by Hiroaki Sato
Japanese Odysseus
That April Mishima took on two jobs: one to write a kabuki play, the other to play a role in a feature film.
On the 18th, Mishima had a young visitor from the National Theatre, Orita Kōji. Orita brought the request that Mishima write a kabuki to be staged that fall to mark the theater’s third anniversary. Mishima, a member of its board of directors, did not just agree to do so; in short order, he decided to direct it himself. And, beginning with a phone call a week later to tell Orita, “I’d like to make a Japanese Odysseus; the Japanese Odysseus is Tametomo,” he threw himself into the task with the intensity of someone who had absolutely nothing else to do.
Minamoto Tametomo (1139–70?) is a warrior who briefly shows up in a contemporary account of the half-day internecine battle known as the Hōgen Disturbance, in 1156. Many legends were born out of the few facts known about him. Toward the end of the Edo Period Takizawa Bakin wove together a number of those legends, adding new stories of his own making along the way, to write A Wonder Tale: The Moonbow (Chinsetsu Yumiharizuki), a fantastic, highly entertaining romance. Mishima based his kabuki on Bakin’s narrative, using the same title. In his play, however, he focused on two themes, largely of his own concoction: Tametomo’s unswerving loyalty to Emperor Sutoku (1119–64), who was trapped into the Hōgen Disturbance, defeated, and exiled, as well as the warrior’s wish—perennially thwarted—to commit disembowelment to follow him in death. Tametomo was also exiled.
“That every drama contains in it a confession is my pet theory,” Mishima wrote of those two themes, but especially the latter, in the program note to the play when it was staged in November. “Speaking of myself the author, Tametomo’s frustrations, his exclusion from a resplendent fate, his image as ‘an unfinished hero,’ and his clear, lofty character are what I consider my ideals, so I made an effort” to bring out those qualities, he explained. But he also made clear his “predilections for decadence and evil,” pointing to the scene where a group of beautiful maidens, led by Princess Shiranui, torture a traitorous man to death even as the snow falls incessantly. And the princess in the scene wears a fur, Mishima added, because she is meant to be a Japanese Venus im Pelz.13
Mishima decided to direct the kabuki, probably because he knew it was to be his last full-length play, except the jōruri version he made of it. Also, it was to embody his own ideals in the classical form that had initiated him into the world of theater. Publicly, though, he explained that he decided to direct it because of the unique method of kabuki production that had come to prevail.
Classical kabuki did not have a “director” such as found in modern theater or, for that matter, the kind of “playwright” taken for granted today. In each kabuki troupe, the lead actor was in essence the director. As to the scripts, each troupe had a chief writer (tate-sakusha) who had at least three colleagues to work with. They would work out a script after picking a subject or theme from the repertoire or a group of known stories, then revise it to accommodate the actors’ wishes. In this arrangement, scripts were often prepared with specific actors in mind. As individual actors’ popularity and income grew, the role of playwrights, such as it was, became even less important.14 The kabuki theater, then, had much in common with the theater in Shakespeare’s time, where “the play was fitted to the performers,” and also with the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century opera theater, where the “composer had to fit his music to the voices available to him in a particular opera house.”15
In Mishima’s view, the kind of playwright-actor collaboration just described ended with Uno Nobuo, whose kabuki for Onoe Kikugorō VI, in 1935, became a smash hit. Uno continued to write and work for Kikugorō and other actors well into the 1950s. But after that, the old ways returned, principal actors making do with traditional techniques they learned, occasionally devising their own. The so-called director’s role became increasingly limited to explaining to the actors “the writer’s intent, characters, and psychological descriptions.”16
“Not that I am so vain as to think I can do more than that,” Mishima added. One real difficulty for Mishima with a new kabuki lay in producing it independent of troupes of which there were two production companies, Shōchiku and Tōhō. (This excludes the leftist and highly popular Zenshin-za, established in 1931, that brought real women into kabuki to play women’s roles.)
The newly created National Theatre did not have its own troupe. When it staged a kabuki, the actors had to be recruited from either of the two troupes, the groups made in admiration of Kikugorō VI and Kichiemon I, both dead by then. Mishima, because of his fame and the respect he had won among kabuki actors, was able to draw from both troupes, but their schedules permitted them only about a week to get together to rehearse after the runs of their own troupes’ engagements were over.
Luckily, the opening night of the fall production at the National Theatre begins late in the season. In the case of The Moonbow that year it was set to be the fifth of November. But because it was a new play and he wanted to turn it into an extravaganza, Mishima decided to have the stage sets, some of which would require innovative technical ingenuity, and everything else ready by the time the actors met for the first time.
In addition, kabuki is a “music drama” that “demands musicality in the accompanying music of course, but also in the speeches”17—written, basically, in seven-five syllabic patterns—and Mishima wanted to incorporate into his play a good deal of gidayū chanting (narrative) and nagauta singing. Both had to be composed. Especially with gidayū, the timing between narration and action must be worked out in detail, which sometimes requires revision of the script—work between chanter and author. “I cannot forget the artistic excitement,” Mishima recalled, “of devising directorial schemes while listening to Enza’s narration as he played it late at night in a hotel in Osaka enveloped in the rainy season, on July 1.” The great gidayū narrator Tsurusawa Enza, here the fifth generation, spent four days just on the scene where “crow-tengu” (crowfaced flying humans) show up, Mishima said.
All this, not to mention the making of stage sets and mechanisms, meant a tight working schedule. The first staff conference was held on May 12, before Mishima sat down to write the play. He finished Act 1 of the three-act play by the end of June, Act II by the end of July, and Act III on September 1. Little wonder that, soon after he agreed to take on the work, he started summoning Orita, “be it during the day, the evening, or past midnight,” to discuss complex details, often “scolding” him—most likely for the young man’s inability to carry out his instructions exactly.
Kill!
The other job Mishima took on in April was the role of a samurai assassin in Gosha Hideo’s movie to be called Kill! (Hitokiri). Based on Shiba Ryōtarō’s story, “The Killer Izō” (Hitokiri Izō), it would deal with historical figures, with Mishima playing Tanaka Shinbē, one of the Tennōloyalist assassins of men on the side of the Tokugawa regime in its final phase. His co-actors were all popular movie stars: Nakadai Tatsuya (in the role of Takechi Hanpeita, the leader of the Tennō loyalist group of the Tosa Fiefdom), Katsu Shintarō (Okada Izō), who was also the producer of the film, and Ishihara Yūjirō (Sakamoto Ryōma)—Shintarō’s brother who was equally popular as a singer. Mishima did not accept the offer Gosha came to make himself on the spot but that evening he phoned him to say yes. Kill! was the first feature film Gosha was going to make. Till then he had directed popular TV dramas notable for scenes of fast samurai action.
Once he got into it, Mishima was delighted to surmise the reasons why Gosha came to him, and he loved all of them. He was doing kendō, however “poorly,” and, by brandishing a sword (albeit made of bamboo), selling “the samurai image.” Society at large regarded him as a fellow “exalting terrorism.” Casting him in the film, the film company’s “calculation” went, would cut the publicity cost that much; after all (and this is not something he said; there was no need for it), he was one of the biggest celebrities of the day. All such considerations were obvio
usly discussed behind his back, completely ignoring his “intellectual part,” and he liked that a great deal. In truth, Hashimoto Shinobu, the scriptwriter who had worked with Kurosawa Akira beginning with Rashōmon, is known to have exclaimed, “A masterstroke!” when told of casting Mishima in the role of Tanaka.
Once the filming started, Mishima noticed shooting sword-fight scenes excited everyone involved, including himself. “Fiction it may be, but that the intent to kill takes everyone present to seventh heaven, is, come to think of it, an odd human fact.”18
Indeed, the two solid days that were needed to film the scene where two groups of men clash in the confines of an inn “passed ‘like a dream,’ to exaggerate a bit.” What made Mishima happy was that all the samurai who attacked him “were slashed up and fell for me. When the filming of the great riotous scene where blood splashed and fumed was over, I felt no fatigue at all, but was brisk both in mind and body, wanting to cut up several dozen more men.” Mishima asked Yōko to come from Tokyo to watch the filming.
He also delighted in pretending each man he was killing was an actual person he did not like. “Even after I returned to Tokyo”—the film was made in a studio in Kyoto—“my work on a novel made great progress. I hear that Saint-Saëns was more famous as a cultivator of roses than as a composer. I wish I would become more famous as a killer than as a novelist.”19
The film Kill! would later attract attention because of the scene where Mishima enacts realistically, intensely, Tanaka grabbing the sword shown him as evidence of assassination and killing himself with it—as if to say, as Mishima put it, “Darn, why bother?” He acted out the stabbing of his stomach with the sword (made of bamboo) and cutting it sidewise with such passion and intensity that the skin of his abdomen tore and bled.
But playing that role also entailed a delicious twist for him. As he wrote to Hayashi Fusao, the man who was suspected of lack of oversight that prompted Tanaka to commit suicide and was temporarily placed under house arrest was none other than his ancestor, Nagai Naomune, at the time magistrate of Kyoto.20
The Debate
April 28 was Okinawa Day. The previous November the Okinawans’ desire to end US military rule had seen its first-step fulfillment when the US had finally allowed them to directly vote for the head of the Ryūkyū Administration and Yara Chōbyō, who called for an immediate, unconditional return of Okinawa, had won the election. It was quickly followed by the election, in December, of Taira Ryōshō, with the same demand, as mayor of Naha.
The day turned into yet another one of large-scale demonstrations and violence. The Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the National Federation of Workers Unions for the first time had agreed to hold rallies throughout the nation together. But there was a catch. The anti-Yoyogi Faction of the Zengakuren was denied participation, so its members engaged in what they called guerilla warfare in Tokyo, clashing with riot police in Shinbashi Station, and attacked police booths in Shinbashi, Ginza, and Sukiyabashi, setting some on fire. The government applied the Subversive Activities Prevention Law. The law, which the ruling party had rammed through the Diet in 1952 as the perceived threat of the Soviet Union mounted, was anticommunist legislation, pure and simple. The police arrested a total of 967.
Yamamoto Kiyokatsu remembered how Mishima practically barged into his house that day, demanding to know why he was doing nothing. After taking him out into a black limousine, Mishima made his driver run parallel to large groups of demonstrators, at one point allowing the car to be isolated in a swirling mass of people who, if they recognized Mishima, could have turned violent and overturned the limousine.
Mishima then took Yamamoto to the National Theatre where he guided him down to the mechanisms below the stage, in the cellar, that allowed people and props to spring out onto the stage, then to the roof where he told Yamamoto he planned to hold a parade of the Shield Society. The Japanese name of the cellar, naraku, which, like its other name, “hell,” means “abyss,” and the theater’s proximity to the Imperial Palace were too suggestive to Yamamoto to resist conjecturing Mishima’s “true intent.”21
Mishima gave a characteristic assessment of the turmoil of Okinawa Day when he responded, on May 13, to the invitation of his alma mater’s Zenkyōtō to engage in debate with the students. He began by telling them that, on the morning of April 28, he met “someone on the so-called establishment side”—perhaps Yamamoto. The man said the students creating turmoil were all “deranged,” but Mishima did not agree with him. He was not saying that to “fawn” on them. What concerned him was that there was not a bit of distress or anxiety in the government official’s eyes. He admired him for that, but that raised a question: Suppose he, Mishima, were on the side of the Zengakuren?
He then brought up François Mauriac’s novel Thérèse Desqueyroux to illustrate his point. In his 1927 story, Mauriac makes his protagonist Thérèse attempt to poison her husband, Bernard. Some time after surviving the poisoning and testifying in court, to keep his social status intact, that his wife had never done anything like trying to take his life, Bernard asks her: “What was your motive?” Thérèse, who had given much thought to the likely question, answers, as Mishima explained: “I’m not sure that it wasn’t simply to see that look of uncertainty, of curiosity—of unease which, a moment ago, I caught in your eyes!”22
Wouldn’t you Zengakuren people want to see some anxiety “in the eyes of Japan’s powers that be, its establishment?” He would, though “from a different direction,” he said. His failure to detect any distress in the establishment figure’s eyes discouraged him, as a matter of fact, and he’s been “dispirited ever since April 28.” This provoked laughter from the students, like some of his paradoxical remarks. But he was, as usual, truthful; he was beginning to sense the prospects for a serious clash between establishment and antiestablishment were diminishing.
As far as the Mauriac story goes, one suspects what Thérèse struggles to say later may have come close to Mishima’s state of mind at the time: “What I wanted? It would be a great deal easier to tell you what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be for ever playing a part, to go through a series of movements, to continue speaking words, that were not my own; in short, to deny at every moment of the day a Thérèse who. . . .”23
In any event, reminding the students that they had invited him to debate on the understanding that both sides agreed on the necessity for violence, however politically opposed they may be, Mishima volunteered that only recently a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had asked him to add his name to the party’s parliamentary resolution opposing violence but he had declined, because he had “never once opposed violence since I was born.”
“What terrified me the most,” he said, was the kind of move toward compromise that had become clear just about a week before the fall of the Yasuda Auditorium. On January 10, as many as eight thousand students had massed to a meeting in the Chichibu Rugby Stadium intended to resolve the autonomy question between students and faculty. Among the nonpolitical students, called nonpori, antipathy to violent confrontations, between students and police, and among student factions, had grown. The meeting did not produce any tangible result, but it was evidence nonetheless of the growing yearning for “order”—not just growing, it “was permeating Japan.”
Mishima did not like it. The Chichibu meeting did not “concern itself a bit with ideology, sense, or logic.” Besides, it was led by the Minsei, clearly showing that the Liberal Democratic Party was in cahoots with the Communist Party. Referring to the depiction of him as a “modern gorilla”—his nickname for himself—on a poster announcing his visit placed outside the auditorium, he declared he’d happily remain as “primitive” as a gorilla to maintain integrity. He wanted “the Liberal Democratic Party to be more reactionary, the Communist Party to be more violent.”
“A human being must do what he must when the time comes,” Mishima said. The large hall-like classroom was full, and Mishima, who had won fame for making outr
ageous statements in public, did not disappoint his audience for he went on to say, “I think I must do it, so I’ll do it when the time comes, though I still don’t know when it will be. The reason I don’t know is that you, too, are sloppy”—“you,” of course, meaning the students he was addressing. One possibility of “doing it” he had in mind, he made it clear, was a violent confrontation with students.
“When I take action, I have no other way than doing it illegally like you,” he continued, reminding the students that their violent actions were illegal. “If I kill someone illegally, with the thought of a duel, I’ll be a homicide, so when that happens, I think I’ll want to die by killing myself or by some other means before a patrolman gets hold of me. I don’t know when that moment will come, but I’d like to become a good gorilla as a ‘modern gorilla,’ by strengthening my body to meet that moment.”
Indeed, what Mishima was hoping to occur was for a “disturbance” to turn into a “civil war,” he told Muramatsu Takeshi. If that happened, the JSDF would field its domestic security force. But between the declaration of civil war and the actual fielding of the security force, there would be “a crack,” and it would be during that short space of time that he would lead his Shield Society into battle with the students so he might be able to die.24
When told he accepted the Tōdai Zenkyōtō’s invitation to debate and was walking into a crowd of violence-prone students all by himself, some of his friends became concerned, so did the Shield Society (and, unbeknownst to him, even the National Police Agency). Mishima dismissed the concern with a laugh, turning down the idea of some of his friends accompanying him, as well as the police offer to provide him with a security guard, and went to Tōdai in a short-sleeved polo shirt and slacks to face a far larger crowd than the organizers had expected, about one thousand young men and women.