by Hiroaki Sato
ΔCenter Pier
Imerina Otaru-bound
Korean Bear (Pier 8)
ΔSouth Pier
Eastern Galaxy Nagoya-bound
ΔT. Pier
Hatsushima Pier
From this opening section, Mishima would use almost all the description in “Center Pier’s landscape,” in Part II, Chapter 1 of the story, though much refined. The notes go on in similar fashion, page after page, interspersed with drawings, with occasional hints of someone providing technical terms, such as “king post,” “derrick booms” (at times Mishima thought the term was “derrick beams”), and “heavy cranes.” There is a great deal of what he observed, in the kinds of detail that add the sense of immediacy: waves, dirty water with wood fragments, seagulls, flags, tugboats, the names of destinations such as Singapore, Lagos, Ababa. “A gull flies. The evening sun shines yellow on its belly. Its belly and the undersides of its wings faintly yellow and bright. Egg color.”
Then come plans and ideas for the story: “In this novel, in Part I, man and woman, each character, play ‘obvious’ roles perfectly.” Then this: “What stops life’s supreme moment, it can only be death.” And then: “gogo no eikō no catastrophe.” Gogo no eikō, “afternoon tug,” would become the title of the story for which he was preparing these notes, though at one point the title was umi no eiyū, “the hero of the sea.” After a while Mishima starts listing particulars on clothes retailing, which he interrupts—or so it appears although that may be true only if the notebook is taken as a consecutive whole—with a clinical description of the physical effects of poisoning (by sleeping pills, German-made paramin) and a deep abdominal cut or cuts. This notebook ends with a cry, “Cold! Cold!”
On the group’s second trip to Yokohama, Mishima was stylishly dressed, in slacks and shoes, both white, a dark or black half-sleeve shirt, and large dark glasses. Kawashima took his old Loreiflex and left a number of photos. The fruit of the trip was the second notebook, which combines more of the details of the story Mishima planned with what he learned during the port visit, and the partial notebook mentioned earlier.
Yet assiduous note-taking was not the only order of the day. Mishima, who wanted to become, among other things, a madorosu (from the Dutch word matroos, “sailor,” “seaman”), after exploring the port and the town and visiting a ship, took his two editors barhopping. He downed the cocktail Angel’s Kiss at every stop, sang, autographed the panties of barmaids when asked, and danced with a shy Matsumoto well into the night—“just like a madorosu,” Kawashima reported.
The story, Mishima’s notes suggest, was to focus on the sailor Ryūji’s “suicide wish,” a result of “the discrepancy between the inner and outer” lives of the man, his bleak spiritual life for all the romantic image that the madorosu conjures in popular songs and such (or did, in those days). “A lady entertaining a suicide wish, while touring a ship, exchanges dark looks with a low-ranking crewman with a suicide wish.” “Wants to die in the trembling of caresses. Wants to die while being caressed. Wish for a luxurious death.” “The proprietress of a Western haut-couture goods store . . . happens to get acquainted, in a bar, with a low-ranking crewman. Albeit a muscular young man, he entertains a suicide wish. ‘Kill me! Kill me!” “The widow takes interest in him, and the two [begin to] love each other.”24
There is a fanciful story behind the English title the novel Gogo no eikō came to have: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. The original title can be vague or mysterious with the word eikō, which, with the Chinese characters Mishima gave it, means “tugging” or “towing” but as a homophone means “glory.” And, indeed, the story emphasizes Ryūji’s youthful wish for “glory” that has come to naught.
“When I was unable to come up with anything in English better than Glory Is a Drag,” wrote John Nathan, who translated the story and went on to write a biography of Mishima, “I went to Mishima for help.” Nathan was a student at the University of Tokyo at the time. “Mishima remarked that it would be nice to have a long title in the manner of Á la Recherche. . . , paused, then rattled off a dozen titles which I jotted down in English. When I read them back, Mishima chose The Sailor.”25
The Sailor has yet to be turned into a movie in Japan, but six years after Mishima’s death, Lewis John Carlino did so in the United States, with Sarah Miles and Kris Kristofferson playing the lead roles.
For that matter, another story of Mishima’s became a foreign film, though much later: The School of the Flesh (Nikutai no gakkō), which he serialized throughout the year of 1963 in Mademoiselle as he wrote The Sailor. In 1998, Benoît Jacquot turned it into L’école de la chair, with Isabelle Huppert and Vincent Martinez in the lead roles. The main character of the story, a thirty-nine-year-old woman who, like the widow in The Sailor, runs a haut-couture store, chases a twenty-one-year-old gigolo who works in a gay bar. On the face of it, this story may appear very different from Le Diable au corps in which a teenager indulges in sex with a just-married woman. But Mishima clearly meant The School of the Flesh to echo the French novel. Not just that Radiguet’s title comes out as Nikutai no akuma in Japanese, but in both stories there are a good deal of decision, indecision, and second-guessing.
Orgasm as Music
The year 1964 opened with Mishima beginning to serialize two novels: Music (Ongaku) in Fujin Kōron and the aforementioned novel Silk and Insight in Gunzō. Of the two, Music takes the form of a psychoanalyst’s report on the progress of a young beauty who confesses frigidity—“music” is her metaphor for orgasm—and on his growing nonprofessional interest in her. Written when, as the narrator says at the outset, “the profession of psychoanalysis is gradually beginning to attract attention [in Japan] though its popularity in no way compares with that in America,” the story sets out to track down, in the manner of a detective story, a woman’s sexual experience in clinical details that ends with a revelation of her incest with her brother.
That particular form of incest is a subject that fascinated Mishima since boyhood. “For a long time I have felt something most sweet in a brother-sister love heightened to lust,” he had written when his play four years earlier, Tropical Trees (Nettaiju), was staged. The sentiment dates from his reading as a boy, he said, of the Eleventh and Twelfth Nights of One Thousand and One Nights where the forbidden love is consummated in a grave.26 In Tropical Trees, too, the consummation ends in death, presumably, though in it the incest is triangular: sister-brother-mother.
In Music Mishima makes incest forced and sordid, perhaps because of the need to give the psychoanalytical thriller some credibility. At the end of the story, he appends a “bibliography” listing six sources in foreign languages, three in German and three in English, obviously to endow the analyst-narrator with the air of a specialist.
Though he had pursued Freud and Jung for a while, following his interest in Hirschfeld and Ellis, in the end he did not develop high regard for psychoanalysis. In the essay he wrote at the request of Life for its special issue on Japan, which the weekly prepared ahead of the Tokyo Olympic Games that fall (“the first time this Western event has ever been held in the Orient”), Mishima twitted American intellectuals for their fascination with psychoanalysis.
Citing Terentius’s words “I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me,” Mishima said, in an obvious nod to Oscar Wilde: “The ordinary man may become enraged to see Caliban’s face in a glass, but the intellectual isn’t the least bit afraid. Even if coming face to face with oneself may at times be the same as peering into hell.”27 This is because “in any country the intellectual is his country’s ‘consciousness’ itself, someone who represents under the light of consciousness the depth consciousness and the unconsciousness of instinct buried in the history, traditions, and culture of his folk.” Or that is what one expects from an intellectual of any country.
“And yet in America it appears that, just as a sailor’s disease once infected even royalty, the ordinary man’s disease of fearing coming face to
face with himself has infected the intellectual. I was amazed to see many intellectuals and artists frequent psychoanalysts. Shouldn’t it be rather that the psychoanalysts come to the artists to ask questions? In our country, a man comes around to the kitchen every morning to pick up the day’s laundry”—at least that was how dirty clothes were taken care of in bourgeois neighborhoods in those days—“but in America you must collect days’ worth of dirty clothes and such and take them to the cleaners yourself.”
Mishima ended the essay this way: “One thing I can’t understand is America’s dishonorable image, which the country has disseminated to the world, of a man helping his wife do dishes, but it is possible that Americans will be rescued even from this evil and restore their prestige in the near future: for one, through the promotion of new ethics that a man doing such a thing is worse than committing robbery or killing someone; for the other, thanks to none other than automation.”28 This paragraph was dropped when the essay appeared in Donald Keene’s translation in the September 11, 1964 issue of Life with the title “A Famous Japanese Judges the U.S. Giant.”
Silk and Insight
If Music was designed to some extent to titillate the readers of the highbrow women’s magazine with what was purported to be frank, clinical discussions of female sex, Silk and Insight was altogether a different affair, an attempt to describe “Japan’s father,” as the working title of the novel had it. To do so, Mishima posits the Japanese-style owner of a textile company against a European-infatuated intellectual who is deployed to destroy him.
The protagonist of the novel, Komazawa Zenjirō, is an idealistic albeit self-serving businessman. President of a textile mill by Lake Biwa, Komazawa says his employees are his sons and daughters. He makes them obey him but also protects them, he believes, with fatherly benevolence. He puts all of them in dormitories where no privacy is allowed. All personal effects, including letters, are subject to inspection by “dorm mothers.” Marriages among employees aren’t allowed. Silk and Insight was, in fact, based on an actual labor strike—called Japan’s first human rights strike—ten years earlier, in 1954, and among the demands the employees of the actual company involved, Ōmi Kenshi, made during the strike under the guidance of a number of outside labor unions were freedom of marriage and respect for privacy.29
Komazawa’s absolutist paternalism works well for him, and his business thrives, until a meddler comes in. Murakawa, president of a rival company who proudly keeps abreast with the latest American management theories and machinery, sees weaknesses in Komazawa’s pre-modern management style, most obviously the pent-up employee frustrations in a slave-labor environment, and decides to destroy him. He sends his friend Okano to incite Komazawa’s young employees to revolt. Educated in Germany before the war, Okano has managed himself well in straddling prewar and postwar Japan as a suave, sophisticated man of the world who upholds Heidegger’s philosophy and loves nothing better than Hölderlin’s poetry. He joins the fraternal gathering of chief executives of textile companies Komazawa hosts.
“Business is tears, Mr. Okano,” Komazawa explains. They are aboard a ship Komazawa has chartered for the occasion to cruise the lake. “I truly think that I am the father and those who work in my factory are my daughters and sons. They guessed that this was the day their father finally made it big, and sang our company song so intently, with all their hearts, and sent our guests on their way, that sentiment, that’s what’s valuable. Precisely the same sentiment has borne Komazawa Textiles along.”
Komazawa is aware of the contempt of his fellow presidents but he knows he is right. Things Japanese are the very best. “The Japanese still aren’t aware of good things that are uniquely Japanese, they still haven’t shed the habit of letting Westerners tell them, only then telling themselves, ‘Well, I see. In that case, I’ll try that,’” he tells a president unlucky enough to have to listen to him. “It wouldn’t do, wouldn’t you say, unless the Japanese themselves awake to the good things about Japan. Why is it? We have the best landscapes in the world, the best girls in the world, we have such beautiful sentiments.”
But it is during this cruise, which Komazawa intended as a celebration of his own accomplishment to impress his rivals, that a disaster strikes: a fire touched off by an overturned movie projector in a dorm kills two dozen employees and hurts more than 300, a result of Komazawa’s restriction on his employees’ free time outside the company premises. In short order Okano picks a young, bright employee named Ōtsuki to lead a strike against the company. Komazawa never understands the reasons for such an act of unfilial insubordination.
“I am speaking the same Japanese language you speak, am I not?” Komazawa asks the young man when Okano arranges a meeting between the two. Told that more than 80 percent of the employees working for him are women and they are forced to do so in pitiful conditions, he is genuinely puzzled. “Well then, what do you want me to give those girls? Clothes? Pretty clothes? Is that what you call liberty, equality, and peace? . . . I gave them money. I provided lodging. I fed them. Now they wanted pretty clothes, so you said, Oh sure, sure, and followed whatever those girls said, did you? I had made a distinction between what I should give them and what I should not, but you can’t make that distinction.”
In this construct, Komazawa versus Okano is Japan versus the West or traditional Japan versus Western-infatuated Japan, and Komazawa versus Ōtsuki is father versus son, Mishima explained in an interview with the Asahi Shinbun. The daily evidently thought clarification was called for because, although the novel dealt with a socio-historically important event that advanced modern values, the author’s position on the leading characters he created and the issues involved was not immediately clear. The story one might expect to be schematic is not.
So, Komazawa, “the enemy of the people,” is defeated; Ōtsuki, the embodiment of youth and progress, is triumphant. But Okano, “the man who thinks he has created a philosophy of destruction” and thus represents “the imported thought of intellectuals that has not taken root in Japanese soil,” is made to succeed Komazawa as president of Komazawa Textiles, the very thing he successfully destroyed.
At the same time, there is Komazawa’s wife, Fusae. Long disabled by tuberculosis, the very disease that felled so many young women in the textile industry during Japan’s industrial and military expansion that largely depended on it, Fusae, the symbol of the dark side of Japan’s modernization, haunts Komazawa’s existence as a curse.
One must also consider the title Mishima chose for the fictionalized account of an actual labor dispute and its outcome: kinu to meisatsu, “silk and insight.” It echoed kinu to gunkan, “silk and warships,” the pithy proverb dating from the Russo-Japanese War that said the production and export of silk fabric and thread enabled Japan to buy and build warships. Work at textile factories was one of both pain and pride, as a chronicler of the sufferings of young women who worked in harsh textile factories has pointed out. The greatest warship Japan ever built, the battleship bearing the country’s ancient name, Yamato, led, in the last phase of the Pacific War, a Kamikaze sortie without air cover, only to be sunk by American carrier-based bombers. The destruction of the Yamato, in that regard, was a sad end to that chapter of Japanese history.30
So what is the “insight”? His employees triumphant, Komazawa is struck down by a stroke. And yet, he is given the last word. Dying and forgiving all, he is made to muse: “The truth that only he knows and the heart that only he values” have remained incomprehensible to those who have defeated him, but the happiness they’ve won “will in time prove to be a counterfeit jewel.” That, Mishima said, is the insight. He also said, “I wanted to depict a drama of this mysterious figure encrusted with old moral ideas.” The man represented the Tennō, he told a friend.31
The Olympian Reporter
For the Tokyo Olympics, in the fall of 1964, all the major dailies seem to have asked Mishima to cover the event. After all, he was not just the most glamorous writer of the day, but also one de
eply engaged in sports. He did not betray their expectations. For the Mainichi, Asahi, and Hōchi, for each of which he became a special correspondent, he wrote articles on boxing, weightlifting, swimming (women’s 100-meter backstroke, men’s 1,500 meter), track and field (800-meter, 20,000-meter race walk, and 100-meter dash), gymnastics, and women’s volleyball (newly added to the Games along with judo), as well as the opening and closing ceremonies. In these articles, he produced some of his most lyrical prose. Here’s how he described the US sprinter Robert Hayes. As the athletes get down at the starting line—
What happened next, I no longer know. Hayes, his coal-black body in a dark blue shirt, was surely at the starting line, but is now way beyond, having broken the tape. A record of ten seconds flat. In that duration there surely was something that rushed before my eyes, like a black flame. Besides, the figure that burnt into my eyes in that instant was neither flying, nor tumbling, but correctly took “the shape of a human being running” as it moved its four limbs precisely as the spokes of a wheel stretched in the four directions from the center of a human physique. How could such a complicated, hard-to-deal-with form dash through a 100-meter space with such divine speed? He accomplished the feat of switching from this to the other side of a space wall.32
Ichikawa Kon, who made a film version of The Golden Pavilion, captured Robert Hayes and other sprinters in this race in unforgettable slow-motion close-ups in his documentary of the Games, Tokyo Olympiad.
Mishima took the main meaning of Japan hosting the Olympic Games in 1964 to be this: the country finally joining the ranks of the advanced nations of the West by, yes, regaining their good graces. A quarter of a century earlier, in 1940, Tokyo was scheduled to host the Olympics—following Berlin—but had to give up the honor because, aside from its own war in China, a war had started in Europe. Then came the war with the United States and other European countries and the devastation, followed by food aid, among other things, from the main adversary. It was to demonstrate recovery, and that it has attained some technological prowess on the way, that the Shinkansen, the Bullet Train, among other things, was built, with its launch timed to run, inaugurally, and it did, on October 1, exactly ten days before the opening ceremony of the international athletic feast.