by Hiroaki Sato
When he traveled in Southeast Asia, Mishima wrote, he heard about or witnessed the Communist-linked patriotic front singing a song in praise of the king for troop unity (Thailand) and the leading Communist force, Pathet Lao, that occupied two-thirds of the country, still expressing respect and admiration for the king (Laos). In the circumstances, there is a distinct possibility for “a Communist government under the Tennō system” that might come about peacefully, because Japan is a representative democracy. But “Communist government or Communist-accommodating government is the opposite concept of freedom of speech.”
Yes, again, that may well be the case. But does it follow that “the urgent task is to link the Tennō and the military with a bond of honor,” even with Mishima’s own caveat that the restoration of that authority to confer honors must be accomplished “not with the Tennō as a political concept, but with the Tennō as a cultural concept”?
In his criticism of “On Defending Culture,”27 Hashikawa did not fail to point to the illogicality of this concluding paragraph. There are some basic problems in Mishima’s premises.
First, if Mishima is putting forward “the Tennō system as a cultural concept” because of his fear of Communism, and doing so on the premise that the Tennō alone has the ability to preside over the “cultural totality,” that imperial ability was lost under the Meiji Constitution, as Mishima himself points out, was it not? Even more to the point, the theory of a modern nation state, Communist or otherwise, is incompatible with the notion of the Tennō as supreme reviewer of all aesthetics (bi no sōransha), is it not?
Second, a direct linkage between the Tennō and the military may be effective as a simple means of preventing a Communist revolution, but the moment the linkage occurs, the Tennō loses his position as embodiment of a cultural concept and assumes his position as embodiment of a political concept, does he not? We already learned that under the Meiji Constitution, did we not?
Mishima, only too aware of these defects, is forced to summarize Hashikawa’s criticisms in his open letter—this time clearly, unencumbered with convoluted logic.28
As far as such arguments go, the saving grace may be that Mishima’s belief in the importance of the freedom of speech was absolute. In another essay on the same subject he wrote not long after “On Defending Culture,” he made it clear that no one in authority should be allowed to discriminate among cultural manifestations.
“We are willing to protect kabuki and bunraku, but we must suppress such decadent [cultural manifestations as] psychedelics and ‘I’ve ended up dying’—that’s what politicians think,” he wrote. “I don’t accept that kind of thinking.” Japanese culture, any culture, is all-inclusive, period. “Be it good or bad, old or new, what is manifest is the Japanese spirit.”29 The essay was somewhat incongruously titled “Link the Chrysanthemum and the Sword with a Bond of Honor.” “I’ve ended up dying” was a phrase in the new vocal trio The Folk Crusaders’ novelty song that had become a hit, “The Drunkard Has Come Back.”
Whether politicians knew Mishima’s contempt for them or not, Hoshina Shigeru, the cabinet secretary of the Satō administration, asked Mishima, at the end of the year, if he would consider running for political office—as a candidate for the Liberal Democratic Party, of course. The idea was far from off the wall. In July that year, in the national elections for the House of Councilors, among the top vote getters were five non-politicians, led by Ishihara Shintarō. The four others were Aoshima Yukio, the writer and film director who later served as governor of Tokyo, 1995–99; Kon Tōkō, the Buddhist bishop who was also an exceedingly popular writer of often rambunctious characters; Daimatsu Hirobumi, who, as we have seen, managed the Japanese women’s volleyball team that won the gold medal in the Tokyo Olympic Games; and Yokoyama Knock (real name: Yamada Isamu), the comedian who later served as governor of Osaka, 1995–2000, only to be accused of sexual harassment and convicted.
Elections for the House of Councilors are divided into national and local, and these five were all elected on the national ticket, which is rather like a celebrity contest. The five were unsurprisingly dubbed “talent [celebrity] candidates.”
There was one surprise: the seemingly apolitical Kawabata Yasunari managed Kon Tōkō’s campaign. The two had known each other since their New Sensibility School days in the 1920s. Kawabata’s lively discussion of the campaign afterward may also have come as a surprise to many, as it showed his grasp of world affairs or his happiness in talking about them.
“It would be best without something like that, that’s self-evident,” Kawabata said of the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty, for example. But when you think of Japan’s domestic and international politics, not to mention Japan’s foreign trade in which the United States is the largest partner, you can’t think of the treaty as something “isolated and alone,” he pointed out. The “leftwing and progressives” talk about the treaty “as if you can cut it off as you might one of your arms,” he said—perhaps in a wry reference to a fetching story he had published a few year earlier, “One Arm” (Kataude). The story opens with a young woman taking off her right arm with her left arm to “lend it one night” to her lover, and goes on to describe in sensual detail what happens in consequence.30
The Suicide Project
Sun and Steel, which Mishima serialized in Hihyō from November 1965 to June 1968, was, simply put, his “suicide project”—“a detailed proposal” based on “a calculation for its execution”—even as some readers ridiculed it as “a solipsistic game of an idea” when it appeared, Tanaka Miyoko wrote.31 Mishima himself observed, toward the end of a series of taidan with Nakamura Mitsuo, that it was “difficult for a living writer to prove his writing act and some other act come from the same root,” even though Sun and Steel, which he was writing just then, was a sincere attempt to do so. He said this just after telling Nakamura that he was “a seppuku specialist.”32
At the outset of the essay, Mishima stated that he opted for “an intermediate form between confession and criticism” in order to describe something he found hard to express through “the objective art genre of the novel.” The result was an extended meditation on how he reached the decision to kill himself.
Mishima was an unusually precocious child but grew up a physical weakling. So, in the manner of “In the beginning was the Word,” he starts by noting that with him there was first the word and only then, much later, the body. And the body, by the time it emerged, had already been worm-eaten by the word. Employing the image of a Shinto shrine that uses trees simply stripped of their bark (shiraki, in Japanese, or “white trees”), Mishima says it was as if termites (shiroari, “white ants”) appeared first, followed by a gradual emergence of a white tree already infested by them. Hence the boy’s assumption of the existence of “the body that should be” with no involvement of the word, the language. It was in the end thanks to the sun and steel that he learned the language of the body as he might “a second language.” The essay, then, will be a history of learning that language, which will be “incomparable” and “most abstruse,” Mishima predicts at the start.
So, there had to be the sun. He encountered it twice. The first time was in the summer of Japan’s defeat, in 1945. “The brutal sun that was shining on the overabundant summer grass on the borderline between wartime and postwar. (The borderline was no more than a series of wire fence half buried in the summer grass, leaning whichever way, collapsing.)” It was, he recalls, “a very close, even summer sunlight, as it intently poured onto all phenomena. The grass and trees thick with green that remained there wholly unchanged, though the war was over, illuminated by the ruthless midday sun, were soughing in a breeze like a clear illusion. It would not disappear even when my fingers touched the tips of those grasses; I was surprised.”
The sun’s relentlessness made an indelible impression on someone who, “already at age fifteen,” had written these lines: “Even then the light comes to shine. / People praise the sun. / I, in a dark hollow, / avoid the
brightness, throw out my soul.” As he goes on to explain, he had been enamored with the Novalis-style night and the Yeats-style “Irish twilight” since boyhood. Surely, the entire poem, “In Praise of the Sun” (Nichirin raisan), retains marks of “Hymns to the Night,” a series of paragraphs expressing a yearning for death by the forerunner of German Romanticism, and The Celtic Twilight, a collection of folktales whose title became synonymous with the literary movement the Irish poet led.33
Out in the sun,
I become a tender maiden.
Without looking at his face clearly even once,
I cast out myself before my lord.
Though remorse is also a form of rest,
brightness does not easily permit it.
Before the regret, repeatedly,
I cast out a new cliff.
This is none of your business,
I’ve always thought.
And I cast out my imbecile labor
as if it were a corpse.
Even then the light comes to shine.
People praise the sun.
I, in a dark hollow,
avoid the brightness, cast out my soul.34
The only way for the boy to be anti-Zeitgeist was to regard the sun as the enemy. As the war ended, however, he began to perceive that doing so would be to “fawn on the Zeitgeist.”
The sun struck him the second time six years later, at the end of 1951, on his way to Hawaii aboard the SS President Wilson. Thereafter it became impossible for him to sever his relationship with the sun, even as he kept doing his work during the night. But “the sun incited me to pull my thinking out of the depths of the night with its intestinal sensibility to the bulges of muscles wrapped in a bright skin.” So it was a matter of time before he faced iron, before, as he put it, “a dark, heavy, cold lump of iron, something that seems to have further condensed the essence of the night, was placed in front of me.”
When he felt he had built enough muscle through bodybuilding, Mishima finally experienced the physical side of the summer festival of his area, Jiyū-ga-Oka, in 1956, by joining the bearers of a portable shrine, something he had dreamed of doing since a boy. The shrine weighed two thousand pounds, and a team of forty men in spiffy festival uniform carried it out of Kumano Shrine into the streets and, after making the rounds, finally back to the shrine, as it “swayed, moved, leapt up, and enthusiastically teetered out of control,”35 sometimes crashing into someone’s hedge.
It was while sharing the physical pain and intoxication with a group of men, while staring at “the eerily blue sky, as it was squeezed up high one moment and collapsed upon me in the form of an abyss the next,” like “a ferocious giant bird with his wings spread wide,” that he had an epiphany: “a glimpse of collective visual sense,” a realization that the blue sky he was staring at and the blue sky his fellow shrine bearers, “the ordinary young men of the street,” were staring at were identical. It was a moment he had long been waiting for. It was also what he had called “tragic.” It was a moment when “the use of the muscle easily clarified what the word had mystified,” comparable to the moment you know “the meaning of eroticism.”
“In my definition of tragedy,” Mishima explains, “the tragic Pathos”—here the word is German—“is born where the most average sensibility acquires a prestigious, exclusive sublimity at a certain moment; it is never born where a unique sensibility flaunts its prestige. Accordingly, those involved with the word may be able to produce tragedy but cannot participate in it. Furthermore, the prestigious sublimity had to be based strictly on a kind of physical courage.”
“Heroism, intoxication, clarity,” and other such factors that make up what is tragic are born when “an average sensibility equipped with a certain amount of physical strength happens to encounter just such a prestigious moment that’s been prepared for you.” This is because “tragedy requires antitragic vitality and ignorance, and, above all, a certain ‘incongruity.’ For someone to become divine at a certain moment, he cannot possibly be a deity or anything close to a deity in normal times.”
Physical strength or the muscle alone is often inadequate, of course. A muscle-bound man often “stores a feeble mind” within his muscles, Mishima has witnessed. In his own case, however, the word came first, so “virtues the word evokes, such as calm and fortitude, had to emerge through physical symbols.” And there was another vital factor. Possession of a perfect physique was not in itself the ultimate aim, for “at the end of such classical formation lurked a romantic intent.”
The romantic impulse that had been an undercurrent in me since boyhood had meaning only as the destruction of a classical perfection; readied in me like a prelude containing all the various themes of the entire music, it had drawn a deterministic structure before I acquired a single thing. That is, even as I deeply held a romantic impulse for death, I had demanded a strictly classical physique as its vessel; my romantic impulse for death had not had an opportunity to realize itself, from a strange view of destiny, for the simple reason, I had believed, that I was ill-equipped with good physical conditions. A romantic, heroic death required strong, sculpturesque muscles; if feeble, flabby flesh faced death, there would only be a comical incongruity, I thought. Even as I yearned to die young, at age eighteen, I felt I was not suited for dying young. That was because I lacked the muscle suited for a dramatic death. That what had had me survive until after the war lay in that incongruity deeply wounded my romantic pride.
We need not ask how much of this is retroactive reasoning, justification as an afterthought. The process of muscle building, the straining of the muscle necessarily leads to moments of “the pure sense of incomparably transparent strength,” which, Mishima found, is “the exact opposite of the word.” And the word—that which gives form to the so-called imagination—is duplicitous. For imagination has allowed human beings to avoid physical pain by, for example, projecting amorphous things like “spiritual pain,” when, as he has come to perceive it, pain is the only “physical guarantee of consciousness” with which to reach “the essence of being,” that is, “the essence of action, the essence of strength.” Furthermore, “behind the pain there is a certain light, which has a deep relationship with the light that lurks behind strength.”
As he trained his muscles, he thus began to have a glimpse of “another sun that was different from the sun that had endowed me with blessings for a long time, another sun full of dark flames of fervor, the sun of death that, even as it never burns your skin, has an even more unusual brilliance.”
So, for the “romantic, heroic death” he had in mind to occur, neither alcohol nor drugs would do. It would require another form of iron, steel: the sword.
It is in this meditation that Mishima described his style of writing. A man with a chameleon-like ability to mimic other styles in his youth, he had long acquired “a style that befits my muscles”—with “ornaments comparable to fat stripped off,” even as it “deliberately maintained muscular ornaments,” those that, like the “manliness condensed in kendō,” “may be useless in modern civilization, but are still necessary for dignity and aestheticism.” It was not a style, Mishima explained, that “accommodates, but a style that single-mindedly refuses.” Because he valued “class formalism above all else,” he preferred “a style like the step-up platform at the entrance of a samurai house on a winter day.”
What about his pursuit of “both literary and martial arts”? He begins with an assertion: If “the martial logic” lies where “a burning desire for death does not lead to misanthropy or apathy but on the contrary links to fulfilled power, the glory of the apex of life, or a will to fight,” there will be nothing that goes further against “the literary logic.” This is because the latter means to expend one’s life on “making artworks that preserve an eerily long life.” There, “death is suppressed even as it is secretly used as momentum, power is single-mindedly devoted to the building of an illusion,” and so forth. To put it another way, the martial art represents life
“scattering away as a cherry flower,” whereas the literary art means “nurturing an everlasting cherry flower,” when “the everlasting cherry flower is an imitation flower.”
Accordingly, “to be accomplished in both literary and martial arts is to be at once a cherry flower that scatters and a cherry flower that doesn’t.” It means to be equipped “in one body with the two most contradictory desires of humanity and the two dreams of realizing those desires.” It is a dichotomous world where, if one is substance, the other must necessarily be illusion, and where either substance faces death. “It is a terrifying death that visits a human being that has never lived in the end, but he can ultimately dream that a death that is not such a death exists in the ‘martial’ world that is illusion.”
That is, to be accomplished in both literary and martial arts means to be able to “remain unperturbed” in the secret knowledge that death, be it brought by the ultimate collapse of the logic of death or that of the logic of life, is “not especially providential.” It has nothing that leads to “salvation by a dream.”
Toward the end of the summer of 1968, Heibon Punch published the result of its readers poll, “Mr. International.” Top vote-getter: President Charles de Gaulle; second, Mishima Yukio; third, Ho Chi Minh; fourth, Matsushita Kōnosuke, the founder and chairman of Matsushita Electric Industrial; fifth, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the first who succeeded in heart transplant; sixth, John Lennon; seventh, Ishihara Shintarō; eighth, Mao Zedong; ninth, Stokely Carmichael; and tenth, Fidel Castro. Robert Kennedy was the top runner in the survey until he was assassinated on June 5 and was dropped from the list.36