by Hiroaki Sato
What is striking about this story is Yōichiro’s description of Fusatarō’s mother, who remains unnamed.
“Well, I must say, it was a happy life you would not be able to imagine. It was not just easeful, your mother was even dangerous. She wore a different kimono every day and changed her hairstyle in dizzying fashion,” Yōichirō recalls for Fusatarō. “Since I was born, I had never been so close to something so human. I was gradually infected by it. I reconciled myself with everything human and accepted all the conventions of society. How nice and pleasant conventions were!”
When that “brief married life” ended, did he grieve? Fusatarō asks. Yes, he did, Yōichirō replies, he wept and continued to weep, until his friends who came to console him told him “he was like a sissy.” “But,” Yōichirō confesses, “it is hard to tell you this, your mother dying was a thoughtful gift for me.”
This story was inspired by—was a thinly disguised account of—an evening Mishima spent with Sadako, as far as the setting is concerned. In mid-August he stayed in a hotel in Atami to finish the last installment of The Golden Pavilion, which he in fact did, on the sixteenth, the day after the O-bon Festival. Knowing he would complete his work as planned, always punctual in such matters as he was, he had invited Sadako for dinner with him at the aforementioned Ryokufūkaku, the restaurant famous for its tempura. It was atop a hill looking down upon Sagami Bay. From their room, as the night fell, Mishima and Sadako watched the Rite of Feeding the Hungry Ghosts—brightly lit boats, with prayers and drums, setting lanterns adrift on the dark water to soothe the souls of those who committed suicide by throwing themselves into the sea.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Kinkakuji
. . . . it is certain that it will turn to ashes.
—The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion received great reviews when it came out, and is still counted among Mishima’s best works. Shortly after the novel’s publication, the monthly Bungei set up a taidan for Kobayashi Hideo to discuss it with the author, and the taidan duly saw print. The redoubtable critic was altogether full of praise—equally of the novel and the novelist. “If there’s anything that’s terrifying in you, it’s your talent,” he said. Calling Mishima “the devil of talent,” he said that the story is full of “inventions of images that bubble up,” and that it “truly never bored me.” The Golden Pavilion is “a lyric, rather than a novel,” because “your Raskolnikov is protecting himself within the subjectivity called motive,” Kobayashi said. It will become a novel if it deals with what happens after the protagonist burns down the pavilion.
One surprise comment Kobayashi had to offer was a question, “Why didn’t you kill [the protagonist]?” Mishima responded somewhat disingenuously: “I was too bound to the actual records” to do otherwise.1 On the face of it, he was correct. Hayashi Shōken, who set fire to the Golden Pavilion in the early hours of July 2, was found in the woods of a hill near the temple around four o’clock on the afternoon of the same day; he was arrested, sentenced to imprisonment in January of the following year, and lived until March 1956. But Mishima could have also “killed” him. Hayashi had attempted suicide.
After fleeing the scene of the crime, Hayashi stabbed himself in and near the heart with a pocketknife and took one hundred tablets of the sedative/sleep medication Calmotin—a drug a Japanese pharmaceutical company invented, so named, and put on the market during the war. It was while struggling with the self-inflicted wounds and the overdose of sleeping pills that he was discovered. As Mishima tells in his story, Hayashi had prepared both the knife and pills in advance, but Mishima obscures the reason and makes the man throw away the knife and pills after watching the pavilion burn to his heart’s content. Moreover, Hayashi had died just about the time Mishima was preparing the fourth or fifth installment or chapter in his serialization of the novel. Earlier, in October 1955, when Mishima decided to take up the subject, Hayashi had been released from a hospital jail in Hachiōji, Tokyo, because of the tuberculosis he had contracted and the severe mental problems he had developed, and transferred to a hospital in Kyoto, via a brief stop in a nearby prison. That, too, could have provided Mishima with another rationale for letting his protagonist die.
Mishima did not allow the protagonist of the story, named Mizoguchi, to die at the end perhaps because he makes his own life run parallel to Mizoguchi’s. Both Mishima and Mizoguchi lacked motor coordination and had youthful apprehensions about sex and botched sexual encounters. The “I” of Confessions comes upon a picture of Saint Sebastian while Mizoguchi witnesses in a temple an elegantly dressed young woman baring her breasts for a young army officer in uniform. Mishima apparently projects himself in Mizoguchi’s imagining of the Golden Pavilion burning up in an air raid. He maintained a certain bravado and nonchalance in his letters written during the conflagrations, but he had witnessed fire-bombings, experienced the terror of being targeted for an air raid, and wandered in the immediate aftermath of citywide incinerations.
The Golden Pavilion that summer [of 1944], feeding on the dark circumstances of war in which one disheartening news followed another, seemed to be shining in ever more lively manner. Already in June, the US forces had landed in Saipan and the Allied forces were dashing through Normandy. The number of worshipers decreased markedly, and the Pavilion seemed to be enjoying the solitude, the quietude.
It was only natural that the turmoil of war and anxiety, countless corpses and overflowing blood, should enrich the beauty of the Golden Pavilion. After all, it was a building that anxieties had built.
Initially Mizoguchi, convinced that “the Golden Pavilion of Diamond Indestructibility and the scientific fire [of air raids] were alien to each other,” does not even entertain the thought of the destruction of the Pavilion. But, as Saipan falls and talk of the inevitability of air raids on Japan proper becomes pervasive and the forced evacuation of parts of Kyoto starts, he begins to think of the possibility: “The Golden Pavilion may be burnt and destroyed by the fire of an air raid. If things go on in this fashion, it is certain that it will turn to ashes” [the emphasis in the original]. The possibility grows into delirious imaginings: “The thought that the fire that would burn and destroy me would also burn and destroy the Pavilion almost intoxicated me. In the destiny of the same calamity, of the same ominous fire, the Pavilion and the world I inhabited came to belong to the identical plane. . . . A fire engulfing the entire Kyoto City became my secret dream.”
But the war ends with the Pavilion left intact. Sometime after the war, it was revealed that the US government had decided to spare the ancient cities of Nara and Kyoto from bombings, but no Japanese knew of any such decision while their cities were burning. On the day the Tennō announces Japan’s surrender, Mizoguchi hurries from the factory to which he is assigned for wartime work back to his temple and finds his Pavilion deserted in the bright midsummer sun but appearing even more “transcendent of things like the shock of defeat and the grief of the race.” And he has the revelation: “The relationship between the Golden Pavilion and me has been severed.” Mizoguchi decides to do the burning himself. By burning it, he tells himself, “This rusted lock between my inner realm and outer realm would come undone wonderfully. There would be nothing to block the inner realm from the outer realm, and the wind would begin to blow through them back and forth, at will.”
Once the main floor of the structure fully catches fire, Mizoguchi is suddenly struck with “the thought to die in the Kyūkyokuchō enveloped in this fire.” The Kyūkyokuchō, the Ultimate Apex, makes up the third floor of the Pavilion. In contrast to the first two floors, the Hosui-in and the Chō’on-dō, which are spacious rooms adorned with statues and decorations, the Ultimate Apex is a small square room made in the manner of a Zen altar.
“Fleeing the fire, I ran up the narrow stairway. . . . I climbed further up the staircase and tried to open the door to the Kyūkyokuchō. The door would not open. The door on the third floor was firmly locked.
. . . I pounded on the door. . . . What I dreamed of about the Kyūkyokuchō at that moment was surely a place of death for myself. . . . And, I dreamed at that moment with earnestness that verged on pain, that small room should have had gold foils all over the place.” But suffocating with smoke, he is struck by the thought that he is “being refused.” He does not hesitate but flees.
In real life, too, Hayashi seemed to have thought of dying in the top room—his own accounts in two police reports vary on this point—but was unable to go up to the second floor, let alone the Kyūkyokuchō, because the door to the second floor was “chain-locked.” While he was hesitating, the fire caught up, and he fled.
In 1960, writing an afterword to the paperback edition of The Golden Pavilion, Nakamura Mitsuo compared Hayashi’s “madness” as perceived by Kobayashi Hideo and Mishima and wrote that, though both saw in Hayashi Shōken’s act “a ‘symbol’ of the madness of the period,” Mishima “wished to recreate this ‘symbol’ through art in order to possess [sanity] firmly. For Mishima, there probably was no other way of maintaining sanity in modern times than trying to live artistically.”2
Using the same word, “symbol,” Saeki Shōichi saw something altogether different. “Firmly woven into the inner motive of the protagonist [of The Golden Pavilion] who is driven to the destruction of the building . . . that may be the symbol of Japan’s traditional beauty,” wrote the student of American literature, “is Japan’s defeat in the war as an indispensable, important link.” And he suggested that the work showing the connection most directly is Mishima’s play Youths, Resurrect Yourselves! (Wakōdo yo yomigaere!).3
The play, published in the June 1954 issue of Gunzō, is in three acts, and it describes a group of law students assigned to a navy aircraft factory near the Atsugi Air Base (today the US Naval Air Facility) on three separate days in the summer of 1945. Act One covers August 7, the day after an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; Act Two, August 15, when Japan surrendered; and Act Three, August 26, when the Ministry for Armament and the Ministry for Greater East Asia were abolished. There are an array of characters with conflicting thoughts and remembrances, but the focus is on a young couple, the law student named Suzuki and a young woman he is in love with, Fusako. Once the war comes to an end, the two sharply differ on what it has done to their psyches.
Suzuki realizes that death, which during the final months of the war was the most abundant, cheapest “commodity” when everything else was in severe short supply, had distorted his thought and feelings. Fusako disagrees. At the end of Act Three, Suzuki tries to explain himself:
Suzuki: . . . Listen, don’t you think this is what happened? That we, in the end, hadn’t loved each other at all?
Fusako: What?
Suzuki: Yes, we had fallen into hallucination. We were caught in a fantasy. We thought we’d fallen in love, but that was an odd fantasy the war gave us. Air raids, dangers to our lives, things like that ganged up on us and made us think that we were in love. From the start we were not in love at all!
Fusako: Why do you say, “from the start”? You just got tired, you just got tired of me.
Suzuki: We must say “from the start.” Unless we do that, we won’t be liberated.
Fusako: Liberated? (She smiles coldly) Here we go, another hallucination.
Suzuki: We were drunk with the sound of sirens. We were drunk with the smell of death.
Fusako: Stop saying “we.” Say “I.”
Suzuki: It has to be “we.”
In his afterword to the play, Mishima was uncharacteristically straightforward. Instead of trying to be ironic or casually erudite, he explained with earnestness how and why he wrote the play. He had never tried to turn his experience directly into some literary piece, but in this case, he made “an exception” for himself. He “became prisoner of a desire to recreate on stage my life during a certain period, to commemorate what I thought was a unique experience to me.” He continued: “Not all the incidents written here correspond one by one to what I experienced at the time. But this play is different from my other works in that everything in it is based on facts.” Because of this, he wrote, he urges his reader to “read this play as a historical drama.”
“There were indeed, in our lives then, advocates of love for love’s sake, innocent rightists, superstitious nihilists, and dreamy Communists such as described here. And, even though the wrinkles of complex emotions unique to youth were submerged under the pressure of the tense era and everyone looked idiotic not to a small extent, I never tried to draw a caricature in this work.”4
The Haiyū-za staged the play with its founder Senda Koreya directing, in Tokyo, in November 1954. The play toured Osaka and Kyoto in the following January.
The Sea Did Not Split in Two
Mishima wrote another work which was similarly important to him, though it showed the effect of the war indirectly. It is the short story “The Sea and the Evening Glow” (Umi to yūyake), his contribution to the January 1957 issue of Gunzō. To commemorate the one hundredth issue of the monthly, its editors lined up many of the prominent writers of the day. To Mishima’s great disappointment, the story elicited little notice. He told a friend of his, Mushiake Aromu: “I wrote it to deal with what was to me a compelling question, so it was painful that it was utterly ignored when published. Had that piece been accurately understood when published, my life after that might have been different.”5
“The Sea and the Evening Glow” has to do with an old sexton’s reflection on the crucial turning point in his life that came in his youth. The narrative is as simple as the setting, which is one late summer evening of 1272 on a hill at the back of Kenchō-ji, in Kamakura. But the protagonist has a seemingly fantastic background. His name, Anri, is a direct transplant of the French name Henri.
When he was a boy shepherd in Cevenne, France, the Pope’s call for the Fifth Crusade was issued and Henri saw Jesus Christ appear and heard the Lord tell him: “You are the one to take back Jerusalem, Henri. You boys take back Jerusalem from the infidels, the Turks. Gather together many comrades and go to Marseilles. The waters of the Mediterranean will split into two and guide you to Jerusalem.”
Evidently Jesus told the same thing to children in many parts of France and Germany, for thousands of them, many tired and sick after long treks, gathered in Marseilles. But the sea did not split nor would it, however fervently the children prayed. In the event, a devout-looking owner of a ship appeared and offered to take them to the Holy Land, free. The children, who were troubled and lost, accepted the offer but were taken to Alexandria instead and sold in a slave market. Henri was bought by a Persian merchant. He then was sold to another man, who took him to India. There he met and was freed by the Chinese monk Dōryū (Daolong), who was in that land to study Buddhism. He followed when the monk returned to China and followed him further to Japan when the monk decided to come to this land.
The question that has haunted Henri all these years, long after he lost his faith, is “the mystery still unsolved . . . hiding in the scarlet glitter of the sea” in the evening sun of Kamakura. “Probably in Anri’s entire life, if the sea were to split into two, there could have been no other time than those moments”—in Marseilles when he and other children prayed. “The mystery was that even in those moments the sea spread itself silently as it burned in the evening glow.”
When Mishima put together his favorite stories in one volume a few years before his death and included this one in it, he noted, “Any [reader of this story] will of course recall at once the most terrifying poetic despair of the Greater East Asian War, ‘Why didn’t the Divine Wind blow?’”6 Mishima could assume this reaction on the part of the Japanese reader because the era he describes in the story was famous for the first of the two Mongolian invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, which were both repelled by “the Divine Wind,” a typhoon.
Daolong is a historical figure. Born in 1213, he arrived in Japan, in 1246, and, in 1253, at the request of the shogunate regent Hōjō
Tokiyori (1227–63), founded the Zen temple Kenchō-ji. He died in 1278.
Will Westerners Understand Japanese Fiction?
The Golden Pavilion came out in book form in October 1956 as the teninstallment serialization was completed. Priced at ¥280, it sold 123,000 copies by the end of the following year. Mishima also had a limited edition of two hundred copies printed, priced at ¥2,500. It was of a “nouveau riche taste and gilded,” he wrote Kawabata in telling him he would be sending him a copy.7 The value of ¥2,500 at the time may be guessed from what Kawabata told Mishima in his letter of the same month. He had just received from Knopf a copy of Snow Country in Edward Seidensticker’s translation. He was told it was a “low-priced” edition, at $1.25, but he was nonetheless surprised at “the high price”—in yen terms, that is. At the time, and until 1971, the exchange rate was pegged at ¥360 for a dollar, and a Japanese publisher could turn out a much-better-looking hardcover edition for an equivalent price of ¥450. The retail price of the regular edition of The Golden Pavilion came to seventy-eight cents.
Kawabata also told Mishima that he was “surprised” by the drawing of a geisha on the cover. Was it because the drawing was clumsy or because anything associated with Japan conjuring up the image of a geisha annoyed him? Kawabata did not say, but it was probably both: Mishima himself expressed appallment when he received Ivan Morris’s English translation of The Golden Pavilion three years later and saw the “moldy sumi-e” illustrations—which, incidentally, have been retained in the paperback editions to this day. At the time he was serializing a diary-format account The Nude and the Costume (Ratai to ishō).8 Kawabata went on to wonder about the worth of Japanese novels such as Snow Country and Thousand Cranes being translated “into the West”—a concern he had voiced to the Knopf editor and then principal promoter of Japanese literature, Harold Strauss, a year earlier.