by Hiroaki Sato
(In one passage describing the three evil men, Mishima couldn’t help taking the authorial liberty of interjecting himself in a contemporaneous, though self-deprecatory, fashion. The three are invited to the Kabuki-za by a politician sympathetic to their cause, even though, uncouth and uncultured as they are, they are unlikely to be interested in kabuki. They watch Danjūrō’s “exit six leaps” in Kanjinchō, with some interest. But when the last play on the program, “Mishima Yukio’s The Sardine Hawker & the Dragnet of Love,” opens, their leader Haguro offers that “a new kabuki play by such a novel-writer isn’t worth seeing,” his two companions agree, and the three decamp. How Haguro, a narrow-minded law teacher at a college far from Tokyo, is conversant with Mishima’s various writings, isn’t explained, but no matter. Beginning on April 1, 1962, the play in question was staged for the second time at the Kabuki-za, with Utaemon, Kanzaburō, Minosuke, and so forth.)
Did Mishima believe in flying saucers? “For several years before writing this novel,” he wrote after the novel came out in book form following its serialization in Shinchō, “I was absorbed in ‘flying saucers.’ More than a few times did the two of us, Mr. Kitamura Komatsu and I, try to observe them from my roof during summer nights. But no matter what effort we made, flying saucers did not show up. At least in my eyes they didn’t. And so I was suddenly enlightened to the belief that ‘flying saucers’ must be an artistic concept.”24
Among the books Ōsugi Jūichirō reads in the novel is The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe.
Ghostwriting
That fall Mishima edited a “Kawabata reader” for Kawade Shobō. In the threesome talk he had with the author and Nakamura Mitsuo to be included in the project, he started by bringing up Kawabata’s stories the writer himself was known to dislike, “Birds and Beasts” (Kinjū) and Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru bijo), expressing his special fondness for them.
“Birds and Beasts” deals with the protagonist’s preference of pets—goldcrests, Nippon terrier, what have you—over humans and with his realization, which he comes to accept, that animal lovers, so called, necessarily perpetrate cruelties on animals.25 In his 1955 essay Mishima had chosen it among Kawabata’s “best three,” asserting that with this 1933 story Kawabata became “a tragedian” who would “ceaselessly explore the blind life force in amorality like that of the behavior of birds and beasts.”26
Sleeping Beauties describes a secret house of sexual entertainment where old men of means, mostly impotent, pay to lie by one or two young naked girls drugged to sleep all night, on the understanding that no touching is allowed. Mishima called the novella “the apex of decadence” and “the lowest depths of beauty” when he was asked for an essay for the geppō to go with a volume in the complete works of Kawabata. When Shinchōsha published the story along with two others in a paperback edition, just before Kawade asked him to edit the Kawabata reader, Mishima brought up Edward Seidensticker as the only person, aside from himself, who called it “an indisputable masterpiece,” even though, he added, their views of literature were “as different as summer and winter.”
“Where in ordinary novelistic techniques, dynamic differentiations of personalities are made through conversation and action, this work, on account of its essential nature, differentiates six young women by employing extremely difficult, extremely ironic techniques,” Mishima was unstinting in his praise. “Because the six are asleep and remain mum, it leaves no physical depictions, other than those of various bodily movements and mumblings in sleep. Its persistent, detailed, necrophilic physical depictions, you may say, are at the apex of idealistic lechery. Yet the work as a whole is palpably oppressive, because revulsion is always woven into this sexual fantasy, and also, because the adoration of life is always mixed with a denial of life.”27
In the threesome talk, Kawabata recognized that underlying some of his stories was “self-revulsion, self-denial,” saying that he was “embarrassed” about Sleeping Beauties. Yes, he said, when he wrote “Birds and Beasts,” he had many birds, such as a shrike and an owl—the reader may marvel at the lively, graphic description of an owl at feeding time—and several dogs. He also said he had meant Sleeping Beauties to be complete with what later became Part I, but his Shinchō editor asked him to continue so as to make it long enough to make a book, hence a novella of five parts. This revelation delighted Mishima.28
Yet all this could have entailed a dose of duplicity on the part of everyone involved. As Kawabata candidly admitted in his own afterword to The Old Capital (Koto), his long-term dependence on sleeping pills had gotten worse just before he started serializing the novel in the Asahi Shinbun in early October 1961. As a result, he barely knew what he was writing throughout the serialization, although he managed to finish it, at the end of January 1962. Shortly afterward, he stopped taking sleeping pills, but that precipitated such violent withdrawal symptoms that he was rushed to University of Tokyo Hospital and remained unconscious for ten days. Sure enough, when he finally mustered enough of his wits and sat down to revise the story for publication in book form, Kawabata found many “irregularities,” a number of “places that do not make sense.”29
Kawabata was truthful about the sleeping pills and hospitalization after the fact but not about the novel that concerns beautiful twin sisters in Kyoto. The daily installments as he wrote them, for a total of 107 installments, were mostly unusable, and someone else had to rewrite them. As Mishima tells it, this hospitalization was done in secrecy.30
Behind this was the common practice of famous or popular writers having ghostwriters, often magazine editors but also independent writers. Kawabata had had a couple of writers, including the redoubtable Itō Sei and the noted critic Senuma Shigeki, who had stood in for him since before the war. One Shinchō editor averred that among the leading postwar writers only Mishima Yukio and Ōe Kenzaburō did no such thing.
Mishima himself was not truthful, either; he had written much—how much remains unknown—of Sleeping Beauties, which was serialized in Shinchō from January 1960 to November 1961, with a good deal of interruption, with Kawabata’s hospitalization at the end of 1960.31 In other words, Kawabata had started the newspaper serialization of The Old Capital even as he finished the monthly serialization of Sleeping Beauties.
Yet Sleeping Beauties went on to win the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award.
In February Mishima had a taidan with the photographer Hosoe Eikō for the photo magazine Camera Geijutsu. Hosoe had been having photo sessions with Mishima since the previous fall for the cover of a collection of his critical essays, Beauty’s Assaults (Bi no shūgeki). When Hosoe showed up at Mishima’s house, the writer was sunbathing on his verandah with nothing on his upper body except for sunglasses. “Today I’m your subject. I won’t mind whichever way you shoot me,” Mishima said. Thereupon Hosoe picked up the garden hose nearby and wound it around Mishima’s body and began shooting. This session lasted for two hours, with Mishima uttering nary a word of protest. Hosoe liked photographing Mishima and asked for, and had, other sessions, in other places—such as the dancer Hijikata Tatsumi’s studio in Meguro, an abandoned factory in Kamedo, and a construction site where Aoyama Church once stood. The photo sessions lasted from September 1961 to the spring of 1962.
The result, published March 1963 as Rose Punishments (Bara-kei),32 would win Hosoe the photo critics’ award, the highest prize in the field, and enhance Mishima’s reputation as an exhibitionist that was already great enough. Mishima bought a number of copies and sent them to his friends overseas.33
Hosoe created images in four categories, Mishima explained in his introduction to the book: “Everyday Life,” which was meant to demonstrate Mauriac’s observation, “All humans are madmen when alone”; “A Laughing Clock or a Lazy Witness,” which turned Mishima into a derisive witness of human life as a whole; “Various Sacrileges,” which enabled him to move freely in “the ancient aesthetic forms of holiness and sensuality” that “transcend time and space”; and “Rose
Punishments,” which brought to the fore “the cruel, thorny rose,” the symbol of “torture and never-ending slow death” that ends in “an ascension to the dark sun.”
The world to which Hosoe transported him, “through the jujutsu of his lens,” Mishima wrote, was “bizarre, distorted, derisive, grotesque, barbaric, and sex-pervaded,” which nonetheless had “in its invisible tunnel a lyrical, sparkling undercurrent flowing, purling.” Or it was a city that was “naked, comical, grim, cruel, also excessively decorative and so monstrous as to force you to look away,” that nonetheless had “in its underground path a lyrical, transparent river flowing inexhaustibly.”34
In early April 1962 Kawabata Yasunari asked Mishima for a sentence from Hagakure written in his own hand—the sentence Mishima had selected and written as epigraph for his volume in a modern writers series: “As Lord Teika’s word handed down to us has it, the ultimate in the way of poetry, it is said, lies in taking good care of yourself.”35 (Lord Teika is the poet Fujiwara no Teika, 1162–1241.) The volume was in Shūeisha’s modern Japanese literature series that came out in March. It included six of Mishima’s short stories and two essays in addition to Kyōko’s House. This publication followed a volume devoted to the author in Kadokawa’s Shōwa literature series in February that included four of his novels and one of his novellas. In March Shinchōsha had published Mishima’s “complete plays.”
Hagakure, which is only too famous for its opening assertion, “The way of the warrior, I’ve found, is to die,” is a large compilation of observations of Yamamoto Tsunetomo (also Jōchō: 1659–1719) that Mishima had counted among his favorite books since the war years, and Fujiwara no Teika wass one of the greatest poets of his time. Earlier that year, Kawabata had been hospitalized after “abusing” sleeping pills, then suddenly not taking them, as Mishima who went to see him described it, comparing the situation to the caisson disease.36 That probably prompted Kawabata’s request a few months later.
Shizue, who thought her son’s calligraphy clumsy, told him not to take the senior author’s request seriously. Mishima agreed but Kawabata insisted. So he went to a well-known stationer specializing in calligraphic supplies and bought quality paper and ink. He practiced hard, creating “mountains of waste paper,” finally sending Kawabata the one his mother “approved as more or less acceptable.” Kawabata wrote to thank him graciously, saying in his letter of April 17, “No matter what your mother may say, your calligraphy is admirable.”
“But,” Mishima wrote in an account of this affair, “I feel that these words of Teika’s have behind them a subtly dark secret meaning.”
I, who was sickly and feeble in childhood and have recently become a ridiculous “health first” nut, understand the benefits of health, while I also understand the indescribable unsoundness of physical health unknown to those who are born healthy.
The eeriness of being healthy, the sickly concern of paying attention to one’s health all the time, the monstrous sensual charm lurking in various exercises, the horrible discrepancy between external and internal, the arrogance that gives the decadence of every mind and nerve the colors of the blue sky and the golden wheat . . . these are the monstrous symptoms that neither methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana, hashish, nor sleeping pills give.
Mr. Kawabata, who asked for calligraphy in my terrible hand, may have seen through this secret quite early on.37
Mishima wrote these words that summer for a monthly newsletter accompanying one of the volumes of Kawabata’s complete works then being published. In Japan, “complete works,” either of individual authors or of select periods, are published in monthly installments, each volume with a pamphlet carrying short essays by various hands, an ad for the upcoming volume, and such. Later that year, Mishima edited a Kawabata reader for Kawade Shobō Shinsha and wrote the introduction. In it he characterized the author as “a mind with the least secrets” he’d known, asking: “What is a secret? Could a human being have a significant secret? So his mind asks us at once. This is a destructive question, but he never pursues it with logic,” because “it is certain that just asking the question freezes us.”38
On May 2, his second child, a son, was born, and he named him Iichirō.
A week later he worked out the framework for what would become his largest and last oeuvre, the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility (Hōjō no umi), even though it took him two more years to make its theme more or less public. That was when he wrote an essay on The Tale of Middle Councilor Hamamatsu (Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari) on the occasion of Iwanami Shoten’s publication of the newly annotated text of the medieval tale for its famed series of Japanese classics. The annotator was Matsuo Satoshi, Mishima’s teacher of Japanese grammar at Peers School.
The tale, attributed to Fujiwara no Takasue’s Daughter (born 1108), is an international romance, as it were, as it encompasses Japan and China and, like her diary Sarashina nikki, emphasizes the importance of dreams; and in it transmigration plays a pivotal role. With its emphasis on dreams, the tale is like Gérard de Nelval’s writings, Mishima wrote, and “it is difficult to determine which has greater weight, dream or life. In this regard, like the words in Shakespeare’s Tempest, it leaves you truly feeling, ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made of.’” Running through The Tale of Middle Councilor Hamamatsu is the belief, Mishima continued, that “if dream precedes reality, what we call reality is more uncertain, and if an eternal, immutable reality does not exist, transmigration is more natural.”
This suggests, “In the author’s eyes, reality must have appeared that attenuated. And the experience that reality begins to appear attenuated is an existential one, as it were, so if we sympathize at all with this tale that at first blush seems ridiculous, it is precisely because we, too, have discovered ourselves that we live in an age in which we cannot be satisfied with a solid, immovable reality.”
The essay, “Dream and Life,” was printed in the newsletter accompanying Volume 77 of Iwanami’s series of classical Japanese literature, to be completed in one hundred volumes.39
In December Mishima started a column for a women’s magazine Josei Myōjō. Called The First Sex (Daiichi no sei), an obvious reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book, The Second Sex, but lighthearted, these monthly columns dealt with men in generalities in the first year and, in the second, with individuals.
The individuals Mishima chose were: the Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Phillip), Kaneda Shōichi (a baseball pitcher who was breaking a number of records), Ōishi Kuranosuke (the leader of the forty-seven samurai), Elvis Presley, Horie Ken’ichi (the young man who became the first to cross the Pacific solo, on a yacht), Fidel Castro, the actor Sonoi Keisuke, Prime Minister Nehru, Daimatsu Hirobumi (a survivor of the disastrous Battle of Imphal40 who turned a women’s volleyball team he managed into the world’s No. 1, leading it to win the gold medal in the Tokyo Olympic Games and who, soon afterward, was invited by Chou Enlai to help establish a women’s volleyball team in China), Alain Delon, Shinran (the religious leader famous for postulating, “Even a good person goes to the Pure Land; why couldn’t an evil person?”), and, at his editor’s insistence, “the novelist named Mishima Yukio.”
In this third-person assessment of himself, Mishima quoted his own assertion, “A man’s characteristics are brain and brawn,” and described himself as a man who, “even with his vaunted literary brain and artificially nurtured brawn, was unable to win one of the biggest fights under heaven, a lawsuit,” thereby making himself “a true laughingstock.” By then it was late 1964. The lawsuit was the one about After the Banquet. The decision in September was against him and his publisher, and they had appealed.
Hayashi the Recanter
Just about the time he started serializing The First Sex, Mishima finished an extended essay he had been working on for some time: an analysis of the Marxist turned nationalist writer Hayashi Fusao. The two-decade period from the 1920s to Japan’s defeat, in 1945, that forced writers and intellectuals like Hayashi to abandon, renoun
ce, or betray their beliefs is a difficult chapter in modern Japanese history. Equipped with the Public Safety Preservation Law of 1925 and other measures, police agencies ran amok.
The victims among writers ranged from Kobayashi Takiji, whom the police tortured to death, in 1933, with the most horrible methods imaginable, for writing stories depicting wretched labor conditions, to Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, whom the Army Ministry’s Press Section proscribed from continuing to serialize his novel Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki) in Chūō Kōron on the grounds that the novel was inappropriate for wartime, in 1943. Tanizaki, for that matter, felt it incumbent to delete, voluntarily, one chapter from his translation into modern Japanese of The Tale of Genji for fear of lèse majesté. In between were people like Hayashi Fusao who, as a result of interrogation, imprisonment, or torture, recanted. That this harsh, repressive regime ended in a war that devastated the country prompts some critics to blame the victims.
So, for the towering conservative scholar of Japanese literature Konishi Jin’ichi, the people targeted for persecution were simply wrongheaded. Marxism is “a philosophy of hatred,” besides the fact that such political thought can hardly translate into “literary arts.” The Japanese intellectual milieu in the 1930s also left a great deal to be desired for having “no scholars able to criticize Marx-Leninism”; the United States, in contrast, had such scholars, Konishi asserts, as witness the development, in the latter half of the 1930s, of the New Criticism that proposed to separate literary products from the circumstances that spawned them. Konishi barely contains his disgust with the Proletariat Movement and such. He refers to Hayashi just once in his massive history of “Japanese literary arts,” for criticizing the movement he had early been a part of.41