by Hiroaki Sato
Glass Cover
On October 25, exactly a month before the date of his planned death, Mishima sat down and wrote a heartfelt tribute to Azuma Fumihiko, his writer friend at the Peers School who had died twenty-seven years earlier. Azuma’s father had proposed to collect his son’s writings, and Mishima at once had arranged to have Kōdansha publish them. The tribute was his foreword.
Akae, the wartime “group magazine” of the three friends “gathered under the hypothesis of youthful death,” nonetheless “did not have a fragment of the shadow of war lying on it,” Mishima wrote. “Young people today must find it difficult to imagine such a nonpolitical season.” Yet there was at the time “the self-evident premise that literature is something to be axenically cultured; there was no resistance, no loud cries, nay, not even escapism. . . . We lived in another, different hour. And death constantly flickered above our heads like the sunshine falling deeply among the trees.”
The great many books written about the war may impress young readers “only with unique experiences,” making them “captives of a dark idée fixe about the wartime life. It tends to be forgotten that there too was ordinary life, there were ordinary grief, joy, sadness, and happiness, there was dailiness, there was quietness, there were even dreams. For example, it was at a musical performance during the war that I heard the clavecin, its sounds so beautiful I had never heard anything like it before or since.”
And those sounds of the clavecin were “Mr. Azuma’s stories,” Mishima continued. “They were, as it were, the acts of an extremely pure youth who, blessed as an incurable patient, was able to keep the fierce actions of the age outside the door.”
In an age when quietness itself was anti-age, just depicting subtle psychology, sentiments that were “not urgently needed,” was anti-age. The consolations for fighting men were considered useful momentarily, but they, too, became “not urgently needed.” In that age only those ill and children were free. But it was a freedom with no one to play with, full of pain, solitary, barren. So the sounds of a clavecin began to flow beautifully.21
Toward the end of that month, Mishima, at his home, discussed a limited luxury edition of Confessions of a Mask with Kōdansha editors, Matsumoto Michiko among them. He proposed a cover made of glass because, he explained, even though the story that had earned him his fame was supposed to be a narrative told with a mask, it was in fact plainly autobiographical. He then had his wife Yōko bring the two issues of Akae—the magazine had ended with Azuma’s death. When Matsumoto read his editorial commentaries and said, “You were saying in those days exactly what you are saying today,” he agreed with her with a laugh.
On November 3, Mishima discussed a plan to prepare a “definitive” bibliography of his works with his wife Yōko and Shimazaki Hiroshi, the Taiwanese-born editor of a mystery magazine known also as a distinguished bibliographer.
That was around noon. In the evening he met his young comrades at Café Almond, in Roppongi. The men then repaired to the lounge of Sauna Misty, where he told them, as the prosecutor’s summary put it: “I am grateful that you have worked with me with the resolve to die until now. But someone must see to it that the regimental commander not commit suicide. I ask the three of you to undertake the task: [the younger] Koga, [the older] Koga, and Ogawa. I ask Morita to do the kaishaku neatly. Don’t make me suffer too much.”
The three who were told to live agreed, more or less. During the trial, the older Koga, who had ended up decapitating both Mishima—with a final stroke after Morita botched it—and Morita, and who therefore had been vital to police questioning, added some more detail: At Sauna Misty, Mishima showed the young men the draft of the manifesto to be displayed on the day of the action and the demands he would make after taking the regimental commander hostage. Mishima also said, after stressing the importance of protecting the life of the hostage: “It is easy to die; it is difficult to live. You must put up with that difficulty.” These were exactly the words he wrote in his “order” to the younger Koga to go to the lawyer Saitō Naoichi after the event.
November 4: Mishima received karate lessons from Nakayama Masatoshi—the last session with the famous head of the Japan Karate Association.
From later that day to November 6, Mishima and the Shield Society trained in Camp Takigahara. After the training was over, Mishima threw a party at Gotenba Inn for the participating members of the Shield Society and some of the GSDF men. He meant it as an occasion to convey a tacit farewell to the members of the Shield Society not asked to take part in the final act. Toasting with everyone, he became pretty drunk.
Around this time, Azusa happened to show his son Sadatarō’s framed calligraphy. Mishima expressed admiration for his grandfather’s calligraphy and asked to keep it. The phrase Sadatarō had chosen was the well-known words of the Chinese Confucian scholar Hu Yin (1098–1156): “Do everything humanely possible and await heaven’s judgment” (or “Having done everything humanely possible, I await heaven’s judgment”).22
November 10: Morita, the two Kogas, and Ogawa went to Camp Ichigaya, entered its compound on the pretext of meeting Capt. Kikuchi Katsuo, made certain that there was space to park a car near the barracks of the 32nd Regiment, and reported the findings back to Mishima. Kikuchi was stationed in Ichigaya then. He received more than thirty letters and cards from Mishima, from August 1967 onward, but he kept only about half of them, burning the rest, mostly the more recent ones, after Mishima’s death. The last one he kept is dated May 23, 1970. In it Mishima congratulated him on completing the GSDF’s command and general staff course (CGS).
The December issue of Chūō Kōron went on sale carrying Mishima’s taidan with Ishikawa Jun with the title, “Concentrating in Order to Burst.” Following Mishima’s death, many likely found it uncannily, immediately, prophetic. It was, in truth, an expression Ishikawa used in praise of writers such as Sakaguchi Ango who presumably did their work with no thoughts of leaving it for posterity. The general drift of the conversation was condemning the idea of “preserving culture,” as evinced in building the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.23
Four Rivers of Action
On the evening of November 11, Mishima had a small gathering of people, Yōko included, at Tōbu Department Store, for the Mishima Yukio Exhibition set to open the following day. It was a show Mishima had decided to have back in May when he saw an exhibition of his collaborator–graphic designer Yoko’o Tadanori’s “complete works,” held in Matsuya Ginza. Ever a perfectionist, he had consulted Kuzui Kinshirō, the founder of the Art Theater Guild, on it.
That evening, when the Shinchōsha editor Nitta Hiroshi brought up his plan to publish his “complete works,” Mishima expressed his wish that it cover not just his novels, stories, and other writings, as is usually done, but also the recordings of his readings, photos, and his film Yūkoku. Photos aside, the inclusion of voice and moving images became easy only with the advent of CD and DVD technologies. As a result, realizing his wish had to wait until Shinchōsha’s second attempt at zenshū to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Mishima’s death. The first zenshū, in thirty-five volumes plus a supplement, published from 1973 to 1976, had no recordings, either of voice or image.
For the exhibition, Mishima wrote an introduction to go with the catalogue. In it he posited that four “rivers” flowed through his life: the book, the stage, the body, and action. Or, as he put it in the Tokyo Shinbun interview a week earlier, his life was “a four-horse carriage,” which could not run with any one horse missing. On each of the four components of his life, he wrote a mini-essay, concluding the one on “the river of action” thus: “This river of action and the river of the book frontally collide. However you may be for ‘both literary and martial arts,’ the coexistence of the two may occur only at the moment of death.”24
“Living is Satyricon, all sorts of things mixed together,” Mishima said in the Tokyo Shinbun interview. Fellini’s film Satyricon was shown the previous year, but eighteen years earlier Mish
ima had written a brief review of Satyricon in Iwasaki Ryōzō’s translation where he characterized the work as depicting “degeneration itself, powerfully, healthily, accurately,” in such a way as to remind him of “an Italian fish market that still nakedly exposes under the sun [the work’s] raw smell, flies, fierce colors, sickening fertility of life and consumption lust.”25
November 12: Mishima, along with Morita, the younger Koga, and Ogawa, saw his exhibition. As the interviewer intimated by saying Mishima’s having an exhibition like that was akin to making his own grave, people must have sensed something. The show, which lasted for six days, until the 17th, drew an astonishing average of ten thousand people a day. The department store had expected a daily draw of one thousand at most. The large attendance made Mishima happy but not the store management because most of the viewers were not interested in shopping.26
That evening Mishima had dinner with Henry Scott-Stokes, at the Fontainebleau, a restaurant in the Imperial Hotel. The journalist, who had received a short note from Mishima in early October saying, “Finishing the long novel”—The Sea of Fertility—“makes me feel sometimes as if it will be the end of the world,” found him “in a most aggressive mood” that night. “Charming as usual but flashes of great aggression. Implied that I might as well pack my bags and go home, as ‘no foreigner can ever understand Japan.’ Think he went a little far. In a sense, no Japanese can ever ‘understand’ the West. So what?”
Mishima was “also strangely critical of the Western scholars in the field of Japanese studies; insisted, looking me straight in the eyes, that the scholars ignore the ‘dark’ side of the Japanese tradition and concentrate upon the ‘soft’ aspects of Japanese culture. Why is he being rude these days? And where has his sense of humor gone to?”
His behavior after dinner was, if anything, even more jarring. He shot out of the restaurant when normally he would have accompanied his guests down in the elevator. Worse, he “crushed a note into the hands of the elevator man.” In Japan tipping is not done, not to mention in such crude fashion.27
To Scott-Stokes it was clear he was rushing to the next appointment. If he in fact was, it may well have been to the one with the four young men at Café Parkside. It was there that, close to midnight, Morita asked Ogawa to serve as his kaishaku and Ogawa agreed.
For the Mishima family, November 13, Friday, was the parent visitation day at their son’s grammar school. Mishima went with Yōko, watched Iichirō in class, and then chatted with the principal for three hours.
November 14: Mishima and his comrades again assembled at Sauna Misty. Mishima told them that on the day of action he would hand copies of the manifesto and the commemorative photos they had taken together to NHK reporter Date Munekatsu and the Sunday Mainichi reporter Tokuoka Takao. Then the five men went over the draft of the manifesto Mishima had prepared.
Mishima had known Date more than two years if we take what he said as fact, though he may well have known him since the latter covered the After the Banquet lawsuit for NHK. His letters to Date and Tokuoka, both dated November 25 and both exactly the same except for the last part where he thanked each for his friendship and named the other recipient of the same letter, show how precisely Mishima had expected the planned action might or might not turn out.
The letters began: “Allow me to omit the preliminaries. I will begin with the matter at hand.” He was preparing the letter for fear, Mishima said, that the SDF might cover up the whole thing because it would take place in its own compound. He asked each recipient of the letter to understand that, if everything worked out according to plan, “it would be no more than a minor incident,” that “it would be no more than our personal play”—his English, meaning action—“no matter how you might look at it.” He knew what he was going to do would strike most as an act of derangement. “No matter how deranged an act it may seem, I would like you to understand that to us it derives from our sense of yūkoku.” The handwriting was as neat and fluid as that in the manuscripts he had received, with no sign of mental stress of any kind, Tokuoka noted as he read the letter.
In making this arrangement with two reliable reporters, Mishima, a student of terrorists in modern Japan, may well have had in mind the case of Nanba Daisuke, who, at age twenty-four, attempted assassination of Crown Prince and Regent Hirohito, on December 27, 1923 when the Taishō Emperor was ill. A son of a member of the Diet and from a distinguished family, Nanba was first taught to worship the Tennō but, as he observed rampant social injustices and the killings of Socialists and Koreans following the Great Kantō Earthquake, he decided to be a terrorist. When he worked out the assassination plan, he sent letters of intent to newspapers and labor unions lest his act be regarded as a result of derangement after the fact. He also sent “severing relationship” letters to some of his closest friends lest they be harshly interrogated on suspicion of conspiracy.
His attempt failed, and Nanba was arrested. The government and prosecution, unable to condemn his act on the ground of insanity, tried to force him to admit remorse. But Nanba refused to express any such sentiment, insisting to the very end that he was right in doing what he had tried to do. Nearly a year later, he was sentenced to death and executed shortly afterward.28
The event was scheduled to take about two hours to play out, Mishima told the two journalists. Still, something might go wrong.
“In the extraordinarily unlikely event that I have to call off the whole thing because of an unexpected prior contretemps”—here, what was meant by “prior” (jizen no) would become clear only after the event—“and return to Ichigaya Hall, it should happen by 11:40. If that were to happen, I would like you to return to me this letter, manifesto, and the photos, and forget about the whole thing. This may be asking too much, but I hope you will be understanding.”29
Mishima would arrange the delivery of the letters by hand in such a way that the two reporters would receive them separately—at Ichigaya Hall where select members of the Shield Society would be having its monthly meeting—just about the time his action would start.
November 15: The weekly Yomiuri called for its phone survey on the outlandishly coincidental topic, “Great People’s Manner of Death.” Mishima responded: “Not a writer’s but a warrior’s decisive death!” His Japanese played on the words bunshi, “litterateur,” and bushi, “warrior.”30
Mishima wrote a short afterword to what was to be a volume of Mori Mari’s writings in her own selection and mailed it to the editor. The publication plan was later cancelled and his accolade was not used as intended. In it he eulogized Ōgai’s daughter as “a brilliant female writer most stern with words. A painter-composer who furthermore uses those words like colors and music. The supreme postwar sanity that has feigned derangement. A child born of a canary, a parrot, an armadillo, and a hedgehog.” She is, he concluded, “Something that in any event is indescribable. Something before which you can only take your chapeau off.”31
Sometime that day he telephoned Ōwada Mitsuaki (Kōmyō), the famous tattooist in Yokohama, and asked if he would tattoo him, but was told a mere seven or ten days, obviously the span of time he had in mind, would not be enough for any respectable job. Mishima must have known that. Perhaps he wished that Ōwada might do to him as Seikichi does to a young, beautiful, (latently) sadomasochistic female in Tanizaki’s short story “Tattoo” (Shisei), carrying out the excruciatingly painful work that normally takes one to two months in a single day, from one morning to the next. As Tanizaki said in his story, tattooing was practiced rather widely during the period he described, but by the midtwentieth century, it was favored only by the narrow stratum of society that Mishima liked: the yakuza.
November 16: Mishima wrote a heartfelt introduction to his horseback-riding instructor Innami Kiyoshi’s book, The Equestrian Reader (Bajutsu tokuhon). When with the Imperial Guard Regiment (cavalry), Innami had the honor of being one of the riders in the wedding procession of Crown Prince Hirohito, in 1924; was a cavalry instructor of Baron Lt.
Nishi Takeichi who would win a gold medal as an equestrian during the Los Angeles Olympic Games of 1932 and perish on Iwo Jima; was a colonel on the staff of the Kwantung Army when Japan surrendered; then, captured by the Russian army, was detained in Siberian concentration camps. Released and returned to his homeland, in 1949, he found horses and horseback riding disappearing fast with the abolishment of the military and the aristocratic class even as horse races grew ever more popular. In the end, Innami became an instructor for hobbyists and was still active at age seventy-four when his book went into print. Mishima, one of his students though never “one of the best,” helped him with the writing of the book and its cover design.
“I loathe women who do kendō, but from the start I have loved women who ride horses,” Mishima wrote. “I cannot bear women invading kendō which is purely Japanese and forms a purely male world.” In truth, women had existed in kendō since prewar years and their number had started to increase from about the time Mishima took it up.
In contrast, “because horsemanship initially developed in European high society and was an elegant social instrument, the picture will not be complete without female figures in it.” Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi Tadamichi, commander-in-chief of Iwo Jima, had noticed this while studying in the United States, reporting to his infant son, with pictures, how, in the US Army, officers’ wives rode along with their husbands. He was in the cavalry himself.32
“Women’s dignified air was once seen in the geisha of the Meiji Era,” Mishima wrote, “but today it is a characteristic that can be seen only in the women members of a horseback-riding club. In the way such a powerful, giant beast is ruled under a woman’s delicate hands, there remains a particular sort of romanticism and, if I may say so, a kind of poeticism.”33