by Hiroaki Sato
“Death-enchanted demon”
Toward the end of the year, on December 22, the playwright Katō Michio hanged himself. He was a good friend and associate of Mishima but even more so, through Bungaku-za, of the playwright Yashiro Seiichi and the actor-translator Akutagawa Hiroshi. Katō was heavily influenced by Jean Giraudoux, so much so, in fact, that Yashiro, reading Giraudoux’s Tessa, la nymphe au cœur fidèle—itself a free adaptation of Margaret Kennedy’s stage version of her own novel, The Constant Nymph—was startled to find Katō had lifted, at times nearly verbatim, a sizable portion of it in his first play, Nayotake, which is set in medieval Japan. (Katō, in turn, was bemused to see the skinny, beautiful young American woman he used to see before the war—and yearn for—on her way to the American School in Tokyo appear, after the war, in the film The Constant Nymph as Joan Fontaine.)
Like Giraudoux, Katō was an absolute seeker of “purity,” as Akutagawa put it, or, as Mishima put it, “I’ve associated with many artists since the war until now, but I’ve never seen someone as purity-pure as he was, such a gem-like personality.”31 And that, in the end, did him in.
Katō, who majored in English at Keiō University, was sent to New Guinea as an army interpreter in 1944 after finishing Nayotake. Coming down with malaria, he spent some delirious months during the rainy season of New Guinea, face to face with death in a field hospital, in truth no more than a collection of ramshackle huts built “in a gloomy, depressing jungle,” where dozens of soldiers died every day. Returning from the war a year after it ended, he translated, among others, William Saroyan’s play The Time of Your Life and Albert Camus’ plays Caligula and The Misunderstanding.
“Mr. Katō, I think, is a poet who was killed by the war,” Mishima wrote when Bungaku-za staged Nayotake two years after his death, in September 1955. “His death came in the eighth postwar year, but the dystrophy in New Guinea, the malaria he brought back from there, the poverty after the war, the pleurisy, the lung ailments—all these formed the causes that led him to death.”
“His eight postwar years appeared to eventually move him toward happiness, but like leitmotifs in music, war, and death resounded as undercurrents, until even the circumstances that might have shown a glimpse of light in a short while worked as tight presages that drove him to death.”
Mishima called Nayotake Katō’s “last work before he was sent to the front, the testament of youth, the material evidence of incorruptible health.” It reminded him, he said, of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, in that both were “the perfect testaments of youth.”32
As Yashiro recalled, it was when friends gathered in a Ginza bar to mourn Katō a week or so after his death that Mishima slipped him a page from his memo book saying that he would henceforth change the combination of Chinese characters of his name to the one he had just written on it: , “Death-enchanted-demon with a ghoulish tail.”33
As it happened, it was the most complete or formal combination, if any such can be said to exist, of the varying sets of Chinese characters Mishima began to apply to his own name, in the early 1960s, in writing Donald Keene. Yashiro, of course, had no way of knowing his friend would start using those characters in his correspondence with the American scholar a decade or so later.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Girlfriend
Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.
[The eternally feminine draws us on.]
—Mishima quoting Goethe in a taidan with Nakamura Mitsuo
Mr. Mishima was the greatest actor I ever knew.
—Nakamura Utaemon VI, after Mishima’s death
The Sound of Waves, the novel that came out in June 1954, begins: “Utajima is a small island with a population of fourteen hundred, with a circumference of less than 2.5 miles.” Utajima, “Song Island,” was closely modeled on what has for some time been called Kamishima, “Deity Island,” though one of the island’s older names was a variant of “Song Island.”
In March of the previous year Mishima went to visit Kamishima, on Ise Bay, thirteen miles east off the coast of Shima Peninsula, in Mie Prefecture. Shima is where the Grand Shrine of Ise is located, and Kamishima is deeply linked to the shrine. He wanted to see an old fishing village on an isolated island for the next novel he planned to write. He consulted his father. Azusa called the bureau of fisheries at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and asked for an island that would meet the conditions his writer-son set: one that is “not at all influenced by big cities, with beautiful scenery, and economically somewhat prospering,” as Mishima wrote in a brief essay, “Remembering Kamishima.”1
The ministry officials took the request made by a former director-general seriously and spent several days making long-distance telephone calls to various places, when such calls were expensive. They finally narrowed the selection to two: one in the north, one in the south. Mishima chose the latter for the name had ancient poetic associations. Azusa later described, happily and proudly, the officials’ efforts as “excessive.” He wrote: “The effect of the Tokyo authorities behind it all may have been too great,” for his son enjoyed “the maximum welcome the locality could afford.”
Indeed, with the letter of recommendation of the administrator of the agency for fisheries, Mishima was met by the head of the fishermen’s association of the island who took him in. He stayed with him for a dozen days while he observed things. One surprise in the household with which he stayed was the bathtub. The family used an oil drum. It was a common substitute for the Japanese military on the battlefields.2
In August Mishima visited the island again—this time to see a stormy sea. He had left a request that he be informed when a typhoon was in the offing. He received a telegram and rushed to the place. By the time he reached Toba, at the tip of Shima Peninsula, the typhoon had passed by but the waves were still high. The ferryboat did not cancel its sailing but plunged right into the waves. Mishima, who was immune to seasickness, had the “thrill of riding up to the top of big waves that looked like mountain peaks, then plunging down to the bottom of the valley [that was] truly exhilarating.”
From the island he telephoned Nagaoka Minoru, who he knew was then the head of management at the department of general affairs in the Mie Prefectural Government. Under the US Occupation’s policy, the Japanese government had shed certain features of its centralized system, thereby losing its ability to appoint prefectural governors, for example. But it retained the power to assign career bureaucrats of its ministries to important positions in local governments.
Nagaoka was surprised. “What kind of business did you have on Kamishima?” The Mie prefectural government is in Tsu, and for many of the city’s residents in those days, Kamishima felt as remote as Korea, although the island lies only thirty miles southeast as the crow flies.
“I’d like to write a story based on a Greek story before Christ, called ‘Daphnis and Chloë,’” Nagaoka remembered Mishima saying. Though the story is Greek, Longus, the romancer of Daphnis and Chloë, is from the third or fourth century a.d. “The trouble was, it was difficult to find just the right place for the setting. In short, I looked for a place without a single pachinko parlor.” The pachinko, which traces its origins to a pinball machine imported from the United States in 1920, became a craze after Japan’s defeat, and by the early 1950s there was not a single town or village worth its name that didn’t boast at least one gaudy, noisy pachinko parlor. Kamishima did not, in fact, have “a single pachinko parlor, nor a single drinking joint, nor a single barmaid,” as Mishima wrote in the story.
In September, a month after completing the monthly serialization of Part II of Forbidden Colors, Mishima began to write The Sound of Waves. He wrote it in a non-serialization format known as kakioroshi, a piece of writing of substantial length published in one piece—the way novels and such usually are where serialization is no longer practiced.
It was indeed a Daphnis and Chloë story set in a fishing village in postwar Japan. The boy is Kubo Shinji, a poor youth whose f
ather was killed while fishing by machine-gun strafing by the US Navy in the last phase of the war; the girl is Miyata Hatsue, the youngest daughter of the richest man on the island. They face the usual obstacles: A young man from a better house than Shinji’s attempts to rape Hatsue, and Hatsue’s father is an irascible curmudgeon. But Shinji and Hatsue remain chaste despite youthful temptations. After a show of bravery on Shinji’s part on a stormy night, Hatsue’s father allows the two to be betrothed.
How can anyone move from the complicated world of scheming gays to the simple world of a mythical romance with such ease? In 1959, when asked to write a “literary autobiography,” he came up with the notion of katagi, “temperament” or “disposition,” to explain the changes he had gone through in his principal writings up till then by first discounting the idea of “a writer’s spiritual progress.”
“I have been tormented by my temperament,” he wrote, although in his boyhood he did not know any such torment, “being one with the temperament, happy to be vaguely floating with it. I was a fake poet, a [fake] writer of tales (“The Boy Who Wrote Poetry,” 1954; “A Forest in Full Bloom,” 1941; “Tinted Glass,” 1940).” Then came “the state in which my awakening as a writer was opaquely entangled with my awakening in life,” and it was in that state that “I began to write stories furiously.” The result was The Bandit, 1948, which is “filled with ambiguous expressions.” In the end, “I had no choice but to recognize my temperament as my enemy and confront it. Unable any longer to put up with myself drawing out of my temperament only lyrical gains, a liar’s gains, and the gains of novelistic technicality, I decided to settle everything and make a balance sheet.” The result was Confessions of a Mask, 1949.
Having finished writing that “novel,” he felt much better. So he tried to “reconcile” himself with his own temperament. Thirst for Love, 1950, was a “fully conscious” attempt to “merge temperament and novelistic techniques.” Following that, “I tried to disengage from my temperament as best I could and disengage also from novelistic techniques with which I was endowed so far, in order to make an abstract drawing and failed (The Blue Age, 1950). My life started. I embraced a ballsy attempt to thoroughly fictionalize my temperament and bury my life in a story (Forbidden Colors: Part I, 1951; Part II, 1953). After such an attempt, I decided to make my opposite in every way and became captive of the idea of constructing, with language alone, thoughts and figures that could not possibly be ascribed to my responsibility (The Sound of Waves, 1954).”
And so went Mishima’s candid self-explications, before moving on to later works.3
Movies Featuring Youth
The Sound of Waves became an instant bestseller. It saw seventy printings in just three months. Mishima became a celebrity—if he hadn’t already been one. The literary establishment did not make much of the story, at least initially, one commentator saying it had “pedestrian scenes typical of American movies”—scenes, that is, that readily appeal to the unsophisticated. Such a reaction may be ascribed to the fact that the novel fell in the romance category.
Regardless, the three major studios immediately competed for film rights to The Sound of Waves. Of the three, Shōchiku had turned two of Mishima’s stories into films, The Snow-White Night, in August 1951, and Natsuko’s Adventures, in January 1953, which was Japan’s second color film, and Daiei, one, Made-in-Japan (Nippon-sei), in December 1953. This last was about a beautiful, Paris-trained fashion designer falling in love with a young practitioner of a very traditional Japanese sport: judo, thereby turning herself back into a “genuinely Japanese” woman after acquiring European airs. The film featured Yamamoto Fujiko, the winner of the first Miss Nippon contest, in 1950, reputedly the greatest beauty Japan ever produced.
Tōhō, which hadn’t done any film based on a Mishima story, was the first to make an offer for The Sound of Waves. But Shōchiku and Daiei followed on its heels. In those days, as today, the use of agents was rare among Japanese authors. In consequence, the competition among the three turned into personal harassment. At home Mishima often feigned absence, and Azusa served as a watchdog. Once outside, Mishima was defenseless.
One day, when Mishima was shopping in a department store, a representative of one studio learning of his presence there turned to the store’s public address system to request a meeting with him. Mishima finally asked Satō Yoshio, president of his principal publisher by then, Shinchōsha, to represent him, and Satō chose Tōhō, which offered to ask Nakamura Shin’ichirō to write the script. A student of French literature and one of the few poets who experimented with rhyming in Japanese, Nakamura at the time was at the height of his fame as a writer of radio dramas. Among those who commented on The Sound of Waves, he had praised it as “a sharp antidote to modern fiction.”4
The studios were eager for film rights to this novel, as with his two earlier novels, but especially this one, because movies featuring young people had potential as great moneymakers. Tōhō’s 1949 film, The Blue Mountain Range (Aoi sanmyaku), along with its title song, had become a runaway hit and created talk of “a newly born Japan.” Based on a novel of the same title by the popular writer Ishizaka Yōjirō, the film portrays a young female teacher—played by Hara Setsuko—assigned to a rural high school who enlists her students to drive out the “feudalistic” forces of the locality. Feudalism, along with militarism and nationalism, was one of the elements of Japanese society the Occupation wanted to eradicate.
Ishizuka’s story referred to the devastation and defeat of war and its causes, but it was free of angst and remained optimistic. The movie was directed by Imai Tadashi, who would go on to win fame for realistic themes with an emphasis on social justice. The Sound of Waves, if anything, was even better, though by then Occupation censors had decamped. It told a straightforward boy-meets-girl story. It was directed by Taniguchi Senkichi whose attempt, in the late 1940s, to make what was to be Japan’s first film dealing with Korean “comfort women”—the script was by Kurosawa Akira—was totally mangled after more than a dozen demands for rewrite by the Occupation’s CIE.5
Tōhō moved fast. It started the filming in mid-July, a month after the book came out. Mishima decided to see part of the shooting on location. He took the train late on the night of August 8—not from his house in Tokyo but from an inn in the hot-spring resort Atami where he was holed up to write. The trip was coordinated with the press. A group of eight journalists had boarded the train in Tokyo to cover the event. Mayuzumi Toshirō, who was to compose the music, was with them. When they arrived at the ferry, the boat had just left the pier but when they called out, it dutifully turned back to pick them up. “The ship here is not a machine,” Mishima wrote in a piece on the trip, “but understands human sentiments.” He learned the ferry’s once-a-day round trip between Toba and Kamishima had been doubled during the shooting.
He stayed again with the head of the fishermen’s association, this time with Mayuzumi. There was little choice. After the book was published, the number of tourists quickly increased and the island people were having difficulty devising ways of accommodating them, but now they suddenly had to cope with the influx of a film-making crew of sixty. As a result, they cancelled all the tourist reservations. Even so, they had to use the elementary school—luckily it was in summer recess—as well as the offices of the Yashiro Shrine and the rooms of ordinary people willing to rent them.
Mishima had to learn the hazards of modeling his characters on actual people once more. The college-age daughter of the lighthouse-keepers had taken offence at the way he described her. He had written that she, the character named Chiyoko, had “ceaselessly, stubbornly thought that she was not beautiful.” Though he suggests otherwise—that some will “find attractive her cheerful face with the eyes and nose delineated in large strokes”—and in the end makes her act as an honorable, sensitive person, a normal young woman would likely find the overall treatment he accorded less than flattering. It was on this occasion, too, that he learned one of the lighthouse keep
ers and his family had been affected by “the death ashes” of the hydrogen bomb tests in the South Pacific.6
The film, with Mifune Toshirō playing the captain of a fishing boat, was shown nationwide on October 20 and created a sensation. It had a scene where Shinji and Hatsue hold each other nude—or almost. The Japanese movie industry had come very far in eight years. In 1946, Japanese actors and actresses were thrown into anguish when David Conde, the head of CIE’s Motion Picture and Theater Division, demanded onscreen kissing be incorporated “for democracy.”7
In December The Sound of Waves won Mishima his first literary prize, though it was a prize his publisher Shinchōsha had just set up. Following this, Mishima would win one prize after another.
The Young Woman in Kimono
After watching the filming of The Sound of Waves on Kamishima for three days, Mishima was back in Tokyo, on August 11. He had to write a kabuki for Nakamura Utaemon VI, the beautiful tate-oyama, the lead female impersonator, of the Kabuki-za. Before succeeding to the illustrious name, in 1951, at the age of thirty-four, the actor had carried an equally illustrious name, Shikan. Enchanted by him early on, Mishima had written in 1949 an essay, “On Shikan,” and in November 1953 adapted for him a short story by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Infernal Transformation” (Jigokuhen).8 The play was immediately staged, with Utaemon playing Kusatsuyu, a beautiful lady-in-waiting who is burned alive so her painter father Yoshihide may create the realistic picture of hell his lord commissioned.
“An actor of whom a frontal discussion as an actor is appropriate,” Mishima had written of Shikan, displaying his fondness of paradoxes, “lacks the inherent condition for being a kabuki actor.” He went on, “The beauty of Nakamura Shikan must lie in a kind of sense of crisis” he engenders, and he cited three female characters the actor played. One was Princess Yuki, of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji), which is the popular name for Act IV of the jōruri Gion sairei shinkō ki, first performed in 1757. As played by Shikan, the princess, whose name means “snow,” “arches deeply backward, her hands tied behind her. She goes on to arch backward more deeply, with a thrilling slowness, until you worry her back may break. Cherry blossoms gloriously scatter onto her chest.”9