbrow affair, as Yashiro Seiichi, who took Mishima to it, recalled. At the time Yashiro, Mishima’s junior by two years, was already a man of the theater. One of his friends got hold of several bottles of sake on the black market and his group had invited Dazai, who flaunted his partiality to drinking and acting dissolutely. For some years after Japan’s defeat only impure alcoholic drinks with swift but horrible effects were readily available. And Dazai had brought along Kamei Katsuichirō, a Marxist who, after jailing and interrogation, had turned away from Communism, in the end joining Yasuda Yojūrō in starting the Nihon Rōman-ha magazine.
Dazai and Kamei sat side by side in the space for the guests of honor, Mishima recalled, “and the young men sitting spread from there out to the four corners of the room.” Introduced to those gathered, Mishima greeted them, was at once taken to the spot in front of Dazai, and offered a cup of sake. It is not clear whether Dazai emptied his cup and offered it to Mishima and filled it for him, as is the custom, or Mishima was simply given his own cup. Mishima was no drinker at the time, but he was known among his friends as “Mishima who has written for Ningen,” as he explained himself.
The atmosphere of the room, to me, felt like that which was somehow extremely indulgent, as between a priest and his followers who trusted each other, as if every one was moved by each pronouncement he made, shared the profundity among them, and at once waited for another revelation from him. . . . [The indulgence] was one that was peculiar to that period, truly pathetic, even as it was filled with the confidence that they represented the malaise of the age, was crepuscular, lyrical, . . . that is, too “Dazaiesque.”
I waited for the chance to say the one thing I had determined to say on my way there, no matter what. If I didn’t say it, there’d be no meaning in my coming here, I’d lose sight of my literary life with it.
But, shame on me, when I said it, I did so, I think, in a very tactless, sneery way. In other words, I said the following to the real Mr. Dazai who was right in front of me:
“Mr. Dazai, I dislike your literature.”31
Had Mishima truly been as brash and blatant to the famous author he met for the first time as he recalled he had? Surely, nine years after the meeting—and eight years before these recollections of his “pilgrimage days” appeared—Mishima had created a hubbub among literary critics by firing a giant salvo against him in a “diary” for publication that began thus:
June 30 [1955], Thursday
Somewhat hot. Cloudy. Met four or five guests.
We advise you not to despise Dazai Osamu but to read him in a kinder fashion.
The disgust in which I hold Dazai Osamu’s literature is in some way ferocious. First, I dislike his face. Second, I dislike his rustic preference for urban sophistication. Third, I dislike the fact that he played the roles that were not appropriate for him.32
Still, Mishima projecting an image of himself rudely and dramatically confronting Dazai seventeen years after the fact prompted at least two participants in the gathering to reconstruct the evening after Mishima’s death: one is the aforementioned Yashiro Seiichi, the other Takahara Kiichi. And a dozen years later, the scholar Etsugu Tomoko looked into the case.
The first thing Yashiro found by checking his own diary was that the encounter occurred not in the fall of 1947, but in December 1946, a point confirmed by Mishima’s own “accounting diary.” To be exact, it occurred on December 14, 1946, Saturday. In the entry for that day, Mishima jotted down: “A sake party at Takahara’s / Both Messrs Dazai and Kamei kindly came / Came home at twelve at night.”33 In other words, it had taken place a year before the serialization of The Setting Sun in Shinchō ended.
Had Mishima said to Dazai what he recalled he had? No one was sure. It was a gathering of twelve people—other than Dazai and Kamei there were ten college students, most of them admirers of Dazai—and it was not as if everyone was paying attention to what anyone else was saying.
But Yashiro, even as he admired Mishima for recreating the atmosphere of the gathering place more or less exactly and even as he recalled Mishima was intently listening to the aphorisms Dazai tossed off, thought whatever give-and-take may have occurred between the two probably never jibed. After all, Dazai was a thirty-seven-year-old who loved to drink and act like a man of the world, whereas Mishima was a deadly serious twenty-one-year-old who did not care to drink. The antipathy and aversion toward Dazai that Mishima flaunted later was, Yashiro thought, a result of the wounded feelings he had that night. He recalled how “triumphantly” Mishima pointed to Dazai’s insufficient knowledge of the speech and daily customs of aristocratic society when The Setting Sun came out the next year.34
What wounded Mishima’s feelings? Takahara Kiichi, who provided his boarding room for the gathering and procured food that night and later an editor of Dazai’s complete works, remembered Mishima asking Dazai for his opinion of Mori Ōgai, one of the giant men of letters from the Meiji Era who was also a ranking officer in the Imperial Army. Dazai, he recalled, re
sponded in his usual thuggish manner, “Listen, kid, Mori Ōgai was no novelist, I tell you. First of all, look at his photos in his complete works. He didn’t mind having himself photographed in military uniform, did he? What can you say about someone like that?”
Dazai was of course joking, but Mishima took his response seriously and started questioning him and arguing to defend Ōgai. Naturally, Dazai refused to take him on. As another participant recalled, Mishima obviously did not understand Dazai’s “clowning.” And that visibly spoiled the mood of the party, if only for a while.35
What likely happened was that Mishima, recalling the encounter years later, retroactively applied to it Dazai’s reputation and image that solidified with his two postwar novels, The Setting Sun and No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku). If the title The Setting Sun alone provided “a metaphor” for Japan’s calamitous defeat “after an era of marching under the sign of the rising sun,” as an American biographer of Dazai put it, the title No Longer Human “domesticated that image to show the defeat of an individual removed from the large historical stage.” The Dazai “malaise,” then, was a clear reaction to “the poet of despair” that Dazai was.36
Meeting Hayashi Fusao
In November 1947, Mishima graduated from the University of Tokyo (“imperial” was dropped two months earlier in education reform) and in December was employed by the Ministry of Finance. By then, he could easily have contented himself as a routinely published author. Kōdansha’s monthly Gunzō carried “A Tale at the Cape” in November 1946, which was followed, in April 1947, by “Prince Karu and Princess Sotōri” (Karu-no-miko to Sotōri-hime), a love story featuring semi-mythological figures that ends in their suicide. Ningen published “The Medieval Period” in December 1946, “Preparations for the Night” (Yoru no shitaku) in August 1947, and “Haruko” in December. Several other magazines published his stories or solicited his contributions, some of which Mishima turned down.