by Hiroaki Sato
I have a wishful prospect that a repeated staging of French Romantic plays might, just might, fill the gap between Shingeki and tradition in modern Japan. This is because, regardless of the literary value of the scripts and the differences in languages, the plays of the Romantic School are linked to Japan’s traditional plays through the commonality in the idea of theater. In that respect, common points are more easily found in lowbrow scripts which focus on staging and acting.11
In June the Bungaku-za, according to plan, produced Sardou’s play in Andō Shin’ya’s translation adapted by Mishima. It then toured Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, and elsewhere.
The Joyful Koto
Even as he was doing all this, in March when the Kumo announced it was open for business, Mishima penned for it a message, “Resurrection of ‘The Joy of Theater,’” to say that what Fukuda stated in his manifesto accorded with what he had in mind. He agreed with Fukuda on three main arguments: that the new Japanese theater created in the latter part of the nineteenth century had confused the attraction of the West and the attraction of Western theater, committing the error of employing theater as an instrument of Japan’s modernization; that it had mistaken what was just the modern West for the West itself; and that it had shut itself up in a closed world and narrow professionalism.
The same thing could be said not just of theater but literature and art as well and, in this respect, Fukuda’s was criticism of modern Japan as a whole, Mishima wrote. Yet, precisely because of that, he thought Fukuda was going too far in blaming everything on the Tsukiji Shōgekijō, the “little theater” established in 1924 on ideas extracted from Stanislavski’s methods, German Expressionism, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, and so on. What was important was not “to question anew what the ‘theater’ Shingeki should aim for,” as Fukuda put it, Mishima said, but to acquire the ability to say simply, “This is or isn’t theater.”12
If losing a sizable number of its members was the first blow to the Bungaku-za, in May Kubota suddenly died—of food poisoning. Invited to a “gourmet party” thrown by the painter Umehara Ryūzaburō, he reacted badly to the clam in sushi and suffocated. Not long afterward, Iwata, the last of the three founders of the theater company, resigned his post as special advisor. Then, in November, the month John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Bungaku-za faced a situation that led to Mishima’s decision to break with it, prompting an additional fourteen of its members to defect. This occurred over the play the company had commissioned him to write.
The play, The Joyful Koto (Yorokobi no koto), has to do with Matsumura, a senior officer of the public safety section of a police precinct, and Katagiri, a rookie cop who looks up to him as his model, his father figure. Katagiri uncovers what appears to be a secret code, which Matsumura learns points to the schedule of a train carrying the prime minister. A plot against the train suspected, Katagiri is assigned to the case. The train is derailed anyway, resulting in a large number of casualties. Katagiri finds out that it was the work of the radical right, or so he thinks.
It turns out, however, that Matsumura was all along a secret agent of the radical left, and the train derailment was an elaborate ploy to smear the rightwing, a revelation that severely tests Katagiri’s trust in human beings in general, Matsumura in particular. The title refers to a melody on the Japanese musical instrument the rookie begins to hear in his head after this betrayal, just as a traffic cop says he does when all the noise subsides while controlling traffic.
In the initial discussion of The Joyful Koto, the Bungaku-za leadership, with Mishima participating, agreed that the play was neither “political” nor “ideological” but that it dealt with “social phenomena.” The case can surely be made that Mishima’s point was to raise the simple question: When you admire someone, are you admiring his personality or his ideology? What happens when one’s simpleminded trust in someone is betrayed? In explaining his intent, Mishima himself suggested that through such betrayal alone can one, a simpleminded one, become “a self-aware human being,” and that the melody on the koto Katagiri begins to hear may be a means of that salvation.13
But he went on to say he would purposefully avoid “annotating” what that melody was meant to be, leaving its interpretation to the director of the play and the audience. Muramatsu Takeshi puzzled this out in his Mishima biography. He noticed that Mishima had just been to Kansai to gather material for his next novel, Silk and Insight (Kinu to meisatsu), and would begin to write it just two days after he finished The Joyful Koto. In the novel, Okano, the would-be bystander who plays the pivotal role in the drama and clearly Mishima’s alter-ego, is presented as a lover of Heidegger and, through him, Hölderlin’s poetry, in particular “Homecoming” (Heimkunft). Indeed, Heidegger’s book, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung), provides a “philosophical annotation” to the novel.
Muramatsu also noted that Mishima, in pointing out the similarities between the betrayed rookie cop and the female protagonist of the play he wrote next, A Hint of Love (Koi no hokage), used the German word Sorge in his program note indicating that it was the original of what was translated as urei, “melancholy,” in a Japanese translation of Heidegger’s book that Mishima apparently used. Through these he deduces that Mishima had in mind the last part of the poem that ends with these lines: “Yet a lyre to each hour lends the right mode, the right music, / And, it may be, delights heavenly ones who draw near. . . . / Whether he likes it or not, and often, a singer must harbour / Cares like these in his soul; not, though, the wrong sort of cares.”14
In any event, after the rehearsal started, with the production set for January, some in the company suddenly began arguing for cancellation on the grounds that it was too obviously anti-left, anti-labor. In September the Supreme Court had handed down its decision on the Matsukawa Incident dismissing the prosecution’s fourteen-year-old argument that it was all a Communist conspiracy, but here was Mishima’s play that pivoted on the radical left’s contrivance and betrayal. Besides, all the characters except for an old maid who works in the precinct office are policemen, and they naturally mouth a fair amount of anti-left vituperations. Some actors assigned to it, visibly upset, said they couldn’t possibly say their lines. After heated arguments, the company decided to cancel the play, the decision contingent on the consent of Sugimura Haruko upon her return from China. She opted for putting it “on hold,” an indefinite postponement.
Kitami Harukazu, who would leave the company soon after this turmoil and set up his own troupe, NLT (an acronym of “new literature theater”), suspected foul play: the Communist Party worked on some members to agitate against The Joyful Koto. Whether that was the case or not, the Rōen—Kinrōsha Engeki Kyōgikai (Workers Theater Congress)—an arm of the national labor union, told the Bungaku-za that it would never again buy Bungaku-za tickets for its members if the troupe produced this play. That would be a huge blow because at the time, the organization had enormous clout in lining up audiences. An even greater blow was the announcement of NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting corporation, that it would not broadcast the play live.
A delegation went to Mishima on November 21 and offered three reasons for the company’s decision to put the play on hold: artistic, commercial, and ideological. Mishima countered with his cancellation, stipulating in a written agreement that the Bungaku-za’s decision was based solely on ideological reasons. On the 25th, he informed the Bungaku-za of his resignation. Then, in an open letter that the Asahi Shinbun carried on November 27, he mounted a blistering attack on the theater troupe. “Art always has a sting in it. It has poison in it. You cannot not swallow poison, merely sucking in honey,” he wrote. “I wanted to make you stronger by pulling you out into a north wind,” but as long as the Bungaku-za wanted to stay “in a greenhouse,” he had “no choice but to part company with all of you.”15
The Bungaku-za pointed out in its response, which the Asahi duly carried on December 7, that it was “prejudice and distortion” on Mishima’s
part to point to the ideological aspect as the sole reason for the breakup because they had proposed three.16 But Mishima, who most likely wanted to test the troupe politically, could only regard the two other reasons as superfluous. Artistically, The Joyful Koto may not be among Mishima’s best, but the Bungaku-za had produced much inferior plays, as Kitami argued during the discussion at the troupe. Commercially, the Rōen’s threat precisely pointed to the ideology or political aspect of it.
Had the fracas not occurred, Mishima might have argued that he intended The Joyful Koto partly as a counterweight to The Tenth-Day Chrysanthemum, which has to do with a rightwing assassination attempt. Later, when he wrote the play My Friend Hitler (Waga tomo Hitler), he explained that he had written the all-male play as a counterweight to the all-female Madame de Sade (Sado Kōshaku Fujin).17
Luckily, Asari Keita, manager of the brand-new Nissay Theatre—just completed the previous September, with the Berlin Philharmonic playing on the grand opening night—promptly bought the production rights to The Joyful Koto and announced its staging in short order. He had commissioned Mishima to write an opera in the summer of 1963. He might have thought that a play mostly with policemen was none too sexy, but he wanted to add Mishima to his staff, which he did as he bought the play, and assumed that the play would be all right if coupled with the opera, titled Minoko.18 Mishima was relieved and happy and “hustled”—his English; it had become a fad word—for its success. One thing he did was to revise the play, which had already seen print in Bungei magazine (February 1964), to clarify the point of each act and scene, so as to emphasize “anticommunism in Act 1, its Antithese (antithesis) in Act 2, nihilism as its Synthese (synthesis) in Act 3, Scene 1, and salvation in Act 3, Scene 2,” as he explained, deliberately using Marxists’ favorite terminology, Antithese and Synthese. He seldom, if ever, revised his plays.19
But Minoko would create another contretemps. The plan was for Mishima to write the libretto, for Mayuzumi Toshirō to compose the music, and for Asari to direct. Mayuzumi—who had composed music not just for Mishima’s epithalamium for the Crown Prince and Princess but also for the film versions of several of his works, including Lectures on Immoral Education—wanted a “grand opera.” Mishima, excited by the prospect of writing one, this time for real, chose to go through three careful steps: prepare an outline of the play in three acts and show it to Mayuzumi and Asari for comments; write the script and do the same; finally, after incorporating his collaborators’ opinions and comments, go over the script, word by word with them. He did the last step in a single all-night session at the Imperial Hotel, on July 4. He managed to work out only the first two acts with the two men, but finished Act 3 on July 17.
But in February, when an orchestra to be conducted by Ozawa Seiji, a chorus, and singers were lined up for rehearsal in April, a month before the scheduled production, Mayuzumi, who had pleaded for postponement, delaying the production by three months, wanted one more month: he had composed midway through Act 2, but he wouldn’t be able to finish the rest in time. Mishima refused. He would not speak to him thereafter until Mayuzumi got in touch with him at the end of April 1970 to get permission for his opera Kinkakuji, based on The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, when the Berlin Opera asked to produce it. In his testimony during the “Mishima Incident” trial, Mayuzumi recalled Mishima telling him: “I listen to you talk on TV, and your thinking resembles mine, but be careful never to allow the rightwing to take advantage of you.”20
“It took me time because it was my first opera,” Mayuzumi said ruefully. “Susano’o no Mikoto”—the wild brother of Amaterasu Ō-mikami, the Sun Goddess—“appears on a motorcycle, and the one he falls in love with is a vestal.” Minoko is set in a modern-day autumn festival. Mayuzumi was able to find a source of inspiration for Act 1 in a festival on Oki Island, but had no such luck with the rest.21 “It may have been influenced by West Side Story, but it was radically new. One of these days I’d like to finish the composition for Act 3 and see the opera staged. At the time I desperately tried to keep the promise in my own way, but couldn’t. I was to blame.”
How He Wrote
“My methodological effort is to make my subconscious activity more alert and quick,” Mishima wrote in an essay that Bungaku solicited on how he wrote his novels and stories. It was shortly before the fracas about The Joyful Koto erupted. “My subconscious does not start moving vividly in an unlimited, formless situation. There are writers whose subconscious starts acting better in a rubbery chaos. I am not a writer of that type. My mind does not become free unless I bind it up with something, determine exactly the direction and purpose for it, and determine precisely the route to it.” In sum, he was “in methodology obviously a classicist.”
Specifically, he took four steps in writing a story: discover a subject, study its milieu (his French), plot the structure, then write. Defining the second step of studying the milieu as “the work of immersing [the subject] in as precise specificities as possible,” he explained: “If it’s a story based on a news item and such, I go as far as checking court records and police files. Even when it’s a totally imaginary story, I carefully check the details of the professions the principal characters are supposed to hold, the details of the lives they’re supposed to lead, so I may give them specificity.” He paid special attention to the landscape and environment in which his characters are supposed to do things.22
A good example may be the short story “The Sword” (Ken) that appeared a month earlier, in the October 1963 issue of Shinchō. The story reads like a straight narrative based on a sport whose environment Mishima loved and knew well: kendō. Yet he visited places and prepared extensive notes: on college campuses and their surroundings, what men on college kendō teams do and say, how they train during their summer camp, their daily schedules and expenditures, how many pushups they do. Also, for the background of the summer training camp for the team he described in the story, he consulted some of the notes he had on the Izu Peninsula port where he had spent time collecting material for Animal Entanglement.
He did not use most of the details he had gathered. Among the discarded was a story about the supervisor of a students’ kendō team. In his notes Mishima had written of an instructor who was superb at kendō and accomplished in shakuhachi, ikebana, and tea ceremony besides, but who also loved nothing better than to engage in sex with pretty, young boys on the team. Senior students told juniors to sleep with him, and so on.23 In the story, the man is presented as a stern but gentle, upright man dedicated to kendō. No sexual peccadillos with boys.
“The Sword” was turned into a movie the next April. Ichikawa Raizō, who had played the protagonist in the film The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, played the captain of the kendō team who, determined to excel at the sport of his choice and to be correct in every respect and at all times or else to kill himself, kills himself after the members of his team break one of the rules he lays down during their summer training camp. The story was also turned into a TV drama not long afterward and broadcast in May.
An equally good but fuller example to illustrate Mishima’s approach to story-writing may be the novel he wrote in the first five months of that year. A year earlier, Kōdansha had asked him to be the first to write for their new series, Novels of Today, and he had agreed. He thought up a story with a sailor as protagonist and told his editor, Kawashima Masaru, that he’d like to visit Yokohama, one of Japan’s largest ports. So, one morning in March 1962, Kawashima, along with fellow editor Matsumoto Michiko, met Mishima at his house, drove to the port town, and spent the day exploring it. They made a second trip in September.
From the two trips Mishima made at least three notebooks. One of them, apparently with a section missing, is devoted to details on the crew on a freighter. Through the introduction of Matsumoto’s younger brother, Mishima with his two companions was allowed aboard a 7,340DW freighter during the second trip and was able to elicit a great deal of facts on the crew: ranks, duties, roles, how each person i
s addressed. In addition, Matsumoto prepared a report at Mishima’s request after the first trip—on what the business of retailing clothes entails, how the Customs House examines the crew’s possessions, and how a private-eye company operates, including the format of the report its employees prepare. Japanese publishers provide well-known authors with such assistance.
What may be the first of Mishima’s notebooks begins, with his words in English italicized. Triangles and circles are Mishima’s:
ΔChild scolded, his Peeping found out by his mother. Ryūji assumes a hypocritical attitude of a compassionate generous father. Father-mother-child’s dramatic scene.
ΟLoad (1) depends on weather (2) also, [leaving port] can be delayed for reasons such as when [the load] increases from three thousand tons to five thousand tons; accordingly, sailing also delayed.
Even while loading, Watch should be on for appearance. Not officially but you can have third officer stand in for you with chief officer’s permission.
ΟUniform only at reception on board.
Summer—short-sleeve shirt with epaulets. White trousers (there’s also a special jacket) and a crew hat.
ΔMarch 18 afternoon, clear.
ΔCenter Pier’s landscape
We enter though the Customs House, and right up front, on the sidetrack passes a freight train pulled by an oldfashioned engine belching black smoke.
Withered plane trees. A mysterious town whose only aim is the sea. An abstract mysterious town whose heart is drawn only to one side. Warehouse companies’ buildings. Warehouses made of red beautiful bricks. A lot of ships.