by Hiroaki Sato
American Wealth
The wonder is that Mishima, unlike most Japanese intellectuals who visited and stayed in America during that period—and, in fact, until some years later—was not cowed or discomfited by the great wealth of the country he saw or that, if he was, he did not show it. If anything, he made clear that the way people in American high society lived perfectly suited his taste, as when he was invited to Alfred A. Knopf, Sr.’s house in Purchase, New York, and, after cocktails, to dinner at the Century Country Club nearby.4
Mishima did marvel at the stark wealth discrepancy between Japan and America. On his earlier trip overseas he stayed only for about a month in the United States and appears to have had just one opportunity to spend some time with a wealthy American. During his second trip he was in New York for several months and came to know some well-to-do people and heard stories about the rich.
The one wealthy man he had met five year earlier was Julius Fleischmann—an heir of the Fleischmann Company that had started out as a yeast maker and grown into an empire. Julius, himself president of a whiskey brewery, was a supporter of the New York Public Library, Metropolitan Opera, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, among other things, and a member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. He had literary aspirations and wrote plays. Probably at the committee’s request, he invited Mishima to his “villa” in Naples, Florida, which he had been helping to establish as a resort town since the end of the Second World War.5 The extent of the man’s wealth on the bay was astonishing.
“On a moonlit night we took a walk along the endless beach of white sand that was his own personal property, during the day he took me to the botanical garden that was his personal property,” Mishima recalled a dozen years later. Fleischmann took him to the yacht harbor that was also his personal property. One of his three boats could easily accommodate ten guests. It was on that boat the host took the young Japanese offshore fishing one day. It had a skipper and an assistant. Mishima was the only guest. When the boat reached the fishing ground, it was naturally the biggest of all the boats that congregated there.
“One of his maids proudly showed me her wardrobe. The number of her clothes was such that it could easily match that of an upperclass lady’s.” Constantly astonished, Mishima once asked Fleischmann a “dumb question.” “Sir, how many cars to do you have?” The answer he got was: “Well, son, I’ve never counted them and I don’t know.”6
That is a story Mishima tells in “The Rich in New York,” one of the many essays he produced out of his second trip. He begins by observing: “I’m aware that the stories you hear about the rich in America are different by several orders of magnitude, but before you recover from one astonishing story, you hear another, which is far more astonishing, and it goes on and on like that.”
One evening in December he was invited to Radio City Music Hall for a preview of a movie and was introduced to Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, III. At the time the Rockefellers were at the apex of the pyramid of rich Americans. When they came out, it was unexpectedly pouring. At once Mishima conjured up a scene, right out of a film, of “a Rolls-Royce pulling up and a chauffer in uniform scrambling out to hold an umbrella over them and take them in.” Instead, he saw the wealthy couple stand about lost, like everyone else, until someone caught a taxi for them. He later learned that the Rockefellers were popular because of that kind of “common touch.”
Another time a friend of his pointed out for him a “personal taxi.” The story was that the wife of a wealthy man who lived in a big house in the suburbs loved theater but was frustrated because she couldn’t get a taxi as soon as she arrived at Grand Central. So she had her husband buy a Mercedes-Benz—“one of the most expensive cars,” Mishima noted—and arranged to have it arrive at the station precisely when she got off the train. So the car became famous as “a taxi no one could use,” he was told.
Visiting New York three years later, Mishima would find not just that this trick was still in force but also ride in one himself. The wealthy businessman husband of the sponsor of his play had his Mercedes-Benz painted yellow with the taxi fare of “25 cents & above” indicated outside, complete with a dedicated driver, and used it to run about town. It was explained to Mishima that the man did this because parking rules were much more lenient for taxis.7 Apparently the use of limousines, as later became common, was unknown then.
“Americans love legends about the rich, and in time even true stories turn into snappy jokes. And even those jokes have a vastly different effect if they have real wealthy people in them,” Mishima wrote, and went on to tell the one about Mrs. Vanderbilt ordering more ice cubes for her drink on the sinking Titanic. Once he was invited to a penthouse. While on the terrace, the host told him in the midst of a glorious nightscape of skyscrapers, “This fifty-story building where we live is mine. So is that sixty-story building rising right there.” Mishima could only sigh: “I wish I could say something like that to my guest once in my lifetime even if I knew it was a lie.”8
Apart from that, Mishima’s celebrity status in Japan by then was such and traveling overseas still so limited that he was asked to leave a few parting words in the Bungaku-za’s program. He will spend the first three days in Waikiki to “heal my soul fatigued by the troupe’s torment,” before going on to San Francisco, Los Angeles, then on to Detroit where he will give a speech at the University of Michigan, he wrote, adding, “It’s a speech in English, mind you, gentlemen.” Referring to his Britannicus work, he continued: “Forced as I was to work on something called ‘rhetoric,’ in Japan I’ve been unable to demonstrate fully the linguistic ability I’m equipped with, but now, finally, I will reveal my true worth. Make sure to observe the spirit of a Japanese male!”
The speech, “The Present State of Japan’s Literary Establishment and its Relationship to Western Literatures,” must have impressed his American audience—if his English were as good as advertised and if he managed to say most, if not all, of what he said in the Japanese version published in the September issue of Shinchō. Although the English version does not seem to remain nor does the University of Michigan have any record of the speech—one wonders who came to hear him in the midst of a summer recess—the Japanese version shows how well read he was in the works of his Japanese contemporaries and how solid his grasp was of the influences of Chinese, German, French, Russian, and American literatures on modern Japanese novelists and poets.9 “Influences in Modern Japanese Literature,” the English speech he gave at Tokyo Women’s Club early the next year, may have been a simplified, recast version of the Michigan speech or at least the Japanese version thereof.10
“I will then go to New York and see My Fair Lady, the July 26 ticket for which I have already reserved,” he wrote, adding, “I plan to come back around November.”11
In inviting Mishima, Harold Strauss, of Knopf, or perhaps Alfred A. Knopf himself, apparently arranged for him meetings with some of the notable writers. That may have been how he met Christopher Isherwood, in Los Angeles. Isherwood took him to a 20th Century Fox studio, where a submarine movie was being filmed. Water was hosed onto the conning tower rising out of a pool and an actor, sticking his face out of it, was saying something. Mishima, who had often seen filmmaking, was not impressed. It was a hot midsummer day, and the scene was refreshing, but that was about all.
Isherwood at the time was working on a film script of Jean-Christophe12—or so Mishima understood. In fact, Isherwood was hoping to do “a possible rewrite” on his own film adaptation of Romain Rolland’s novel for the producer Jerry Wald—a point worth noting if only because one of the things that would impress Mishima during his New York stay was the number of rewrites film and stage scripts casually go through in America.
On July 16, Isherwood wrote in his diary: “Nice Yukio Mishima, whom I met yesterday and took out to see John van Druten. But oh, the hopelessness of communication! Here’s this guy, with all of his qualities, his ear for words, etc.—and nothing of it came across.” Van Druten had
made a play out of Sally Bowles, one of Isherwood’s Berlin stories, calling it I Am a Camera, which was a great Broadway success.13 The play would later become Cabaret.
“The well-to-do young novelist James Merrill,” who invited him to stay in his house in Stonington, Connecticut—“an old seaside town with only nineteenth-century buildings”—was probably another writer Strauss arranged for Mishima to meet. This was on August 16, sometime after he arrived in New York. The following day Merrill’s friend, “a very wealthy middle-aged man who has done absolutely nothing since he was born,” took the two out yachting. Merrill and Mishima discussed the balance between description and conversation in a novel. Merrill quoted a European critic’s metaphor, which Mishima thought beautiful. It was to the effect that a conversation in a novel should be like a splash that flies out of a wave when after slowly rising it topples. If Mishima indeed understood that much of what Merrill said, that was because, as is often the case when learning a foreign language, Mishima’s hearing was far better than his ability to speak.
Back at Merrill’s house around four, both took a nap on the rooftop. Then there was a cocktail party. It was an informal affair in a resort town. Merrill the host was barefoot. A “hysterical duchess” took apart a Japanese wooden egg-shaped mosaic and neither she nor anyone else could put it back together, turning everyone into a nervous wreck. A duchess? Perhaps she was one. Perhaps it was a nickname.14 In any case, this would become a scene in Mishima’s next novel, Kyōko’s House.
Mishima’s Play in New York
During August the idea of staging some of his modern nō plays in New York came up and became definite. The Knopf edition of the Keene translations included a notice asking anyone interested in producing the plays to get in touch with the translator. From among the several who showed interest, Mishima selected two, Keith Botsford and Charles (“Cheese”) Shults, both young, as producers. Their idea was to link two of the five plays, The Lady Aoi (Aoi-no-ue) and Sotoba Komachi (the original title retained in English), with a kyōgen in between, and produce them as one. Mishima agreed, told them the outlines of four kyōgen, and the three chose Hanago, a comic followup on Hanjo. He then asked Keene, who had left for Japan shortly after Mishima arrived in New York, to translate it. The contract said that the play would open in October. He was to receive an advance of sixty dollars (“a cute income!”), which he would split with Keene.15 With that, on August 28, Mishima left for Puerto Rico.
This may be a good place to consider what Mishima did or tried to do in recasting the themes of classical nō plays in modern settings and thought. As Keene pointed out in the introduction to his translations, the practice is common—his examples are Cocteau’s Infernal Machine, O’Neil’s Mourning Becomes Electra, and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera—and it may not be “necessary to be acquainted with the original play in order to appreciate the new one.” Still, “a knowledge of the earlier work adds a dimension and permits us to measure the workings of a modern intelligence against a familiar background.”16 Here let us look at Mishima’s 1951 play The Damask Drum (Aya no tsuzumi), if only because a Japanese classical scholar tried to analyze what Mishima was trying to do with it.
The original Aya no tsuzumi, attributed to Zeami Motokiyo (ca. 1364–1443), like all nō plays, is short and simple.17 It tells of an old garden sweeper in a makeshift imperial palace who has a glimpse of a court lady and falls in love with her. The lady, hearing of this, avers, “Love knows no distinction between high and low,” and tells him to strike a drum she has hung on a katsura tree by a pond, saying that if he strikes it and she hears the sound, she will give him another glimpse of herself. Overjoyed, the old man strikes the drum and continues to do so, but there is no sound. He doesn’t know that the drum is made of twilled fabric. Driven to despair, he throws himself into the pond and kills himself.
The court lady, told of what happened to the old gardener, begins to be troubled by the lapping sound of waves in the pond that sounds like a drum. Wasn’t the drum she gave the old man supposed to make any sound? Then the old man appears as a vengeful ghost and forces her to beat the drum on the katsura tree. Fatigued and weakened, she throws herself into the pond. Having seen this, the old man turns into “an evil snake” and disappears into “the abyss of love.”
Mishima’s play also consists of two distinct scenes but is fairly long (most plays have to be long in comparison with nō plays, although this does not apply to the time required for nō staging), and it has more characters. The story, set in a modern world, unfolds in two offices on the third floors of two buildings facing each other across a street. One, belonging to a none-too-fashionable lawyer, is old, “a room of good intent,” “a room of truthfulness,” while the other, belonging to a haute couture dressmaker is “a room of evil design,” “a room of falsity.” The two offices are set to the right and left on the same stage.
The protagonist is an old janitor who works in the old office. The office has just closed for the day. The conversation between the janitor, named Iwakichi, and a young spunky secretary, named Kayoko, reveals that he saw three months ago a beautiful woman in the dressmaker’s room across the street—“in a golden fur coat,” whose hair is “as dark as the night sky”—and has since been in love with her. Furthermore, he’s been writing her a letter a day, with Kayoko as deliverer. Today’s is the hundredth.
In the dressmaker’s office, which opens for business just about the time the law office closes, appears a group of three: two young men, Toyama and Kaneko, and a teacher of Japanese dance, Fujima. Toyama is obviously a lover of the beautiful woman in question, for now identified as “the lady.” Kayoko delivers Iwakichi’s letter for the day. Kaneko accepts it. Soon the dressmaker, “Madame,” joins the group and reveals that she has been entrusted with every one of Iwakichi’s letters to “the lady,” one of her best customers, but has never shown any of them to her, using them instead to clean the comb for her five “wirehaired fox terriers.”
When “the lady,” Hanako, shows up, Kaneko hands her Iwakichi’s letter. When she opens and reads it, Toyama and Kaneko read aloud snatches from it and make fun of Iwakichi. Then Fujima thinks up a trick to play on him: throw a drum, one of his stage props, into Iwakichi’s room with a note telling him to beat it; if Hanako hears the sound through the city noise, she will fulfill his dream of kissing her once.
Hanako—who remains silent throughout the first half of the play—gives a nod to the ruse. They open the window, call out to Iwakichi across the street, and the old man, who has been lurking in his darkened office in the hopes of having a glimpse of Hanako, opens his window and receives the thrown drum. Reading the note, he hangs the drum on the potted katsura tree in his office and beats it but it doesn’t make any sound. Quickly finding out that the drum, made of cloth, is not meant to make any sound, he despairs and throws himself out of the window to his death. The group in the dressmaker’s office, chatting and laughing among themselves, is unaware of what has happened, until a store clerk bursts in to tell them the news of Iwakichi’s death.
The second part of the play consists of a conversation between Hanako and the Ghost of Iwakichi. It is midnight. Hanako comes in the dressmaker’s office with the keys she snitched from the Madame. Having broken away from a dinner party midway, she is in a short coat over an evening dress. As she begins to talk in a low voice, the Ghost of Iwakichi emerges from the window out of which he threw himself and gradually moves toward the dressmaker’s office. The window opens on its own. Hanako admits she has come drawn by him but tells him that death is “not proof enough of true love.” When he tells her he has no proof to show her, she responds: “Proofs are all over me. Women are filled with proofs of love. Filled with proofs of the kind that, once you pull them out, cease to be love.” The Ghost declares he will make “the drum of twilled woolen fabric” sound to demonstrate he’s still in love with her. She says, “Please do.”
The Ghost beats the drum and, surprise! it makes a sound “merrily.” Exulting, he
says, “It’s made a sound! It has! You’ve heard it, the sound of the drum, haven’t you?” But Hanako says, “with a shrewd smile,” that she has not. Bewildered, he beats and beats, but she says she doesn’t hear anything. Desperate, he decides to beat the drum as many times as the number of letters he wrote: one hundred. As the number grows, he grows weaker, even as she insists she can’t hear anything. When he finishes one hundred times, he, the Ghost, fades away. Toyama bursts in and, grabbing and shaking Hanako, tells her everyone has been worried about her. The play ends as Hanako dreamily says, “I would have heard it, if only he had beaten it one more time.”
Konishi Jin’ichi, who would go on to write a massive history of Japanese literature competitively with Keene—his in five volumes, Keene’s in four—contemplated The Damask Drum as a means of understanding the Mishima literature as a whole. The production he saw was the second one, in 1955, which incorporated obvious nō elements: nō masks, special vocalization, the way of walking called suriashi, “foot sliding,” and the fact that Hanako was played by the nō actor Kanze Shizuo, then twenty-four years old and later a living national treasure. But every character was dressed in modern dress—with Kanze in a bordeaux evening dress, shoulders bared. It had a string quartet in place of the traditional flute and drum accompaniment.
After explaining the western critical terms “theme,” “motif,” and “message,” Konishi concluded that whereas Zeami and Mishima pursue the same “motif” in their plays, they are completely different in “theme” and “message.” In sum, Mishima’s references to classical nō—and they are not limited to his “modern nō plays” but some of the novels as well—are merely “casual hoops” or else “invisible hoops” around his works, so that it is good if you notice them, but doesn’t do much harm if you don’t. It all depends on how deeply you wish to understand his “themes.”18