by Hiroaki Sato
As the critic Okuno Takeo wrote two years later, citing these comments, Japan’s “consumer culture was rapidly turning luxurious”—however inadequate it may seem a few decades later—“but the young had lost their dreams, oppressed as they were in their daily life as confining and boring as that before the war.” As a result, “people were vaguely anticipating something shocking. “The Season of the Sun” appeared in that amply prepared soil as if readymade for it.”18
Mishima’s initial reaction to Ishihara’s story was negative, even dismissive. When it appeared, he was writing a short book on criticism at Kōdansha’s request, and he was carrying out this assignment in a diary format which, covering the period from June 24 to August 4, would be published in book form, late that year, as A Novelist’s Holiday (Shōsetsuka no kyūka). By way of commenting on the story, he began with the Japanese notion of a connoisseur (tsū). That evening in July he ate a tempura dinner at the restaurant Ryokufūkaku, Green Wind Pavilion, in Atami, where he was staying, and the restaurant was famous for tempura.
To properly appreciate such things, you have to be a tsū. But connoisseurship is something even university students can attain to an astonishing degree, be it with nō drama, kabuki, tea ceremony, or flower arrangement, Mishima mused, and moved on to the not dissimilar idea of the Japanese notion of “the way of artistic skill” (geidō).
“Now, the novel is said to be a modern art, but our ready-made idea concerning the way of prose (bunshō-dō) has much that resembles Japan’s way of artistic skill. There, too, is room for students to flaunt their connoisseurship, and we often encounter connoisseur-like prose . . . and praise it as reserved, praise it as unscheming, or marvel how accomplished it is.
“Because I, too, used to write prose typical of a student versed in literature, I feel all the more embarrassed when I come in contact with such prose,” Mishima went on. “The only hobby appropriate for a university student is probably sports. And the only prose appropriate for a university student must be an athletic one in its cleanliness. No matter how resplendent a costume it may wear, it must show a glimpse of healthy muscles underneath it.”
Mishima then came to the point. “Incidentally, I recently read a story by a young man which was about a student boxer titled ‘The Season of the Sun.’ Whether it’s good or bad, what was most regrettable to me was that this kind of material was written in a prose common to students versed in literature, a prose which was essentially the exact opposite [of what its subject requires].”19 His was, in other words, a summary putdown of an upstart writer by someone with a chameleon-like mastery of style.
Yet “The Season of the Sun” went on to win the Akutagawa Prize toward the end of the year, making Ishihara the youngest to win the coveted prize. In February 1956, the weekly Asahi featured Ishihara, “the student writer who won the Akutagawa Prize.” His first collection of stories, titled of course The Season of the Sun, sold three hundred thousand copies.
In March, Mishima apparently asked for a taidan with Ishihara and started the conversation by saying, with obvious ostentation, “Having written a variety of stories over the past decade, all the writers of postwar literature have attained field rank. I’ve been a perennial flag bearer, playing the role of regimental-flag bearer with no end in sight, but now I’ve found an appropriate person to whom I can hand over the regimental flag. Mr. Ishihara, I’d like to hand the tattered flag to you.”20
Not that Mishima was completely taken with Ishihara. Asked to comment on the Ishihara phenomenon by the Tokyo Shinbun the following month, he began his essay: When his rival furiously trashes Ishihara, he, with an Edo-ite’s compulsion to side with the loser or the maligned, ends up defending him; but should his rival praise the novella extravagantly, he would become a furious trasher. Ishihara’s “originality” lay, Mishima suggested, in that he “offered to the literary establishment” the kind of “raw youth” one saw in the beach resort of Hayama, on the west coast of the Miura Peninsula, that provided the setting for Ishihara’s story.21
“The Season of the Sun” was turned into a film, with Shintarō himself playing a bit role, and spawned three fad words: taiyō-zoku, “the sun tribe” (sullen youth loitering on a sun-bathed beach), Shintarō-gari, “the Shintarō cut” (a crewcut with a good deal of hair left on the top), and the adopted English word “dry” (casually, indifferently indulging in violence and sex). Mishima went on to engage in six more taidan with Ishihara, the last one in the fall of 1969.
A Novelist’s Holiday, which came out in November, was characteristic of Mishima in its wide range of references, from Edward G. Robinson’s film Black Tuesday (the title translated in Japanese as Five Minutes before Execution) to Terentius’s observation, “I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me.” Mishima quoted the Roman writer to discuss the cultural chaos that Japan was thought to be going through at the time.
One entry in this “diary” may be peculiarly indicative of the time. On July 8, Mishima returned to Tokyo to attend a farewell party in the evening for a twenty-nine-year-old American. No doubt because it was only ten years after Japan’s defeat, his departure to teach Japanese at Harvard University not just merited a farewell party but the party drew a dozen men of letters and theater.
“Mr. [V. H.] Viglielmo, this formidable master of the Japanese language, a lover of [Natsume] Sōseki, a mixture of lofty pride, and clumsy, youthful humility, a youth who, while being crushed by a dark impulse, straightforwardly believes in God and his own beautiful face,” Mishima wrote. “He wished to die, like a Greek, while he remained youthful in appearance. And he would turn to me, older by a year or two, and say, You have missed a chance to die.”
Among those who attended the party were: Akutagawa Hiroshi, the scholar of French literature Satō Saku, Yashiro Seiichi, Nakamura Shin’ichirō, and another French scholar and novelist Fukunaga Takehiko.22
Ever pressed for time for writing and suffering from lack of sleep for days on end as a result, Mishima took an unusual step for a writer at the time when he went to Kyoto to gather information for The Temple of the Golden Pavilion: he flew—from Haneda, in Tokyo, to Itami, in Osaka. The first successful jet-powered passenger aircraft, the Boeing 707, had started service in 1954, and the second, Douglas’s DC-8, in June 1955. But the Japan Air Lines still used the propeller-driven DC-4s. As far as such things go, the ban on domestic aircraft manufacture in Japan instituted by the Occupation as part of the process of demilitarization was not lifted until the following year and Japan’s first passenger aircraft would not be tested until 1962. The Itami Airport, when Mishima arrived there, had large weedy patches on its runways. He then hired a taxi to go to Kyoto.
The resident monk of the Kinkakuji firmly declined to cooperate and neither granted an interview nor allowed an examination of the personal quarters. His reason was simple: It was unthinkable to work with someone who was going to write a novel about the fire that destroyed his temple. All Mishima could do was to closely inspect all the nooks and corners of the temple compound that regular tourists were free to visit. He prepared a number of sketches and notes. He stayed at the Kamada Inn, an old lodge near the Nanzenji, the headquarters of Rinzai Zen.
He wrote Sadako: “Every day I go places to collect information and, back [in the inn], keep busy sorting things. I may not even have occasion to view the garden at the Gionji. Tomorrow I’ll be going to East Maizuru to visit the hometown of the monk who set the Kinkakuji on fire. After that I will also stay at the Myōshinji.”23 The Gionji is also known as the Yasaka Shrine. The Myōshinji is another famous Rinzai Zen temple, though of a school different from that of the Rokuonji, which is not far from the Kinkakuji. This temple agreed to allow Mishima to stay one night, and Mishima closely observed the young monks training. He did not take part in zazen because that would have been too painful for his legs. One discovery he made there was that Zen temples served as mental clinics. He met a middle-aged man who was happy as he had recovered from a nervous breakdown he had su
ffered as a result of a divorce a month earlier.
Recalling the one-night stay at the temple a decade later, Mishima wrote: “Some may say it is an act fearless of heaven to write about life in a Zen temple after just a one-night stay, but I hear that Ėmile Zola had just one dinner with an actress at the Opera House in order to write Nana.” And: “I still can’t forget how delicious the rice was that was said to have been cooked on pine wood. I have never eaten a rice meal as tasteful as that since I was born.”24
Maizuru is a port city in northern Kyoto. An important naval base until Japan’s defeat, it became famous in the years that followed as an entry port for soldiers and other expatriates returning from the Soviet Union and other parts of the Asian Continent. Mishima was there during the war—from the end of June to early July 1944—to train in seafaring at the Maizuru Naval Engineering School, a few months before it became a branch of the Naval Academy. This is suggested in Confessions of a Mask.
East Maizuru is a town where Hayashi Shōken’s father was born. The young man himself spent his middle-school years there, though he was born and grew up at Cape Nariu, a forlorn place north-northeast of East Maizuru, where his father had a temple. The cape juts into Wakasa Bay and faces the Japan Sea. Mishima visited the area this time with his father’s friend in Kyoto as a guide. The fickle weather there in late fall impressed him. At the start of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, he would write, with the protagonist narrating the story: “My father’s hometown was land overflowing with sunlight. But in two months of the year, November and December, even on spectacularly fine days when you didn’t seem to see a single cloud, a shower would pass four or five times a day. My variable mood may have been nurtured in that land.”
Back at the Kamada Inn Mishima found the popular comedian Ban Junzaburō (“Banjun”) staying there. Banjun saw him lifting a barbell on the verandah of his room and bantered about it. They went out to eat and became friends.25
Bodybuilding
Mishima had taken up bodybuilding in September. That month he read an article in a weekly emphasizing how this new, postwar sport could transform the human body. Along with the spectator sport of professional wrestling, this American import focused on physical display, made famous by Charles Atlas, was becoming a vogue. Mishima at once sought an introduction to a man featured in the article, Tamari Hitoshi, captain of the Barbell Club at Waseda University. When they met, he hired him on the spot as his private coach. He arranged to have him visit him three times a week. When he had to go to Kyoto he asked him to have a lightweight barbell delivered to his inn.26 He had decided to follow Tamari’s instruction to do bodybuilding exercises every other day even while he traveled.
Years later Tamari, who remained Mishima’s good friend and by then chairman of the Japan Bodybuilding Federation, recalled how Mishima explained to him the reason he took to bodybuilding with such dedication: “Why is it that so many of the Japanese writers are like Dazai Osamu and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke who either look neurotic or seem to have just recovered from TB? It’s as though they can’t write good stories unless they are sick and feeble and those around them approve of it. This is ridiculous. There ought to be a strict line between what you write and how you live. No matter how unquotidian or radical your writing may be, there is no reason for your daily life to be unhealthy or degenerate. Rather, it ought to be healthy.”27
As Mishima himself noted, Dazai was well built and tall, though he willfully dissipated himself, mainly through drinking.28 “Because I had found objectionable the tendency of the Japanese literary establishment to revere and value a work only because the writer wrote it laboring over it, losing weight, even getting ill,” Mishima wrote, “I weighed myself before starting on The Golden Pavilion and, after finishing it and proving that I hadn’t lost a single gram physically, shouted, ‘Bravo!’”
That was Mishima’s “literary” reason, if you will. The real reason was his “intense physical inferiority complex,” as he freely admitted once his physique became more or less presentable, or so he thought. He took up bodybuilding because of the advent of Ishihara Shintarō.
Yuasa Atsuko, as a good friend, may have thought nothing of openly making fun of his miserable body (he was skinny, his legs looked fragile—the latter flaw he did not try to correct through bodybuilding),29 but among his fellow writers, the critic Okuno Takeo noted, Mishima’s “extraordinarily pale, unhealthy look, poor motor coordination, and clumsiness” was something of a taboo even to mention. But then there came along this young writer who grabbed Japan’s imagination, and he was no ordinary young writer. He was “a sportsman capable of anything—sailing, soccer, and boxing—and who was not in the least embarrassed that he . . . was a spoiled kid from a bourgeois household”—Okuno using the term bourgeois in the Japanese sense at the time of “the upper crust of the middle class.” And the young man seemed to take it for granted as his birthright. Mishima was mortified.
Once he took up bodybuilding he never deviated from the path he chose. From September 1955 until his death he pursued physical improvement—not just through bodybuilding but also through boxing, kendō, iai (the art of cutting down an opponent from a sitting position), and karate—with “a superhuman effort that made you weep,” in the end creating what Okuno has called “a modern miracle”—“a complete reformation [by a writer] of his own physique.”30
Of these sports, however, boxing was where Mishima failed utterly. He took it up in September 1956, just a year after he started bodybuilding, with a well-known trainer Kojima Tomo’o. He did so because, with bodybuilding, his “physical self-confidence subjectively ballooned too much.” Feeling “the iron wall that had separated me and sports having finally collapsed,” he decided to take up “the toughest, the fiercest sport, the sport that would scare most men in their thirties,” namely, boxing. But he had absolutely no aptitude for it. Ishihara Shintarō once came to visit him in his gym and filmed his sparring. Mishima made such a clumsy spectacle of himself that members of the Bungaku-za gathered in his house had a jolly time watching the film while playing recorded mambo music.31
Boxing lasted for just about a year for him, but he became a fan of the sport. He often went to see championship matches, wrote about them for newspapers, and from time to time had a taidan with a boxer.
The End of the Affair
While still gathering information for The Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, Mishima wrote to Sadako: “I think I can come back earlier than planned, on the 17th, and will telephone you around noon on the 18th. Would you keep the afternoon of the 18th onward free for me? Kindly let me slip into the cracks of your extremely busy schedule. My desire is to take care of the arsonist monk as quickly as possible so I may see the beauty in Tokyo the soonest.” Mishima ended his missive with “To Imperial Princess Sadako. Your Subject Yukio.”
The initial reaction to the serialization of The Golden Pavilion that began in the January 1956 issue of Shinchō was highly favorable. In March Mishima visited Kyoto again for further information. This time he took Sadako along. They put up in an elegant inn in Gion Hanami Kōji. There are in Japan restaurants and inns which, though not necessarily intended only for well-paying customers and guests, refuse to accept those the chef or the proprietor does not know directly or indirectly. The inn the two chose was one of those. Sadako arranged to stay there through her relative.
Mishima, for his part, had left word with his father that he’d be staying at the Miyako Hotel, the most prestigious Western-style lodging place in Kyoto. He knew Azusa would never accept his liaison with a restaurant owner’s daughter, however high-class the establishment may be, let alone the fact that he’d stay in the same place with her. While in Tokyo Mishima did not need to tell his parents exactly where he was going to be, but he had to do so when away from the city.
It was three months later—in the wee hours of June 4—that Mishima telephoned Okuno, obviously drunk, and carried on and on, boasting how he’d finally been able to sexually satisfy a woman.32 Okun
o, only a year younger than Mishima and by then a good friend of his, had seen women attaching themselves to Mishima in bars and clubs but was still surprised by his cerebral friend’s delirious manner.
Mishima was happy with Toyoda Sadako. Gradually, however, he sensed or decided that the affair would come to an end. And the two would indeed part from each other in May 1957. As Yuasa Atsuko saw it, the parting occurred largely because Sadako became uneasy as she realized Mishima was too far ahead of her, too knowledgeable and intelligent in everything, to catch up no matter how she might try. After resisting for quite a while, Mishima finally introduced Sadako to Atsuko, and the two women remained close friends thereafter.33
Mishima may well have foretold what was to come, and described what he thought of Sadako, in the short story “Boats for Feeding Hungry Ghosts” (Segaki-bune) that appeared in the October 1956 issue of Gunzō. Set in an inn in Atami known not so much as a lodging as for the food it serves, the story describes a meeting one summer evening between an old, famous writer named Tottori Yōichirō and his son Fusatarō. Yōichirō’s first, common-law wife, Katsue, has just died in an infirmary and newspapers have reported it in an indignant, accusing tone. Fusatarō, whose mother, Yōichiro’s second wife, had died a few months after his birth, has asked to meet his father to find out the truth. Did he know Katsue was in an infirmary and, knowing that, did he do nothing for her? Unlike his own mother, who was rich and beautiful, Katsue was with Yōichirō when he was a poverty-ridden, struggling writer.