by Hiroaki Sato
“My excitement when I saw it was extraordinary,” Mishima wrote. “A [stage] drama never happens this way. This was in the territory of fact, without a foreshadowing, without a dialogue to be heard. But when this poor, unhappy nineteen-year-old youth, who called himself an opponent of the Tennō system, put his feet on the step of the carriage in glittering gold, and came face to face with His and Her Highnesses, there, unmistakably, human beings came face to face. That moment was far more glittering than the decorations of the carriage and the gold braiding of the outriders’ uniforms.”24
In the evening Mishima went to NHK Hall to hear the cantata he wrote in celebration of the newlyweds. It is indicative of his fame and prestige that the National Broadcasting Corporation commissioned him, rather than an established poet, to compose words for an epithalamium. Mishima came up with a duet in classical language, which he openly called a “parody” of the love songs exchanged between the mythological Prince Magari no Ohine and Princess Kasuga in the History of Japan (Nihon shoki).25 Mayuzumi composed the music. Wilhelm Schüchter conducted. It was broadcast on NHK TV and Radio.
Just about the same time, Mishima wrote an essay titled “Portrait at Eighteen and Thirty-four” to contrast himself sixteen years apart. Saying he is now a danna-sama, a term blending endearment and certain respect from the perspective of a third party, he wrote: “I lord it over my wife appropriately, I behave in accordance with common sense within the family, I am building my own house, I am cheerful not to a small degree, I like to badmouth other people now just as I did in the past. I am delighted when someone says I look younger than I am, I follow fashions and dress frivolously, I pretend I have absolutely no interest in things unless they are vulgar. I try not to say anything serious, I have a lot of contempt for intellectual vanity, I seldom read books.”
This last was of course an obvious pretense in the guise of self-deprecation. Reading on his own was impressive enough. For example, in the early part of the year he had read, with concentration, the works of the mycologist (especially slime fungus), folklorist, and naturalist who made his name in England through magazines such as Nature, Minakata Kumagusu, and the folkloric interpreter of Japanese literature and poet Orikuchi Shinobu, both prolific writers. Also, in a country that prizes taidan and group discussions among well-known writers, Mishima could not go many days without some magazine asking him to take part in one session or another to analyze a writer or writers, let alone write a blurb on a book or someone’s “complete works,” brand-new or reissued.
“I am paying attention to my health so that I may live until I am 150 years old. I go to kendō Mondays and Fridays, I go to bodybuilding Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays,” he continued. “Comparing my body with other writers’ flabby bodies or bodies like boiled chickens with the meat all stripped away, I pretend to think that no one has a body as excellent and taut as mine. Besides, this being the thirteenth year in my life as a novelist, I no longer have to live day to day so fearful of them.”
To end this short “literary autobiography,” he changed his subject rather abruptly: “Even so, I am sometimes tempted simply to join the Self-Defense Forces or something. I’d hate to die of a disease or under an atomic bomb, but I wouldn’t mind getting killed with a gun.”
Having written this, Mishima remembered again a question a friend of his asked back in 1943, using the German word for “die”: “Are you prepared to sterben?”
Earlier in the essay, he had explained that the friend, on a baseball team, had just been diagnosed with pulmonary infiltration, and described his reaction this way: “I felt the world suddenly go dark before my eyes, I felt painfully that I couldn’t possibly die when my life had barely begun.” When his friend’s question came back as an echo, he wrote: “If I’m so asked as straightforwardly, I’ll have no choice but to reply, No, I’m not prepared. But the idea of death nonetheless remains the sweetest mother of my work.”26
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Kyōko’s House
“You praise my work first and other critics stop praising it.”
—Mishima to Okuno Takeo
As he brought his first kakioroshi novel to a close, Mishima mused that he had long been troubled by the “eerie, ominous, incredible feelings at the prospect of completing it sooner or later.”1 The forebodings, if they had to do with the fate of the novel, came partly true. Kyōko’s House, published in September 1959, did well commercially, if not well enough for someone as successful as Mishima by then was; it sold 150,000 copies in the first month. But it was a critical failure. Some of the more prominent reviewers dismissed it as too redolent of Mishima. Coming right after his marriage and all the great effort he put into the work, such reviews let Mishima down severely.
Not that opinions were unanimous. Among the initial reviewers, Okuno Takeo praised it highly. It is “a model of classical psychological fiction” and “Mishima’s greatest masterpiece since Confessions of a Mask,” he wrote in the review that appeared in the same month as the novel. “In depicting modern youth, it is, in artistic perfectibility, far above Ishihara Shintarō’s The Fissure (Kiretsu) and Ōe Kenzaburō’s Our Era (Warera ga jidai).” But the participants in the year-end group review of literary works that year in Bungakukai were at once dismissive and merciless, all five agreeing that Kyōko’s House was a failure.
Hirano Ken said that he saw Mishima “used all the material he had on hand in full,” but that the story has “no climax.” Yamamoto Kenkichi was oddly backhanded. Mishima had never created a failure, be it The Sound of Waves or Virtue Falters, he said, but “this time he has made a big mistake for the first time.” Usui Yoshimi offered an observation that carried the air of a personal coup de grâce: Compared with the worlds Mishima created in other works, the one here “seems broad if the question is whether it is broad or narrow, but in the end it is narrow. The setup of the characters is all filled with Mishima-style stereotypical paradoxes, isn’t it? The whole thing is set up with paradoxes that come with the sense that they become shallow if repeated too often. Since he set up characters paradoxically as he pleased and did nothing but to line up samples of their paradoxical interpretations as he pleased, the story is truly monotonous.”
The two other participants, Etō Jun and Saeki Shōichi, both agreed that Kyōko’s House was a failure. Of the two, Etō was somewhat conciliatory, albeit cryptic. Mishima “may have had the idea of mirroring the outside [in his characters],” he said. “I think it is Mishima’s trick: saying he’d mirror the outside while mirroring the inside.” Etō went on to amplify his view later when he took up the novel to place it in the context of Mishima’s oeuvre up to that time, and we will take a look at it in a moment. What irritated some of the initial respondents obviously was that Kyōko’s House was too much about and of Mishima.
“All the [four] characters who appear in the novel merely represent the various aspects of Mishima Yukio,” Saeki said. Or, as Okuno put it, albeit not to condemn, Mishima “poured all his multifarious experiences” into this novel, so that “one is tempted to wonder if he had deliberately designed his life so as to write it.”2 In other words, the four young men around whom the story moves are all Mishima’s alter egos.
So Fukui Shunkichi, the student boxer, embodies the thought-erasing physicality of sports Mishima idealized. Funaki Osamu the aspiring actor is a narcissist who, while losing himself in women, becomes so acutely conscious of his scrawny body that he takes up bodybuilding. Yamagata Natsuo the Japanese-style painter is an aesthete who for a while becomes trapped by mysticism—an area that fascinated Mishima. And Sugimoto Seiichrō the salaryman and the most argumentative and articulate of the lot is also a cautious, calculating climber of the corporate ladder who acts responsibly even as he swears a paradox, “How can you live without the conviction that the world is bound to perish?” Mishima was, financially and in other ways, a supremely responsible man.
As to this last point, Mishima made it plain, just before the marriage, for example, that h
e was not a writer in the Bohemian mold. “I by nature hate most upheavals and troubles,” he wrote for the ladies’ monthly Fujin Kōron. “Therein lies the difference between my way of life and the way of life of old-fashioned writers and, more recently, of self-destructive types such as Dazai Osamu and Sakaguchi Ango.”3 We have seen Dazai. Sakaguchi was also prone to alcohol (and drugs), and died of brain hemorrhage. One might even add that Seiichirō, though not allergic to alcohol, is no more than a social drinker, just as Mishima was.
There is a fifth character, the woman in the title of the novel, Kyōko, but her role is largely to be a “mirror,” which is what the Chinese character for kyō of her name means—that is, to show to the reader the comings-and-goings of the four men who get to know one another in her house. (Her open house was modeled after Yuasa Atsuko’s salon in real life. The novel did not sell better than it did, at least for the first few years, because Atsuko, upset that her house was described as “carrying the feeling of a brothel,” told the publisher Shinchōsha not to advertise the book—an action she regretted later.4 Kyōko herself is presented as exquisitely attractive and wholly liberated as Atsuko actually was.)
“Because I depicted ‘an individual’ in The Golden Pavilion, I decided to depict ‘an era’ in Kyōko’s House,” Mishima explained in the ad copy for his publisher that was not used because of Yuasa Atsuko’s intervention. “The protagonist of Kyōko’s House is not a person but an era. You might say that this novel is not part of the so-called postwar literature but part of ‘the-postwar-era-is-over’ literature”—that is, what may be called the “post-postwar” era today. “I tried to delineate some of the typical examples of emotion and psychology of an era that believed that ‘the postwar era is over.’”5
What Mishima meant to suggest through the four male alter egos was the sense of being up against the wall that was the era. The period covered is from April 1954 to April 1956, and there was ample reason for those so inclined to feel they are in a dead end.
At the start of the story, for example, Natsuo refers to an incident of “just last month”: “a Japanese fishing boat at the Bikini Atoll was hit by a nuclear test fallout, its crew suffered atomic bomb sickness, the people all over Tokyo feared atomic tuna, and the price of tuna crashed.” The matter is brought up more or less as a passing thought to suggest external events do not touch the aesthete. In fact, it was an “extraordinary social disaster” that darkened the prospects of Japanese society.
On March 1, 1954, the fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru and its twenty-three-man crew became the first direct victims of the series of nuclear tests the United States had been conducting since the second half of the 1940s. It was a result of American scientists’ underestimation of the megatonnage of the hydrogen bomb they exploded that day and the shift in the direction of the wind after the explosion. The fishing boat was outside the designated radius of the test, to no avail. All the crewmen suffered from radiation and one died. The tuna they had caught had to be dumped; so were all the fish the other boats caught in the waters adjacent to the testing area. In November that year the movie Godzilla (Gojira) was released; in it a giant monster resembling a Tyrannosaurus Rex revived by nuclear tests brings destruction to Japan.6 The Geiger counter, used not just to measure the radiation of fish brought back from the South Pacific but also to measure radiation in the rains brought by the typhoons, would become ubiquitous in the news programs, its sinister clicking sound a symbol of something ominous, for years to come.
Mishima contrasts the Japanese society so situated with the annihilated cityscape that was Japan less than a decade earlier, and calls it “a wall”—a wall the four young men all feel they face, “without saying it, without talking about it.”
They couldn’t tell whether it was the wall of the age or the wall of society. Either way, a similar wall had utterly collapsed during their boyhood, revealing a boundless expanse of rubble in the bright outside light. The sun rose from the horizon beyond the rubble, and set on it. The daily sunrise that dazzled fragments of glass bottles gave beauty to the innumerable scattered pieces. The boundlessly cheerful, the boundlessly free boyhood in which it was possible to believe that the world consisted of rubble and fragments had disappeared. The one certain thing now was that there was this huge wall and that the four were standing before it, face to face with it.
However, the four men react to this situation differently. “I’ll smash up this wall,” Shunkichi the pugilist resolves. “I’ll turn this wall into a mirror,” Osamu the lazy actor thinks. “I’ll paint on this wall, no matter what,” Natsuo decides, to turn it into “a mural of landscape and flower.” And Seiichirō the most worldly and ambitious tells himself. “I’ll become this wall. The thing is for me to transform myself into the wall itself.”
As it turns out, Shunkichi stumbles into a brawl with a bunch of hoods the very night he wins a championship belt, gets his right hand smashed, and joins an extreme rightwing group;7 Osamu commits double-suicide with a female loan-shark who is ugly and older; and Natsuo gets sucked into Shinto mysticism until one morning he is amazed by a single daffodil left by his bedside, which reminds him of the Chinese Emperor Huizong’s painting of daffodils and a quail, and decides to move to Mexico.
As to Seiichirō, he simply redoubles his eschatological sense of the world. Now working in an office in the midst of Wall Street, he one day sees the Herald Tribune blaring in its headline “the unprecedented prosperity” of the US economy. The United States has already gotten out of the 1953–54 recession, improving upon all the economic indicators of the past with unexpected speed. In fact, the national income will easily increase by $20 billion and reach $320 billion. The waves of this economic boom have reached the shores of Europe and Asia as well, dashing “the wishful thinking of Marxist economics” while proving that capitalism can resurrect itself like a phoenix.
Seiichirō knows there is “no falsity, no exaggeration whatsoever” to this account, though its triumphant tone reminds him of a college paper reporting a victory in a football game. As someone who works on Wall Street, where “worldwide prosperity originates,” he witnesses the truth of it every day. “That threat known as historical inevitability, that ancient astrology, can frighten no one any longer.” But to him, it was exactly “a clear omen of what he called ‘the collapse of the world.’” New York, because it is the engine of worldwide prosperity, is the very place that will touch it off. And by the time the waves of “the monstrous prosperity of this country” fully reached the “Oriental island nation” Japan, each of the small group of four men would have chosen “a personal death, through a personal tragedy, of a design appropriate for each,” even though, as Seiichirō saw it, they would have “merely added themselves to a ring of reincarnation. Beyond these physical or spiritual deaths surely waited a grotesque, disgusting reincarnation!”
Nihilism and Fascism
When he completed Kyōko’s House, Mishima had written in his “diary” for Shinchō that “the womb that gave birth to it” was his 1954 short story “The Room You Can Lock” (Kagi no kakaru heya) and that, in that sense, it was “a study of Nihilism.”8 “The Room You Can Lock” recreates Mishima as a fresh bureaucrat in the Finance Ministry remarkably well—he used the daily log he kept at the time to reproduce the protagonist’s “totally unmoored” sentiments and the “dark, pathetic” environment of a country destroyed and occupied—though he termed its focal part “fiction”: a weekly sexual visit with a married woman he happens to meet on a dance floor, Kiriko (her husband never comes home until very late). Kiriko, with cardiac beriberi, collapses on him during sex and dies soon. He then plays with her nine-year-old daughter until he discovers that the child, with an early onset of menstruation, begins to act like a seductress. Writing about this story nearly a dozen years later when his short stories were collected, he ventured it might have provided premonitions for “the advent of Mr. Ōe Kenzaburō,” his “view of eroticism,” adding it was “free for the reader to see premo
nitions for the political situation after 1954.”9
Mishima had given a succinct assessment of the era in a short story a year earlier, in 1953, “A Memorandum on Eguchi Hatsu-jo” (Eguchi Hatsujo oboegaki): “The age of the Occupation is an age of humiliation. It is an age of falsity. It is an age of obedience face to face and disobedience when the back is turned, of physical and spiritual prostitution, and of machination and deception.” The story’s protagonist, Eguchi Hatsuko, is the antithetical reincarnation of the prostitute in medieval legend, Eguchi, described in Eguchi, a nō play attributed to Kan’ami (1333–84). The medieval predecessor is said to have turned into the Bodhisattva of Universal Virtue for her understanding of this world after exchanging tanka with the poet Saigyō (1118–90).
Mishima shared Seiichirō’s conviction in “the collapse of the world.” He made a historical examination of it in “On New Fascism,” an essay he wrote a few months after “The Room You Can Lock” as his response—“a term paper”—to some leftists who decried him as a Fascist. Citing such thinkers as Bertrand Russell (Power: A New Social Analysis), the British Communist R. Palme Dutt (Fascism and Social Revolution), the “philosopher of Fascism,” Giovanni Gentile, and the German theologian Helmut Thielicke, he begins with two propositions: that Communism and Fascism are common in that they aim for government based on a worldview, rather than government based on technicalities, such as parliamentarism, and that—this is secondary—whereas the Fascism of Europe appealed to the bourgeoisie and therefore to the intelligentsia, its Japanese imitation never did. Why? It was because “Fascism pandered to Nihilism.”
“Europe at the start of the twentieth century brimmed with the tides of antirationalism deriving from Nihilism. By pandering to this [state of affairs] Freud and Fascism emerged. Their forerunner was Nietzsche,” Mishima summed up. “According to Helmut Thielicke, the Nihilist, by holding nothingness as absolute, faced the collapse of the self and the collapse of the world and condemned himself to the Funktionär that is a cog in a piece of machinery, thereby creating ground for accommodating Fascism.” But such a social functionary was in essence “a lamblike drug addict” and was useless. Fascism chose those who advocated “active Nihilism” and were “Nietzsche’s epigones.”