by Hiroaki Sato
The samurai were respected, Mishima continued, because it was thought that at least they were able to die without hesitation. He had asked the SDF to accept him for training for he likewise had respect and love for the soldiers. SDF troops were no longer regarded as or perceived to be the same as prewar “soldiers,” but no matter. To enable himself to act without hesitation, he thought he had to learn “the martial way.”
“In the absence of martial training, a man can regard himself as a weakling in whatever way he wants to, can justify himself for any cowardly, excusable act, can surrender himself to any demand. That way, his ultimate safety will be guaranteed.”
“Once a man decides to follow the martial way,” in contrast, “his safety will no longer be guaranteed. That is because then no cowardly, excusable act will be permitted any longer and, where the odds are overwhelmingly against him, there is no other way than for him to either die fighting or kill himself. But only then will he be able to die beautifully and perfect his life honorably.”
Here, again, Mishima used the word jijin for “killing oneself.” That samurai tradition was carried forward to the Second World War, and he wrote “Beautiful Death” by way of thanking the GSDF. But whether the intended readership understood what he was talking about in the way he meant it is altogether another matter.
The Young Man Called Morita Masakatsu
It may well have been on June 19, 1967, in Café Victoria, in Roppongi, that Mishima for the first time met Morita Masakatsu, the young man fated to commit double suicide with him, as it were.
The previous November Morita, a freshman at Waseda University finally after flunking entrance exams for two years in a row, had, when approached, readily joined the just-formed student body Nichigakudō and, the following February, had become a founding member of the National Defense Society, a study group. Mishima’s meeting on June 19 was with the Society’s representatives. When the news broke of Mishima’s “actual experience with the GSDF,” its members begged him to find an appropriate place for them to do the same, and he had worked out just such a place with the Defense Agency: Camp Kita-Eniwa, in Hokkaidō. Subsequently, thirteen members of the society trained there for a week, starting on July 2.
It is assumed that Morita was among the students gathered at the café that day. But, even assuming that he was there, Mishima may not have seen in the young man anything other than a regular student except for his unusually round baby face—the kind of face to which he was partial. Still, in ten months Morita jotted down in his diary that, in his opinion, he and Mishima liked each other. Morita’s excitement over Mishima in time would become intense enough to lead some later commentators to suggest that, absent him, Mishima might not have taken the path he took.
Morita was born the last child of an elementary school principal, on July 25, 1945, in Yokkaichi, Mie, barely a month before Japan’s surrender. Yokkaichi, an industrial city, had begun to be bombed in June, turning a large part of it into wasteland. It was in a bomb shelter, in fact, that he was born. His father wondered if he should name his fifth child Hirakazu (“peace”) or Masakatsu (“sure victory”). He opted for the latter—the vain hope that the Japanese military would win.
In high school Masakatsu was an ordinary, even an indifferent, student with no strong views one way or another. His diary entries show him, for example, vacillating between admiration for the student federation Zengakuren’s ready resort to violence and condemnation of it.
Zengakuren is the acronym of Zen Nihon Gakusei Jichikai Rengōkai, a federation of the student bodies of 145 colleges and universities that was formed in September 1948 in revolt against the militarism and patriotism imposed on institutions of higher education until Japan’s defeat, in 1945, as well as the institutions’ own heavy-handed bureaucratic governance. The Communist Party that gained freedom under the Occupation held sway over it from the outset. Led by Takei Teruo, a student at the University of Tokyo and a Communist, the Zengakuren fought a succession of noncampus political issues that arose as the Cold War worsened: MacArthur’s Red Purge, the Korean War, and the Peace Treaty. Following the Denunciation of Stalin and the Hungarian Upheaval, however, the federation, in 1958, began to split with the Communist Party and the split led to further splits, as we will see later. Takei himself was expunged from the party during 1960 when he criticized it.
Morita Masakatsu was a young man without any intellectual training, susceptible, and, if anything, romantic, who also, like most youths, entertained the thought of death from time to time. He could easily fall for strong notions. If Waseda was not in an upheaval when he became a student there and if no one had asked him to join a new student group to be formed, he might as well have joined the Zengakuren.
In August 1967, he saw the film Japan’s Longest Day that deals with the Palace Incident. Learning that a divided cabinet had decided to surrender, with the Shōwa Tennō siding with those who argued for it, some of the staff officers at the Ministry of the Army tried to overturn the decision. In the turmoil, Lt. Gen. Mori Takeshi, Commander of the 1st Imperial Guards Division, and Lt. Col. Shiraishi Michinori, of the 2nd General Army, were killed. When they learned the coup failed, two of the principal schemers, Maj. Hatanaka Kenji and Lt. Col. Shiizaki Jirō, shot themselves. What he came away with from the film, Morita noted in his diary, was “protection and preservation of kokutai,” Japan’s reason for being as a nation. Minister of the Army Gen. Anami Korechika disemboweled himself on account of that slogan, leaving a blood-splattered testament simply stating, “With death I apologize for my great crime.” Okamoto Kihachi directed the film. Mifune Toshirō played the general. It is reputed to have the longest scene of seppuku ever.4
Morita knew Mishima to be an internationally famous author. The month he matriculated at Waseda, Mishima’s Yūkoku opened as “a film for adults only” and attracted a great deal of attention. Later, when he heard about Mishima’s proposal for a “homeland defense corps,” and that was after he became a founding member of the National Defense Society, Morita jotted down in his diary that it was “incongruous” for the “foppish” Mishima to entertain such an idea—not imagining he would in time tightly knit himself into the inexorable scheme “the fop” was devising. What attracted him most about Mishima in the end may well have been the older man’s insistence that you must be willing to die for any idea you think important.
In turn, the eagerness of the National Defense Society, which included those involved in the Ronsō Journal, may well have led Mishima to the idea of forming a militia later that year.5
Mishima’s argument on the 2.26 Incident as “a moral revolution” that had appeared in the March issue of Bungei that year6 had elicited a cordial but strong endorsement, as it were, from Kawabata Yasunari. It came in his reply to Mishima’s letter, requesting an article for Hihyō upon resumption of its issuance. “I marveled to read your great writing in Bungei,” Kawabata wrote. “It might be rude for me to say this as if it were something new, but it is indeed a splendid, great writing; for a long time [after reading it] I found myself admiring it, almost stunned. I had no thoughts of my own on the 2.26 Incident, but your excitement came through to me sentence by sentence, the rhythm ever heightening.” He then added, “I thought your letter to Miss Mori Mari was also incomparable.”7
Not long after this exchange of letters, Mishima and Kawabata, along with two other writers, Ishikawa Jun and Abe Kōbō, took action about another revolution—the one that had started just a few years earlier: the Cultural Revolution. On February 28, the four writers issued “an appeal” objecting to China’s attempt to “suffocate academic and artistic freedom.” Addressed to the world, it stated that the four were “transcending right-left ideological positions.” They were mindful that Mishima was gaining notoriety as a rightwing monstrosity while Abe and Ishikawa were known for their left-leaning views. They were also mindful of Japan’s recent past. They brought up the notion of “patriotism through literature”—their government’s wholesale attempt to
impose “thought control” on all activities during the war just two decades earlier.8
In addition, Kawabata remarked, each of its four signers had a different view of the Cultural Revolution. It is not immediately clear what those views were, but Mishima in the end may have been wrong in his understanding of that stupendous political upheaval. A week or so earlier, he had been shown some photos of the Red Guards savaging the people they decided to label the enemies of the Revolution—political leaders, prominent writers, and others, with placards with their “crimes” written on them hung from their necks—and he had said that, if forced into such a position, he’d put up a fight and die. He had also recalled a young actor who, four years earlier, had refused to play a role in his play, The Joyful Koto, exclaiming, “I can’t say such anticommunist lines!” On both counts, he may have been right in his indignation.
But he was wrong in his wish that Mao Zedong and Lin Biao win the battle. “It would be terrifying if those Mao and Lin were criticizing won and joined hands with the Soviet Union,” he observed. As it would turn out, the Mao-instigated revolution was far darker in nature. Mao and Lin apparently split, with a quarrel, if it was, leading to Lin’s death, and the eventual defeat of Mao’s agitation led to a gradual relaxation of the Communist ideology. Mishima was correct only in observing that China’s future was “outside prediction.”9 By early that year, 1967, even Japan’s Communist Party was revolting against the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to control it.
At the same time, opposition to the US war against Communism was quickly growing. Even as Mishima began his military training, huge anti–Vietnam War rallies were staged in New York and San Francisco, on April 15, with half a million participating. In May, the International War Crimes Tribunal convened in Stockholm by Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre judged the United States guilty in its conduct in Vietnam. On July 23, a race riot erupted in Detroit, which would turn out to be the largest of its kind in US history; it was touched off by wholesale arrests of blacks welcoming back Vietnam veterans. (That happened a few days after the Wuhan Incident that had exposed the schisms within the Chinese communists to be violent enough at popular levels to force Mao, who was in Wuhan for mediation, to flee.) Anti–Vietnam War rallies and movements kept spreading throughout the world. Regardless, the United States continued expanding its forces in Vietnam, until, at the end of the year, Gen. William Westmoreland announced the number of US soldiers under his command totaled 478,000.
Resplendent Epistolary Exchange
In his letter to Mishima expressing his admiration for his writing on the 2.26 Incident, Kawabata mentioned Mishima’s “letter” to Mori Mari. He was referring to Mishima’s response to Mori’s letter to him that had just appeared in “Resplendent Epistolary Exchange,” a publication gimmick of the ladies’ monthly Fujin Kōron.
Mori, Ōgai’s eldest daughter and a regular guest at Mishima’s Christmas parties—with professional bartenders and catered food—had begun her epistle by asserting that some of the words Shibusawa Tatsuhiko chose to characterize the Marquis de Sade in his book on the marquise—innocence, monstruosité, and senteté—were perfectly suited to Mishima. She detailed the de Sade that Shibusawa described, then turned to Mishima’s puzzling behavior—as typified by his unseemly eagerness to try everything and his alarming choice of attire such as “loud aloha shirts.” Why, she wanted to know, for example, did he have to appear in “a ceremonial dress of the tropics” in order to explain how it differed from a waiter’s garb? She did all this before concluding nonetheless that all that type of behavior was “natural” because he was like “a child who demanded a new toy every day.”
Along the way, Mori, casually yet obviously to flatter Mishima, brought up her father, Ōgai—the one writer she knew Mishima esteemed. “Although Mr. Mishima has a dark side,” she wrote, “he, meanwhile, also has a side as bright as a pellucid blue; he has brightness in his intellect—intellect to me is a dark place—and has a sober brain like Ōgai, and like me, and his common sense is well developed.”
All the odd things he does, at any rate, are “compelled by curiosity and an inquisitive mind that derive from your innate, innocent nature,” wrote Mori, sometimes using the third person, sometimes the second operson, in referring to him, and ended her epistle: “Having understood this, I will give up on the fact, as something I can’t do anything about, that you don’t dress in a manner that would emphasize your face—the mystifying, my favorite, face, the one I like next to that of Nureyev, that of [Jean-Claude] Brialy—with extraordinary eyes you cannot forget once you see them. Since I have badmouthed you so much,” she concluded. “I shall simply add that the photograph of you costumed like a slave (is that what you were?) in The Arabian Nights that I saw the other day was wonderful.10
In his response Mishima followed the indirect approach Mori had taken. Instead of addressing Mori’s sartorial and other complaints about him first, he began by noting “the literary paradise” Mori created for herself, going on to praise, The Joy of Sweet Honey (Amai mitsu no yorokobi), a story just published in Shinchō. He said that it was, “as it were, a Japanese Colette’s work, a work that should be called a Colette permeated with Fauvism, a sensual masterpiece.” The story described in dreamy, sensitive detail a pubescent girl’s lambent sexual stirrings that are at once narcissistic and incestuous. Mori had established her reputation ten years earlier with a prize-winning collection of essays, My Father’s Hat (Chichi no bōshi), which spelled out her adoration for her father. “Sweet honey,” obviously redundant, was, in fact, how she had characterized the feeling with which her father had enveloped her.11
In praising Mori as a Japanese Colette, Mishima cited André Gide’s observation in Prétextes to the effect that the most important quality for an artist is sensuality. That must have made Mori doubly happy. She had lived in Paris for a little over a year not long after marrying, in her teens, a student of French literature, Yamada Tamaki. There she had experienced what would later be called culture shock, and the sojourn may have been too short for a proper understanding of the city and its culture; but, as often happens in such cases, she remained enamored of things French.
Mishima then analyzed Mori’s exact understanding of lust, not just the amorphous desire of a pubescent girl (named Moira or Moïla in the story at hand) but also the more direct desire of a grown male (named Peter Orlov), marveling at her “accurate knowledge of male lust.” Indeed, Mori had written several stories about homosexual, bisexual lovers—featuring characters named Guido, Paulo, Hans, and such, acting out their assigned roles, one should add, in totally Japanese settings.12
In using such names Mori followed the examples of her father and some of his contemporaries. Ōgai named his first son Oto (Otto), the other sons Furitsu (Fritz) and Rui (Louis), his first daughter Mari (Marie), the second Annu (Anne). He also named Mari’s first son Jakku (Jacque).
Such naming was popular for a while. What set Ōgai apart was that he also often drew on Chinese classics for those names. So, in the case of his first son, he chose a set of two Chinese characters that read “oto” in Japanese but meant “tiger” in classical Chinese, because the son was born in the Year of the Tiger. In addition, he had a good reason for choosing European names. While studying military medicine in Germany, from 1884 to 1888, he had noticed German and other European friends had trouble correctly pronouncing his personal name, Rintarō. 13
Finally getting to the heart of the matter, as it were, Mishima adopted a mock-serious tone to reject, indignantly, Mori’s comparison of him to “a fatso like the Marquis de Sade.” Her epistle was itself “a wonderful literary piece, yes,” Mishima wrote, but she was wrong in everything she said about him. How could he, an adult, be “innocent,” to give the most obvious example? The most appalling of all was “the horrible sartorial taste” she intended to foist on him. He didn’t want her to be his “sartorial advisor” in any way whatsoever because,
“A black silk muffler with two stripes
in white or gray”—what foppish taste is that? That you should want such a foppish muffler to snake around me, a simple, spartan guy who, may I tell you this, even in this extreme cold, the severest in decades, goes about naked under a shirt, wearing no overcoat, let alone a muffler! A striped kimono (tōzan) with a black collar, a Hakata obi, with a woolen inverness—you better have your favorite, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, be decked out like that.
Yoshiyuki Junnosuke was a popular novelist who, though prone to illnesses, flaunted being a womanizer with various affairs under his belt, even as he showed off his frivolity. Born in 1924 and thus a bit older than Mishima, Yoshiyuki was grouped with Endō Shūsaku and several other writers as “the third new faces.” He, like Dazai Osamu, was the kind of writer Mishima despised. Mishima, who prided himself in dressing correctly as occasion required, goes on:
I look far better in a kendō uniform made of white cotton fabric layered and roughly sewn together. Aside from that, while I respect your preferences for things French in every way, I am one who feels nauseated by the male fashion of that country in every way. A men’s coat with raglan sleeves—how revolting that is! When it comes to men’s fashion in Europe, Italy (north) is first, next comes England, then Germany, that’s all. Please, in the future as well, I beg you to drop the thought completely of what I ought to wear.14
Mori Mari, born in 1903, was a relatively late comer to the literary scene. She began publishing her translations of French writers—Musset (On ne badine pas avec l’amour), Maupassant (Le Horla and others), Loti, Alphonse Daudet, Florent Fels, Gyp or Sibylle Gabrielle Marie Antoinette Riqueti de Mirabeau (Mademoiselle Loulou)—in the second half of her twenties and her own essays in her thirties. Deprived of her income as the copyrights to her father’s works expired, shortly after Japan’s defeat, in 1945, she was plunged into poverty, the state that would be with her for the years that followed. She had been divorced from her second husband, Satō Akira, a professor of medicine, back in 1931, and never married again.