by Hiroaki Sato
To this Kazu says: “Policy and such are secondary. All you need for an election is money and feeling. I am an uneducated woman. I mean to slug it out with only those two things on my side.” It is these words of Kazu’s that were put in the mouth of Azekami in “the document.” The real Azekami had “encountered many difficulties since girlhood,” in the complainant Arita’s own words, before rising to the top of her world and who, having hobnobbed with old-style, often unprincipled politicians for some time now, was familiar with their words and actions, and so is Kazu portrayed in After the Banquet. In the event, Kazu’s response sounds natural. But coming right after the campaign strategist’s calculating tone, it may have made her, in Arita’s eyes, particularly vulgar.
In its decision, the district court agreed with Arita on three of the four demands he made, turning down only the main one asking the defendants, Mishima and his publisher, to take out a full-size advertisement in each of the three major daily newspapers, Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri, to apologize for “the great trouble” they’d given him with the publication of After the Banquet. Mishima and Shinchōsha were ordered to pay four-fifths of one million yen, the monetary damages Arita claimed, the remaining one-fifth deemed Arita’s responsibility. The notion of punitive damages is alien to the Japanese judiciary and the amount of requested compensation is cut unless the lawsuit is judged wholly meritorious. (In 1961, the year Arita brought the suit, average monthly pay for a company employee was ¥24,000, but substantial bonuses were routine, so a million yen was equal to what such an employee made in just about two years.)
Mishima and Shinchōsha appealed, Arita died in March 1965, and in the spring of 1966 the Arita side made a reconciliation offer: not a single word of After the Banquet need be changed. At the end of November that year, the Tokyo Superior Court, an appeals court, accepted the agreement between the two parties. Because Arita “died, savoring the satisfaction that he had imported into Japan a new legal concept of privacy,” whereas the defendants were able to maintain the principle of “no amendment of the original text,” the matter “ended well for all,” Mishima concluded.35 But the suit was, he also noted, “an unfortunate event which led the so-called rights of privacy astray into various questions in diverse terrains such as social reputation and personal affairs, cultural values and critical aspects of artistic works.”36
Several years later he added that he lost confidence in the Japanese court system after the trial and decision because the judge ignored Arita’s lies. When asked by Mishima’s lawyer if he had given his book to Mishima, Arita indignantly insisted he never had, that he might have given his book to such writers as Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki but not to a disreputable one like Mishima. Mishima’s lawyer then offered as evidence the autographed copy Arita had presented Mishima with, but that did not sway the judge’s view. Apparently to the judge, Arita’s reputation as a former foreign minister was more important.37
The lawsuit, in any case, at once made “invasion of privacy” part of the Japanese language, with the English word privacy intact because no exact counterpart was thought to exist in Japanese. The lawsuit became a landmark.
With his lawsuit Arita may have drawn unnecessary attention to himself, for the focus of the novel is not on the candidate so much as on his wife who makes an all-out effort to help him. When Mishima met Azekami before writing the story he told her the subject he had in mind, for it was “a conflict between politics and love,” adding: “I have a beautiful image of the woman protagonist for this novel, and I am hoping to draw, through you, an ideal figure, a positive human being.” At the outset of his story Mishima describes Kazu this way:
Kazu evinced a streak of wild rusticity in her voluptuous, elegant figure and always brimmed with strength and passion. A man whose mind worked in an intricate manner felt ashamed of his own complexity in front of her, and a man whose mind had grown enfeebled felt greatly encouraged or else crushed just to see her. A woman who, by some blessing from heaven, is equipped, as she is, both with masculine decisiveness and feminine headstrong passion in one body, can go much farther than a man.
Kazu was cheerful in every corner and niche of her character, and her indomitable self had a simple, beautiful form. Since her youth, she preferred loving to being loved. Her childlike rusticity hid some pushiness that she had, and the many kinds of malice of the tiny human beings that surrounded her nurtured her untrammeled, simple heart further.
Among the many women Mishima created, Fukuzawa Kazu is one of the most fully drawn and convincing. Her real-life counterpart, Azekami Terui, made substantial donations when a museum to commemorate Arita Hachirō was built on Sado Island where he was born. She outlived him by twenty-four years.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The 2.26 Incident, Yūkoku
The arrêt that leads to the summit separates two abysses: the pleasure-tinged death wish (not, perhaps, without an element of narcissistic masochism), and the animal fear arising from the physical instinct for survival.
—Dag Hammarskjöld
Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.
—Georges Bataille
In February 1960 the filming of Windblown Dude (Karakkaze yarō) started, with Mishima playing the lead role: young heir of a declining yakuza family. The director, Masumura Yasuzō, by happenstance, was Mishima’s classmate at the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo, although he had gone back to study philosophy after joining the movie studio Daiei, in 1947. Other than the academic background, he had another similarity with Mishima: an abiding fascination with lowbrow life. Of the nearly sixty movies he made, a sizable number had to do with yakuza.
However, angry that the studio president chose a total amateur for the lead actor, Masumura was tough and relentless as he drove Mishima hard throughout the filming; and Mishima behaved like an obedient student. In one scene Masumura cried “NG!” more than a dozen times; each time Mishima, standing ramrod straight, responded with “Hai!”—“Yes, sir!”—and redid the scene.1
On March 1, in the scene where he was to be gunned down on an escalator in a department store, Mishima, believing he had to go for real, dropped flat on his back on the moving machine, the backside of his head striking it hard. There was little external injury, but a doctor feared the effects of a concussion and required him to remain in the hospital for ten days. The movie was completed in the meantime and it was released on March 23. Masumura was as famous for his fast-paced work as for his stern directing and often turned out four movies a year, as he did that year.
Mishima wrote several accounts of the acting experience, among them a monologue in the voice of a down-and-out yakuza talking about the proper way of handling mistresses. At one point, incongruously, the young man says, “And because women are stupid as you know . . . we don’t teach our mistresses Kant’s philosophy nor make them read Gide’s novels.”2
Another was a short story, “Star,” which, in the voice of a popular twenty-three-year-old actor playing a down-and-out yakuza, gives in some fascinating details the process of filming, in contrarian fashion. Here, again, inadvertently perhaps, Mishima revealed himself. Early on in the story the young actor says: “I’m twenty-three, the age when you are supposed to be able to manage any tough work. But as a result of uninterrupted fatigue and sleepless nights for the last half year, I know my youth is rapidly approaching twilight.” Mishima, then thirty-five, was a night owl who, though he slept until past noon, kept up a busy nightlife. But during the filming, he had to report to work early in the morning and often stay with the crew until late into the night. Even then he kept up his writing schedule.
Toward the end of the story, the fatigued protagonist is seized with a death wish. Kayo, his plain, thoughtful attendant who doubles as his lover, says she understands the sentiment:
Being a star is in every respect a question of appearance. But appearance is the only stereotypical model, the only model that has taken shape, for “true recognition” for
society at large, and this they are fully aware of. Society knows that the origins of the recognition are ultimately in the fountain of falsity that we profess. The only thing is that the fountain can’t do without a mask covering it so everyone may feel safe. The star is that mask. On the other hand, the real world is always hoping for the death of the star. That’s because if the mask stays the same, they’ll know the existence of the fountain. You constantly need a new mask.
Mishima wrote the title song of the movie and sang it.3 Fukazawa Shichirō, the author of On the Narayama Song, composed the music. King Record, which had started out as a unit of the publishing house Kōdansha in 1931 and become independent in 1951, put out the record. Mishima, in any event, knew that he was “an alarming ham,” as he told Donald Keene.4
On March 16, while he was required to be in the hospital because of the fear of a concussion, Mishima began rehearsing Salome under his direction, with Kishida Kyōko playing the lead role. In his brief statement on directing the play, Mishima wrote, “For more than twenty years now, it has been my dream to direct Oscar Wilde’s Salome. If you allow me to exaggerate a bit, I joined the Bungaku-za only because of my wish to be allowed to direct Salome some day. Imagine my joy when I learned it would become a reality.”
But his “is not Oscar Wilde’s Salome so much as a joint work of us three, Hinatsu Kōnosuke, Aubrey Beardsley, and me,” Mishima explained: Hinatsu, because Mishima used his “magnificently elegant and abstruse translation,” rather than the other existing version, Mori Ōgai’s (both Wilde’s French original and Alfred Douglas’ English translation are simple, and so is Ōgai’s, which is from a German translation); Beardsley, because he put before Wilde’s words Beardsley’s illustrations that utterly ignore period authenticity, including those of books of Zola and Flaubert; and Mishima himself, because he regarded it as his interpretation.5 Kishida remembered him shedding his usual easygoing self and turning deadly serious as director. The production opened on April 5 and moved on to Nagoya, Osaka, and Kyoto.
In May Mishima, along with Nagaoka Teruko and three others, became a planning advisor of the Bungaku-za.
On June 26 Mishima met a married couple—not identified—at the Prince Hotel, in Shinagawa, and swam in the pool there with them. With his vaunted body, he may have thought he presented a fine spectacle as he swam, but he swam poorly. Though not on the same occasion, Kita Morio once bathed with him. Mishima plunged in and swam a length with the breaststroke. Kita followed him after a while, quickly overtook him with the crawl, and waited for him at the other end of the pool. “I expected him to say at least ‘You’re faster than you look.’ But he didn’t say a word, he didn’t even smile. He got out of the pool without looking at me and went into the bar.”6
Kita, a psychiatrist by profession, won the Akutagawa Prize that year for his fictionalized account of one part of the Nazi Directive Night and Fog: the annihilation of the mentally ill. His father, the tanka poet Saitō Mokichi, was also a psychiatrist and ran a mental hospital.
Mishima and the couple then had dinner on the Ginza and went to Asakusa to have some fun at The New World, a large entertainment center built a year earlier. The visit gave him an idea for a short story: a young, serious, loving couple who, it turns out, perform sex for a small, secret gathering of rich women. Their job is merely hinted at in the words of a middle-aged female pimp whom they meet at The New World before the session that evening. The title of the story, “Million-yen Rice Crackers” (Hyakuman-en senbei), comes from the name of one of the food items Mishima saw sold in the garish building.
On August 2, he had a threesome discussion with Itō Sei and Saeki Shōichi on the two currents of modern Japanese literature, Shiga Naoya and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, for Gunzō. That day he sent invitations for a party on the following Sunday. One to Okuno Takeo read:
I haven’t been in touch with you since Othello. Now, on August 7 (Sunday), past 6 in the afternoon, I will have a small dance party called an Aloha Meet in my garden. Please make sure to come with your wife. Men are required to wear an aloha shirt.7
The reference to Othello is obscure, but the aloha shirt had gained Japanese admiration for American tourists who flaunted their predilections for flashy colorfulness as they flooded Japan. The party was held around the statue of Apollo. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko remembered Mishima opening it with greetings in English and Japanese—there were a number of foreign guests—by saying, “I am happy that the most beautiful ladies and gentlemen under heaven have gathered this evening.” Mishima loved to greet his guests at his parties in similar fashion. For the Aloha Meet he had engaged the popular singing trio, Three Graces, to provide songs for the dancers.
Following the dances Mishima screened Donald Richie’s film as well as the photographer Hosoe Eikō’s film,The Navel and the Atomic Bomb (Heso to genbaku). Hosoe would later take some of the more memorable photos of Mishima.8
In the middle of that month Mishima went on a trip to collect material for his next novel, Beastly Entanglements (Kemono no tawamure), a story of psychological self-entrapment, seduction, and murder. It deals with a dandyish scholar-dealer of expensive porcelains, his wife who avows no jealousy for his many affairs but secretly has a private eye follow him, and a college student employed to help him in his store who falls in love with her. It is a variation of Thirst for Love, although, unlike that other novel, any real-life source for the narrative line, if there was one, remains unknown. Mishima wrote that it was only when he heard Leonore Overture as conducted by Herbert von Karajan at La Scala in January 1961—five months after he collected basic descriptive material—that he was finally able to settle on the overall structure of the novel.9
Regardless, Mishima was assiduous in gathering information. He went to Hamamatsu to see the airbase, although in the story the character who is in the Air Self-Defense Force is a minor one, and also to see a manufacturer of musical instruments, although in the story the visit translates into a single paragraph worth of description of the assembly of a ukulele. He stayed for a week in the fishing port of Arari, on the west coast of the Izu Peninsula, to observe the milieu for a seaside nursery that supplies exotic plants to a Tokyo wholesaler. Mishima’s assiduity in information gathering may be typically seen in a passage like this:
The dendrobium’s faintly red flowers allowing you to glimpse their dark purple far inside did not seem to suggest that they were hiding their bashfulness; rather, they seemed to have ostentatiously locked it away. The Hawaiian anthurium’s brilliant red is like synthetic resin with the cat-family’s leathery tongue sticking out of it. The tiger tail’s seaweed-resembling pliant form that belies the tough quality of its spotted, darkgreen leaves fringed in light yellow. The improved Decora Elastica’s large, oval leaves, the Ananas’s ferocious green leaves with lateral black stripes. The Kwannon bamboo’s glossy leaves profusely sprouting from its hairy, skinny stalks. . . .
It was while he was on this trip that Arita Hachirō telephoned him at his home to lodge his protest on “invasion of privacy” for the first time. That and Arita’s subsequent insistence on privacy—but months before he actually brought the suit—led Mishima to write an essay, “Privacy.” Recalling the weeklong stay at an old-fashioned inn in Arari port, where not just the inn but also the whole port totally ignored the idea of “privacy”—with a town loudspeaker blaring announcements, transistor radios (then new on the market and popular) “emitting monstrous noise,” trucks crashing by on the road right next to the inn, people in the next room partitioned by paper doors carousing till late at night—he wrote: “In a city, you wouldn’t tolerate the noisy radio of your neighbor, but here all the radios competed in noise. If you can’t stand your neighbor’s noise, all you have to do is to turn up your radio louder.”
“There’s no need to copycat Western-style privacy,” he concluded, for “if everybody gets used to [all the noise] and feels no pain, that’s all you need in life.”10
The 2.26 Incident
On August 28 he comp
leted After the Banquet. He then set out to write, and finished writing in mid-October, what would become his most famous, and to himself the most important, story, “Yūkoku.” (The title has been translated as “Patriotism” and the story is so known in English; but, as Mishima himself pointed out and as we will see, there is a problem with the choice of the English word, so we will stay with the original word.) The story begins:
On February 29, of the eleventh year of Shōwa (that is, on the third day from the eruption of the 2.26 Incident), Lt. Takeyama Shinji, the 1st Infantry Regiment, the Imperial Guards Division, agonizing since the occurrence of the incident that his close friends were participating in the rebel army, became pained and furious at the situation in which fighting within the Imperial Army seemed inevitable, and carried out suicide by disembowelment with his military sword in the eight-mat room of his home at 6 Aoba-chō, Yotsuya Ward. His wife, Reiko, also carried out suicide by sword to follow him in death. The lieutenant’s will had just a single phrase, “Long live the Imperial Army,” while his wife’s will apologized for lack of filial respect in dying before her parents, saying, “The day that has to come for a soldier’s wife has come,” and so forth. The last moments of a fiercely loyal man and his fiercely loyal wife were truly such as to make the demons and deities weep. The lieutenant was thirty years old, his wife twenty-three; it was less than half a year since their nuptials.
The “incident” is so called because it began in the predawn hours of February 26, 1936, with a series of assassinations of high-ranking government officials. Army units led by two dozen junior-grade officers—“young officers” in standard Japanese accounts11—assaulted and killed the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Saitō Makoto, Minister of Finance Takahashi Korekiyo, and Inspector-General of Military Education Watanabe Jōtarō. The three other targets—Prime Minister Okada Keisuke, Former Lord Privy Seal Makino Nobuaki, and Grand Chamberlain Suzuki Kantarō—managed to escape or survive. Of the three who survived, Suzuki, severely wounded, would serve as prime minister to end the Pacific War, whose origins may be found partly in what happened as a result of the 2.26 Incident.