by Hiroaki Sato
Azusa laid out a careful plan: his son and Miss Shōda would casually meet at the Kabuki-za, then secretly repair to a small but prestigious Japanese restaurant on the Ginza that Azusa knew about through his bureaucratic connections. The meeting duly took place, but the matter did not go further. The Shōdas were in a delicate position. Just then the Imperial Household was making quiet inquiries. In fact, in November that year Crown Prince Akihito’s engagement to Shōda Michiko would be announced, with the marriage scheduled for April of the following year. This outcome would spawn the speculation among some Mishima readers a decade later that the heroine of Spring Snow was modeled after Her Highness Princess Michiko.7
Yuasa Atsuko came to the rescue. At the time, her daughter was a student at the Elementary Division of the Peers School, and she was in the same class as a son of Komatsu Shizuko, a sister-in-law of the renowned Japanese-style painter Sugiyama Yasushi. Shizuko, when she learned that Atsuko’s friend, Mishima Yukio, was looking for a bride, told her that her niece, Yōko, was a sophomore at another Christian institution, Japan Women’s University. She soon brought a photo taken by Akiyama Shōtaro, then famous for his photographs of women that adorned the covers of weekly magazines.
That was on March 23, and Mishima liked what he saw: the photo showed a charming woman with a perfectly round, lovely face. That day, in the “diary” he had begun in the April issue of Shinchō Mishima noted that his long novel finally started moving forward.
Here some backtracking is needed.
Even while in New York, Mishima had kept up a considerable presence in Japanese theater and literature. A month after he arrived in New York his play The Morning Azalea (Asa no tsutsuji) was staged in Tokyo. Sending a program note for it, he wrote: “Coming to America, you are surprised to see among hotels and houses of the wealthy so many buildings that are in Victorian style, of nineteenth-century taste. Those who put themselves forward as modern do not simply call them Victorian style but ugly Victorian style. In the Japanese eye, though, it symbolizes old Europe and makes us feel most nostalgic about it, and it is not at all ugly. The Morning Azalea is that kind of Victorian-style drama. It is a drama overflowing with an old-fashioned, nineteenth-century taste.”8
Indeed it is. A miniature of The Rokumeikan, the play describes an overnight dance party at a viscount’s mansion in 1927, during which, instead of a fratricidal attempt, the news of the collapse of the bank catering to the peerage arrives. The kabuki actor Nakamura Utaemon played the lead role and the actress Nagaoka Teruko directed it.
September saw the publication of a limited edition of Virtue Falters and its film version was released in late October. October also saw the Bungaku-za revive The Rokumeikan; the troupe would tour the country with the play for more than a year, visiting a total of thirty-five cities. And in November Shinchōsha started the publication of “selected writings of Mishima Yukio” in nineteen volumes—only three years after it put out his “selected writings” in six volumes. Each volume came with a photo of the author and the author’s own commentary, among other paraphernalia.
Back in Japan, in mid-February Mishima wrote another play for the Bungaku-za, The Rose and the Pirate, which he explained was inspired by a production of The Sleeping Beauty by the Royal Ballet he saw in New York, in particular its grand divertissement. He had this to say on the writing of the play in the “diary”:
Once you start writing a piece, you find all the plans you had laid out before doing so betrayed one after another irresistibly—this is something a writer experiences all the time, and I am not surprised by it in the least. But this time, this rule was brought home to me with unusual clarity. I say this because during my idle days and months in New York I was determined not to write a single manuscript, so I single-mindedly made plans for this drama in my head, giving thorough thought to its structure, fully working out the devices in the details, so that I was supposed to be able to write it according to plan, with great ease.
Nonetheless, the moment I started writing it, I began to realize that the plan that had seemed so precise was ramshackle with many cracks, with the upshot that I had to redo everything except for the main theme. . . .
The day before yesterday I told Mr. Fukuda Tsuneari about this, and he responded, with his usual concision, “Unless you start writing it, the perspective doesn’t open up.” Perspective is a skillful choice of word.9
While in New York Mishima may have been determined not to write a single manuscript, but there was at least another piece of writing he had begun to plot: the “long novel” mentioned above. Yoshida Mitsuru remembered Mishima telling him about a lengthy story he planned to write as soon as he went back to Japan, which would be about “five young people.” Each time the two went into a restaurant or a coffee shop, he would pull a notebook out of his briefcase and take careful notes on the details of the place: “the darkness of the room, doors, walls, chairs, tableware, waiters, guests, everything.” Asked why he was doing that, he said the story he had in mind would have scenes in New York.10
So, in the March 10 entry of The Nude and the Costume he noted: “Fine. Warmth in the afternoon honeylike. / Thinking every day of starting to write a full-length kakioroshi novel, Kyōko’s House, I’m too afraid to pull myself together to do it. For a one thousand-page product, explorations in the brain alone serve no purpose.” Kakioroshi, which simply means “just written,” refers, when applied to novels and such, to a writing of substantial length that is not serialized but published upon completion. Mishima explained why he had chosen this approach when he finished the novel toward the end of June 1959: “It was my wish for some time to write a long kakioroshi novel, which comes from my Western addiction. If it is customary for Western writers to turn out one novel every two or three years, it can’t be that Japanese writers, who are financially more blessed, cannot do the same. In fact, try it and you can do it.”
As it turned out, Kyōko’s House was fated not to be a model kakioroshi. When the Hachi no Ki group decided to publish their own members-only quarterly, Koe, in September 1958,11 he placed the first two chapters in its inaugural issue. “One difficulty no novelists of the West expect is the mental burden under which Japanese writers must do such work while living in the midst of the incessant hurly-burly of Japanese journalism,” he went on to say. “This spiritual burden made me exaggerate my hardship and unnecessarily stiffened my resolve. Any Western novelist may have done it as if it was just the work of making a small pond in his garden with his own hands, but I often had the impression that I was engaged in constructing a dam.”
This observation was certainly true of Mishima. He was journalistically among the most provocative and prolific writers, and that was not just because of his ability to turn out, in quick succession, greatly different kinds of fiction and essays, long and short. It was also because of his ability to inhabit the disparate worlds of fiction, criticism, theater, film, and sports with equal ease and energy. One is even tempted to add another ability of his—to have his presence felt in Japan while staying overseas for months on end. No journalist worth his salt could ignore him for long.
Mishima’s marriage proceeded in parallel to Shizue’s illness.
Shizue, who with the onset of menopause had been complaining for some time about the discomfort she felt around her neck, finally went to see a surgeon through a relative’s introduction. The doctor said it might be a malignant tumor and urged her to see a cancer specialist as soon as possible. Two days later Mishima took her to one by taxi. At first the oncologist had a pleasant smile on his face, as is customary, but upon examining her neck his expression changed, which Mishima did not miss. The doctor called in his intern and, as the two carefully reexamined her neck and throat, he said, “Gefährlich.” Shizue did not know German but Mishima did; the word meant “dangerous.”
After the examination, the doctor asked Shizue to leave the room, telling Mishima to stay, and, as soon as she left, he came to the point at once: he thought she had advanced c
ancer and had only several months to live. In trying to convey the news to Azusa’s niece by phone, Mishima could not stop sobbing, in the end crying loudly.
Shizue was taken to the University of Tokyo Hospital, where after further examinations it was decided she needed hospitalization. The day before the hospitalization, Mishima took her to a Chinese restaurant, then to the New York City Ballet, which was visiting Japan then. “I have never seen such a mysterious ballet,” Mishima recollected half a year later. “There was neither sound nor color, only human beings leaping up and down like shadows.”12
That was in early April. On April 13, Mishima met Sugiyama Yōko at Ketel, with Atsuko serving as the young woman’s chaperon. The three then repaired to Hamasaku, one of the famous Japanese restaurants on the Ginza, and, after dinner, to a nightclub. As he danced with Yōko, he noticed, he told Atsuko later, she wasn’t “fluid” in her movements, a sign that she hadn’t “played around” much. Afterward he thanked Atsuko and offered to send Yōko home by taxi. Atsuko then knew the meeting was a success. The following morning Mishima telephoned her and said, “She is very good.” After that the marriage process moved forward like clockwork.
On April 21 he met Yōko for the second time, again with Atsuko accompanying her. First, the three of them saw Stage Struck, Sydney Lumet’s film with Susan Strasberg and Henry Fonda (which gave Mishima an opportunity to savor the still-fresh memories of New York, including staring at Fonda at FAO Schwarz and meeting Strasberg’s father at the Actors Studio13), then went to the restaurant George’s, before going to a nightclub in Aoyama. The following day he went to a barber and had a crewcut.
On April 30 Atsuko and Komatsu Shizuko came to visit the Hiraokas at their Midori-ga-Oka house and discussed the overall schedule. The following day Shizue underwent surgery. It was found that her tumor was not malignant. At the news Mishima burst out crying. On May 5 Mishima, along with his father, invited Mr. and Mrs. Sugiyama, their daughter Yōko, as well as Yuasa Atsuko and Komatsu Shizuko, to a Chinese restaurant, and set the wedding date. During the dinner Mishima announced, in a manner that struck Atsuko as a bit too businesslike: “I’ve just started a long novel of one thousand pages. Once this work gets on track, I’ll have no time for marriage and such. I would hope to settle this matter before that occurs.”
On May 9, dowries were exchanged between the Hiraoka and Sugiyama families, as noted earlier. In the entry in his “diary” that day, he indulged in a lengthy, overtly literary justification of his decision to marry.
“To align myself with the customs and morals of this society and live more or less in it while continuing a work that puts all customs and morals in doubt is an extremely obvious logical contradiction,” he wrote. “I have perhaps spent many more years than anyone learning gradually the wisdom of life that you must first bind yourself up in order to be truly free. Just as the leisurely swimmer rids his entire body of tension and lets himself float in a most relaxed fashion, I ought to acquire the art of letting myself float in the sea of contradictions, or so I realized.”
“The famous passage in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or had charmed me for a long time,” he went on: “‘Marry and you will regret it. Do not marry and you will also regret it’”—the words perhaps from Diasalmata. “I also remembered well the episode that Flaubert, while taking a walk in a park late in his life, saw a family with a perambulator and said, ‘I could have had a life like that.’”
After carrying on in similar vein awhile longer, Mishima stepped into a convoluted argument as he sometimes did:
It isn’t that a man cannot choose, but it is the free will that ultimately knows the impossibility of choice; it is for this reason that the free will that refuses to affirm the fact that there is only one life can resist fate. . . . And an action is a bastard child who is born between fate and the free will, and a man, in truth, can never know if his action is a result of an incitement of fate or an error committed by the free will. In the end it seems to me that to deal with yourself as you do in floating your body in the sea is a mark of the greatest respect you can pay your life. . . . After thinking things like these I have decided to marry.
The question is: Were the Sugiyamas unaware of Mishima’s homosexuality or at least his open or public association with it? The answer: They were of course aware of it. As the marital prospect quickly advanced, Sugiyama Yasushi at one point is said to have asked Azusa: “There’s rumor that Mr. Mishima is homosexual. Is that true?” Azusa was upset and replied angrily: “There’s no such fact. My son has described that world as his literary topic and that has spawned misunderstandings.”
But then he committed a slip of the tongue. “You see, sir, it’s to deny such rumor that my son wants to get married as soon as possible, and that’s his intent.” That almost wrecked the marriage; Sugiyama wanted to annul the proposal. But his daughter Yōko strongly objected to the annulment. Why? The guess may well be right: She, who was still in college, wanted to marry Mishima the famous man, if not the man himself.14
The Honeymooners
On June 1, Hiraoka Kimitake and Sugiyama Yōko were wed at Meiji Memorial Hall, a detachment of Meiji Shrine. Mr. and Mrs. Kawabata Yasunari served as official matchmakers. The reception was held at International House, a Western-style hotel equipped with a Japanese garden intended for visiting foreigners. For the format Mishima chose a cocktail party, something few Japanese held in those days personally, especially for a wedding reception. The layout of International House allowed guests to freely saunter out of the reception area into the garden and come back in. After building his own house, Mishima would throw a cocktail party from time to time, with a professional bartender, himself formally attired in tuxedo.
For the master of ceremony, Mishima turned to Roy James, who had become Yuasa Atsuko’s live-in companion toward the end of the preceding year. Roy, originally one of the regulars of her house salon, had begun to live in her house. When Atsuko met him and added him to her salon, he was a struggling gaijin serving as an emcee at Nichigeki Music Hall and doing other odd jobs. After she came to know him, she found he had an unusual background. Despite his English name and despite his—to the Japanese—unmistakably “Western” appearance of blond hair and blue eyes, he was Turkish. His father was a lieutenant of the Turkish Army that fought the Soviets in Siberia and was defeated, and who had come to Japan via Korea. Living as he did close to a Turkish school as a boy,15 Mishima likely knew that the existence of Turks in his city was a result of Japan’s pre-defeat foreign policy extending to the land of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.16
Roy’s father was a Muslim cleric and chose Ramadan, the name of the holiest of months in the Islamic calendar, for his son, Abdul Hannan Safa, who was born in Keiō University Hospital, in 1929. Nicknamed “Hannan Boy,” he grew up as the darling of neighborhood mothers, in Shitamachi, an enclave for the poor, as opposed to Yamanote, an enclave for the upper class, where Atsuko grew up.
Toward the end of the Second World War, as Turkey severed its relations with Germany and declared war against it and Japan, Abdul Hannan became an enemy alien, was rounded up for hard labor, and almost died. In the confusion of the last phase of the war, not many Japanese knew, as Atsuko certainly did not, that Turkey had become an enemy country and, in consequence, one of the victorious nations with Japan’s defeat. Atsuko’s husband at the time, Shun, perhaps because he found himself in a not altogether comfortable position as an American Nisei working in a defeated Japan, was particularly kind and considerate to Roy. It was he who suggested that he live in the Yuasa household.
Initially with Mishima’s help, Roy would start getting some real work and went on to become a highly successful emcee, ranked as the most popular TV emcee for sixteen consecutive years. With his wit and vast and exact memory, he was also popular among those holding corporate meetings.
The reception over, the newlyweds at once left on a two-week honeymoon. They went west. After staying in Odawara overnight, they went to Hakone, where Mishima saw woodblock
prints from early Meiji at a shop in front of the hotel and sent them off to James Merrill and James McGregor as gifts. Their next stop was the hot-spring town of Atami. Then they traveled to Kyoto by dome car. On the train Mishima overheard a passenger say, “In Hakone yesterday I met the Prime Minister and had a long conversation with him about the cabinet he is forming.” At that moment, indeed, Kishi Nobusuke was trying to work out his second cabinet, which he would announce on June 12, only to fall, two years later, following the greatest antigovernment movement in modern Japan.
In the ancient capital they visited the Daiei Studio to see the movie of The Golden Pavilion in the making. The scene they saw being filmed was where Ichikawa Raizō, playing the protagonist, was severely criticized by his friend, played by Nakadai Tatsuya. With the temple itself objecting, the title had been changed to Conflagration (Enjō). The film, which Ichikawa Kon directed, went on to win several prizes, including one at the Venice International Film Festival. The couple also went to see Utaemon perform at the Minami-za. In Osaka, Mishima bought two neckties made of Tatsumura fabric and sent them to Christopher Isherwood.
“In the evening, Roy James, who served as master of ceremony at our wedding reception and who happened to be in the area for work, came to visit,” Mishima wrote in the June 10 entry of his “diary.” “In order to launch myself as a jazz singer in the future, Roy, I’d say, is going to be an important friend.” One of the things Mishima did during the trip was to take Yōko to nightclubs and cabarets. That night it was Arrow, a “new, chic club with a spacious garden.” It was its opening night and Roy had served as emcee.