by Hiroaki Sato
In March 1949 the US government dispatched to Japan Joseph Dodge, the Chicago banker with an “antediluvian” view of the economy, to force the Japanese government to take extremely stringent economic measures for a “super-balanced budget,” as Japanese officials called it, “without qualification or dissent.” Dubbed “the Dodge Line,” this policy aimed to “transform Japan into a low-cost, high-volume industrial exporter linked to its Asian neighbors,” and was carried out by Ikeda Hayato who had just been installed as finance minister, even though it would have to overturn all the campaign promises the Democratic Liberal Party had made. Ikeda, later to serve as prime minister and implement the famous “income-doubling” plan, was an able former finance bureaucrat and had no choice but to meet Dodge’s demands even as his government was thrown into an uproar. The effects were immediate: mass layoffs, bankruptcies, and deflation.10
The three incidents involving the Japanese National Railways in a span of six weeks, in July and August 1949, had to do with resultant social upheavals. Just after midnight on July 5, the body of the JNR president Shimoyama Sadanori was found on the rail tracks not far from the center of Tokyo, his head severed; late on the evening of July 15, railcars parked in a rolling-stock shelter in Mitaka, Tokyo, suddenly started to run and crashed into residences, killing six and injuring thirteen;11 and in the early hours of August 17, in Matsukawa, Fukushima, north of Tokyo, a running train overturned on the spot where one rail was deliberately removed, killing three, including the engineers.
The Shimoyama and Mitaka incidents occurred following the first and second steps of the government-announced layoff of one hundred thousand JNR employees. After the incident in Mitaka, Prime Minister Yoshida wasted no time in accusing Communists and their sympathizers of creating those murderous acts, and the police arrested a sizable number of union members of a factory in Mitaka.
Then came the derailment in Matsukawa, which among the three incidents would create one of the most contentious court cases that would last for fourteen years. Instances of foul play continued to surface. The police were shown to have fabricated crucial evidence. The sole witness, who came forward to say he saw a dozen GIs remove the rail in question, was summoned to the Japanese police and the American Occupation’s Counter Intelligence Corps and soon afterward found dead. It was nearly two decades later, in 1963, that the Supreme Court accepted the lower court’s decision two years earlier and declared all the accused not guilty.
Other steps to curtail Communist influence were taken. In July 1949, an advisor to the Occupation’s CIE gave a speech at Niigata University, urging that “Communist professors” be fired. In September the government discharged seventeen hundred schoolteachers. In June of the following year the Occupation purged twenty-four Communist Party members from public service and in July ordered removal of Communists and Communist sympathizers from newspapers and broadcasting. In September, the government happily complied with “the Red Purge” and forced more than ten thousand employees out of various sectors. Like victims of the McCarthyism then raging in the United States, those removed from work during this Red Purge would have a hard time finding employment in the many years that followed.
For all this social turbulence, Yamazaki’s suicide was singular enough to mesmerize the mass media and the public in several respects. He was the top student at the elite faculty of the elite university and had hoped to become a professor and pursue “quantitative criminal law.” He was from an illustrious family: his father and three older brothers were all physicians, besides the fact that the father served as mayor of Kisarazu, Chiba, when the town became a city, in 1942, as the navy decided to turn it into a base. He was mobilized as a student and was a second lieutenant in the army when Japan surrendered. Yamazaki used the prestige of his school for his business openly. He apparently had enough sexual drive to maintain a stable of eight mistresses.
Above all, Yamazaki displayed the kind of rational, detached, even amused cynicism that seemed to eminently symbolize the distortions of postwar chaos. He left a manuscript titled I Am an Evil Faker, which was posthumously published, and a testament, at least part of which he evidently wrote after he took poison. The first of the four items that made up the latter read:
Caution. Do not touch the corpse before inquest. Because it is so set out in law, immediately notify Kyōbashi Police Station and subject the corpse to autopsy according to Postmortem Law. The cause of death is potassium cyanide (or so I was told when I obtained it; make certain that the one who handed it to me told the truth). Incinerate the corpse with those of marmots. Sell the ashes and bones to a farmhouse as fertilizer (Great if the tree that grows from it sprouts or sucks in money).
Item 2 consisted of a tanka: “So desiring, heart at peace, maple leaves scatter; there’s the evidence of a rational life.” The composition seemed to mock the custom of composing a farewell-to-this-world poem just before certain death. The memory of many military commanders writing such tanka before imminent self-immolation, especially toward the end of the war, was still fresh. The mass media called Yamazaki “a typical après-guerre youth,” après-guerre being the French expression in vogue, and “a modern Faust.”12
Kimura Tokuzō was among the many fascinated by Yamazaki. He thought of Julien Sorel and suggested a story idea to Mishima: Why not create out of the man Japan’s postwar version of the protagonist of Le Rouge et le Noir? Mishima agreed that it was a great idea and said that he would start such a story “after giving it careful thought.” Sometime afterward, however, he came back to Kimura and said that Shinchō, the magazine of Shinchōsha, proposed a similar idea to him, adding that the monthly offered to provide him with a special editor for the project and collect all the necessary material for the work. Would he, Kimura, mind if he worked on the idea for Shinchō?
“[Mishima’s] wish to switch from Ningen, which was unstable in its existence, to Shinchō, which was of an old stable house, was not something unexpected; but in my heart I wasn’t amused,” Kimura wrote, recalling the incident years later. But he was philosophical. “Nevertheless, there was no contest between a writer who was the flower of the season and a magazine that was declining. Besides, I had to realize that my own idea, the wish that Mishima would create a Japanese Julien Sorel out of Yamazaki as basic material, was itself based on the recognition of the calculating approach common to the two men”—Julien and Mishima—“and I could only give myself a resigned smile.”13
Not that Ningen treated its authors shabbily. For example, as noted earlier, the Kamakura Bunko that published it paid Mishima ¥5,600 in October 1947 for his contributions up to that time, when his starting monthly salary at the Ministry of Finance two months later was ¥1,350. (The inflation at the time is shown in the fact that Mishima received ¥8,925 for The House on Fire published by Ningen a year later or ¥255 a page; the earlier payment came to ¥70 a page.)
Still, the Kamakura Bunko had gone bankrupt before the end of 1949 and the magazine was sold to another publisher, Meguro Shoten. By luck, Ningen serialized a sensational story—a memoir of a life in Siberian concentration camps, “In the Shadow of Aurora” (Aurora no kage ni), by Takasugi Ichirō, the penname of Kimura’s former boss, Ogawa Gorō—almost simultaneously as Shinchō serialized The Blue Age, but that did not help.
It was a sign of quickly changing times that Kimura, who had featured Thomas Mann’s lectures, “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” in its inaugural issue, felt it necessary to do a special on “agonizing democracy” in the first issue of Ningen under Meguro Shoten. Six months later, in June, the Korean War broke out.
The New Residence
With Confessions and Thirst for Love selling well, the Hiraoka family moved to Midori-ga-Oka, in Meguro, in August 1950. It was their first move in thirteen years. Their house in Shibuya, built on a 280-squareyard site, was not small by the standard of later boom periods, but it was not large by the standards of self-respect the Hiraokas thought appropriate for themselves. Also, the house was rented.
Both the size of the land and the rental status of the house were negative legacies, as it were, of the debt-ridden Sadatarō and the spendthrift Natsuko.
The new house was rented. In Midori-ga-Oka, the price of land did not change whether you rented or bought it. Most of the area belonged to two large landowners whose ancestors were district chiefs during the Edo Period. Unless you really wanted to buy the land, you rented it.14 The site, at one thousand square yards, was more than three times as large as the one in Meguro, though in Midori-ga-Oka, the size was average. At the time, the house of a similar size probably cost ¥1–1.5 million, while the price tag for the one thousand square-yards of land probably did not exceed ¥600,000. But the house the Hiraokas chose was one in which someone had hanged himself. It hadn’t had a taker for a long time as a result, and its asking price was half what it would have normally cost. The neighbors—mostly former high-ranking officers of the Imperial Navy and Army, now down on their luck—were more curious about the family moving into it than they would have been otherwise.
Mishima was able to make the move because his income suddenly increased. Thirst for Love, priced at ¥200, sold seventy thousand copies, bringing in royalties amounting to ¥1.4 million. Reflecting the stabilizing effect of the Dodge Line, it was priced the same as Confessions published a year earlier. Relative prices are notoriously hard to compare, but in 1950 the average daily pay for a carpenter was ¥180. Half a century later a carpenter would easily command a wage ten times the average price of a hardcover edition of a book for a day’s work.15 The paperback edition of Confessions was priced at ¥70 in June 1950; it had become ¥320 by 1984 when its eighty-first printing was issued. During the same period the carpenter’s daily wage had become more than seventy times as large.
The move to Midori-ga-Oka seemed to cheer up the family. In the summer of 1950 Azusa was fifty-five, Shizue forty-five, and Mishima twenty-five. Shizue for the moment appeared to have given up the thought of divorcing Azusa. The three of them were at times seen walking down the road to Toritsu Daigaku Station, chatting and laughing among themselves. Azusa had a Japanese-style crew-cut known as kakugari—a hairstyle favored by carpenters and other artisans. Mishima sported a Regent: the hair on top made to rise, and the hair on the sides slicked back, with a generous dose of pomade.
Nosaka Akiyuki, who saw Mishima about that time, compared his face with that hairstyle to “a gourd growing at the tip of a vine, with the further impression of being deformed.”16 (The following year, when he had his hair cut short, his mother told him she’d no longer walk out with him, Mishima reported to Kawabata.17) Shizue was in her usual kimono. Chiyuki, who was then twenty and at the Faculty of Law of the University of Tokyo, was seldom, if ever, with them. He was occasionally seen dashing out in wooden clogs to buy roasted sweet potatoes from a passing vendor.
One of their neighbors was Sugai Takao, a medical student at Keiō University. Later a physician with a thriving clinic, he was six feet tall, unusual for a Japanese in those days. From “an elegant family” and handsome as well, he loved to project himself as a playboy. Mishima got along with him. Once he asked the student, “Did you know mine is a house for pompom girls?” Sugai looked perplexed. During the Occupation years Japanese prostitutes who mainly went out with American soldiers were called pompom girls. How is Mishima’s house a brothel?
“You know, the street address of my house is 2323”—pronounced nii-san, nii-san, “brother, brother,” which is a vocative used when someone calls out to a stranger as when a prostitute wants to attract the attention of a potential customer—“you see, brother, brother, drop by for fun.” It was a joke Mishima told many.18
Azusa, the one who had long railed against Mishima’s desire to pursue writing as a career and pressured him to work for the ministry of finance, was now acting as if he were his son’s business manager. One of his self-appointed tasks was to burn his botched manuscripts every day, except when it rained, in front of his house. One neighbor, who would go on to write a memoir about living in Midori-ga-Oka, was struck not just by the odd practice but also by the volume of manuscripts being burnt. One day she asked Azusa why he was doing what he was. His reply: “We don’t want someone to collect them and sell them at high prices.” His other task was to stamp the author’s documentary stamp for each copy of his son’s books. He was on several corporate boards and serving some others as advisor, as was the wont of former ranking bureaucrats.19
On August 2, the day after the family’s move to the new house was completed, Mishima went to stay and work at the Green Hotel, in Karuizawa, a summer resort for the well-to-do. The hotel was famous—its design was attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright for a while—and there, one morning, he rode out with the wife of the professor of French literature at the University of Tokyo, Watanabe Kazuo. In an essay on the sojourn published the following year, he described the experience with some amusement: on that occasion it was Mrs. Watanabe, an easy, capable rider, who fell off her horse as it tried to follow Mishima’s trotting away.20
Two years earlier, in October 1948, Mishima had taken up horseriding at a club in Tokyo. One may wonder why. He was extremely clumsy with horses when horseback riding was part of military exercises at colleges and universities—“I am afraid of horses,” as he simply admitted21—and now, following Japan’s devastation of war, it was a hobby of a much diminished privileged class. Most likely he wanted to maintain the airs of being part of the upper crust of Japanese society precisely because it was utterly in ruins.
In fact, the short story he wrote out of that experience, “Distance-Riding Club” (Tōnorikai), is remarkable, even astonishing, in its total disregard of the social and economic realities of the day as it depicts the wife of the Grand Chamberlain who, while riding a horse with a group of club members, encounters a dignified general whose marriage offer she had spurned thirty years earlier when he was a captain. The general, as the story has it, had survived the war unscathed.
Mishima’s essay on his Green Hotel stay has one notable point if only because of the description of Watanabe Kazuo. There he is identified as “Prof. Y” and is presented as someone whose erudite conversation was regaling, extending as it did to “the pagan passion of [Paul] Claudel.” Yet Mishima had had a disheartening experience with the famous scholar.
In December 1946 he was deeply touched to read Watanabe’s favorable comment on “A Tale at the Cape” in the Tokyo Shinbun. He had admired Watanabe’s translation of Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. Also, Mrs. Watanabe was his mother’s friend. So, in 1948, when Kōdansha decided to publish a collection of his stories, he asked Watanabe for a preface.
When he visited him to pick it up, however, the scholar endlessly complained about the economic hardships of the day in general, the difficulty of getting enough food in particular. It was during that period that a judge was reported to have died of malnutrition by sticking to the government-specified rations. But Mishima regarded Watanabe’s behavior as unseemly. Even worse, though the scholar had complied with his request and written what was wanted, he had titled it a gijo, “counterfeit preface.” This, and the fact that he found the man to be “so polite as to be insulting,” had completely turned him off.22
Among the students Watanabe had about that time was the futurewinner of the Nobel Prize, Ōe Kenzaburō.
At the Green Hotel, Mishima also ran into Nagai Kuniko.
Joining Groups
That same month Mishima joined a “movement for the three-dimensionality of literature,” Kumo no Kai, “Cloud Society,” named after Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds. As befits the aspirations of a country emerging from a ruinous militarism and war, the group had a grand aim of uniting “literature, theater, art, music, film,” and any other artistic endeavors, and it counted among its sixty-three members some of the more illustrious men and women of the day: Fukuda Tsuneari, Jinzai Kiyoshi, Kobayashi Hideo, Nakamura Mitsuo, Sugimura Haruko, Nagaoka Teruko, and Senda Koreya.23 Its leader, Kishida Kunio, was the doyen of modern thea
ter. He had been “purged” by the Occupation for having served, from 1940 to 1942, as director of culture of the government-sponsored national patriotic association Taisei Yokusan Kai. Regardless, he enjoyed great respect.
Upon the formation of the group, the Asahi Shinbun asked a few members, Mishima among them, for comment. Mishima sought as the group’s antecedent André Gide and La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), observing that in the past, Japanese artists had confined themselves in their own narrow fields. That way they would never be able to appeal to the world. The idea for the new group might change it, he suggested.
However, when the Kumo no Kai had its first meeting the next month and staged for its inaugural presentation Strindberg’s Miss Julie, with Senda, one of the group’s executives, playing Jean, Mishima was disappointed. His main complaint was that the play showed how “boring” Naturalism could be. As a matter of fact, for all the excitement it generated among those concerned, especially among its members, the Kumo no Kai appears to have petered out after Kishida Kunio died four years later, in 1954.24
Mishima became the youngest member of the Hachi no Ki Kai, “Potted Tree Society,” a small group that was definitely more informal in its setup and aim. Some of its members were also members of the Kumo no Kai: Jinzai Kiyoshi, Nakamura Mitsuo, Fukuda Tsuneari, the award-winning historian of European art Yoshikawa Itsuji, the scholar of English literature and the then prime minister’s oldest son Yoshida Ken’ichi, and the student of Stendhal and novelist Ōoka Shōhei.