by Hiroaki Sato
Mishima insisted, however, that he did not care for Shirato or any other manga artist with a political or educational agenda. Instead, he loved manga such as Hirata Hiroshi’s savage samurai tales and Akatsuka Fujio’s wild slapstick placed in modern-day Tokyo. Akamatsu’s Mōretsu A-Tarō, then at the peak of its popularity, was his favorite. The title character is a fierce (mōretsu) but gentle-hearted Edo-ite boy whose name, “A-Tarō,” comparable to “A-John,” comes from the fact that his father, obsessed with I-Ching divination, planned to have lots of boys and name them A-Tarō, B-Tarō, C-Tarō, and so on, as they came, but his wife died as soon as she gave birth to the first one. So A-Tarō is the only son he got. The good son runs a grocery store for his father, surrounded by a rambunctious gang of neighbors. The stories have to do with all the outlandish fracases they create.
Mishima was a fan of manga since his adolescence in the 1930s, when Tagawa Suihō’s extraordinarily popular and endless series on a stray black dog—hence his name Norakuro—turned soldier ruled the day and Mishima developed his preference for “awfully vulgar, awfully intelligent manga” as something “indispensable for [his] physiological health.”11 Now, he vied with his children for the latest issues of manga magazines, some of them weeklies, as they were delivered. He naturally could not help but reflect on the generational differences: When he was in higher school and university, he and his fellow students could not “give up the vanity, in the presence of others, that you read highbrow books.” But now even the members of his Shield Society openly read nothing but manga as they lay in the bunks of GSDF barracks!
Still, it was not in Mishima to do anything like telling the youth to stay away from graphic narratives. His essay, after all, was originally titled: “I’d Like You to Develop Off-the-wall Cultivation.”
What he was afraid of, he explained, was what might happen when the young people became bored with manga. They might seek “cultivation”—in the sense of Bildung—of the kind that characterized the Taishō Era, seeking ideas such as “humanism” and “cosmopolitanism.” His fear was not unfounded, he suggested. Look at the manga artist Mizuki Shigeru. Mizuki had exhibited such “magnificent talent” when he had started out with ghouls and ghosts, but once he turned to Miyamoto Musashi, he, alas, regressed to what Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and his era strove to achieve!
Mishima frowned upon the kind of swordsman Musashi had become after the wildly popular, drawn-out account of the man that Yoshikawa Eiji had written in the latter half of the 1930s: the epitome of the seeker of the Way, in his case the unity of the sword and Zen. Postwar movies about Musashi mostly stressed that aspect of the swordsman, beginning with the three-part series Inagaki Hiroshi directed in the mid-1950s, with Mifune Toshirō in the role of Musashi.
Mizuki, who was drafted and sent to Rabaul, on New Britain Island, during the war and lost his left arm—and that was some years before he established himself as a manga artist12—was particularly good at recreating the ghoulish tales he heard when a child, and Mishima was drawn to them. He was an admirer of Ueda Akinari, as we have seen. Just about a year before his paean to manga, he had devoted some of his ruminations on the art of fiction that he was continuing in the magazine Nami to explain how such tales can be “masterpieces.”
One of the two stories he had recently read was Inagaki Taruho’s latest, titled “I, Sanmoto Gorōzaemon, Dismiss Myself with Your Permission, Sir,”13 he explained. As Mishima reveals quickly, the story is basically a translation into modern Japanese, albeit with some clever twists, of the well-known graphic narrative from the 1780s Tōtei bukkai-roku—also known as Inō mononoke roku—in which a phantasmagoric monster with a host of ghouls under his command tries to scare a boy named Heitarō night after night, but fails. And when he realizes he has, he shows up in human form, more or less, and courteously dismisses himself, leaving a mallet with the boy. Mishima cited this story as an example of how in “language art,” the same quality can be attained between “dream and reality, fantasy and fact.”
The other tale he chose to describe was Kunieda Shirō’s 1925 story recently reprinted, Divine State’s Tie-Dye Castle (Shinshū Kōketsu-jō). Written with a touch of German Romanticism, with some scenes suggestive, Mishima noted, of Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim” and “Landor’s Cottage,” as well as Izumi Kyōka’s story about a magically alluring woman living alone with a crippled idiot for a husband in the depths of mountains, “An Itinerant Priest of Mt. Kōya” (Kōya hijiri), the unfinished tale has to do with a fog-shrouded castle in the middle of a lake which, in truth, manufactures red tie-dyed cloth (dyed with human blood!) in its basement factory.
As Kunieda makes clear in the story, the idea of a castle where human blood is used as dye stuff comes from the thirteenth-century collection Tales Gleaned in Uji (Uji shūi monogatari). But he makes the story far more ghoulish by presenting the lord-president of the castle, always wrapped in white cloth, as a man suffering from “galloping leprosy”—yes, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s “Duke of Portland”—who turns anyone he touches instantly into an incurable, horrifying leper. When the fief lord finally sallies forth from his castle, he dons a bright red blood-dyed jacket that makes him look like a flame as he moves about in the town in the darkness of night.
“It becomes self-evident that the aim [of Kunieda’s story] lies not in mystery-solving but in turning terror itself into beauty and fascination,” Mishima wrote. Characteristically, in discussing this novel, which was ignored as no more than “an odd specimen of pulp fiction” when it appeared, Mishima cited the distinction between story and plot E. M. Forster made in Aspects of the Novel, to wit: “‘The king died and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief,’ is a plot.”14
To go back to manga, Mishima pointed to what likely had touched off the extraordinary popularity of manga in postwar Japan.
“The tendency among the youth not to read difficult books but to avidly read graphic novels,” he wrote, “makes no exception to the rule that the phenomenon that occurs in America occurs necessarily in Japan, too, and in a somewhat Japanized form. When I went to America for the first time, in 1952, I was surprised by the flood of comics, and was surprised again to learn that those crude manga without a smidgen of the sophistication of the ‘Blondie’ of the past were more the reading material for adults.” Mishima had arrived in the United States when the Golden Age of Comic Books, so called, was entering new territory.
In fact, even though the Occupation banned samurai movies with “feudalistic” content, it freely allowed Hollywood movies that included Westerns with revenge and other “feudalistic” themes, as well as Disney’s animated films, and, with them, inadvertently or otherwise, encouraged the culture of comic books.
What did Mishima mean by Japanization? “Compared with American comics, Japanese graphic tales are a shade more grim and dark both in eroticism and cruelty. To make up for it, though, they are avant-garde in nonsense. You will see how I, in search of comics that never exist in America, have entered this way (!)”—as in the way of the warrior, he meant, hence the exclamation mark—“through graphic samurai tales. The upshot of all this is that I have become friends with Gosha Hideo, bad-mouthed as he is as a cartoonish director, and we talk about everything, agree on everything.”15
As we have seen, Gosha directed the film Kill!
“The Oval Portrait”
On February 20, Mishima completed the third novel of his tetralogy, The Temple of Dawn. It ends with Honda Shigekuni—the reserved, dignified lawyer who holds together the narrative thread through the four stories but also a Peeping Tom—getting caught by his own wife while spying on his prized guest, the Thai princess Jin Jan, making love to another woman through a hole in the wall, then watching his newly built villa burn down in a spectacle that reminds him of what he had seen in Benares.
Several days after finishing the novel, Mishima wrote what he called “my gloomy monologue, which will be of no interest to others.” It
turned out to be of great interest to others, naturally, though, at least to one commentator, it read like “an extremely obfuscating, truly bizarre confession.”
People might imagine him enjoying a respite before taking on the next volume, the final one of the tetralogy, as might a soldier on a march taking a short rest, Mishima wrote, but, in truth, he was feeling “extremely unpleasant.” Why? Whenever he starts to write, two “realities come into being: that of the fictional world and that of the real world. Some writers may confuse the two, as when Balzac, on his sickbed, famously asked for the doctor he created in one of his novels. But his own methodology requires that the two never be confused, Mishima asserted.
In fact, for him “the most fundamental impulse for writing is always born of the conflict and tension between these two realities.” Nor do “the temporal future of the fictional world and the temporal future of the real world” merge in the manner of “parallels in non-Euclidian mathematics,” as happens in Poe’s story, “The Oval Portrait,” in which the moment a painter completes the portrait of his beloved wife “of rarest beauty” by giving it the final tint, she dies.
For him, “to write is not to continue to be captivated by the inspiration of the nonreal world,” but to confirm his freedom moment by moment—“not the so-called writer’s freedom, but the freedom to decisively choose either of the two realities, at any point in time.” The choice, in short, is between giving up literature or the real world. The “unspeakable unpleasantness” that he felt when he completed The Temple of Dawn came from that “psychology,” Mishima said. What happened? “The moment one fictional world was completed and closed, all reality outside fiction turned into wastepaper.” And this happened neither as a result of his freedom nor as his choice, leaving him as puzzled “as if duped by a fox.”16
This “monologue”—and the above is just one way of paraphrasing what Mishima wrote—is “obfuscating,” because, for one thing, as he appears to generalize the matter, The Temple of Dawn was certainly not the first fiction he completed, and, for another, he left unexplained why he chose to make this confession at that juncture. So, Morikawa Tatsuya, a Buddhist priest, sought what might have prompted the “monologue” in The Temple of Dawn itself.
Mishima made it clear that he intended the tetralogy to embody the Buddhist philosophy of transmigration-reincarnation in general and, in the third novel, ālaya-vijñāna (the eighth or seed consciousness) in particular. Indeed, Mishima, through Honda, devotes a good part of The Temple of Dawn to an exposition of ālaya-vijñāna that forms the core of the vijñapti-mātratā (consciousness- or mind-only) theory of Mahayana Buddhism. Ālaya-vijñāna is at times called the eighth consciousness, because it comes after the eye-, ear-, nose-, tongue, body-, mind-, and thought-consciousness (manas-vijnāna). In some ways it may be comparable to depth psychology, but it is said to be exceedingly difficult to comprehend. Morikawa proposed that Mishima engaged in the “monologue” because in the course of writing The Temple of Dawn, he “firmly glimpsed, if for a second, how the dizzying world that this gigantic thought”—ālaya-vijñāna—“opens up actually exists.” At that moment, “the entire reality and life that Mishima had lived was turned into void and nothingness.”17
But you can take a less religiophilosophical view and say that with the “monologue” Mishima was simply telling those who might care about such things that he was ready to pursue death as single-mindedly as Hagakure prescribed, and as the Shinpūren did. All the talk of “two realities,” “freedom,” “choice,” and, above all, “the real world turning to waste paper,” was merely to confuse. So was his announcement five months later, as he reflected on his twenty-five years as a writer, that all he had done was nothing more than an accumulation of “excrement.”18
His worldly ambition—his attachment to this world, to put it in Buddhist terms—remained strong, nonetheless. It was in fact in the letter to Donald Keene dated one day after his death, November 26, 1970, that he pleaded with the American scholar to see to it that the tetralogy in English translation be published properly because he believed that, if that is done, “readers will be sure to appear from somewhere in the world who understand me.”19 The letter began: “I have finally become what my name says, the Death-Enchanted Ghostly Demon with a Tail.”
The dead giveaway in the “monologue,” if we may call it that, was this statement: “But there still remains one volume. There remains the final volume. The words, ‘Once this volume is finished,’ are the greatest taboo for me now. That is because I cannot think of the world after this [tetralogy] ends, and also because to imagine that world is at once loathsome and terrifying.”
Worldly concerns Mishima carried to the end, but he did start to cut worldly ties. He “frantically concentrated on work from the yearend to February,” finishing The Temple of Dawn, he told Keene just about the time he wrote the “monologue,” in a letter dated February 27. Now, he began taking care of the various “commitments one by one” that had “hooked” him—that is, the essays and such he had agreed to write.
He was feeling dispirited, Mishima explained. Until the preceding year, he had hopes for his “own small Götterdämmerung,” but following the general elections in December, “everything suddenly quieted down, just as it had after the 1960 upheaval” against the US-Japanese Mutual Security Treaty, and all “the sense of danger disappeared. . . , and accordingly I, too, lost all perkiness.”20
“Golden Death”
The disappearance of a personal Götterdämmerung meant the need to change the narrative direction of “the final volume,” Mishima indicated to Muramatsu in March.21 At a very early stage of plotting and planning for The Sea of Fertility, when he had not decided whether the drawn-out story of metempsychosis encompassing the first three quarters of the twentieth century was to be told in four or five volumes, he had envisioned the following for the fourth volume:
The fourth volume—the forty-eighth year of Shōwa [1973]. Honda already in old state. Various figures that appear to be the protagonists in the first, second, and third volume come and go around him, but they are the ones that had already completed their missions, and are fakes. Throughout the four volumes, he searches for a protagonist but cannot find one. Finally when about to die at age eighty seventy-eight, an eighteen-year-old boy appears, and, just like an angel, radiates with eternal youth. (It cannot be thought that the protagonists till then have disappeared and escape transmigration when they have reached nirvana. The female protagonist in the third volume has ended in a miserable death)
Seeing a sign on the boy, Honda becomes exhilarated and grabs the impetus for his own nirvana.
When you think of it, this boy, the boy from the first volume, is an embodiment of ālaya-vijñāna, ālaya-vijñāna itself, ālaya-vijñāna that is Honda’s seed.
When Honda is about to die and enter nirvana, he sees beyond the window the boy setting sail toward the sky of light. (Death of Baldassare)22
In the actual story he wrote, “the boy” is handsome and brilliant yet a monster. Although his nefarious schemes, and his spirit, are quashed by a wilier character, Honda ends up facing nothingness instead of nirvana or deliverance from worldly bondage. The title of the story, which Mishima apparently settled on after he started location research in May, was The Decay of the Angel (Tennin gosui). The original phrase means “five-stage decay of the heavenly being” and embodies the Buddhist belief, with details varying somewhat from one sutra to another, that a heavenly being loses his divine faculties in the following fashion as he approaches his death: he starts batting his eyes; the flowers of his tiara begin to wither; his clothes begin to collect dust and bodily grime; he begins to sweat in his armpits; he begins not to return to his own seat but to sit in any place. Ōe no Asatsuna (886-958) wrote:
Whatever is alive is bound to die.
Lord Shakya was unable to escape the smoke of sandalwood.
When pleasure is exhausted sadness comes.
Even the heavenly being meets the
day of five-stage decay.23
The one commitment Mishima disposed of that he cited for Keene shows what was expected of someone of Mishima’s stature. An afterword to an anthology of three writers, Uchida Hyakken, Makino Shin’ichi, and Inagaki Taruho, Volume 34 in the Japanese literature series by Chūō Kōron, the work required him to make a selection for each of the three and present it with a knowledgeable, insightful, and enticing analytical commentary.24 Although Mishima regarded Uchida as the greatest prose stylist in “Shōwa literature” and admired Inagaki for his “philosophical bigness” and was thoroughly familiar with their writings,25 a writer with a far smaller range of activity than Mishima would surely have found such an assignment time-consuming and daunting.
Another essay Mishima wrote in similar vein was on Tanizaki—this one for Volume 6 in the Japanese literature series by Shinchōsha dedicated to the other Japanese author who had been rumored to receive the Nobel Prize but died, in 1964, without doing so. Mishima began by noting that he had already discussed Tanizaki’s entire œuvre, as he indeed had, and since he did not like to repeat himself, he would take up “Golden Death” (Konjiki no shi), one of the works Tanizaki disliked and shunned after writing them—he deleted it from his “complete works”—because such pieces often contain “a certain important impetus.” Unlike Kawabata’s “Birds and Beasts” (Kinjū), which the author also disliked and shunned, but which is a masterpiece in Mishima’s opinion, “Golden Death” is “an obvious failure.” Nevertheless, “in disgust and indulgence, a writer can sometimes go over the boundary despite himself. His sensibility can go over the limits of reason, destroy the form, and there allow a glimpse into an unexpectedly vast wilderness.”