by Hiroaki Sato
from beyond the city streets.
And it ends:
I wait for the disaster.
Good news was bad news.
Today again the forehead of the runover dead was black
and my blood froze clotty red. . . .28
This poem attracted the attention of commentators because it opened the section “Poems at Age Fifteen” when the first of nineteen volumes of Mishima’s “complete works” was published, in 1957—the first time his poems saw print in that manner. In it some have detected Mishima’s projection of his own “narcissistic death.” In truth, Bad Poems (Mishima’s English), his sixth original compilation where it was placed, has other poems that spell out a fascination with death.
In “Report of Death” (Fuin), for example, the barely fifteen-year-old poet compares himself waking in “a corner of a room of dusty night darkness” to “a dead person awakening in the abyss of blackened gold dust,” and says, “I am not afraid of death; what I fear is eternity.” It ends: “Hearing a report of a death, my heart rejoices / more than it does hearing news of a birth.”29 In another poem he imagines a suicide.
Thanks to the antique dealer’s sun
the floral patterns on the curtain had withered,
the furniture faded, the air
festering yellow.
In the old mirror wet with the air
my face wavered flat, yellow.
. . . Soon death flew up like flies
noisily, faintly, here and there in the room.30
Of course, the “calamity” in “The Disaster” may well have been “‘the Holy War’ in whose faith wartime boys found an opportunity for selfdestruction,” as Mishima put it—the war with China, before it avalanched into the larger one with the United States and others.31 For years before the prolonged, then expanded war ended, many young men did not expect to live to twenty-five.32 It was “with the phantom, in my head, of a nighttime air raid that was bound to come” that Mishima wrote, in February 1945, the short story that sweetly described double suicide, “Circus.”33
By then death was everywhere. “Profuse deaths surrounded me: deaths in war disasters, deaths in the line of duty, deaths from wounds and illnesses at the front, deaths in battle, deaths from being run over by the train, deaths from illnesses,” as Mishima enumerated them in describing, in Confessions of a Mask, how he seriously thought of committing suicide one night and decided against it because it would look “ridiculous” in the midst of deaths “like an abundant autumn harvest.” Still, when he heard the news that Hiroshima was wiped out and the government said that white clothes would be effective against the “newtype bomb,” he deliberately walked about wearing white clothes.34
“I learned it was an atomic bomb several days later, from a professor, definitely,” Mishima wrote. “This is the end of the world, I thought. This eschatological view of the world has been the only foundation of my literature ever since, although it probably was not something that suddenly came into being as a result of the atomic bomb so much as something that had existed unseen in me from the outset.”35
In his testament to “commemorate August 1945,” he cited in full Lt. Wakabayashi Tōichi’s homiletic poem, which we have seen, because, in arguing that life is “holy” and therefore suicide must be rejected as “a kind of spasm” and yet one must train oneself spiritually for the inevitable death, the “military deity” of Guadalcanal embodied the eschatological sense that prevailed in the period of civil disturbance of Japan’s Middle Ages.36
The idea of suicide, double suicide, took an intense literary twist in The Bandit, the novel Mishima started a month or so after he learned of Mitani Kuniko’s betrothal. After what he takes to be betrayal by the woman he loves, Yoshiko, the protagonist Akihide chooses another woman with whom to commit suicide. Still, initially it is suicide that he wants. “Defeated in his [quest for the] last assignation [with Yoshiko], did not Akihide single-mindedly hope for death just as a man trudging on a desert with a fierce thirst yearns for water? He must have noticed that at that instant his yearning for Yoshiko had been marvelously switched to that for death.” The second chapter was originally titled “The Suicide Planner.”
In the spring of 1948, Mishima wrote an essay for Ningen, “The Murderous Weapon of the Seriously Ill,” in which he posited:
Does suffering kill a human being?—Nay.
Does an ideological torment kill a human being?—Nay.
Does grief kill a human being?—Nay.
There is only one that kills a human being in the East or the West, in ancient or modern times: “Death.”
Here “the seriously ill” was his generation: those who survived the war.37
That June, Dazai Osamu and his mistress Yamazaki Tomie committed double suicide. When a women’s magazine asked him for an essay on their deaths, Mishima responded with alacrity. But he focused on the act of double suicide itself, rather than address what the popular writer’s choice of that manner of death might mean, the subject the editor had in mind. Calling his “an oddball’s” view, he argued that double suicide—he used the two common words for it, “dying for love” (jōshi) and “proving one’s heart” (shinjū) alternately—is a matter of form, not of spirit, that it is “an artificial form,” and that, in the sense that “simultaneity” in the natural death of two persons loving each other is highly unlikely, it is “an artistic act, a creative act.” In making his case, he would treat double suicide of those of different sexes as the same as that of those of the same sex “in the manner of [Otto] Weininger.”
He went on: “man’s darkness at its base derives from ‘the unknowability of simultaneity’” and double suicide is a way of cracking that unknowability. He cited Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Assignation” as an example. In describing “double suicide that does not lose simultaneity, [with the two deaths occurring] merely in different places,” the story “heightens it to the joy of holy elucidation of that unknowable mystery.” Idealization, then, is inevitable to “‘the simultaneous death’ artificially brought on.”
Yet, in the end, “double suicide has not once been understood from inside.” In his play Shinjū yaiba wa kōri no tsuitachi, the master depicter of double suicide, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, could only allow Heibē to utter, “Lovely oh lovely,” as he cuts his lover Kokan’s throat with a razor before he cuts his own. It is because of this unknowability that people since mythological times have sought salvation in “decorating” the people who commit double suicide—as in the case of Prince Karu and Princess Sotōri.38
With this idea much on his mind, he went to a gathering of Matinée Poétique just about that time and posited, “If it’s between a young couple, double suicide can be beautiful and should be all right, shouldn’t it?,” only to win round condemnation, Mishima recalled some years later.
Matinée Poétique was a group formed in 1942 by a dozen poets—mostly young, most of them readers of Western poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé—who wanted to remedy “the anarchic situation of hopelessly easy modern [poetry writing] in Japan”39—an exasperation that had arisen because outside traditional tanka and haiku and lyrics, free verse had long come to be equated with “modern” poems. So they wrote poems in set forms and with rhyme schemes. Some of the group, such as Nakamura Shin’ichirō and Katō Shūichi, were tough-minded men of letters, but the poems they produced were promptly laughed out of existence. As Katō noted in his memoir, the fault was with the group’s idea itself: “employing contemporary Japanese as the raw material to approximate symbolist poetry, premised as it was on fin-de-siècle French.”40
Mishima went to the gathering because he was drawn to the group’s very endeavor that looked utterly “out of season” in the chaos following Japan’s defeat. But he was soon put off by the group’s “French odor,” he wrote, if not by the criticism of his advocacy of double suicide.41
“I dislike human beings who commit suicide,” Mishima announced in late 1954. An Akutagawa Ryūnosuke reader was p
lanned, and he was asked to contribute an essay.
Akutagawa had killed himself at age thirty-five. Mishima explained he disliked weaklings, perhaps because he himself was “as gentle, as easily hurt, as a lamb, as a dove, lachrymose, lyrical, and sentimental.” The dislike might, in that sense, be a warning against himself. He didn’t like suicide in any event, because it was a manifestation of weakness. “Suicide requires a kind of courage,” he admitted. “I thought of committing suicide, and I think it was simply because of my cowardice that I did not carry it out. But I can in no way respect a man of letters who commits suicide.”
One such writer he cited, other than the subject of his essay, was the French advocate of Fascism and collaborator Drieu La Rochelle whose suicide following the German retreat was thought to be “political,” but was, Mishima judged, something “commanded by a most decadent artistic conscience.” To explain, he brought in the samurai and seppuku. “For the samurai there were virtues they set for themselves. For them, seppuku and other forms of self-killing were, within their own moral code, no more than actions on the same plane as that of devising a strategy, carrying out an attack, and engaging in a duel. For this reason, I accept a samurai’s suicide. But I do not accept the suicide of a man of letters.”
“Akutagawa committed suicide because he liked suicide,” Mishima concluded. “I dislike that way of living, but I have no right to say accusatory things about someone else’s way of living.” He made clear what he was objecting to: the tendency to regard as important the confessional mode of writings Akutagawa adopted in the last phase of his life.
Mishima was conscientious about the task given him, of course, that of assessing Akutagawa’s writings. Akutagawa was comparable to Ueda Akinari as a writer of short stories, Mishima said. Ueda “intensely disliked not just man’s five greeds but mankind itself,” whereas Akutagawa was a “feeble-minded genius who tried to live sincerely, truthfully, against his dispositions.” Still, Ueda’s Tales of Rain and Moon (Ugetsu monogatari)—Mizoguchi Kenji’s film Ugetsu, which had won the Silver Lion Award of the Venice Film Festival in the previous year, was based on some of his stories—and an able collection of Akutagawa’s stories “will make an interesting contrast in the history of literature,” Mishima wrote.42
It wasn’t as if the thought of death was constant or continual. One day in the summer of 1955, Mishima wondered why the thought of death that had never left him from boyhood until his twenties had “receded into the distance so suddenly,” he wrote in his diary-format criticism, A Novelist’s Holiday. The wonderment was occasioned by the death on the previous night of the seventy-eight-year-old doctor who ran the hospital across the street. Mishima had once believed he’d die at age twenty, and the belief stayed with him well after he had passed that age.
He knew there was nothing special about the change. “The despair and disillusionment I felt when I finally decided I had to live was something every twenty-four-year-old youth tastes. Many of young people’s suicides are the afterimages of the fierce vanity concerning death during boyhood. People do not easily die out of despair.” Yes, during some idle moments he still thought of “a desirable death”: death by a stray bullet, for example. “This death by a stray bullet, this situation of a genuine murder, is something I have thought through, death as a total approval of the indolence of a happy spirit,” he mused. “In my boyhood, I, too, dreamed of my own heroic death!”43 The realization may have partly reflected the fact that he was enjoying “his golden period when his creative powers were at their fullest.”44
But the thoughts on death never left him. The United Kingdom announced a plan to seek production of hydrogen bombs and France that of atomic bombs in March. The heads of the Big Four—Dwight Eisenhower, Nikolai Bulganin, Anthony Eden, and Edgar Faure—gathered in Geneva in July to discuss ways of reducing tensions between the Eastern and Western blocs. And the summit only reminded Mishima of the US agreement earlier that year to pay “compensation” to the victims of a hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll aboard a Japanese fishing boat, and of the staggering “imbalance” that had come to exist between the bomber and the bombed in Hiroshima and on the “invasion into every corner of our daily life” of the bomber’s ability to “crush his sensitivity under the intellectually conceptualized image of the world.”45 Two years earlier, he had stressed the importance of death as “a strictly individual matter” in his comment on the “eschatological” sense that was the result of stupendous mass killings that the Atomic Age had rendered thinkable.46
And, as he concluded A Novelist’s Holiday, Mishima brought up Hagakure, the most famous compilation of “lessons on death” that a samurai had left, or, as Mishima put it, “an incomparably mysterious moral tract in which not Diogenestic paradoxes but wisdom on action and decision keep producing paradoxes.”47
“In a couple of years I’ll be forty; it’s about time I made a plan for the rest of my life. I feel good to think I’ve lived longer than Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, but now that I’ve reached this point, I must try to live as long as I can at any cost,” Mishima mused in a filler-like essay for a small magazine in the summer of 1962. “When it comes to the average life span in ancient times, it was eighteen years during the Bronze Age, twenty during the Roman Empire, it is said. Heaven in those days must have been brimming with beautiful youths, but the spectacle of Heaven these days must be ugly indeed.” He decided to live at any cost, because “when a human turns forty, you can’t hope to dream of dying beautifully.”48
“Already I’m beginning to think being young or youthful is something absurd,” he wrote a year later in concluding the account of his literary pilgrimage days. “Well then, do I look forward to ‘being old’? I ask, but I can’t take that either. So is born the idea of death that is now, momentary, second-by-second. This, for me, may be the only idea that is truly vivid, truly erotic. In that sense, I may be innately diseased with an incurable romantic disease. It may be that the I at twenty-six, the I the classicist, the I who felt closest to life was, by chance, counterfeit.”49
The novel he published a few months after he wrote these words, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, drew, from a fellow writer, a strong reaction. The focus of the story, from the narrative viewpoint, is on Noboru, the thirteen-year-old son of a widow who runs an expensive imported apparel store. He is a member of a group of six teenagers, everyone “sensitive, awfully intelligent, beautiful boys who are cruelty itself, and kill a cat to test their courage.” Not just kill but dissect the animal. The boys then kill the sailor Ryūji because he does not just sleep with Noboru’s mother but marries her—and dissect him, though the dissection is merely hinted.
Dōmoto Masaki, Mishima’s “playmate” in the theater who, among others, served as associate director for the film Yūkoku, recalled the omitted section Mishima showed him: “The description of the cruel dissection was full of metaphors of glittering oceans and exotic foreign sights, as intoxicating as the stories of Arabian Nights. The pubic hair is seaweed that enwraps a pearl shell, the manroot and glans turn into the minaret and roof of an Islamic mosque and are torn and peeled even as they glitter blindingly in a golden sunset. A perfection by a solemn collapse.”50
Still, the motif of the novel, the adult Ryūji’s death wish and its fulfillment—though not by the wisher’s own hand—is obvious. It is while recalling his dream of death, “a wish for a luxurious death,” that Ryūji drinks a poisoned tea offered him, without knowing it:
Boiling with scorching melancholy and ennui, overflowing with vulture and parrot, and palm trees everywhere! Royal palms. Peacock palms. Death had come out of the glitter of the sea, spreading, pushing toward him like a thunder cloud. He blissfully dreamed of a solemn, incomparably spectacular death before the eyes of thousands of people, the opportunity that had been lost to him forever. If the world, in the first place, had been prepared for a death overflowing with such glittering light, there’d be no wonder if it went to ruin because of it.
Among
the reviewers of the story, who were mostly favorable though indifferent, Hinuma Rintarō stood out. Writing for the Yomiuri Shinbun in October, Hinuma noted the “anguish” Mishima evinced in it and spoke of the difficulty the writer had to expect as he “set out on a new journey” that “inevitably accompanied the end of his spiritual drama that visited him with the perfect death of his youth.”51 Or, as he put it bluntly when he asked Mishima: “When are you going to die?” It was because of this question, which Hinuma asked on more than one occasion, that, when told of his death, in 1968, Mishima blurted out, “Did he commit suicide?” Hinuma hadn’t, but he was Mishima’s age and his death was sudden.
“I feel as though Mr. Hinuma and I talked only about death,” Mishima reflected when he wrote about him for the literary magazine Hihyō through which the two had come to know each other. “When I think of it now, he had known, with an insight unique to someone near death, the dangers of the direction my literature is aiming toward, as if it were the palm of his hand. Whenever we met, he recommended that I commit suicide on the spot. . . . He insisted, he urged, that my committing suicide right now would be like Kirillov’s logical death and my literature would be perfected by that alone.”
Kirillov is Alexei Nilych Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s Demons, the man who is resolved to take his own life and does, arguing, “If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will [by killing myself].” At the end of a document he is asked to sign declaring he had committed the murders that he hadn’t, Kirillov writes, in French: Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort! 52
Hinuma had “misunderstood” him, Mishima went on to say, that he, Mishima, had “publicly stated” that he “would never commit suicide as a man of letters.” The reason was simple: “Because literature has no ultimate responsibility, a man of letters cannot find a truly moralisch [moral] trigger for suicide. I do not recognize anything other than a moralisch suicide. That is to say, I do not recognize anything other than a samurai’s killing himself with his own sword.”53 The term Mishima used for killing oneself in the last sentence translated here is jijin, “self-blade.”54