by Hiroaki Sato
In the fall of 1951 Nosaka Akiyuki, a twenty-one-year-old student of literature at Waseda University, once came up close to Mishima during the ten days or so he worked at Brunswick. One day during his job search, he spotted a flyer glued to a utility pole. It said the bar Brunswick was recruiting bartender trainees and waiters. The daily pay was ¥750, more than double the day laborer’s wage. When he got there, there were already two dozen men making a line.
“The owner-manager named Kelly, whose facial features had a Western touch, interviewed us though all he did was to chitchat,” Nosaka recalled, “told us to seat ourselves, to wait in a place that looked more like a café than a bar, and in the end employed me and two others. When Kelly turned on the switch, the semi-dark interior snapped into another world: a large aquarium with tropical fish, hung on a wall were a bullfighting poster and a sombrero, behind the counter were lines of gorgeous liquor bottles, installed in one corner was a jukebox with doughnut disks casually stacked by it.”33
As a bartender trainee, Nosaka’s job was to make scotch with water, clean glasses, and wash the cleaning cloths. Brunswick was more or less a café during the day, though a fair number of customers began drinking liquor long before the sun set. Come evening, however, astonishingly pretty boys, who were primly dressed like virgin girls, would begin showing up and go straight to the second floor. With that, the drinking customers would also go upstairs. One particularly beautiful boy was Maruyama Akihiro. Then sixteen years old, he would become a singer and an actor and a close friend of Mishima’s, appearing in two films based on Mishima’s writings, one a play, The Black Lizard (Kuro-tokage), and the other a novel, Spring That Lasted Too Long (Nagasugita haru).
One day a group of three men seated themselves at the counter. Nosaka at once recognized one of them: Mishima. He had seen him several times before, the first time more than a year earlier. Enchanted by Confessions of a Mask, he read everything Mishima wrote that he could lay his hands on. The actual Mishima he had glimpsed in various places had not disappointed him. He was exactly what he had expected from his writings to be: a stylish punk. (Or in the assessment of some women who knew him, his attempt to be stylish was all embarrassingly wrong.) A little afterward, at the Kabuki-za, Nosaka even overheard some old men in the audience titter about the rumor that Mishima had just been jilted by a young oyama, an actor who exclusively plays a female role in kabuki.
That day Mishima took out a cigarette and tried to light it with a lighter without success. Nosaka quickly lit a match and offered it to him. Mishima said, “Thank you.” His clear enunciation was memorable. The pretty boys hadn’t arrived yet, but Kelly invited the men upstairs anyway. Thereupon Mishima said, changing an old ditty a bit for the occasion:
Pass by the Ginza and you get an invite from upstairs,
Oh dear, deer-dappling on his sleeves beside!
This was followed by a guffaw. Nosaka saw that Mishima was in a terrific mood, but he did not remember any other words Mishima uttered, because, he figured in retrospect, he was nervous being so close to the famous author. The day he decided to quit and informed Kelly, Kelly took him upstairs. It was an extravagantly appointed parlor. The box seats along the walls were already full, and on the floor at the center, apparently meant to be a dance floor, were pairs of customers and boys under bright lights, “lip on lip, holding each other, looking each other in the eye, totally unconscious of other people.”34
Brunswick was not the only gay bar Mishima patronized. There were several others, among them one right in front of Shinjuku Station. The building had three floors: the first floor was a café specializing in sweets; the second was a beauty parlor doubling as a studio where you paid to take photos of nude women; the gay bar was on the third floor. There the walls were all covered with red velvet. The only brightly lit spot was the bar with a bartender. The rest of the spacious parlor was lit with only five tiny light-bulbs.
Called simply R, it was a favorite haunt of the famous detective story writer Edogawa Ranpo, the nom de plume that was a clever recreation in Japanese of Edgar Allan Poe, meaning “tottering along the Edo River.” His real name couldn’t be more mundane: Hirai Tarō. He was known as an authority on homosexuality.35 Mishima’s play mentioned above, The Black Lizard, was squarely based on Edogawa’s novel with the same title—a story of a handsome private eye pursuing a gorgeous nude dancer who happens to be a criminal with extravagantly perverse tendencies.
As Mieko quickly learned, she was not the only woman Mishima took to Brunswick. The woman he chose as his frequent companion was none other than Ryōko’s older sister, Atsuko. She was tall and goodlooking enough to have easily been able to play a male role in the all-woman revue Takarazuka that had started out as a girls’ operetta house in 1913.
Like her sister, Atsuko became a frequent visitor to Mishima’s house. In her case, it came about because one of her “boyfriends,” the tall, handsome medical student, Sugai Takao, took her to his “good friend’s house,” without telling her the friend was Mishima Yukio. As she recalled, the two fell in love with each other at first sight. How far that “love” went is not clear, but she would play some important roles for him, material, practical, and literary.
Told that Mishima wanted a refrigerator, a rare, expensive appliance at the time, she readily got one for him. She was married to Yuasa Shun—or Shun Yuasa, a Japanese-American and one of the great many Americans who poured into Japan with the Occupation forces. As such he had ready access to the PX. Further, a graduate of both the University of Washington and Gonzaga University, he was an elite mechanical engineer attached to the Occupation Headquarters. He then worked as a consultant to Tokyo Gas Company and helped promote the use of air-conditioners in Japan.
It was Atsuko’s second marriage, her first being to a first lieutenant of the Imperial Navy and an accounting officer that had taken place toward the end of the war. She and her Nisei husband lived with her daughter from the naval officer, in a large house she inherited from her father. Shun allowed, and Atsuko took it as her birthright, an utterly free run of the household. A group of people from various fields, young and old, all of them Atsuko’s friends, like Sugai and Mishima, came and went, doing whatever they pleased. She in effect ran a “salon,” and it would provide the setting for Mishima’s large novel several years later, Kyōko’s House (Kyōko no ie).
Atsuko would also help find a bride for Mishima, even as she knew several gorgeous or graceful women with good upbringing he pursued, among them Kajima Mieko and a Diet member’s daughter Kobayashi Hidemi, whose mother was German. One means of his pursuit was letters—this she knew simply because she received many of them herself. At one point, she complained, “‘Shin Yukio,’ again?” Meaning “Your Subject Yukio,” it was the epistolary valediction he routinely used—in his letters not just to her but also to other women.36
By the time Atsuko made this plaint, it must have been well into 1953 or beyond. On November 10, 1952, during the coming-of-age ceremony for Akihito in which he was formally designated Crown Prince, Yoshida Shigeru gave his congratulatory speech as prime minister, ending it with “Shin Shigeru” or “Your Subject Shigeru”—an old form of referring to oneself in a formal address to the sovereign. It was a custom seldom recalled even during the days when the Tennō had an outsize presence in Japanese consciousness.37 In his speech Yoshida also used the word kokutai, so redolent of intractable Japanese politics until the country’s defeat seven years earlier. The mass media made political hay out of these revelations, taunting Yoshida as being anachronistic, antidemocratic, or worse. Yoshida, after all, was, in postwar Japan, admired as a more enlightened politician: he was jailed for exploring ways of suing for peace toward the end of the war and was now working for democracy, the American dictate—although, in truth, he maintained an old-school reverence toward the Tennō throughout his life.38 Mishima, in any event, delighted in taking up this form of imperial deference.
There may have been one woman Mishima pursued that Yuasa
Atsuko was not aware of even as she regarded herself as his confidant in such matters: Kawabata Yasunari’s adopted daughter, Masako. During the wake for Hayashi Fusao’s wife, in June 1952, Mishima asked Mrs. Kawabata for the young woman’s hand. “No, I haven’t forgotten it. During the wake Mr. Mishima just so unobtrusively brought up the subject of marrying my daughter, and so I, too, just so casually but firmly turned it down,” Mrs. Kawabata reminisced a dozen years after her husband’s death, in 1972.
As his visits with Kawabata became regular, Mishima started to bring special gifts for Masako, a teenager, and to help her with her homework. With a touch of theatricality he once even declared: “I will bring her cakes and such until some handsome man begins to visit her with a large bouquet.” Mrs. Kawabata did not explain why she rejected his proposal.
CHAPTER TEN
Going Overseas
The sun! The sun! The perfect sun!
—Apollo’s Cup
On September 11, 1951, soon after his time in Izu and Karuizawa, Mishima took a test at the Occupation’s CIE. He had applied to participate in the American-sponsored International Conference of Young Artists to be held in the United States. As he had predicted in his letter to Kawabata the day before the exams, however, his English was judged inadequate, and he was rejected.1 Thereupon he began to study English in earnest, buying for example a tape recorder, then brand new on the market and expensive, in order to practice English conversation.
As the Cold War worsened, the US was taking steps to promote cultural exchanges. The conference of young artists was one example. From the end of 1950 to early 1951, Wallace Earle Stegner, of Stanford University, whom Mishima mentions in his letter to Kawabata, had toured several Asian countries to collect short stories to be translated into English with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In Japan, Stegner apparently asked Kawabata to take care of the Japanese contributors. Kawabata, in turn, asked some of the writers he thought well of to recommend their own stories. Mishima thought about it and said he would pick “Distance Riding Club.”
In the year 1951 the economy was booming. The Korean War had created a “special demand.” In January, with the Chinese Army resurgent in Korea, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, who in 1946 had given Japan the new Constitution with the contentious no-war clause, Article 9, re-emphasized the need for Japan’s rearmament. In fact, with the outbreak of the Korean War in June of 1950, MacArthur had ordered the creation of a paramilitary force. When the Japanese government worked out a seventy-five thousand-man force two months later, it called the force Keisatsu Yobitai, “Police Reserve Force,” insisting it was not a military, that the country was not “remilitarizing.” This it was compelled to do to avoid the obvious conflict with the Constitution—Article 9 says the country shall never maintain “land, sea, and air forces [riku-kai-kūgun], as well as other war potential”—to accommodate the prevailing sentiments for peace.
The result was a monstrosity. Visiting the Police Reserve Force in September 1952 to spend a day with it, Hino Ashihei, who had garnered extraordinary fame and popularity as a “soldier writer” from the late 1930s to the early 1940s only to be accused of “war collaboration” on the heels of Japan’s defeat,2 found, in effect, a police force armed with “carbines, rifles, mortars, and bazookas”—and, yes, tanks and warplanes. Hino called it nue, “a chimera.”3
The anomalous nature of the “non-military” military would dog the force after it changed its name to Hoantai, “security force,” the following month, and to Jieitai, “self-defense forces,” in July 1954. The palpable “sophistry,” as the English professor-turned-social critic Nakano Yoshio later put it,4 and the nebulous standing of the forces, would trouble Mishima as he involved himself with them in the last few years of his life.
On April 11, President Harry Truman fired MacArthur over differences with the general on the conduct and aim of the Korean War and replaced him with Gen. Matthew Ridgway.
Still, non-military matters were coming to the fore as well. On April 19, the Japanese runner Tanaka Shigeki won the Boston Marathon. In September, a Japanese delegation led by Prime Minister Yoshida went to San Francisco and signed a peace treaty with forty-eight nations and a mutual security treaty with the United States. Both treaties were initiated by the United States, with the peace treaty including a proviso requiring the existence of the security treaty. Both peace and security treaties had a sizable proportion of Japanese opposed to them, and the latter, the security treaty, would create the largest political upheaval toward the end of the decade. It would also go on to play an important role in Mishima’s life a decade later.
Two days after the treaty was signed, on September 10, the news arrived that Kurosawa Akira’s film, Rashōmon, had won the Grand Prix in Venice. A moral parable with four different accounts of a single event, the movie brought Japanese film to international attention for the first time and marked the beginning of Kurosawa’s worldwide fame. (The Snow-White Night, the first movie based on a Mishima novel that came out at the end of August, was submitted to the Cannes Festival, but did not win any prize. Some of the more famous Japanese film stars of the day played the lead roles, and Mishima made a cameo appearance in a dancing scene.)
Mishima in New York
Failing in his attempt to visit the United States on the pretext of taking part in the international conference, Mishima pulled some strings and finally succeeded. On December 25, 1951, Friday, he left Japan as a special overseas correspondent for the Asahi Shinbun. The director of the daily’s bureau of publications, Kaji Ryūichi, was one of Azusa’s classmates at the First Higher School. Kaji, himself a writer of historical bent, believed that one must know the world to be able to write.
The day before the departure for the United States, Mishima stayed up all night to finish a full-length play, Nothing Is More Expensive Than Something Free (Tada yori takai mono wa nai). A drama in three acts, it depicts the consequences of a couple’s decision to employ a maid who offers to work for room and board only. The woman in truth was the husband’s seductress twenty years earlier, not long after the couple’s marriage. Back then a well-to-do German’s mistress, she is now down and out, hence her offer.
The ship that awaited Mishima at Yokohama was America’s top luxury liner, the SS President Wilson. Mishima’s family, Sugai Takao, Atsuko and Ryōko, Nakamura Mitsuo, and some of the editors who worked with Mishima came to the pier to see him off. When he caught the clownish Takao’s eye, he raised his arm to his face and moved it back and forth horizontally to indicate he was crying. Or he hastily put on dark sunglasses to hide his tears, according to one of the women Nakamura overheard tartly observe.5
The travels would last five and a half months, until May 10, 1952. Mishima went to Honolulu (a ten-hour stop), San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Puerto Rico (San Juan, one night), Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, Lins, Geneva (a one-day stop because foul weather diverted his plane), Paris, London, Athens, and Rome. He wrote several accounts of these travels, the main one being Apollo’s Cup (Apollo no sakazuki), many parts of which were published in various magazines.6 Though he did not give any hint of it in any of the accounts, he continued to write literary work assiduously throughout his journey.
For the first three days aboard the President Wilson the sea was rough, the sun only occasionally appearing to cast gloomy light on the pitch-black waves. Mishima was picking up English fast. One day, at lunchtime, with the ship rolling, the cups and plates on his table started to slide. Trying to stop them, Mishima leaned forward, but his chair began to slide as well and continued to slide. The jolly old waiter, laughing, asked, “Where are you going?” Mishima didn’t miss a beat: “To San Francisco.” That, in any case, was the way he told the story.
On December 28 the sky was clear, the sea calm. The captain and the crew changed into white uniforms. Mishima stayed in a lounge chair out on deck until sunset. “The sun! The sun! The perfect sun!,” he wrote, exulting in “the freedom to
sunbathe all day, the freedom to stay in the sun for one whole day without being bothered with work and guests, the freedom to have your distinct shadow wait on you all day—staying on sundeck this one day, my face quickly became suntanned.” Among the movies shown aboard the President Wilson were Bambi, Cinderella, and George Beck’s Behave Yourself. Mishima loved them all.
He visited third-class cabins and found the “apocalyptic theory” he had heard appear to be true: that American liners did not take as good care of third-class passengers as Japanese liners had in prewar days, because Americans never went third-class. The third-class cabins he visited and saw were just like “silkworm shelves.” Vomit was splattered everywhere, body odor and the smell of garlic filled the air. It was the veritable “Asiatic chaos.” And the passengers were mostly young Asians—Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese—in stark contrast to first-class cabins which were mostly occupied by middle-aged Americans.
“They go to study America. They go from the Orient, which once exported their ‘ancientness,’ to import ‘modernity,’” Mishima mused. “They are still far from importing enough of the latter. No matter how much import surplus they have, they can’t stop importing.” There may be differences between countries, however. “Only recently, for the second time since Meiji, have we experienced the age of civilization and enlightenment as a result of our defeat, but Japan with its weak stomach rapidly excretes what it can’t digest, so it can’t help becoming ever more greedy, taking in one new thing after another in rapid succession.”