by Hiroaki Sato
The upshot was the consensus: Nakatani, playing Hisao, “did not have to go as far as putting his hand to the knee, but he could at least glance at it. Since then he has done so,” Mishima added, “when absorbed in his role, even putting his hand on the knee without really meaning to.”24
In the course of composing the play, Mishima also wrote, during the summer, a politico-economic tract, “Will the Tortoise Catch Up with the Hare?—Problems of the So-called Underdeveloped Countries.” He considered “the dangerous distortions of our rapid modernization”25 against Japan’s recent history, with his focus on Mao-led Communist China and Nehru-led India that were on the rise.
“An Unpleasant Masterpiece”
In the fall Mishima, who, along with Itō Sei and Takeda Taijun, had become a judge for an annual new writers contest that Chūō Kōron set up, recommended the novella On the Narayama Song (Narayama-bushi kō) by Fukazawa Shichirō for top prize. A stark retelling of a “poetic tale” in the tenth-century collection Tales from Yamato (Yamato monogatari), it describes, in a simple, realistic setting of a poor mountain village, and with artless language, the legendary practice of abandoning old people in remote places to save food. Though he had recommended it, Mishima found it to be “a repellent novel, one reading of which will give you gooseflesh,” he wrote Kawabata, so much so that he was even afraid of touching the Chūō Kōron issue that carried it.26 A dozen years later, in the last series of essays Mishima wrote, titled What Is a Novel?, for the magazine Nami, he remembered the time he read the novella as “the only time he felt a chill while reading a fresh manuscript.”
It was an unpleasant masterpiece. It was an unpleasant masterpiece which hides within it something that makes us feel as though our fundamental desire for beauty and order were mocked, a kind of consensus and agreement which we call “humanity” trampled upon, the sense of our intestines that normally lie unexposed to the outside air suddenly made to feel exposed to the air, the sublime and the trivial deliberately messed up, “tragedy” disdained, both the rational and the emotional rendered meaningless—makes us feel, after reading it, that there is nothing in this world that we can rely upon. My terror at Mr. Fukazawa’s writings even to this day originates in the impression I had the first time I read On the Narayama Song.27
Early in the following year, on February 5, Mishima attended the publication party for the novella held well past midnight at Nichigeki Music Hall. Fukazawa played the guitar, guitar-strumming wanderer as he was, and there was a striptease show. Mishima’s companions included not just Itō and Takeda but also Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Masamune Hakuchō. A year on, the novella was turned into a film, with Kinoshita Keisuke directing.
On December 1, Mishima’s dance drama Orphée, based on Jean Cocteau’s film, was staged, Mishima directing. It featured an Edo courtesan dancing on a Parisian street.
In the same month another of Mishima’s novels, The Spring That Lasted Too Long (Nagasugita haru), which he serialized in a ladies’ monthly at the same time as The Golden Pavilion but in twelve-installments, came out and it sold 150,000 copies in no time. In contrast to The Golden Pavilion, it was a lighthearted romantic comedy, written with the obvious expectations that it would be turned into a movie: A young couple become engaged, grow frustrated because of their inability to “do it” before the wedding, get entangled in embarrassing situations as a result, but manage to remain “chaste” to each other until their marriage. There are unlikely rescues by friends, narrow escapes, and an unconvincing denouement. Sure enough, it was turned into a film at once and shown in May of the following year.
On New Year’s Day 1957 Mishima skipped his annual courtesy call to Kawabata, in Kamakura. Instead, he had an assignation with Toyoda Sadako at the Imperial Hotel, at three o’clock in the afternoon. (He went to see Kawabata the following day.) On January 29, he received the Yomiuri Literary Prize for The Golden Pavilion. In March, the April issue of Gunzō started to serialize his next novel, Virtue Falters (Bitoku no yoromeki), ending it in the June issue. Mishima, who completed the three-installment novel as early as April 15, wrote it with focus and ease. It was his attempt to make his own version of Radiguet’s The Devil in the Flesh, even though it is not narrated in the first person and its viewpoint is a woman’s. It tells of a respectable married young woman’s plunge into a yearlong affair with a bachelor the same age whom she once kissed, before the marriage, in a summer resort.
“I wonder about abruptly beginning with an immodest topic, but Mrs. Kurakoshi, though still twenty-eight years old, was truly blessed with the heavenly gift of sensuality,” Mishima opens the story, in a manner that echoes, however obliquely, the opening of The Devil in the Flesh: “I am sure to incur a good deal of reproach. But what am I to do?” Mrs. Kurakoshi, or Setsuko, “grew up with very strict manners, in a house of aristocratic lineage.” The description of Setsuko’s family, the Fujiis, is reminiscent of passages in Confessions and the short story Preparations for the Night.
. . . members of the Fujii family were a graceful tribe without any sense of witticism. In a family where the head of the household, being very busy, is often absent and where women dominate, titters of laughter may constantly ripple, but witticism tends to grow thinner and thinner. This is all the more true with a graceful household. Setsuko, used to hypocrisy since childhood, would now be unable even to imagine that anything was wrong with it, but that was none of her fault.
For the reader who wants to see in the novel Mishima’s backhanded revenge on Mitani Kuniko, what gives the game away may be the just one kiss Setsuko had with a man other than her husband before she was married. “The kiss, though you couldn’t necessarily say it was playful, was of a very shabby sort, and all Setsuko remembered was the faint brush of the dry lips of a flustered, agitated man.” Following marriage, her husband taught her “multifaceted” ways of kissing, though his sexual interest in her did not take long to wane. The reader can almost expect what comes next: “That the young man’s kiss had happened only once, that it lasted just for a second, and that it was clumsy besides, increased its importance all the more in Setsuko’s memory.”
That may be what someone who botched any such first encounter would want to happen in the mind of the partner who has since gone out of reach and is unlikely to give him a second chance. But Mishima wasn’t just happy to oblige his reader in that fantasy. Stoked by the memories of the kiss, Setsuko seeks to have an affair with the same man, succeeds, and, rather than be disappointed as often happens with such a “reunion,” derives as much pleasure from the adventure as her partner does.
Further, when she realizes the affair is going nowhere, she quietly withdraws, without making any fuss that could be embarrassing, even though the extramarital affair forces her to have three abortions, the last almost killing her. She discovers from her father, who is part of the uppermost crust of social respectability, that the revelation of her affair would mean ruination for him. (The father is told nothing; the matter is discussed in reference to an unfortunate acquaintance’s action.) She couldn’t possibly allow that to happen. In short, she is an ideal partner for an affair. The novel is known to have been based partly on an affair Mishima actually had, though the amour did not last long.
The novel became a runaway bestseller upon publication in book form. And, like “the spring that lasted too long,” the expression “virtue falters” and two ramifications thereof—yoromeku, “to commit adultery,” and yoromeki fujin, “adulterous lady”—became popular words. When told of this, and that was soon after he returned from his second overseas trip, Mishima said he simply used someone’s Japanese translation of the title of the Marquis de Sade’s novel, Les infortunes de la vertu, adding that, as he did not know French, the translation may have been of Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu.28
Mishima the Playwright
While writing these three novels—very different from one another—Mishima remained engaged in a range of activities. It was a period of his precipitously risin
g fame, but he perhaps attracted the greatest attention, if that was possible, in the genre of drama.
Other than the ones mentioned so far, he published Collection of Modern Nō Plays (Kindai nōgaku shū) in April 1956. In the fall he took on the task of preparing “a rhetorical rewrite” of Racine’s Britannicus for the Bungaku-za. (In the previous year he had done a kabuki adaptation of the same playwright’s Phèdre, which the Kabuki-za duly produced, with him directing.) When the Bungaku-za wanted to produce the play and its “supreme advisor,” Iwata Toyo’o, demurred, saying the existing version was wanting, the troupe turned to Mishima, who was by then closely affiliated with them. So the translator Andō Shiny’a was lined up to prepare a “faithful word-for-word rendition”—in truth, a “word-for-word” translation from French into Japanese would make little sense—of the Racine drama so Mishima might touch it up rhetorically.
Still, when the work was done Mishima unstintingly praised the existing translation, by Naitō Arau, as “incomparably accurate” and “noble, elegant, and sensuous,” although the translation was “deliberately not for stage use.” As he mightily struggled with Andō’s translation for rhetorical improvement, he would occasionally dip into Naitō’s, only to find his Japanese to be “far superior” to his own and better as words to be enunciated on stage, so he stole from it “shamelessly and without permission.”29 When the play was published in book form, he gave four examples to show what he had done, each with the original, Andō’s translation, his rhetorically changed version, and a comment, except for the last example, which was the last line of the play, where he added Naitō’s translation to illustrate there was little to improve upon as it had the kind of dignity that was crucial to the conclusion of the play.30
Britannicus was staged at Daiichi Seimei Hall from March 5 to 23, with Yashiro Seiichi directing, Akutagawa Hiroshi playing Néron and Kishida Kyōko, Junie. On the last day Mishima appeared onstage among the armored guards. Then the play moved to Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Nagoya, and Yokohama.
April saw the Kabuki-za produce, for the second time, Yuya, Mishima’s nagauta—a form of chanted narrative accompanied by kabuki dance—for nearly the entire month. From the 16th to the 25th, the Bungaku-za produced “a Mishima special,” staging The Puissance Wall and the modern nō play The Damask Drum.
From the 5th to the 25th of May, the Shinpa produced The Golden Pavilion at the theater Shinbashi Enbujō. Murayama Tomoyoshi, who adapted the novel for stage and directed it, was a versatile writer-artist. In 1921 he dropped out of the Imperial University of Tokyo and went to Germany where, fascinated by Constructivism, he once exhibited his artworks with the likes of Picasso and Braque. After his return to Japan he became a force in the modernist-proletarian movement, organizing an avant-garde art society MAVO and writing, directing, and designing plays. Though he recanted in the 1930s, he remained leftist. Beginning in 1960 he would write a famous series on ninja for the Communist daily Akahata, depicting them as accomplished but anonymous technicians fated to be ground down by larger forces. His prewar illustrations for children’s stories, along with his calendar paintings, have continued to be reissued.
However, Mishima, who had doubts about dramatizing The Golden Pavilion, was lukewarm to Murayama’s version of his novel. Although he said he was impressed that Murayama managed to tell the story meticulously, he quoted a statement of the German novelist and playwright Friedrich von Spielhagen to summarize his thoughts on the matter: “A roman cannot be rewritten into a drama but the material of a novella almost simultaneously becomes the material of a drama.” The Golden Pavilion, of course, is a “roman” or a full-length novel, not a novella.31
Mishima took Toyoda Sadako to see the play, on May 15. That would become the last time the two saw each other.
Late that month the film The Spring That Lasted Too Long was released. On June 20 and 21 the Haiyū-za staged another of Mishima’s modern nō plays, Hanjo. Partly exasperated that no theater troupe offered to stage it after it was published in the January 1955 issue of Shinchō, Mishima had had it staged two months earlier, on April 12, on the pretext of the appearance of Keene’s English translation and the Knopf editor Harold Strauss’ visit to Japan. He did so with three English people on hand, Helen McAlpine and Ivan Morris among them. He directed the play himself. In creating the new protagonist, Hanako, he had explained he had in mind “women in love” such as the Portuguese nun Marianna Alcoforado in Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge or the Sappho as interpreted by him, who “at the height of her action . . . mourned not for any man who had left her embrace empty, but for the one, no longer possible, who had grown equal to her love.”32
On July 9 Mishima left for the United States. The second overseas trip would turn out to be much longer than he had planned. This time he went, he thought, as a well-known man. After all, he went to the United States at the invitation of Knopf to mark the publication of Keene’s Five Modern Nō Plays. But America was different from Japan in the way it treated such people, and he would encounter the kind of difficulties he wouldn’t have imagined as a celebrity writer in top form in his homeland.
On January 1958, in his first public appearance following his return from the trip, he stood on stage after the curtain of the last Tokyo production of The Rokumeikan. Among the remarks he made was that in New York he realized he was “a spoiled child”—he used English—of Japanese journalism. In New York he had once asked Keene what he should do to become famous. Keene drily replied, “No one would turn to look even if Hemingway and Faulkner walked arm in arm in Times Square.” That was, in fact, exactly what he had observed. One day he saw Henry Fonda in FAO Schwarz. Fonda was soon to appear in a Broadway show, but none of the customers paid attention to him, overtly or covertly.33
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Overseas Again
The producer Keith is the leader of a boy gang, . . . a fine Italian operetta troupe.
—Mishima on the group that tried to stage his play in New York
It was in July 1956, a year before Mishima left for the United States for the second time, that the Japanese government’s annual “white paper” on the economy, titled The Growth and Modernization of the Japanese Economy, proclaimed: “We are no longer in the postwar era.” Actually, the Economic Planning Agency had borrowed the expression from the title of the English professor-turned-social commentator Nakano Yoshio’s essay that appeared in Bungei Shunjū earlier that year. In it Nakano had argued that it was about time the Japanese stopped being weighed down by the nation’s defeat or being “simply emotional” and started, instead, looking forward to the future.
The economic agency meant that Japan had finally recovered from war devastations. This was welcome news to the Japanese who were going through an unrelieved series of domestic and international turmoil, political and economic. The statement, along with its variations, became a catchword of the day, although the economy was still feeble.
In industrial output, Japan had regained the 1935 level by 1950, but that was because, even as the nation’s ability to produce was cut by half during 1945 as a result of intense bombing in the last phase of the war, its machinery and equipment was left remarkably untouched. What the ten-month bombing destroyed was much of the social stock—public structures such as railroads and waterworks, buildings, and houses—so much so that it took another five years for the country to regain the level of overall national wealth it had had in the mid-1930s, the standard “prewar” reference point. In other words, when the government announced the end of “the postwar era,” the Japanese were finally living as they had two decades earlier—actually, still at a lower level when increases in population were taken into account.1
Having announced that the recovery period was over, the report spoke of the future, albeit cautiously; there remained a number of uncertainties. “To prevent the economy from slowing down,” it said, Japan had to “reform its economic structure lest it fail to get onto the crest of global technological innov
ations,” automation and nuclear power among them.
The mass media was catching on, talking about the coming age of “consumption revolution” to be led by “household electrification.” The weekly Asahi revealed the true state of affairs when it wisecracked about the new trend by dividing Japanese households into “seven classes” by the home appliances owned (August 21, 1955): “Everyone probably has electric lamps. So let’s say the households that have only lamps are seventh class. The ones that add a radio and an iron to them are sixth. An electric heater and a toaster make them fifth. An electric mixer, an electric fan, and a phone make them fourth. An electric washer makes them third. A refrigerator makes them second. A television and a vacuum cleaner make them first class.”2
One telling photograph from about that time shows Mishima in a leather jacket, fashionable at the time among punks and hoods, sticking his head into what was then an oversize refrigerator for the Japanese household; the one, as noted, Yuasa Atsuko had acquired for him through her Nisei husband. He apparently thought it noteworthy enough to be photographed with it. It was still during a period when Mishima could simply assert, by citing Arnold Toynbee, that “a Zen temple with an electric washing machine is no longer a Zen temple.”3
Internationally, Japan was beginning to compete, but mainly in light industries. In 1957, the year Mishima left for the United States, it led the world in shipbuilding, but its top exports were products such as staples and silk. The international balance of payments had turned so negative that Kishi Nobusuke, who became Prime Minister in February, had to term its reduction a national policy, just before leaving Japan to visit the United States, in June, and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry had to restrict the amount of money allocated for imports.