by Hiroaki Sato
The Occupation Involvement
In the fall of 1949, there was an unexpected turn of events: George Saito, of the Occupation’s Public Opinion and Sociological Research Division, asked to meet Mishima, so the two met. Saito, later a scholar of Japanese literature, told him that a Capt. Tufts, a composer, was looking for a Japanese who would write a libretto with a Japanese theme for a collaborative Japanese-American opera, and invited him to meet the composer and listen to some of his music.
Learning that Saito already knew Haniya Yutaka and was preparing to have his incomplete philosophical novel Dead Souls (Shirei) translated into English, Mishima asked Haniya to accompany him to the next meeting. Haniya, guessing that Mishima, like him, had “a phobia of being interviewed by a gaijin,” came along. After Capt. Tufts played snatches of his composition on the piano, Haniya told the Americans that the composer would find “in Japan no one more appropriate than the young writer sitting next to me to write a libretto” for what he had in mind. He cannot forget, Haniya later wrote in his inimitably convoluted language, the way Mishima Yukio, at these words, “laughed as he looked down showing suddenly with his entire body the shyness that has tremulous innocence at its core.”37
Mishima apparently told Saito and Tufts that his libretto would be based on “Prince Karu and Princess Sotōri” and their discussion went as far as revising the story to modify its tragic ending. According to a Yomiuri Shinbun interview in early December, Mishima expressed the hope to work out something with Capt. Tufts and see it staged “before the ratification of a peace treaty.” But perhaps because of the Korean War that erupted half a year later the plan fizzled and nothing came of it.38
It may be, however, through this involvement with the CIE that Mishima came to know Herbert Passin, the progenitor of the Public Opinion and Sociological Research Division within the Occupation bureaucracy39 who would help him two years later when the young writer decided to go to the United States for the first time.
And in the Meantime
Also, in December, Mishima wrote Kimura Tokuzō: “I, right now, cannot forget, awake or asleep, the appearance of a boy at Brunswick, I sigh all the time, as if my adolescence has restarted. A loving heart is so pitiable, isn’t it?” He then quoted parts of his own diary, saying “my confessional habit has raised its head again”: “December 11—[The publisher] Sōjusha sent me three Zweig volumes. Confusion of Feelings—these are terrifying words. Each word, each phrase, penetrates my heart, penetrates into my organs and intestines. Heart confounded, I cannot work; the old professor protagonist’s despair is the same as my state now. I shouldn’t have read it. Terrifying. Terrifying. Now, writing a novel is a desperate desire for internal balance.” Mishima also referred to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Marcel Proust’s Time Regained as showing old age as a time when “despair” and “empty hope” can only get worse.40
That day, Mishima was in a mood to talk in a somewhat feverish vein. He penned another letter—this one to Dan Kazuo, a writer of the Japan Romantic School whose debut work Flower Memento (Hanagatami) had led him to write an elaborate appreciation five years earlier.41 It was mainly to thank Dan for sending him his “novel,” Dazai Osamu, which reminded him, Mishima said, of Eduard Friedrich Mörike’s Mozart on the Journey to Prague. But he also talked about an outlandish dream he recently had about a gigantic peacock. He then stated, rather abruptly, that it was becoming clearer to him that “there cannot be any salvation in this world beyond writing sincerely, dedicatedly, a novel saying ‘There can never, never, be any salvation in this world.’”
“Today a writer without a powerful idea dies or weakens just as a soldier without a powerful body dropped out during the war,” Mishima insisted. “This is because in a mythical, monstrous, fabulous age such as the modern times, each person must act out a fierce drama, which he will not be able to bear if he tries to do it with his body alone.”
“I am an affirmer of violence,” he went on, “and I would like to act out, with spiritual violence, a very bloody evil deed. In fact, whenever I see a pretty boy, I want to splash oil all over him, light it, and burn him.” His “ideal life” if he were to become rich enough would be to “keep a hungry lion” and, when the time for his own death approaches, to “throw all the boys I love into the lion cage and die, while watching the spectacle, by taking heroin,” but not Philopon [Methamphetamine], nor Adolm [Cyclobarbital calcium], nor potassium cyanide—all closely associated with the war and its chaotic aftermath.42
What fascinates here, in retrospect, is Dan’s summing-up of Dazai’s life and literature in his foreword to his “novel”—in truth a memoir of the author’s uncontrollably licentious days of “drinking and womanizing” with Dazai, from 1933 to 1941. “Dazai’s death was what his life, which was in short his literary art, that was planned, hypothesized, and induced, over the length of forty years, finally lured him to,” Dan observed. “The literary art Dazai had to pursue to the end devoured his body.” And: “His hypothesized life was not completed unless he chose death.”43
Did Mishima, later an avowed hater of Dazai, sometimes recall these words?
CHAPTER NINE
Boyfriends, Girlfriends
All human beings are bisexual.
—Gore Vidal
An innocent-looking scoundrel, a childlike adult, a man of common sense with talents of an artist, a conman who makes imitations.
—Fukuda Tsuneari on Mishima
Confessions went into a second printing in early 1950. In June, when Shinchōsha published Mishima’s next full-length novel, Thirst for Love (Ai no kawaki), the same imprint accepted Confessions in its paperback series (thereby undermining the sale of Kawade’s hardcover edition and creating ill will). The publisher’s blurb for the first edition of Thirst for Love was “An ambitious work by Mishima Yukio, the shining star of postwar literature!” In its second printing, the blurb was rewritten: “An ambitious work by Mishima Yukio that goes beyond Confessions of a Mask!”
Asked to write an afterword to the paperback edition of Confessions, Fukuda Tsuneari began by calling Mishima “a fertile barrenness” and ended it with the hope: “I look forward to watching him manipulate his mask at will.”1 Mishima did not disappoint the Shakespearean scholar and playwright. In the year 1950 alone, he published three novels dealing with three different themes. He followed Thirst for Love, in June, with The Blue Age (Ao no jidai) and The Snow-White Night (Junpaku no yoru), both serialized before appearing in book form in December. This was in addition to two collected works, published in May and June: The Lighthouse (Tōdai), which included three plays and eight stories, and Monster, which included one play and five stories.
The year also saw his first head-on involvement with theater. In February, he directed his own play, The Lighthouse, with the theater troupe Haiyū-za, “Actors Theater,” that was founded in the midst of war, in 1944. Yashiro Seiichi arranged it, though he had already left the troupe by then. The one-act drama deals with a twenty-five-year-old repatriated soldier in love with his thirty-year-old stepmother. It had attracted enough attention at the end of the previous year to be staged by two different troupes, in Osaka and in Kyoto. When subjected to a group review earlier, the play had elicited a memorable comment from the novelist Nakayama Gishū: “What an astonishing talent. . . . No doubt about it, he’s a genius. Maybe [another] Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. He’s got no flesh but he’s got brains.”2
Mishima’s directorial debut was a failure; he was more interested in the words he’d written than in how the actors performed them. Yashiro who came to see the rehearsal was blunt: “Mishima, directing is watching the actors’ movements. If you like your script so much, take it home and read it”—or so Seki Hiroko recalled Yashiro telling Mishima. She was one of the actresses who appeared in the play3 and, Yoshiro remembered, one of the women Mishima pursued at the time. But the experience put on firmer ground Mishima’s association with actors, actresses, and directors. Then, in December, another, older troupe, Bung
aku-za, founded in 1937, staged his play Kantan in its Atelier, the troupe’s practice space.
(The name Bungaku-za was a straight translation of Littérature Théâtre. One of its three founding managers, Iwata Toyo’o decided on the name in order to stress the literary rather than political qualities of the plays to be presented at the theater. Along with another founder-manager Kishida Kunio, Iwata had studied drama in France after the First World War when anti-realism was in fashion. To the general reader he was better known as Shishi Bunroku, the writer of humorous stories; married to a Frenchwoman, he turned to the genre when he found he couldn’t make a living in the theater. A third founder-manager was Kubota Mantarō, another important name in modern Japanese theater and also a haiku poet.)
Kantan is a twist on the nō drama with the same title that was based on a Chinese story from the Tang Dynasty. The original story is one of Buddhist enlightenment and tells of a man who suddenly becomes the ruler and enjoys all the attendant glories for fifty years—all while asleep on a magical pillow, only to find upon waking that everything had happened while millet was being cooked for him to eat. Mishima’s play turns the homiletic tale upside down and tells of a man who spurns all seductive opportunities while asleep and finds upon waking that the world he had thought dead before falling asleep has revived. It would become the first of Mishima’s “modern nō plays.” Akutagawa Hiroshi, the first son of Ryūnosuke who committed suicide in 1927 at the age of thirty-five, directed it and played a role in it. He would go on to distinguish himself as a character actor.
Actually, Mishima’s first play to be staged was The House on Fire (Kataku), a one-act play about a loveless couple, and that had occurred a year before, in February–March 1949. Again, Yashiro was involved. Then still a member of the Haiyū-za and just twenty-two, he persuaded the group to stage the play and produced it. The troupe’s founder, Senda Koreya, an outstanding actor who had studied theater in Germany in the 1920s and was often jailed after his return to Japan for promoting proletarian theater, played the lead role. In that regard, Mishima enjoyed “extraordinary luck and glory,” as Yashiro put it. Mishima went to all the rehearsals and saw every performance of the play while it ran, from February 24 to March 2. It was, like his directorial debut a year later, a sobering experience. He was forced to realize how inadequate his grasp of his material was when actors asked him questions.4
Yashiro, incidentally, makes his appearance in Confessions, though unnamed. He is the one who takes the narrator to a red-light district where, faced with an ugly, lurid, and brazen prostitute, the narrator discovers or confirms his impotence with a member of the opposite sex. Most likely nothing of the sort happened, Yashiro wrote long after Mishima’s death. As soon as tea was served, as is customary in any Japanese inn, Mishima paid the full amount and fled. How could Yashiro say that? Because that was exactly what he did. Two years younger than Mishima, he had pretended to be an experienced playboy, but he had never slept with a woman, a prostitute or otherwise. In fact, his “companion to be” that night was a healthy girl of seventeen or eighteen fresh from the countryside, and he was unable to forget her; as a result, he wrote a one-act play two decades later.
Yashiro, for that matter, even as he confessed he was unaware of Mishima’s homosexual tendencies during the period these things happened, in 1947, recalled being introduced to a Peers School student in Mishima’s house with whom he was on intimate terms. He did not make anything of it except to guess that Mishima was acting to amuse him—this partly because in Japan “intimacy” between young males is accepted. Yashiro does not say how the student looked. Kimura Tokuzō did. When Mishima died and the photo of the young man who died with him appeared, Kimura was startled to remember “the one young man who had attracted Mishima in his youthful days.” The two looked so alike!5
Early Religious Interest
The title of the play The House on Fire is a Buddhist metaphor for this work that comes from a well-known parable in The Lotus Sutra,6 and this may be a good place to note that Mishima’s interest in religion had started early. This is clear just by looking at the nine plays he had written before The House on Fire, mostly in his early teens, although what is considered to be the first one, Mamie, had little to do with religion. As Mishima was meticulous to note, it was based on the tale La Chèvre de M. Seguin that Alphonse Daudet tells in one of his letters to the (fictitious) lyric poet Pierre Gringoire.
Among Mishima’s eight other plays, however, The Corpse and Treasure (Shibito to takara), “a verse drama in one act” with the subtitle Bhalchandra, has the format of a standard Buddhist tale. The Route (Rotei) is a drama of the Annunciation, with the citation of Luke 1:28, “And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee”), which, with a touch of Macbeth, refers to catacombs and Palestina (Act III, Scene 2). The Wise Men from the East (Tōhō no hakase tachi), based on Matthew 2:1-9 and again with a touch of Macbeth, describes the agitation of Herod on the night “the star” appears; it is an eerily accomplished play for a fourteen-year-old. Mishima also set out to write, but did not finish, a verse drama on the birth of Jesus Christ.7 As he wrote Azuma in a separate letter, because his father insisted that he read books on Nazism, he started reading those on Jewish issues, and he was also drawn to the Bible and commentaries on it for a while.8
The House on Fire became an impetus of sorts to Mishima as a professional playwright. In February The Anxiety of Love (Ai no fuan) saw print—a startling story of a young man and a young woman, both seventeen years old and in love with each other, who are shot dead by an adult who claims to be a four-month-old fetus she aborted, even as the couple start making love, apparently for the first time. In October two one-act plays came out. One was Niobe, which is about a woman who ends up losing all her five children she had with five different men while married to one, and the other, A Saintly Woman (Seijo), was about a young man who forces his older sister to follow his every whim and eventually kills her, unhinged by her saintly willingness to do whatever she is told.
That same month Mishima published an essay, “A Fiction Writer Eager to Write Drama,” in the theater magazine Nihon Engeki. “I understand all too well Hofmannsthal’s yearning for Greek culture when he casually mentions ‘the self-evident sense of form,’” he wrote. “My craving for dramatic literature is this, in the end. . . . Drama being by far an older genre than fiction, reconfirming ‘the self-evident sense of form’ which drama makes its natural requisite seems to be important work for me as a fiction writer.” He added: “The plays that have moved me the most are, first, Racine’s Phèdre, second, Porto-Riche’s Le Vieil Homme, and, third, Mauriac’s Asmodée.”9
Three Novels
Of the three novels that came out in December 1950, Thirst for Love concerns the young widow Etsuko’s crazed love for a farm boy. Now the live-in mistress of her father-in-law, Etsuko loses heart at the climactic moment in her attempt to force sex on the boy—and ends up killing him. Mishima’s epigraph is from Revelation, 17-4: “and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast,” on whose forehead was written “the Mother of Harlots.” To explain this story, Mishima wrote he was infatuated with novels of François Mauriac, adding “a comical confession” that he owed a great deal to Freud’s Studies of Hysteria.
The Snow-White Night was turned into a movie the following year, thus becoming the first of Mishima’s novels to be so treated. Serialized in Fujin Kōron, the monthly for educated women, from January to October, it was a drama of adultery. A beautiful young woman married to a bank official thirteen years older commits suicide the moment she discovers that the man she fell for wasn’t serious about the affair or had, at best, simply taken advantage of the difficult situation she found herself in. The man, her husband’s friend and customer as company president, is married and known to be a womanizer.
Mishima was not married, but this novel may be read as a revenge fantasy about Mitani Kuniko. Besides the overt similarities to real life,
including the fact that the protagonist’s name Ikuko as a Chinese character has a striking resemblance to the name Kuniko, Mishima lovingly describes her: “she had the air of someone who discounted a large portion of her innate beauty on her own. That beauty lay in lips as they naturally were. Nonetheless, she applied a US-made lipstick rather thickly to hide the madder red of their natural state. That beauty lay in svelte legs of someone who grew up in a Western-style house, not tortured by living on tatami. Nonetheless, she hid them with a longish skirt that had gradually come into fashion since the past summer but was still rare.” And so forth.
The third novel, The Blue Age, was directly based on one of the sensational events of 1949. In November of that year, Yamazaki Akitsugu, “student president” of the Hikari (Light) Club, committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide. Yamazaki, a junior at the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo, set up an “American-style” investment-loan company in September 1948 with some of his fellow students. The company pledged investors a monthly return of 13 percent while charging borrowers a prepaid 21 to 30 percent interest. His business quickly expanded, and he moved his office to the Ginza the following January. But by the summer he was running into trouble. In July he was arrested on charges of illegal financing. He was released in September, but the credibility of the Hikari Club plummeted and he was unable to line up enough money to pay the creditors. He chose to kill himself.
Yamazaki’s meteoric rise and fall had to do with Japan’s defeat, the Occupation, and rapid US policy shifts. The Tokyo consumer price index, which was three times the level of 1935 in the year Japan was defeated, grew to be two hundred forty times that three years later. Meanwhile, the Communist takeover of China became certain and the United States’s urgency to turn Japan into a bulwark against Communism in the Far East mounted. The Japanese economy had to be strengthened, and the Communist Party and activities associated with it, such as those of labor unions that the Occupation had legalized and encouraged, had to be curbed. What the Japanese called “course reversal” ensued.