by Hiroaki Sato
West Side Story: book by Arthur Laurents; music by Leonard Bernstein; lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; choreography by Jerome Robbins. The only “fresh” musical Mishima was able to see that season, and he could do so only because his CBS TV friend, which is to say, Keith Botsford, acquired a ticket for him. He found Robbins’ power over the production excessive and, though he thought the fight scenes impressive, the romantic scenes between the modern Romeo and Juliet were too conventional and sugary.
Jamaica: book and lyrics by E. Y. Harburg; music by Harold Arlen. The story line may be too trashy for words but a great success as a sheer entertainment, in Mishima’s opinion. Also closest to Nichigeki shows in Japan, Mishima thought. The main attraction was the superb Lena Horne, who, despite her movie successes, had been expunged from Hollywood because she married a white director. “New York is the most advanced city in racial matters, and here there is practically no racial prejudice,” Mishima noted. “Still Josephine Baker has bitter memories of having been rejected by first-class hotels and first-class restaurants.” Ricardo Montalbán, who played the seamstress Horne’s fisherman lover, played a kabuki actor in Marlon Brando’s movie Sayonara, released not long before. Equally impressed by the black dancers who filled the stage, Mishima regretted he would not be able to use them on the Japanese stage.
The Threepenny Opera: music by Kurt Weill. One of the Off-Broadway shows Mishima saw, at Theatre de Lys (today’s Lucille Lortel Theatre). “The actors here are not at all famous,” Mishima wrote, “but they had a complete mastery in acting and I thoroughly enjoyed the play.” This production had started two years earlier and would run another five years.22
One thing that unconditionally enthralled Mishima was the New York City Ballet. Its twentieth New York season opened on November 19, and Mishima saw all the performances he could. The ones he left notes on were: The Cage (music by Stravinsky; choreography by Jerome Robbins); Apollo (music by Stravinsky; choreography by George Balanchine); L’Apre-midi d’un faune (music by Debussy; choreography by Jerome Robbins); and Western Symphony (music by Hershy Kay; choreography by George Balanchine).
The worst off-Broadway show or the worst show of any kind was a production of Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas, which he saw on December 19, at the Royal Playhouse, on East 4th Street. The drafty, dingy, musty theater had only about twenty people in the audience, with Mishima apparently the only one who paid for the $1.70 ticket. The sets and costumes were all worn-out.
One actor “came onstage with a book in hand and frequently looked at it as he walked about the stage,” Mishima wrote, “so I thought that was an odd prop. It turned out he was reading from a script. He was perhaps a last-minute understudy.” Nine years later he would produce the play himself despite severe economic constraints of the small theatre troupe with which he was involved. The translation was one he “rhetorically adapted.” By then he had seen the Comédie-Française production of the great “theatrical drama” that had much impressed him with its “somber, gorgeous sets and costumes as if Velasquez’ paintings had started to move.”23
In early November, Hiraizumi (née Kajima) Mieko invited Mishima to her apartment. Her husband, Wataru, was a son of the historian Hiraizumi Kiyoshi, best known as an ardent proponent of kōkoku shikan, which holds the Tennō to be the raison d’être of Japanese history. Hiraizumi Kiyoshi resigned his post as professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo on the day Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender, but continued to proselytize his view. Wataru, unlike his two older brothers who became historians, entered the foreign service in 1952 and was assigned to New York as Japan was admitted to the United Nations, in December 1956. He went on to become a member of the Diet—conservative, as may be expected—and later served as chairman of the Kajima Peace Institute, which his father-in-law Morinosuke created, originally as a cultural institute, in 1957, to satisfy his bookish inclinations.
Wataru remained a good friend of Mishima’s. Mieko well remembered Mishima’s visit to their Manhattan apartment: he stayed in one room for some time, intently looking out the window and taking notes as dusk fell. She would see some of the descriptions incorporated into Kyōko’s House. In the story her name is Sugimoto Fujiko, that of her husband, an elite employee of a large trading company, Seiichirō, and their apartment is on 56th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues:
Even though buildings of the same height stood shoulder to shoulder like the tines of a comb on the street side, the view of what formed the interior yard for the block presented something different: low roofs, roof gardens, and the balconies sticking widely out created highs and lows; and, beyond them, you could sometimes see the rear windows of old houses made of red bricks. As a matter of fact, right below the window of this third-floor apartment was a narrow, vacant roof garden stretching out. Oddly, though, there was no entry to or exit from it except the window. Seiichirō and Fujiko kept a stack of firewood for the fireplace right outside the window.
On the roof garden, in the splashing rain, were a couple of pots in which the flowers were so completely dead you couldn’t tell what they originally were, along with a broken, misshapen wicker chair. There was no earth you could see but several tall plane trees rose from among the eaves. November had just begun, but their broad, yellow leaves had mostly fallen, plastering the concrete floor of the roof garden and the wicker chair like advertising leaflets. . . .
About the time he moved to the Van Rensselaer Hotel, Mishima still assumed that Botsford and Co.’s schedule was on track. In an interview published in the daily Tokyo Shinbun, on December 2, he stated that the play would start at the Actors Playhouse, in the West Village, in January and last for about a month. The theater has only about one hundred fifty seats and, though that will be good from the perspective of “a close merger between actors and audience,” the income will naturally be small. He did not plan to move it to “a large Broadway theater,” he said, obviously tongue-in-cheek, even if it proved to be a smash hit.
In a separate UP dispatch, asked when he planned to return to Japan, Mishima was quoted as saying he would pack up and flee if the New York Times gave a foul review.24 Not long afterward, responding to a request for an essay by the daily Yomiuri Shinbun, he maintained the same outlook. He spoke of his expectations, as he had “never imagined in Tokyo,” to “stay on in New York to welcome the New Year.” Saying he could openly speak ill of them because his “merry, good” friends “couldn’t possibly read a newspaper in Japanese,” he wrote: “. . . the producer Keith is the leader of a boy gang, the other producer Cheese a lazybones, the manager Dan a shapeless Danny Kaye, the director Jimmy Greek-born and a Lotus-Sutra bonze, and the stage designer Hugh a carefree guy; add to these Keith’s beautiful wife Ann (who is doing the costume design), and you might have a fine Italian operetta troupe.”25 By the time these words saw print, on January 3, 1958, he had fled New York.
The quick unraveling, from Mishima’s perspective, started on December 14, when he went to a party at the Japan Society, then on 49th Street between Fifth and Madison, next to Saks Fifth Avenue, and had a surprise encounter. Among those gathered, mostly Japanese, someone said, introducing him to someone else: “This is the famous Mr. Mishima Yukio.” Mishima turned to look; it was Kuniko. The two almost dropped their champagne glasses. Mishima said, in his baritone, “My name is Mishima.” Kuniko, with her husband at her side, managed only, “How long are you going to stay here?” In the course of the evening she once heard him give his famous laugh. She had come, with her two children, to live in New York in the summer of the previous year to accompany her husband, an employee of Japan’s only bank permitted to handle foreign currencies in those days: the Bank of Tokyo.
In those days, and until much later, it was a rare Japanese corporate or government employee who had the luxury of taking his wife, let alone his children, to an overseas post. Perfectly mindful of this, Mishima contrived to describe Fujiko, in his story, as a daughter of an enormously rich man—as Mieko actually was—who was able to send
her to New York independently of her husband. Something similar probably was the case with Kuniko.
The Japan Society party was “a torture” to Mishima, and not just because of his encounter with Kuniko. Many of the Japanese gathered there had heard about his play that was going to be produced in New York and wanted to know when that was going to happen. Their curiosity was only to be expected; it was something that had never happened before. Two days later, on December 16, Mishima, no longer able to contain himself, telephoned the director, Jimmy. “Our negotiations with a couple of well-known actresses all fell through,” the director said. He was in unusually low spirits. “Unless we can find one by the end of this week, we won’t be able to do the play as planned.” “December 16th was the worst day,” Mishima wrote.
The next evening he called Shults, easier of the two producers to talk to, and arranged to meet him the following day. The foundation from which additional funds were sought had also turned down the application, Shults explained when they met. The reason was the explosion of the first US satellite, Vanguard. Already disheartened by the Soviet Union’s spectacular success with Sputnik I, on October 4, followed by the equal success of Sputnik II, on November 3, all Americans turned “cautious” at the ridiculous American failure on December 6.
It isn’t clear whether the money-giving foundations reacted that fast, for the chain of events occurred in just two months. But it certainly was a “blow to US prestige,” as the New York Times put it. The fall of the stock of Martin Company, the manufacturer of Vanguard rockets, was so precipitous that the New York Stock Exchange had to halt its trading. Moreover, Shults said, there was a string of contretemps with actresses.
That night Mishima could not sleep. The following day he made phone calls to change and make reservations—change the flight back to Japan via Europe to first class and make reservations with the very best hotels in Europe. “I could no longer stand breakfast in a paper bag,” he wrote. On Christmas Day he wrote a long letter to Tennessee Williams expressing sadness at being unable to see his own play produced in New York. On New Year’s Eve he flew out of New York to Spain, “welcoming the New Year” in Madrid. He left Rome on January 8, and arrived back in Tokyo on January 10, 1958.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Marriage
I am paying attention to my health so that I may live until I am 150 years old.
—Self-portraits at eighteen and thirty-four
“Once, it was in America, you see, I tried to live for six months all alone,” Mishima told Kojima Chikako nearly a dozen years after the fact. “From that experience, I know very well, I felt it painfully, a human being can’t live all by himself.” Kojima was an editor of Shinchō assigned to Mishima beginning with The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and thus fated to go to Mishima’s house on the morning of the day of his death—to receive the last installment of the tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility.
Mishima told Kojima about his six-month stay in America on June 24, 1968, when she went to receive the last installment of Part II of the tetralogy, Runaway Horse. She remembered the remark because the seeming acceptance of a normal marriage it suggested contrasted markedly with his obvious excitement over the ending of the story he had just completed: the young terrorist’s death by disembowelment.1
It is not clear when Mishima, who at one time or another had vowed not to marry until forty, changed his mind. The day his marriage became formal with an exchange of dowries, on May 9, 1958, he wrote in the diary-format criticism The Nude and the Costume he started in Shinchō, “I think it was three years ago that the idea of ‘marriage’ gradually began to ripen in my head.”2 Perhaps. As he said to Kojima, though, it may well have been during his stay in New York that he made a firm decision, for there was one person who heard him make the vow in that city: Yoshida Mitsuru, at the time stationed there as an official of the Bank of Japan.
Mishima had met Yoshida on December 21 that year and spent the entire day with him. One thing that surprised Yoshida during the daylong excursion—and there were several memorable things—was Mishima’s eagerness to talk about his marriage plans. He appeared quite serious even as he “joked” that no young girl from a good solid family would marry a writer like himself. Still, he discussed two basic “conditions” for the woman willing to marry him.
First of all, she should not show any overt interest in what her husband writes. The ideal would be someone who had never read a single novel of his. The second one was the opposite: she nevertheless must always keep in mind that her husband is a writer. She should not fool around or snooze away thoughtlessly while he is struggling to write. After discussing these and other details, Mishima announced he’d be married next year.
Yoshida, well known for his epic Requiem for Battleship Yamato (Senkan Yamato no saigo), was an ensign who survived the sinking of Japan’s largest battleship. He wrote its first draft in a single night after Japan’s defeat. The Occupation censored it.3 Mishima, who had been acquainted with Yoshida since about the time he was completing his law studies at the University of Tokyo, in 1947, became one of the first to read the manuscript. When it was published, in 1952, he composed a brief but heartfelt tribute.
Comparing the only large-scale naval suicide sortie in world history with the Battle of Thermopylae, Mishima wrote: “Be it blind faith or primitive religion, the battleship Yamato was a symbol of one old virtue, one great moral imperative, by which a man could die. Its destruction was the death of a religion. Confronted with its death, the warriors were placed under the equal condition of life and within the order of a perfect imperative, and their youth unexpectedly faced an ‘absolute.’ You cannot deny that beauty.”4
Yoshida kept a close account of that December day in his diary. When he arrived at Mishima’s hotel, Mishima asked him to wait while he took care of some business over the phone. Apparently learning that the production of his play was postponed, Mishima, without rancor, quickly arranged flights and such for leaving New York. It was a sparkling Saturday. So the two writers took the train up the Hudson to Tarrytown to visit Washington Irving’s manor, Sunnyside. At one point Mishima said: “I’m going to build a house sooner or later, but I wonder if it’s going to be open to the public like this after I die?”5
Other than the marriage plans, one other thing surprised Yoshida that day: Mishima’s bitterness about the “ineradicable” superiority complex he said the Americans have over the Japanese. (In his published or public accounts of his associations with Americans, he gives nary a hint that he witnessed that complex.) Yoshida’s own conclusion after his two-year stay in the United States was that “almost no social life was possible separate from racial differences in this country” but that, when it came to the Japanese, their mortal enemy till a dozen years earlier, the Americans were well-mannered enough “to accept them with a smile and tolerance lest vivid memories of the ferocious battles be reawakened.”
By late in the evening Mishima was visibly tired, but then he said, “Let’s go to a bar I save for special occasions.” The moment he said so, he had a second wind. Somehow Yoshida guessed what kind of bar it would be, and he was right. It was one for homosexuals, a tiny hole-in-the-wall joint in the West Village. What Yoshida didn’t know was that it was the same one to which Donald Richie had taken Mishima five years earlier. It was called Mary’s.6
Arranged Marriage by Choice
Once told of his son’s desire to be married, Azusa moved quickly. He had nagged his son about his bachelorhood. Mishima, after all, was, by tradition, the one responsible for the Hiraoka household, and he couldn’t stay unmarried forever. Besides, his younger brother, Chiyuki, had been married for three years now. Shizue, who looked tired out from taking care of her hospitalized husband—he was laid up in the University of Tokyo Hospital in November—was happy to hear the news, too. Azusa began looking for candidates as though he was given a thrilling assignment.
The first thing Azusa did was to make a “public announcement” through the alumni associ
ation of the Peers School, Ōyūkai, the Society of Cherry-Blossom Friends. A number of résumés with photographs soon began to arrive. Azusa, the picky type, made the first selection. Mishima then narrowed it.
At last, one photograph caught Mishima’s attention. She was a graduate of the Peers School. Shizue probed the matter through her friends in the upper-class society and learned that Mayuzumi Toshirō knew her. The young woman had become acquainted with him as she visited him backstage with her musician friend. Both Azusa and Shizue asked him for help. Mayuzumi soon learned that the woman wasn’t at all interested in meeting Mishima for a possible marriage. But Mishima insisted and Mayuzumi agreed to arrange for him an “accidental” meeting with her at Ketel, himself escorting her. Mishima was charmed, took her to a nightclub and danced, but she still wasn’t interested.
Famous women’s colleges and universities were also explored, among them the University of the Sacred Heart. Founded in 1914 as a higher school for Christian education for women, the Sacred Heart had become, in 1948, the first women’s university during the postwar educational reform. It was a magnet for daughters of the higher echelon of Japanese society. As it happened, before the Hiraokas started making bridal inquiries, the university had routinely recommended Shōda Michiko “with confidence.”
Michiko’s father was president of Nisshin Seifun, a large wheatpowder manufacturer and for many years known overseas as the producer of “cup noodles.” That was credential enough, but she was unusually good-looking and an outstanding student as well. She was the president—the title in English—of the student body, was studying English conversation, and was active in a variety of sports, especially ten-nis. (Tennis in those days was a sport only the well-to-do could afford. That’s why the “tennis match” between the Crown Prince and a daughter of a very rich man became such a glamorous affair to the Japanese. Now, having tennis courts appears to be routine in high schools and such in Japan. Times change.)