Persona

by Hiroaki Sato

  The same “principle” also created a schism within the Shield Society, prompting its “mainstream” faction to move to expel the others.53

  Mishima had to ask the young Thai women to meet him again so many days later because of his extraordinary schedule. Three days after spending two and a half hours with them, he started another “lodging together” with the Shield Society. This time they rented the temple Shōgetsu-in, near the GSDF Camp Asagasumi.

  The temple was no Tokiwa-ken. It provided no meals so the participants mainly relied on the canned foods they brought. There was no heating, either; the men slept in their sleeping bags. Neither smoking nor drinking was allowed, and communication with the outside world was banned, though the temple was in Itabashi Ward, not far from the center of Tokyo. After calisthenics at eight every morning Yamamoto started his lecture of the day. He also trained his students in secret surveillance of the area surrounding Asagasumi Camp as well as an infiltration of the camp, though the latter did not go beyond a plan discussed and analyzed.

  Following the five-day session, Mishima led the third group of Shield Society members to train with the GSDF. Among the ten new recruits who took part in the military training that month was one who had spent ten years—half of his life—in France because of his father’s assignment. Asked by a fellow recruit if the French were as “revolutionary” as they were reported to be, putting up barricades and clashing with police, he said, no, they were “conservative, class-conscious, and racist.” France is “a country that regards itself as the center of the world.” The social influence of leftist students and intellectuals such as Sartre and Beauvoir was “extremely limited.” He joined the Shield Society because he heard it would enable him to take part in military training. In France he had thought of joining the Foreign Legion.54

  The GSDF training took up almost all of March, from the first to the 29th, although he took some nine days off to work on pressing matters. By then he had been sitting on a couple of literary-award committees, such as the one for the Akutagawa Award, but had also agreed to be a member of a brand-new one Shinchōsha had set up. As he had written a few months earlier, one such award-committee required him to read seven or eight full-length novels into which, he stated, “each author had put his heart and soul,” and the work was “a great spiritual burden.” Characteristically, however, Mishima mentioned the work not to complain, but to make fun of the subject on which the weekly Asahi solicited a brief essay on his “reading technique,” saying someone who approaches reading as a “technique” can only be “vulgar, plebeian, and pompous.”55

  Another thing he did during the break from military training was to go to an area called Nino’oka, in Gotenba, Shizuoka, a spacious open land with a view of Mt. Fuji favored by the well-to-do for their villas. The visit was, of course, to acquire knowledge of the milieu of the locality where he planned to set Honda’s villa in The Temple of Dawn.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Yakuza

  “Such decent Japanese as he will gradually disappear.”

  —Tsuruta Kōji on Mishima

  Around the time the Tōdai Struggle peaked, Mishima saw two yakuza movies in a row, both featuring Tsuruta Kōji, and the cool, knowledgeable accolade he gave the second of the two, Gamble in Don’s Honor (Sōchō tobaku), would change the appreciation of a popular genre that artistic-minded critics had treated as lowbrow. Kasahara Kazuo, who wrote the screenplay, said Mishima’s article gave the genre “citizenship, however small.”1

  Like cowboys and gunfighters in America, yakuza and samurai were popular film subjects from early on in Japan. Yakuza films attracted great directors in the second half of the 1920s: Itō Daisuke, who made a trilogy on the historical yakuza Kunisada Chūji, in 1927, and Tsuji Kichirō, who made a film on Kutsukake Tokijirō, the fictional yakuza created by the playwright and novelist Hasegawa Shin, in 1929.2 After Japan’s defeat, the subject regained popularity, but each decade came with a different treatment of yakuza. The yakuza depicted in the 1950s were mainly those from the end of the Edo Period and often included historical figures topped by the most popular film subject, Yamamoto Jirochō, of Shimizu Port,3 and his men. In these films everyone was stylishly dressed, à la grand kabuki.

  Kurosawa Akira abruptly put an end to it. With his Yōjimbō (1961), he brought down-to-earth realism to the genre, beginning with the protagonist, played by Mifune Toshirō. The man, as befits a masterless samurai, was presented as scruffy and grungy, and the yakuza as what the word means: useless, trashy. Kurosawa enhanced the effect by the black and white medium he still favored. There may have been nothing “realistic” about the ronin’s prowess as swordsman, but the sword-fight scenes showed arms severed, blood splattering, people cut up screaming. Clean, kabuki-style yakuza films quickly lost ground.

  The great Zatōichi series followed. The 1962 film about a blind masseur as a preternatural swordsman, played by Katsu Shintarō, was such a hit that two dozen more were made within the next dozen years. The series, too, stressed the down-to-earth quality of yakuza life, though, again, there was nothing realistic about the masseur’s swordsmanship.

  Along with the series came films dealing with “modern yakuza,” those mainly of the years preceding the Second World War. Where earlier ones had often depicted rival yakuza houses coming into conflict and ending in spectacular scenes of two groups of men fighting, the new yakuza films put their narrative focus on the schisms in human relations unavoidable in a world of violence bound by a simple code of honor, loyalty, and a senior-junior bond that, as things start going wrong, cannot be sustained in the end.

  Gamble in Don’s Honor, the film that captivated Mishima, however, reversed the prevailing narrative pattern of the yakuza films of the decade. Instead of conflicts between rival groups, it deals with one that arises within a single yakuza group, the Tenryū Family. After the family head, sōchō, is struck down by a stroke, a top henchman tries to hold it together. He doesn’t just fail; in pursuing his aim, he brings down the whole house.

  The unraveling begins when the sōchō’s “brethren” and “group leaders” gather to pick his successor and settle on the most respected group leader, Nakai. However, Nakai declines the honor in deference to Matsuda, his simple-minded, hot-tempered, violence-prone coequal, on the grounds that he, Nakai, is from a different house and thus an “outsider,” whereas Matsuda, albeit in jail now, is more rightfully heir in that regard. Senba, one of the “brethren,” who had anticipated Nakai’s reaction and worked out a “consensus” behind the scenes, at once moves to name the sōchō’s son-in-law as successor, and his motion is accepted on the spot. The rest of the film follows the consequences of Nakai’s choice that, however admirable by yakuza code, ends in his killing Matsuda, the blood-brother he tries to help, not to mention Senba.

  “What thread of natural inevitability is extended to each sequence so meticulously!” marveled Mishima after noting that he saw the film in an “ideal environment,” a small rundown joint where the ticket seller wasn’t even in her booth when he showed up and where the toilet odor amply wafted into the auditorium as the door to it opened and closed. The place was crowded, and he had to sit in the front row where the seats were so low he inadvertently stepped on the one he chose.

  “What sophistication rules, without a bit of showiness, what absolute indifference to the world outside the story is maintained!” Gamble makes it clear that the story begins in the spring of 1934, a year as turbulent as any other in modern Japanese history, but it does not allow anything suggestive of outside events—such as the ascent to the throne of Japan’s puppet emperor, Puyi, in its puppet state, Manchukuo, and the great fire in Hakodate that killed two thousand people—to intrude into the story.

  “How every character preserves a set pattern faithfully, even in breaking a code, in rebelling, how dedicated each character is to the stylistic perfection of a closed society!”

  As Mishima does not fail to note, there is one episode that “might collapse t
his small world.” That’s where Senba’s conspiracy surfaces; his plan from the outset has been to take over the Tenryū Family for funding a patriotic group by paying for the heroin imported to Japan—a slight suggestion of Japan’s opium use in Manchukuo and China. But it comes out at the very end, and there’s “no ideology” introduced, “no hint of criticism.” The film constitutes “a tragedy set up at the extreme edge of absolute affirmation,” a tragedy that “in every detail, just like a classical drama, accords with human truth.”4

  This assessment by Mishima would win Gamble the status of a “masterpiece,” but, self-revealing as it was, it would have some ironic consequences. It led the architect-cum-poet-cum-film-critic Watanabe Takenobu to call Gamble a “super yakuza film” and predict yakuza films would not survive unless they “change[d] key.” He had in mind the French film critic André Bazin who characterized Shane as a “super western,” a western “that would be ashamed to be just itself, and looks for some additional interest to justify its existence.”

  Yakuza films did, indeed, change key after Gamble. In the 1970s they would turn “documentary”-like, presenting themselves as based on actual incidents. But Watanabe’s characterization would be invoked to condemn Mishima’s manner of death as nothing more than to live “a super yakuza film.” Meanwhile, his death would compel Kasahara, who had been moved by Mishima’s praise of the movie of which he wrote the script, to give up writing yakuza films altogether.5

  Just as Mishima liked yakuza films, so did many college students, those in the student movement included. Mishima in his essay noted that the one fellow who was waiting at the ticket booth when he got to the rundown theater to see Gamble somewhat late looked “like a student.” Many in the audience were, we may assume, members of the New Left. Shima Taizō, who had barricaded himself in the Yasuda Auditorium, reports he was “embarrassed” by his fellow students’ infatuation with ninkyō, the most important yakuza code, a readiness to sacrifice oneself for someone in an impossible situation—à la Sydney Carton. The previous fall, it was an important theme of Tōdai’s annual student festival. At least one large poster with a painting of a tattooed yakuza was up on a wall in the Komaba campus.6 A later critic would point out all of that represented “an intense yearning for a homosocial worldview.”7

  In Praise of the Shinbō Tachiyaku

  Aside from yakuza infatuation, it would be misleading to assume in any way that the student movement in Japan at the time was all seriousness. Like similar movements elsewhere, it had many festive elements, a large dose of the desire to enjoy the moment. In fact, “festive” and “festival” were the two words often used by the participants. Shiine Yamato, Mishima’s editor at Heibon Punch, took part, with his girlfriend, in International Antiwar Day demonstrations on October 21 as if joining a festival. When running away from the riot police in a group of several students, he surely felt “only the sense of terror sprout” in his mind, but when running around with several thousands of them, it was as if “having fun in Disneyland”—though, as he took care to note, the theme park did not exist in Japan yet.

  When he learned the Zenkyōtō of the University of Kyoto planned a “Pharisees-Barricade Festival” in April, he called the organizers to ask if he could bring a nude model to shoot her as part of the campus event. The fellow who picked up the phone said, Sure, mouthing what sounded pseudo-philosophical: “I think a festival is something like a struggle, whereas a struggle is something like a festival.”

  A Zenkyōtō leader at the university was more up front about the raison d’être of the movement: “We’d like to enjoy ourselves doing whatever we want to even as we crush the establishment. We want to destroy everything that has the breath of government power on it: our university’s clock tower, the riot police, Punch, all of them. We’d like to engage in truly provocative actions in every field. We are, you know, reformers of academic pursuits, arts, and sex life.”

  The two-week-long programs for the event included go-go dance parties, movies, celebrity lectures, performances by rock’n’roll bands and avant-garde theater troupes, ending with a happening for which campus walls would be “liberated” for mural painting with quantities of paint and thinner provided. Among the films to be shown were A Hard Day’s Night (Japanese title: The Beatles Are Coming, Yah, Yah, Yah!), Violated White Uniform (Okasareta Byakui—a young man’s attempt to murder lesbian nurses), and The Dutch Wife in the Wilderness (Kōya no Dutch Wife—a horror film inspired by A. Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”).8

  Mishima, in any event, was as emphatic in determining Gamble in Don’s Honor to be a masterpiece as in stressing his “empathy” for the lead actor who played the protagonist Nakai, Tsuruta Kōji. Not that Tsuruta was one of the top yakuza stars, nor that he had been ranked, albeit when a little younger, “the most handsome movie star” for a number of years. It was because in his recent yakuza movies, Mishima said, Tsuruta was superb in the role of shinbō tachiyaku, in kabuki a lead character who is required to remain passive, often till near the end.

  Above all, the reason for his strong feeling for Tsuruta may lie in the fact, Mishima mused, that Tsuruta’s “intra-war emotions, his switch to the shinbō tachiyaku role, and the bags developing under his eyes have all become my own problems.” Tsuruta, who was Mishima’s age, was in the naval air reserve during the final phase of the war and regarded himself as an undeserved survivor of a Kamikaze unit. The yakuza Tsuruta’s final act is “an outburst of what may be called the heroism of indecisiveness.” Using the word shigarami, a set of relational considerations that constrain one from taking certain steps, Mishima concludes with a passage that may almost sound parodic:

  Whether liberating oneself from shigarami is something manly is highly doubtful. Whether freedom makes someone manly is extremely doubtful. Tsuruta’s actions on the screen are caused not as a solution by the cutting apart of the entanglements of shigarami that press down on him in mutually contradicting layers, but always in accordance with “the pure shigarami” that he has found in a variety of shigarami, “the shigarami” that is the fundamental principle common to a variety of shigarami that he has extracted.

  What that is, is hard to say. But murder is always a sadness, and necessity and inevitability always go against a “readily understandable justice.”

  A few months after the essay appeared in Eiga Geijutsu, Playboy arranged a taidan between Mishima and Tsuruta. The give-and-take between writer and actor, as may be expected, centered on yakuza and being Japanese. When Tsuruta toward the end said now was the time for a Shōwa Restoration and Mishima said he’d throw himself into it if necessary, Tsuruta said: “Mr. Mishima, when that happens, please give me a call. I’ll grab my military sword and rush to your side.” Mishima’s response to this was his usual raucous laughter.

  The two middle-aged men liked each other so much, Mishima invited Tsuruta and his wife to his house to continue the conversation. When the time finally came for the Tsurutas to go home, Mishima, ever a stickler for manners and etiquette, came out, with Yōko, to see them off and, despite the rain, kept standing at the gate, until the Tsurutas’ car went out of sight, moving Tsuruta to say to his wife, “Such decent Japanese as he will gradually disappear,” the Playboy editor reported.9

  In early April Mishima finished writing The Terrace of the Leper King, the play inspired by a stone statue he saw in Angkor Thom, in the fall of 1965. Partially covered with lichen and said to be that of Jayavarman VII, the statue came with the legend that the Cambodian ruler who built the Bayon was a leper. The combination of two opposites, “extreme gloom and extreme splendor,” was a subject favored by the Late Romantics as typified, Mishima noted, in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s masterpiece, Duke of Portland, for example. In the conte, the young, adventurous, fabulously wealthy English nobleman who excels in boxing and fox-hunting is brought down by leprosy.

  (The fin de siècle tale has a single footnote appended to it that must have struck a chord in Mishima. It says, in part: “
The author has been obliged to modify slightly the actual character of the Duke of Portland—since he writes this tale as it ought to have occurred.”10 As pointed out earlier, the historical Jayavarman VII did not die young and his leprosy is no more than conjecture provoked by the lichen covering the stone statue.)

  “With [the king’s] body collapsing, his giant cathedral goes on to complete itself,” Mishima wrote. “That terrifying contrast, it seemed to me, is a metaphor for an artist’s life in which the artist is destroyed even as he transfers all his being into his artwork.”11 The resplendent Bayon that rises is “eternal youth,” even as the one who instigated the building can no longer see it, blinded as he is by leprosy. The play ends with a paean to the youthful physique that survives the death of the spirit.

  It was a similar combination of two opposites in the Late Romantic vein that Mishima stressed in Kawabata Yasunari when the Mainichi Shinbun asked him for a short essay on him that same month of April. Kawabata attained yūgen, the aesthetic ideal the medieval poet Fujiwara no Teika strove for, which Zeami two centuries later placed at the core of his dramaturgy: “In nō drama, yūgen and the flower are almost synonymous,” Mishima posited. Hana, “flower,” being what Zeami called “the life of nō,” this statement may be unsurprising. What is not is the next sentence: “That is, what is most gloomy and what is most resplendent are synonymous.” And: “There, a girl’s truly happy, clear smile and the cold beauty of her corpse come out of the same fountain.”

  Mishima summed up the beauty of Kawabata literature as reien, “cold sensuosity.” Though probably “unplanned,” his representative work is called Snow Country, Mishima judged. Mishima was evidently mindful that Teika’s thirty-one-syllable poem Zeami singled out as embodying yūgen was “No shelter for halting the horse to brush off my sleeves, here at Sano Ferry this snowy evening.” Zeami’s metaphor for the ultimate of yūgen was “snow in a silver bowl.”12