by Hiroaki Sato
It was in her mid-fifties that she won her first literary recognition; in 1957, her essays on her father was awarded the Japan Essayists Club prize. This was followed by the Tamura Toshiko prize, in 1961, for her stories about homosexual, bisexual lovers, The Lovers’ Forest (Koibitotachi no mori). In 1975, her full-length novel The Room of Sweet Honey (Amai mitsu no heya) won the Izumi Kyōka prize. This last, which she finished five years after Mishima’s death, won the prestigious prize partly because of his extravagant praise of The Joy of Sweet Honey, which formed the middle section of the completed novel. She died in 1987, at age 84.
Death in India
On September 26, Mishima, with Yōko, left for India at that country’s invitation. In Mishima’s estimation, the Indian government invited one “oddball” character a year. Two years earlier it was the playwright and stage-director Iizawa Tadasu who, as editor of Asahi Graph, had devoted an entire issue to the photos of the victims of atomic bombs as the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect, in 1952, and the US ban on such photos became moot. A year before, it was the social anthropologist Nakane Chie who was known for her studies of villages in India. Her book published that year (1967) judging Japanese society is “vertical” would become an unprecedented bestseller.15
The couple arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai) on the same day, went to Aurangabad on the 29th, Jaipur on October 1, Agra on the 2nd, and New Delhi on the 3rd, where Yōko took a flight back to Japan the day after. Mishima went on to Benares (Vanarasi) on the 7th and to Calcutta (Kolkata) where he stayed from the 8th to the 11th. He then flew to Bangkok where he stayed, with an excursion to Laos, until he returned to Japan on October 23. He visited Thailand partly to avoid Japanese journalists’ obsession with the Nobel Prize, partly to gather more information for The Temple of Dawn (Akatsuki no tera), the third in his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility.
In Aurangabad, Mishima visited the Ajanta and Ellora Caves—the latter, a temple partially built in a cave, “somewhat resembles the Mayan Chichen Itza and Angkor Wat,” but “Ellora is the most refined” of the three, Mishima noted; in Jaipur, the Pink City—“the pink town built by Maharaja Jai Singh in the eighteenth century”—and Amber Fort (Amber Palace); in Agra, the Taj Mahal; and in Benares, Sarnath outside the city, and the ghats—“the stone-paved [steps] along the Ganges River where people at once bathe, rest, and cremate,” as Mishima put it. What he observed at the ghats so profoundly affected him that he went there twice, in the manner Honda Shigekuni does in The Temple of Dawn. Honda holds together the narrative thread of the four novels.
Mishima, a state guest, made courtesy calls to President Zakir Hussain and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in New Delhi. He found President Hussain to be “a truly great man.” “A national industrialization is something we must do, and we can’t avoid modernization, but what do you think about the harm that comes with it?” Mishima asked the President who received him in his official residence, the Rashtrapati Bhavan. In asking the question, Mishima probably had in mind not so much the pollution that was engulfing Japan at the time as the cultural distortions. “I believe there are absolute limits to such harm,” Hussain replied. Mishima took it to reflect his confidence in Indian culture and marveled if there was any Japanese willing or ready to say that much about Japan.
With Prime Minister Gandhi, Mishima caught a whiff of what India had just begun to undertake. She was “extremely tired, looking sad” when he walked into her office, he reported. Yet, as they talked, “she began to unwind, showing truly beautiful smiles, and when the talk turned to the food question, her eyes grew intense.” Amid continued reports of starvation deaths, the plan for what was later to be known as India’s Green Revolution had just been put into motion that year.
One day in New Delhi, Mishima invited a colonel (infantry) of the Indian Army to his hotel room and talked for one and a half hours. The Indian-Chinese relations were tense, and the two armies had just had two consecutive border clashes, in September and in early October. The colonel expressed frustrations over the Chinese Army’s “human wave tactics” that treated casualties as nothing to be bothered about. As to his own army, so many were unemployed in his country that they never had any trouble in getting new recruits, but they did suffer from shortages of technical officers. When Mishima asked him about the kind of militia he was apparently thinking of forming, the colonel dismissed the idea out of hand. “Militias are just rich men’s hobbies; they are no use in war.”16
Mishima also talked with a round of “writers and professors in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, and Bengali,” but what impressed him the most was India’s “stubborn” perseverance in the outmoded ways, he told the journalist Tokuoka Takao in Bangkok. Tokuoka, who was in the Thai capital “in reserve” for the Vietnam War in case the two special correspondents the Mainichi Shinbun maintained in Saigon were found inadequate for the escalating war, was ordered to find and interview Mishima on the Nobel Prize to prepare an “in case he wins it” article. But when he, not knowing that Mishima was in Bangkok to avoid that particular topic, went to look for him in a hotel—and found him, as he expected, at the Erawan Hotel—he was told not to touch the subject. Tokuoka complied, and the two talked about other matters, among them India.17
For Tokuoka, this was his second meeting with Mishima. Less than half a year earlier, he had interviewed him on “actually experiencing” the GSDF. Still, he was disconcerted by the writer’s “loony sincerity” when he found him in the crowded “steak room” of the prestigious hotel, earnestly explaining the need for Japan to revise its Constitution so the country might have a proper army—to an aloha-clad, ruddy-faced American tourist with a baseball cap, sitting across the table. The American must have recognized Mishima from an article in Life and said hello to him.18
Before his visit, his preconceptions of India were no different from those of most people, Mishima was honest to tell Tokuoka; it was “a country you couldn’t do anything about, burdened as it was with all sorts of difficult problems, beginning with food crises, droughts, and population.” But he found the actual country “extremely attractive.” “As many as six hundred million human beings resist Europeanization and protect the outmoded ways, be it a religion or everyday customs, one way or another.” There had to be something about such a country.
Tokuoka could not disagree more, but in a different sense. Three years earlier, he had headed a small group of journalists accompanying the torch bearers for the Tokyo Olympic Games, from Olympia to Calcutta, in a small made-in-Japan car and, perhaps because of the rough terrain the group had had to ride through of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, he found India, the destination of that leg of the torch-bearing, intolerable.
It was not just that Tokuoka, as a member of the Japanese populace fetishistic about cleanliness, couldn’t take the squalor in India. Why, for example, wouldn’t, couldn’t, those who seemed to seize every chance to find time to beg for money, for food, work, instead, on the bridge they were supposed to be working on? Why didn’t Jawaharlal Nehru do something about such things, instead of giving noble sermons on the international stage? In citing an example of work, Tokuoka may have had in mind the work ethos that had earned a considerable reputation for Japan with the Olympic Games: every construction project completed on time. But Mishima simply laughed, telling Tokuoka that it was wrong to expect India to “be like Japan.”19
“In India everything is out in the open. Everything is presented, everything forces you to ‘confront’ it. Life and death, and the famous poverty as well,” he wrote in an article for the Asahi Shinbun that saw print upon his return to Japan. “Bombay, the first city I visited, was a beautiful town. Including its dirtiness, it is beautiful in a way that’s hard to describe.” In front of his hotel stood “the resplendent Seagate where once upon a time the Queen of England and Viceroys landed and entered India. In the sea wind of the Arabian Sea coarsened mud color, around the gate styled like an arch of triumph the color of burnt sienna, women in saris of various colors, women carry
ing a load on their heads, lacquer-black beggars, sailors in white clothes make up a colorful tableau.”
The last viceroy of India was Lord Mountbatten whose role in its Independence and the Partition, in 1947, has since been criticized. His previous title was the Earl of Burma. In that capacity, he, who was so proud of his good looks and loved to appear in his resplendent naval uniform, had become the last member of the British royalty to look after British—or rather, European—interests in Southeast Asia when Britain, Holland, and France tried to take back their colonies after Japan was beaten, in 1945. The Dutch attempt to retake their former colony, Indonesia, with their colonial military’s “pathological abhorrence of reason and moderation toward Indonesians,”20 wrote Laurens van der Post, Mountbatten’s aide during the transition, led to tens of thousands of deaths, whereas the French attempt to regain control of Vietnam led to the disastrous, horrendous American intervention.
“The people in the streets of New York are simply walking on their feet. But here, people are not simply walking on their feet,” Mishima observed. “Some are walking, some stop walking, some are squatting, some lying down, some eating banana, children are jumping around, old people are sitting atop a tall platform—then, white holy cows join in, dogs join in, caged parrots join in, flies join in, trees thick with green join in, red turbans join in, beautiful saris join in. They join in, move, merge, working together to paint a picture of ‘life’ that completes itself moment by moment and then again moves on.”
Then there is “death,” willy-nilly. On “the superbly crescent-shaped west bank” of the Ganges, right next to the devout Hindus earnestly performing ablutions that get rid of every possible sin, cremations go on day and night, “out in the open.” This is done in accordance with the Hindu belief, Mishima noted, that death immediately turns you into the five elements of air, earth, water, fire, and ether before samsara or transmigration, which, as we have noted, is the grand theme he chose for the tetralogy he was writing.
And, speaking of death, “Hinduism is a religion of sacrifice.” Instead of a great many human beings once offered up for sacrifice in Jaipur, today goats are offered. Especially in the State of Bengal, where,
because the object of worship is Great Mother Goddess Kālī who is starved for blood, in the famous Kalighat Kalika, in Calcutta, thirty to forty goats every day, four hundred of them on special festival days, are sacrificed, right before people’s eyes. This may be the only place in the world where a sacrificial rite is performed so openly.
The kid, neck placed in the collar of the sacrificial platform, raises screams of grief, before his head is lopped off with a single stroke. . . . Here is a glimpse into the bloody-red truth of humanity that humans should properly confront but modern life has hidden away under its thick mask of hygiene.
“Whenever I thought of the decline and disappearance of Buddhism in this country,” Mishima mused, “I could not help thinking of the rule that a religion is discarded by the fundamental force of the ‘nature’ of the locality as it becomes refined, systematized philosophically, and acquires universality.”
Mishima called open cremation, open goat beheading, and some other things he saw in India “horrors of the real world,”21 but it was there that he had an epiphany: Where there is a problem, “for the problem itself, solution is not everything.” As a matter of fact, “if solving a problem is to make it disappear, India as a whole, does not, in truth, wish such a solution.” Indeed, in India’s stubborn adherence to the outmoded ways, he saw the possibility that India might be preparing to give the world “a new spiritual value at the end of its blind, advanced technologization.”22
That, at least, was what he felt when he saw an American youth performing ablutions at a ghat in Benares, “praying in earnest.” It was during that decade that many Westerners went to India in search of truth or enlightenment. So, early in the decade, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder went there, as did the Beatles, though, in their case, after Mishima’s visit.
The descriptions of the spectacles near the Seagate and in the Kalighat cited above may well have been tamed for the consumption of newspaper readers. When he recreated some of what he had observed in The Temple of Dawn, which was serialized in Shinchō, from September 1968 to April 1970, he was far more graphic, far more exact.
In the novel, Honda finds himself in Bangkok, in the fall of 1941, to look after a lawsuit for a large trading company; it had sold a large quantity of antifebrile pills that was largely found spoiled upon arrival in Thailand, and the Thai buyer sued. When the suit is resolved in its favor, the company offers him a free trip to any country as a token of gratitude. There is a stiff wind of war in the air, and this may be the last chance for any Japanese to travel in that part of the world with impunity, it is explained. Honda takes India, and selects a couple of places to visit with “a compass of intuition.”
Arriving in his hotel in Benares after a long train ride, Honda quickly bathes in cold water. He is agitated with “mysterious youthful expectations,” Mishima wrote. “Outside hotel windows, the air was filled with the suffocating westerly sun. He felt as if he’d be able to grasp the mystery with his hands just by plunging himself” into it.
For all that, Benares was a town at once extreme in sacredness and extreme in squalor. On both sides of the alley where the sun filtered in over the eaves were rows of shops selling fried foods and sweets, an astrologer’s house, shops selling starch by measure, everything heavy with foul smell, humidity, and disease. He passed through it and was out on a cobbled plaza facing the river, where he saw, squatting in rows on both sides of it, swarms of lepers who had come on pilgrimage from all over the country, now begging while awaiting their deaths. Many pigeons. The scorching 5 pm sky. Only several copper coins stuck to the bottoms of the tin cans in front of the beggars. Lepers, some with one of their eyes crushed in red, were holding up their fingerless hands in the evening sky, like mulberry trees after pruning.
There were cripples in all shapes; dwarfs jumped about. These were rows of bodies like undeciphered ancient letters lacking in common signs. . . .
Benares is “a carpet so ugly as to be resplendent,” Honda muses. But it is there, at the Manikalnika Ghat, “the apogee of purification,” that Honda, as he watches the crematory fires from a boat on the Ganges, undergoes a kind of spiritual epiphany.
Corpses were committed to the fire one after another. As the ropes binding them burned and disintegrated, as red and white corpse sheets scorched and disappeared, he saw a black arm suddenly lift itself, a corpse arch its body in the fire like someone turning and tossing while asleep. With those set afire earlier, the color of black ashy charcoal was exposed. The sounds of something boiling over reached him over the water. Hard to burn were the skulls. A caretaker of cadavers carrying a bamboo pole constantly went back and forth, stabbing and smashing the skulls; even after the bodies had turned to ash, the heads smoldered. The black muscles of his arms stabbing and smashing the skulls glowed in the flames, its clonk-clonk sounds bouncing against the walls of the temple.
The languidness of the purification to return to the four elements, the useless fragrance that remains even after the human flesh that resists it dies. . . .
It is this cremation scene that Honda vividly remembers in the denouement of The Temple of Dawn when his villa burns down and two of his guests, a couple with a death wish, turn to ashes.
Tokuoka the journalist was surprised when Mishima casually told him the amount of “manuscript fee” he was paid by literary magazines for his “serious” novels and other things. It was, in Tokuoka’s estimation, less than one third the weekly Sunday Mainichi for which he worked would pay. That, in turn, would mean that a single installment in the monthly Shinchō for which Mishima was serializing The Runaway Horse just then would earn him an amount he could “blow just by going out one night.” In fact, for Mishima “who loved kitsch but also loved firstclass things, it may not have been enough for a single meal with drinks,” Tokuoka though
t.23 No wonder he had to write so assiduously for popular, entertainment weeklies and such, and do other things that paid him well, to make real money.
One mystery in Tokuoka’s recollections of Mishima in Bangkok had to do with the Rose Palace. That was one thing he wanted to see, Mishima told Tokuoka, because it would appear in one of his novels. Tokuoka, who had seen the palace several times—“a smallish twostoried palace surrounded by a hedge of bougainvilleas”—thought it would be a cinch to arrange such a visit, although the palace was then being used as the Thai Army’s command post for hunting down communists. At the time Thailand still hadn’t sent its troops to Vietnam to fight with US forces, so the units assigned to fight communists on Thai borders to the northeast and the west were the only ones that were in combat operations.
Tokuoka got in touch with his acquaintance in the Thai government, director-general of information and culture at the foreign ministry. What he learned was off-putting: Mishima had already tried to secure a visit through a number of channels. That persistence had turned off those involved, besides the fear, it was explained, that intelligence on communists might leak through Mishima. The bit about intelligence greatly amused Mishima, but Tokuoka’s effort came to naught and the visit didn’t work out. Or so he believed.