Persona
Page 46
What Mishima decided to do in “Yūkoku” was to describe what is not at all mentioned in the original account: the reality of such “excellent” and “admirable” deaths. “ Yūkoku” was an “attempt to thoroughly analyze . . . and inspect with precision” what lies behind the florid clichés employed for those “brave in loyalty and fierce in morality,” such as “scattered like a flower” and “as gallantly as cherry blossoms at the moment of scattering,” he wrote when the story appeared as part of a selection. So, after plunging his sword—its blade with white cloth tightly wound around it for gripping except for the several inches toward the tip—into the left of his stomach with the intention, no doubt, of calmly pulling it straight to the right:
Even though he had exerted the force himself, he felt as if someone had given the side of his stomach a painful blow with a thick iron rod. For a moment his head reeled, and he didn’t know what had happened. The several inches of naked blade was already completely buried in the flesh, and the paper his fist gripped was in direct contact with his stomach.
His consciousness returned. The blade surely pierced the peritoneum, the lieutenant thought. It was hard to breathe, his chest throbbed violently, and he could tell that in a depth so far, far from him he couldn’t think it was his inside, a terrifying, ferocious pain was boiling up as if the earth tore apart and hot lava was flowing out. The ferocious pain immediately came close to him at a terrifying speed. The lieutenant was about to groan despite himself, but suppressed it by biting into his lower lip.
So this is seppuku, the lieutenant was thinking. . . .
To provide “clinical descriptions . . . in such abundance,” Mishima went on to observe, would “not in the least detract from the monumentally heroic character of the hero and the heroine.”32 Mishima knew well killing oneself by cutting one’s stomach was far from easy. He knew that the attempt to die by Capt. Kōno Hisashi, who was wounded in leading the assault on Makino Nobuaki, hospitalized, and reduced to killing himself with a fruit-knife his brother Tsukasa smuggled in, was agonizing, messy, and prolonged, contrary to the brother’s description of it in utterly clichéd phrasing, even though he, Mishima, almost replicated the phrasing in rendering Iinuma Isao’s death at the end of Runaway Horse.33
Mishima knew, too, the equally prolonged agony of Minister of the Army Anami Korechika, who, after the Tennō sided with those of Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarō’s maneuver who were for surrender, killed himself with a short sword, without a kaishaku, a second—although what’s remarkable, in retrospect, about Mishima’s reference to Anami’s seppuku is the reason he found it admirable: the war minister carried it out without giving a hint of what he was going to do to anyone around him.34 Mishima seems not to have mentioned Ōnishi Takijirō, but he must have heard about the way “the Father of the Kamikaze” killed himself. The day after Japan’s defeat, Ōnishi wrote, with a brush, a testimonial to apologize for sending the men under his command to useless deaths and committed seppuku, as Anami did, without a second, refusing any kind of medical intervention. It took him more than fifteen hours to die.35
There was something else: the sensuality of disembowelment with a blade. Mishima wrote: “The story of ‘Yūkoku’ itself is no more than an unofficial part of the 2.26 Incident, but the spectacle of love and death, the perfect melding and potentiation of Eros and taigi described here, is the only bliss I expect in this life.” He stated this when yet another selection of his short stories including “Yūkoku” was published, in 1968.
“If some busy person asked to read just one story by Mishima which embodies his essence that condenses all the good things and bad things about him, he would do well by just reading ‘Yūkoku,’” he added.36 This was, he noted, a reminder. In 1965 he had written, at the end of his afterword to the last of the six-volume selection of his short stories: “I imagine that even a reader who never once has read my writings will be able to have an unerring idea of me as a novelist by just reading this short story titled ‘Yūkoku.’”
There he had also said: “The 2.26 Incident is the one incident that has extended important influence to my spiritual history. The sensation I had when I was eleven years old was repeatedly ruminated and became a yeast that formed my own ideas of ‘breakdown,’ ‘tragedy,’ and ‘heroism.’”37
Ruminate on the failed uprising he surely did. A year after the short story, he wrote a play, The Tenth-Day Chrysanthemum (Tōka no kiku), to describe the empty life of a target of assassination in an uprising who has survived, with the suggestion that the uprising was the 2.26, albeit with a twist: The time specified for the play is “within the 24 hours from the night of October 13 to the early evening of the following day, the 14th, in the Twenty-Seventh Year of Shōwa (1952), that is, the year the Japanese–United States Peace Treaty went into effect.” The title of the play derives from the fact that September 9 (to be exact, the 9th of Ninth Month by the lunar calendar), following Chinese tradition, is Double-Yang Day, also known as Chrysanthemum Day. Because of this festival rite, the chrysanthemum was considered to be of little use on the following day, the 10th.
In 1965 Mishima turned the story “Yūkoku” into a film, of which we will see more later. The following year, he worked out a story purported to be a first-person eye-witness account, “Voices of the Heroic Souls” (Eirei no koe), to present the executed officers of the 2.26 Incident, along with the Kamikaze pilots, as spirits unable to rest because the Tennō betrayed them. And in the summer of 1970, a few months before his death, Mishima chose “Yūkoku” to represent his work when he had an opportunity to co-edit the Penguin anthology of modern Japanese literature New Writing in Japan with the English scholar Geoffrey Bownas.
Here, what Mishima said of the word yūkoku may be noted. In his introduction to the English anthology, he pointed out that the word, though translated as “patriotism” by Geoffrey W. Sargent, “conveys more than a hint of melancholy: the word yū is related to the verb ‘to feel grief ’ and grief is the emotion sustaining this story.”38 It is an old Chinese word (youguo) meaning “worried about the state of the nation” and is different from a word of far more recent vintage that is the standard Japanese equivalent of “patriotism”: aikoku or aikokushin, “loving one’s country.” Mishima suspected the latter word was coined as Christianity flooded into Japan after the country opened itself to international commerce and diplomacy in the mid-nineteenth century and with it a word corresponding to agape had to be devised because the concept of “love” as in “loving one’s country” was alien to the Japanese.
The word aikokushin gave him “gooseflesh,” he wrote in an essay on the word, in early 1968. “To tell the truth, I don’t like the word aikokushin much. Somewhat like aisaika [the uxorious man], it gives my back gooseflesh. The meaning of this ‘I don’t like’ is a bit different from the symptoms of political allergy certain sensitive people feel with the word. For some reason I just don’t care for such words; if I could, I’d keep my face turned away from them. This word smells of something made by the government. Also, it doesn’t have a pedigree or gentleness as a word. Somehow it has the air of something sneakily forced upon you. Something that understandably creates resentment lurks at its bottom.”39
In fact, when he turned the short story into a film five years later, initially for foreign consumption, Mishima left the original title untranslated. “If ‘yūkoku’ were translated as ‘aikoku,’ the nuances of the sentiments of the young officers of the 2.26 Incident will disappear,” wrote Isoda Kōichi, who, though born six years after Mishima, displayed a sense of deep affinity in understanding Mishima. “Nevertheless, the [sub]title ‘ai to shi no saigi [the rite of love and death]’ suggests that the Japanese act of ‘jijin [killing oneself with a sword]’ is linked to the universal human question of ‘eroticism and death.’ One reason he is internationally appreciated is that his national sentiment is simultaneously equipped with universality as humanview.”40
One question remains: What prompted Mishima to take up t
he 2.26 Incident in this particular fashion? Mishima, ever the self-analyst, wondered about that himself. In mid-1966, writing on the occasion of publishing “The 2.26 Incident Trilogy,” he spoke of the once-in-a-lifetime bliss for Lt. Takeyama and his wife that he had described in “Yūkoku.” The couple would have missed it, he wrote, had they waited until the following day because the very next day the lieutenant would have learned that the internecine battle in the Imperial Army had been averted. So where did he get “the conviction that such a bliss, once missed, even by just one night, would never come again in your life?” Mishima went on to respond to his own wonderment:
Directly, in this very conviction lay the core of my experience of the war, also the experience of reading Nietzsche during the war, and also my sympathy with the philosopher Georges Bataille, who should be called “the Nietzsche of Érotisme.” Bataille, who was a devout Catholic until his adolescence, one day experiencing “the death of God,” plunged into research of érotisme. . . . Surely, with the breakdown of the 2.26 Incident some great god died. At the time an eleven-year-old boy, I merely felt it only vaguely, but when I encountered [Japan’s] defeat in war at the hypersensitive age of twenty, I felt that the terrifyingly cruel sense of the death of god at the time might be closely related to what I had intuited as a boy of eleven.41
Several months before writing “Yūkoku,” Mishima had reviewed the Japanese translation of Georges Bataille’s L’érotisme. “Bataille’s virtue” lies in sticking to “the banal notion,” Mishima wrote unable to resist his fondness for paradoxes, that “one must begin by doubting all sorts of cultural taboos in order to rediscover . . . the image of the world that has disintegrated into fragments and scattered away,” and for that Bataille proposes “the unifying principle” of eroticism. “As a result,” Mishima said, “it appears that the vestiges of eroticism you can see in those individual fragments are, on the contrary, incrassating in an age like ours; it also appears that against the humanism of the West, now ‘death’ is appearing on the stage as a major principle of civilization.”42
Bataille, who begins his book with the thesis “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death,” describes orgasm this way: “On the one hand the convulsions of the flesh are more acute when they are near to a black-out, and on the other, a black-out, as long as there is enough time, makes physical pleasure more exquisite.” Bataille is known to have called brothels his churches, hence perhaps the reference to time constraints. “Mortal anguish does not necessarily make for sensual pleasure, but that pleasure is more deeply felt during mortal anguish.”43 Mishima may have had such passages in mind in describing the death throes of Lt. Takeyama.
Another source of impetus for the writing of “Yūkoku” may have been The Aristocrats’ Staircase (Kizoku no kaidan), a novel by Takeda Taijun for which Mishima had written a blurb a year earlier. A first-person narrative by a seventeen-year-old who serves her father, the prime minister, as a secret scribe, the fiction obliquely deals with the 2.26 Incident. The narrator Himiko’s father, Nishinomaru Hidehiko, is modeled after the famously womanizing aristocrat Konoe Fumimaro, though, unlike the fictional character, Konoe at the time was not prime minister nor, for that matter, did his candidacy to succeed Okada Keisuke after the latter’s narrow escape work because his sympathy for the rebels was known. Like the real prime minister, Hidehiko escapes harm—only to have an assignation with Himiko’s same-age friend Setsuko who is in love with none other than Himiko herself.
Himiko’s brother, Yoshihito, who in turn is in love with Setsuko, is a sensitive army officer who fails to be part of the uprising because Himiko, who adores him, drugs him while he is visiting his family to say a tacit farewell; she’s learned what he’s up to in advance. Waking up the next morning, Yoshihito dashes off to his assigned location, too late. Ashamed, he goes into the woods, tries to kill himself by disembowelment, but fails. Taken to a hospital, he dies after being in agony for nearly a day—in the manner of Capt. Kōno Hisashi in real life.
In “Yūkoku,” Lt. Takeyama commits suicide because his officer friends, knowing he is newly married, do not tell him of the imminent event. In The Tenth-Day Chrysanthemum, Hidehiko escapes assassination with the help of his mistress. Mishima, beginning his blurb with the sentence, “The 2.26 Incident that I experienced in my boyhood, I might say, defined the idea of heroism throughout my life,” called The Aristocrats’ Staircase “a brilliant work.”44
But it may well have been, above all, Donald Keene, the translator of his modern nō plays, who inspired Mishima to take up the 2.26 Incident the way he did. He once suggested that Mishima consider dealing with the incident as an embodiment of “the action of pure human beings, people who acted utterly unselfishly, people who acted 100 percent for an ideal,” as he told the journalist Tokuoka Takao when the two traveled the western part of Japan together a year after Mishima’s death. Keene, a first lieutenant of the US Navy during the war, had been profoundly moved when he, a language officer, read the captured diaries and letters of Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal. What struck him was the unadorned idealism they expressed in sheer suffering and agony before their annihilation—something he hadn’t detected in the letters of American soldiers he read as a censor.
Also, soon after the war, when sent to Qingdao, Keene came to know a courteous former officer of the Japanese Navy who told him of the idealism that had driven a group of young military officers, including himself, to carry out what was to be known as the 5.15 Incident. The man, Murayama Noriyuki, had been part of the assault groups that, on May 15, 1932, killed Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, the revered proponent of “preservation of the Constitution.” Like all other participants Murayama had got off with a relatively light punishment—he was released with the sentence of ten years of imprisonment greatly reduced—a fact that gave the participants of the 2.26 Incident false expectations, it was said. They thought they’d be given an ample opportunity to air their views, as the participants in the 5.15 Incident had been, and never be condemned to anything like executions.
Indeed, great sympathy had been expressed for the perpetrators of the 5.15 Incident. With the unemployment rate sky high and the appalling destitution of peasantry continuing, the government seemed to take only wrong steps. The planners of the uprising said in their manifesto, “We weep for Japan’s present state and, though barehanded, are about to light the bonfire of a Shōwa Restoration as a forerunner of society.” Whether their action would succeed or fail was not the issue, the manifesto said. The important thing was that the citizenry as a whole would follow suit and rise.45 Again, Kita Ikki’s philosophy was behind it.
These things had led Keene to look into, among others, the philosophy of the politician Nakano Seigō.46 When Keene had suggested the 2.26 Incident as a possible topic for him, Mishima said he wouldn’t touch it, pleading ignorance of Manchuria. What Mishima meant is not clear, but the leaders of the uprising had acted at the time as they had because most of them, along with their units, had been scheduled to be shipped off to Manchuria where several years earlier the Japanese military had set up a puppet nation, Manchukuo. Once there, they’d have no way of directly appealing to the Tennō. Mishima did not refer to Manchuria in “Yūkoku.” But he was careful to note that the 2.26 Incident embodied for him “the purity and innocence, the audacity, the youth, and the death” of the men who carried it out.
Two years after writing the blurb for Aristocrats’ Staircase, Mishima read a critical analysis of Yasuda Yojūrō, the writer who had mesmerized him awhile in his youth, and was moved to write, “Linking the fulfilling sense of life with death has long been at the center of my aesthetics.” The analysis, by the poet Ōoka Makoto in his Criticism of Lyricism (Jojō no hihan), said, and this is a part Mishima quotes, “Mr. Yasuda himself, who says ‘action’ is the sublime expression of the sense of beauty in the absolute sense (in other words, in the suicidal sense), does not act, and he affirms that ironically. What matters is not to act, he�
�s saying, the only thing that matters being the sublime aesthetics expressed through action.”
This “exquisite analysis” gave him a foreboding “sense of affinity,” Mishima wrote, adding: “Mr. Ōoka cites one example after another of ‘the degradation’ of Mr. Yasuda’ style, displaying a sharp hand in extracting its logical inevitability and consistency, thereby forcing the reader to slide down in a single swoop from the spiritual decadence to the self-aware aesthetic of defeat, to the self-denial of the word, to demagogy, to death, in the second decade of Shōwa [1935–45]. Come to think of it, I live in such halcyon, eventless days, and yet can’t somehow separate myself from the attraction of death, maybe thanks to Mr. Yasuda (though this is rather a joke).”
Mishima wrote this on April 27, 1961 in an entry for a “diary” to be published in a small magazine.47 That evening, after an hour’s bodybuilding exercise, he had dropped into a bookstore on the Ginza and happened upon Criticism of Lyricism. As soon as he went home, he read the book in one sitting and wrote a letter of thanks to its author, whom he hadn’t met. Shortly afterward he rewrote the diary entry to turn it into a brief review for the Tokyo Shinbun and said, “The existence of Mr. Yasuda Yojūrō is an eerie myth, a dramatic life of a specialist on the paradox between beauty and death, his long postwar silence in itself a myth.” Yasuda, an advocate of chauvinistic Romanticism who had been influenced by German Romantics such as Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich von Schlegel, fell silent on the heels of Japan’s defeat and had yet to break the silence.
“Essays are rare,” Mishima continued, “that have discussed as superbly as this one how terrifying, thrilling, and also attractive it is to live and die in a single era, turning one’s life and philosophy into a drama.” This essay “lays out an ominous prophetic insight and view of destiny on the fundamental structure of the Japanese sense of beauty and, after reading it, we are given the impression of facing a dark sea.”48