by Hiroaki Sato
As the Mishima editor and critic Tanaka Miyoko pointed out, however, such a reading may well have “bewildered Ōoka himself.” What Ōoka had actually done in Criticism of Lyricism was to expose “the philosophical weakness” of the wartime generation by targeting Yasuda as representative of the amorphousness of their thinking in order to “say a last farewell to the roguish ‘lyricism’ that was a chronic disease for the Japanese.” In the event, through “this brilliant sleight of hand,” was Mishima simply announcing his readiness to turn himself into a myth?49
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Assassinations
Japan’s leading postwar author.
—The New York Times, November 1960
The poet Benn and the philosopher Heidegger furnished quotes for the apocalyptic mood. The background to it all was the thoroughly researched and soon to be expected death by the atom.
—Günter Grass
In November 1960 when Mishima and Yōko arrived in the United States on the first leg of their world tour, John F. Kennedy was about to defeat Richard Nixon for the presidency. As it turned out, the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where they had made a reservation was Nixon’s campaign headquarters, and on the day they arrived at the hotel, November 7, they were asked to stay that night at the Gaylord Hotel across the street; Nixon’s entourage had taken up the place on the eve of Election Day.
“Travelers’ feelings are simple,” Mishima wrote. “Out of the fury that we’d been kicked out of our hotel one night, we came to hate Nixon completely and only hoped that Kennedy would win.” This turn of events was all the more rankling because in Japan he had been repeatedly told Election Day would be November 4 and Mishima had stopped in Hawaii specifically to avoid the election-day brouhaha. Oddly, in Hawaii, too, no one seemed to know or care for Election Day, even though “Hawaii had just joined the Union and had acquired the right to vote for the first time.” Still, when he watched on TV a smiling Nixon giving a concession speech as his wife stood by, “weeping with an indescribable expression,” Mishima decided that the man was “quite a wily old fox.”1 He loved Disneyland, though—had “never thought such an exciting place could exist,” he wrote Kawabata.
Arriving in New York on November 10, Mishima and Yōko put up at the Astor Hotel, then “right smack in Times Square.” Five days later they saw his plays staged at the Theatre de Lys as part of the presentations of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA). They were two of his “modern nō plays,” Hanjo and Aoi no Ue, the latter titled The Lady Akane for the occasion. Lucille Lortel, the “very wealthy” Connecticut backer of the theatre, had pointed out that Aoi no Ue was unpronounceable for the Americans (her own suggestion was “Lady Saito”—likely because Saitō was the name of the proprietress of the eponymous restaurant, one of the few that offered Japanese food in New York at the time). Before the staging, she invited Mishima and his wife to the Plaza Hotel where she lived while in the city. As a result, he had occasion to see its rooms, not just its men’s room.
The ANTA Matinee Series in the Greater New York Chapter presented five playwrights every fall, one playwright each on a Tuesday, for five weeks. That year the five included Beckett and Ionesco. Mishima impressed the New York Times drama critic Louis Calta. Hanjo and The Lady Akane demonstrated why he was regarded as “Japan’s leading postwar author,” who was “versatile, subtle and effective,” Calta reported.2
Anne Meacham played Yasuko Rokujō, the principal character of The Lady Akane. Calta noted she had “recently covered herself with glory as a last minute replacement for the leading player in ‘Hedda Gabler,’” while Mishima wrote that she had “risen to stardom since appearing in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer,” in January 1958, probably because the Japanese poster for the film version of the play featured Elizabeth Taylor in a swim suit. Mishima had a bouquet of “a dozen large white chrysanthemums” delivered to Meacham.
“At one o’clock that night, the morning edition of the New York Times came out,” he wrote. “I bought a copy in the elevator of my hotel after midnight, read it in my room, and tasted some excitement. It was what you call ‘a rave,’ and, I would say, a review I hadn’t expected.” He added, however, that New York critics tended to be tough on Broadway but generous to Off-Broadway, to the “conscientious” shows in particular. Many in the audience, Mishima noted, were middle-aged and those in the know, and most women wore fur coats.3 Two weeks later, Mishima was on a panel with Edward Albee and Jack Gelber at the same theater.
Although the possibility of seeing his plays staged in New York had been a source of excitement and disappointment three years earlier, Mishima had not planned his world trip or his third visit to New York on account of it. He learned of the production from Donald Keene after laying out a meticulous itinerary.4 It was during this New York stay that he met Greta Garbo, a meeting that “deeply moved him.” Faubion Bowers, “the savior of kabuki,” invited Mishima and Yōko to his house and also Garbo.5
On December 2, the two left the United States and went to Portugal (of Lisbon, he exclaimed, “What a beautiful town!”6), Spain, then on to Paris. There, in the city where during his first visit eight years earlier he had lost all his cash, Mishima, now with his wife, went to see Jean Cocteau, the man he had admired since his youth, rehearse three of the short plays he’d written when young. In one of them, The Shadow, Kishi Keiko played the lead role. Kishi, the popular Japanese actress, three years earlier had married Yves Ciampi who directed the joint French-Japanese film Typhon sur Nagasaki in which she was paired with Danielle Darrieux, and had since lived in Paris. She won Mishima’s admiration as much as Cocteau who “seemed to have a halo” when he appeared. His sickly body wrapped in a brown coat, he sat in the seat right in front of Mishima and Yōko to direct, gesturing with his long arms and his “famously beautiful fingers.”
“Those who don’t understand this never will,” Mishima wrote, “but it is a difficult thing indeed for a Japanese to act with a foreign language in a foreign country, in a play by a foreigner, among foreign actors and actresses”—especially in Paris where the people are hypersensitive about their own language. Cocteau’s attempt at stylization rendered the judging of Kishi’s acting somewhat moot. Still, “the fighting spirit and passion” of the “delicate-bodied” actress, with “her beautiful voice,” deeply moved him.
In London Mishima met and had a pleasant two-hour talk with Arthur Waley, the famous (and at the time the only) translator of The Tale of Genji who would not visit Japan lest he be disappointed by the changes modern times had brought to the country. He also met the poet Stephen Spender who had visited Japan. On New Year’s Day the couple were in Rome. Mishima visited Giovanni Aldini, a professor of marble sculpture, in his studio. Aldini was working on a replica of a statue of Apollo owned by the City of Rome, for the city. Mishima asked the sculptor to make another one for him, and Aldini agreed. The 1,500-pound replica was delivered half a year later and installed in the middle of Mishima’s garden.
Mishima and Yōko then went to Athens, Cairo (where the Great Pyramid of Giza struck him as “an indecent monument,” a marker of “an unimaginably dark civilization, an ontological civilization on whose strength the Europeans have never once depended”7), then—via Karachi, Calcutta, and Bangkok—on to the final destination of their trip, Hong Kong. There they stayed for five days. With or without Yōko, Mishima made the point of visiting bad places, opium dens and water-borne brothels among them.
The Tiger Balm Garden in particular impressed him.
Built in 1935 by the philanthropist Hu Wen-hu (the second hu meaning “tiger”) who had amassed a fortune from the cough drop he invented, the eight-acre garden made only of garishly painted concrete and stone presented, the English pamphlet said, a “typical landscape of Oriental beauty.” In his essay, “What Goes Against Beauty,” which was prompted by the garden, Mishima meditated on what might constitute “beauty.” The garden reminded him of Poe’s tale “The Domain of Arnheim” and the lan
dscape-gardening aesthetics of the story’s unimaginably wealthy protagonist, Ellison, such as his assertion, “The original beauty [of the country] is never so great as that which may be introduced.” Yet Ellison’s aesthetics, rooted in idealized notions of “the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome,” paled in the face of “the ultimate collection of bad taste” that was the Tiger Balm Garden. The Chinese extravaganza in which “grotesqueries never elevate themselves to abstraction”8 appalled and mesmerized Mishima.
Rightwing Killers
The couple returned to Haneda Airport on January 20. Less than two weeks later a murder implicating Mishima occurred.
Late on the evening of February 1, a young man, loudly saying, “I’m a rightwinger!” barged into the residence of Shimanaka Hōji, president of the publishing house Chūō Kōron, and, brandishing a knife, killed Shimanaka’s maid and seriously wounded his wife. The killer, who surrendered himself to the police early the following morning, said he had meant to kill Shimanaka for publishing Fukazawa Shichirō’s short story “Tale of a Stylish Dream” (Fūryū mutan), in his monthly magazine Chūō Kōron, but Shimanaka wasn’t home.
The story was an inconsequential, even jokey, account of a dream, real or made up, of a leftwing revolution in which the reigning Tennō and his spouse, along with the Crown Prince and Princess, are beheaded. If some of Fukazawa’s earlier stories had described stark daily necessities that subsumed morality, “Tale of a Stylish Dream” had little to do with anything—or, if it did at all, made fun of the leftwing through a play on a Chinese character where sayoku, “leftwing,” came out as “left-greed.” But there they were: the heads of the Tennō et al rolling about on the street, with the author in his own dream cursing Empress Dowager Shōken, the Meiji Emperor’s consort. To rightwing groups, the story was glaring lèse majesté. The seventeen-year-old perpetrator, Komori Kazutaka, had been, in fact, a member of the Patriotic Party until shortly before the act.
Actually, less than three months earlier, another member of the Patriotic Party had committed an assassination that reverberated throughout the world. A few weeks before Mishima and Yōko left Japan, on October 12, a young man dashed onto the stage in Hibiya Town Hall where Chairman of the Socialist Party Asanuma Inejirō was giving a speech, and stabbed the chairman to death—a spectacle caught and witnessed on TV and wired globally. The perpetrator, Yamaguchi Otoya, was, by coincidence, also seventeen. Not long after the December issue of Chūō Kōron with Fukazawa’s story went on sale, members of rightwing groups started showing up at the publishing house to protest and threaten. The publisher hastily replaced the editor of the monthly, but the rightwing kept up the pressure, demanding dissolution of the company.
Then, in early January, the February issue of the monthly Bungakukai appeared with Ōe Kenzaburō’s story “The Political Boy Dies” (Seiji shōnen shisu). What the author intended as the second half of the novella Seventeen, it had as its protagonist a youth modeled after the Asanuma assassin, “a seventeen-year-old who is fearful of death and others’ eyes, exhausted from masturbation and delusion, and burning with the sense of impotence and self-loathing,” that is, “a diddly dickhead masturbatory impotent crybaby brainless dupe like a dog with an excessive inferiority complex.” These are the narrator’s self-characterizations in a story written in the form of a letter addressed to himself. The confessor hangs himself in the penitentiary, where he is sent after lengthy questioning at the Metropolitan Police Department and the Tokyo District Prosecutors Office.
Yamaguchi killed himself in real life, as he does in the story. But Ōe, well known for maniacal descriptions of masturbation, did not stop there. After making the young man proclaim himself to be “the chosen boy with a true rightwing soul,” he appends a note saying the suicide had a smell of ejaculation in his pants when his body was taken down. Rightwing groups could not contain themselves any longer. On January 30, just two days before Komori went to Shimanaka’s residence with the plan of killing him, they assembled at Hibiya Town Hall—the same place where Asanuma had been assassinated—to “protect our citizens from a Red Revolution.”
The murder at the Shimanaka household threw Mishima into turmoil. As soon as he heard the news on the radio, he rushed to Shimanaka’s house and accompanied him to the hospital. Word was out that Mishima himself had recommended the publication of Fukazawa’s story, and he was receiving life-threatening phone calls and letters, some threatening to set fire to his house. Suspicious men turned up in his neighborhood.
The murder also prompted the Metropolitan Police Department to provide “several hundred commentators” with protection, Mishima wrote to Donald Keene. A plainclothes officer, with gun in pocket, began to stay close to Mishima around the clock and in his house when he was home.
“Every day a police body guard is with me,” he wrote his translator, “so I can’t even go to a barber by myself; I don’t know if I should call this state of affairs amusing or what, but going to a night club with a bodyguard, I feel like a little king [Mishima’s English] and nice. . . . Is a Nazi era coming to Japan as well?” (In the same letter Mishima said the Japanese newspapers were reporting that the NY theater showing his plays was “full house every day,” even though Robert McGregor had written that the attendance was scant, with “only thirty-five people showing up even on Saturday evenings.”9 The Players Theater was showing three of his plays at the time, with Herbert Machiz directing. The Japanese media tended to exaggerate any United States and European reactions to things Japanese.)
In truth, the situation became so unsettling around the time Mishima wrote these words that he issued a statement denying his editorial involvement: “According to what I hear, about [Chūō Kōron] carrying that ‘Tale of a Stylish Dream,’ rumor’s abroad that despite the fact that the president of the Chūō Kōron objected, I pressured him to print it. This is an outrageous misunderstanding, there isn’t even the fact of my recommending it. . . . If my name was used, people in some quarters used it as an excuse out of desperation.”10
This, according to Ide Magoroku, was not exactly true. Ide, then an assistant editor at the publisher Chūō Kōron, went to see Mishima to pick up a manuscript the magazine had requested. The manuscript turned out to be “Yūkoku.” In handing it over to him, Mishima asked Ide to tell the editor-in-chief to consider publishing it in Chūō Kōron along with Fukazawa’s work, which turned out to be “Tale of a Stylish Dream.” Evidently, the editor-in-chief had previously asked Mishima for his opinion of the Fukazawa story. Ide had no idea what the story was like, but conveyed Mishima’s message.
As it happened, “Yūkoku” shortly appeared in another magazine specializing in fiction with which Ide was involved, but “Tale” in Chūō Kōron a little later. Years afterward, reflecting on the rising rightwing clamor at the end of the 1950s and what happened as a result of the publication of Fukazawa’s story, Ide wondered if Mishima did not mean to counterbalance it with his story—to kill the “poison” of Fukazawa’s rambunctiously anti-Tennō-house tale with the “poison” of his seemingly super rightwing tale. Ide, in fact, even wondered if Mishima did not write “Yūkoku” for that particular purpose.11
The rightwing threats did not abate. Fukazawa Shichirō withdrew from the literary world altogether, resuming his guitar-strumming drifter’s life, until he settled on what he called Love Me Ranch, in Saitama, where he refused to see anyone but his closest friends. He also permanently proscribed publication of “Tale of a Stylish Dream.” Ōe followed suit, removing “The Political Boy Dies” from his own oeuvre. The two stories have since been available only in pirate editions.12
More deleterious was the self-censorship Chūō Kōron and other publishers began to practice. They toned down liberalism and progressivism. In one well-known case, Chūō Kōron cancelled the publication of the January 1962 issue of its monthly Shisō no Kagaku just before it went on sale. The issue was devoted to the Tennō system. For Mishima, the incident may have marked his turning away
, some say, from the orthodox notion of rightwing toward something more esoteric or more personal.13
If the United States at the time was gearing up for serious confrontation with the Soviet Union, first to climax in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Japan had entered what was later dubbed “the political season”—a deceptively mild term for the violent confrontation between left and right, with its focus on the Tennō system, that would last for a dozen years. There were always possibilities for overt rightwing or anticommunist acts.
In December of that year, for example, thirteen men were arrested in a plot against the Diet, later called “the only attempted coup d’état in postwar Japan.” One of the men was Miyake Taku, a leader of the 5.15 Incident who, after release from prison, had become a rightwing activist. In fact, the attempted coup in its naïveté had a striking resemblance to the plot three decades earlier, though there were some differences. It had, unlike the 5.15 Incident but like the 2.26 Incident, some supporters among the ranking officers of the military, the Ground Self-Defense Forces, though this time none of the officers were subjected to prosecutorial interrogation. The attempt was also international in nature. At least one Korean and one Chinese businessman as well as a major general in the Korean Army were to supply weapons if the uprising had actually occurred.
The plotters, led by a Japanese industrialist who had enriched himself in shipbuilding during the Pacific War, advocated san’yū, the three no’s: No tax, no unemployment, and no war. No tax was to be achieved through drastic budget cuts and privatization of public corporations; no unemployment through massive public works programs; and no war through prevention of foreign invasions by developing missiles and space weapons. The Japanese have no monopoly on such glaringly contradictory policy ideas, to state the obvious. In any event, to achieve these aims, the plotters meant to assassinate some Cabinet officers and so turn the government rightwing in a single stroke.