by Hiroaki Sato
The name of the group originally came from the nō play The Potted Tree (Hachi no ki) that describes a destitute samurai who burns his last and only possession, a potted tree, to warm an unexpected guest on a snowy day, although directly it came from a haiku Nakamura composed for Yoshikawa when the latter left for Europe that alluded to the play, or so Ōoka said in an entertaining essay he wrote a month before he left for the United States on a Rockefeller grant, in 1954. The group chose the name, in any case, because the members took turns inviting the others, along with their wives, to their homes and were expected to create a banquet by scraping together whatever food and drinks they might have for the evening.25
The Offer to Elope
On October 23, the fifth anniversary of his sister Mitsuko’s death, Mishima came home and found two young women chatting away with Shizue. When he learned that the visitors were Mitsuko’s former school friends who had come to reminisce about her and told the name of one of them, Itaya Ryōko, he instantly recognized it: Mitsuko had often talked about her as one of her best friends. Itaya, then married and with the family name Moriwaki, had just moved near Toritsu Daigaku Station. From then on she would come to spend evenings with the Hiraokas often because her husband routinely stayed out late. This led to some entanglements.
Ryōko’s husband ran the Japanese subsidiary of a Swedish trading company. As such his income was far above average and he showed it off. He drove foreign cars, a conspicuous “status symbol” at a time when domestic carmakers were far from establishing any kind of reputation. (The Imperial Household did not use domestic cars until 1967.)
Late one evening Ryōko was walking home along a dark street with Mishima as her escort—at Azusa’s order—when a foreign car came from the opposite direction and stopped. It was her husband; he had come home earlier than usual because he had acquired a new car, a Chevrolet Prizm. He picked them up, took Mishima home. As soon as the two reached home, he bawled her out: What do you mean, walking hand in hand with “a threepenny writer” in the middle of the night?
Ryōko wasn’t amused. Her father, Itaya Kōkichi, was one of the most successful corporate executives in prewar and wartime Japan, particularly famed for driving English tobacco out of China, and she, like her sisters, had grown up pampered, in a household with dozens of servants, with two foreign cars, a Chrysler and a Mercury.26 She had a terrible fight with her husband that night, but he didn’t leave the matter at that. The next morning he marched her, weeping, to the Hiraokas and demanded to know the truth. Mishima wasn’t home. Azusa angrily told Ryōko’s husband that his son might be fond of her, but there was nothing more to it than that.
Mishima felt bad about this development or else pitied Ryōko. Soon afterward, again while walking her back to her home, he said to her, rather abruptly, “From tomorrow I’ll be canned in a hotel on Ōshima for a week or ten days. Make up your mind.” Popular Japanese writers often sequester themselves—or publishers sequester them—in a hotel room to finish a story with a deadline, and for this act the word “can”—as in “canned food”—is used. Ōshima is a fairly large volcanic island off the east coast of Izu Peninsula, southwest of Tokyo. Mishima had visited it a couple of times before. He was inspired to write his play The Lighthouse during his visit to it in March of 1949 when he had one cup too many and was staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep.
“You mean I run away with you?” Ryōko remembered asking him.
“I’ll take responsibility. Why don’t you come with me?” Mishima said. Ryōko was momentarily tempted. But his next words put her off. “If we want to turn back, now’s the time.” Her retort: “If you want to turn back, do.” Nothing came of the conversation. Still, she continued to visit the Hiraokas.
Forbidden Colors
With the January 1951 issue of Gunzō, Mishima began to serialize what was to be his homosexual magnum opus, Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki).27 When ten installments (eighteen chapters) were finished, they were published in book form, in November. But even as the book came out, Mishima made clear his intention to carry his story forward. He wrote Part II, originally titled The Secret Drug (Higyō), after he returned from his first overseas travels.
The long narrative deals with convoluted sexual vengeance. The old writer Hinoki Shunsuke has had only bitter experiences with women. Among others, his third wife, a beautiful woman prone to blatant adultery, committed double suicide with a young lover. Three of the women who have treated him shabbily are still alive. When Shunsuke becomes acquainted with a handsome young man with a perfect physique named Minami Yūichi and learns that Yūichi, who should be irresistible to any woman conscious of her own sexual attraction, in fact is unable to love women, the old man plots to avenge himself on the three women through the young man. This is how Mishima describes the advent of the youth:
At that moment, in the midst of the seawater, a single wake emerged, raising delicate splashes like white caps. The wake came headlong toward the beach. When it reached the shallows, the swimmer stood up in a wave about to collapse. For a moment his body was blotted out in a splash, then appeared again as if nothing had happened. His powerful legs kicking the seawater aside, he walked toward [where Shunsuke was sitting].
He was an astonishingly beautiful youth. Not so much a statue in the classical period of Greece as an Apollo made by a bronze sculptor of the Peloponnesian School, his body, brimming with benign beauty of the kind that was frustrating in a way, had a nobly erect neck, sprawling shoulders, a slowly spreading chest, elegantly round arms, an abruptly narrow, chaste, solid stomach, and legs that were manly and taut like a pair of swords.
It was in May 1951, when the serialization of Forbidden Colors was in full swing, that another young man, this one a reader of the novel, made bold and sought out Mishima’s house, clutching a sheet of paper with only this request written on it: “Where is the place called Redon, sir, that appears in your novel titled Forbidden Colors? I have come here hoping that you will tell me. As soon as you tell me, I will go away, so please.” It was Fukushima Jirō, then a twenty-one-year-old college student who forty-seven years later would be subjected to a lawsuit by Mishima’s children over his book describing his relationship to their father.
Fukushima, who had been deeply shaken by Confessions a year earlier—the shock was “as if a pill resembling a toxin, thrown into my body, had quickly spurted up blue bubbles, without melting, and spread throughout me”—felt exhilarated as he realized that the new novel, Forbidden Colors, was to deal with homosexuality head on. He thought he “heard a clarion trumpet at the launching of a snow-white, sleek new passenger ship with a pointed bow.”
A maid came out, took and delivered Fukushima’s note, came back, and invited him in to a small stylish room. It did not take much to impress Fukushima, a poor student from a complicated family in Kumamoto, but Mishima’s house was in the kind of posh residential neighborhood he had never seen. In ten minutes or so, Mishima opened the fusuma door and came in: “his face lively, fresh-blue where he had just shaven, his slender body in a kimono with detailed indigo patterns against the white ground, which was swished up with a heko sash, creating about him the aura of the son of a good family who might appear in a Meiji or Taishō play.”
While chitchatting, Mishima told Fukushima that the bar in question was in a labyrinthine place so he’d take him there himself one of these days. He then asked if Fukushima had time and, finding out that he did, said he was about to go out himself so they’d go together, and left the room. After a while, the maid came and said Mishima was ready and waiting. He indeed was, just outside the entrance door, but in a completely different garb though equally stylish: “in a light, indigo jacket and snow-white pants and shoes.” After visiting Mishima’s friend, apparently a man of means, for his large house was packed with antiques, Japanese and European, the two parted, Mishima handing him his card with the time and the name of the place where they were to meet written on it, in “somewhat blockish, manly letters”—a café named Red
on on the Ginza. In the novel underway, Mishima had switched the locations of two gay bars, Redon and Brunswick.
Fukushima could not believe the famous author would be so casually friendly to him. After meeting in such fashion several times, Mishima finally invited him to a hotel. The result was not satisfactory to Fukushima. In time he would find that he derived pleasure only from a young boy.
Soon Fukushima became Mishima’s factotum. Among the chores he ran—mostly chores that Mishima evidently devised so Fukushima might have something to do—was one that required him to take the unsold copies of his books from one bookstore to another. He also helped Azusa in gardening and other things. He observed how Mishima resembled Azusa in meticulousness and how close he was to Shizue.
That August, Mishima invited Fukushima to beautiful Imai Beach, on the southeast side of the Izu Peninsula. Mishima loved the sea, the ocean, but he couldn’t swim, Fukushima found. (Mishima then went to Shizu’ura, south of Numazu, to “can” himself to write a story for Shinchōsha, and showed its editor, Sugawara Kunitaka, that he could swim about five yards. Watching this, Sugawara guffawed, called it dog crawl, and predicted that anyone who saw his desperate face while struggling in the water would be disillusioned, “even someone who has been in love with him for a hundred years.” That’s what he reported to Kawabata.28)
Fukushima also learned that, even after getting pretty tipsy in the evening, and after having sex with him, he could, and would, work through much of the night, writing fluidly in his neat, clear, masculine handwriting in a manner that required little revision. He would sometimes show Fukushima the parts just written, telling him he was weaving him into some of the characters. Fukushima marveled to see the novel that had grabbed his imagination continue “live,” right in front of him, now with parts of himself in it.
The problem for him was sex with Mishima. When he finally showed, despite himself, that he could not stand it, Mishima blanched. He cut short their stay at the luxury seaside inn. Back in Tokyo, Fukushima resumed visiting the Hiraoka household but the sudden, understandable aloofness of Mishima, and of Shizue, soon forced him to give up.
Later Fukushima suspected, though with the caveat that he could be aggrandizing himself in doing so, that three of Mishima’s works might reflect what happened after the weeklong stay on the beach that ended in failure: the short story “Death in Midsummer” (Manatsu no shi) in which a woman loses two of her three children and her sister-inlaw by drowning, all at once, while at a beach resort on Izu (the story comes with an epigraph, a sentence from Baudelaire’s Les Paradis artificiels: “La mort . . . nous affecte plus profondément sous le règne pompeux de l’été”);29 a play; and the second part of Forbidden Colors. In this last, there appears a character named Fukujirō, the utterly unattractive petit-bourgeois uncle of Minoru, the high-school boy Minami Yūichi falls in love with.
Fukushima learned that there was a model for Yūichi and that he had jilted Mishima, plunging him into inconsolable grief. As the well-to-do antique collector whom Mishima had taken him to see the day he first visited him told him, Fukushima had shown up at the right time. As fate would have it, Fukushima would see the model himself twice, twenty years apart, both times someone pointing out the man as Yū-chan “in Mr. Mishima’s novel.”30
The English term “gay bar” became part of Japan’s underground jargon as a result of the enormous presence of American soldiers and civilian employees that came with the Occupation. It would gain wider currency through Forbidden Colors.
The Party
That same month, Mishima went to visit Kishida Kunio in northern Karuizawa where the playwright, somewhat impoverished, lived in a large estate. Itaya Ryōko was invited by her high-school friend Kanetaka Kaoru to come and stay in Karuizawa that summer because Kanetaka managed to rent a house, ramshackle but sizable. Ryōko, whose husband was to be away for two months in Europe, agreed. Soon she learned Mishima planned to be in Karuizawa about the same time, so they promised to meet up while he was there.
One evening Kanetaka decided to throw a big party. Ryōko phoned to invite Mishima. It fell on Mishima’s last day in the resort town. He said he’d postpone his return to Tokyo by one day. Would she mind coming to pick him up because he didn’t know what was where in Karuizawa? When Ryōko arrived by taxi, Mishima asked if he could bring a girl, Mr. Kishida’s daughter, in fact, because he was supposed to take her back to Tokyo. This annoyed Ryōko, but she had no choice.
Kishida’s daughter, Kyōko—who a dozen years on, in 1964, would be known worldwide appearing almost nude in the movie Woman in the Dunes, based on Abe Kōbō’s novel—remembered the party night well, as Itaya Ryōko did. When she arrived at the place where Mishima was staying, she was surprised to see a taxi and a tall woman with striking features waiting. The woman looked at her with some animosity, an unexpected development for Kyōko. She hadn’t thought Mishima had rounded up another woman for the night.
The three of them sat in the backseat, Mishima between the two women. As the taxi wound through a mist-shrouded mountain road, Kyōko was tense. She kept silently looking out the window. From time to time Ryōko would whisper into Mishima’s ear, and he would laugh out loud. Years later Kyōko would learn she had some reason for her unease: some of the partiers had hatched a “show” in which one of the boys would make love to her so others might watch. Mishima had firmly said no and made them abandon the plan.
In time the car stopped by an ancient-looking building surrounded by larch trees. They got out of the car. An exotic beauty standing there in a black blouse and flared skirt smiled at them and said, “Welcome to you all.” Kyōko did not think she had ever seen such a beautiful woman. Kanetaka, then twenty-three, had an Indian father. One step inside the house, Kyōko was struck by the casual urbanity of the young women and men gathered there, all obviously upper-class people. In a simple cotton dress, she felt like a country girl, out of place. The tables were loaded with liquor and wine, cheese, ham, and a variety of fruits—all luxury items at the time. Someone was playing the guitar. Some were dancing cheek to cheek. The room was full of cigarette smoke and body heat.
That night, when Kyōko had finally got into the mood of the thing and was enjoying dancing, she noticed Mishima wasn’t there. She told Rose—Kanetaka’s original given name—she was getting sleepy, and Rose promptly took her upstairs where there were futons already laid out.
When she was left alone, Kyōko heard some whispering in the next room. The rooms were divided by sliding doors. She opened the door and saw Mishima and Ryōko lying on a futon holding each other. She hastily closed the door. Feeling utterly lonesome, she started sobbing. Mishima opened the door, came into her room, and said to her gently but firmly, “Don’t worry. I’ll be here all night writing.” When she woke to the chirping of birds in the morning, Mishima was still there, in her room, writing—or so Kyōko remembered. Ryōko remembered Mishima “shuttling” between Kyōko’s room and her own for much of the night.
Mishima was known to stay up late to write even when he traveled with his classmates during college days. That night, he was likely to have been writing a couple of installments of a lighthearted novel Natsuko’s Adventures (Natsuko no bōken) that he had just begun serializing in the weekly Asahi, although he may also have been bringing to a close Forbidden Colors. Kyōko recalled how Mishima kept writing even as he chatted with her on the train back to Tokyo and how he handed the finished manuscript to the editor waiting at the station.
Kajima Mieko, one of several women to attract a good deal of Mishima’s attention afterward, and perhaps as a result, also remembered well the exotic Kanetaka and what Mishima called a “wild party” in his letter to Kawabata.31 Her father, Kajima Morinosuke, a diplomat, a historian, and, above all, president of Japan’s largest general contractor, maintained a magnificent villa in the best area of Karuizawa, adjoining “Kajima Forest.” Earlier that day, she saw a woman walk up to her villa straight through the large garden. When the woman saw her s
he stopped and, looking her in the eye, said clearly, “Miss Kajima, I’m having a party tonight. Would you care to come join us? You’d be most welcome.”
It was unusually direct coming from a stranger, but something about the tone of her voice was irresistible, and Mieko said yes. Later in the decade, Kanetaka would start what would prove to be one of the most popular TV programs ever in Japan, TBS’s “Travels through the World.” It lasted for more than thirty years, until 1990.
Gay Bars and the Girls
Over a period of several years that followed, Mishima pursued Mieko, overtly and not so overtly, until perhaps 1957 when she was married. He invited her to a variety of performances: ballet, kabuki, orchestra, or whatever he thought was appropriate for the daughter of one of the richest men in Japan. In his dealings with her, Mishima presented himself as a suave gentleman from the world of theater or film. He asked her to come in a black dress to the Comedie Française, in kimono to kabuki, and so forth. Mieko was rich enough to comply with each of his whimsical requests.
One day, and this could have been not long after they became acquainted with each other during Kanetaka’s party in Karuizawa, he asked her to dress like a man. His invitation card said he would take her to a place she might never have thought existed. Mieko borrowed her older brother’s jacket and Stetson. As usual, they met at Ketel on the Ginza, a restaurant established in 1930 by Hellmuth Ketel, a German POW during the First World War when Japan attacked Quindao, Germany’s leased territory with a naval port, and took over.32
Mishima took Mieko across the tree-lined street, walked around Matsuzakaya to a place named Brunswick, which was behind the department store. As soon as they entered it, several young men spotted Mishima and surrounded him, crying, “Look, Mishima Sensei’s here!” Mieko was miffed. Did Mishima bring her here just to show off his popularity among the people who were apparently queers? Besides, the first boy who deigned to talk to her, said, in feminine language, “You are a woman, I think.” The world of gays was no surprise to her. She was more worldly than he had thought.