by Hiroaki Sato
“I am in the salon of the Copacabana Palace,” he wrote Kamogawa Tadashi, on February 3, 1952. “I am sorry to say, but here’s no gay life. Already for a week or ten days, nothing has happened.” Gay life is a term he used, in katakana. “Among the boys in the hotel salon, there is a cute one of sixteen or seventeen, but I have no language with which to make myself understood.” According to Mogi, Mishima “regularly” brought to the hotel boys of “the sort who hung around in the parks.” When asked how he managed it, he said that in “that world” there was no need for words.
“In America there were two aventures in ten days,” Mishima went on, using a French word, but “Americans somehow do not stimulate my desire.” He followed this with a revealing observation: “Further, I hate to be loved because it’s claustrophobic.”17
Cash Stolen in Paris
Mishima stayed in Paris longer than in Brazil. Several days after his arrival on March 3, he was swindled of most of his cash—then a whopping sum of $1,350 in travelers checks—and he had to move out of the Grand Hotel to the only Japanese-run pension in Paris. He lived there, on practically nothing, for a month, until the money was recompensed. The relative economic status for most Japanese tourists and visitors overseas at the time may be discerned from the fact the film director Kinoshita Keisuke, who had received an award the previous year for his Carmen Comes Home (Carmen kokyō ni keru), the first color film in Japan, was among those staying there. It was indeed through Kinoshita that Mishima found the cheap lodging.
Kinoshita introduced Mishima to Mayuzumi Toshirō, who lived nearby. Mayuzumi jotted down his first impression of Mishima in his diary: “Striking and weird-looking.” Mishima was tanned and his large eyes under his prominent forehead seemed to glare. The first thing he asked Mayuzumi and Kinoshita to do was a surprise: to take him to a gay bar. They did—to one in Saint Germain called La Reine Blanche. The pretty boys all surrounded Mayuzumi and ignored Mishima. Mayuzumi, later a well-known composer who, perhaps misconstruing the import of his good friend Mishima’s death, went on to become the chairman of a large rightwing organization, was then a nattily dressed, French-speaking twenty-two-year-old with a born urbane air. Mishima didn’t speak French. A week later, he announced he’d go there by himself, and he did.
Although he denied that losing his money tainted his view of Paris—according to his plan, Paris was merely a way station to Greece and Italy, he insisted—he titled a brief article published in the Asahi Shinbun shortly after his return to Japan “Not Falling in Love with Paris.”18
“Because the Japanese newspapers I read in foreign countries persistently reported on the anti-American sentiments rapidly gaining momentum after the Peace Treaty took effect, I came back determined to become pro-American,” he began his article, giving a characteristic twist on the matter, “but the fact that I didn’t grow fond of France has nothing to do with this.” The Japanese Diet had ratified the peace treaty, along with the security treaty with the United States, on April 28, 1952.
“Paris is a town where you go either intending to study painting for many years or else to have fun for several weeks, using money like hot bathwater every day, and promptly leave,” he continued. “Paris is a city like an extremely sensitive, beautiful, haughty woman. If you can’t spend years to seduce her, if you have just a brief while, the only thing you can do is to slap her on the face with a bundle of money.” Then he made a specific point. “All Parisians have a Middle-Kingdom notion of themselves that regards all foreigners as country bumpkins, so even in a toilet a woman sits to beg for a tip.”
Apparently Mishima did not have a chance to go to a hotel or restaurant with a similar arrangement during his time in America as he would five years later.
“Meanwhile, the yearning for Paris among young Japanese men and women is like their yearning for a novelist. No species of human being is as disappointing as the novelist when you see the real thing. Someone who goes to Paris out of yearning is just like a reader who, not content with the novel he has read, takes the trouble of going to see the novelist to adore him.” Mishima then philosophizes à la Oscar Wilde. “The niggardliness of Paris is a hotbed for the birth of sublime art, and the baseness of Paris the reality of the nobility of art. I am not saying paradoxically that Paris is a hotbed of good art because it is born against Paris citizens’ vulgarity. As Thomas Mann says, art is something extremely heinous. It is fated to have a structure like that of the Japanese house with the toilet right behind the alcove for art.” The “alcove for art,” tokonoma, is an especially built niche of a guestroom set aside for art objects, flowers, and offerings.19
After five days in London, from April 19 to 23, where he saw Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd and Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing, Mishima arrived in Greece, “the place of my passionate love.” As his plane crossed the Ionian Sea and reached the sky above the Gulf of Corinth at sunset, he called out the name, Greece.
“The name once led Lord Byron, who had bound himself into immobility with the comings and goings of women, to a battlefield, that nurtured the poetic thoughts of the Greek misanthrope Hölderlin, and that gave courage to Octave, the figure in Stendhal’s novel Armance, in his last moments.”
Asymmetry and Exteriority of Greece
He accepted Greece—or, rather, the Greek ruins—as it might be presented in postcards. He was put up in an unclean third-class hotel because he had failed to make a reservation. Inflation was raging in the country at the time and a meal at a good restaurant cost seventy-five thousand drachma. He did not know a single Greek word so he could not tell what a shop sign said. But such things did not matter. He was ready.
What struck him first of all was the abundant, exquisite, almost “savage” blue of the sky that he determined was indispensable to the beauty of the ruins—the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Olympia, and the Theater of Dionysus. If the sky were as stagnant and gloomy as that of Northern Europe, the effect would be reduced by half. Then there were the ruins. After giving it a good deal of thought, he deciphered the nature of their beauty: asymmetry. Having come away from France where “symmetry,” along with “moderation,” in art surfeited him, Mishima was startled by the beauty of asymmetry, not the least part of his surprise arising from the knowledge that Greece was the teacher of France in artistic matters.
As he knew, the asymmetry of the ruins was an effect brought about not by design, but accidentally by willful destruction. And, as he contemplated, the asymmetry of the ruins reminded him of the stone garden of the Ryōan-ji, the Rinzai Zen temple in Kyoto. Japanese artists in the past depended not on the “methodological consciousness” of the Western artists but on what might be called “persistent intuition.” What they pursued was something einmalig—the German for “one of a kind”—in contrast to something universal. The beauty they created in the end and the beauty the Western artists created were the same in solidness, but for the Japanese each attempt was what counted. What was “mysterious” about the Greek ruins, Mishima concluded, was that their asymmetrical beauty, which was accidentally created, was the same as “the ultimate beauty the intuition explored and found.”
In the midst of such musings, he interrupts himself to mention “a Greek boy of twelve or thirteen [who] has been following me, never wandering far away, for some time now, for some reason. Does he want money, does he want some of the English cigarettes I am smoking,” he wonders, “or does he want to teach me the custom of boy-love of ancient Greece? If it’s the last, I already know it.” Then back to aesthetic speculations.
“The Greeks believed in the exterior. That was the great thought. Until Christianity invented the ‘spirit,’ human beings did not need anything like ‘spirit’ and lived proudly. The interior that Greeks thought of always maintained a bilaterality with the exterior. Greek drama has nothing like spirituality of the kind Christianity posited. It simply repeats, as it were, the lesson that excessive interior always suffers revenge. We should not think of the staging of any G
reek drama separate from the Olympic games. Under this abundant, ferocious light I think of the pantheistic balance like the muscles of the contestants that incessantly sprang and stood still, incessantly tore and held themselves together again, and I am happy.”
Mishima moved on to Rome on April 30. None of the ancient buildings, including the Colosseum, impressed him. But what he saw in the National Museum in Terme wiped away his first impressions of Rome. The Mother of Venus and the Daughter of Niobe, among others, tingled his spine, he wrote. At the Borghese Museum, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love and Veronese’s St. Anthony Preaching to the Fish enchanted him. At the Palazzo dei Conservatori, he finally saw Saint Sebastian—both, of course, Guido Reni’s and, placed just a statue away, Ludovico Carracci’s. In the end, his two weeks in Greece and Rome left him wondering: “Will this sense of continuity, of ceaseless rapture, visit me again in my life”?
The day before leaving Rome, on May 7, to go back to Japan, Mishima went to the Vatican, for the second time, to “say farewell to Antinous.” The beauty of the famous bust of “Emperor Hadrian’s favored boy and deified,” had so mesmerized him two days earlier, he realized, that he hadn’t noticed the statue right next to it. Mishima’s guide here was Jacob Burckhardt’s Cicerone, from which he quotes, at the end of his account, a passage on various images of Antinous.
Mishima’s description given as a train of thought appears to contain one willful distortion, however. Standing in front of “the beautiful Antinous,” he recalls Nietzsche and his “pessimism of strength,” which in turn makes him think of “Greek pessimism.” He then quotes the observation whose earliest attribution seems to be to the Greek gnomic poet Theognis: “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came.” Mishima concludes: “Antinous’s melancholy is not his alone. He represents the pessimist of ancient Greece.”
But Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, quoted those famous words—here, in reference to Oedipus at Colonus20—to condemn “the terrible wisdom of Silenus,” the shaggy, old half-beast, half-man who mouths it to King Midas, thereby rejecting the philosophy of his teacher Schopenhauer that embraced it, according one interpretation.21 Did Mishima deliberately ignore that part of Nietzsche’s argument to confirm his own view?
La Ronde, Olympia, Les mal parties
Upon his return from overseas travels, Mishima resumed writing on a range of subjects with knowledge and casual references.
In an essay for the nō house Kanze, for example, he gave a history of drama by way of complimenting Umewaka Manzaburō II on his performance of Hanjo. The essences of drama are in poetry and verse (dialogue), he argued, pointing out that while the verse drama started with the Greek tragedy in Attica, went through Racine and Shakespeare, and lives on in today’s theater, Maurice Maeterlinck, the poets of the Irish Literary Revival, and Hugo Hofmannsthal, among others, questioned the validity of drama in that tradition. The dance drama, he explained, meanwhile developed as a compromise between verse drama and poetry, but its ultimate form, the ballet, is impure by its nature. From that perspective, it is in nō drama that a “superb poetic drama” is achieved as it harmonizes the two elements of drama and poetry.22
Speaking of the French film La Ronde, which he saw in London, Mishima noted that the movie version added a prologue and an epilogue to Arthur Schnitzler’s original story and the unexpected playfulness of the raconteur played by Anton Walbrook, previously known as Adolf Wohlbrück (he added parenthetically), succeeds in recreating Europe’s golden age of easy licentiousness in 1900. The film cannot be because of this subject, for it will be hard, will it not, he asked, to recreate the prevailing sentiment of everyday life in Japan around 1900 by making a film out of, let’s say, Takekurabe? The story he brought up for comparison is by Higuchi Ichiyō, and it describes a spunky pubescent girl growing up in the red-light quarters who one day realizes what her life is going to be like.
The difference between the original La Ronde and its film version reminded Mishima of the bunraku Ninokuchimura that he saw recently and found far superior to its kabuki version in effecting pathos. Just as the pathos of love and its consequences is better conveyed through puppets and not by human actors, he noted, so is cynicism about lust; it may be conveyed unobtrusively in writing but not by human beings acting it out, hence the need for the raconteur. Among the actors and actresses in La Ronde, Daniel Gélin, who plays the young gentleman, is excellent, Mishima thought, though he didn’t think much of him in Le Plaisir that combined three stories of Maupassant.23
Asked to review the translation of Jean Baptiste Rossi’s novel Les mal parties for the Mainichi Shinbun, he couldn’t help marveling, “France is an amazing country”—it has produced another precocious writer! Rossi at age sixteen described an affair between a fourteen-year-old boy and a twenty-eight-year-old nun.24
Among the other movies he reviewed from the fall of that year to early next year were Olivia and Le diable au corps. As to Olivia, the work of an all-female crew, the relationship between the headmistress of the finishing school, played by Edwige Feuillère, and the student, played by Marie-Claire Olivia, was like that of Delphine and Hippolyte in Baudelaire’s Femmes Damnées, though Mishima had to sigh: “in reality there can’t be such a beautiful pair of lesbians.” The film also brought to mind the jōruri-turned-into-kabuki Kagamiyama kokyō no nishikie, which has to do with conflicts among women, with one of them, Onoe, committing suicide, just as the headmistress in Olivia attempts to.25 About Le diable au corps he wrote twice; after all, the Radiguet story had captivated him so when he was young. In the first piece, he judged it to be “a well-made movie indeed . . . but totally different from the original,” and in the second, he explained what he meant after saying it’s “not of good taste” to bring up the original in talking about a film.
“The original is a dry work and quite an ironic novel; the movie is a serious love story filled with ‘wet oh so wet’ love and emotion.”26 “Wet oh wet” is a phrase in Inpumon’in no Taifu’s tanka in the One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets (Hyakunin isshu).
Itō Shizuo and War Poems
In March 1953 Itō Shizuo died of tuberculosis. In a memorial piece written for his “collected poems” published a few months later, Mishima said he’d heard Itō had wanted to delete from his work all the poems exalting the war, but his “war poems are not necessarily of low value.” Although Itō wrote only a few poems that can be properly characterized as “war poems,” the desire to remove all such pieces from one’s writings was all too common in the chorus of “war crimes” and “collaboration” that arose following Japan’s defeat. At any rate, they were, in Itō’s case, “the inevitable results of his own youthful sufferings,” Mishima wrote, and were “also half-despairing fantasies for recovering his youth.”
Indeed, “the perfect, bright, poetic crystals” that are some of his war poems “suggest instead the premonitions of the laments of Hyperion betrayed by real Greece.”27 Hyperion here is the epistler-protagonist of Hölderlin’s eponymous novel. Mishima, an admirer of the novel who had regretted he hadn’t brought it with him as he stood on the hill of the Acropolis, would later mention the novel again to compare its description of nature with that of his in The Sound of Waves: if Hölderlin’s attempt created a “mind-only,” “idealistic” extreme, his own to create “my Arcadia” ended up making something as artificial as that of the Trianon Palace.28
In each piece Itō wrote, one can “clearly read the intellectuals’ dark confusion before the Second World War, their youth spent there, the Romantic excitement at the outbreak of the war, the process in which it escaped toward a Classical equilibrium, and the premonitions of disillusionment,” Mishima observed. The question then is: “Was this poet who constantly took the unhappy age as his inspiration, as his providence, an unhappy poet? Or was he a happy poet?”29
Safety Academy
In
July 1953 Mishima visited the Hoan Daigaku, “the security academy,” one of the anomalous institutions set up in the process of creating a non-military military. As the government prepared to change the Police Reserve Force to the Security Force, it set up the security board and, along with it, what was meant to be a combination of the former Military and Naval Academies in an attempt to get rid of the unnecessary rivalries between the two officer candidate schools before Japan’s defeat. The weekly Asahi had a series in which one writer would visit a school one whole day and write a report on it, and assigned Mishima to the newly created non-military military academy.
In each stage of devising and changing the names of non-military military institutions, the government studiously avoided anything suggestive of the armed services. But the military intent was clear to everyone else, and Mishima expected to find a military academy in the Hoan Daigaku as he was driven to the old Navy Communications School, in Yokohama, where it was located. What he found, superficially, was little different from a regular private college, except for the following: the uniform (resembling that of the old Japanese Naval Academy) and fatigues (US style), a group of US military “advisors” led by a lieutenant colonel permanently attached to the school, the fact that the drill instructors were mostly graduates of the Japanese Military and Naval Academies, and a strict curfew.
There was one thing that disappointed yet amused Mishima: the discovery of the English name given the institution: “safety academy.” If only the bureaucrats had had enough sense of humor to call it by its Japanese name, anzen daigaku, no one would have objected!30