by Hiroaki Sato
Noting that Morris’s book had been preceded by Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji, Mishima brought up his long-standing view of Japanese culture as consisting of two contrasting aspects. He observed that Japan’s tawayameburi, “muliebrity,” first introduced to Britain’s intellectual class by Waley, was being further explicated by Morris’s book, even as Japan’s masuraoburi, “virility,” was making itself felt through the films of Mifune Toshirō as an “action hero.” Kurosawa Akira’s movies featuring Mifune had appeared successively: Throne of Blood, in which Mifune played Macbeth transplanted to Japan’s Age of Warring States, in 1957; The Hidden Fortress, in which he played a warrior-commander, in 1958; Yojimbo and Sanjuro, in which he played a scruffy swashbuckler, in 1961 and 1962.
On the evening of March 12, Mishima had a reunion with Keith Botsford. The would-be drama producer seven years earlier, now married, Botsford invited him to dinner at the Café Royal. Two days later, Sunday, Mishima, along with Mr. and Mrs. Ivan Morris, was a lunch guest of Margot Fonteyn at her villa outside London.
The British ballerina, who had received the title “dame,” that day was “completely wrapped in dark brown”—blouse, tights, and boots—and “vivacious, talking happily, entertaining people, enjoying herself,” even as “she fussed over her disabled husband,” Mishima wrote. Fonteyn’s husband, the reckless Dr. Alberto (“Tito”) Arias, had been shot nine months earlier, in June 1964, and was now a paraplegic. The shooting was done in retaliation: in 1959, Arias, with seven other men, had perpetrated what Time called “a low-comedy invasion” of his own country, Panama, to overturn the government and miserably failed.6 Mishima couldn’t help exclaiming to the boyish Fonteyn, “Today you are just like Fidelio!”
Among the writers Mishima met were Edna O’Brien, of The Country Girls, and Angus Wilson, who had strongly recommended publication of Confessions. O’Brien, meeting with him for dinner after the cocktail party Secker & Warburg threw for him at the Arts Theatre Club, told him she’d been rather scandalized during the cocktails. A total stranger in a leather jacket had grabbed hold of her as soon as she stepped in and said, “When this is over, let’s go out.” Mishima found her to be “typically Irish, full of gentle sensitivity, and with a homey feel.”
The time with Wilson, who invited him to his “isolated mountain hut” in Sussex, was “the most profitable during this stay in England,” Mishima wrote. Wilson regaled him with a number of stories. He said, for example, that during the summer, nightingales kept warbling throughout the night so that he had to close all the windows. When he was growing up, the middle class was so poor it was part of the table manners to leave some food on the plate—to show, perhaps, that they were not totally starved. In England, actors gained respectability only in the latter half of the nineteenth century and went on to acquire aristocratic airs. John Gielgud was, Wilson told Mishima, the last of that generation who could no longer find his place among the new actors. In that respect, they were just like kabuki actors in Japan, Mishima said. Wilson, who had remained a fan of Japanese literature, highly praised the Abe Kōbō novel, The Woman in the Dunes, which had come out the previous year, in Dale Saunders’s translation.
Mishima was interviewed for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, and the BBC. After the Times interview appeared, on March 21, he was surprised by the swift effect it had. The hotel attendants became visibly courteous. In a restaurant a gentleman came up to him and asked, “Is it true you work until midnight and eat breakfast at two in the morning?” Obviously part of the interview was garbled. A woman writer accusingly said to him, “The British newspapers fuss about you foreign writers. They completely ignore us, their own.”
The Guardian interview did not appear until he left England and arrived in Paris, on March 26, and the BBC interview until April 19. By then Mishima had finished the filming of Yūkoku.
Filming Yūkoku
In his detailed account of the preparations and making of the film, as well as its outcome, Mishima wrote that, once he thought of turning the story into a film, his mind never strayed from it. He looked for small animal figurines the lieutenant’s wife is supposed to have collected, from one shop window to another, until he found what he liked. Before he left Japan, he decided that the background music for the film would be the Liebestod aria from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, so he searched for “a new edition of an old recording of it,” but he could not find one even at the largest record store in London.7 Donald Richie, the greatest observer of the Japanese film industry in the preceding fifteen years, said he “suggested the Liebestod as suitable music” for the film and “found the right recording”: “Stokowski’s 1939 version on 78s.” 8
Mishima did practically everything for the movie Yūkoku: he wrote the scenario for it, directed and produced it, and played the role of the protagonist, Lt. Takeyama. It was a silent movie, and he handwrote the four intertitles in four languages to be made part of it, for from the outset he planned it for Japanese, English, German, and French audiences—but especially the non-Japanese viewers.
Mishima financed the entire cost that in the end came to ¥1,259,570. For a few things he turned to his friends. Fujii Hiroaki serving as production manager assembled the crew, and Dōmoto Masaki, who had directed some of Mishima’s “modern nō plays,” stage-managed it. One of the difficulties was finding an actress to play the lieutenant’s wife, Reiko. The woman Mishima had in mind had to be “homespun, feminine, but quietly passionate,” someone of whom “an ordinary army lieutenant during the 1930s would think, My wife is the most beautiful woman in the world.” After meeting the women his eminent friends recommended, he found, via Fujii, such a figure in Yamamoto Noriko, a nineteen-year old who had given up becoming a film actress after playing a couple of small roles. In Yūkoku, she appeared with the stage name of Tsuruoka Yoshiko.
The movie was filmed in utter secrecy, in just two days, April 15 and 16, and submitted to the Tours Festival for Short Movies the next year. In the message he prepared for the festival, Mishima called the film Les Rites de l’Amour et de le Mort and began by speaking of the spectacle of seppuku or death “through drawing out the intestines” as described by the terrified members of the foreign embassy who demanded punishment for those who attacked and killed foreigners in the mid-nineteenth century—a spectacle which you can no longer see except in theater. His reference was to the Sakai Incident. On the 15th of Second Month 1868, a band of Tosa samurai killed and wounded eleven French sailors. In response, the French consul-general demanded punishment of the samurai and in the end twenty of them were chosen to disembowel themselves. The French officers made to witness the procedure grew so aghast they are said to have stopped the proceedings when the eleventh man finished his turn.9
The meaning of the calligraphy written in the scroll [hung in the alcove in the film] is shisei (sublime sincerity). Never once in Japanese history did the essence of an age reveal itself in the rite of death as starkly as it did during the period of just about ten years after 1936.
Neither had there been young men who wanted to be sublime beings in the rite of death as much as the officers of the Imperial Guards Division at the time did. For them there was no point in living except to heighten the samurai tradition to a purer form.
But the young men of that age group at the time also had a desire for love, that is, sexual desire. In that respect, too, they wanted to be sublime, tried to be ritualistic.
Mishima then spoke of the nō-stage setting he used for the film, for in nō “concretism lies in the expression of essential things.” The officer’s hat for the Imperial Guards Division he wore in the film was a nō mask, and the white kimono the woman wore was “a wedding dress, its color signifying a pure death.” He added that the music he used was the 1936 recording of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
Les Rites de l’Amour et de le Mort became one of the two finalists but lost out to the other candidate because the jury fiercely split. The critic for Variety, Gene Moskowitz, was for i
t and indignant about the outcome. Under the heading, “Tours 11th Shorts Fest Bestows Prize First Time But Nothing For Brilliant Japanese Gore,” he asked, “But what can be said about a fest that gives absolutely nothing to the most audacious, brilliant and personal film shown in competition?”10 In other words, it was a great success.
Among the prominent Americans who wanted to see Yūkoku while visiting Tokyo later were Edgar Snow, of Red Star Over China fame, and Leonard Bernstein. Mishima was busy on both occasions, and asked the film’s production manager Fujii to arrange a private viewing. Bernstein watched the film intently, with a stern look on his face, Fujii recalled. “The Rite of Love and Death is wonderful and I was terribly moved,” the composer-conductor said afterward. “But I have one question for you: Why did Mishima use Wagner’s music, not traditional Japanese music?” Fujii could only manage, “Because Mr. Mishima likes Wagner.” Bernstein cracked a smile and left, with “Best regards to Mishima.”11
It was perhaps while he “wandered around the cold towns of Tokyo toward the end of January searching for a military uniform from the time of the 2.26 Incident”—or after the filming was over—that Mishima had a couple of “dates” in a sadomasochists’ club in “Tokyo’s gay ghetto in Shinjuku.”
“Mishima liked to pretend he was committing seppuku,” a man called Ryūtarō recalled for a visiting writer from England forty years later. “I had to watch, and eventually he brought along a sword and showed me how to stand behind him as his kaishaku. He also had other props. He would write out a death poem”—a poem, usually in tanka form, that a samurai or a soldier would write before killing himself. “And oddest of all, he pulled a huge length of red cloth from his briefcase. What’s that? I asked him before we started. ‘Blood,’ he said. ‘Blood and guts.’” For the filming of Yūkoku, pig guts and “buckets of blood” were secured.
“I was impressed the first time we did this. Mishima got hard at once and as he died he came. Without touching himself at all. I had never seen anyone do that before. I didn’t find the role-playing at all arousing and wanted him to fuck me, but he didn’t want to—I think I was just a witness to something he wanted to do in front of an audience.”12
Ryūtarō, then twenty years old, was requested to wear a high-school uniform for these sessions. About the same time he wrote Yūkoku, Mishima had also penned a short story for the gay magazine ADONIS describing a man carrying out seppuku with a high-school student. In the story, “Execution of Love” (Ai no shokei), published in APOLLO, a special issue of ADONIS, in October 1960, a junior high-school gym teacher carries out the act urged by a “beautiful boy,” a student he loves but apparently has never touched, who has brought a knife for that purpose. The teacher, with features resembling Mishima, including his age, is named Ōtomo Shinji. The story was published under the pseudonym of Sakakiyama Tamotsu.13
Following Mishima’s death, Yōko, who had been scandalized by the film Yūkoku, demanded to have all of it destroyed. Fujii Hiroaki was given the unenviable task of doing so, and he did it all by himself. He collected forty-three prints in all and burnt them in an incinerator one by one. But he begged Yōko to preserve at least an entire set of the negatives. She agreed. So he packed it in a wooden “tea box,” part of Yōko’s trousseau, that she offered. Then the matter was forgotten. Some years after Yōko’s own death, in 1995, Fujii mustered the courage to ask to see the set again. After a search, he found not just the “tea box,” neatly tucked away in a corner of the storeroom of the Mishima house, containing all the negatives with Japanese, English, French, and German intertitles, but all the material related to the filmmaking carefully packed in several cases—the evidence of Yōko’s respect for her husband’s work. That was how Yūkoku was turned into a DVD and made part of the complete works that was being published.14
The Vietnam War
The student movement that would capture so much of Mishima’s attention in the last part of his life took a vigorous turn in January 1965 when Keiō University students rallied to protest the doubling of tuition. Student activism of the 1960s was worldwide, and in most countries, it shared some common elements: the influx of baby boomers into colleges and universities and the students’ growing impatience with unchanging academic institutionalism.
But the largest common denominator was the opposition to America’s escalating violence in Vietnam, and that, too, took a palpable turn in the first months of the same year. In March, the United States started bombing North Vietnam under the code name of “Rolling Thunder,” and landed two battalions in Da Nang. There were already twenty-three thousand marines active in South Vietnam.
In April, the writer Kaikō Takeshi, with several others, founded a citizens’ movement against the war calling itself “Peace for Vietnam! Federation of Citizens and Cultural Organizations,” soon known by its Japanese acronym Beheiren. It was at Kaikō’s proposal that the Beheiren raised ¥2.4 million—or $6,700 at the exchange rate of the day—to take out a full-page antiwar ad in the New York Times. The ad appeared in November that year.
Kaikō had a direct motive to lead such a movement. In February, as the Asahi Shinbun’s “emergency correspondent,” he had joined a military operation around Ben Cat, to the northwest of Saigon, with the Asahi photojournalist Akimoto Keiichi, that ended in a disaster. A five-hundred-man strong South Vietnamese combat unit, with nine US “advisers”—despite their direct intervention in the war, American soldiers were technically not regarded as co-equal to the South Vietnamese forces—was trounced by “invisible snipers” as soon as they sallied forth into a jungle. In Kaikō’s own group of two hundred, only seventeen managed to regroup. By observing the daily comings and goings in Saigon and United States and Vietnamese soldiers in Fort Ben Cat, Kaikō had concluded, as proved prescient, that only the National Liberation Front (Vietcong) and Buddhist monks had any kind of unifying power.
Kaikō, who had won the Akutagawa Prize just before Ōe did, would write three novels based on his experience of the Vietnam War, the third one unfinished. The first one, Into a Black Sun (Kagayakeru yami), in 1968, won the Mainichi Shuppan Bunka Prize. When he learned the Ministry of Education was giving him its literary prize for the second, Darkness in Summer (Natsu no yami), in 1972, he declined on the grounds that a novelist had no reason to receive a literary award from the government. The real reason was the war that still raged. In his reports from Saigon, back in 1965, he had conveyed Vietnamese intellectuals’ hope that Japan would intervene to end the war and had started a peace movement. But the Japanese government had gone on to consistently, powerfully, endorse the US intent to annihilate “the Vietcongs.”15
Translating d’Annunzio
That spring, Saeki Shōichi and Muramatsu Takeshi revived Hihyō, “Criticism.” Mishima joined the members-only quarterly magazine and began his share of contribution with the first part of his translation of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s drama, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. To do the translation of the work on the legendary martyr who had enchanted him since he was a boy, Mishima did something not many writers at his age and in the midst of an extraordinarily busy life would do: learn another language for one specific purpose of translating a play.
Mishima had long looked for d’Annunzio’s play translated into German or English, the two languages he could read, until he concluded that there was none and that if he wanted to read it he had to do so in the language in which the Italian poet and dramatist wrote it: French. If no one had translated it into English or German, that was because, a scholar had concluded a few years earlier, “the French writings of Gabriele d’Annunzio are of peripheral significance in his literary career” and because “except for occasional references in general studies of the author, they were completely forgotten.” This is not to say that the critical reaction to Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien was all negative when it was first staged. Although there were “many disparagers,” Léon Blum, among others, “expressed astonishment at the fact that a foreigner had been able to compose a dra
matic poem with such mastery of the resources and vocabulary and rhythm.”16
Mishima set out to translate with Ikeda Kōtarō, a young French student Muramatsu recommended. It turned out to be “the awesome work of collaborative translation,” he wrote—“awesome” because he knew nothing of French. “First I studied the grammar and proceeded to do the translation work, like a crawling ant, ascertaining with Mr. Ikeda the case and the person of each letter and phrase, inquiring on the meanings of each word in great detail. We did all-night work once every week. And even in the midst of this painstaking labor, I enjoyed mining bit by bit the voluptuous images rich with sensuality unique to d’Annunzio. At times we debated a single word for several hours. I was moved à la ‘beginning Dutch learning.’”
This last refers to Beginning Dutch Learning (Rangaku koto-hajime), an account of the difficulties Sugita Genpaku (1733–1817) and other physicians met when they tried to decipher Dutch medical books for the first time in the early nineteenth century.
During the Edo Period, when Holland was the only European country with which Japan maintained trade relations, some physicians who came into possession of illustrated medical books brought from that country17 realized that Dutch medicine was far more advanced than theirs, which was basically Chinese medicine. A small group of them decided to crack Dutch to learn what the books said but at once faced monumental difficulties. There were no Dutch-Japanese dictionaries at the time and none of the official Japanese interpreters stationed in Nagasaki, the only port that allowed foreigners to come and stay, were of any help because their grasp of the language was primitive. Sugita’s book, published in 1815, described the time-consuming, nerve-racking process the physicians had to go through.