by Hiroaki Sato
The open interest in sex began to be toned down, then suppressed, as Japan’s war in China worsened in the 1930s, patriotism and such came to the fore, and constraints began to be placed on free, indulgent aspects of life such as luxury items. Sex became almost taboo during the Pacific War phase of the Second World War, except in ever more thriving brothels. With the revival of “democracy” following Japan’s defeat, it made a comeback with vengeance. Popular books on various aspects of sex came out by the hundreds.
There was censorship, of course, and confusion. We have seen the Occupation’s initial approach to it. To go somewhat ahead of Confessions, in January 1950 the police seized the Japanese translation of The Naked and the Dead claiming violation of obscenity laws; the translator had given omanko for Mailer’s “pussy.” The ban was lifted, however, when the American holder of the rights to the Japanese translation objected and the Occupation censors held the action of the Japanese police to be “undemocratic.”
By then US censorship was easing. But the case of Itō Sei’s translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the copies of which police confiscated in July of that year, must have posed a dilemma to the Occupiers. The reason the police gave for the action was that the D. H. Lawrence novel was banned in the United States. Itō and his publisher sued the state when the initial judgments went against them. It would go on to become a cause célèbre in relation to “freedom of speech” guaranteed by the new Constitution. The matter was not resolved until seven years later when the Supreme Court dismissed the case on the grounds of “public good,” another item stressed by the new Constitution.
Kawabata and Youthful Homosexuality
Mishima, in any event, chose to stress his youthful homosexual yearnings in Confessions. The question is: What made him do so? Here the answer may well have been simple: The diary-based story “The Boy” (Shōnen) that Kawabata was serializing since the May issue of Ningen of that year dealt directly with young “homosexual love,” as the author put it plainly.
Kawabata based his stories on his diaries and recollections often enough, at times publishing early diaries only slightly edited, with comments and explanations. “The Boy” is one such story that includes part of a school composition done in epistolary form.
In 1916, Kawabata, then seventeen and a fifth grader in junior high school, became a “room chief” of the dormitory and fell in love with a pretty underclassman, Kiyono (real name: Ogasawara Yoshito). In “The Boy” he speaks of caressing—“your fingers, hands, arms, chest, cheeks, eyelids, tongue, teeth, legs”—though he, unlike some of his classmates, was too “timid” to take the next step that he called “soiling.” Such lovemaking was common in single-sex dormitories and the teachers were not particularly abashed or disturbed by it, a point Kawabata makes clear.
Kawabata was acutely aware of himself as a young man. In the entry of January 21, 1917, for example, he wrote: “If each of my fantasies took some form and appeared, how long would I be able to stay unblushing? Can I even once look at a pretty boy or a pretty girl without thoughts of the flesh?” He reflected thus when he decided he was in no position to accuse a classmate of trying to take over as Kiyono’s lover.
“I may have been sexually somewhat sickly because there was no feminine presence in my home, and I indulged in licentious fantasies from childhood,” he wrote in a composition he submitted as a freshman at the First Higher School that he had left Osaka for Tokyo to attend. “And I may have felt a weird desire for a beautiful boy as well more than a normal person does. When I was preparing for tests, I was still more inclined to be tempted by a boy than by a girl, and even now I am thinking of dealing with such lust in my work. How many times did I wish acutely, If only you were a woman!” The composition was in the form of a letter to Kiyono.
The autobiographical story ends with the narrator, now twenty-one, visiting Kiyono in an isolated spot in Kyoto. By then an important member of the Shinto-inspired religious group Ōmoto, Kiyono was living an austere life with other converts. It was during the visit that Kawabata was disconcerted to discover that the youngest sibling of the erstwhile underclassman he so loved turned out to be a boy even though he looked and behaved like a girl.13
“Perverse Sex” Thwarted
Expectations were that what purported to be a frank account of adolescent sex and how a young man failed in his first heterosexual act should sell. Perverse sex, assuming it was that, would be even better. It did not work out that way, at least initially. Perhaps the glut of books on sex had an opposite effect. The stress on sex (“the instinct of sex”) and love (“the sexology of love”—a pun on seiri, which, despite what the inclusion of the character sei, “sex,” suggests, actually means “destiny” or “principle,” not “sexology”) in Kawade Shobō’s own ads, may have given the impression that Confessions was just another book in the genre. Few took notice of the book for months after it came out, on July 5, in 1949. Later, the view took hold that with this novel Mishima appeared on the literary scene like a meteor, but that was not the case. It took half a year for the book to begin to attract attention.
Mishima began to fret over his resignation from the Finance Ministry even as he continued to write and publish a stream of stories, essays, and plays. Shortly before the publication of the book, the Japanese economy started contracting quickly as a result of a US-imposed policy (as we will see soon), greatly affecting the publishing industry. But all four volumes in the Kawade series preceding Confessions had done well, especially the fourth, which had seen a second printing in two months, and that did not help . (The series would end with Confessions.) A selection of his short stories and plays Kawade published on the heels of Confessions, in August, sank into oblivion almost immediately. Mishima begged Kimura Tokuzō to carry a review in Ningen. Kimura agreed and asked Jinzai Kiyoshi to read the book.
Jinzai’s review appeared in a two-page spread in the October issue of the magazine and it was exquisitely enticing. By first noting the words “Vita Sexualis” prominently printed on the book’s band, Jinzai, a novelist and an outstanding translator of Russian literature, especially of Chekhov, suggested that if Ōgai’s account was “paradoxical”—“Vita Sexualis” was a slap on the wrist of the Japanese Naturalists, “the acne worshippers”—Mishima’s work is “even more paradoxical” because it is meant to be “a perfect confessional fiction.” Of the four chapters that make up Confessions, the first two “consist of the most brilliant pages” of the entire volume. “In particular, the passage in Chapter 2 where ‘I’ describes the flesh of the martyr St. Sebastian that abruptly emerges and the first ejaculation he experiences as he faces its pictorial depiction struck me as a triumph in men’s literature (or, to put it in extreme terms, I can say male literature) that is rare in world literature.”
The picture in question is that of Guido Reni’s painting St. Sebastian in the collection of the Palazzo Rosso, in Genoa, in an art book. The original passage reads:
The moment I saw the painting my entire being was shaken by a certain heretical bliss. My blood rushed, my organ brimmed with the color of fury. This part of mine that had grown so gigantic as to tear apart any moment waited ferociously for my handling as it had never before, accusing me of ignorance, panting fiercely. Unbeknownst to myself, my hand started a movement no one had taught it. I had the sense that something dark and brilliant was coming up in quick steps from inside me to attack. In no time, it spurted out accompanied by a dizzying intoxication.
Jinzai denied he was exaggerating; anyone who doubted him could go to “the real thing.” He even told the reader that this passage “almost” caused him to have an ejaculation, let alone erectio. Nonetheless, Jinzai did not forget to point to “some kind of indescribable chasm” he felt between the first and second halves of the story as the focus moves to “a Platonic (or rather stoic) love” for Sonoko, leaving the matter with a wonderment: Was the chasm “no more than an illusion” on the reviewer’s part or “a shadow cast by what may be called a crisis that
is actually assaulting the author”?14
Jinzai’s review did not help much, however. Booksellers began returning unsold copies. The situation began to change only toward the end of the year and, once it did, it did so dramatically.
On December 26, 1949, the Yomiuri Shinbun, one of the top three national dailies, carried in the literary portion of its annual “The Year’s Top Three” section the opinions of nine writers and critics, six of them naming Confessions among their choices. The six were Kawabata Yasunari; the literary critic and historian Hirano Ken; the Shakespearean translator and critic Fukuda Tsuneari; the student of European literature, novelist, and critic Itō Sei; the proletarian writer and critic Aono Suekichi; and the Buddhist monk-writer Niwa Fumio. This unusual outcome owed, to a large extent, to Hanada Kiyoteru’s review titled “St. Sebastian’s Face” in the January 1950 issue of Bungei—which, as is customary in magazine publishing, had gone on sale a month earlier, in early December 1949. Hanada had proclaimed: With this work, “in the literary realm, Japan’s twentieth century begins, half a century late.”
Hanada was impatient with his fellow writers who did not comprehend what Mishima had accomplished with the “I-Novel” form. One such story he mentioned was Futon by Tayama Katai, published in 1907. Called, in a 1930 commentary, “the forerunner [in Japan] of the Ich-Roman, the beginning of the description of one’s self,”15 the novella in Naturalist vein describes a married writer’s impossible lust for a beautiful young woman whom he has accepted as a live-in “disciple.” In the final scene, the protagonist, named Tokio, goes up to the woman’s second-floor room after she was sent home and pulls out her futon and nightgown: “He put his face on the particularly soiled velvet collar of her nightgown and inhaled, to his heart’s content, the smell of the woman he missed. / Sexual desire and pity and despair swiftly assaulted Tokio. He laid down the futon, spread the nightgown over it, and cried, face buried in the cold, soiled velvet collar.” Futon kicked up a literary storm.
However, unlike Jinzai, who argued that Ōgai’s “Vita Sexualis” was a criticism of Naturalists’ writings such as Futon, Hanada asserted that Ōgai and Katai were on the same plane. “Both the mask with a wily expression that Ōgai consciously puts on in “Vita Sexualis” and the mask with a dumb expression that Katai consciously wears in Futon are, in Jungian terms, both ‘extroversive,’” he wrote; “these masks, therefore, are functioning merely centrifugally.” He then said what may have chagrined Mishima. “In contrast, the masks both Dazai and Mishima consciously use are equally ‘introversive’; even though their expressions are markedly different, one blushing with embarrassment, the other showing off an arrogant mien, they are both constantly moving inwardly, functioning centripetally.”
But there was one thing that crucially differentiated Mishima, not just from Ōgai and Katai but Dazai as well, Hanada continued. Whereas for those three, as well as their epigones, a mask became necessary because each had “a face—his own flesh”—and had to “hide it from the others’ eyes or to stare at it himself, Mishima alone among them needs a mask to search his flesh that he lost completely.” In this he is representative of Japan’s “Lost Generation,” born out of the Second World War, just as Radiguet was of a generation born out of the First. It isn’t that “Mishima Yukio wears his mask because he is concerned in the least with what others might think. He wears an introversive mask called sexual perversion and searches his own body because he is dissatisfied with his own self that is rational, too rational, and is conducting a harsh self-criticism.”
In the end, though, what prompted many writers to take note of Confessions may well have been not so much Hanada’s psychological analysis as his harsh, contemptuous dismissal of the three writers who had discussed the work as a group in Gunzō—Hayashi Fusao, Nakano Yoshio, and Kitahara Takeo—as “those from the nineteenth century” and his flat assertion that neither “eighteenth-century-style emotionalists” nor “nineteenth-century-style intellectualists” could possibly understand what Mishima had done in the novel.16
Was Mishima Perverse?
Was Mishima sexually perverse? Or, perhaps the question should be: What, aside from his desire to “vivisect himself” and become a successful author, impelled Mishima to insist on his own “sexual aberration”—that was what he said it was—in a confessional style? The question arises because there was in the first place what Jinzai Kiyoshi called “some kind of indescribable chasm” in the novel, a disconnect between the first half, Chapters One and Two, and the second, Chapters Three and Four. How could the narrator dispose of the principal character in the second half, Sonoko—Mitani Kuniko in real life—so abruptly? Was Confessions an attempt to cover up or rationalize his heartbreak in a standard or normal love affair?
The question, which remained strong for some time, was put to Mishima most acutely by a young woman poet in the early 1960s. Having heard Mishima denounce “the literary establishment,” that “everyone who is part of it tells only lies,” once too often, Shindō Ryōko, over a sizzling steak at a steakhouse he had invited her to, asked him, “You write a lie in Confessions of a Mask, don’t you? When your first love became a bride, you were so sad you wanted to die, did you not?” At this unexpected sally from her, and this was long before biographical details became public, Mishima turned “painfully somber,” Shindō recalled.17
The narrative gap in Confessions—between two very different narratives—is something any reader notices: the story of the narrator’s growing fascination with members of his own sex, followed by that of an encounter with a young woman who attracts him. But the confessions end when the narrator is drawn to a young tough nearby even as he is with the woman. Mishima himself knew that the story was off balance.
In deciding to explore what he called his Tendenz, Mishima mined his considerable knowledge of world literature, including tracts on sexology. He also went to see at least one authority in the field. Kimura Tokuzō recalled Mishima visiting him a few months after he started to write what was to be “his representative work, Confessions of a Mask.” Mishima was on his way back from a psychologist in Kimura’s neighborhood. He excitedly talked about his “perverse tendencies” and his visit with the psychologist was to “elicit his opinions about them.” He then talked at length about Wilde, Verlaine, and “homosexual literature ancient and modern, in the East and the West.” This prompted Kimura to tell the young man that he expected to see from him a “‘Vita Sexualis’ as good as Ōgai’s.” “Mishima turned around and, with his monomaniac eyes glinting, said, ‘So you can tell!’”18
“I think both in this country and in foreign countries there are few kinds of naked, confessional descriptions of sexual inversion,” Mishima wrote to Shikiba Ryūzaburō when the psychiatrist who had written books on Aubrey Beardsley and Marquis de Sade acknowledged receipt of the copy of Confessions. “One of the few is Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt, but it mainly stresses the aspect of spiritual history. I have seen the rare book called Livre blanc by Jean Cocteau, but it, too, is nothing more than a short story.” He added, “In early summer last year I read Sexual Inversion in Man [sic] and Love and Pain [sic] by [Havelock] Ellis that deals with sexual psychology.” Mishima explained that he had sent him the book in the hopes that his own account might be of some use to Shikiba’s “research.”19
In Confessions, it was neither Havelock Ellis nor Sigmund Freud but Magnus Hirschfeld that Mishima quoted at length for sexual self-analysis. It may well have been from the “psychologist,” whom Kimura noted as Mishima having just been to see, that he learned the views of the German sexologist. That psychologist, Mochizuki Mamoru, had published articles on various aspects of sex in magazines before assembling them in Sex and Life (Sei to seikatsu), in March 1949. Mochizuki had also made his name the previous August by his pronouncement during the Tōhō labor strife, “Only warships didn’t come.” That was when the Occupation, which had encouraged a labor movement as part of Japan’s democratization process, sent the Eighth US Army, inc
luding tanks and armored vehicles, to evict the strikers occupying the movie studio in opposition to a summary dismissal of twelve hundred workers.
When Mochizuki was writing, one theory divided homosexuals into two categories, “true” and “pseudo”: that is, the hermaphrodites and those with no physical abnormalities but with marked tendencies toward sexual self-love. In the chapter on “self-centeredness of sexual love” in Sex and Life, Mochizuki termed the former abnormal, the latter perverse.
Although most boys have self-centered sexual desire and often fulfill it through masturbation, Mochizuki wrote, self-centeredness dissipates with most, persisting into adulthood only with a small minority. Those who remain self-centered tend to be shy, unable to play with other children, and to stay home when young. If a member of the same sex establishes contact with any of those, pseudo-homosexual love is born. If a member of the opposite sex manages to establish contact with him, he may be able to engage in what appears to be normal sex but remains the same at his core. In other words, “pseudo-perverts” do not have anything out of the ordinary in the way of sexual desire; it is simply that they are not constitutionally inclined to work with members of the other sex. This, Mochizuki wrote, is what Magnus Hirschfeld also recognizes.20