by Hiroaki Sato
In working on d’Annunzio’s drama, Mishima of course had plenty of French-Japanese dictionaries and he had in Ikeda immediate help on hand. Yet he set himself a task that those Dutch learners might not have thought of. “I would translate several lines,” he wrote, “consulting Mr. Ikeda’s word-for-word translation, trying as best I could to turn them into sentences that sounded right as Japanese but that would also keep any Japanese odor at a distance.” “Japanese odor” or washū referred to any Japanese turn of phrase that might slip in when the Japanese wrote in classical Chinese; because classical Chinese was assumed to work under rigid rules, any such infraction was considered a defect or an error. Put differently, Mishima tried to achieve in this translation something grammatically and culturally natural. No wonder Mishima concluded his description of the exercise by saying, “For the first time I touched the Dämon of the work called translation.”18
The work took over a year, ending at 5:30 on the morning of July 14. Mishima was exact in recording such matters. That evening he threw a party for a small group of his artist friends, though not to mark the completion of the work but to celebrate the expansion of his house.
The translation was serialized in Hihyō in three installments. When an imprint specializing in art books, Bijutsu Shuppansha, agreed to publish a deluxe edition of the translation the following year, Mishima wrote a concise, scholarly essay tracing the shifting legend of Saint Sebastian whose “existence is extremely doubtful,” noting that, as far as artistic presentations of the figure are concerned, the saint did not shed all his clothes to become naked until twelve hundred years after his presumed death.19
For this edition he selected fifty out of the great many pictures of martyrdom he had collected, including the sixty he had purchased in a print shop in the piazza di Spagna, in Rome. This he did, he wrote, following the example of d’Annunzio who wrote he had collected two hundred pictures of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom to write the play. Mishima had two of the pictures, one by Reni and one by Sodoma, reproduced in color for his book.
In his essay on Saint Sebastian, Mishima cited the following lines as his favorites—the words of the archer Sanaé in Act IV, just before Sebastian orders his men to shoot him:
They are far off, already far off!
You can no longer see the horses
of the squadron. A white croup
disappears in the bend of the road, behind
the Tombs: the decurion.
He has never looked back.
Lord, now we are going
to untie you.20
Yet one imagines that Mishima was happy to read at long last—and translate—d’Annunzio’s loving description of the martyr tied naked to the trunk of a laurel tree “like a beautiful Diadumene”—d’Annunzio makes the emperor call him Adonis.
They have stripped the Martyr in order to tie him to the trunk of a great laurel-tree with cords of Spanish grass. Standing, his naked feet on the knotted roots, he rests on the svelte column of his right leg the weight of his body smooth as ivory; his wrists bound above his head, he resembles the beautiful Diadumenos fastening the band about his forehead.
It is the Archers of Emesa that Augustus has ordered to revenge with their arrows the Empire’s Sun-King. They are overcome with love and fear. Sanaé, the archer with eyes of different colors, is among them. He watches the plain.21
And Mishima surely envisioned what he was to bring to himself when he came upon Sebastian’s cri de cœur in the course of the exchange of love between Sebastian, the leader of the First Cohort,22 and his men who adore him but have been ordered to kill him, Sebastian, the seeker of pain and suffering,
I tell you, I tell you:
he who most deeply
wounds me most deeply
loves me.23
(Tr. Michael O’Brien)
This, Mishima judged, is where “the conflict between Eros and agape is driven up against the wall.”24
The Boom and Fatigue
The Japanese later characterized the decade of the 1960s in their country as “golden,” a period of double-digit economic growth. The nation’s gross domestic product increased fivefold in nominal terms (2.6 times in real terms) over the span of ten years. The per capita income quadrupled, even as the actual prices of daily items, such as eggs, beer, and electric bulbs, remained steady. By the time the Japanese economy was judged to be the second largest in the world, in January 1968, the days of underfed, snotty-nosed kids running around in dirty, shabby clothes were gradually fading.25 Instead, obesity among children was becoming a matter of social concern. Some children were unable to complete some events in an athletic meet because they ran out of breath too easily.
The titles of the government’s annual economic white papers from the mid-1960s onward tell the happy prospects Japanese policy makers faced. The report for 1965, the year Satō Eisaku, Kishi Nobusuke’s brother, became prime minister, was called “the tasks for stable growth.” This was followed by “the road to continuous growth” (1966); “improving efficiency and social welfare” (1967); “the Japanese economy in the midst of internationalization” (1968); “confronting abundance” (1969); and “the new dimensions of the Japanese economy” (1970). The economy of the second half of the decade was called “the Izanagi boom” in reference to the deity in Japanese mythology who, with his spouse, Izanami, is said to have populated the Japanese archipelago with a myriad of deities, thereby creating the country.
One cannot refer to this dizzying economic growth, later termed a “miracle,” without reference to its enormous cost. Some of the results of unchecked pollution came to the fore during the same decade. Among them were “the four great pollution diseases”: the Minamata Disease, in Kumamoto (neurological syndrome caused by methyl mercury dumped into the coastal waters); the Second Minamata, in Niigata; the Yokkaichi Asthma (caused by sulfurous acid gas spewed into the air); and the Itai-itai (It-hurts!-it-hurts!) Disease, in Toyama (caused by cadmium dumped into a river).
At just the midpoint of this “golden decade,” even as the publication of Kōdansha’s six-volume selection of Mishima’s short stories was under way, in the usual monthly installment-payment fashion of a volume a month, Shinchōsha offered to put out a single-volume selection. Mishima chose four stories for it and wrote an afterword in which he said: “I put together these four pieces this time because they were written about the same time and have a common theme. This selection must be the most degenerate of all my works. My sense of fatigue, powerlessness, and the decadence of the sentiment that soured and rotted—I put all that in these four pieces.”
“I feel something unspeakably ominous in these works,” he continued. “But what subtle part of the Zeitgeist was it that made me write such pieces? The medium”—that is, he the writer—“often does not know the face of the deity that has possessed her.”26
What are the four stories and what are they like?
“The Strange Tale of the Pale-Moon Villa” (Gettan-sō kitan), published in the January 1965 issue of Bungei Shunjū, is a horror story subtly, cleverly narrated in the manner of an old-fashioned tale—say, à la Edgar Alan Poe. A young handsome marquis, while in his villa on a cape, compels his young companion servant to rape an idiot girl so he may see human beings copulate. He is only interested in watching things, observing things. This happens during the summer before he marries a beautiful woman. Not long after the marriage, he is found dead, on the beach, apparently having fallen off the cliff. Foul play is suspected but no perpetrator is found.
The main narrator, the marquis’s young servant, knows, however, who did it. The marquis’s eyes were gouged and stuffing the eye sockets were oleaster berries—the same berries the idiot girl was picking when raped. The beautiful marquise, when told of the rape from the servant, tells him her own secret: during her marriage there was no sex, with her husband only interested in “looking at every nook and corner of my body, earnestly.”
“Pilgrimage to the Three Kumano Shrines” (Mi-Kum
ano mōde), published in the January issue of Shinchō, depicts a folklorist-poet who clumsily, in a palpably amateurish fashion, attempts to turn himself into a myth as he visits the three holy places of Kumano with an admiring female tanka-disciple-cum-caretaker, Tsuneko.
The scholar—“the dean of Japanese literature at Seimei University, a doctor of literature, who is also known as a tanka poet”—was modeled after the charismatic folkloric interpreter of Japanese literature Orikuchi Shinobu who sought to ascertain the origins of old Japanese words and customs such as the Tennō’s original role. Orikuchi noted, for example, that the word Shintō itself is a formulation under the influences of the alien religion Buddhism that regarded the combination of folkloric beliefs and practices as “heretical” and that what is often assumed to be indigenous about it is hard to establish.27 He wrote poems in tanka and other forms under the penname of Shaku Chōkū. Like Mishima a devotee of kabuki, Orikuchi was a noted homosexual who was known, at least among some of his students and colleagues, for his pronounced aversion to women.
Mishima, when young, was familiar with Orikuchi’s books of poems that revealed a complicated upbringing—not too dissimilar to his own—and went on to read much of his other work. Although it was during the period from 1958 to 1959 that he read his many volumes with a great focus typical of him—he read in tandem the works of Minakata Kumagusu—Mishima showed his sure grasp of the man’s accomplishment when he wrote an essay following Orikuchi’s death, in 1953. The essay was for Mita Bungaku, the literary magazine of Keiō University where the scholar-poet taught.
“Just as Pater depicted in Marius the Epicurean the appearance, rituals, and customs of deities of the heretical ancient world who were gradually forgotten and betrayed, if you read Mr. Orikuchi’s Introduction to the Origins of Japanese Literature, you can clearly observe the fates of the deities of ancient Japan in the infant deities who retain their influences in the tales of wandering nobles and in the themes of Mother’s Land which reemerge in the biographical novels after the Heian Court,” he observed with a sweeping sentence in a short but sweeping essay.
“Tales of wandering nobles,” kishu ryūri tan, is a literary genre strongly associated with Orikuchi. In such tales, an aristocrat is typically “exiled” or forced to wander far from Kyoto, in outlying regions, to atone for his sins in one way or another. Orikuchi also stressed the importance, in ancient Japan, of the concept of “Mother’s Land,” haha no kuni, which he proposed was the same as the netherworld. By the time he wrote Pilgrimage, in any event, Mishima was turning against the kind of literary or folkloric speculation that earned Orikuchi fame.
“Because Japan had none of that ugly, vulgar violence of Christian culture, the greatest misfortune that overturned ancient culture,” Mishima continued:
Mr. Orikuchi managed to end his life of living in the ancient world even as he lived in modern times possessed as he was by the remnants of deities that still remain in the Japanese race, without falling into scholastic positivism as Frazer did in The Golden Bough or without aligning himself with the convention of discovering a new Christianity as Pater made Marius do. Western Grecianists and Heathenists are dogged by a trace of the edginess or the sense of guilt that they are heretics to Christianity, with only people such as Goethe, Winckelmann, and Pater coming close to achieving the rounded airs of a classicist. If and when Mr. Orikuchi’s achievement is widely introduced to the West, people will be surprised that such a healthy “ancient” lived in the twentieth century.28
“Peacocks” (Kujaku), published in the February issue of Bungakukai, was meant to be “the reverse of Dorian Gray,” Mishima explained, adding that he “loved it the most” among the four. A man named Tomioka, who inherited considerable assets from his landowner father, is suspected of slaughtering a large number of peacocks in a nearby children’s park because he was seen watching the birds in total absorption. A detective who visits him to inquire, while being kept waiting in the guest room, notices, among the carelessly scattered exotic bric-a-brac including a graphic, painted peacock made in metal on a mantelpiece, a photo portrait of an “incomparably beautiful boy” who appears to be sixteen or seventeen.
When the man he has come to question shows up, the first thing the detective notices in the tall, lean man with scholarly bearing of about forty-five is his face that “reveals terrible ravage”: “His hair had a sprinkling of gray strands, and his skin was enfeebled and flaccid. His facial features were well proportioned, but that proportionality had too pronounced an air of something made to order, the feeling of a miniature landscape garden left alone for a long time and covered with dust: a pond thick with dust, a tilting red bridge, a small stone lantern, a rustic porcelain house where dust has collected even in its interiors.”
In time, the detective is told that the “boy of celestial beauty” in the photo is Tomioka in his youth. The story surely has a good deal of self-projection. Photos of Mishima as a child and well into his teens show him to be an oval-faced embodiment of innocence, whereas those at about the time he wrote these stories show him to be a man with a haggard, ravaged face albeit with large alert eyes. (Saeki Shōichi, Mishima’s associate and professor of English, characterized Mishima as “a person of eyes, a writer obsessed with lucidly seeing through things.”29) As a purposeful reversal of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the story reminds the reader of what Basil Hallward says of the portrait he did of Dorian Gray: “I have put too much of myself into it.”30 In Oscar Wilde’s novel, of course, Dorian remains beautiful and youthful while the figure painted in his portrait grows uglier and uglier as he continues to commit immoral acts.
The fourth story, “The Morning of Innocent Love” (Jun’ai no asa), was published in the June 1965 issue of Nihon, just before it was included in the selection. A well-to-do married couple, both “inordinately youthful-looking,” are found murdered on the terrace of their house. A college student is soon arrested and readily confesses—the second half of the story consists entirely of the questions and answers between a detective and the young man—that he and his girlfriend were separately, unknowingly, lured into the couple’s house to have sex with them, he with the wife, she with the husband, in separate rooms. When he wakes up early next morning, the student realizes what has happened. Then, when he sees the married couple passionately kissing each other on the terrace just outside the room, he kills them with the knife he happened to have—out of “an admixture of admiration and anger,” “an anger blended with joy and yearning.”
The husband, Ryōsuke, and the wife, Reiko, had fallen in love when he was twenty-three, she eighteen, and married seven years later, with the war in between. Since then, “they had lived in memories of love only the two of them knew. . . . They had bet each moment on their first encounter, that beautiful first astonishment. In her fifty-year-old husband Reiko repeatedly saw the vestiges of the twenty-three year old, and in his forty-five-year-old wife Ryōsuke constantly discovered the freshness of the eighteen-year old.”
“What the two tried to evoke was a simple thing,” the story tells us. “One morning in May, a virginal girl’s eyes intently look at the youth she loves, the field is full of dew, the horizon is hugely blocked by the anxieties of war and life, a separation is scheduled, a kiss brushes by their lips like the first flush of dawn. . . . Such an unforgettable form of bliss of love” was what they wanted to relive from moment to moment. But “the husband was always there, and the wife was always there. . . . From the moment being there becomes certain, corruption advances. Unlike an ordinary couple of this world, [Ryōsuke and Reiko] tried to resist this corruption and disintegration effect.” When they realized they had run out of “poetry, imagination, and acting, they thought up the most unnatural method”—entrapping a young couple for sex for one night so they might have “that kiss that ripened on a girl’s lips one morning in May.”
So, in these four stories Mishima depicted a young aristocrat who is only interested in observing things and is killed as a result,
a scholar who ineptly tries to turn himself into a myth of his own making, a man who is “the reverse of Dorian Gray,” and a couple who try to relive “the first astonishment” of love forever, fail in the end, and are murdered. Decadent and degenerate these stories may or may not be, but Mishima may well have thought, “I have put too much of myself into these stories.”
The Sade Case
Toward the end of June, Mishima started the play Madame de Sade and completed it two months later. As the source material, he credited the book on Sade by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, a student of French literature and sexual perversion he had known since the mid-1950s when he had happily responded to Shibusawa’s request for a foreword to a selection of Sade’s writings in his translation, then urged him to write an extensive essay on Sade for the magazine he was editing. Ever since, he had been “thrilled” to read each of the younger author’s new books, once even buying a book, unable to wait for a complimentary copy he had expected. (It soon turned out to have been sent to Mishima’s previous address).31
The title Mishima chose for the play, though, was the same as that of the psychiatrist Shikiba Ryūzaburō’s book that had come out twenty years earlier, and his characters were all women, with the focus on Sade’s wife, Renée, rather than on the man who inspired the word “sadism.” Also, Mishima had used some of Shikiba’s other books for his other writings. As a result some conjectured that Mishima’s primary idea came from Shikiba’s book. But, when Shibusawa’s life of Sade came out, in September 1964, Mishima found his approach “intense.”
“I was not quite satisfied with Mr. Shikiba Ryūzaburō’s dilettantish biography of Sade,” Mishima had written Shibusawa, “so I felt my thirst was slaked [by your book], and at the same time I was surprised that he did only such sinless things in his real life.”32 In the afterword to the play, he also explained that his aim was to “attempt a logical elucidation of the mystery” that remained in Shibusawa’s book: Renée’s unflagging devotion to her husband while he was in prison, followed by her abrupt renunciation of the man the moment he was set free.33