by Hiroaki Sato
If this view appears somewhat deficient today, it may be well to remember that Mochizuki was writing just about the time Alfred Kinsey put together Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in which he rejected the view that “homosexuality is innate.” In a commentary on the report, Lionel Trilling complained that Kinsey’s treatment of homosexuality—“the sexual aberrancy which is, I suppose, the most complex and the most important in our cultural life”—was “oversimplified” and “confusing.”21
Mochizuki noted Mishima’s visit in his cryptic diary, and that he discussed with the young man, among other things, Brunswick, then a famous gay bar on the Ginza. He did not say he lent Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie to Mishima, but in Confessions the narrator refers to Hirschfeld three times, the first time in relation to his first masturbatory ejaculation. He notes: “In my case, it is a very interesting coincidence that Hirschfeld should place the painting of St. Sebastian in first rank among the paintings and sculptures perverts favor.” He then gives the life of Saint Sebastian: How, when his secret conversion to Christianity was exposed, he was shot dead with “countless arrows,” but how, when he revived after a devout widow’s care, he was bludgeoned to death with cudgels. The narrator concludes the section with “an unfinished prose poem” on Saint Sebastian he wrote years afterward.
The second reference occurs when the narrator describes how he gradually began to “transfer” his attention from “older young men” to boys younger than himself. His concern here is with the German sexologist’s taxonomy. “Hirschfeld makes divisions among perverts,” he reports, “calling androphiles those who are attracted only by the adults of the same sex and calling ephebophiles those who love only boys and those between boys and grown youths. I was beginning to understand ephebophiles.” Or, as a summary of Hirschfeld’s works in English puts it: “Ephebophiles, who are attracted to youths from puberty up to the early twenties; androphiles, who love persons between the early twenties and fifty.”
The narrator of Confessions then gives the etymology of ephebophiles, noting that it “derives from Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and Hera and the wife of the immortal Hercules. The goddess Hebe was the cupbearer of the Olympian gods and was a symbol of youth.” It may be added, if only because Mishima would later make clear his dislike for old men time and again, that Hirschfeld had another category: “gerontophiles, who love older men, up to senile old age.”
The third reference occurs near the end of Confessions. The narrator describes his deliberate avoidance of women and his uncontrollable lust that at times drove him to indulge in “the bad habit as many as five times a day.” In consequence, “Hirschfeld’s theory that explains perversion as an utterly simple biological phenomenon disabused me of my ignorance.”
Most notably perhaps, though Mishima makes no direct reference to it, Sexualpathologie includes a case study of a young homosexual presented through his letters. This young man bears a striking resemblance to Mishima, beginning with the fact that his father was a ranking government official and himself a law student.
Magnus Hirschfeld, who founded the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin, in 1919, was among the greatest sexologists of the era who “ranked with Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud.”22 Because Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code criminalized homosexuality, he was often called on to testify in courts, most notably during the Eulenberg Trial, in 1907, Moltke v. Harden, the biggest homosexual scandal of the period that engulfed the highest echelons of Kaiser Wilhelm’s entourage.23 But when the Nazis took over, in 1933, his open advocacy of sexual freedom, including the fact that he, a Jew, was an important member of the movement to abolish Paragraph 175, turned him into the Nazis’ primary target, and his books, along with his vast collections at his institute, were destroyed in the Nazi Book Burning. He died an exile in Nice, in 1935.
Parallel Narratives Examined
Was Mishima exaggerating or in some way faking his homosexual tendencies? Mitani Kuniko was convinced he was. Asked what she thought of Confessions when she read it, she said, “Mr. Mishima was a very sincere, serious person. He just feigned ‘sexual perversion,’ I thought.”
Among those who have written about Mishima, Muramatsu Takeshi, for one, forcefully argued that Mishima decided to emphasize homosexual interests in Confessions because he had to give up on his love for Mitani Kuniko. Muramatsu, a student of French literature who observed the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, in 1961, and, in the following year, the Algerian War of Independence from the Algerian side, knew Mishima’s family very well.
Muramatsu grew up not far from the residence of the Hashi family, and his mother knew Shizue since both were young. She would point out the Hashi house to him whenever the two passed by it, saying it was where the former principal of the Kaisei Middle School, that is, Shizue’s father, lived. She also told him, in the early 1930s, that Shizue said she wanted a divorce from Azusa—the plaint she would repeat well into the mid-1960s when the two served as adjudicators in a family court.
Muramatsu knew there were some discrepancies between reality and fiction in Mishima. To start, Mishima wrote, in the novel, “After my sister’s death, [Sonoko] was soon married. Shall I call it the feeling of a heavy burden taken off my shoulders? I made myself merry. I boasted to myself that it was the natural consequence of not her having abandoned me, but my having abandoned her.” In truth, Mishima became hopelessly drunk on the night Kuniko married, on May 5. He, still a student, was not known to have had many opportunities to consume alcohol, but he became dead drunk “for the first time since he was born,” Muramatsu recalled Shizue telling him.
As he saw it, all the homosexual talk in the first half of Confessions was fiction, although that would deny even a common adolescent fascination with members of the same sex. It was necessary for Mishima to “put a mask of homosexuality on the protagonist,” Muramatsu judged, so as to “reverse the positions of man and woman in their mutual relationship.” For him to feel “a heavy burden taken off his shoulders” at the news of the marriage of someone with whom he was in love, he had to have the knowledge that he had homosexual tendencies, even if that was not known to anyone else.24
Muramatsu—who reminded the Times (London) bureau chief in Tokyo, Henry Scott-Stokes, of “a bit of Action Française types, same combination of rightwing views and intelligence one saw in the Action Française in the 1930s” when the two met at Mishima’s dinner party in 196825—bases his rebuttal of the “homosexuality legend” pertaining to Mishima, along with the “rightwing legend,” not just on his knowledge of a friend but also on his close, chronological reading of Mishima’s writings.
Referring to the notes Mishima had taken in 1946 on kissing Kuniko, for example, he points to a subtle but decisive role reversal Mishima managed in transferring the initial description into the novel. In the notes, it is “I” who was eager to kiss Kuniko, whereas she, unable to shake off the behavior expected of young women in those days, was “stiff like a doll” when kissed and embraced: “She was reluctant even to take her raincoat off. As though it were her underwear. . . . Not only that, she freely allowed me to kiss her lips but would not try to kiss mine. Also, she freely allowed me to hug her but would not try to hug me back. She was stiff like a doll.” In the novel, Sonoko is “panting” in the narrator’s arms, “her cheeks blushing crimson like fire,” but “she still did not appeal to my desire.”
Muramatsu does not overlook “A Tale at the Cape,” the dreamy fragment of a romance Mishima wrote during the wrenching period astride Japan’s surrender—that is, before he learned of Kuniko’s engagement. By examining a contemporary translation, Muramatsu notes that the short story is based on Gabriele d’Annunzio’s novel Il trionfo della morte that devotes its last two-thirds to “a tale at the cape.”
Yet what stands out in light of Mishima’s love for Kuniko is not the death of a young couple who appear airily in front of the eleven-year-old boy lost on the cape, which Mishima presents as an incident in Märchenland, Muramatsu suggests, so mu
ch as a description of the young woman. “The person who looked dazzlingly beautiful to my eyes,” Mishima wrote, “surely had not passed twenty, and had a face very like that of someone whom I had drawn up in my mind for some time as what the bride who would visit me in the remote future would have to be like.” In other words, Mishima, in writing the story, was envisaging Kuniko. That was three months before he learned of her betrothal.26
The change that occurred in Mishima upon Kuniko’s engagement, then, is transforming, if you will, in the “long story” he embarked on “with the ambition of astonishing people,” in January 1946. In what was finally titled The Bandit, Kuniko, now named Yoshiko, remains a beautiful young woman, “a person as beautiful as never seen before” (the Chinese characters Mishima chose for the name mean just that, “beautiful person”), but this time she emerges as a licentious woman.
After allowing the protagonist, a viscount’s son named Akihide, to have a moment of dalliance with her, Yoshiko casually abandons him and goes on to misbehave openly. In recasting the same person as such a figure, Mishima perhaps merely brought to the fore d’Annunzio’s nymphomaniac Ippolita, her sexual nature barely, if at all, hinted at in “Cape,” but it was a vengeful act nonetheless. Similarly, in the novel Mishima stresses death that was barely glimpsed in the fairyland setting of the earlier story. When he realizes Yoshiko wasn’t serious with him, Akihide decides to commit suicide, although, when he manages to do so, it is with another woman who has agreed to marry him, and he carries out the double suicide on the night of their wedding.
This contrived narrative, set in the mid-1930s, gave Mishima a great deal of trouble. He prepared detailed notes, character sketches, and drafts for the novel. In one memo he wrote for himself “because someone said the story reminded me of Radiguet,” he took care to note: “The difference between me and Radiguet: Radiguet is a Romanticist who sees romance in the development of normal psychology itself; I am a Realist who tries to realistically embody a romantic psychology that is absolutely impossible.”
Mishima wrote and rewrote the story, chapter by chapter, and at one point gave it up altogether. When he finally completed it, he characterized it as a piece in which all the literary influences he had received were “exposed, without any connecting links, randomly,” adding, “The reader will be surprised by the odd blending of the two very opposite concepts of the French psychological novel and the German Romantic novel.”
Kawabata, for one, sensed a deeply wounded young man behind what may be termed a series of obfuscating psychological interactions among the characters. In the preface he wrote, he spoke of “the flowering of Mishima’s talent at so early an age” that he found “both dazzling and painful,” suggesting that, even as some may see Mishima as someone “totally unwounded by his own work,” others will see that his “work comes out of his many deep wounds.”27
Mishima’s love for Kuniko probably was as serious as any first love can be. Mishima said it was, on a number of occasions. Soon after writing Confessions, he wrote Ninagawa Chikayoshi, at the time on the editorial board of the Kamakura Bunko and another scholar of French literature who later became a professor at Waseda University: “I wouldn’t have been able to live without writing about her. Even if the exaggerated expression of ‘being unable to live’ were not improper, I was overwhelmed by the being called Sonoko. . . . The woman called Sonoko is, [to use] the name of her real being, Kuniko. I have trouble conjuring the image of the real Kuniko, however I tried, as I kept writing the imagined name Sonoko in my work.”
Mishima remained agitated even as he wrote about the novel he had finished. He certainly meant to write tekitō, “proper,” not futō, “improper,” and he certainly meant to say “had trouble,” not “have trouble.” Mishima was clear-headed enough to be aware of the discrepancy he thought he found between his literary creation and the real person, for he went on to say in his letter to Ninagawa: “The actual Kuniko did not have as much spirituality or sensitivity as ‘Sonoko.’”28
The failure with Kuniko was a serious blow to Mishima. Japanese publishers routinely insert a “monthly report” called geppō, a kind of newsletter, in each new title. In his “notes” to Confessions in Kawade’s monthly newsletter for July 1949, Mishima amplified the death-life part that he had described in the January précis: “This book is a testament of the realm of death that I have inhabited until now. To write this book has been for me suicide reversed. If you make a movie of someone leaping to death and run the film backward, the suicide jumps up from the bottom of the valley to the top of the cliff with a ferocious speed and returns to life. What I have attempted in writing this book is such an art of recovering life.”
In his aforementioned letter to the psychiatrist Shikiba Ryūzaburō, Mishima wrote that his worry was “less about my inherent Tendenz than about my physical incompetence in the normal direction, so I thought confession would be the most effective as a mode of psychoanalysis.” His concern about his “physical incompetence in the normal direction” would prove unfounded, if it had any foundations.
Muramatsu followed Mishima’s writings with care and sympathy to show how the pain of the breakup with Mitani Kuniko never left Mishima till the end of his life. Toward the end of his life, indeed, there is, for example, Ayakura Satoko, a young woman from the blue-blood aristocracy who provides an undercurrent throughout Mishima’s lifework, the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility.
Early on in the first of the four novels, Spring Snow, Satoko, in sudden turmoil, asks Matsugae Kiyoaki, the son of a low-ranking samurai accorded marquisate status as a result of his work for the Imperial Restoration: “Suppose I suddenly disappeared, Kiyo-sama, what would you do?” She already has a marriage offer and she wants to know if Kiyoaki, who feigns indifference, truly loves her. In describing the intimacy and the eventual breakup that ensue, Mishima surely was thinking of what might have happened to Kuniko and himself had not things happened as they did, Muramatsu suggests.29
Muramatsu also recounts what his sister, Eiko, observed when, just about a month before carrying out his planned death, Mishima had the theater troupe of his creation Rōman Gekijō (Romantic Theater) stage his 1958 play The Rose and the Pirate (Bara to kaizoku). The play, which may well have been inspired by his unexpected encounter with Kuniko in New York, in December 1957, concerns a popular thirty-seven-year-old writer of fairy tales who, ever since marrying the man who raped her, has professed to disdain lust but falls in love with a handsome thirty-year-old idiot who visits her, convinced he is one of the boy characters she has created.
Muramatsu Eiko, the actress Mishima nurtured and who played the writer in the overtly fanciful drama, reported noticing Mishima cry at the end of Act Two during a rehearsal and, again, on opening day, October 22, when he was in the audience. Act Two is where the intimate, fairyland conversation between the two main characters ends with the idiot telling the writer: “I had told you just one lie. There was no such thing as a Kingdom.” Muramatsu thinks this scene clearly indicates the “kingdom” that Mishima had imagined with Kuniko.30
Reading too much into such things can mislead, of course. In the case of The Rose and the Pirate, Mishima did not try to hide his crying. Many saw it, and some were alarmed. But asked about it, he laughed if off, “I was so deeply moved by the actors’ wonderful performance.” Azusa suggested that his son cried because he was distraught over the difficulties involving his private militia, The Shield Society.31
Muramatsu Eiko herself, whom Mishima expressly assigned to play the fairytale writer, was less struck by the tears he shed than by the realization later that the staging just before his death of this particular drama—which ends with the female writer declaring, at her wedding, “I have never had anything like a dream”—was part of his “last theatrical presentation” of himself. Before his death, he had scheduled production of another play of his, Salome, which, for all the shock and turmoil of his death, was staged as planned, in January 1971—at his wife Yōko’s insistence.32 Furthe
rmore, he was known to be highly expressive as a theater viewer in the tradition of kabuki enjoyment.33
At any rate, Romano Vulpitta has suggested that Muramatsu Takeshi may have gone too far in emphasizing the consequences of his friend’s breakup with Mitani Kuniko on his psyche. Mishima’s own “words and actions” are there, the Italian diplomat-turned-scholar of Japanese literature has pointed out, as “an obstacle to casually dismissing” the “homosexual legend,” along with the “rightwing legend.” Muramatsu was too eager in his attempt to remain “respectful” to Mishima Yukio.34
More to the point, there is, Muramatsu himself did not neglect to note, the problem you cannot really avoid in writing a biography: how “not to create personal trouble for those surrounding” the subject.35 Among other things, Mishima’s wife, Yōko, was alive when Muramatsu serialized the biography in Shinchō, from 1988 to 1990, and she was famous for working hard after her husband’s death to tramp down any suggestion that he had had homosexual involvements. It is known that Muramatsu knew far more than he let on.
Indeed, Muramatsu would admit his friend’s sexuality, albeit indirectly, long before taking on the difficult task of writing his biography. Shortly after Mishima’s death, the University of Toronto asked him to give a series of lectures on Japanese views of life and death. Later he expanded and serialized them in Shinchō. He then revised them to turn them into a book, published in 1975.
The result was an unusual history of Japanese literature largely focused on death and, shall we say, love. In the section on “the aesthetic of double suicide,” Muramatsu addressed homosexual love, pointing out that writings on male-male double suicide preceded those on female-male double suicide that Chikamatsu Monzaemon popularized in his plays, and added: “The average modern sensibility finds it hard to understand double-suicide by homosexuals.”36 After all, Chikamatsu’s contemporary Ihara Saikaku (1642–93) could proclaim, in writing Great History of Male Love (Nanshoku ōkagami), that “no attempt [was] made to hide dislike of women” among the characters he chose to describe.