Persona

by Hiroaki Sato

  For Katō Shūichi, the question was integrity. He recognized that “Marxism helped open the eyes of a generation of writers to political and social phenomena,” but concluded that, precisely because of that, “after ‘recanting,’ many writers could become active supporters of [Japan’s] war and militarism. Erstwhile Socialist theoreticians also worked to turn [the expansionist slogan] ‘The Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere’ into a theory.” There was another dimension to the problem, in Katō’s view: the “unexpected offspring produced by the fad of Marxism.” Either in reaction to the socio-economic theory or through the process of recanting it, or even completely apart from it, they developed and “focused on an ideology that was the opposite of Marxism”—namely, “particularism as opposed to universalism, nationalism as opposed to internationalism, irrationalism as opposed to rationalism.”42 Yasuda Yojūrō, who founded the Japan Romantic School, was of this group. Kamei Katsuichirō, who had recanted before becoming a charter member of the magazine, was one of the more prominent among them. Katō doesn’t mention Hayashi even in passing.

  Neither Konishi nor Katō tackles the question of what recanting under the threat of torture entailed—not at least in the literary histories where they offer these arguments. Mishima did, in focusing on Hayashi.

  Hayashi, while a student at the Imperial University of Tokyo, became, in early 1926, one of the thirty-three students arrested in the government’s first attempt to eradicate Marxism under the Public Safety Preservation Law. That time he was imprisoned for ten months. In 1935, in prison again, he reflected on what had ensued in the ten years since the Kyoto Gakuren Incident, and realized he had spent four of them in detention pens, detention houses, or prisons, the remaining six years on parole; he had been taken to fifteen or sixteen police stations and had been tried about the same number of times. The prisons that had incarcerated him were in Kyoto, Tokyo, Chiba, and Shizuoka.

  (Gakuren stood for Gakusei Shakai Kagaku Rengōkai, Students Federation of Social Science. In the 1910s, groups for studying social science were set up in higher schools, professional schools, and universities. “Social science” here meant Marxism. Their popularity quickly spread and the government became nervous. The result was the Public Safety Preservation Law. The federation’s second meeting was held in July 1925 at the Imperial University of Kyoto, hence Kyoto Gakuren. Among the thirty-three arrested, at least two were tortured to death.)

  Reading Hayashi’s writings from the earliest and including those in prison written in diary or epistolary form, Mishima saw the writer develop a distinction between “sentiments” (shinjō) and theory or “thought” (shisō). A typical example of “sentiments” is Hayashi’s disappointment, despite himself, when his mother came to see him in prison in a different hairstyle. The new hairstyle destroyed his image of the mother who had nurtured him for three decades, he felt, musing: “This is one of the conservative emotions, but I’d like to think such conservatism should be allowed.” Examples of “thought” or, to be exact, the emotions that led him to Marxism were legion: pity for “one bullied by poverty,” reflections on “people who became victims of social expediencies,” and so forth. What happened in the course of thinking in his long incarceration was, first, the desire to unify those “sentiments” and “thought,” and, then, “the cold realization” that there was no difference between the two.

  Mishima’s analysis may not persuade those who view Hayashi as someone who “switched sides from the extreme left to the extreme right.” For them, the first evidence of his betrayal is found in the historical novel Hayashi had begun even before his formal recanting, The Youth. The novel deals with Inoue Kaoru and Itō Hirofumi, who played vital roles during the revolutionary period that led to the Meiji Restoration but went on to play even more vital roles in government and industry after the new regime came into being. The two initial ideas for those who dedicated themselves to “regime change,” from the shogunate to the imperial or monarchial system, were “upholding the Tennō” and “repelling the aliens” or keeping the country from colonization by Western powers.

  But during the crucial period of a decade or so in which the movement split the country, the second idea transformed itself into that of “opening the country.” Inoue and Itō, two of the many bright men sent to Europe and the United States to study how to devise ways of “repelling the aliens” were among those who underwent the complete transformation. And, in The Youth, Hayashi makes them exclaim after returning from overseas study: “We could become radical advocates for opening the country only because we were radical advocates for repelling the aliens! Therein lies a likeable human secret.” This can be taken as a blatant attempt of self-justification and it was.

  Not that Hayashi did not agonize over recanting. He thought over “the spiritual inferno” that someone in his position faced, “with despair on the right, quagmire on the left.” But Mishima found him “unique” and “logical” in the recanting process and decided that “a recanting such as his could not become a question of conscience.” He added:

  The question that many intellectuals agonized over when faced with recanting must have been whether in adhering to Marxism alone lay a complete expression of spiritual freedom. Some of them, even as they sniffed out, with mind’s transcendental ability, that outside Marxism there also was territory for spiritual freedom, couldn’t help being concerned that, for the time being, all the territory outside Marxism was in the hands of government authorities, under their approval. Indeed, any approved form of spiritual freedom is the most heinous form of spiritual freedom.

  Mishima began this close literary analysis, the longest he would ever write of any writer, by recalling his first visit with Hayashi. The publisher of the newspaper for which Hayashi wrote reviews was in a ramshackle building that still retained the devastations of the war, with its corners burnt, crumbling. In the immediate postwar chaos, the people who started the paper evidently hadn’t given much thought to its name for it was simply, generically, called Shin-yūkan, “a new evening edition.” As Mishima left, Hayashi, already tipsy in the afternoon, pissed from the third or fourth floor where his editorial room was, which had few windows intact.

  Mishima at the time had hardly read Hayashi; he’d known only of his notoriety as an opportunist or worse, the word being part of the lingo popular among leftists at the time. But the older writer treated him, a young writer, with “a youthful straightforwardness that was unique to him,” and Mishima was impressed. He decided to read his writings by putting himself “under the same, equal destiny” Hayashi had met. By so doing, he discovered “the beauty and gentleness of sentiments he normally hid from others’ eyes, as well as the other side of those qualities, the sense of despair, revealed here and there in his writings, like the small wildflowers blooming in the cracks of a stone fence.”

  Mishima’s essay, which saw print in the February 1963 issue of Shinchō, was not all adulatory. He was perceptive as a literary critic and pointed out weaknesses where he saw them. As he explained in his afterword when the long essay came out in book form the following year, his motive for examining Hayashi was twofold: “one was my righteous anger at the prejudice against Mr. Hayashi of the world at large, and one was [a need to] straighten out my own youth that I had to think about variously in relation to the problems [he presented].”

  The year 1963 also saw Hayashi start serializing in Chūō Kōron an argument that would earn him even more opprobrium: Affirming the Greater East-Asian War (Dai-Tōa Sensō kōtei-ron). That year the Asahi Shinbun chose him to write its monthly literary review—a point worth noting in view of the liberal stance for which the national daily would become famous, if it still had not.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Contretemps

  At age thirteen Noboru was convinced he was a genius . . . and that the world is made up of some simple symbols and decisions.

  —The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

  In January 1963 Mishima learned of a r
evolt at the Bungaku-za. Fukuda Tsuneari the Shakespearean translator stole a total of 29 members out of the company of 118 to form his own troupe, Kumo (Cloud). Fukuda had joined the Bungaku-za in 1952, provided it with his original plays and translations such as Hamlet, and directed some, then had withdrawn from it in 1956 over disagreement with Sugimura Haruko. Early on as a member of the Hachi no Ki Kai, Mishima had observed, “When it comes to writers, however close you may be to them, you never know when you may get stabbed in the back.”1 That casual observation he had made at the gathering of friends proved true first when Yoshida Kenkichi insulted him to his face. Fukuda’s action was the second: Fukuda pulled off the coup by keeping Mishima—and everyone not involved—“outside the mosquito net.”

  One person who deeply regretted joining the exodus was Mishima’s close friend, Kishida Kyōko. When Fukuda broached his plan to her, she said she’d come along if Mishima joined the deserters. Fukuda said he’d tell him himself but asked her to keep the matter secret in the meantime. When Kishida asked Mishima about it later, he replied glumly: “He told me he was leaving just a day before the news appeared in the newspapers. How can you make an appropriate move in just one day?” The breakup of the Bungaku-za hit the headlines on January 14, 1963.

  Yoshida Chieko, the manager of the troupe who reluctantly went along with Fukuda because those departing entreated her that the new troupe needed a professional manager, recalled that Fukuda, whose only motive was to become “the boss,” was wary of her joining him: “Intrigue and suspicion are the two sides of the coin. In the end, I quit eight months after I switched,” she said.

  In his memoirs on the Bungaku-za, Kitami Harukazu, the actor who was also assigned by the company to chronicle its official history, wrote: “As may be known from the fact that he passionately directed Macbeth and wrote and directed Akechi Mitsuhide that was based on it, Fukuda’s persistent dramatic interest lay in betrayal and rebellion. And just like those figures, he may well have been someone who could not trust not just others, but himself as well. Or, perhaps like Hamlet, he was at once a dreamer and an intriguer, who tried to live aggressively, sincere and considerate while also cruel.” As a result, the moment the intrigue “was realized, you could see he’d inevitably hurt those surrounding him.”2 Akechi Mitsuhide (1528?–82) rebelled against his overlord, Oda Nobunaga, and killed him. Within thirteen days he was attacked and killed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98), another warlord with allegiance to Oda.

  With Fukuda, dissension surfaced on his approach soon enough. The first major complaint was that he staged only the plays he translated. The Kumo troupe opened with the production of his translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and carried on in the same vein. In 1967 Fukuda would be forced to move away to set up another company.

  What disquieted Mishima was not so much Fukuda’s action as the fact that he had been kept in the dark about the move. If told of it in advance, he might have been sympathetic. After all, even as he set about helping rebuild and reorient the Bungaku-za, he wrote a congratulatory message for the Kumo when Fukuda issued a manifesto on the official formation of his company. One reason for the revolt was the size of the Bungaku-za. It had grown too large for a group that was supposed to be tight-knit and communal. Early on, when a different troupe joined the company, two currents or factions had formed within the company and Iwata Toyo’o, for one, had foreseen an eventual breakup. More recently, conflicts between the founding members, along with those who joined a few years later, and younger ones had been coming to the fore.

  Another reason, which was not evident for a while but would blow up in less than a year, was political. Like many progressively minded groups in literature and art, the Bungaku-za was becoming increasingly left-leaning. Not just that the Soviet Union was riding high as the adversary of the United States, but Communist China was eminently, ostensibly, succeeding in its “smile diplomacy.” Japanese intellectuals invited to China on friendship tours were regaled with enticing spectacles. Murayama Tomoyoshi, who had turned The Temple of the Golden Pavilion into a play, was one of them. Meeting a number of “ordinary folks” on one of those tours, he was “taken aback,” he had written following a 1957 tour of China. It was only a dozen years since Japan had been forced to abandon its prolonged, ravaging military presence in China and two dozen years before the Chinese government started protesting the way certain incidents were treated in Japanese textbooks.

  “The people have utterly changed from what they were before the Revolution. They are mildly disposed, full of smiles, kind, self-sacrificial, abounding with love, brimming with joy, full of hope, plain-spoken, and artless.” The transformative powers of “scientific socialism” were obvious, wrote the man who should have known better.3 During a friendship tour in 1965, Murayama would be further impressed by a highly organized, disciplined display of humanism accorded a member of the visiting Japanese group who fell into a coma.4

  Similar experiences enchanted many members of the Bungaku-za, the company’s actress-leader, Sugimura Haruko, on down. Mishima had seen only the anomalous tip of China, Hong Kong, on his world tour, but he had doubts. After the Bungaku-za toured China in the fall of 1960 along with two other troupes, Kubota Mantarō invited the leading participants to his house for a party. There much of the talk was, apparently, how wonderful China was, but Kubota seemed none too happy about it. When the Bungaku-za discussed what to stage in China before the tour, the host country’s advisor had turned down The Rokumeikan, flatly saying anything by Mishima would be unacceptable. The other candidate, A Woman’s Life (Onna no isshō), Morimoto Kaoru’s play directed by Kubota, was accepted but only with revisions for the Chinese production. China offered only simplistic “revolutionary” plays to the visitors (as well as their own people).

  Kubota could not take it any longer when an actress during his party blurted out, “Political ideas have priority over theater.” He kept drinking cup after cup for a while, until suddenly he sat upright and announced, “Well, then, I’ll part company with all of you tonight,” and wept—as Iwata who was there recalled three years after the defection.5 Both Kubota and Iwata must have bitterly recalled that nearly a quarter of a century earlier they had founded the Bungaku-za to counter the “politicalism” of the day.

  For now, however, Mishima energetically set out to help rebuild the shrunken company. Calling the defection “a happy revolution” as he would the Meiji Restoration only in that one could claim external forces prompted it,6 he joined its board of directors and worked out its future direction, proposing a three-prong approach, as the Asahi Shinbun reported on February 23: first, newly written plays and translated plays; second, plays such as Tosca stressing theatricality and drama that made the theater attractive in the first place and kept it that way before modern realism took over; and third, plays that bring out the best of Japan’s classical drama.7

  Mishima had already provided plays for the three categories for the Bungaku-za, although the company had yet to formally stage any of his modern nō plays that fall in the third category. This may have frustrated Mishima; some of them had already been produced in foreign countries—the United States, Brazil, Germany, and Sweden. Also, in Japan, it was not the Bungaku-za but a Shinpa troupe that fully staged one of them, The Damask Drum, for the first time, and that did not happen until the previous May.

  What may have been a surprise to many was the mention of Tosca in the second category. In March, when Victorien Sardou’s drama, La Tosca, on which of course Puccini’s opera was based, appeared on the Bungaku-za’s short list of plays scheduled for production in the immediate future, Mishima wrote that the idea of staging La Tosca was to show “what was once considered the most theatrical in Europe.” Kabuki during the Meiji Era absorbed foreign theater far better. “There could be works of art that may be second-rate as literature but first-rate as theater. Now that the Bungaku-za has years of experience, it should be able to do something like this. Our wish is for the audience to savor the joy of a play
full of breathtaking romance and suspense.”8

  Mishima had given a good deal of thought to the matter. He had long been troubled by the watering down of theater and drama brought about by the Shingeki that was born in mid-Meiji to move against the theatricality embodied in kabuki and had maintained its stance ever since. He could not stand “the wakelike feeling” engendered at modern Japanese theaters, “in particular the death-ash feeling during a Shingeki production,” he wrote in one of his several essays explaining or, to be exact, defending his choice of La Tosca. The recognition of the problem was nothing new. Kishida, Kubota, and Iwata had proclaimed in 1937, in their manifesto for setting up the Bungaku-za, that their aim was to get out of both “the atmosphere of the traditional, convention-bound ‘theater’ and the awkwardness of the unnecessarily radical ‘Shingeki’” so that the new company might “offer the intelligent masses ‘entertainment for the spirit’ through the stage.”9

  Mishima recalled how profoundly moved he had been by the Comedie Française production of Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas he saw during his visit to Paris in December 1960; the stage-set for the opening was “as solemn as one of Velásquez’s court paintings,” with the rest equally elaborate and well done. The Parisians in the know counseled against his wasting his time on such a play, echoing Sainte-Beuve’s condemnation of the play, such as “Typical Hugo, nothing left out, powerful and sublime some would say, more gross and violent than ever: a certified incurable, magnificently historical, and with huge red capital letters.”10 So the schism existed in France as well.

  To remedy the situation in Japan, staging a French Romantic play might work as good medicine, Mishima thought, but Ruy Blas and another of Hugo’s plays, Hernani, would be too difficult for the Japanese stage. In the end, Mishima hit upon La Tosca, which brought Sarah Bernhardt such extravagant fame. Mishima even quoted Oscar Wilde who, according to Bernhardt’s memoirs, was in a throng of several thousands welcoming her when she landed in Folkestone, England, and shouted, “Hip, hip, hurrah! A cheer for Sarah Bernhardt!” and strewed an armful of lilies in front of her.