by Hiroaki Sato
There were of course lopsided aspects to Japan’s economic, technological, and cultural state, as Arthur Koestler, sent to Japan by Life for its Japan special, readily noticed: Tokyo is “the first city in the world with a monorail system linking airport to urban center—but it has no citywide sewage system.” A man famous for all sorts of his own inferiority complexes, Koestler also did not overlook “Olympicitis”—the fear among some quarters that Japanese women might divorce their husbands in droves for tall, good-looking Caucasian athletes who would descend upon them with the Games.33
Mishima was uncharacteristically wistful when he wrote for a small magazine about the post-event funk that prevailed in Japan, “All the Pleasures Are Now Over”:
The Olympics over, there are so many people who have collapsed into a state of funk.
When you think of it, in the almost one hundred years since Japan sailed out into the modern history of the world, we’ve frequently had “lantern marches” [to celebrate military victories] and savored the so-called national excitement many times, but there had never been such a single-mindedly peaceful festival on which so much money was expended with abandon and which lasted for two weeks besides. Furthermore, it had the elements of “a safe war,” “a war with no bloodshed,” “a clean war,” and everyone was able to enjoy this “war” without worry and enjoy “Japan’s victory.”
In this Olympics, come to think of it, we went the opposite of what we said during the war, “Luxury is foe,” and put into practice Mr. Hayashi Fusao’s amusing dictum, “Luxury is friend.” All the citizens learned the joy of profligacy. Instead of receiving alms from someone else, we learned the joy of squandering money, inviting people, playing the host’s role, indulging in happy concerns for others, and succeeding in all this.
Mishima couldn’t resist a yakuza-style analogy. “It was as though someone who in his youth was poor, hot-blooded, spread his name with each brawl, but who gradually became less hot-blooded, paid more attention to his business, made some money, and joined the ranks of gentlemen . . . who, then, decided to gather together a host of friends to an extravagant banquet and made a success of it.” Mishima also could not help contrasting Japan following the defeat of the war with the West and Japan nineteen years since through two images of the Tennō. “When during the opening ceremony I saw His Imperial Majesty in so obviously an excellent mood and his dignified figure as he accepted IOC President Brundage’s request and declared the opening of the Games, I recalled his sad photograph with Marshal MacArthur nineteen years ago and was overwhelmed by the contrast.”34
By the “sad photograph” he meant the one carried on the front pages of all Japanese newspapers toward the end of September 1945. A photo taken during Hirohito’s first visit to Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Douglas MacArthur, it had, to the left, the tall, conquering general in his service uniform and at ease, arms akimbo, and, to the right, the Tennō rigid in tuxedo and at attention, arms straight down on his sides. MacArthur was a master of theater, as his aide-de-camp Faubion Bowers once observed, and it casually, indelibly, showed who was the boss. Among the Japanese who saw it first there were cries of lèse majesté, and newspapers initially did not carry it, but the Occupation Headquarters quashed the demurral.
For the Yomiuri, Mishima wrote a series of five separate articles to discuss various sports as he actually experienced them. He began: “If I act like a regular sportsman in any way, my friends who knew me as a pale-faced young aspiring writer in bygone days won’t be able to help a contemptuous sneer just as someone might as he sees a nouveau riche trying to hide his poverty-stricken days of the past.” Admitting his “intense physical inferiority complex” until he reached his thirties, Mishima went on to describe his sudden decision to try bodybuilding—“a gospel” as it turned out, but which nonetheless would make him “a laughingstock, the material for many a cartoon for years to come.” Still, “if there’s anything truly exciting in the world, nothing beats the knowledge that your strength is increasing from day to day. It is one of the most essential joys for a human being.”
Aiming for the Nobel Prize through a Translator
Silk and Insight, which Mishima had written as “a summing-up” of his literary endeavors for the several years up to that time, was, despite the Mainichi Art Prize it won a month after its publication, a commercial disappointment. It sold only 15,000 copies, with an additional 3,000 copies printed after the prize. For comparison, Kyōko’s House, albeit a critical failure, sold 150,000 copies initially and much more later. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, a well-told tale with a faint echo of the popular Western in the early 1950s, Shane, sold 50,000.
Perhaps its subject lacked immediacy. Among the literary works of the day, Ōe Kenzaburō’s A Personal Matter (Kojinteki-na taiken) was a barely disguised account of the author having a brain-damaged child and, although its ending was counterintuitive and criticized by many,35 won the Shinchō Literary Prize that year. Kojima Nobuo’s The Hugging Family (Hōyō kazoku), the winner of the newly created Tanizaki Jun’ichirō Prize the following year, dealt with the perturbations of a college-instructor-translator of English literature whose wife commits adultery with a young American soldier staying with them—a timely subject when the presence of GIs was growing in Japan with the expansion of the Vietnam War.36
Of the two writers, Kojima, who was ten years older than Mishima, was among the writers then being touted as “third new faces,” while Ōe, who was his junior by ten years, had accomplished a swift rise to fame as remarkable as Mishima’s a decade earlier. At any rate, it was over Ōe’s Personal Matter as much as Silk and Insight that Mishima and John Nathan broke their writer-translator relationship.
Nathan, a linguistically gifted youth who became the first American to enter the University of Tokyo as “a regular student,” in 1963, translated The Sailor for Knopf. In February 1965 the editor Harold Strauss wrote Mishima that Nathan had done “an outstanding job” of it when he read the translation. To celebrate, Mishima invited Nathan to a Japanese restaurant. In the euphoria in which sake flowed, he asked the young scholar to become his “official translator” with the Nobel Prize in mind and Nathan happily agreed.
But when he went home and read Silk and Insight, which he knew Mishima wanted him to take on next, Nathan “found it empty of genuine feeling. Furthermore, the writing was jugular, a gorgeous example of what Japanese critics were calling ‘Mishima-beauty.’” In the meantime he had been drawn to A Personal Matter. He started translating it with Strauss’s agreement but did nothing with Silk and Insight. By late that year, especially after receiving in mid-October Mishima’s gossipy letter quoting, among other things, “the famous woman critic Dominique Aury at Gallimard” extravagantly praising his translation, The Sailor, he felt guilty enough to seek a meeting with Mishima “to tell him the entire truth.”37
In mid-November Mishima invited him to his house. After some hesitation, Nathan divulged his change of heart, saying the style of Silk and Insight was such that he didn’t think he “could make it work in English.” Belatedly told of what he might have guessed, Mishima responded by saying, “You’re wise not to try something you’re not confident about. I’m glad you told me.”
What is remarkable about Nathan’s description of this turn of events is the courtesy Mishima maintained throughout the meeting. Still, not long afterward Nathan heard that Mishima spoke of him as “a hoodlum seduced by the Left.” Mishima in fact never got in touch with him again. It is easy to see why, although Nathan professed not to “understand very fully what was behind Mishima’s adamant repudiation” even as he sat down to write his biography several years later.38 After all, it was not just that Ōe was Mishima’s rival—in a Gunzō poll of readers on the writers they wanted to read most, Ōe came first, he second, in 1963, though Mishima was first, Ōe third, in 196439—but it was at Mishima’s parties that Nathan and Ōe had met.
Ōe, born in 1935 and now “the standard bearer of the postwar g
eneration,” was gaining popularity, especially among leftist students, with a series of essays expressing postwar angst that was compounded by the failure of the mass opposition to the revised US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty. Among other things, he helped to popularize the notion of “victim versus victimizer” in reference to the atomic bombs America dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki versus Japan’s war against China.
In the summer of 1966, Nathan, still in his mid-twenties, felt compelled to vent himself when Life asked him to write on Mishima. The portrait he provided was lively in a manner possible only for someone who had spent a good deal of time with the man, but it came with a killer sting.
“Mishima has a rare capacity for enjoying himself, and he loves nothing better than a party. He has only to walk into a room full of people and it belongs to him,” Nathan began describing Mishima at parties.
Mishima weighs into a party with gusto, delighting over the food, mixing experimental drinks, neighing hoarsely at all the jokes, including his own. Talking Japanese or his ungrammatical but fluid, arresting English, Mishima is clever, amusing, astute, catty. He will amuse himself by shocking. “You know, I can’t write about something unless I’ve seen it happen,” he will say too loudly. “I’m a little too worried now because I want to do a novel about a homicide.” Then he is off again, heehawing, singing in English, drinking tequila with lemon and salt in imitation of Marlon Brando.
Mishima threw these parties himself more often than not. “He is a lavish entertainer; his parties bring together well-known writers and critics, diplomats, movies stars, US embassy people, visiting publishers from New York,” Nathan continued. “Invitations are in English, engraved on Tiffany stationery. Drinks are served upstairs, waiters in black tie and white gloves serving caviar from silver trays. Dinner, at eight, is always good, impeccably de rigueur: when the menu calls for shellfish, guests are provided with gleaming precision tools designed to get the most out of the mollusks.”
These descriptions were ensconced in the pictorial spread worthy of the famous photo magazine and sure to have delighted Mishima: pictures of him in casual wear sitting at the center of his round couch, in a sailor’s costume and singing, arm-wrestling with his muscle-bound torso bared, doing kendō in a white costume with what appears to be a real sword (rather than the usual bamboo shinai), sitting in a white suit in front of a blowup of a still from the seppuku scene in the film Patriotism with the sword poised to stab his bared left abdomen, and sitting on a Western chair in formal Japanese attire.
Yet Nathan took care to show flashes of a dagger. After noting Mishima’s “creative energy” was such that “it would be difficult to find a Western writer of his caliber who could equal his output,” and assuring the reader that “No other Japanese commands a verbal range so vast or manipulates the language with such absolute precision,” he concluded his assessment of Mishima’s work this way: “In several of his more recent novels, spindly, schematized characters are crushed under the weight of lush description. The elegance of his style is unequaled in Japanese literature, but he has had increasing trouble making people come alive on paper.”40
Again, it is easy to imagine how deeply this offended and hurt Mishima. Their relationship completely severed, Nathan would return to Mishima again only after his death, to write a biography of the man. Mishima came out in 1974.41
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Nobel Prize
“The more deeply you wound me, the more deeply you love me.”
—Gabriele d’Annunzio, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien
John Nathan opened his Life essay thus: “Yukio Mishima is Japan’s likeliest candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and there can be no doubt that he will someday be capable of deserving it. Certainly, Mishima desires the prize: he makes no secret of his avidity for international recognition.”
When did Mishima begin to entertain the notion of receiving a Nobel Prize? It could have been early—for example, in May 1961, when Kawabata asked him to write a letter recommending him for it. But the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in December 1963 carrying an article on the world’s leading authors (“Världen ledande författare”) and including him among the nineteen selected for it may well have been the decisive moment.
The accompanying list was a glamorous one that included some living, some dead. Four of the six Americans on it had received the prize: Pearl Buck (1938), William Faulkner (1949), Ernest Hemingway (1954), and John Steinbeck (1962). Also on the list was Albert Camus, the 1957 recipient, who was perhaps at the height of his fame in Japan then. And Mishima had one key ally willing to push him toward the prize: Donald Keene.
In May 1964 Keene, at the request of his publisher, the Grove Press, became a member of the American delegation for the fourth Formentor Literary Prize, which was, in his estimation, “second only to the Nobel Prize in its influence.”1 Unlike the Nobel Prize, it had been established only three years earlier, in 1961, by a consortium of publishers. But Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges were its first recipients, and just before the jury for the fourth award convened in the Schloss Mirabelle, in Salzburg, the award money of ten thousand dollars had been announced. There were no other international prizes of comparable prestige. One consequence, of course, was that “there were titanic conflicts and dark intrigues more characteristic of Wagner to the German north and Verdi to the Italian south than of this quiet Mozartean museum,” reported Melvin J. Lasky in his short, wry account of the proceedings.2
“Oratory flared” among the forty critics and writers who came from thirteen countries, though the seven delegations, even as each carried the name of a country, were not represented by their nationals alone. The British delegation, for example, was composed of a Dutch, Canadians, Americans (among them Mary McCarthy), and even an Austrian. The “clear front-runner,” which became the final winner, was the Russianborn French writer Natalie Sarraute’s latest book, Les Fruits d’Or, “a novel about a novel,” Lasky wrote, “which is competing for a prize and is widely praised and meanly destroyed by a ruthless band of literary critics.”
In fact, that was almost exactly what happened to the novel itself. “Miss McCarthy thought the book to be already ‘a Classic,’ but Mr. Herbert Gold saltily doubted whether it could ever be ‘read for a second time.’” Other pronouncements were equally divergent. Roberto Moravia called it “a masterpiece,” John Weightman “a joke,” “a disaster,” and “a bore,” while “the Indian vice president of the meeting, the redturbanned Sikh Kushwant Singh, protested that he could not even read the book ‘the first time’ and threatened to turn his back on ‘the whole of decadent European literature.’”
Amidst all this, Keene left a distinct impression making a case for Mishima—as distinct as McCarthy did, making a case for Sarraute. “The Americans, under the influence as they often are of an ‘old Orient hand’ (in this case, Prof. Donald Keene from Tokyo), argued for the Japanese candidate, Mishima,” Lasky reported. The book Keene pushed was After the Banquet that he had translated himself. His speech, delivered in French—the lingua franca in those days, though Lasky couldn’t help twitting it: “Some called it ‘franglais,’ others ‘frenglish’”)—and it had measurable effect, for “on the penultimate ballot the Japanese led all the rest.”
As “the laws of literary politics” have it, Keene’s backing in the end did not work, but he was unfazed. Serving as a member of the American delegation for the Formentor prize at least three more years, he kept pushing Mishima and, after each session, told Mishima, we assume, of where he stood, as he had, in a taidan with him, a month after the Salzburg meeting. In it he stressed that Mishima’s reputation was so great he was known “even in small European countries such as Finland, Denmark, and Norway.” Moreover, he pointed out that his literature could be internationally appreciated because of its lack of “exoticism,” without reference to “geisha and seppuku.” Two days after the taidan, on June 18, Mishima left for New York to discuss future publishing plans with Kn
opf. When the taidan was published early the next year, it was titled “Mishima Literature and Internationality.”3 Little wonder Mishima was expansive about the Nobel Prize when he drank with John Nathan in February 1965.
Mishima’s “internationality,” indeed, only seemed to grow. And the aristocratic setting for prize-giving he soon witnessed must have inflamed his desire for the Nobel Prize.
In March 1965 he spent two weeks in England at the invitation of the British Council. The two short accounts of the sojourn he wrote for the Mainichi Shinbun4 showed him to be a unique man of the world. He found time to go to a local gym for bodybuilding while attending a round of literary, cultural functions. But the first event he was invited to may have given him the most favorable impression. On March 11, the day he put up at the Kingsley Hotel (now Thistle Bloomsbury), he was among the two hundred guests for the ceremony at “Lady Johns’ beautiful mansion”5 to honor Ivan Morris, the translator of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, with the Duff Cooper Prize for his account of aristocratic life during Murasaki Shikubu’s days, The World of the Shining Prince. The former prime minister Harold Macmillan was the prize giver and he reminisced suavely about the days when Duff Cooper, the dashing politician, and he were both young. Those “happy days,” especially for the upper class, were “forever gone,” he said.