by Hiroaki Sato
Just about a week before his graduation, Sakurai Shoten published a small selection of Mishima’s fiction in its “new writers” series. “A Tale at the Cape” was its title story and the volume included “The Medieval Period” and “Prince Karu and Princess Sotōri.” Late that month, another publisher—this one in Kyoto—offered to publish another collection, again courtesy of Fujii Masaharu, although the company went bankrupt before fulfilling its offer.
Of these stories, “Preparations” was a barely disguised account of his experience with Kuniko, probably with some suggestive sexual elements added. In contrast, “Haruko” was a concoction—a story written in response to Kimura’s request for a contribution for a special supplementary issue of Ningen. It describes a three-way relationship among the young narrator-protagonist, her aunt, and the aunt’s sister-in-law. Including it in a 1970 selection, Mishima called “Haruko” “a postwar forerunner of fiction on lesbianism terribly fashionable now.” For these two stories Mishima credited Kimura’s exquisite and expert editing, saying they were almost “collaborative works” with him.37
“Preparations” drew favorable notices from some of the more established authors, among them Hayashi Fusao, and it was Hayashi whose reputation was at its nadir that Mishima chose to go visit, in November 1947. A writer who had started out in the 1920s in the vanguard of the Proletarian Movement, Hayashi fell victim to the Public Safety Preservation Law of 1925 created to suppress Communism. After repeated jailing, he recanted. He then wrote novels with nationalistic overtones that gained him fame and popularity. He even openly advocated expunging Marxism from literature altogether. When Japan was defeated in the war that he, like many others, had supported, Communists and other leftists who regained their voices denounced him as a turncoat or worse. So Hayashi was a man of infamy.
“Young fellows would have turned up their noses at a mere suggestion of association with him,” but Mishima chose him for a visit because he wanted to “enjoy the thrill of a ‘dangerous liaison,’” Mishima explained years later when he wrote an extended essay on the man.38 More seriously, he had recoiled from the ideological about-face the majority had made.
“The newly acclaimed writer Mr. K looks upon me with a pitying smile because I have expressed indifference to political arguments,” he wrote to Hayashi soon after his first visit, “but I’d rather respect someone who has been baptized by Communism.”39 Mishima would maintain a close interest in the older writer almost to the end of his life. Of Hayashi’s stories, The Youth (Seinen), which he wrote soon after recanting, was the one Mishima particularly commended to the young men he would come to know. It dealt, in fictionalized form, with some of the Meiji leaders who reversed their outlook on the world after visiting the United States.
Mishima’s own stories were being published, and the royalties he received, along with occasional lecture fees and such, were by no means negligible. For example, on October 27, 1947, he received a sum of ¥5,600 from his stories in Ningen, which, as he took care to note, came to ¥70 a manuscript page. But the Ningen payment was the largest sum he received during the eighteen-month period covered in the diary, and the total expenses for the period came to ¥13,366.50.40 More important, the royalty income was not regular and, as yet, not enough to make an independent living.
As a result, Mishima’s literary “successes” made Azusa all the more uneasy. After the war ended, Azuza’s position became uncertain. The public company, from which he, as a former high-ranking bureaucrat, drew a salary close to that of the governor of Tokyo, stopped functioning. In October 1946 it changed its name. Although he went on to sit on several corporate boards41 after the government shut down the public company, in January 1948, Azusa had reason to be concerned. He visited Kimura at the Kamakura Bunko.
“With a long oval face resembling Mishima’s, and serious-looking, he palpably exuded bureaucratic airs,” Kimura recalled. Azusa asked, “Is my son good enough to become an independent novelist whose work appears in the Asahi Shinbun?” Having a novel serialized in a national daily was the hallmark of writerly success, Azusa knew, and the Asahi was, as it remains today, among the top dailies.
Another question he asked was, “How much work will a novelist have to do before he can make a living?” Kimura was hardly in a position to respond to either question properly.42 This pecuniary concern, which Mishima deeply understood, was practical, pressing, and enduring. To go beyond being content to be an author of a couple of books, Mishima wrote Kimura, one “must secure a living” outside writing or else “earn an adequate income to support a household by writing” and, to do the latter, “one must also write three-penny novels.”43
That was exactly what Mishima did after he decided to become a writer. The same concern explains the reputation he gained early on for being strict on payments for his work. Henry Scott-Stokes, the British journalist who became friends with Mishima in the last part of his life, recalled two bank officers visiting him to demand payment for the article Mishima wrote, via Scott-Stokes, for a London newspaper. The paper had rejected the article.44
“He had to work very late at the government office,” Azusa wrote of his son, “and did not come home until nine or ten.” Elite bureaucrats were expected to work long hours then, as they are now. “He then would go into his study to prepare manuscripts. He would stay up half the night and have to get up early in the morning to go to work. He slept only three or four hours each day.” He was in his office by eight-thirty every morning. The last day of August was a rainy day. Mishima on his way to work slipped on the platform at Shibuya Station and almost fell onto the track. When he walked home to change his muddied suit and saw his father at the front door, tears sprang to his eyes.
“You can do things only if you are alive, when the matter reached this point there was nothing left for me to do but to abandon my hundred-year strategy,” Azusa later put it histrionically. “I told him, ‘You can quit the government, now just be a writer and nothing else, my absolute condition is that you become Japan’s Number One writer.’”
Or, as Shizue recalled, Azusa said, as dramatically: “We have reached a point where it’s no longer a matter of theoretical argument. It’s a matter of life [or death]. I surrender unconditionally. From today on, I will help you with all my might. I have trampled you, have beaten you down, but you still have broken out of it trying to become a writer. Perhaps you may become something.”45
Azusa’s permission to quit the government may have been part of the reason, but what truly prompted Mishima to resign from the Ministry of Finance was the request from the publisher Kawade Shobō in late August 1948, to write a novel for its new series. On September 2, he submitted to the Ministry a letter of resignation; three weeks later he received a formal letter of “dismissal by request.” Mishima’s life as an elite bureaucrat lasted only for nine months.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Confessions
Of all the kinds of masks, the mask called “a natural face”
is the one I distrust the most.
—Letter to Hayashi Fumio on November 4, 1947
Mishima struggled hard to find a persona in which he felt comfortable—like a man in search of a perfect suit of clothes.
—Donald Richie
Kawade Shobō’s request would give birth to Confessions of a Mask. The first writer the publisher had chosen for its series was the popular author Shiina Rinzō, whose Eternal Prelude (Eien naru joshō) had come out in June. Kawade was taking some risk in choosing Mishima for the series. Though his first full-length novel, The Bandit, was scheduled to come out in November, with Kawabata’s preface, Mishima was just beginning to be known.
When Kawade’s editor Sakamoto Kazuki, along with a colleague of his, came to his office at the Finance Ministry to make the offer, on August 28, Mishima jumped at it, declaring he’d tender a letter of resignation at once to devote himself to writing. He and the two editors went out to lunch at a restaurant on the Ginza and ate hamburgers. It was just three year
s after Japan’s defeat and hamburgers were pricey. At the time the Ministry was still in temporary digs, a former elementary school. For that matter, the envelope in which Kawabata sent his preface to The Bandit, in October 1948, reached Mishima with “Censored” stamped on it.1
Mishima spent two months deciding on what to write. On November 2 he told Sakamoto: “This next novel will be my first I-novel ever; of course, it won’t be an I-novel of the Literary Establishment sort, but it will be an attempt to vivisect myself in which I will turn on myself the blade of psychological analysis that I have honed for the hypothetical figure so far. I will aim for as much scientific accuracy as I can; I will try to be Baudelaire’s so-called ‘victim and executioner.’”2 “The hypothetical figure” obviously meant himself. Baudelaire’s L’Héautontimorouménos says, in its penultimate stanza: “I am the wound and I am the knife! / I am the blow and I am the cheek! / I am the limbs and I am the wheel, / And the victim and the executioner!”3
The I-novel or shishōsetsu, one direct outgrowth of Naturalism and the Japanese adaptation of the Ich-Roman, is a mode of story-telling in which the protagonist, the thinly disguised (if at all) author, describes his or her own experience, preferably of a disreputable sort, presumably with unadorned honesty, even as the names, professions, and other details may be altered. What counts, in any case, is experience.
It was while struggling with The Bandit that Mishima, in a lengthy letter to Kawabata, in early March 1946, expounded on the importance of experience for writing fiction. He was showing each chapter to his mentor as soon as he finished it, but the direct impetus for his stress on experience in fiction writing was “The Weakness of Modern Japanese Fiction,” an essay that Ningen carried in its February 1946 issue. Its author, Kuwabara Takeo, was a well-known professor of French literature at the Imperial University of Kyoto. During the war years he was absorbed by John Dewey’s writings, in particular Art as Experience. What provoked Mishima was Kuwabara’s statement: “Art is born of imitation.” Calling it a “shallow conclusion” which cast the scholar’s “sanity” into doubt, Mishima asked: “Isn’t art born of experience after all?”
The experience he has in mind, he wrote, is “an experience one step higher than the experience in daily life, an experience turned into a symbol through a distilling effect.” After restating this in a couple of sentences, he concluded: “in the formation of art, a supra-historical trigger is latent in the special experience of the first stage (a sort of languid inspiration), and a historical trigger is hidden in the involuntary distilling effect of the second stage. What appears to be imitation is no more than an excess of this historical trigger.” It is not clear if this last sentence, in particular, made any sense to Mishima himself, but it is clear that he regarded experience as basic to his writing.4
In choosing the explicit I-novel format for Confessions to “vivisect” himself, Mishima may have decided to take head-on a writer who had created a sensation by committing double suicide in the middle of that year—the one he had met two years earlier. In mid-June Dazai Osamu threw himself into the Tamagawa Aqueduct with one of his latest mistresses, Yamazaki Tomie. Yamazaki, then working for two beauty parlors, one for the Occupation, was married at the end of 1944, but two weeks after the wedding, her husband, an employee of Mitsui & Co., was sent to Manila. As soon as he arrived there, the US forces landed in Luzon and he was lost in the Battle of Manila, in February. When Dazai met her, in March 1947, his wife, Michiko, had just had a second baby and he had just impregnated a third woman.
The Tamagawa Aqueduct was built to supply water from the Tamagawa River to the center of Edo in the mid-seventeenth century. Its use for that purpose was abandoned in 1901, but because of its swift current despite its narrow width it became “a great place for suicide.” Up to the time Dazai and Yamazaki threw themselves into it that year, fifteen bodies had already been recovered, on top of thirty-three in the previous year, 1947. The day the bodies of the two were recovered, June 19, was the writer’s thirty-ninth birthday, and his new novel, No Longer Human, was being serialized in Tenbō.
Dazai had gained enormous popularity the previous year with The Setting Sun, but his double suicide in the midst of the serialization of another work fanned the popular fascination with him. As soon as No Longer Human was published in book form, it became a runaway bestseller. Though it takes the form of a “madman’s” notebooks that happened to have fallen into the narrator’s hands, it closely chronicles, in a confessional mode, Dazai’s life that was known to have been dissolute, aimless, and reckless. The number of “Dazai patients” skyrocketed.
However, if Dazai’s success gave Mishima a hint in the selection of a confessional narrative mode, Mishima had no intention of following the writer in any other way. “I recognize his rare talent, but there are few writers who made me feel such a physiological antipathy from the start,” Mishima recalled in My Pilgrimage Days, “probably because, following the law of love and hate, I was the type of writer who would deliberately expose those parts Dazai would have wanted the most to keep hidden. Accordingly, at the very point where many young writers found their own portraits in his writings, I may have hastily turned my face away.”5
Indeed, what Mishima worked out may be said to have been “founded on the rejection of the ‘logic of life’”—“the antinomy of life and art of the I-novelists” that Dazai most dazzlingly represented in postwar Japan, as the critic Aeba Takao put it.6
Sexual Confession
Mishima told Sakamoto he would start work on Confessions on November 25. Methodical and punctual as he was, the date so specified more than three weeks ahead and after contemplating the matter for two months—the date he would choose for his own death by disembowelment and decapitation twenty-two years later—makes us wonder: Did it have some special meaning for him? Could it be, for example, that it was on that date three years earlier that Mishima learned of Mitani Kuniko’s engagement?7
Sakamoto received the manuscript in two installments, the first 250 pages in late March 1949 and the remaining 90 pages a month later. Even before the manuscript was finished, he had urged Mishima to write ad copy for his own work. Mishima was happy to comply and wrote several, all professing his mental turmoil.
But first there is what he scribbled on the title page of his manuscript that was dropped when the story went into print.
Above and to the right of the title, Kamen no Kokuhaku written vertically, as Japanese is most of the time, he added, in German, twice: das sonderbare Geschlechtsleben eines Mannes, and below it, das sonderbare. Above the epigraph on the left side of the page, as Japanese progresses from right to left when written vertically, he scribbled überspannte / sonderbare / seltsame / das exzentrische / ungewöhnliche Geschlechtsleben eines Mannes.8
He would later replace the epigraph—in the manuscript a sentence from Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris in Japanese translation: “Chacun d’eux portait sur son dos une énorme Chimère”9—with most of the last paragraph of Book III, Chapter 3, of The Brothers Karamazov, “The Confession of a Passionate Heart—in Verse,” where Dmitri exclaims to his brother Alyosha, “Sensuality is a tempest, is greater than a tempest!”—which Mishima omitted in quoting the passage—and goes on to say:
I cannot bear that someone, even superior in the heart and with a high mind, begins with the ideal of the Madonna, but ends with the ideal of Sodom. Even more frightening, someone already with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not repudiate the ideal of the Madonna either, and this ideal makes his heart burn, truly, truly burn, like it did in his youthful innocent years.
(Tr. Alexander Truskinovsky)
In the Japanese translation of the Dostoevsky novel Mishima quoted, the word “confession” in the paragraph heading is given as the heavily religious zange, but he chose for the title of his story the more demotic kokuhaku, perhaps to make clear that his had nothing to do with religion.
Also, in the several pieces he wrote at Sakamoto’s request, he tried to illumi
nate, as if for himself, what he intended to accomplish in the “novel.” The self-advertisement published in the April 1949 issue of Kindai Bungaku was a piece he had written in January. In it he compares his work to two literary works, “Vita Sexualis” and Armance.
Of the two, “Vita Sexualis” is Mori Ōgai’s account of his own sexual encounters since boyhood until his stay in Germany (Oct. 1884 to July 1888). When he published it, in 1909, Ōgai was surgeon general of the Imperial Army, and the army reprimanded him for it on the ground that the work was too unseemly for one of its top officers. Armance is Stendhal’s early novel, which has one crucial mystery left unexplained to the very end: possibly, impotence. “Even though writing this work is an evident death of my existence,” Mishima explained, “I feel that, while writing it, I am gradually recovering my life. What happened? My life before writing this work was the life of a corpse.”
Why “confessions of a mask”? Mishima appended a note to his own ad copy: The “seemingly contradictory title derives from the paradox that to me the mask is one attached to the flesh and that there can be no truer confessions than those of a mask so attached to the flesh. A man can never make confessions, except that, though seldom, a mask deeply biting into the flesh can achieve them.”10
Mishima’s psychological turmoil may have been real, but his emphasis on sex was partly a response to the times. Open sexual expression was back in vogue. Previously, sex had blossomed as the subject of literature and entertainment during “the Taishō Democracy,” from the 1910s to the 1920s, when ero-guro nansensu, things “erotic, grotesque, nonsensical,” became popular. Academically, interest in sex was touched off by a translation in 1914 of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which led to publication of a number of books dealing with “perverse sex,” “perverse psychology,” and the like.11 In 1917, Kawabata Yasunari, for instance, noted in his diary that he was reading On Perverse Lust (Hentai seiyoku-ron) by Sawada Junjirō. Then a first-year student in The First Higher School, Kawabata had also bought the English books, Sappho and Modern Man’s Confession. He was thinking of writing a story to be titled “Bestialism” (Chikushōdō).12