by Hiroaki Sato
21 Letter to Noda, September 2, 1945, Zenshū 38, 756.
22 Letter to Mitani, August 22, 1945, Zenshū 38, 921.
23 Mitani, Kyūyū, 112–14. The word Mishima used for “universalization” is sekaika, not the English-Japanese hybrid gurōbaru-ka that came to dominate the discussions of the world economy in the last part of the twentieth-century. Nor was it “internationalization” or kokusaika that became Japan’s national slogan not long after his death.
24 Letter to Shimizu, May 2, 1944, Zenshū 38, 588–89. “Genjū-an no ki,” Miyamoto Saburō et al., eds., Bashō bunshū (Iwanami Shoten, 1959), 189.
25 Sakamoto Tarō et al., eds. Nihon shoki, ge (Iwanami Shoten, 1965), 181.
26 Nagoya Times interview with Mishima on Suzaku, Zenshū 24, 725–26.
27 “Sengo goroku,” Zenshū 26, 560.
28 “8 gatsu 15 nichi zengo,” Zenshū 28, 526.
29 Shiga Naoya, “Kokugo mondai,” published in the April 1946 issue of Kaizō. The short essay begins by recalling Japan’s first consul to the US Mori Arinori’s famous advocacy of abandoning Japanese in favor of English: Shiga Naoya no Nihongo haishi-ron. It may be read online.
30 Letter to Mitani, October 5, 1945, Zenshū 38, 922–23. Mitani, Kyūyū, 124–27.
31 Among recent books, John Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 123–32, gives the most detailed account of what the Japanese government did. See also Handō Kazutoshi’s Shōwa-shi: sengo-hen, 1945–1980 (Heibonsha, 2009), 19–21. Unaccountably, Rōyama Masamichi practically skips the subject in Yomigaeru Nihon, 40–41. Rōyama’s treatment sharply contrasts with Konishi in Kaikoku to jōi, Nihon no rekishi, vol. 19, 93–96, where he gives a detailed account of the women provided to some of the first Americans, including Consul Townsend Harris.
32 “Shūmatsu-kan kara no shuppatsu—Shōwa 20-nen no jigazō,” Zenshū 28, 516. “Hachigatu jūgonichi zengo,” Zenshū 28, 527. Letter to Shimizu, August 16, 1945, Zenshū 38, 604.
33 “Shūmatsu-kan,” 517. Hiraoka, Segare, 79–80. Kihira, Chichi to ko no Shōwa hishi, 214.
34 Muramatsu, Mishima Yukio no sekai, 134. “Shūmatsu-kan,” 516.
35 Shibai nikki, Zenshū 26, 94–264.
36 The renaming had occurred on September 22. James R. Brandon, “Myth and Reality: A Story of Kabuki during American Censorship, 1945–1949,” Asian Theatre Journal 23.1 (2006), 1–110, footnote 37 (online). Shirō Okamoto, The Man Who Saved Kabuki: Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censorship in Occupied Japan, trans. and adapt. Samuel L. Leiter (Honululu: University of Hawaii, 2001), 66.
37 October 4, Shibai nikki, 180–81.
38 Okamoto, The Man Who Saved Kabuki, 52–54, 149.
39 Ibid., 72. The translation is based on the original interview.
40 Shibai nikki, Zenshū 26, 211.
41 Mitani, Kyūyū, 151.
42 “Gūkan,” Zenshū 36, 548.
43 The official and legal “titles” of the rescript are both long. The text is online, in the National Diet Library website, where the page of the Kanpō (government register) that prints it is shown. It can also be read in such books as Kanda Fuhito and Kobayashi Hideo, eds., Sengo-shi nenpyō: 1945–2005 (Shōgakukan, 2005), 172–73, and Tsurumi Shunsuke and Nakagawa Roppei, eds., Tennō hyakuwa, ge (Chikuma Shobō, 1989), 192–94.
44 George Sansom in The Western World and Japan (New York: Knopf, 1949), 318. “For an important charter of this character the oath is remarkably vague,” Sansom observed, and went on to provide two entirely different translations to discuss it.
45 Ben-Ami Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2005), 205. Henderson, who taught at Columbia University before and after the war, evidently told Wilhelmus Creemers about his role when Creemers was doing research to write his doctoral thesis at Columbia, “State Shinto After World War II: 1945–1965” (1966). Theodore McNelly, “The Role of Monarchy in the Political Modernization of Japan,” Comparative Politics, vol. 1, no. 3. (April 1969), 373–74. Also, Dower, Embracing Defeat, 308–14. Judging from other accounts, such as the one by the then Minister of Education Maeda Tamon, R. H. Blyth played the pivotal conduit’s role. Tsurumi and Nakagawa, Tennō hyakuwa, ge no bu, 192–224. Both Henderson and Blyth would go on to play seminal roles in the understanding of haiku in the United States and elsewhere.
46 George Sansom, A History of Japan to 1334 (London: Cresset Press, 1958), 25–26.
47 Orikuchi Shinobu, “Ōmubematsuri no hongi,” included in Kodai kenkyū, vol. 2 (Chūō Kōron Sha, 2003), 128. The lecture was originally given in 1928. See also “Shintō ni arawareta minzoku ishiki” in the same volume. It was given in the same year.
48 Tsurumi and Nakagawa, Tennō hyakuwa, ge no bu, 644–46.
49 Ōuchi, Fascism e no michi, 378–83. For Ohara and Minobe, see Frank O. Miller, Mitobe Tatsukichi: Interpreter of Constitutionalism in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 220–44. For the Shōwa Emperor’s view and knowledge of the theory of the Tennō as a state organ, see the journalist Takamiya Tahei’s detailed account of the matter, “Tennō kikan-setsu to Heika no senken,” in Handō, Shōwa-shi tansaku: 1926–45, vol. 3, 134–60.
50 Terasaki and Miller, Shōwa Tennō dokuhakuroku, 30–31.
Chapter Seven: To Be a Bureaucrat or a Writer
1 The Japanese word taidan will be retained throughout this book. One of Mishima’s early editors explained why taidan (dialogues) and zadankai (group discussions) are popular in Japan: they elicit multifaceted opinions on a single topic; elicit honest opinions coming out unexpectedly; produce unexpected results from a combination of participants and topics; are easy for the reader; and impose less burden on the writer’s time and energy and less financial burden on the publisher than the solicited manuscript. Kimura Tokuzō, Bungei henshūsha: sono kyō’on (TBS Britannica, 1982), 212–13.
2 “Taidan: Ningen to bungaku,” Zenshū 40, 73–74. This taidan was conducted in July 1967. Here the minus figure given is “120.”
3 Yoshida Nagahiro, “Mishima Yukio shoki sakuhin no mondai,” Toshokan Forum, No. 5, 2000. Can be found online (with Japanese encoding) at http://web.lib.kansai-u.ac.jp/library/about/lib_pub/forum/2000_vol5/2000_5_3.pdf (accessed on July 11, 2012).
4 “Watashi no henreki jidai,” 283.
5 Kojima Chikako, Mishima Yukio to Dan Kazuo (Kōsōsha, 1989), 49–50. Letter of January 9, 1946, also quoted in Andō, “Nichiroku,” 86–87. Not in Zenshū 38.
6 “Watashi no henreki jidai,” Zenshū 32, 283–84.
7 Kawabata wrote the fictionalized account twice, first in five installments, from August 1942 to April 1947, and second, in four installments, from August 1951 to May 1954. Seidensticker translated the book as The Master of Go.
8 “Kawabata Yasunari inshōki,” Zenshū 26, 563–66. Letter to Noda Utarō, Zenshū 38, 761.
9 Kawabata Hideko, Kawabata Yasunari to tomo ni (Shinchōsha, 1983), 187–89.
10 For “Yokohama jiken” and attendant torture, see Hōsei University’s website, Chapter 6 of “Taiheiyō sensō-ka no rōdō undō.”
11 Kon Hidemi later included the essay in Sanchū hōrō (Chūō Kōron Sha, 1979; originally 1954). See “Satomura-kun no koto,” 109–25. Kon was lucky enough to escape Luzon, through Taiwan, back to Japan, but up to 80 percent of the Japanese soldiers and others were killed or died during the Battle of Luzon which, on the Japanese side, largely consisted of escaping enemy pursuers who relied on bombardments, bombings, and strafing. Unless Kon revised the piece later, the word that irked the American censors was not tekigun, “enemy military,” as Kimura wrote, but tekki, “enemy aircraft.”
12 During the London Conference to determine the legal rules for the tribunals, the Soviet delegate I. T. Nikitchenko put it most bluntly: “a person who had not acted on the part of the European Axis powers would not have committed a crime.” Richard Minear, Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Pr
inceton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 93. As a result, the war crimes of the victorious nations were not considered. As US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote, agreeing with Justice Radhabinod Pal, one of the eleven judges of the Tokyo Military Tribunal, the Tokyo Trial “did not . . . sit as a judicial tribunal. It was solely an instrument of political power” (ibid., 66). Or as the layperson Elizabeth Gray Vining, the English tutor to the then Crown Prince Akihito, put it simply, the whole setup was a legal sham. She asked: “Could a court be impartial and justice be served, when the judges were also the prosecution and the outcome of the trial was known from the beginning? Under ordinary circumstances would we consider a trial fair in which the judge and jury were friends and relatives of the murdered man?” Vining, Windows for the Crown Prince, 169.
13 Kimura, Bungei henshūsha, 203, 217–18, 238–42.
14 “Watashi no henreki jidai,” Zenshū 32, 284–87.
15 Letter to Kimura, May 4, 1946, Zenshū 38, 486.
16 Kimura, Bungei henshūsha, 136–61.
17 The legendary Sassa Narimasa (d. 1616 or 1639). Kihira, Chichi to ko no Shōwa hishi, 10–11.
18 “Dance jidai,” Zenshū 27, 205–7.
19 In his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass says the same thing happened in Germany.
20 Itasaka, Kyokusetsu: Mishima Yukio, 25–31.
21 Sassa Teiko, “Mishima Yukio no tegami,” an eighteen-part serialization in the weekly Asahi, from December 13, 1974, to April 11, 1975. The description of “an incident” appears in the January 31, 1975 installment; letter on Mitani Kuniko quoted in the December 27, 1974 installment.
22 Sassa Teiko, “Mishima Yukio no tegami,” February 28, 1975 installment.
23 Kihira, Chichi to ko no Shōwa hishi, 245. Sassa Teiko became Kihira Teiko on marriage.
24 Ibid., 164.
25 “Kaidai,” Zenshū 1, 680–81. The passage in Confessions occurs on 346–47.
26 Meredith Weatherby, trans., Confessions of a Mask (New York: New Directions, 1958), 233–35.
27 Kaikei nikki, Hokan, 522–23.
28 Minear, Victors’ Justice, 6.
29 “Waga aisuru hitobito e no hatashijō,” Zenshū 26, 631–33.
30 Inose Naoki, Picaresque: Dazai Osamu (Shōgakukan, 2002), 16, 376–67. Dan Kazuo thought that the word shayō came from the last line of the kanshi Gen. Nogi Maresuke wrote during the Russo-Japanese War: Kinshū jōgai shayō ni tatsu, “Outside the Jinzhou Castle I stand in the setting sun.” Dan Kazuo, Shōsetsu: Dazai Osamu (Iwanami Shoten, 2000), 219–20. Because the word shayō also means (as a homophone) “at the company expense,” it became a fad word as part of shayō-zoku, meaning those employees who made payments on the pretext that what they did was for the company.
31 Watashi no henreki jidai, Zenshū 32, 286–90.
32 Shōsetuka no kyūka, Zenshū 28, 562.
33 Kaikei nikki, Hokan, 538. As for the serialization of Shayō, see the chronology in Dazai Osamu, Ningen shikkaku, Ōtō (Kadokawa Shoten, 1989), 163.
34 Yashiro, Kishu-tachi no seishun, 39–44.
35 Etsugu, Mishima Yukio bungaku no kiseki, 151–72. Etsugu’s review includes some of the comments on Mishima’s assault on Dazai in the “diary” as well as a list of the participants and an interview with some of them.
36 Phyllis Lyons, The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 1.
37 “Kaidai,” Zenshū 16, 757, 760–61.
38 “Hayashi Fusao ron,” Zenshū 32, 338.
39 Letter to Hayashi, November 6, 1947, Zenshū 38, 780.
40 Kaikei nikki, Hokan, 623, 630.
41 “Musuko no bunsai,” etc., Zenshū 39, 132.
42 Kimura, Bungei henshūsha, 148–50.
43 Letter to Kimura, July 24, 1946, Zenshū 38, 487–88.
44 Henry Scott-Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 18–19.
45 Hiraoka, Segare, 83, 97. Zenshū 39, 133.
Chapter Eight: Confessions
1 Kawabata’s letter of October 30, 1948, Ōfuku shokan, 58.
2 Letter to Sakamoto, November 2, 1943, Zenshū 38, 507.
3 “Je suis la plaie et le couteau! / Je suis le soufflet et la joue! / Je suis les membres et la roue, /Et la victime et le bourreau!” The English translation is by Michael O’Brien.
4 Letter to Kawabata, March 3, 1946, Zenshū 38, 242–46. Also, Zenshū 1, 664–65.
5 “Watashi no henreki jidai,” Zenshū 32, 286–91.
6 Aeba Takao’s appraisal quoted in Etsugu, Mishima Yukio bungaku no kiseki, 143–44.
7 Some have suggested that the day Yoshida Shōin was beheaded, 27th of Tenth Month, of the 6th year of Ansei, falls on November 25, 1859, by the solar calendar. See Hiraoka, Segare, 11–12. In truth, that day seems to fall on November 21. Another speculation has it that November 25 is 49 days before Mishima’s birthday, January 14, and that, therefore, he intended to be reborn on his birthday according to the Buddhist idea of transmigration and rebirth that was the theme of his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Forty-nine days is what is needed for rebirth. Nakamura Akihiko, Resshi to yobareru otoko: Morita Masakatsu (Bungei Shunjū, 2003), 261.
8 The German words mean: “the curious sexual life of a man” / “the curious” / “high-strung/ curious/ strange / the eccentric / unusual sexual life of a man.” Courtesy of Doris Bargen.
9 “Kaidai,” Zenshū 1, 677.
10 “Kaidai,” Zenshū 1, 673.
11 Inose Naoki, Magazine seishun-fu: Kawabata Yasunari to Ōya Sōichi (Shōgakukan, 2002), 113.
12 Kawabata Yasunari, Kawabata Yasunari zenshū hokan 1: Nikki, techō, note (Shinchōsha, 1984), 445, 458. Sasakawa Takahira, Kawabata Yasunari: Ōsaka Ibaraki jidai to seishun shukan-shū (Izumi Shoin, 1991), 111–12.
13 Hatori Tetsuya, Sakka no jiden 15: Kawabata Yasunari (Nihon Tosho Center, 2002), 57–76, 311–12. Shōnen included in this volume consists of excerpts.
14 Jinzai Kiyoshi, “Kamen no kokuhaku hyō,” Mishima Yukio senshū, vol. 4 (Shinchōsha, 1958), 203–6.
15 Maeda Akira’s “Kaidai,” Tayama Katai, Futon, Ippeisotsu (Iwanami Shoten, 2002; originally 1930), 140.
16 Hanada Kiyoteru, “Sei-Sebastian no kao,” Gunzō special Nihon no sakka 18: Mishima Yukio, 110–17.
17 Shindō Ryōko, Shindō Ryōko shishū (Shichōsha, 1989), 124.
18 Kimura, Bungei henshūsha, 150.
19 Letter to Shikiba, July 19, 1949. Zenshū 38, 513–14. Also, Zenshū 1, 678–79. Ellis has Sexual Inversion and Love and Marriage.
20 Mochizuki Mamoru, Sei to seikatsu (Shisōsha, 1949), 177–79.
21 Lionel Trilling, Liberal Imagination (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1950), 232.
22 Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexual Anomalies: The Origins, Nature, and Treatment of Sexual Disorders (White Plains, NY: Emerson Books, 1956), 199–200, and the Publishers’ Note. This summary in English does not give the editor’s name.
23 Norman Davies, Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 876–77.
24 Muramatsu, Mishima Yukio no sekai, 12 and 162–64.
25 Scott-Stokes, Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, 6–7.
26 Muramatsu, Mishima Yukio no sekai, 96.
27 “Tōzoku sōsaku note,” Zenshū 1, 611. “Kaidai,” 661–64.
28 Letter to Ninagawa quoted in Andō, “Nichiroku,” 120. The letter is not included in Zenshū 38.
29 The Mishima editor Tanaka Miyoko noted that the name Matsugae Kiyoaki and the title of the novel of which he is the protagonist come from a twelfth-century song Mishima cited at age eighteen in an essay on the celebratory aspect of classical Japanese poetry. The second half of the song, as Mishima copied it, reads: Matsugae kazashi ni sashitsureba / haru no yuki koso furikakare, “When I dress my hair with a pine twig / it is the spring snow that flutters down on me.” Tanaka Miyoko, Mishima Yukio: Kami no kagebōshi (Shinchōsha, 2006), 29–30. Mishima, “Kotohogi,” Zenshū 26,
362. However, Mishima is likely to have made an error in copying the song; in the original, matsugae, “pine twig,” appears as umegae, “plum twig.” Kawaguchi Hisao and Shida Nobuyoshi, eds., Wakan rōei shū, Ryōjin hishō (Iwanami Shoten, 1976), 464, 472. The possibility that Mishima used a text with a variant cannot be ruled out, but the context suggests umegae is correct. Courtesy of Kyoko Selden.
30 Muramatsu, Mishima Yukio no sekai, 109–11.
31 Hiraoka, Segare, 227–28.
32 Muramatsu Eiko, “Saigo no enshutsu,” geppō to Zenshū 26, 1–2.
33 Shindō Ryōko recalls being unsettled watching Mishima looking at the staging of another play of his. When she expressed puzzlement after the curtain, he had a perfectly legitimate reason for his reactions. Shishū, 123–24.
34 Romano Vulpitta’s afterword is to the 1996 paperback edition of Muramatsu Takeshi’s Mishima Yukio no sekai, 593.
35 Muramatsu’s own afterword, ibid., 581.
36 Muramatsu Takeshi, Shi no Nihon bungaku-shi (Kadokawa Shoten, 1981), 335 and the afterword.
37 Haniya Yutaka, “Mishima Yukio,” Gunzō special Nihon no sakka 18: Mishima Yukio, 75. Mishima’s letter to Haniya in October 1949, Hokan, 230–31.
38 The Yomiuri interview, on December 9, 1949, “Nichibei gassaku no shinzen opera,” Hokan, 140–41.
39 Herbert Passin, Encounter with Japan (Kodansha International, 1982), 183.
40 Letter to Kimura, December 16, 1949, Zenshū 38, 490–91.
41 “Dan Kazuo Hanagatami,” Zenshū 26, 433–36.
42 Letter to Dan, December 16, 1949, Zenshū 38, 689–91.
43 Dan Kazuo, Shōsetsu: Dazai Osamu, 2–4. Dan’s “novel” is a description of the author’s association with Dazai Osamu, but Dan categorized it as a novel, rather than a biography, because it was one person’s account and did not contain much objective, third-party material.
Chapter Nine: Boyfriends, Girlfriends