by Hiroaki Sato
The following day, November 17, Mishima used a woman’s image in another way. In a letter to Shimizu Fumio, he compared Japan following its defeat to a young widow. “This is a vulgar metaphor, but, because she was still young, if just one Japanese man had stood up for her, he could have turned her into a real woman.” In reality, all the men who showed up for her had despicable motives, in the end forcing her simply to “grow old, full of wrinkles.”
“The Sea of Fertility is coming to an end, but I tell my family and publisher that it’s taboo for them to say, ‘When this ends. . . .’ This is because, to me, for this to end is nothing less than for the world to end. I once wrote the great temple Bayon into a play, The Terrace of the Leper King; this novel has been my Bayon.”34
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Seppuku
Mishima had a strong idea of being a “samurai.”
—Ishikawa Jun
I like very much the Hagakure idea that one must die a dog’s death.
—Mishima to Nakamura Mitsuo
The day he wrote his last letter to his erstwhile Peers School teacher Shimizu Fumio, Shinoyama Kishin finished photographing Mishima for the photo series A Man’s Death. Among the photos Shinoyama had taken were those of “Mishima drowning in mud, Mishima with a hatchet in his brain, Mishima beneath the wheels of a cement mixer truck, and of course Mishima as Saint Sebastian, arms roped above his head to a tree branch and arrows burning deliciously into his armpit and flank.” There was also a photo of Mishima sitting “naked on the floor with a dagger buried in his abdomen, and, standing behind him, with a long sword raised waiting to behead him on his signal, is Shinoyama.”1
Later that afternoon, Mishima attended a party at the Imperial Hotel to celebrate the publication of the one thousandth issue of Chūō Kōron where the winners of the Tanizaki Jun’ichirō Prize, given by the same publisher, were also honored. Mishima, one of the judges of the prize, spotted Mrs. Tanizaki and apologized to her for having recently taken up for discussion the work her husband had not liked after writing it, “Golden Death,” and quickly left the party with the young poet Takahashi Mutsuo, saying he could not stand the company of old people.
Nosaka Akiyuki, who attended the party, saw Mishima come out of it surrounded by painters and such and walk straight to the elevator to leave. He kept looking down, chin drawn, forehead prominent. Nosaka and a couple of writers of detective stories sitting in the couches in the lobby agreed: Mishima carried a “pretty eerie atmosphere.”2
The Last Taidan
November 18: Mishima invited the photographer Saitō Kōichi to the Kōrakuen gym to shoot members of the Shield Society, himself included, practicing karate. Saitō had been taking photos of Mishima for several days for his series, “portraits of Shōwa writers.” In the dimly lit gym, Mishima pointed out Morita, the older Koga, and others for him, saying, “They are all good fellows.” Like most who observed Mishima’s body with some care, Saitō noted it “unbalanced”—the upper part “excellent” but the lower part “poor and weak.” Still, Mishima looked perfect in karate garb, he thought. The two-hour karate session over, Saitō came out of the gym with him. It was a fine day. When he told him he had taken enough photos, Mishima sounded a bit disappointed but walked away with the usual “See you again.”3
That evening Mishima had what was to be his last taidan. The Marxist literary critic Furubayashi Takashi had started a series of talks with writers of “the postwar school,” and he chose Mishima for the seventh person in the series. The result turned out to be less a regular taidan in which two people say whatever comes to mind on a loosely set topic than a standard interview where a well-prepared person asks probing questions. Furubayashi was not just probing but frequently antagonistic. Mishima in fact had turned down his earlier requests for a taidan.
Thus Furubayashi began the taidan by announcing, “Whereas I have made my arguments from the standpoint of defending ‘postwar,’ it seems to me that you, Mr. Mishima, go out of your way to call postwar principles your enemies, praise the Tennō system, and fan militaristic sentiments as you do with ‘the Shield Society.’ As I think you know, until now I have written only Mishima criticisms—or have written only your accusations and attacks.”
Yet the transcript of the two-hour-long questions and answers shows Mishima never lost patience or became irascible or dismissive even when Furubayashi became overbearing. Perhaps, having read the preceding six interviews Furubayashi had done, as he said he had, Mishima decided to use the occasion to clarify himself on certain points.
So, when asked, bluntly, about his “cynical” statement that his sister’s death, which occurred soon after Japan’s defeat, was a more serious blow to him than “the shock of the defeat” itself, Mishima responded: “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t unsettled by Japan’s defeat or that I didn’t feel a sense of liberation as the postwar era arrived.” He was “completely muddled” for a few years after Japan’s surrender.
When questioned on the “purity-orientation” in his writings—such as the focus on physicality over intellectuality as in the heroes of the novel The Sound of Waves and the short story “The Sword,” or the focus on tidiness over messiness as when he presents the Tennō in “The Voices of Heroic Souls” as a figure astride a white horse who gallops over the fresh snow—Mishima brought up Georges Bataille as the European thinker to whom he felt the greatest affinity, and explained: Just as Bataille argued that a taboo must exist for you to have a chance for a sense of liberation, so in Japanese culture there once were the contrasting notions of hare, “public or formal,” and ke, “private or informal.” In today’s world of relativism where taboos or the idea of hare has ceased to exist, one must seek something transcendental or absolute to experience eroticism.
Furubayashi did not miss a beat and said, somewhat derisively: So, in your case, Mr. Mishima, that goes directly to your idea of the Tennō. Mishima agreed, unperturbed, then added: As far as that goes, a feudal lord would do just as well.
At the same time, Mishima admitted to his ineradicable fascination with “muddy, dark spiritualism”—“things that are very fanatic, obscuranticismic.” “That’s Dionysus in me,” he added. “My Dionysus leads to the Shinpūren, leads to the Southwest War, leads to the Saga Revolt and others, to those destructive impulses that ought to be called dark obscuranticism”—the insistence on remaining unenlightened.
What may surprise in this taidan is that Furubayashi ends up completely surrendering to Mishima. Once, in a keynote speech at a literary symposium, he focused on attacking him, Furubayashi tells Mishima. But when he was finished, Hirano Ken, the novelist known for raising contentious issues, spoke up and said, “If you like Mishima so much, come right out and say it. That would make your argument more logical.” When he thought about it, Hirano was correct, Furubayashi admits. He also tells Mishima that he has bought all of his great many books, except for a couple of titles, so one book dealer offered to buy the whole thing for a whopping sum. He had even gone to see The Moonbow, he confesses.
Younger than Mishima by just two years, Furubayashi, following Japan’s devastation and defeat, had turned to Marxism in a state of utter despondency—“kyodatsu, that eerie psychological blankness.”4 But he had felt the years since had been for him nothing more than a yosei, life lived just for the sake of living after the meaningful part of one’s life is over, he confided. As a draftee, he was sent to naval air bases in Kyūshū where, he later discovered while looking at the lists of Kamikaze pilots, he had known a number of men who flew off to their deaths. Whenever he thought of them, he said, everything about his postwar life turned “blank.”
Nakamura Kenji, the editor of the book-review weekly Tosho Shinbun that was carrying Furubayashi’s series, remembered the evening session distinctly. Arriving at Mishima’s house with the interviewer and a stenographer at eight in the evening as told, he saw the man walk into his guestroom with an attaché case, in a half-sleeve shirt. Already flush with alcohol, he too
k out a cigar case as soon as he settled down on a sofa, picked one cigar for himself and, as he offered one to Furubayashi, said, “I am totally immoderate in drinking and smoking.” Nonetheless, he was “clear and full of confidence throughout the interview.”
Nakamura also did not forget to note that, the interview over, Mishima asked the stenographer when the transcript might be ready. When told that it would be in a week and he would have plenty of time to correct and amend the script, he “simply nodded, wordlessly.”
What sticks in the mind of the reader of the taidan is Mishima’s response when Furubayashi expressed the fear, common among liberals, that Mishima’s activity with the Shield Society was paving the way for Japan’s remilitarization and reintroduction of conscription or at least allowing the rightwing and conservatives to take advantage of him. Mishima said if some were taking advantage of him, let them. He was different from them. “You will find out soon enough.”5
Reading the taidan to write a memoir of his association with Mishima a quarter of a century later, the journalist Tokuoka Takao noticed Mishima say, toward the end, “I think I’m already like Petronius. And, to exaggerate, I think the human being who knows the Japanese language will come to an end in my generation.” Here Tokuoka thought Furubayashi’s interlinear note, “Roman Emperor Nero’s aide and author of Satyricon,” might mislead. What Mishima had in mind surely was the Petronius at his death as described by Henryk Sienkiewicz in Quo Vadis. There the Arbiter Elegantiæ has the Greek physician cut the vein at the bend of his arm and slowly dies. Having come out in Kimura Ki’s translation in 1928 as part of Shichōsha’s world literature series, Quo Vadis was a book most students of his generation read.6
November 19: Mishima and the four young men got together in the lounge of the sauna of Isetan Kaikan. He told them the exact apportionment of time to each step of the planned action: twenty minutes for the assemblage of troops after taking the regimental commander hostage, for the sole purpose of taking him hostage was to force him to order the troop assemblage; thirty minutes for Mishima’s speech; and five minutes each for the speech of each young man. For the “speech” of each youth, Mishima evidently used the ancient term nanori, declamation to introduce oneself on an ancient battlefield. Then they will declare the disbandment of the Shield Society, and shout, “Long Live the Emperor!” three times. Morita asked whether he can kill the hostage if the demands are not met. Mishima said, No, he must be left unharmed.
That day he wrote Bōjō Toshitami to thank him for writing him to say he had seen his exhibition. “Looking back upon the path I have followed, it is all vague and bleak, and I feel no special sensation about it. I think my Golden Age was when I was fourteen, fifteen years old. As a matter of fact, in those days, the moment I came home, I’d ask, ‘Haven’t I received a letter from Bōjō-san?,’ then open your envelope the color somewhere between birch and apricot—such literary manna dew I have not come across since.”
He does “not feel like reading recent novels,” he told the man who had been his literary co-aspirant more than three decades earlier. So he read Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte and was “intoxicated by its fin-de-siècle fragrance, even though the story is a trifling one of sexual love.” Also, he found Julien Gracq’s novel Un beau ténébreux “highly readable, because it has the feel of fin-de-siècle literature modernized, although the translation is no good.” Earlier that day he faced “fifteen, sixteen opponents in a quick succession” in kendō. He does that sort of thing perhaps because he is “so straightforward as to be dumb even with newcomers,” but he feels “greatest while in the thick of kendō” because then he “can forget everything.”7
Writing to Murakami Ichirō the same day, Mishima said that among the books he read of late were Plato’s Phaedo and Kusaka Genzui’s writings.8 Phaedo describes Socrates’ discourse on why he is willingly taking poison. The main point is stated toward the beginning: The true disciple of philosophy “is ever pursuing death and dying; and if this is true, why, having had the desire of death all his life long, should he repine at the arrival of that which he has been always pursuing and desiring?”9 Kusaka, Yoshida Shōin’s brother-in-law, was wounded in the battle at the Hamaguri Gate on the 19th of Seventh Month (August 20), 1864, and killed himself the next day while being cared for in the nobleman Takatsukasa’s house. He was twenty-four.
November 20: Mishima visited Shinoyama’s studio with Morita Masakazu and made the final selection of photos. But the book never saw the light of day. Following what happened five days later, on November 25, both Shinoyama and Bara Jūji Sha that had sponsored the project decided against its publication. There was Yōko’s strong objection to consider as well. As a result, the exact line-up of twenty to forty photos taken for this project remains unknown.10
November 21: Morita went to Camp Ichigaya, got in on the pretext of delivering one of Mishima’s books, Introduction to Action, to the regimental commander, Col. Miyata Akiyuki, and learned that he would be away on the date of the planned action. Later that day, when the five men assembled at the Chinese restaurant Daiichirō, Morita told Mishima about it. After their discussion, they decided to switch the hostage target to the commander of the Eastern Army, Gen. Mashita Kanetoshi. Mishima telephoned the general and made an appointment to meet him at 11 o’clock.
That day and the next, at Mishima’s instructions, the four youths went to Shinjuku Station Building with the ¥4,000 he gave them and bought cords with which to tie up the camp commander, wire and other things that might be needed to barricade his office, the calico large enough to write the demands on and be displayed before the gathered troops, a bottle of brandy for an analeptic purpose, a canteen, and whatnot.
November 22, Sunday: Mishima took Yōko and the two children to the sculptor Wakebe Junji’s studio to see the life-size clay model of himself. He had been posing for Wakebe on Sundays since early fall. That evening he took his family, along with his brother Chiyuki and his family, to Suegen, an old Japanese restaurant in Shinbashi. He was dressed in a polo shirt and jeans.
While driving in Yokohama that night, Morita asked the younger Koga to take over the role of kaishaku if he were unable do it. Koga agreed.
November 23: The five men gathered in Room 519 of the Palace Hotel, in Marunouchi. They cut the cords to appropriate lengths and rehearsed the exact steps of their planned action several times. When he played the role of Gen. Mashita being gagged and tied up, Mishima put up serious resistance. He practiced his speech, with the TV turned up. At one point Morita asked him what the absorbent cotton was for. “To plug our assholes,” Mishima replied. In disembowelment one sometimes loses control and defecates. As he wrote the manifesto on the white cloth with brush and ink, he laughed and said, “This isn’t going to be worth a penny”—either self-mockery of a man who was strict on payment for what he wrote or a prediction of a man who knew exactly what would not happen.
They prepared headbands, with shichishō hōkoku, “to be born seven times to serve the country,” written on them, the red sun at center. Shichishō hōkoku was one of the militarist-rightwing slogans during the war, and it was commonly attributed to the genius of guerilla warfare Kusunoki Masashige (1294–1336), although in the fourteenth-century Chronicle of Great Peace (Taiheiki) it was Masashige’s brother Masasue who said something similar but not exactly in the phrasing later accepted and flaunted.11 Mishima of course knew all that.
Around eight-thirty that evening Mishima met Morita at the high-class restaurant Shiki, in Sukiyabashi, then the two moved to join the others at the restaurant specializing in shrimp, Tsurumaru. He urged the young men each to compose a jisei, a farewell-to-the-world poem, in this instance in the 5-7-5-7-7-syllable tanka form. He told them not to try to be clever but say whatever they wanted to say. Some would later dismiss Mishima’s own compositions—he wrote two—as conventional and flat, but that would be missing the point. Being conventional was the very point of such compositions.
In this regard, the Chiku
ma editor Azuma Hiroshi had it right. Even as he condemned the first as straight out of any of the samurai fighting for the Imperial causes at the end of the Tokugawa Period and the second as belonging to someone like Lord Asano, of the forty-seven samurai incident, he said, “their old-fashioned cookie-cutter quality eerily moves you.”12
Masurao ga tabasamu tachi no sayanari ni ikutose taete kyō no hatsushimo
The sword a man grips clatters in its scabbard, the years I’ve endured it, today the first frost
Chiru o itou yo ni mo hito ni mo sakigakete chiru koso hana to fuku sayoarashi
Ahead of both world and men loath to scatter a flower scatters as midnight gale blows
The first tanka may allude to a Man’yōshū poem: Masurao no satsuya tabasami tachimukai iru Matokata wa miru ni sayakeshi, even as it may also echo a famous one of the shogun Minamoto no Sanetomo (1192-1219): Mononofu no yanami tsukurou kote no ue ni arare tabashiru Nasu no shinohara, “As a warrior lines up arrows in Nasu field of bamboo grass hailstones spatter on his handguards.” The second poem may allude to a tanka by Fujiwara (Nijō) Sadatame: Kazu naraba yo ni mo hito ni mo shiraremashi wagami no ue ni amaru ure’e o: “Were I worthy both world and men would know: all this melancholy that bears down on me.”13
November 24, morning: The five rehearsed again in Room 519 of the Palace Hotel. Each took turns in playing Gen. Mashita. At one point Morita asked, “Where is the carotid artery?” “Silly, you don’t even know that? Here,” Mishima said. “Be careful. Don’t skewer me.” At eleven he called Gen. Mashita to confirm the appointment the next morning.14
About two in the afternoon Mishima called Date Munekatsu, of NHK, to confirm the time he could call again the next morning. He also called Tokuoka Takao, of the Mainichi, to do the same, saying it’s “a purely personal matter,” nothing that would “excite a scandal sheet for women.”