by Hiroaki Sato
In mid-1966, when a women’s weekly asked Mishima for an homage to bullfighting to go with a series of photographs, he gladly complied. “Among the roughest, life-risking jobs men do, there are few whose essence so depends on elegance and beauty,” he began the article, “The Matador’s Beauty.” “Unlike America’s dust-smelly, dingy cowboy, the matador wears a courtier-like gorgeous silk costume.” What makes the matador what he is? It’s the fact that he wears nothing “under that showy costume”—no protector, no underwear. And, of course, “a man can rightfully don a colorful, resplendent suit only when he involves himself with death, courage, and a spurt of blood. . . . The matador is beautiful because of the danger and even more beautiful because of death.”
Of the bullfight, Alphonso Lingis would write what would have delighted Mishima, though more than a dozen years after his death. “No woman spread-eagled in a strip show is as brazenly exhibited as the matador in the corrida,” the American philosopher observed. “His body and his blood are exalted in a monstrance of scarlet velvets, spun-silver lace, and jewels over against the black fury of the bull. Insolence flaunts his torso, contempt splays his thighs, flash-fires of foolhardy intelligence crackle across his tensed and cynical posturing, his testicles and penis jeweled in the codpiece and provocatively exposed to the lusts of the crowds.”55
Mishima ends his homage with the penultimate stanza of García Lorca’s poem on the writer-matador who was gored in August 1934, “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”:56
No one knows you. No one. But I sing you.
I sing for the sake of the figure you cut and your grace.
The signal ripeness of what you came to know.
Your appetite for death and the savor of its taste.
The sadness beneath the valor you show.
(Tr. Forrest Gander.)
In September, the monthly Gunzō published Mishima’s story that seemed to honestly describe an actual incident that directly involved him and his family, along with his meditation on it. It’s titled “From the Wilderness” (Kōya yori).
Early one morning during the rainy season, an about forty-day period from June to July, Mishima is awakened by a commotion outside. He has just gone to bed, at six o’clock, and fallen asleep. Evidently, someone is trying to break into the house. Mishima finally gets up and, with wooden sword in hand, goes downstairs. After a good deal of excitement in the household, he goes back up to his study because of the noise of a windowpane shattering upstairs, and finds there a skinny, tall young man standing in the semi-darkness—trembling, with a large volume of the encyclopedia plucked from the bookshelves open before him.
Mishima has never before seen a face “as horribly pale as that of the young man.” Still, he feels relieved, figuring that this must be one of “the standard-issue literary, ideational madmen.” He asks the intruder, “What have you come here for?” The young man tenses up, but says, “Please tell me the truth.” He repeats it a couple of times.
“Please tell me the truth.”
I did not understand what he meant, but I said as mildly as I was able to manage.
“All right. I’ll tell you the truth whatever it is.” By doing this, I thought I’d bide my time.
At that moment my shoulder was pushed from behind.
A policeman came in. Two more policemen came in.
“Please tell me the truth,” the youth said once again, as if fevered.
“Well, then, let’s go to a quiet place and talk, relaxed,” said one of the policemen in uniform.
The youth obediently walked out of the study, guarded by two policemen. One of them took the green encyclopedia from the youth’s hands and went out, carrying it with him. I recognized a small stain of blood on the fore-edge of the volume.
Strange enough, I was thinking that the policemen would lead the youth into a quiet room so I might talk with him. But the moment they approached the entrance to the kitchen, they suddenly pushed the young man from behind, trying to thrust him outside. The young man began to struggle. . . .
The young man is taken away, Mishima and his father, Azusa, are later summoned to the police station for questioning; after two hours of that, the man is brought in for identification, and it’s over. But Mishima can’t get rid of the youth’s image, can’t help thinking about him, until he begins to recognize himself in him—that “the fellow is my shadow, my echo.” So he decides to do what the young man asked him to do: to tell the truth.
The truth is, Mishima explains, that, even though his mind, as that of a novelist, is vast and contains many things, such as an airport and a central terminal, tree-lined streets, shopping areas and residential areas, and he is thoroughly familiar with all the details, this map of his mind doesn’t record “the vast territory” that he normally neglects—the territory whose existence he can’t deny.
It is a vast wilderness that surrounds the metropolis that is my mind. It must be a part of my mind, but it is an undeveloped, barren, bleak region that is not recorded in my map. It is wild and barren as far as the eye can see, with neither leafy trees nor sprouting wildflowers. Here and there rocks stick out, the wind blows over them, sprinkles sand on them, and carries it away. I know the existence of this wilderness but haven’t walked toward it, though I know I once visited it and must visit it some day, once again.
Evidently, that fellow has come from that wilderness. . . .
After “From the Wilderness,” Mishima would publish just two more short stories before his death.
In an interview conducted by the Mainichi Shinbun in March 1966 to mark his “first appearance on French TV,” there was the following exchange between the interviewer and Mishima.
Q: Are you serious [i.e., Do you think you are a seriousminded person]? Do you think you are akin to Salvador Dali?
A: It is my flaw that I am serious about everything, and it is also the root cause of my comicality. Dali is not at all comical. He is sublime.
Q: Do you think suicide is a form of apologia?
A: There are two kinds of suicide. One is suicide from weakness and defeat. One is suicide from strength and courage. I despise the former and praise the latter.
Q: What do you think of human life?
A: I do not necessarily think it’s supreme.
Q: Aren’t you afraid of dying?
A: I’m sure I’ll be scared when I die, but at least I’d like to die pretending it’s nothing. That’s a courtesy to the humans who are alive.57
At the end of the year, Mishima was solicited for an essay by the Yomiuri Shinbun on “the first thoughts for the New Year”—to appear on January 1, 1967. Titling it “Hesitancy at the Start of the Year,” he opened the essay as if the heading were part of the sentence that followed: “In fact, there has been something special about the way I’ve felt welcoming the New Year for the last couple of years.” He will turn forty-two in the middle of the month, he’ll write about that special feeling to see if it is only his or something common to people his age. Following the custom, the daily had asked a group of prominent figures to record their sentiments for the New Year.
Two years earlier he had started a tetralogy “in the hopes of at least leaving some scratch marks on the surface of the earth,” and on every New Year’s Day he had hoped he’d live until he finished it, that he’d finish it as soon as possible. Since it must be natural for anyone who has taken on a big enterprise past the midpoint in life to hope to live until the work is done, he assumes he is no different from most people in that regard. What might make him different from others was this: “At the start of every year, a mysterious, sorrowful hesitation assaults me. Shall I call it a hesitation or shall I call it an inability to give up? Thing is, I wouldn’t be able to complete this big novel until five years from now at the earliest, but by then I will be forty-seven.”
That will mean that, as long as he waits until the completion, he’ll have to “forsake a spectacular heroic end forever. It’s this unsettling foreboding that the extremely diffi
cult decision might come this year on whether to give up becoming a hero or to give up completing the lifework.”
Mishima then imagines someone telling him: You must give up the dream of becoming the kind of “action hero” you have in mind by age thirty; to talk about such things twelve years beyond that is as silly as “an old spinster putting on thick makeup.” He imagines his riposte: “But I still have physical strength not inferior to that of young men”—adding parenthetically, “Such thinking may be ‘an old man taking a cold bath’”—“and I think that age forty-two is still not too late an age demarcation point, though barely, to become a hero.” Mishima then brings up, in a forum where one is supposed to talk about one’s plans and such, two figures who weren’t that young when they died.
“Saigō Takamori died at age fifty as a hero; the other day when I went to Kumamoto to research the Shinpūren, I was moved to discover that Kaya Harukata, one of the leaders of that revolt—which tends to be regarded as a foolish action of young men—who pulled off a spectacular end to his life, died when he was my age. If I did [something similar] now, I, too, would be able to do it before reaching the final age to be a hero.”
Saigō Takamori, who led the Satsuma Rebellion, in 1877, had himself beheaded by his aide when wounded with gunshots in the middle of what was to be the final battle. The last forty-odd men who had survived with him were killed or killed themselves in the ensuing mêlée. In thinking of Saigō and Kaya, Mishima also thought of Ernest Hemingway who had shot himself six years earlier. The American writer had yearned for “an adventuresome heroic death,” but every such opportunity “ran away from him, until finally he committed suicide in a manner most contrary to his wishes.” Mishima concluded: “I don’t want to end up like that.”58
A year later Mishima would write an homage to Saigō, in the form of a silent address to his famously chunky statue in Ueno Park. In the manner of Ezra Pound offering to reconcile himself with Walt Whitman, saying, “I have detested you long enough. . . . I am old enough now to make friends,” Mishima offered to make friends with the leader of the rebellion whose outcome was never in doubt. He’d been put off by him for a long time, not just because of his “grotesque” physique à la a sumo wrestler but also because of the “vulgarity” he sensed in his compatriots’ adulation for him: the Japanese assume one condition for being admired as a great man is “amorphously antirational.”
But now, not so much because of the times, as because of his own age, “The time has come for the beauty of your heart to clarify itself like the dawn light,” Mishima told the statue. “You knew tears, knew strength, you knew the vanity of strength, you knew the fragility of an ideal. And you knew what responsibility was, what it was to respond to people’s trust. You knew, and you acted.”59
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Death in India
A religion is discarded by the fundamental force of the “nature” of the locality as it becomes refined, systematized philosophically, and acquires universality.
—Mishima, Indo tsūshin
Shortly after “actually experiencing the SDF,” Mishima sat down to write an extended commentary on Hagakure. He did so for a publisher that had just started a series of books on “the wisdom of the Japanese,” and his was to be the second. He took to the work with relish because he had extolled its virtues twelve years earlier; now, he could detail the whys and wherefores of his admiration in the larger context of his achievements and conduct.
Hagakure—it means “hidden in foliage,” but here the title will stay untranslated1—was one of the three books he had admired and always kept handy during the war, the two others being Radiguet’s La bal du Compte d’Orgel and the collected works of Ueda Akinari, Mishima explained. Of the latter two, Radiguet’s attraction faded over time because he, Mishima, survived the war and did not die before turning twenty; so did Akinari’s, although, with Akinari, Mishima did not clearly remember why he had once been so taken with the Edo writer, except perhaps that Akinari represented for him an anti-Zeitgeist stance and his skill as a writer of short fiction. Akinari studied with scholars of National Learning, but was dismissive, for example, of the idea of exalting things that are supposed to be purely, genuinely Japanese, such as the “Yamato spirit.”
Only Hagakure, which was promoted, and popular, during the war, “the season of death,” when young men vied to read Paul Bourget’s Le Sens de la mort, for example, but which, along with most other things so treated during the war, was, as soon as Japan was defeated, trashed “as repulsive and to be forgotten,” remained with him—no, it began to “radiate more light” in him after the war. “That may be because,” Mishima mused, “Hagakure is by its nature a paradoxical book like that. During the war, it was a luminous body placed in the light; but it was in the darkness that it truly began to radiate its light.”2
The compendium, put together by a young samurai named Tashiro Tsuramoto who visited Yamamoto to hear him talk and recorded his words, in the manner of Eckermann’s conversations with Goethe, over a period of seven years, is indeed a paradoxical book. For starters, it seems to advocate death over life, asserting that, when you have a choice to live or die, you must choose to die, but Yamamoto himself died peacefully, “on the tatami,” neither in a sword fight nor by seppuku. He was leading an eremitic life after taking Buddhist tonsure, when Tashiro decided to elicit his opinions on various matters and jot them down. This is a little hard to take, given the famous dictum, given also his advocacy of a “frenzied death”—a readiness to plunge into a fight, be it military or personal, in a state of frenzy, regardless of the consequences, even if, that is, you knew you would be immediately overwhelmed and killed.
So, in the celebrated passage, which is in the opening of the compilation, Yamamoto says: “The way of the warrior, I’ve found, is to die. In a situation with a choice, you can only choose at once to die. There’s nothing complicated about it. With calmness you just go right ahead. Talk such as, ‘You’re missing the mark’ or ‘It’s a dog’s death,’ may be good for a sophisticated warrior’s way, urbane style. But, for us, in a situation with a choice it isn’t necessary to hit the mark.”
It was chiefly because of these statements that during Japan’s war with Western countries, Hagakure was “strongly recommended for the young men heading to the battlefields to resolve” to face death. It was also because of the book’s inextricable linkage to the war that those who knew the famous dictum but did not read the book evoked “a reprehensibly fanatic image” of it. But, as what follows the quoted passage shows, Yamamoto was not exactly urging you to seek death.
“We all want to live. There’s always a better reason for what you want. If you miss the mark and live, you’ll be a coward. That’s the tricky line. If you miss the mark and die, you may be crazy but it won’t be shameful. That’s the solid way of the warrior.” At any rate, “If you relive your death every morning and evening and remain in a constant state of death, you will achieve freedom in the warrior’s way and complete your duty without making a mistake during your life.”
In other words, you achieve freedom by acting as if you were already dead, Yamamoto says, and that is the philosophy of Hagakure, Mishima avers. Yamamoto also advocates opting to die when you face a decision to live or die. Not that you are bound to face such a decision in your life. You may never have such an occasion. It is simply that “death = choice = freedom” is the ideal schema for the samurai.
The way of the warrior is something you must contemplate in every detail, day and night, on the assumption that you may not be able to live through the day. You may win or lose, depending on the circumstances. But you can’t shame yourself. You must die. If you have shamed yourself, you must revenge yourself on the spot. No wisdom is required for this. An accomplished warrior doesn’t think whether he’s going to win or lose, but dashes into the place of death with single-minded determination. In so doing he rids himself of all “illusions.”
Yet, as Mishima makes sure to note, Yama
moto also posits what can be the antithesis of the famous or infamous dictum underpinning Hagakure philosophy: “A man’s life is truly brief. You should live doing whatever you like to. In this world, which lasts for a duration of a dream, it is foolish to live doing only what you don’t like to, suffering. . . . Appropriate to my present circumstances, I think I’ll go out less and mainly sleep while alive.”
Yamamoto studied Zen, which was important to the samurai, and is said to have achieved enlightenment. So there may be little contradiction between his insistence on the samurai’s willingness to die at any moment and the carefree state he calls for at the same time. Yet the contrast is stark and may surprise those who approach the book with preconceptions.
Yamamoto has a range of homely advice, not necessarily for the samurai class. In addition, there are general social observations, among them what Mishima calls the Hagakure-style “political ideal (rinen) of democracy,” to wit: “It is hard to achieve what you desire by insisting on the Principle (gi) because you hate the unprincipled (fugi). If you nonetheless adamantly insist on the Principle, believing that it is the supreme thing, you tend to make more mistakes than not. Above the Principle there is the Way. It is hard to find it easily. That would require highest wisdom and intelligence. When you see it, [you will realize that] things like the Principle are small.”
In any event, while working on the commentary on Hagakure or soon after finishing it, Mishima wrote a short essay, “Beautiful Death.”3 There, he again brought up ancient Greece where “the ideal was to live beautifully and die beautifully,” adding, “The ideal of our way of the warrior must have been the same.” The difficulty in modern Japan was simple: if it is “difficult to live beautifully,” it was “even more difficult to die beautifully.” There are two conditions for living and dying beautifully: you have work to which you can devote yourself sincerely and your country or people (minzoku) are worth dying for gracefully, without hesitation. If the country or the people are in an unsound state where whatever you do doesn’t matter one way or the other, you must first rectify the situation.