by Hiroaki Sato
In comparison, “How gigantic and sturdy a stomach China the Middle Kingdom has! It will soon digest even Chinese Communism, erasing its form and substance completely. And then, not a single bruise sustained by ‘modernity,’ the Middle Kingdom will again wait for new imports, with its mouth agape, ready to swallow them all.”7 Mishima wrote this less than three years after Mao Zedong’s Communist Party took over China.
As the President Wilson left Honolulu, Mishima spotted a “small, skinny woman near sixty” wistfully looking toward the receding city on the promenade deck, a Japanese. They struck up conversation. Forty years earlier she had emigrated from Sendai, a city in northern Japan, to California, and she was now on her way back to the United States from her fourth (and probably last) visit to her homeland. Her family ran a medium-size hotel in Los Angeles and was doing well, and her son and niece were US citizens, but, to her disbelief, the US government still had not allowed her to become its citizen. Every attempt she had made so far to naturalize had failed at the last minute.
Telling Mishima this reminded her of something else. She was one of the first to be arrested and thrown into jail following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor—apparently weeks before the wholesale roundup of people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast. Why she met that fate Mishima doesn’t tell us, but from her account, she appears to have been one of the overtly pro-Japanese Japanese residents in the United States.
“In the prison there were nine women, including herself, and everyone regretted that the Japanese Navy only attacked distant Pearl Harbor and did not come to mount an assault on the US mainland,” Mishima says the woman in a grayish-blue dress, with gold-rimmed glasses, and a lei around her neck recounted. “Just a glimpse of the spectacle of a Japanese landing operation on the US mainland would have made her so happy she’d gladly have seen herself sacrificed: she wouldn’t have minded her body blown to smithereens by a Japanese artillery shell.” It did not stop there. “The women were excited and prepared to die. . . . If they had to kill themselves, they’d hang themselves, they agreed. There was no rope in the prison, so they unraveled their socks and made thin ropes with the yarn.”
In New York, Mishima had an organization-related caretaker. One of his American friends in Tokyo was Herbert Passin. He decided that the American PEN as it was then was too weak to be of much help to Mishima and turned to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), in particular its executive secretary and his friend, Pearl Kluger. The committee, which advocated anticommunist socialism, had only recently come into being as an affiliate of the (International) Congress for Cultural Freedom, itself established in 1950, and counted among its “correspondents,” though not necessarily at the time Mishima arrived in New York, Arthur Miller, Robert Oppenheimer, David Reisman, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Irving Kristol. Passin must have told the organization “exaggerated stories about me,” Mishima wrote. They welcomed and treated him in a manner that was “at once friendly and extremely courteous.” Among them Mrs. Kluger’s kindness was such that “your parent wouldn’t be able to match it.”
“Mrs. Kluger is a socialist,” Mishima added, for the occasion copying with ease a certain American way of writing about such matters. “She is thirty-seven or -eight, and you can immediately tell she is bright and quick.” Her German family name means just that. “She lives in an apartment with her husband and three children. A born New Yorker and a fast talker, she is truly efficient. Nonetheless, she is affected easily and, when her emotion runs high, she can abruptly turn into an ordinary woman—the type of woman who isn’t really rare in Japan.” Mishima’s portrait of Pearl Kluger was probably a fond caricature of a vivacious, intelligent American working woman such as was commonly portrayed in Hollywood movies of the day.
She goes to her office every day. She makes dozens of phone calls a day. Coming home, she cooks supper. She takes care of all domestic matters. Finally she goes to bed. Then, at midnight, her baby who has gone to bed early wakes up and begs her to play with him. . . . The day before a cocktail party, she splurges and buys a pair of suede shoes at a chic store. All that night she forgets about socialism, drunk with the happiness of having bought the shoes. Sometimes she reflects on her married life and cries, wondering if she has not wasted twenty years of her life, having been a victim of her husband and children. She does this especially when she imagines that her husband must have a blonde mistress.
Mrs. Kluger herself is close to being blonde, and she sometimes feels jealous of redheads. She takes Mishima to the top of the Empire State Building and meekly confesses it’s her first visit to the landmark, which reminds him that, having had monthly meetings near the Sengaku-ji for some months, he has never stepped inside the precincts of the famous temple where the forty-seven samurai are buried. She takes him to Radio City Music Hall and “demands” that he be impressed by the size of the theater. Having failed to elicit appropriate consternation, she makes the point of stopping an usher as the two leave the theater and asks him how many people it can accommodate. Getting the number she wanted, she exclaims, providing a model response: “Oh, my, seven thousand people!”
Not long after Mrs. Kluger looked after Mishima, Riesman and Galbraith resigned from the ACCF. Several years later, the committee announced its discovery that one of its funding entities was a CIA front organization, and said it would cut its relationship to it. The ACCF also changed its name. But in time the organization faded away. This may deserve mention partly because the Nihon Bunka Kaigi, Japan Cultural Congress, which Mishima and others would establish in 1968, was a vague offshoot of it and most likely affiliated with the CIA.
Everywhere he went, Mishima was asked, “What do you think of Mr. MacArthur?” Every questioner evidently expected a negative response. Quickly realizing that American intellectuals loathed the SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), now gone from the scene, “like a caterpillar,” Mishima decided that MacArthur’s “Supermanism” was what turned off the Americans, even though by then the general was “fading away” as he had predicted himself and his popular adulation was becoming a distant memory.
The day Mishima arrived in New York from Los Angeles, he was taken to the Metropolitan Opera House where he saw Richard Strauss’s Salome and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. The combination of two operas that evening was for a charity benefit and most in the audience were elaborately dressed. The interior of the opera house was “a copy of a European one, decorated as it was like a gilded Buddhist altar,” but its halls and toilets were “as old and dirty as those of Japanese movie theaters.” The opera house at the time was on Broadway and 39th Street.
Mishima left no words on Gianni Schicchi but many on Salome, an object of his “passionate love,” ever since he read it at age eleven or twelve and was “thunderstruck” as it was “‘a grownups’ book where evil is let loose and sensuality and beauty liberated.”8
“The stage set for Salome was operatic and conventional. It did not have a smidgen of the fin-de-siècle atmosphere Wilde intended, whose intent Strauss inherited,” he wrote. “Strauss’ music is nervous and rude music. In this single act, it insistently repeats the breathing of an emotion’s terrifying exaggerations and reaches its apex as brutal lyricism develops following Iokanaan’s beheading. Strauss is twentieth-century Wagner. He is direct heir to the scorpion Wagner that infuriated Nietzsche, a disciple of genuine decadence. For a long time I have loved extremely his symphonic poem ‘Don Juan.’ And I have fantasized letting him compose music for Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice.’”
The stage set may have been conventional but Mishima liked it, on two counts: First, “the chorus was orderly and disciplined, intent on playing its role; second, the acting of the lead characters closely followed the music, in some parts close to kabuki, as exaggerated as possible.”
He made these observations for “someone who might want to produce it in Japan,” and described the way the opera proceeded, not forgetting to add that Ljuba Welitsch, who played Salome, was
, in the Scene of the Seven Veils, too “optimistically fat to arouse interest.” (That “someone” would prove to be himself. Eight years later, in directing Salome, he copied some actions that are not in Wilde, including the idea of “two pages lying on their backs around Herodias’ feet bothering her with constant coquetry.” Wilde’s play has just one page.9)
During his ten-day stay in the city he also saw the musicals Call Me Madame and South Pacific, the comedy The Moon Is Blue, the movies Rashōmon and A Streetcar Named Desire. The reputation of the Japanese film among the intelligentsia was “extraordinary,” Mishima noted. Some years later, Mishima would make friends with Tennessee Williams, but at the time his English was inadequate and he did not understand the film based on his play very well.
One morning Meredith Weatherby, who had translated Confessions of a Mask, came to visit him in his hotel, and the two spent the entire day discussing the details of the translation. Weatherby had studied Japanese before the war and was working at a US consulate in Japan when the war broke out. While under house arrest in Kobe he translated nō plays and other pieces of Japanese literature. When Mishima came to New York, he was at Harvard University doing graduate work. He soon returned to Japan and would also translate another story of Mishima’s, The Sound of Waves (Shiosai). Some years afterward he established the publishing house John Weatherhill, in Tokyo, and was much admired as a meticulous editor.
(In his letter to Kawabata in the previous September, Mishima had reported that Ivan Morris had written to question if Weatherby had finished his translation and had a good publisher for his translation. Confessions in fact would not be published until later in the decade. Was Morris’ concern the novel’s subject? Perhaps. The City and the Pillar, of Gore Vidal, published in 1948, had “shocked” those concerned, eliciting from reviewers such comments as “disgusting,” “sterile,” and “gauche,” although it went on to become a bestseller. The novel sold thirty thousand copies in hardcover, earning the author “a vast $20,000,” making him feel rich enough to go to Rome to stay in a hotel.)10
Weatherby then phoned Donald Richie, at Columbia, to ask him to take Mishima around the city. When the two met, Mishima told Richie what he wanted: “to visit every Saint Sebastian hanging in New York, to see the Strauss Salome at the Met, and to experience a real gay bar. He gave as reason for this last that he was halfway through his next novel, Forbidden Colors,” Richie wrote in his diary. “There were several such in Greenwich Village, I had heard, and so we set out and eventually located one called Mary’s. There we sat over our drinks and watched middle-aged men talk like women. This was something neither of us had expected and it was not very interesting. Nonetheless he gravely thanked me . . . he had the finest social manners of anyone I had ever met.”
“With Mishima one became objective, saw oneself dispassionately,” Richie continued. He would go on to know Mishima well. “It was he who created this heightened atmosphere because of an inner consistency upon which he insisted. To be with Mishima was to take part in a drama.”11
Late one night Mishima was taken to a bar in Harlem and spent two and a half hours there—as he noted, from 12:30 to 3:00 in the morning. It was a boisterous joint packed with “prostitutes, pimps, sailors, gentlemen, actors, athletes, students, gigolos, and criminals rubbing shoulders as they drank.” He saw a pair of black lesbians openly necking. There were only a few whites, including the Columbia student who took him there. Mishima identified him as “B” in his report on the trip. Richie guessed that “B” is “(probably) Holloway Brown, my roommate at Columbia, with whom Yukio got on very well indeed.”12
A Mrs. Williams on the Occupation staff had asked the Department of State to help him in the United States, but he used only Herbert Passin’s letters of introduction to avoid complicating appointments, Mishima explained to Kawabata in his letter from Brazil, in February. As it happened, Passin helped him in person as well, interpreting for him when necessary. He was back in New York because of a misfortune: his baby had died.
“Everyone in America was kind to me, but Miss Kluger, Mr. Passin’s friend, took especially good care of me,” Mishima wrote. “I was surprised that the Americans I met were all such nice people. But there is a bit of difference between a nice person and a nuanced person, and in being nuanced, nobody can match someone who has lived in Japan for a long time like Mr. Passin. Japan gives ‘nuance’ to a human being.”13 Abroad for the first time in his life and finding himself in a country where people seem almost instinctively nice, Mishima couldn’t help being a bit of a cultural nationalist, though in a private letter.
Imperial Relative in Lins
On January 27, as the Super Constellation carrying him reached the sky above Rio de Janeiro in the wee hours, he saw the lights along the coastline of Sugarloaf—“like a necklace left on a table made of black marble.” Having written this, he added: “The impression of a fragile, pure beauty at a certain moment can only lend itself to a mediocre simile. Beauty tries hard to remain friendly with mediocrity lest its secret be known.”
He went on: “But this first nightscape of Rio moved me. I called out the name, Rio. When the plane, preparing to land, tilted its wings, I felt I could happily crash into Rio’s lights. I didn’t know why I’d had such yearnings for Rio. There surely had to be something there. There had to be something that had ceaselessly pulled me from the other side of the earth.”
Mishima’s stay in Brazil was leisurely and lasted until Carnival was over at the end of February. Practicing for Carnival started early. In the first practice march he came across, he saw black boys dancing, arms on white girls’ shoulders, arm in arm with white boys—“a spectacle never seen in the United States.” The actual Carnival would turn out to be one of the high points of Mishima’s travels. He turned his exhilarations into an operetta, Bom Dia Señora, with stage directions at one point suggesting using a record he, the playwright, brought back from Brazil. The opera house Shōchiku Kageki Dan, produced it in Kyoto, in September 1954.
On February 5 he went to Sao Paulo and, on the 11th, to Lins where, about ten miles outside the city, Tarama Toshihiko, formerly a member of the Imperial Higashikuni family and a grandson of Emperor Meiji, lived as owner of a coffee farm. Mishima knew him from his schooldays.
“Lins,” Mishima wrote, “is the basis for Japanese immigrants” in Brazil, the second largest recipient of Japanese emigrants between the mid-nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Pacific War. Just outside the city there were “neither paved roads, electricity, gas, nor running water,” showing “the cultural imbalances” within the country.
In Brazil, there is boundless undeveloped land, Mishima reported. Some among the richest Japanese immigrants with their own planes fly over undeveloped land and purchase large tracts by pointing to the land below, saying, “From that valley to that forest.” There are extraordinary differences between those successful and those unsuccessful among the Japanese immigrants. Some successful ones own their own airport and several planes within their own coffee farm, as well as a church, a movie house, and a school for their employees. One of them is reputed to have built an additional airport to invite the President to his sukiyaki party.14
Mrs. Tarama, who adopted Higashikuni Toshihiko, was among the rich and she did so, obviously to “buy” a peerage rank, now abolished and useless. The abundance of nature Mishima observed in Lins reminded him of his childhood dream of becoming an entomologist. In one corner of his host’s garden was a three-foot-tall termite mound, a veritable “old castle after the royalty has escaped the capital.”
That, and the setting, inspired Mishima to write three years later a three-act play, The Termite Mound (Shiroari no su), which concerns love entanglements in the dispirited household of a former Japanese aristocrat, now the owner of a coffee farm in Lins. The aristocratic background of the protagonist, named Kariya Yoshirō, is barely concealed, and he is described as listless, indifferent, and mindless. Today the play might easily provoke a libel suit—
unless, of course, the real former prince was an entirely different sort of man or else someone who could take such things in stride.
One night Mishima went out to watch, flashlight in hand, a large army of “market gardening ants” on a long, solemn march. These ants—he was told they were called ha-kiri-ari, “leaf-cutting ants,” in Japanese—were mesmerizing enough for him to append a full description by Julian Huxley to his account of Lins.15 This encounter also appears in The Termite Mound, which the Seinen-za produced, from October to November 1955.
Lack of Gay Life in Rio de Janeiro
Carnival finally arrived on February 23. As Mishima reports it, it was initially an occasion for the rich to parade themselves, with the poor throwing confetti at them as spectators. Now their positions were reversed, with the rich as spectators, themselves having fun mainly in clubs and such. “I danced through three of the four nights, two of them at the night club, High Life, and the last one in a baile à fantasia at a yacht club,” wrote Mishima. “The intoxication of Carnival has no value whatsoever in the eye of someone who just wants to watch it. As a result, I’d like to confess honestly that I was intoxicated.”
At one point during the last night he danced out onto the street to join the wild crowds, shirt stripped off. That was one thing he had not been able to do until then.
One question some early biographers raised about Mishima’s stay in Brazil is, in Saeki Shōichi’s words, “If we are to compare Mishima to Gide, where on earth was Algeria for him—that is, the place where he had the first trigger for and practice of homosexuality?” After hedging quite a bit, for lack of evidence, Saeki concluded that it was Brazil.16 (When Saeki was writing, the only thing to go on was the result of John Nathan’s interview with Mishima’s guide in Brazil, the Asahi correspondent Mogi Masa.) As it later came to light, Mishima himself had complained about a lack of gay life in a letter from Rio de Janeiro to one of his friends in Tokyo.