Persona

by Hiroaki Sato

  One of the “victims” of the San’yū Incident was Yamamoto Kiyokatsu, who would later play an important role in Mishima’s life. Then a colonel and an intelligence officer in the GSDF Staff Office, Yamamoto led the effort, with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, to reveal the plot and succeeded in doing so. But Yamamoto’s report did not reach Kaihara Osamu, director-general of defense who practically ran the Defense Agency (his nickname was Emperor Kaihara), enraging the man. Unlike some of his superiors, Yamamoto did not have to resign, but his next post, military attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Thailand, was cancelled.14

  Japanese Myths

  On March 15, while the Shimanaka Incident was still hot, Mishima was hit by Arita’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit. His immediate concern was the English translation of After the Banquet that Donald Keene had agreed to undertake, a contract with Knopf already signed. He wrote Keene about uncertainties created by the lawsuit, asking him to find out about its effect on publication of the translation, and suggesting Thirst for Love or the novel he was writing just then, Beastly Entanglement, for Keene to consider should Knopf decide to drop After the Banquet. “I jumped for joy,” he wrote three weeks later when he received a letter from Keene saying Knopf saw no problem.15

  Mishima’s trust in Keene and dependence on him was considerable by then. Earlier, Holiday magazine had asked him to contribute an essay and Mishima had agreed, evidently on condition that the magazine would ask Keene to translate it. The essay was about the “myths” that Americans were—and still are—prone to hold about the Japanese. It began:

  Japan first became famous for samurai, harakiri, Fujiyama, and geisha. She then became famous for low wages and shoddy export goods, then for her people’s “inscrutable smile.” Then she became famous for her warlike people, but once defeated, became famous for kimono, ikebana, girls with the quality to be the chastest wives in the world, quiet friendship, cameras, transistor radios, woodwork, porcelain, paper lanterns, tempura, sukiyaki, and the great philosophy of Zen. . . .

  The Japanese automobile, which had been laughed off the California highway a few years earlier, still had a long way to go before establishing a beachhead in the United States.

  Some of these “myths” may be considered “scandalous” by the people themselves, Mishima went on to note. Take Sayonara, the 1957 Marlon Brando film, which won four Oscars. Based on James Michener’s story in which an American military officer during the Korean War falls in love with a Japanese woman, it was a modern version of what had been for the Japanese the most scandalous myth of them all: Madama Butterfly. During the Second World War the Japanese government treated the opera as a national insult and banned its production. The question has to do with the foreign view of Japanese wives.

  We, the spoiled Japanese men, take it for granted that our wives wash our backs when we take a hot bath, but for Americans this simple service appears to be a cause for great excitement. When you think of it, though, don’t American ladies happily wash the backs of their beloved dogs? In the event, it may well be that they don’t want to wash their husbands’ backs out of respect, because they make distinction between dog and husband.

  In Japan, too, there are wives and there are wives. I know a married woman nicknamed Tange Sazen, the name of a legendary samurai who lost an eye from a wound in combat. She got this nickname because she loves to sleep late. Every morning her husband gets up, washes his face, makes his breakfast, eats it, and, finally, when he is ready to go to work and says, “See you later,” she opens an eye, barely, to signal her acknowledgment of his departure, before falling back to sleep.16

  This essay, “Japan: The Cherished Myths,” in Keene’s translation, appeared in the October issue of Holiday that was entirely devoted to Japan. (The translation above is not Keene’s.) To mark the Japan special, Curtis Publishing invited Mishima to a symposium in San Francisco, in mid-September. Among the speakers who gathered were Faubion Bowers, from New York, and Laurens van der Post, the Afrikaner who was a Japanese POW in Indonesia during the war. Two decades later Ōshima Nagisa would make a film based on van der Post’s experience in Japanese prison camps, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, with David Bowie, Sakamoto Ryūichi, and Kitano Takeshi, aka Beat Takeshi. Ōshima, it is said, had Mishima in mind as the model of Capt. Yonoi, the young, intense, homosexual, sword-brandishing commandant of the prison camp.

  At the symposium Mishima gave a speech in English, and it was titled “Japanese Youth.” He had prepared and practiced it in Tokyo, with Burton Martin, a teacher at Waseda University. Martin’s comment to the effect that Mishima’s English was like someone who can follow dance steps but can’t walk straight delighted Mishima as “exquisite.”

  Mishima’s subject was the typical young man of the day, “a youth of twenty hanging out at a corner of the street . . . quite tall . . . his appearance is like an American, particularly when he lights a cigarette,” to quote from his English. Tall because he had grown up with America’s postwar nutritious largess, and looking like an American because doing so was the wish of every Japanese youth, as it still is. “Wearing bluejeans, a gay-coloured summer-shirt, a straw hat with a colourful ribbon and a heavy suntanned skin proving his pleasant summer life on the seashore,” Mishima went on. Was he poking fun at Ishihara Shintarō, the fellow writer and future governor of Tokyo, and those who came under his influence? Perhaps, though one must say Mishima himself also dressed like that when occasion required.

  The question, Mishima posited, is what happens as the Japanese youth matures. A “synthesis of the occidental logic and the oriental intuition” is attempted, but for the Japanese it is a “tragic cultural task.” For lo and behold: “99 percent of the Japanese play golf, or see KABUKI, or chant KOUTA with GEISHA girls, or see NOH plays and a Hollywood movie in a single day, or eat a beef-steak after a tea-ceremony without thinking about it.”17 Before the audience of 300, Mishima was happy that people laughed when he thought he joked,18 although his English, which he spoke in a raised voice, was “almost incomprehensible,” Bowers decided.19

  On April 13 Mishima, jointly with Shinchōsha, sent the Japan Writers Association a petition for support of his position on Arita’s lawsuit. Two days later he went to the association and presented his argument before its Speech and Expression Committee. The association agreed to support him. Afterward he visited the president of the Japan PEN Club, Kawabata Yasunari at the time, and asked for the club’s support. On the 20th, the first court hearings were held on the lawsuit. On May 13 Mishima, together with the president of Shinchōsha, attended the regular meeting of the PEN Club. The club agreed that the lawsuit was unjust, though it did not issue a formal statement to that effect.

  It was in his letter later that month suggesting that his club’s issuing a formal statement at that juncture might not be a good idea that Kawabata asked Mishima to recommend him for the Nobel Prize. The idea of a Japanese writer receiving the international prize was gaining credence in Japan as the translation of Japanese literature into foreign languages quickly increased. Limiting the scope to Mishima’s works of that year alone, English, Italian, and Yugoslavian translations of The Sound of Waves were published, and so were German, French, and Finnish translations of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.

  Mishima at once complied with Kawabata’s request. The letter he wrote, translated into English by Saeki Shōichi for the club, began: “In Mr. Kawabata’s works, delicacy joins with resilience, elegance with an awareness of the depths of human nature; their clarity conceals an unfathomable sadness, they are modern yet directly inspired by the solitary philosophy of the monks of medieval Japan.”20 Kawabata would not receive the prize until seven years later, in 1968, but by then Mishima himself was a serious contender.

  During the same month of May, Mishima sought out a detective story that had left an indelible impression on him as a boy: Black Lizard (Kuro-tokage) by Edogawa Ranpo. Rare among Edogawa’s many stories, it features a “bad woman” as protagonist: an extraordina
ry enchantress who loves nothing better than to dance in a packed house with only jewelry on her body, a robber-kidnapper, and a sadist to boot. The woman, who calls herself Black Lizard, battles Edogawa’s famous creation, the private eye Akechi Kogorō.

  Mishima wanted to reread the story to turn it into a play. He completed the play, by mid-July. In the play, he brought to the fore the love engendered between the two antagonists, kidnapper and private eye. First staged the following March with the doyenne of the Shinpa Mizutani Yaeko and Akutagawa Hiroshi in the lead roles, Black Lizard went on to create a boom for the Edogawa story, which hadn’t enjoyed anything of the sort before, and Mishima’s play with the same title would in time bring national fame to the extraordinarily beautiful transsexual singer-actor Maruyama Akihiro as creator of “modern oyama,” female impersonators. He of course played Black Lizard. Mishima famously said to Maruyama once: “You have just one flaw: You don’t fall in love with me.”

  As Mishima predicted, the Arita lawsuit dragged on for several years, but it had one side-effect before long: Mishima’s withdrawal from the literati group Hachi no Ki Kai. One member, Yoshida Kenkichi, sided with the plaintiff. A former diplomat’s son who had studied at Cambridge University, Yoshida knew Arita well and at first tried to play a reconciler’s role, suggesting that Mishima visit Arita.21 It did not work. Exasperated, he said to Mishima, at one Hachi no Ki Kai meeting, “You are a Philistine. Don’t act big.” He was known for his impeccable English-style gentlemanliness but also for straight talk of a flamboyant variety. Whether the face-to-face insult occurred during the November gathering in 1961 is not known, but that was the last session Mishima attended. Some time afterward the monthly fraternal group dissolved.

  At the end of November the Bungaku-za began staging The Tenth-Day Chrysanthemum, with Sugimura Haruko, Kishida Kyōko, and others. After a month in Tokyo, the production moved to Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka. In January the play won the Yomiuri Bungaku Prize.

  Nuclear Threat and UFO

  The January 1962 issues of four different monthly magazines carried four stories by Mishima, two short, the other two the first installments of full-length novels to be serialized. In addition, the Mainichi Shinbun carried his essay on January 14. Three of the five were thematically related.

  To begin with the two thematically unrelated pieces, one of the novels, Love Dashes (Ai no shissō), that started in the ladies magazine Fujin Club, was meant as light reading but with a tricky setup: an author, himself a character within the novel, decides to write a love story about a young man and woman he knows and for that end takes steps to make them fall in love with each other, but the couple, realizing what’s happening, resist; further, each of the characters, including the author-narrator, is given a chapter or chapters to provide a first-person narrative.

  One of the short stories, “The Thermos Bottle” (Mahōbin), in Bungei Shunjū, tells of a one-night affair between a Japanese businessman visiting San Francisco and a woman who was his lover until several years ago but is now, like him, married. The title comes from the protagonist’s unsettling discovery that his child and his former lover’s child both react exactly the same way to the thermos, “the magic bottle” as the Japanese call it.

  (The story shows how Mishima’s reaction to the Golden City had changed. In his visit a decade earlier he had noted the horrible taste of the miso soup he ate at a Japanese restaurant, which, most likely, was run by someone of Japanese descent who had gone through the relocation experience. In “The Thermos Bottle,” he describes, albeit in fiction, a Japanese woman who is prospecting to set up a Japanese restaurant “based on a totally new concept” in the city.)

  The other story, “Flowers on a Hat” (Bōshi no hana), like “The Thermos Bottle,” was obviously inspired by Mishima’s visit to San Francisco, but it is different. It reads not so much like fiction as an account of what Mishima actually experienced. Indeed, it may well have been, considering the subject of the other novel he had started and the newspaper article he wrote for the Mainichi. The vignette, in Gunzō, describes a hallucinatory vision of mankind’s annihilation that the first-person narrator has while sitting in San Francisco’s Union Square.

  So, sitting in Union Square one day in September, “a truly beautiful season when the sunlight from the clear sky, unique to California, is filled with an appetizing richness like bread baked golden,” the narrator overhears a fat passerby, perhaps an Italian American, loudly say “Dag Hammarskjöld” to his companion. “The news of the UN Secretary-General’s death in a mystifying plane accident was reported yesterday.” Perhaps in consequence, the utterly peaceful details of the scene the narrator observes in the park, the “absurdly solid, glittering, blessed things,” begin to make him uneasy. Then everything freezes: a mother sitting on a bench knitting, her baby son in a walker near the bench, the young woman sitting next to the mother who appears to be a typist, a gentleman walking by with a cane—each captured in minute detail in the narrator’s observing eyes. Behind this momentary hallucination was talk of a catastrophic war.

  When I left Japan my mind was filled with visions of war. I’d heard that even in America, in one part of California, there is an area believed to be safe even if a hydrogen bomb were dropped, and that a great many citizens of the East had actually moved there. Bomb shelters have spread in short order, and even large corporations like US Steel have begun manufacturing them. But to me, all these things were neither new nor fresh. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the annihilation of the world today is either a romantic too blessed for words or too much of a realist to see a moment ahead—either way someone blind. The question is when it will come.

  The Berlin Crisis had begun in mid-August, and on the day Mishima left for San Francisco, the United States had resumed nuclear testing, on which it had set a unilateral moratorium three years earlier after completing the largest series of such tests. The American and Soviet leaders were vying in grand posturing, as when Nikita Khrushchev boasted that the Soviets weren’t afraid of hydrogen bombs because Russia was so vast it could absorb any number of them.

  This last is what Mishima quoted in his essay for the Mainichi Shinbun titled “Eschatology and Literature.” Starting the essay with “a conventional phrase in nō drama, ‘the Former Buddha already gone, / the Latter Buddha yet to appear, / we’re born in a dream in between,’” Mishima went on to observe that no one could be sure that “This year 1962 will end with this lament,” an observation repeated since Japan’s medieval ages. As he explained, the Former Buddha is Sakyamuni, the Latter Buddha Maitreya, “the future Buddha” who is said to appear to succor the world 5,670 million years after Sakyamuni attained nirvana.

  “The end of the world may come” before the year is up, Mishima wrote. The reason was simple: “At least the end of the world has come to exist as a scientific possibility since the invention of the hydrogen bomb. Thus it is as if the advent of the Maitreya has been guaranteed by this scientific possibility.”

  “Literature is always on the side of the eschatological view of the world,” Mishima asserted. But in the past, eschatology, which has existed in any age, was in the domain of religion or philosophy. In fact, “no thought was more encouraging for literary creation and for the recording function of literature than the thought that the world would soon end,” for it enabled the writer to leave with the wish: “Beautiful one, stay awhile.” But now it has entered the domain of science, which is “premised on the synoptic, conceptual, mechanistic view of the world.” This being so, “the moment literature accepts it, it collapses.” The dilemma for literature is that it cannot be on the side of hope, either. The question for novelists, then, is how to handle “the specificities of life that are fluttering in their hands” without being on the side of despair or on the side of hope.22 The essay in effect described the approach he took in one of the two novels he had started about the same time, The Beautiful Star (Utsukushii hoshi).

  The Beautiful Star is a science fiction of sorts in that �
�it melds the real and antireal” to an unusual degree, as the student of German literature Takahashi Yoshitaka put it.23 The people who make up the two opposing forces in the story—a family of four whose head, Ōsugi Jūichirō, tries to save mankind through world peace, and a group of three men led by a “permanent assistant professor” of law, Haguro Masumi, who are determined to destroy it through “euthanasia of all mankind”—are all presented as entirely believable beings in their everyday specificities.

  Yet they are also extraterrestrials—or, to be precise, humans whose “minds and bodies are completely governed by the souls of extraterrestrials”; the four Ōsugis each believe they came from Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, while the three evil men know they are from the unknown planet 61-Cygni, in the constellation Cygnus which, Mishima in his fastidiousness took care to note, the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel discovered in 1838. In addition, all of them see flying saucers, vehicles from the extraterrestrial world. Indeed in his lecture series, Jūichirō argues that world peace can be achieved “according to the teachings of the flying saucers” and it is on one that the family, led by the cancer-ridden, dying Jūichirō, tries to escape Earth.

  What lies behind all this is, of course, the nuclear contest between the two superpowers. “The Soviet Union has finally tested a nuclear bomb of 50 megatons,” Jūichirō laments at the outset of the tale. That historic event occurred on October 30, 1961. “They are about to commit the horrible crime of disturbing the harmony of the universe. If America follows suit . . . the end of mankind on Earth will be sure to come. When rescuing humans from that fate is our family’s mission, how powerless we still are, how nonchalant our society is!” In this setup, “the beautiful star” of the title wryly refers to Earth.