Persona
Page 56
From a different perspective, Mishima gave a different explanation. Since his early days as a writer, he had insisted that, of the three genres of fiction, poetry, and drama, the last one was the second best means of the author “making a confession”—that is, revealing himself—poetry being the very best, and fiction the least fit for that purpose. In Madame de Sade, he put himself in the position of the Marquis de Sade as assessed by others in his absence: his wife Renée saying he is not a monster, his mother-in-law Mme. de Montreuil saying he is a monster, and so on. He was “not as great as de Sade,” he took care to note, but he wanted to show how diversely assessed he was among diverse people.34
In any event, in crediting Shibusawa’s work prominently—he cited its title on the title page of his play as if it were the subtitle—Mishima inserted himself into the so-called Sade Incident. Back in 1960, when the sale of the second half of Shibusawa’s translation of L’Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice was banned, Mishima had written Shibusawa: “If you become an ex-convict as a result of this incident, I’ll have an ex-convict among my friends, and there’ll be no greater honor for me.”35
The following year, Shibusawa, along with his publisher, was indicted on possession of pornographic material. Some of the leading writers of the day, such as Endō Shūsaku and Ōe Kenzaburō, lined up as “special defense counsel”—by Japanese law, those with no legal credentials but with expertise on the relevant field can offer themselves as such with a status equal to that of a lawyer, rather like “expert witnesses” in the United States—and defense witnesses. The Sade Case, nevertheless, would drag on for nine years, until 1969. So, Mishima with Madame de Sade, in which he took care to include descriptions of some salacious sexual acts, was openly ridiculing the legal proceedings, which Shibusawa himself constantly subverted with his decision to have “a festal time” with it.
When finally the Supreme Court handed down its verdict, finding the defendants guilty as charged, the penalty it imposed was seventy thousand yen—a puny sum, which Shibusawa did not let go without publicly pouting, suggesting that it was in itself a travesty of justice.
As always, Mishima had some acute, at times self-mocking things to say about the play on hand: in this instance, the “oddity” of “a Japanese playwright writing a play about the customs of France, and that of the eighteenth century.” “In Japan, there is the infamous ‘translateddrama acting.’ In the West, there is no such thing,” he observed. “In the West, there was no such need; for a long time, if the role of an Oriental was called for, the actor had only to make slant eyes, open his arms like a baby, and toddle about on tiptoe to satisfy the audience adequately.” In contrast,
Japan’s Shingeki, as is universally known, started out with redhead [i.e., European] plays to rebel against traditional theater, and that inevitably brought about the development of “acting by mimicking redheads,” which, having the tradition of mimic-acting in medieval kyōgen unconsciously in its background, while at the same time completely wiping away its elements of parody and criticism, was engrossed in mimicking Westerners’ language and behavior single-mindedly, with fool’s honesty, carefully, in deadly seriousness. (What a Japanesey effort!) It was a truly clumsy, makeshift bridge, but it was, in any case, the only bridge that linked our theater to the West.
“Whatever you might say,” Mishima continued, “that acting, after a history of several decades, has shown some worthy results as it has reached the stage of being able to produce Western plays that Westerners do not find too ridiculous. The only stylized acting that Shingeki actresses and actors who, though they are Japanese, can’t even play a geisha or can’t look right with sword on hip (these are verily the symbols of the modern Japanese) have nurtured and inherited is what is called ‘translated-drama acting.’”
The expression Mishima chose for “play a geisha” is kimono o kite tsuma o toru, “wear a kimono and hold up the front hem,” which is what a geisha is expected to do when she stands up and walks—something any kabuki actor who plays a woman’s role executes naturally, gracefully. Mishima went on to add, tongue-in-cheek: “Japan’s so-called translated-drama acting has become a rare cultural asset that ought to be the crown of the world, realizing world theater one step ahead of everyone else.”36 Here, “the crown of the world” is the commonly accepted Japanese translation of über alles in der Welt.
Self-appointed Japanese Expert
On September 5, Mishima left, with Yōko, for another world tour, which would last until October 31. The two traveled to New York, Stockholm, Paris, Hamburg, and Bangkok before returning to Tokyo. The Vietnam War was worsening, but he included Bangkok in his itinerary because of the Phra Phang, the Temple of Dawn, there. He planned to use it in his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, the first installment of which he had submitted to Shinchō for its September issue.
Mishima also crossed over to Cambodia to visit Angkor Thom, in Siem Reap. There, when he saw the stone statue of “the Leper King,” he had an idea for a new play on the assumption that the Leper King was Jayavarman VII, the conqueror and unifier of Cambodia who out of his deep religiosity built the ruinously extravagant Angkor Thom. In truth, the statue in question may represent not the king, but “a god of death.” Also, though much of the king’s life is shrouded in mystery and legend, what is known suggests he lived to ninety or so. Yet because the partially lichen-covered statue, in the traditional Buddhist posture of “sitting in meditation,” shows a youthful-looking full-bodied man,37 Mishima, that night, in his room of the Auberge de Temple, in front of the walled city, worked out the outline of a play about a king who dies of leprosy in his youth that was to embody the notion, “The body is eternal, youth immortal.”38 The play in the end would be titled The Terrace of the Leper King (Raiō no terasu).
It was while Mishima and Yōko were in Stockholm, from September 22 to 27, that the Associated Press in two dispatches from that city mentioned Mishima as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, and it was while the two were in Bangkok, where they stayed the longest, from October 12 to 30, that the wire service, again from Stockholm, reported, on October 14, that Mishima was among the finalists.
These dispatches inflamed the Japanese mass media. The only Japanese winner of a Nobel Prize till then was the physicist Yukawa Hideki, who had received it, in 1949, for his prediction in the mid-1930s of the existence of the meson. The timing of the award and the nature of the field—the international prize came when Japan was still struggling with the aftermath of the war, including the nuclear devastations—had left the greatest impression on the Japanese. But since then there had been no Japanese recipient of the prize.
Among others, the Yomiuri Shinbun carried a long article with a zealous title, “The Nobel Prize and Japanese Literature,” in its evening edition of October 15th. To the daily’s embarrassment and the disappointment of all Japanese, the news from Stockholm the very next day was that the prize went to the Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov whose masterwork, And Quiet Flows the Don, had won great acclaim. Less than a week later, however, the Japanese media became worked up again: a Nobel Prize was awarded to a Japanese after all! The field was in physics once more: Tomonaga Shin’ichirō shared the prize with Harvard’s Julian Schwinger and Caltech’s Richard Feynman. Japan’s international celebrity author had lost out in literature, but no matter: the media immediately turned its massive attention to Tomonaga.
Mishima remained a strong contender for the literary prize for the next few years, until Kawabata Yasunari received it, in 1968. Keene would later write that, in May 1970, when he was in Copenhagen, he learned that Mishima had failed to get the prize because a self-appointed Japanese expert “on the basis of the few weeks he spent in Japan,” who had “extremely conservative views,” denounced Mishima as “a radical.” As a result, the Swedish Academy that may have already decided on Mishima chose Kawabata, whom the “expert” strongly pushed.39
When the prize went to Kawabata, Mishima remarked to the poet Takahashi Mutsuo,
“If I, not Kawabata, had gotten it, Japan’s seniority system would have collapsed with great clatter,” adding, “If another Japanese gets it, it will not be me, but Ōe [Kenzaburō].”40 His prediction came true, albeit over a quarter of a century later. Ōe won the prize, in 1994.
Mishima had gotten in touch with Takahashi, back in 1964. Intrigued by The Rose Tree: Fake Lovers (Bara no ki: Nise no koibito-tachi), the book of poems he received from its author, Mishima telephoned the unknown young man for dinner at an expensive Chinese restaurant on the Ginza, and chatted with him. He then wrote a laudatory afterword for Takahashi’s next book, Sleeping, Sinning, Falling. “Mr. Takahashi was exempted from the human rule that every boy grows up to be a young man,” his being a world “where he did not have to go down to the bottom of the sea, down to the bottom of the vagina which many a young man mistakes for a philosophy, mistakes for profundity,” Mishima said, rather graphically. He also cited John Rechy’s City of Night to exalt Takahashi as one of the “ethereal angels” in the third of the categories made in the novel.41
Not long after he was honored with the afterword, Takahashi realized he had said, in a newspaper interview about to be published, something that Mishima might consider rude. He urgently sought a meeting with him. Mishima met him in a hotel bar in Akasaka that evening. Upon learning what the young man’s agitation was all about, he laughed. Mishima said he had assumed that Takahashi had been blackmailed by punks and needed money, showing him a bundle of cash he had brought in his bag. Mishima then urged Takahashi to agree to any interview, not to miss any chance to become better known.42
CHAPTER TWENTY
Shinpūren, Men of the Divine Wind
“Are you not ‘turning perilously rightist’”?
—Tokuoka Takao
In the spring of 1966, when he wrote “Voices of the Heroic Souls” (Eirei no koe)—eirei, “heroic souls,” is a term of respect for the war dead—and handed the manuscript to Shizue to read, as he routinely did with his writings, Mishima said: “I finished writing it in one stretch last night. It completed itself.” He also told her, according to her recollections six years after his death: “My hand started to move on its own and the pen slid over the paper of its own will. It wouldn’t have stopped even if I had tried to stop it. At midnight I heard low voices mumble in every corner of my room. It appeared to be the voices of many people. I listened, and understood they were the words of the soldiers who died in the 2.26 Incident.”
A few nights earlier, he had told her, with tears in his eyes, about the miserable backgrounds of those soldiers. When she read the manuscript, she felt “the blood throughout my body chill.” She also feared that something had “possessed” her son.1
Whatever Mishima may have told Shizue, “The Heroic Souls” is far from a piece of automatic writing. Yes, in it, he describes what are purported to be the delirious utterances of a medium in a Shinto session called kamugakari, “deity-possessed,” that the narrator says he has attended. In the variety of kamugakari described here, a medium, possessed by a deity or deities, gives voice to a person or a group of persons, apparently unprompted save by an accompanying instrument.
But at the end of what he presented as a recreation of one such session, Mishima was careful to list eight books as material on which it “greatly relied.” Four of them had to do with the 2.26 Incident; two about the Occupation, including a biographical account based on documents of the diplomat Shidehara Kijūrō, who became the second prime minister after Japan’s defeat; one about the Kamikaze forces;2 and one about reigaku, a study on the use of the medium in Shinto. Mishima could have easily added Hagakure; he makes the medium quote a couple of passages from it.
Further, when “ The Heroic Souls” was made part of “the 2.26 Incident trilogy” shortly after its publication in the June issue of Bungei, Mishima explained that his narrative was structured like a nō drama—to be exact, the structure of its shuramono category in which the ghost of a warrior appears to retell his defeat in battle and his inability to rest in peace in death.3
At any rate, when interviewed by the daily Fukui Shinbun, Mishima explained that “The Heroic Souls”—or “the 2.26 Incident trilogy”—was an expression of his frustrations or irritations. Closely analyzing his own aesthetics, he found an admixture of a belief in “classical beauty and eroticism,” as well as his “experience of the war,” he said. Ultimately, the whole thing would have to come to the Tennō system.
The danger in Japan, Mishima added, was the fact that “the gap between classical rationalism such as American democracy and what is emotional that exists in the Japanese is gradually widening.”4 By thus bringing in the Tennō system, he knew he was taking a plunge—it would be “a fiction,” he told Fukushima Jirō, that would show “the origins of [my] rightwing thinking.”5 And in “ The Heroic Souls,” the Tennō, though not so clearly identified, is made to die at the hands of the aggrieved, resentful souls of the officers of the 2.26 Incident who were executed, as well as the Kamikaze pilots.
This kamugakari session is conducted by just two persons: a saniwa, “the divine judge,” who in this instance doubles as the player of a musical instrument—usually a six-string koto but here a flute, a natural stone the size of two fists put side by side with a hole through it—and a kannushi, the shrine priest who is the chief officiator but in this instance serves as medium. The age of the saniwa, Kimura Sensei, is not given, except to hint that he is middle-aged or older. The kannushi, Kawasaki Shigeo, is a twenty-three year-old male who “may be called a beautiful boy, with pale, clear features, thin eyebrows, a nervous, narrow, shapely nose, and small, gentle lips which may be mistaken for a lady’s.” He became blind in an accident when he was eighteen but has “since opened his spiritual eyes under Kimura Sensei’s guidance.” The medium’s role is to give voice to “our present concern.”
Prompted by the stone flute Kimura plays, Kawasaki begins to sing, “with a barely discernible smile on his face, suddenly clapping his hands rhythmically.” What startles and thrills the narrator is Kawasaki’s voice. It is usually a husky whisper, but this time it apparently represents a chorus coming from somewhere in the distance. And what the chorus does is to describe Japan at this very moment, in the middle of high economic growth, with sarcasm—in a combination of modern and classical or literary languages.
As the narrator self-consciously explains, the medium, “even after a divine soul leans on him and occupies him, does not necessarily speak the words of the deity in the ancient language of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki if it is a new soul. He freely speaks the modern language, at times using modern words and phrases that may strike some as discordant.” This out-of-place explanation brings to mind a scene in Silk and Insight where Okano goes to see Masaki—a member of the prewar Holy War Philosophy Institute turned Shinto medium. Even as he is fascinated by his friend’s transformation, Okano cannot help making sharp-edged observations on the man. “Heroic Souls” begins:
Too ineffably awe-inspiring to speak of,
Your Majesty—before you we prostrate ourselves and say:
Now, the four oceans are not necessarily calm
but in Yamato Nation under the sun
a belly-slapping, dancing world has emerged;
under your virtuous rule, peace fills the world,
people look at one another with smiles loosened by peace;
benefit and loss crisscrossing, friend and foe allied,
foreign monies make people run about;
those who no longer want to fight love even cowardice,
only nefarious battles prevail in the dark;
husband and wife, good friends, can’t trust each other,
false humanism turned into means of food,
hypocritical amity covers the world. . . .
The litany continues, in a rising chorus “imbued with inexplicable anger and lamentation,” the narrator reports, but it ends with an abruptly accusatory question: “Why did Your Majesty become a human being?” And
with that the medium collapses with exhaustion, panting.
In the second part of the kamugakari, the medium, prompted by the saniwa’s inquiry, “Which deities are you? Kindly respond,” states: “We are the souls of the betrayed.” The medium goes on: “We are the ones who thirty years ago raised a just army, were given the infamous label of rebels, and were killed.” Thirty years before 1966 is 1936, so these are the souls of the officers who were executed, the narrator reminds us, in consequence of the 2.26 Incident.
The narrator’s stress in his account of the incident, which, albeit put in the mouth of a medium, is based on various documents, including exact quotations, is on “the supreme purity” of the “love (koi)” that the officers felt for the Tennō—“His Majesty the Grand Marshal astride a white horse, distant and small, as the figure of Living Deity for whom we are to die”—and the Tennō’s utter failure to grasp that sentiment, compounded by his declared willingness to suppress them as rebels himself. The officers’ sentiment is embodied in the words of a captain who shouted as the men were led to the execution ground: “After we die, all of us will go to His Majesty, with blood on us. And, even if we die, we will exert ourselves for the sake of our Great Lord. Long Live the Emperor! Long Live the Great Japanese Empire!”
The medium’s song, a grief-stricken cry that the Tennō reacted to the officers’ uprising as a human being, not as a deity as he should have, thereby “abandoning” them, ends, again, with the question: “Why did Your Majesty become a human being?” Toward the end, the medium is “grieving like a demon.” He collapses, writhes on the floor, and faints.
The third part of the kamugakari introduces the souls of the Kamikaze pilots, the “younger brothers” of the 2.26 Incident officers—“We who offered our lives to His Majesty’s State in an attempt to stir up the last Divine Wind for the Divine State at the very moment when we were about to be defeated in war.” But the Divine Wind did not come. The reason was this: “Ever since you ascended the High Honored Seat, Your Majesty has always been a human being.” That is understandable. His Majesty is a sincere human being. Nevertheless, “just twice in the history of Shōwa, Your Majesty should have been a deity. . . . [You] should have been a deity in your duty as a human being”—“Once, when our older deities rose up; once, after our deaths, after our country was defeated.”