by Hiroaki Sato
About three he called Kojima Chikako, his editor at Shinchō. He told her he’d like to hand her a manuscript the following morning, but he would have to go out in the morning for a regular meeting of the Shield Society. Are you an early riser? She replied she was up by seven or seven-thirty every morning so there should be no problem. He said, “Well . . . in that case . . . would you be able to come here around 10:30?”
Kojima, who was used to going to his place to pick up a manuscript in the afternoon, at an exact time he would specify, felt it odd, felt even a bit anxious, but she decided Mishima perhaps wanted to “casually” show her members of the Shield Society in uniform, something she actually hadn’t seen yet. She had heard him boast how “cool” his men looked.15
Around six in the evening, the five men showed up at Suegen. Toyosan (real name: Akama Yuriko), the maid assigned to the private room Mishima had reserved, remembered the occasion well. Obviously—in retrospect, perhaps—to boost the gathering’s mood, Mishima gossiped about the actresses he admired: Fuji Junko, who had gained sudden, great popularity among the lovers of yakuza films, especially those in the student movement; Wakao Ayako, who had played his opposite in the film Windblown Dude, in addition to appearing in two films based on his novels; and Sakuma Yoshiko, who had played Ayakura Satoko in the stage production of Spring Snow in the previous year—all with, one may note, roundish faces like his wife Yōko. Mishima talked about Katsu Shintarō, who starred in the film Kill! with him (and helped him act in certain scenes), observing that he was a fascinating man who played his real self in films and such.
When she returned to the room after a while, Toyo-san found Mishima lying on his side as if meditating and the four young men in stolid silence. “I had thought I’d become more sentimental when the final moments came,” he said, “but I feel nothing. In the end, it may be some third-party who has seen us that becomes sentimental.”
Around eight, the men left Suegen. The younger Koga drove. On the way home, Mishima said: “Gen. Mashita is a great man, and I feel terrible doing something like this to him, but he’ll understand if I kill myself before his eyes.” He added, “If troops suddenly came at us before we entered the commandant’s room, we’d have no choice but to bite our tongues and die.”
He handed the older Koga his green pocket notebook with his schedules closely written in it and asked him to burn it.
As Azusa recalled, Mishima came home around ten, and he stepped into the dining room directly from the terrace. It was his wont to come to his parents’ place after evenings out and tell funny stories, punctuating them by his usual laughter, before repairing to his room to work. That night, however, he asked, “Where’s Mother?” Told she went to a wedding ceremony but would be back soon, he sat around chitchatting distractedly until Shizue came back. She said, “My, you rarely come to us at this time.” Mishima apparently paid his evening courtesy visit to his parents, when he was in Tokyo, closer to midnight. “Are you done with your work?”
“Yes. I am completely tired out tonight. Mother, I’d like to go to bed early.”
“Please do. You sure look tired. You work too hard. The best thing is to lie down.”
“Yes, I’ll do that. Good night.”
The parents’ Japanese-style house and Mishima’s Western-style one were linked by something like a corridor. Shizue walked Mishima to the end of the room and said, “Take good care of yourself.” She watched him walk away.
“For a month or two till then Kimitake had been looking more exhausted by the day, but he looked particularly bad that night,” she would recall. “It’s only about ten yards to his entrance but he trudged toward it, head down, shoulders sagging. Worried by his beaten appearance, I watched him intently until he disappeared, as I seldom did.”16 The accumulating toll on Mishima of the course he had been pursuing was apparent to those who paid attention, as well as in some of the photos during that period.
The younger Koga dropped Morita at his apartment, in Nishi-Shinjuku, and he and the two others, Ogawa and the older Koga, returned to his apartment, also in Shinjuku, to spend the night. The three discussed the matter of kaishaku further. Ogawa asked the younger Koga to take over if he could not do it for Morita, and Koga agreed. But the three had agreed that each would do whatever any of the other two might not be able to do.
In the meantime, Morita went out, had a simple meal (“rice with tea poured over it”) at a diner, went back to his apartment around one thirty in the morning, and entrusted his roommate and Shield Society member Tanaka Ken’ichi with Mishima’s letters to Date and Tokuoka with the instruction that they be handed to the two reporters when they show up at Ichigaya Hall. He then went out, telephoned a friend who worked as a cashier at a “midnight bar,” and took a walk with her. He returned to the apartment around three.
The Day of His Death Was a Brilliant Autumn Day
On November 25, Wednesday, Mishima got up at eight. It was a brilliant autumn day. While he was shaving, a phone rang and the maid picked it up. It was from Yōko. As always, she had taken the children to their schools—Noriko, then eleven, to the Primary School Division of Mishima’s alma mater, in Shinjuku, and Iichirō, then seven, to the Ochanomizu University Elementary School, in Bunkyō. Then, on her way to the Equestrian Club, in Setagaya, for morning horseback-riding, she remembered something, hence the call. Before the maid hung up, Mishima snatched the phone from her, as he had never done in the past. Yōko repeated what she had told the maid. Mishima said, “Oh, I see,” and hung up. Shizue was also out for work on the mediation committee of a local family court.
Around ten, Mishima telephoned Gen. Mashita to confirm the appointment. He did the same with Date and Tokuoka. A few minutes later, the younger Koga walked in the gate. He had parked the car with Morita, Ogawa, and the older Koga in it about ten yards away from Mishima’s house. The four young men all had the Shield Society uniform on, but wore a coat or a cardigan over it lest they attract attention, their hats tucked away in shopping bags. They had washed the white Corona at a gas station on the way.
Mishima handed a large envelope to the maid, telling her to give it to Kojima, of Shinchō, who would soon show up. He then handed Koga three envelopes and told him to go back to the car and read them. The envelopes, for the two Kogas and Ogawa, each contained three ¥10,000 bills and a “directive.” The directive confirmed the role of each of the three young men who were to survive—in the case of the younger Koga, to protect the hostage, Gen. Mashita, with the older Koga. As “the list of demands” issued during the act also showed, Mishima seriously feared the possibility of a soldier taken hostage in such circumstances attempting suicide. The three were ordered to surrender themselves as soon as the act was over, so they might “explain the spirit of the Shield Society in court.” The directive gave the name of the lawyer to turn to, Saitō Naoichi, and his address. The money was for initial legal costs. It made it clear that Mishima alone was responsible for the entire action. In that regard, his killing himself with a sword was “natural,” he wrote, but Morita was to be admired for his “gallantry” in volunteering to kill himself as “a model” for the young people concerned about the present state of Japan.17
Mishima came out in Shield Society uniform, complete with the hat. He had the Seki no Magoroku refashioned into a military sword on his left hip and his brown leather attaché case in his right hand. The case contained, among other things, two daggers, one of them an “armorpiercer,” originally used for cutting the enemy’s head off after hand-to-hand combat. The young men saluted. Mishima returned it, and asked if the three men accepted his orders. When he received an affirmative, he got into the front passenger seat, and the car left. It was around 10:15.
When their car came out on the south side of the Meiji Shrine’s Outer Park, which lies southwest of Ichigaya, they found it a little early, so they drove around the park twice. At one point, Mishima said, “If this were a yakuza film, something like the giri and ninjō song of “A Lion Amid Peonies” (
Karajishibotan) should start just about now, but we are more cheerful than we’d expected, aren’t we?” He began singing the song. The four young men followed. Karajishibotan is a 1966 film featuring Takakura Ken and Ikebe Ryō. The title referred to the fanciful tattoo the lead actor Takakura flaunts on his body. Takakura also sang the title song.
Because she had always visited Mishima from her office, not from her own residence as she did that morning, Kojima Chikako miscalculated the time needed for the route and arrived at his house at 10:40, late by ten minutes. The maid she knew well told her Mishima was already gone, as she handed her an envelope. Kojima knew Mishima was strict on time and she had never been late, but she couldn’t help but wonder: Was the time he had specified “that exact”? Could he not wait for a few minutes? Does he get impatient when the matter has to do with the Shield Society?
Then she remembered his “somewhat clouded voice” the previous day, and had a momentary doubt. She put that away, yet felt “tripped up.” Then there was the envelope. Mishima’s envelopes in the past were always unsealed so she might check the contents on the spot if she wanted to, but this one was “sternly sealed.” Vaguely troubled and bothered, she went to her office. She was in for a surprise when she opened the envelope and checked the manuscript. The top page read, “The Decay of the Angel (Final Installment),” while on the last page were the words, in Mishima’s neat handwriting,
The Sea of Fertility: Finis
November 25, the Forty-fifth Year of Shōwa
Kojima was perturbed. She had sensed that the completion of the tetralogy would not be far in the future, but had not expected it to occur with the installment for this month. With other manuscripts, Mishima had never failed to tell her when the serialization was going to end. She was confused and kept wondering as she sat at her desk. Then she noticed a commotion in the office. Something was wrong with Mishima. All the editors and others were rushing to the third floor where there was a TV set. Soon the news came: Mishima has attempted to kill himself with a sword. Shortly after twelve-thirty his death was confirmed.
Confounded, with memories of Mishima in the past several months rushing through her head “like a kaleidoscope,” Kojima went back to her desk, on the fourth floor. She started examining the manuscript. At 140 pages it was double, triple the usual size. It contained chapters twenty-six to thirty. She started to read. Reading, she heard Mishima’s voice as if each character he had written raised itself from the manuscript to speak to her.
“His decline deliberately proceeded, and his end was quietly being foretold,” read a passage in Chapter 28. Honda Shigekuni is now eighty-one. “Like the hair that pricks the nape of your neck on your way back from a barber, death pricked the nape of Honda’s neck each time he remembered it, though he was oblivious of it when he did not. As he contemplated on how all conditions for welcoming death had ripened by some force, he was mystified that death had not yet visited him.”
“A sign saying ‘27 km to Nara’ caught his eye,” read a passage in Chapter 29. “Time flowed. Every time he saw such a sign, he thought of the phrase, ‘the milestone on the journey to the Netherworld.’” Honda is now on his way to Nara by taxi to visit the Imperial convent Gesshōji where Ayakura Satoko, Matsugae Kiyoaki’s lover six decades ago, is the presiding nun. “It seemed unreasonable for him to take the same road back again. One sign after another loomed on the road, clearly showing him the way to go. . . . 23 km to Nara. Death was pressing on him one kilometer at a time.”18
In the last chapter Honda leaves his taxi and starts to walk the approach to the temple gate, which is of considerable distance. Mishima’s description of his protagonist’s struggle to reach his destination seems to begin to run even more parallel to his own.
Mishima, with the help of four young men, carried out his goal according to plan—almost. The first hitch came with Maj. Sawamoto Taiji, who was serving as Gen. Mashita’s aide to look after his guests, when he checked to see, through a special small transom on one of the double doors to the general’s office, if the guests were ready for tea. He could not see clearly, but something was awry. So he walked over to the operations office across the hall.
Col. Hara Yūichi, director of the office, came out and looked in the transom. He could not see clearly, either, but thought that the general, seated on the sofa opposite the doors, against the balcony, moved oddly. He tried to get in and found the doors locked. He threw his body against them and managed to make a crack. Someone shouted, “Don’t try to come in!” Hara noticed a folded paper on the floor. He took it back to his office and read it. It was a list of demands. Unless all the demands were met, they would kill the general and Mishima would kill himself, it read.
The whole notion was preposterous. Instead of following the demands, the first and foremost of which was assemblage of all troops on the base in front of the main building by 11:30 so Mishima might give a speech, the men on hand decided to rescue the general. That day, in one of the conference rooms on the same floor, a group led by Vice Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. Yamazaki Akira, was deliberating on administrative plans for the next fiscal year, and in another room, a group led by Lt. Col. Nakamura Nobumasa was working on year-end exercise plans.
Lt. Col. Kawabe Haruo led the first group to break in, from the chief of staff ’s office, which, facing the general’s, was to the left. He pushed the door with his back and tumbled in. Mishima swung up his sword and wounded him on the right side of his head and the right cheek. Kawabe shouted, “Stop that!” Mishima shouted back, “Don’t get in my way!” and struck at him. Kawabe raised his arm to block the blow and received a deep cut on it. Sgt. 2nd Class Kasama Juichi sustained three wounds on his right arm, including a broken ulna. Lt. Col. Nakamura jumped in and met Mishima eye-to-eye. He tried to wrest the sword with his left hand as Mishima swung it down, cutting deeply. Nakamura never completely recovered the hand’s function.
After this group was successfully repelled at the door, seven more men broke in from the vice chief of staff ’s office, which was to the right of the general’s. Maj. Gen. Yamazaki first grappled with Morita who had a dagger. Lt. Col. Takahashi Kiyoshi, who had a wooden sword, struck Morita on the right wrist, and Morita dropped his weapon. Mishima saw this and struck at Takahashi who, in blocking the blow with his wooden sword, almost lost his right thumb and received a deep cut on his right forearm. Maj. Terao Katsumi received a long slashing wound on his back and a cut on his right forearm. Col. Kiyono Fujio threw an ashtray with legs at the younger Koga who was guarding Gen. Mashita. Mishima attacked him. Stepping back, Kiyono threw a large globe at him but stumbled and fell. His right upper and lower thighs had a slash and his right shinbone was broken. As the men retreated under Mishima’s menacing sword, Yamazaki received a cut on his back close to his hips.
For all the wounds he inflicted, in the end on eight men, Mishima used his sword in such a way as to minimize the damage, or so Gen. Mashita, who watched what enfolded while gagged and tied, and one of the victims, later testified. Still, Mishima’s Seki no Magoroku was sharp. One stroke down an officer’s back sliced his uniform about twenty inches as with a razor.
It was only after the second group failed that the officers decided to accept Mishima’s demand and told Mishima that. Mishima told them to summon the troops by twelve. It was already 11.35. At 11:40, the assembly order was given through the PA system. At 11:44, Ogawa and Morita came out on the balcony, hung the cloth with the manifesto written on it, and scattered copies of its printed version to the crowd of about eight hundred people who had gathered below. Among them were Date and Tokuoka and other journalists. By then helicopters of the news media were clattering in the sky.
At twelve o’clock Mishima emerged on the balcony with Morita. Both wore a shichishō hōkoku headband. Mishima held a drawn sword, but he handed it to Morita before climbing the parapet to give a speech. Loud jeering and heckling started soon from among about one thousand troops assembled on the double. The noise of the helicopters was dea
fening as they circled back to the place. Yet Tokuoka, taking notes on the ground not far from the parapet, was surprised how loud, clear, and rhythmical Mishima’s voice was. He at once sensed that Mishima had trained not just his body but his throat through kendō and bodybuilding just for this purpose. He was also impressed by the ferocity of the hecklers. The troops’ anger at Mishima having wounded their officers was real.19
In his speech Mishima tried to cover the main points of the manifesto: that unless the SDF effects Constitutional reform, there will be no Constitutional reform, and the SDF will forever remain part of the US military; and that, as it stands now, the SDF is unconstitutional—“all of you are unconstitutional!” Mishima thundered.
Even as he harangued the troops, shouting, pleading, Mishima was obviously concerned about the time; he occasionally checked his wristwatch. Finally, he asked: “Isn’t there anyone among you fellows who will follow me?” The jeering grew ferocious. He then remained silent for a while. Then he said, the last sentence slowly: “All right, I can tell you are not rising up for Constitutional reform. I have lost my dream for the Self-Defense Forces. Well then, I will shout ‘Long Live the Emperor.’” He turned toward the Imperial Palace, to the east-southeast, took a “correct sitting position,” lower legs tucked under the thighs, shouted “Long Live the Emperor” three times, and disappeared from the balcony. It was 12:10.
Mishima ducked back in the general’s office through the window. As he unbuttoned his jacket and stripped naked (he had nothing underneath), he removed his wristwatch and gave it to Ogawa, saying something like “I couldn’t help it” (or “I had no other way to do it”), according to Gen. Mashita. He also said, “I have nothing against you, sir. I did this to return the Self-Defense Forces to the Tennō,” according to the older Koga.