by Hiroaki Sato
The kabuki he wrote this time, The Sardine Hawker & the Dragnet of Love (Iwashiuri koi no hikiami), was based on a couple of children’s stories from the Muromachi Period (1392–1573). It is a comedy. A sardine hawker disguises himself as a warlord to attract the attention of a courtesan whom he has no way of approaching otherwise. As it turns out, she, actually a princess, had fallen in love with him, the sardine hawker, and, having failed to approach him, had lost herself in the pleasure quarters. The play required a mastery of classical language as well as rhetorical and theatrical conventions of kabuki. In a brief essay he gives a glimpse of the difficulties involved, with his usual irony. As a devotee of kabuki since boyhood, he had hated kabuki composed in modern language or a half-digested “new kabuki language,” he wrote. So he was happy when the Kabuki-za asked him to turn “Infernal Transformation” into a kabuki play.
But once I started on it, it was difficult indeed to reproduce not just neoclassical language but also the jōruri style, which is in extreme bad taste and brims with grotesque, innocent humor. What may have been funny to me as audience or reader was far from funny once I put myself in the shoes of someone who writes it. After all, jōruri writers’ heads were packed with what they had heard of ancient stories of Japan and China, but they did not have a single fragment of cultural education that might get in the way of writing jōruri. In contrast, we lead an irrational life of hearing Heifetz with the same ears with which we’ve just heard bunraku10 and, on our way home, discussing Sartre in a bar. It would be too self-indulgent to propose to write a jōruri in such circumstances. This isn’t to boast at all, but I almost suffered an attack of cerebral anemia when I finally completed the scenario, took it to the Kabukiza, and started the reading.11
It was in Utaemon’s greenroom, where he had become a frequent visitor, that Mishima met, toward the end of August, a young woman in kimono who, with her white skin, delicate arms, and large eyes tapering off toward the outer edges, looked like a bunraku doll. She was a nineteen-year-old daughter of a man who owned a famous Japanese-style restaurant in the high-end entertainment district, Akasaka. She would become Mishima’s important companion for the next two and a half years. Her name was Toyoda Sadako.
A week after they met, they ran into each other on the Ginza. Mishima invited her to a café named Victoria. There he talked as if he had all the time in the world. It must have been a rare thing for him to do, especially with someone he was meeting only for the second time. He was constantly under pressure for work. Though few knew it, he had severe stomach cramps from time to time. This was something Mayuzumi discovered when he happened to hole up for work in a hotel room next to Mishima’s. The walls of their hotel rooms must have been very thin; late one night he heard Mishima moaning. He rushed to the next room and found Mishima doubled up like a shrimp. To his surprise, Mishima had an injection syringe ready with him. The stomach pain didn’t just occur that night. It happened often enough and he was prepared for it, though sometimes he had to call for a doctor.
Toyoda Sadako and Mishima agreed to meet several days later again, at the same café, and they did. After that, they made dates to see brand-new movies, Utaemon’s performances, went to French restaurants on the Ginza, Japanese restaurants in Shinbashi, and so forth, until one day she agreed to go to an inn with him. It turned out to be an inconspicuous but elegant place in Shōtō, just outside the brothel district in Shibuya. It was formerly a mansion. Transformations of grand houses into restaurants and inns were common in the years that witnessed reversals in fortune as a result of the war, the abolishment of peerage, and the Occupation-led land reforms.
Following their time together at the Shōtō inn, the two started dating almost every day. Initially, they would first meet at a restaurant to eat and then go on to an inn to make love. Soon they reversed course: first make love, then eat. They then started going to night clubs after dinner. The mid-1950s was the golden age of night clubs. Mishima and Sadako tried all the well-known ones at the time: Golden Gate, in Iikura; Ginbasha (Silver Carriage), in Shinbashi; Cosmopolitan, in Nogizaka; Pearl and L’Ami, in Shibuya; Marunouchi Club, near Tokyo Station; and their favorite, Manuela, in Uchisaiwai-chō. Often they danced late into the night.
Sadako met Mishima each time in a different kimono. Wearing dressy kimono to go out came naturally to a young woman from the high, traditional end of the mizu-shōbai, “water trade,” or, more elegantly, karyūkai, “the realm of flowers and willows”—a somewhat inclusive term for restaurants, bars, geisha houses, and at times brothels. It came with the territory.
Still, the kinds of kimono Sadako routinely wore for dating Mishima were costly, comparable to, let us say, dressing up each time in a different Chanel or Balenciaga suit. In the 1950s there were still many kimono craftsmen so an expensive kimono may have been comparable to a “designer dress” made to order, unlike the individual kimono made by a famous kimono maker today, which may cost up to one million yen. Also, during the days kimono was the standard garb, many of them were of as high quality as craft.12
The novel Mishima wrote next, The Sunken Waterfall (Shizumeru taki), clearly reflects his close association with Sadako. It has a female character who, aside from being exquisitely portrayed, is notable for her kimono and for the unmistakable intimacy Mishima brings to bear in describing it. Mishima was, of course, always meticulous in getting things right. He probably learned most of which fabric carried what specific name from his mother, who, after all, was routinely dressed in kimono, and from women friends, as well as kabuki people. But the kinds of kimono he describes in The Sunken Waterfall are different from what his kinsfolk ordinarily wore, both in material and make. So, for her first date with the male protagonist, Kidokoro Noboru, the woman, Kikuchi Akiko, shows up in a café, “a small cathedral,” strikingly dressed.
She was waiting in the innermost part, in a dimly lit corner. As he approached her, Noboru was surprised. She was dressed so gorgeously she looked out of place. Her kimono was of Hitokoshi silk crepe with large designs dyed into it—clusters of wisteria hanging down from her shoulders against the white ground and wild chrysanthemums growing up from the lower hem. Her obi was of handwoven brocade with large checkerboard design alternating gold and silver, her obi clasp made of scarlet and white votive paper cords. For all that, she looked neither suffocating nor boorish. It sat elegantly perfect on her slim body.
“I’m on my way home from a dance meeting,” she said before he spoke, catching his surprised look. “I left midway.”
“So you dance.”
“I just watch.”
As the story is set up, Noboru’s surprise in this scene may be less than entirely convincing. The only grandson of a great industrialist and an inveterate playboy, he, at twenty-seven, has all the money he needs to pick an appropriate venue for any woman he chooses for the night, and his rule is to sleep with each just once. He keeps several rooms on hand at any time: “a luxurious hotel for a woman who likes everything to be luxurious, a neat little homey inn for a woman who likes a place like that, a stylish hotel for a woman who likes a stylish hotel,” and so on. In the circumstances, he surely must have met any number of expensively attired women!
In any event, “Akiko was gorgeous and was in kimono. He telephoned a quiet Japanese inn in a residential area in Yamanote, which was said to have formerly been a daimyo’s mansion.”
Then comes this passage:
To take a bath, Akiko changed clothes in the next room. Noboru vividly heard the sound of that gorgeous kimono with large designs slip down her round shoulders. The elegant silk, as if cutting the air sharply, fell to the floor of its own weight and made a faint rustle as it touched the tatami and collapsed.
Lying in the guestroom part of the suite, Noboru heard it all. He asked himself: When was it that I began to like such elegant, soft things?
Later in the novel, during their second assignation, which happens many months later, Noboru and Akiko go to the same inn.
Because No
boru asked her to leave her undergarments as they were, Akiko agreed with a smile, did as asked, and left for the bathroom.
Noboru stood alone in front of her kimono of English flannel hung on a freestanding clothes-hanger and the undergarments laid down as she took them off. There was the scent of a woman’s room that might linger a little while after its occupant left it. . . . The colors of the kimono of English flannel were blurred like a rainbow, and on one edge of the tray for personal belongings were a pair of white lace gloves hanging with the lightness of feather. The dark-green obi hanging from the lower crosspiece of the clothes-hanger slowly waved downward as it slid to the middle of a tatami. At one end of the hanger dangled the rust-red obi clasp with its firm tuft neatly cut at one end, swinging. The white Western-style undergarments overflowed the tray, like froth left by a wave, as they faced these multicolored drifts. . . . Noboru put the undergarments up against his face. . . .
Such things about Akiko are lovingly detailed. The Sunken Waterfall as a fiction, though, is an artificial and disjointed construct. If Noboru is a playboy who seeks a different woman each time, never sleeping with the same woman twice, Akiko is a married woman who is granted free rein in sexual liaisons by her husband, his sole stipulation being that she return home every day, however late.
Their first night together Noboru finds her frigid. Deciding as a result that he is a man incapable of spiritual love, she a woman incapable of physical love, he makes a proposal for the two of them: “Now that two persons who are unable to love have met, why not create a truth out of a lie, a fact out of an illusion, to see if they may synthesize love, like a mathematical formula that produces a positive number by multiplying a negative number by a negative number?” Akiko agrees. Thereupon Noboru removes himself to a remote dam construction site where he, along with some of his fellow workers, lives isolated during the long winter months. The isolation over, the two meet once again, but Noboru finds Akiko in love with him and is repelled. Confused, Akiko commits suicide.
In the fall Mishima had a taidan with Takamine Hideko, the lead actress in Twenty-four Eyes (Nijūshi no hitomi), Kinoshita Keisuke’s latest film based on Tsuboi Sakae’s story about a schoolteacher and the fate of the twelve children she taught on an island. The movie is reputed to have reduced the entire country to tears, as indeed did the men in the audience when he saw it, belatedly, for the taidan, Mishima told Takamine. Asked if he cried, he replied he did not, citing “the English critic” John Symonds’s observation to the effect that the simplest thing in art is to make a human being cry and feel prurient. Not that he is immune to such things, he added. Recently he reread Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme and was deeply touched.
Such high-flown talk did not faze Takamine. After all, she had debuted in film at age four and remained a star ever since. When the topic turned to kissing scenes in film, Takamine asked if he could direct one, and he said, no, he wouldn’t be able to because he had never kissed himself. Thereupon, she said, “I’m sorry about that. Why don’t you come to my place? I have plenty of bags of tricks.”
When Takamine asked, “You still have girlfriends who stir your heart, don’t you?,” Mishima responded, “Yes, sure, some.” “As I see it, though,” judged the actress who had once fallen in love with Kurosawa Akira, “they are nothing more than research material, in your case.”13
Twenty-four Eyes would win two prizes in Japan and become the first Japanese film to win the Golden Globe Award the following year.
Source of Literary Inspiration
The dam sites Mishima visited to observe to write The Sunken Waterfall, in October 1954, were the ones at Naramata (later Sudagai), in northern Gunma, and, further north, at Okutadami, on the border of Niigata and Fukushima. The Naramata construction had begun two years earlier. Both dams were large-scale and on difficult mountainous terrain and were built with outsize American construction machinery and loans, as the Japanese economy began to recover from the war.
When the novel came out following serialization in the first four issues of Chūō Kōron in 1955, Mishima received a number of letters from construction workers faulting him on the descriptions of life during the winter isolation. He had based that aspect of the book—which takes up a bulk of the story—on information he received through scant correspondence with an employee of Tokyo Electric Power Company. The incident prompted him to resolve to stress basic background research in future works.14
In early November 1955, Mishima went to Kyoto to collect information for a new novel. His publisher had asked him to serialize one in its monthly, Shinchō, during 1956, and he chose the Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, for its subject.
The Kinkakuji, the popular name of the Rokuonji, the Deer Garden Temple, has been so known because of its gilt pavilion, a reliquary for the Buddha’s bones. The third Ashikaga shogun Yoshimitsu (1358–1408) built it, along with many halls and towers, toward the end of the fourteenth century, on a large estate for the Kitayama (North Mountain) Palace, once the aristocratic Saionji family’s villa, in Kyoto. Following Yoshimitsu’s will, the Kitayama Palace was renamed the Rokuonji after his death and turned into a Zen temple of the Rinzai school. Though most of the halls and such he built were moved or ruined in subsequent centuries, the Golden Pavilion remained more or less intact until July 2, 1950, when an acolyte and college student named Hayashi Shōken torched it. Shōken was his Buddhist name given at the temple; his real name, also Buddhist, was Yōken.
What stirred the literary imagination when that happened was not so much the burning down of a prominent national treasure itself as the confession of the arsonist, who was arrested in no time, that he did it to express his “antagonism to beauty,” as phrased by Kobayashi Hideo, who just then was writing a series of critical essays for Shinchō and took up the incident at once. Hayashi himself had said in his police deposition that he “burnt it because of my thought of jealousy toward beauty.” He had gone on to explain: “I once in a while had the thought that I was treated as a madman within the temple. It sometimes occurs to me that while I feel I am a negligible human being, I also think that I am a greater person than those who say they are heroes.”15
These words fascinated Kobayashi. As Nakamura Mitsuo explained in writing an afterword to The Golden Pavilion a few years later, Kobayashi, who had “lived with a madman” in his youth—by “a madman” he apparently meant himself although his association with the poet Nakahara Chūya whose lover he stole was only too famous—couldn’t regard Hayashi as “a stranger.” The arsonist’s words showed “a madman’s speculation for the sake of speculation, reflection for the sake of reflection,” Kobayashi wrote.
He also wrote that it was “an incident truly symbolic of our times.” Recalling what he had observed when he visited the pavilion earlier that year, he suggested that madness had become commonplace since Japan was defeated in the war.
Nothing had changed in the precincts, but a new attitude was evident among the viewers. A “gentleman” chased a woman, trampling on the green moss as he did so, a woman climbed a red pine and struck a pose for a camera below, one man picked up a pebble and threw it to the pond as though practicing pitching. The guards of the Rokuonji roared themselves hoarse [as they tried to stop them], but there were too many of them to contend with. . . .
At the time, many Japanese professed to take “democracy,” the Occupation gospel, to mean, seriously or otherwise, the freedom to behave as they pleased. For Kobayashi, the resultant unhinged behavior such as he witnessed the tourists exhibit around the Golden Pavilion was a form of madness, and he did not think it strange that a young man who worked at the temple should turn himself into an arsonist in such a milieu.16
Mishima, who had read Kobayashi’s essay, decided to take up this “madman” who talked about “beauty,” though in a brief essay much later, he wrote, “The Kinkaku that burnt down didn’t have much attraction for me. . . . That the protagonist of my story thinks it’s beautiful is enough for me; on that point I
don’t have much sympathy with him.”
The direct impetus for Mishima, in fact, may have been the news in October 1955 of the completion of the rebuilt pavilion. Discussing “the aesthetic of Muromachi” in the same essay, Mishima said: “What I love is the freshly built, glittery gilt pavilion that people badmouth, likening it to a movie set,” not the ancient or tired-looking one that had lost much of its luster over the centuries. “I think in that [glitter] lay the aesthetic of Muromachi, lay Shogun Yoshimitsu’s bliss. Only with that glitter [the building] matches the design of the nō costumes.”17 What strikes many of those who see a nō drama staged for the first time is the incongruously resplendent costumes the actors wear in telling mostly somber stories ridden with anxiety and torment.
Competition
But there may well have been an element of writerly competition in Mishima’s choice of the burning of the Kinkakuji as his subject. “The Season of the Sun” (Taiyō no kisetsu), a novella by a university student named Ishihara Shintarō, created a sensation midyear. Printed in the July 1955 issue of Bungakukai as the winner of that year’s New Face Prize, the story depicted casual violence and sex among upper-class youths while focusing on a student boxer and his lover who dies of complications after an abortion.
Among the judges, Yoshida Ken’ichi said: “This is a work that has detailed to a revolting degree the speech and behavior of the pack of youths you often see around town these days whose bodies are well balanced but whose faces reveal a hopelessly idiotic state”; Takeda Taijun: “The offensiveness of this work became an issue. Except, its offensiveness is dry and not deliberate, and the work reads exceptionally well as fiction”; and Hirano Ken: “Before I had time to think of this and that, I was compelled to read it to the end. So the real après-guerres have taken root in Japan as well, I half-lamented, and I couldn’t help thinking I don’t have the ability to criticize this kind of world.”