Persona

by Hiroaki Sato

  Past eight o’clock he went to the nightclub Manuela in tuxedo because the invitation to the performance of the chanson singer Koshiji Fubuki said “black tie.” Spotting him, Kawaguchi Matsutarō cried, “Aha! Here comes the idiot, the idiot! I was told to come in tuxedo, too, but came in a regular suit, and the only guys who’ve come in tuxedo are Tōhō executives!” Kawaguchi, himself an executive of the company but also a popular writer-cum-film-director, then forced Mishima and those other executives to line up and dance the cancan. That “surprised me,” Mishima wrote.

  Koshiji’s duet with Raymond Conde was “tasteful and very good indeed,” but it was “wasted” because of all the noise the audience made. Conde, a Filipino who had come to Japan in 1932, married a Japanese, and settled down, was also a top clarinetist through much of Japan’s long love affair with jazz during the postwar period. Around eleven Mishima went to the Meiji-za to attend the rehearsal of a dance drama he had written, Crossing All the Bridges (Hashi-zukushi). He came home at one-thirty in the morning.

  More than half a year later, on May 12, 1959, Mishima met Koshiji to discuss the play he was going to write for her. But the two had known each other since August of 1953 when the ladies’ magazine Fujin Asahi asked them to discuss “the Paris the two of us saw.” Koshiji, who had started out with the Takarazuka Revue and, after leaving it, achieved stardom as a singer and actress, had just spent a few months in Paris “to study the real thing”; chanson, which was quickly gaining enormous popularity in Japan, was part of her repertoire, and it was thrilling for her to hear Édith Piaf actually sing.

  It was telling of the reputation of Paris in those days: Koshiji could not see what was so great about Paris for some time, but the cultural supremacy of the city was such that she felt compelled to walk about any number of streets, always in high heels, even though that pained her feet horribly. Among the Japanese notables who were in the city at the time were Kobayashi Hideo and Kon Hidemi.28 Mishima became good friends with Koshiji after the taidan—they appeared so close indeed that for some time Shizue was convinced her son would marry the famous singer-actress.

  On August 18 Mishima completed the play promised for Koshiji: Onna wa senryō-sarenai—the title may be literally translated “A Woman Is Never Occupied,” with the caveat that “occupied” here refers to the Occupation. It concerns a love affair between Karayama Izuko, a widow heiress to a coal-mine fortune, and James Evans, a lieutenant colonel attached to the GHQ as chief of political affairs who is supposed to have a direct line to the SCAP.

  The plot hinges on Evans’s ability to manipulate Japanese politics—including the power to remove names from the list of people to be “purged”—and a socialist trying to become prime minister, so the actual time is 1947, when Katayama Tetsu won the premiership. Written to bring out Koshiji’s seemingly breezy attractiveness, the play may be slight. But it is notable for Mishima’s complete refusal to allow any language barrier despite the setting, with everyone speaking natural Japanese, and for the following scene where Evans, after dancing with Izuko, compliments her beauty against the backdrop of the bombed-out city of Tokyo. Izuko wants to have some fresh air and has him open the window. It is January:

  . . . By the window is your beautiful profile. Yours is a truly luxurious, gorgeous profile. Coming through a war of that magnitude, just as though it had been a brief shower, here’s your truly Oriental noblewoman’s profile transmitting Japan’s ancient history, its expensive, lascivious blood. In the meantime, there under the starry midwinter sky spreads endlessly the burntout city, dotted with the lamps of bomb shelters, miserable, dark, unhygienic lives, the ugliest scars of war enveloped in the darkness. The night-wind blows in through tin doors, and inside, rolled in soiled futon a great many families are fighting starvation and cold. . . . What kind of contrast is this? What a cruel disparity! This is a truly Oriental contrast. . . .

  The play was produced at the Geijutsu-za, from the second to the twenty-seventh of September. Koshiji played the lead role, of course, and Nagaoka Teruko directed it.

  In mid-September Mishima met Tennessee Williams, who was visiting Tokyo, partly to see a Japanese production of A Streetcar Named Desire, for a taidan. Donald Richie and Williams’ secretary, Frank Merlo, attended the session as “observers.” Williams, who had seen the rehearsal of his play just before the conversation, begins by complimenting the Japanese actors and actresses, adding he wished they’d done the play in some Japanese style, say, kabuki-style. Mishima responded by saying that reproducing the original manner of staging is exactly the Japanese way, be it in kabuki or something else.

  At one point Mishima says he prefers the original Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Williams’s rewrite for Elia Kazan, and Williams happily agrees though he says he always values the stage director’s opinions and tries to incorporate them—an interesting response given Williams’ well-known eagerness to accept Kazan’s suggestions.29 Throughout the session Mishima called Williams by his personal name while Williams called Mishima by his surname. The taidan was duly published in the monthly Geijutsu Shinchō under the title of “Nippon as Seen by a Playwright.”30

  For two days at the end of November, the 28th and 29th, Mishima played the role of Benten Kozō in the bunshigeki. Kawatake Mokuami’s 1862 kabuki, Aoto zōshi hana no nishiki-e, features five robbers, Benten Kozō among them. But when the scenes with Benten Kozō alone are pulled together and staged, as is often done with kabuki plays, the title changes to Benten musume meo no shiranami,31 and it was in this telescoped version that Mishima got to play the female-impersonating extortionist who, when cornered by the police, disembowels himself. NHK televised the whole one hour of it.

  About that time Daiei had the idea of turning Kyōko’s House into a movie. Nothing came of it, but Nagata Masaichi, president of the movie studio, asked Mishima to come by to confer. Mishima did so, on November 30. Right off the bat, Nagata said he was interested in bringing in someone like Mishima to attract more moviegoers, to wit, to use Mishima as “Mishima Yukio.”

  Dressed smartly for the occasion, Mishima asked, What do I look like? If you were to play a role the way you look, Nagata answered, you should be “a bad guy opposite the handsome lead. The role of a fellow who has lost his way would be good. The more yakuzalike, the better.” Mishima liked that and signed an exclusive contract with the company as a film star. He also liked Nagata’s subsequent announcement: “Cocteau in the West, Mishima in the East. The East and the West happen to be in the same orbit.”

  The following month Mishima wrote an essay, “I Want to Be an Objet.” (In art and related fields, the Japanese routinely use the French word objet for “object.”) He packed it with aphoristic statements that at times verge on sophistry but essentially reveal the truth about himself.

  Someone like the writer Ishihara Shintarō’s brother, Yūjirō, may think that appearing in movies to “act” makes him “action-oriented,” Mishima observed, but “expressing oneself through writing is far more action-oriented.” This is because “action-oriented” means “to work according to one’s free will, build whatever world he likes through words, and create what doesn’t exist in reality or what resembles reality.” In that sense, the only “action-oriented” person in filmdom is the director. To put it another way, all actions in film are fake, but “I am very much drawn to fake actions like that, as if my will has been taken away by someone else, and that’s why I want to an actor.”

  “I am frequently fatigued hiding myself. I become exhausted hiding myself repeatedly. If I were to reveal myself, I could do only fake things.” It is in movies, rather more than on stage, that fake actions look most real. The movie actor’s acting is “the remotest from action while looking like action.” In other words, “The movie actor is an objet in the extreme.” And “I’ll find it more interesting if I’m treated as much of an objet as possible.”

  By the time he wrote these things, the script for his first movie was being prepared, and its director picked, Masumura Y
asuzō, as well as the actress to play the heroine, though he could not disclose her name yet, he said. He had asked for as intense a love scene as possible—his wife opposed it—and for scenes where he could show off his chest hair, the one part of his body in which he had “confidence.” Masumura wondered about the “confidence” part, because he hadn’t shown it to him yet.32

  The role given Mishima was indeed that of the son of a yakuza, opposite one of the more handsome movie actors of the day, Funakoshi Eiji, who had played the Japanese architect in Alain Resnais’ film that year, Hiroshima mon amour. The script had been originally written for Ishihara Yūjirō but had been shelved because of the fear that the last scene where the protagonist was to be gunned down would mar his image.33

  Invasion of Privacy

  In January 1960 he started a ten-month serialization of a new novel, After the Banquet (Utage no ato). It would bring him the first lawsuit on “invasion of privacy” under the new Constitution.

  For the Tokyo gubernatorial race in 1959, the Socialist Party put up Arita Hachirō as its candidate against the LDP candidate, Azuma Ryōtarō. If Azuma was a prominent physician, an authority on sports medicine, Arita, who was to be the model for Noguchi Yūken in After the Banquet, was a prominent diplomat whose political thinking and career reflected the difficult international maneuvering required of Japan before the country went to war and who, after its defeat, tried to help chart a new course for it.

  After serving as minister or ambassador in Austria, Hungary, Belgium, and Luxemburg, Arita became ambassador to China in January 1936, just a month before the uprising on February 26, soon called the 2.26 Incident. But three months later, he was called back to become foreign minister in the cabinet of Hirota Kōki, who, himself a diplomat, was fated to become the only civilian to be sentenced to death during the Tokyo Trial and hanged.

  Arita went on to serve as foreign minister in three more cabinets: the first Konoe cabinet, from October 1938 to January 1939; the Hiranuma cabinet, from January to August 1939; and the Yonai cabinet from January to July 1940. He was of the group that argued for “working out order in East Asia with East Asian countries,” rather than with European countries and the United States. He was, for that reason, reluctant to ally Japan with Germany but went along with the Japanese-German anticommunism pact, signed in November 1936. He was opposed to strengthening the pact, but at the army’s insistence, the government went on to include Italy in November 1937, and Hiranuma Kiichirō’s cabinet sought to strengthen the pact further. That cabinet famously collapsed when the German-USSR Non-aggression Treaty was announced, in August 1939, with Hiranuma resigning with the bemused utterance, “The heaven and earth of Europe has produced a monstrously labyrinthine phenomenon.”

  Toward the end of the war, Arita submitted “an address to the Throne” to counsel surrender when such a stance, if publicly known, could have easily cost him his life. In fact, on August 15, the day of surrender, both Hiranuma, then president of the Privy Council, and Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarō were attacked by an army unit brandishing machine guns and their houses were burnt down. Hiranuma, though he headed a large rightwing group, was known to be a vocal critic of the military for its inability to defend Japan from the American onslaught. Suzuki had brought the surrender.

  Under the Occupation, Arita was “purged.” In 1953 he was elected to the House of Representatives as an advocate of non-remilitarization of Japan. Two years later the Socialist Party chose him as its candidate for governor of Tokyo, but he lost. For the 1959 race the party tried again, and this time Arita might have won. But Kishi Nobusuke, working on a revised US-Japanese Security Treaty, pulled out all the stops to destroy the “peace advocate,” and Arita lost, again. One thing Kishi did was to immobilize Arita’s wife, Azekami Terui, the model for Fukuzawa Kazu in After the Banquet.

  Unlike Arita, who had education and a distinguished diplomatic career, Azekami, who married him, a widower, in 1953, had come up the ladder in the “water trade” the hard way. But in 1950, she, by then in her early forties, purchased the Hannya-en, a mansion so called because parts of the Hannya Temple in Nara, along with a nō stage once owned by a daimyo, had been moved to its spacious garden, turned it into a high-class Japanese-style restaurant, and in no time succeeded in making it a popular haunt of moneyed conservative politicians and business leaders. Arita and Azekami, in short, made an incongruous, fascinating couple.

  During her husband’s 1959 gubernatorial campaign, Azekami first mortgaged her restaurant to raise campaign funds without telling Arita. Then, with her prime customers quickly falling off, she tried to sell it. A large real estate company offered to buy it. Kishi stepped in and quashed the deal. His LDP distributed a “document with no source identified” purporting to chronicle Azekami’s sexual liaisons in eyewitness detail, which weekly magazines happily picked up. One day before the vote, the LDP spread the rumor that Arita, then seventy-four, was on his deathbed. After the election, Arita divorced her.

  All this was public knowledge. Further, in planning a fictionalized account of the election, Mishima read Azekami’s own accounts and visited her at her restaurant with his editors and received her approval for the story that he wanted to write and, through her, Arita’s as well. To show his approbation, Arita sent him his book just published, They Call Me Hachi the Idiot (Baka-hachi to hito wa iu), autographed.34

  Yet as the serialization of Mishima’s novel progressed, Arita grew agitated and started pressing the publisher of Chūō Kōron to suspend it. When Shinchōsha published the fiction in book form, in November, he sued Mishima for alleged invasion of privacy, the following March.

  Arita’s focus in his lawsuit was on the “Peeping-Tom” descriptions of his bedroom acts with his wife in After the Banquet. But because there are in fact only a few of them in the novel and they are as unavoidable as they are slight, Arita may well have been really upset by Mishima’s not too positive a description of him as outwardly a knowledgeable, cultured European-style gentleman who in reality hasn’t outgrown old-fashioned Confucian ideas and can act like someone uneducated and unrefined.

  When Fukuzawa Kazu, in the novel, sees Noguchi Yūken for the first time during the reunion of a group of former diplomats at her restaurant, the Setsugo-an, she is most impressed by his dignity, refinement, and refusal to take part in small talk, in particular the kind of nostalgic recollections retired diplomats are wont to flaunt: a colorful, idyllic life in Dominica, Hermann Göring with his young lover glimpsed on the subway, this or that operatic performance in this or that city. The group makes a distinct contrast to the down-to-earth, even ostentatiously vulgar conservative politicians she knows so well. But even in this group of men who have managed to preserve their stylish European airs, Noguchi sets himself apart.

  “His manly face had a rustic simplicity that he seemed never to lose and, unlike the others, his attire showed no pretentious or dandyish airs,” Kazu observes. Arita was from Sado Island, in the Japan Sea, off the coast of Niigata, once a favored place for exile. “Above his sharp, clear eyes ran eyebrows like shapes drawn in brushstrokes with excess force. Such superb individual features conflicted with one another, emphasizing their disharmony with his skinny body. Besides, though he always maintained a smile on his face, he seldom nodded in agreement.”

  Kazu falls in love with him. With her trained eyes, she notices that the nape-side of his collar is slightly discolored, like “a faint shadow,” but that only arouses her maternal instinct. The two start dating. Gradually, inevitably, though, Kazu begins to see that he is not what he appears to be—or at least that his dignity and studied superiority is not a born part of him.

  Once she invites him to the Kabuki-za. At every sorrowful climax of the play she sheds tears—Mishima famously did the same—whereas Noguchi remains “cold, detached.” During the intermission, he asks, obviously amused, “Why do you cry at such a silly, foolish play?” But then, when he realizes he’s lost his cherished Dunhill lighter the “consternatio
n” he displays is “astonishing.” The authoritative, impassive composure he had maintained up to that moment vanishes. “The expression on his face as he groped into every pocket, half rising from his seat, muttering, ‘No, not here, not here,’ was totally different from what he normally showed.” His loss of composure grows worse until, out in the hall, an usherette holds up a lighter and asks if it is what he’s looking for. (This was self-caricature on Mishima’s part: A woman friend remembered Mishima once behaving the same way.)

  When Noguchi discovers that Kazu has mortgaged her restaurant to raise funds for his election campaign and has been campaigning for him besides, distributing posters, giving speeches, and so on, Noguchi, feeling his honor betrayed, beats her, kicks her as she collapses on the floor.

  Arita may have been irked further because Mishima quoted some passages from the “mysterious document” verbatim as if to authenticate the slanderous concoction. In one scene, for instance, Yamazaki Motoichi, a disillusioned Communist-turned-election strategist, tells Kazu: “How big a campaign the election of Tokyo governor requires? Well, here’s an example: suppose you want to put up two election bills on each of all the utility poles throughout Tokyo. There must be 150,000 to 160,000 poles, so you got to have 300,000 bills. If the bills cost ¥3 a piece, that makes it ¥900,000. Assume it costs ¥1 to put up a single bill, and the total will be ¥1,200,000. That’s a sum that can take care of a small election campaign.”