by Hiroaki Sato
The next day the couple took a coastal liner to Beppu, the hot-spring town in Kyushu. Just before the ship reached Kobe, around six in the evening, Mishima took a bath—“out of the whimsical desire to take a bath aboard a ship,” a motive which, Mishima wrote in his “diary” that day, was “absurd.” Nonetheless it led him to a chain of thought:
. . . such absurd motives lurk everywhere in life, and you can’t say none can form a trigger of historical events such as the assassination of Marat. If there were utterly motiveless acts, it would become easy to grasp the purity of desire, but modern life brims with multifarious motives; as a result, the actual presence of desire has become unclear. Motiveless crimes are no more than the products of fantasy in modern times, and the more motiveless the crime seems, the more irrational, the more nonsensical the motive that prompts it may be. As I wrote The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which was an investigation of the motive of a crime, even a shallow, silly idea of “beauty” could be enough of a motive for a crime of arson on a national treasure. Meanwhile, if you take another viewpoint, to live through modern times, it is possible to believe in a single silly, shallow idea and amplify it until it becomes the fundamental motive of life itself. That’s what Hitler did. But by setting up such a motive, directionality is lost, so that one mistake you make in steering, and you can turn it into a motive for death, a motive for suicide.
The following morning the couple arrived in Beppu and went directly from the port to Mt. Takasaki, a hill nearby famous as a refuge for monkeys. At the hotel, Mishima had no time for a nap; he was beset with requests for autographs and pithy writings on shikishi, blank decorative paper boards made for that purpose. In the evening, an NHK reporter came to interview him.
Mishima’s marriage, in fact, was such a journalistic event that he was subjected to interviews and asked to contribute articles once it happened. In one of the interviews, he explained the reasons for one of his conditions: his preference for a “round face”—that is, the kind of face his brand-new wife had. “I prefer a round face because mine is elongated,” he told the interviewer. “If both of us have elongated faces, like my parents do, it won’t be good eugenically. That will produce a child like me. If someone with an elongated face comes to me as my wife on top of that, it will produce someone like a horse with a top hat.”17 As far as that sort of thing goes, he’d like someone shorter than he, he said, because, as his American biographer John Nathan put it, “Mishima was a small man, though he never gave that impression.”18
After dinner the two went out to town and saw the movie All About Marriage (Kekkon no subete), which concluded by extolling arranged marriage. The fast-paced director Okamoto Kihachi’s debut work, it featured the popular singer-actress Yukimura Izumi playing the lead and Nakadai Tatsuya “an ordinary man” she finally decides to marry. Mishima found it “very good.” Close to midnight, the two went to a cabaret called Silver. There a striptease dancer recognized Mishima, so the whole house welcomed the newlyweds.
The next evening he heard that a local movie theater was showing Virtue Falters, so after dinner he and Yōko went to see it: “I was surprised that it was dumber than I’d ever imagined. I can’t think of any film that could be stupider than this. Besides, I don’t know who spread the rumor, but when the movie was over and we came out, there was a crowd at the entrance; we’d gone to see a movie but they had come to watch us.”
The next day, on June 14, they took a “hot-spring” train to Hakata. A man who said he was a plainclothesman and a fan of Mishima’s work asked him for an autograph and gave him a bottle of beer as a token of gratitude. But his expression of gratitude didn’t stop there. At each station he would stick his head out of the window and loudly announce the identity of the man he was with. Crowds would gather and look in. Many offered comments. One of them said loudly enough so the Mishimas could hear: “With all of us watching them like this, they must be embarrassed.”
In Hakata, they saw a US war film featuring Robert Mitchum and Curd Yürgens, The Enemy Below. On June 15 they took a flight from Fukuoka back to Tokyo, the first air flight for Yōko.
Young Friends
The marriage brought some cheer to the Hiraoka household in Midoriga-Oka. For one thing, Mishima started to go out more often with some of the young members of the neighborhood association. Remnants of the Tokugawa Period, when smallest administrative units were created and made responsible for the actions of the residents, neighborhood associations continue to play a role in matters such as fire and burglary prevention, upkeep of sanitary standards, neighborhood beautification, making festival arrangements, and even dispute resolution. Among the men Mishima often spent time with were Matsumura Motomi, heir of a sushi restaurant whom he came to know at the bodybuilding gym, and Tsukada Keiichirō, who ran a café.
One day, at Mishima’s request, they took him to a ghost house set up in Tamagawa Park. In the entry of his “diary” for July 10, he wrote: “Night: With friends in Jiyū-ga-Oka as my guides, I went to the Ghost Festival in Tamagawa Park. It was a ghost festival that wasn’t scary at all. I pulled the giant rubber snake afloat in midair, and the stagehand who was manipulating it near the ceiling barked at me, ‘You, fucking bastard!’ I wanted to use a scene from the festival in Chapter 3 of Kyōko’s House, but the experience doesn’t seem to provide good material.”
Matsumura and Tsukada recalled the incident somewhat differently. The rubber snake, large mouth open, tried to swallow the three, fully expecting them to flee. But Mishima was clumsy and got entangled in the contraption, almost pulling the whole thing down. The stagehand became angry and subjected Mishima to considerable tongue-lashing. Finally freed, the three came outside. Mishima spotted a group of hoods idling. Apparently having heard that Matsumura was a good street fighter, he urged him to fight them. He didn’t seem to know you couldn’t just start fighting anyone without provocation. Matsumura and Tsukada fondly recalled how their friend loved to look like a hood, though—with a crewcut and in a black leather jacket.
In Chapter 3 of Kyōko’s House, two of the four main male characters, Natsuo the painter and Shunsuke the boxer, with Shunsuke’s mother, visit a spot near the park by the Tama River late one summer afternoon. But that they do after visiting Tama Cemetery to offer prayers to Shunsuke’s brother who was killed in the Solomon Islands, in 1942. There is no mention of a ghost festival.
The two young friends remembered a few other things from that evening. After the ghost festival they decided to visit Mishima’s house, which was not very far. On the way was a railway crossing. The signal was flashing and ringing but there was no train in sight just yet, so the two crossed. Mishima did not until the train came and went. The two asked him why. His reply: “I’m not that cheap.” Arriving at his house, they found Yōko listening to a record. After a while Tsukada asked her to dance and she agreed. But no sooner had they started to dance than Mishima came between them and stopped them.
The “diary” entry for that day ends: “In his journals, Gide wrote on a piece he was working on, ‘Today too I was immersed in moving this large lump just a little forward.’ When you are involved in a long novel for a considerable length of time, you marvel how appropriate his expression was.”
A Bad Guy’s House
That summer Yōko became pregnant. About the same time Mishima decided to build a house, but it wasn’t until October 13 that he signed a contract. Satō Ryōichi, vice president of Mishima’s principal publisher, Shinchōsha, knew Hokonohara Yasuo, an architect on the staff of the design section of Shimizu Corporation, one of Japan’s largest construction companies, and he arranged to have the architect and the novelist meet in his office. Hokonohara was also an abstract painter—what the Japanese call a painter of “modern art”—who was young but already known as a prickly, sometimes irascible character. Legend had it that once he barked at the head of his section over a design he found unacceptable, “Resign, sir! Resign from this company right now!” Coming from a young subordinate who, b
esides, flaunted long hair like an out-of-date art student, was of “a thin type both in muscle and bone,” and wore a jacket of his own design with “mysteriously wide lapels” and “a dated Bohemian tie,” this impetuous outburst may have startled the section chief but won him popularity among his colleagues.
When Mishima explained in detail the kind of house he had in mind during their first encounter in Satō’s office, Hokonohara was mightily put out. “Mr. Mishima was one client who imposed on you, the designer,” he wrote, “his quirks or preferences, or shall I call them the stink you couldn’t possibly stand, anyway strong quirks, and yet gave you no solutions. [He wanted the house to be] Victorian Colonial style. . . . So I asked him bluntly, ‘You mean the sort of house you often see in Westerns that some nouveau riche, a bad guy with a Colman mustache, inhabits.’ To this, what d’you know, his instant riposte was, ‘Yes, I like a bad guy’s house.’ That defeated me completely, and I decided to take it on seriously.” Mishima then added, “My ideal is to sit in an aloha shirt and jeans in the middle of Rococo furniture,” which further exasperated the architect, as Mishima himself recalled.19
Hokonohara and Mishima wrote these things when Shinchōsha’s art magazine asked both men to describe the building of the house after it was completed, in May 1959. By then they were good friends. Mishima wrote that in his household the architect was called Hokoten, an abbreviation of Hokonohara Tennō, akin to saying “Emp. Hoko,” because there was no way of beating him in any argument. Mishima, who was shown Hoko-ten’s article before it went to press, found it very funny, so did Yōko when he told her what it said, probably verbatim. She laughed so hard she pleaded with him to stop because it might damage her body. She had given birth to her first baby not long before, on June 2, 1959. They had named the girl Noriko.
In his article Mishima repeated the point he made in his program note for The Morning Azalea about his fondness for what the New Yorkers condemned as “ugly Victorian,” and added, “The last blooming of Baroque taste that had lingered into the nineteenth century is ultimately my notion of Europe, and to me so-called Europe is nothing more than something that glitters, something luridly colored.”
“My argument is,” he went on, “that if you are to build something in accordance with modern architecture fashionable these days”—and here he may have been thinking of the Seagram Building—“you should go one step ahead of Japonica and build an exact copy of Katsura Detached Palace.” By “Japonica,” Mishima probably had in mind something akin to Japonisme. Katsura Detached Palace was famously singled out by the German architect Bruno Taut as the finest example of Japanese architecture. Though Taut’s prewar stay in Japan was short, his praise touched many Japanese intellectuals—not just because it came from a European but also because it occurred when the international ostracism of Japan was growing. Ishikawa Jun’s 1939 novel, Line-Drawing (Hakubyō), is in part a complex argument with Taut’s view.
Mishima, in any case, wanted to take advantage of modern amenities in daily life, but buildings of Japanese-style simplicity were eminently unsuited to them. Hokonohara intimated that “instruments of convenience of civilization” wouldn’t sit well with the kind of European-style house he envisioned, either, but Mishima was insistent. He wrote, “According to my stubborn theory, what modern art architecture aims for stands at the opposite end of the conveniences of living, and all modern mechanical instruments are philosophically in contradiction of such architecture.” In short, he wanted “a most anti-Zen-temple house.”
Seven years later, when a magazine for young readers offered to show his house and some of his favorite possessions with glossy photos, Mishima elaborated on his choice of architectural design and explained where some of the interior décor came from:
I am innately fond of bright Mediterranean culture and love Latin colors. Further intoxicated by Latin American Colonial architecture, I decided to transplant its tropical beauty and melancholy to Japan, built a house in Spanish Colonial style, and decorated its interior with French antiques as well as Spanish antiques. The fan-shaped, inlaid Spanish frame at the very end of this photogravure is my first memorable purchase. As to the furniture, my wife and I visited as many antique shops in Madrid as we could, until our legs turned into wooden sticks, devoted as we were to the grand decorative beauty of Spanish Baroque.20
The two-story house, in its subdued elegance, was more Palladian, perhaps, than “Victorian Colonial,” the term Mishima stuck to in explaining its design to inquiring journalists and editors, as he had in various writings. In the equally European garden, facing the main building where he lived with Yōko, stood a white statue of Apollo with a lyre. The statue was surrounded by mosaic pavement depicting the twelve zodiacal animals. Mishima imported it from Italy. In addition, he built a separate house, quite an ordinary, Japanese-style, one-story house, for Azusa and Shizue to live.
Whatever Mishima’s ideas for it, Fukushima Jirō most likely gave an accurate appraisal of the elaborate European building he worked out. Fukushima, who, upon reading Forbidden Colors, had impulsively visited Mishima to find out where the gay bar called Redon was and ended up an old-fashioned student-help for the Mishima household, had gained the impression, from magazine photos and such, that the building was “grand and resplendent.” But when he visited Azusa and Shizue following Mishima’s death and actually saw it, he felt it was “a kind of fraud” perpetrated on “the congested Tokyo,” Mishima’s “dream maximally packed into a small plot of land.” Yes, the garden railings, the pots with palms, outdoor tables and chairs with complex designs, and the nude statue erected at the center of the garden were all pure-white.
Instead of “the splendor unthinkable in Japan” attributed to the building by various commentators, however, Fukushima saw something “dwarfish” about the whole setup.21 That sense of things dishearteningly diminished may be inevitable after the person closely associated with them disappears, especially when that person is an outsized personality like Mishima Yukio. But there must be a good deal of truth to what Fukushima found.
Deadly Serious about Learning Kendō
Toward the end of the fall of 1958, Mishima took up kendō. He sought advice from Chūō Kōron president Shimanaka Hōji, who told him to talk to one of his editors, Kasahara Kinjirō, who held four dan in the sport. Mishima duly telephoned Kasahara—an occasion the editor remembered distinctly, except perhaps for the dates. Mishima sounded unusually stiff and formal. Asked why he wanted to learn kendō, he became even more awkward, only saying he just wanted to do it, asking for an introduction to an appropriate dōjō. From his tone Kasahara felt something deadly serious about the request.
The next evening Mishima came to the publisher’s building as instructed. As Kasahara walked him to the dōjō, which was in the Daiichi Seimei Building that once housed the GHQ, he explained the kinds of gear he would need. When the two reached the dōjō, which was on the fourth basement, Mishima stiffened even more, “like a first grader about to go into his classroom for the first time,” asking in low tones such things as when to take off his shoes and where to put them. They then sat on their knees in the hall outside the dōjō and offered prayers to the shrine built inside it. When Kasahara said, “This is all you need to do,” Mishima for the first time looked relieved.
Actually, Shimanaka had asked Yano Ichirō, president of the insurance company, to give Mishima special permission to become a member of the dōjō. Also, Mishima had checked a couple of dōjō before he turned to Shimanaka.
Kasahara recalled he took Mishima to the dōjō one fine day in early September 1959, but Mishima had written he had visited the dōjō for the first time on November 28, 1958.22 Kasahara, of course, was recalling the old event more than a few years after Mishima’s death in which a sword played a crucial role, and that may explain why he remembered his “deadly serious” tone and such but not when that happened.
At any rate, it was in kendō that Mishima found his home, “the ideal of harmony between body and
spirit.” When he was at the Peers School he had had to do it, along with judo, archery, and horseback riding, but as a boy he had recoiled from “the shouts unique to kendō.” Those “indescribably vulgar, barbarous, intimidating, shameless, nakedly physiological, anticivil and anticultural, antirational, animalistic shouts filled the boy’s heart brimming with bashfulness.” But now, twenty-five years later, he truly loved them. Why the change?
I came to recognize on my own and tolerate for myself the shouts of “Japan” that lie at the base of my spirit. In these shouts is bluntly revealed that which modern Japan is ashamed of, tries desperately to hide. These are linked to the darkest memories, linked to the fresh blood that was shed, that originated in the most honest memories of Japan’s past. These are the shouts of the depth consciousness of the race that lurks and flows underneath the superficial modernization. That kind of monstrous Japan has been chained, left unfed for a long time, enfeebled, and moaning, but he can shout out now, borrowing our mouths, in the dōjō for kendō.23
In April 1959 Mishima’s new house was completed and the family started to move. On the 10th of that month, Crown Prince Akihito married Michiko, the union touted as one of “tennis mates.” Mishima, getting up at one-thirty p.m., as was his wont, practiced kendō solo in the garden, and turned to TV to see the marriage procession. As the horse-drawn carriage with the prince and his bride moved through the Palace Plaza, a young man threw a stone at it, dashed to it, and tried to climb into it. He was immediately pulled off it by several policemen and wrestled down, but Mishima had seen not just the parabola the stone made but also Princess Michiko “arch backward in astonishment.”