by Hiroaki Sato
Mishima saw his point, saying he had regarded him as his righthand man because of such rectitude and independence. Yet he was not persuaded why Mochimaru was reluctant to accept an independent job he offered. He did not see why the young man was unwilling to take total control of the Shield Society, which he had practically run from the outset.
In fact, a schism had been developing between the two for some time. Mochimaru was the man Mishima trusted the most, but he had different ideas on some critical points. He often warned Mishima against his reliance on Yamamoto in military matters, reminding him how during the 2.26 Incident the senior officers had all turned against “the young officers” once the planned uprising became reality. A few years after Mishima’s death, he would even go to see Yamamoto to tell him that he, Yamamoto, had incited and betrayed Mishima.
But he agreed with Yamamoto on what the Zenkyōtō and others were doing: it would not lead to a “revolution.” “We would rise against a leftwing revolution as a counterrevolutionary force, that was self-evident,” he said of the Shield Society. Citing “Counterrevolutionary Manifesto,” he pointed out that for a counterrevolutionary force, there ought to be “just one battle,” and it would have to be “a life-or-death battle.” In the event, the Shield Society was a force to react. The Shōwa Restoration that the young officers of the 2.26 Incident advocated was a revolution, and that was to act, Mochimaru reasoned, using the English words action and reaction. But the leftwing students were unlikely to start a revolution. He did not see why Mishima seemed so pressed about International Antiwar Day. In the end he told Mishima that he would quit both the Ronsō Journal and the Shield Society but would help the society’s activities from outside. Mishima had no choice but to agree, but it was a serious blow.
“His sorrow was not ordinary,” wrote Muramatsu who received a phone call from the dismayed Mishima on the matter. “It was not a lament over the loss of an important right-hand man so much as the grief of a father betrayed by his son.” As it happened, a few months earlier Mishima had written: “You don’t have to bring up a faraway figure, Che Guevara; a revolutionary has to be betrayed by the subordinates he trusts just as Kita Ikki was betrayed by the young officers.”
Whether it was all a betrayal or not, Mochimaru, Nakatsuji, Bandai, and others leaving Mishima reminded Muramatsu more of Mishima’s own creation, Iinuma Isao, the protagonist of The Runaway Horse. Half of those who had agreed to Iinuma’s plan for a Shōwa Restoration drop out when they learn that the army has refused to work with them.1
Yamamoto Kiyokatsu, however, guessed, in retrospect and as an outsider, that what happened was all Mishima’s doing. “The true reason” for Mishima’s action, he wrote, lay in his decision to replace “the chief of students” in order to “completely sever the [Ronsō Journal ’s] relationship to rightwing forces.” By doing so, he would be able to shed more of “the political nature” from his “private defense movement,” Yamamoto thought.2
The essay in which Mishima invoked Che was on Kita Ikki and in it he said: “Neither have I been influenced by Kita Ikki’s thought nor have I been awakened to something by him.” The denial would later prompt some to challenge Mishima on his veracity. But Mishima went on to say: “Yet, behind the various phenomena of Shōwa history that interest me has always stood the lanky figure of Kita Ikki in Chinese garb, like a weirdly towering peak. It was an ominous image, but it was also the idealized image of a Japanese revolutionary that is tragic in a certain way.”
Iinuma Isao, the fictional character Mishima created to represent the quintessence of those who agitated for a Shōwa Restoration in actual history, closely reflects the ideas Kita propounded. Isao’s initial plan is to blow up several power substations in Tokyo, assassinate a few weighty financiers, and occupy and set the Bank of Japan on fire to touch off enough turmoil to prompt the institution of martial law. That would enable the placement of the financial industry “under the direct control of the Tennō,” a vital step toward sweeping national reform to save the people suffering from dire poverty. Their deeds done, all would gather in front of the Imperial Palace and disembowel themselves.
Death by disembowelment aside, martial law as impetus of national reform and the belief in the Tennō’s power to carry it out if the matter were left to his sole decision were central to Kita’s 1919 treatise Outline of a Legislative Draft for Reform of Japan (Nihon kaizō hōan taikō), as Mishima explained. The Tennō’s right to do so derived from tōsuiken, the prerogative of supreme command. (The argument resembles that for “unitary presidency” in the United States). In truth, the Tennō’s powers under the Meiji Constitution were severely hemmed in, but no matter.
Mishima’s essay was lucid and sober. Mishima characterized Tennō worship as “illogical,” citing Kita’s comparison, in a much earlier treatise, of the imperial system that had taken shape by the early twentieth century to “the worship of clay idols practiced by indigenous people in Oriental villages.” Though he disavowed any influence from the man who held such sway over the young leaders of the 2.26 Incident, Mishima took special pleasure in discussing Kita. His genius, he wrote, could only be compared with that of Otto Weininger—in “fierceness,” in both “chaos and insight in the youthful thought process,” in “impetuosity in developing logic,” and in “the delicacy of the intuition that supports it all.” Also, both thinkers did not want to be less than brilliant.3
Mishima was equally honest in his self-analysis even in lighter, casual circumstances, as in a short interview the fiction magazine Shōsetsu Seven did with him just about the same time, for its July issue. Among “the ten blunt questions” the interviewer asked was: Tell us just one “episode” you remember from the periods of “experiencing the SDF.” Mishima’s answer: “At the officers’ club, they were talking among themselves. ‘There he is, Mishima.’ ‘The guy looks like a playboy mixed into a peasant, doesn’t he?’ Sharp, don’t you think?”
Another “blunt” question: What do you think of people calling you brazen? Mishima’s answer: “I absolutely agree with them. It’s as if the word were made for me.”4
No Art Superior to Death
From July 26 to August 23, Mishima led the fourth group of Shield Society members for training at GSDF Camp Takigahara. As in the past, he slipped away from time to time to do other things, but during this stay at the camp he kept a sporadic diary.5 Among the things he described were Mt. Fuji at various times of day and in shifting weather; some of the training he went through, such as helicopter rappelling; pinks, daylilies, thistles, and other wildflowers in bloom covering the training grounds; Typhoon No. 9 hitting the area directly from Okinawa, which he had visited in July for background information for The Moonbow because the play contains scenes on the islands albeit in imagined ancient times. Mishima also noted how the GSDF tried to cut costs by simplifying some equipment in comparison with the US military, the SDF’s overseer. As he told the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Finance when he was invited to give a talk there two months later, the budget for the SDF was so stringent that the troops had to buy toilet paper themselves.6
One military observation he quotes comes from a Capt. Gotō: “Sportsmen and military men closely resemble each other, but sportsmen fight in top condition, whereas military men fight in lowest condition. So drink and degrade your condition.” Perhaps the captain was a holdover from the Imperial Army, though he used English for “top condition” and “condition.”
The entry for August 19, Tuesday, opens with a curt note: “practice parade; all afternoon.” That day the Shield Society had its regular monthly meeting, and the practice was for the first public full-dress parade scheduled for November 3. In a letter two weeks earlier, Mishima had asked Kawabata to attend it by way of expressing his appreciation of the two books the senior writer had sent him, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech turned into a book, Japan the Beautiful and Myself (Utsukushii Nihon no watakushi),7 and his two talks at the University of Hawaii earlier that year, also turned into a book,
The Existence and Discovery of Beauty (Bi no sonzai to hakken).8
In his letter Mishima had said that, in the Nobel Prize speech, Kawabata explained “the bright, lifelike essence of nothingness for the first time so Westerners might readily understand it,” and, in the Hawaii talks, that “the several pages on cups at the outset” reminded him of “Proust’s description of the kitchen”—the way the French writer depicted a knife, the tip of an asparagus, and such, “in colossal detail.” The first of the two talks Kawabata gave in Hawaii opens with a reference to “the beauty of the assortment of glasses gleaming in the morning sunshine on a long table on a corner of the terrace restaurant which extends onto the beach.” Kawabata at the time was staying at the Kahala Hilton Hotel.
The letter of August 4, however, had ended on a startling note, a result perhaps of the subject of the two books. In both—in the case of the Hawaii talks, the second one, which he gave on May 16, 1969—Kawabata had referred to suicide in Japan.
In the Stockholm speech Kawabata cited his own 1933 essay whose title was taken from Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s will in which the man contemplating suicide spoke of nature looking ever more beautiful in consequence. Kawabata mentioned Dazai Osamu, along with his avantgarde painter friend who used to say, “There is no art superior to death” and “To die is to live,” and Zen master Ikkyū who had attempted suicide twice. “I neither extol nor sympathize with” those who commit suicide, but his painter friend, who was born in a Buddhist temple and graduated from a Buddhist school, “must have had a different view of death from that of the West.”9
His reference to suicide in the Hawaii talk was literary, rather than factual, but he was far from condemnatory of the act if not explicitly sympathetic. He had, after all, started out by closely describing his life with a dying grandfather (Jūrokusai no nikki, 1925), once described himself as “a master of funerals” (Sōshiki no meijin, 1923), and was for a while fascinated by the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Shisha no sho, 1928) and séance (Jojōka, 1933). So, in his talk, he cited poems in the Man’yōshū lamenting legendary youths, both male and female, who killed themselves because of complications of love, as well as the passages about Ukifune in The Tale of Genji after she has tried to kill herself for a similar reason.
“Be it a fish that swims in a pond or a deer that calls in the mountains, it would be sad indeed not to help it after it is captured by a human and about to die,” says a Buddhist monk who happens by Ukifune who has failed to drown herself. “Human life does not last forever, but it would not do not to extend the life of someone dying if only by one or two days.”
Kawabata then quoted an interpretation of this story by Umehara Takeshi, who had switched his field of scholarly investigation from German philosophy focused on Nietzsche to classical Japanese literature not long after the war, that Murasaki Shikibu here is arguing that succoring even “a human being who must end her life, a human being as hopeless as that . . . lies at the core of Mahayana Buddhism.”10
These passages may well have led Mishima to unburden himself in uncharacteristic fashion. “For four years now, while being laughed at, I have been single-mindedly making preparations little by little toward the year 1970,” he wrote. He did not come right out and say what the preparations were for, only that he did not want to be taken to be “tragic,” though he would not mind if it provided “an idea for a cartoon.” “What I fear is not death, but my family’s honor after my death. Were something to happen to me, society at large would at once bare its teeth, start finding fault with me, and turn [family honor] into, I think, something dishonorable and trashy.
“I do not mind myself getting laughed at while alive, but I cannot bear my children getting laughed at after my death. You are, Mr. Kawabata, the only person who could protect them from that happening and I am single-mindedly dependent on you from now on.”11
The latter half of the diary he kept at Camp Takigahara is devoted to a close description of the music for the gagaku Ranryō’ō and the instrument used to play it, the flute called ryūteki, with Mishima’s own drawings of the instrument. Gagaku is a ceremonial dance that reached Japan from the Asian Continent in the seventh century and was adopted by the court.
The story Ranryō’ō is based on a legendary Chinese general Lanling Wang who was so glamorously handsome, it was said, that he had to wear a demonic mask when leading his troops into battle lest they become too enamored of his beauty to neglect to fight. Mishima’s description of the music—to be exact, what goes through his mind as he listens to the ryūteki—is appropriately lyrical, until he comes to the realization, “The sound flows without any development. This is what’s important!” Anyone who has listened to the gagaku flute for a proper duration will agree with Mishima on the “no-development” part, though some may question whether that’s what makes the music important.
Mishima in no time turned this fragmentary diary into what was to be the last short story he would write, Ranryō’ō. There the realization just referred to is somewhat elaborated: “I knew that the music of the flute flows without any development whatsoever. You make no development, that is important. If music is to be truly faithful to the continuation of life (just as the flute is so faithful to human breathing!), what can be purer than that it makes no development.”
“And when I came to, the sound of the flute was about to explore into a certain depth of no return,” the narrator reports. “I recognized the pale, smooth back of the sound of the flute. I do not know the depth of what sort of feeling it is, but it will pierce through the feeling, enter an even deeper, transparent, tenebrous border, which will suddenly grab our world and crush it, just as a child unthinkingly squishes the fruit of a Chinese lantern plant in her palm.”
The story ends with the flutist abruptly telling the narrator: If the enemy you are thinking of is different from the enemy I am thinking of, well then, I will not fight.
Although Mishima does not mention it in his diary, on the evening of August 23 one of the Shield Society members came to his room to play the gagaku flute. The young man was Sekikawa Masakatsu, a Doshisha University student. Sekikawa, identified as “S” in the story, went on to become an authority on gagaku.
The Most Terrifying Lèse Majesté
On September 4, Kikuta Kazuo’s stage adaptation of Spring Snow opened at Hibiya Geijutsu-za. Kikuta, the founder of the theater, was a popular playwright and songwriter. Other than his original works, he had turned Gone With the Wind into a play. With Ichikawa Somegorō and Sakuma Yoshiko in the lead roles, Spring Snow proved so successful that the planned closing date of September 28 was extended by three months, to December 27.
In the program note for the dramatization, Mishima observed that in writing the novel he was not too different from Proust, who wrote about aristocratic life in great detail even though he had “not come from an aristocratic family,” or from Stendhal, who wrote about high society even though he “did not know much about it.” The difference was, he went on, that Bōjō Toshitami, “the blue-blood aristocrat,” had given his story “a big stamp of approval.”
Earlier that year Bōjō had written Mishima a long letter to tell him how moved he was by Spring Snow that had just come out in book form. He felt as if it described his own family, he said, but in the same letter he had noted a single error in the use of a term in the New Year’s Tanka Recitation. Mishima at once wrote to thank him, assuring Bōjō that, coming from the “Arbiter Elegantiarum,” his commendation gave him “the most definite joy,” thereby reviving a friendship that had practically been dead for two decades. When Fuji TV proposed to turn the novel into a drama series, Mishima agreed on condition that Bōjō supervise period authenticity.
In that work, Bōjō found another error: In the novel, the New Year’s Tanka Recitation ceremony is supposed to take place in the second year of Taishō Era (1912), but that was not possible: that year the nation was in mourning for the Meiji Emperor. At any rate, the drama, in six parts, was aired from the end of February t
o early April in 1970.12
As to the novel’s central concern, Mishima spoke of the difficulty of constructing a love story in modern times. The reason is simple: “absolute obstacles” to love that two young people have to surmount have ceased to exist. As he had clearly spelled out fourteen years earlier when he had given a series of “lectures on love” to the readers of the monthly Myōjō, most of the traditional inhibitions and understandings, real or imagined, had vanished or were vanishing fast with the “freedom” Japan’s defeat and the US Occupation had brought. Though taking the form of suggestions and advice by a know-all writer on a meteoric rise, the “lectures” were in truth a candid, liberal description of the sexual mores of Japan around 1955, homosexual and heterosexual, premarital and marital.13
In the early part of the Taishō Era when Spring Snow is set, however, some obstacles still existed, Mishima said. “The biggest, highest taboo imaginable” or “the most terrifying lèse majesté” an imperial subject could commit was to “violate” an imperial princess. A daughter of a ranking aristocrat betrothed, with “imperial approval,” to an imperial prince, as Ayakura Satoko is in the novel, was in effect an imperial princess. Perhaps, Mishima suggested, though he was talking about his own novel, Matsugae Kiyoaki, the fiction’s “Hamlet-type protagonist of indecisiveness, violated the taboo so he might savor ‘true love.’”14