Five Modern Japanese Novelists

by Donald Keene

yo ni mo hito ni mo The message that to fall before

  sakigakete The world and before men

  chiru koso hana to By whom falling is dreaded

  fuku sayo arashi Is the mark of a flower.

  This tanka is a pastiche of the language and imagery of the jisei poems composed by innumerable Japanese soldiers before their death. By “to fall,” Mishima of course meant to die. Although other people dreaded the thought of death, by dying Mishima could prove he was a flower among men; the samurai, ready always to give up his life, is like the cherry blossoms, the quickest flower to fall.

  Mishima composed another tanka earlier that year, in July, and this too served as a jisei:

  masurao ga For how many years

  tabasamu tachi no Has the warrior endured

  saya nari ni The rattling of

  iku tose taete The sword he wears at his side:

  kyō no hatsushimo The first fall of frost came today.

  It is not clear what Mishima meant by “first frost” (hatsushimo), but the term was peculiar in a poem composed in July. Perhaps he anticipated, even four months earlier, his death in November when white frost would cover the ground.

  These two tanka were the last he composed. They also were the first he had composed since 1942, when he was seventeen years old. For twenty-eight years he had not felt impelled to use the classic Japanese verse form as a medium to express his emotions, but he was determined to play to the full the role of the dying samurai, and one of the elements of that role was the farewell verse to the world. Because jisei were also composed by people who died of old age or from the complications of a bad cold, it is often difficult to tell from the poem alone the circumstances of the poet’s death, but Mishima’s jisei are somehow ominous. He tells us that up to now he has deliberately ignored the rattling of his broadsword, striving to suppress his anger, but his patience is exhausted, and he will let the sword have its own way.

  It was probably shortly after composing his final jisei that Mishima wrote farewell letters to three old friends, including Ivan Morris and myself. The opening sentence of the one I received was “When you read these words I shall be dead.” Then, as if to lighten the mood created by this declaration, he recalled that I had often written his name not with the normal characters for Mishima Yukio but with facetiously chosen inauspicious characters that meant something like “Not yet dead demon, dim devil tail.” I had done this by way of “revenge” for the funny characters he used when writing my name. Now my joke had acquired sinister overtones, as if I had been expecting his death all along. It was strange that Mishima recalled this bit of mischief on my part in what he knew would be his last letter to me, but this recollection may have seemed appropriate to the final actions of a samurai. In the letter he said that he had long wanted to die not as a writer but as a military man.

  There was one thing in that letter (and also in the letter sent to Ivan Morris) that was definitely not in accordance with his chosen role. He had heard that American publishers were unwilling to publish works by dead foreign authors. This was not true, but somehow he had convinced himself of it, and he asked Ivan and me to do everything we could to ensure the publication of the translation of his final tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. But why should a man, about to commit suicide in a most spectacular manner and resolved to die as a military man rather than as a writer, have cared whether or not his books were published in foreign translation? Obviously, he could never die only as a samurai; literature was too much a part of his makeup to be rejected.

  Mishima’s first major novel, Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no kokuhaku), published in 1949 when he was twenty-four, tells how he felt compelled to wear a mask before others. At first the mask may have put on by way of self-protection, as was true of Dazai Osamu, a novelist for whom Mishima always professed intense dislike. Dazai wrote that early in life he discovered how different he was from the people surrounding him and that the only way he could protect himself from the others was to wear a mask and pretend to be like them. His mask covered a face that probably wore an expression of self-pity. Mishima put on his mask for quite different reasons. His efforts were always directed not at concealing his real expression from the gaze of other people but at making his face into the mask he had chosen. He used the mask to subdue the sensitivity, timidity, and self-pity that Dazai carefully preserved behind his. Mishima was able to make the mask a living part of his flesh, and he died with it firmly in place. In the end, he may not even have been aware that he wore a mask, so much had its attitudes and his own coalesced.

  One element shared by the mask—the simple, unaffected man of action—and Mishima the writer was the belief in the beauty of early death. As a high-school student at the Peers’ School, Mishima was attracted especially to the novels and personality of Raymond Radiguet, the brilliant French author who died in 1923 at the age of twenty. Mishima remained fascinated with youth, and especially with youthful death, throughout his career as a writer. Unlike Doctor Faustus, who craved youth only after he had become old, Mishima yearned for youth even while he was still quite young—not eternal youth, but youth that ended with the dramatic suddenness of the fall of a cherry blossom. In 1966, when he was forty-one, he wrote, “Among my incurable convictions is the belief that the old are eternally ugly, the young eternally beautiful. The wisdom of the old is eternally murky, the actions of the young eternally transparent. The longer people live, the worse they become. Human life, in other words, is an upside-down process of decline and fall.”

  I cannot prove that Mishima was influenced by the fourteenth-century Buddhist priest Yoshida Kenkō, but their expression is strikingly similar. Kenkō wrote in Essays in Idleness (Tsurezure-gusa),

  We cannot live forever in this world; why should we wait for ugliness to overtake us? The longer man lives, the more shame he endures. To die, at the latest, before one reaches forty, is the least unattractive. Once a man passes that age, he desires (with no sense of shame over his appearance) to mingle in the company of others. In his sunset years he dotes on his grandchildren and prays for long life so that he may see them prosper. His preoccupation with worldly desires grows ever deeper, and gradually he loses all sensitivity to the beauty of things, a lamentable state of affairs.

  Kenkō, whose influence on the development of Japanese aesthetics was enormous, insisted on the importance of the perishability of things. Even Japanese who have never read Essays in Idleness can empathize with this belief, as we know from the special Japanese fondness for cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms are lovely, it is true, but not so lovely as to eclipse totally the beauty of plum blossoms or peach blossoms. Even so, the Japanese plant cherry trees everywhere, even in parts of the country whose climate does not favor them, and they pay scant attention to plum or peach blossoms. Perhaps the greatest attraction of the cherry blossoms is not so much their intrinsic beauty as their perishability. Plum blossoms remain on the boughs for almost a month, and other fruit trees bear blossoms that last a week, but the cherry blossoms fall after a brief three days. Moreover, the Japanese cherry trees (unlike plum or peach trees) do not bear edible fruit; the Japanese plant these trees solely for their three days of glory.

  I wonder if Mishima’s often repeated insistence on the beauty of early death had similar origins. At the commemorative funeral service on the first anniversary of Mishima’s death, the distinguished critic Yamamoto Kenkichi asked why Mishima had not taken to heart the writings of the great playwright of nō, Zeami, who had described the different “flower” appropriate to each stage of a man’s life. Yamamoto was sure that if Mishima had not killed himself at the age of forty-five, his art would have blossomed in later life in ways not possible in a young man and that these works of his maturity would have added to the luster of his oeuvre. I doubt that Mishima would have agreed. Each sign of approaching old age—whether short-windedness when he raced around a track or even the realization that his tastes in food had changed and he now preferred traditional Japanese dishes—stirred in
him regret that he had not been able to die young.

  Mishima was given the perfect opportunity to die young during the war. He was called up for an army physical examination. He decided, apparently on the advice of his father, to undergo this examination in what was technically his permanent domicile, the family’s ancestral home in Hiroshima Prefecture. In Tokyo, where he was born and had lived all his life, his undernourished physique would have passed unnoticed, but in Hiroshima, among the strapping young men from the farms, he would have looked frail to the point of debility. In addition, he happened to have a cold on the day of the examination, and when the inexperienced young doctor asked if he always had a fever and coughed so much, he nodded gravely. His cold was diagnosed as pleurisy, and he was sent home the same day, to his joy and relief. Some recent Japanese critics have interpreted Mishima’s fascination with the military and with early death as a response to the humiliation he experienced at failing his medical test. I doubt this; if he had wished to be accepted for military service, all he would have had to do was to answer the doctor truthfully. But I think it quite likely that in his forties, he felt he had missed something by not having served in the army. He received permission to undergo training with the Self-Defense Force, and he clearly enjoyed the fraternal companionship. Surrounded by men half his age, Mishima shared their jokes and ate the same terrible food. If he felt any guilt over his wartime experiences, it was not because he had failed his medical test but because he had failed to die. The unit that he would have entered if he had passed the medical examination was not long afterward massacred in the Philippines.

  The narrator of Confessions of a Mask exults in the thought of an early death, imagining that his scrawny, unattractive body will somehow, miraculously, attain the glory of the martyred St. Sebastian. I asked Mishima once if the schoolboy compositions included in Confessions of a Mask (including a prose poem on St. Sebastian) were actually written when he was a middle-school student, and he said they were; his fascination with the beautiful young man who dies transfixed by arrows began early. The narrator of the novel states that his first ejaculation was occasioned while looking at a reproduction of Guido Reni’s painting of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Mishima touched on the death of St. Sebastian in his later works as well, although sometimes he referred instead to the similar instance of Adonis, the young god whose blood must be shed. This theme is particularly prominent in his works of the 1960s.

  The heroes of Mishima’s works are often men who die young or dream of a youthful death. The narrator of Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Ivan Morris’s translation) is a high-school student who yearns to perish together with the Kinkaku, a building he adores, in the wartime destruction of Japan. When the building escapes unscathed from the war, he has no choice but to destroy it himself, still with the hope of dying with it. The hero of Runaway Horses (Homba), a boy of the same age, is so enraged by the spiritual corruption of Japan that he kills a politician, an emblematic figure of all he detests, before turning his knife on himself. In the novel Gogo no eikō, translated as The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, a sailor falls from grace with some boys who worshiped him because of his reluctance to die young in the manner of a true hero; they therefore preserve his glory by killing him.

  Death and love were intertwined in Mishima’s imagination. In 1961 he published Patriotism (Yūkoku), the first of several novellas and plays devoted to the ideals of the young officers or the 1960s. Mishima was fascinated by the unselfish idealism of these men who eagerly laid down their lives for the emperor. Patriotism is set at the time of the abortive coup of February 26, 1936. Lieutenant Takeyama, the hero, was not included in the coup because his friends were reluctant to involve a newly married man in a suicidal endeavor. But he resents having been excluded and decides he must kill himself in order to prove that he was no less ready than they to die for the emperor. His bride, aware of what it means to be the wife of a military man, does not attempt to dissuade him. Then, after he has committed seppuku, she plunges a dagger into her throat. Mishima did not intend their suicides to seem either pathetic or horrifying; on the contrary, he felt that Lieutenant Takeyama and his bride had achieved the greatest joy in life. Just before they kill themselves, they make love with the ardor of newlyweds and with delight in each other’s bodies. They die, still young and beautiful, still deeply in love and absolutely secure in their beliefs. Mishima himself took the part of Lieutenant Takeyama when the work was made into a film. The music played throughout was the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde.

  It was essential to Mishima’s story that Lieutenant Takeyama kill himself by committing seppuku, the ritual disembowelment. Obviously, an overdose of sleeping pills or a leap from the roof of a building would not have made a satisfactory ending to the story. But this seppuku did not have the usual sense of proving, by exposing one’s entrails, that one is free of any taint of guilt, nor was it a punishment imposed from above on a samurai who had disobeyed an order. Nor was Lieutenant Takeyama following his master—the emperor—in death. It was not even a gesture of remonstrance, urging the government to return to the path of virtue. It was a love-death, the exaltation of the lovers leading to the supreme moment when love and death are one.

  The form of the deaths was traditional, just as the thinking of both Lieutenant Takeyama and his bride was traditional. Lieutenant Takeyama would have been ready to die for the emperor on the battlefield without an instant of hesitation or uncertainty. His bride was a traditional Japanese wife, mild and gentle, who did not question her husband’s decision but who had the strength of purpose to drive a dagger into her throat. This was the Japan that fascinated Mishima, the Japan that formed the foundation of his aesthetic.

  In 1967 Mishima published Introduction to Hagakure (Hagakure nyūmon). Hagakure is a book of reflections, completed in 1716, by a samurai named Yamamoto Tsunetomo. The work opens with a famous statement: Bushidō to iu wa, shinu koto to mitsuketari. A free translation would be “Bushidō—the way of the warrior—consists in discovering when to die.” Mishima said of this work that it was the matrix of his entire literary production and the source of his vitality as a writer. This was surely an overstatement, but we know that he read Hagakure during the war years and that its ideals—those of the samurai—never left him, even when he shirked military duty.

  Mishima’s emperor-worship, probably the most controversial aspect of his thought, seems to have stemmed from the same source. His emperor-worship was not directed at Hirohito, the reigning emperor throughout Mishima’s life. He even would mimic the emperor at a garden party, saying Aa, sō in response to every word he heard. In Mishima’s story “The Voices of the Heroic Dead” (Eirei no koe), the ghosts of the leaders of the February 26 incident and the kamikaze pilots of 1945 bitterly reproach the emperor for having betrayed them by declaring that he was not a god. Those who died in the name of the emperor knew, of course, that he was a human being with ordinary human weaknesses, but they were sure that in his capacity as emperor, he was a god. If he had supported the young officers who participated in the February 26 incident and especially if he had ordered them to commit suicide, he would have behaved like a god and not like a mere ruler surrounded by aged and corrupt politicians. When the emperor declared that he was not a god less than a year after the kamikaze pilots had joyfully died with his name on their lips, he made their sacrifice a pitiable, meaningless gesture.

  Mishima once declared that he believed in the infallibility of the emperor. This, of course, did not refer to the emperor in his human capacities, any more than a belief in papal infallibility implies unconditional acceptance of the pope’s views on modern art. Rather, in his capacity as a god, the emperor is the incarnation of Japanese tradition, the unique repository of the experience of the Japanese people. To protect the emperor was, for Mishima, to protect Japan itself. It would be a mistake to identify these political views with the Japanese right wing. Especially in his novel Runaway Horses, Mishima demonstrated his
awareness of the sinister motives of professional supporters of right-wing causes. He was sure that only the purity of the young, the readiness of the young to die for their beliefs, could save Japanese culture from disintegration under the double threat of greed—the merciless hacking away of Japan’s landscapes—and Westernization—the superficial adoption of foreign things and manners because they are foreign.

  Mishima’s love of tradition developed into an unchanging element in his aesthetics. His insistence on tradition accounts for his retention of the traditional orthography, although almost every other writer of his generation adopted the spelling reforms promulgated after the end of the war in 1945. He had nothing but scorn for writers (like Dazai) who could not write the language appropriate to the upper classes. He had a very clear idea of what traditional etiquette involved and did not readily forgive anyone who transgressed. But perhaps the respect in which he differed most conspicuously from other writers of his generation was his knowledge of Japanese classical literature and his use of this literature in his own works.

  It is recorded that Abe Kōbō, when asked what traditional Japanese literature had contributed to his writings, responded, “Nothing.” Perhaps he was joking or was hoping merely to surprise his interlocutor. Mishima might have answered, “Everything,” although that too would have been misleading. All the same, he thought of himself as a classical writer and again and again turned to the classics of both Japan and the West for inspiration or at least a sounding board on which to test his own ideas. The most obvious of his borrowings from Japanese classical literature are his modern nō plays in which he borrowed the themes of fifteenth-century plays, though he set them in contemporary Japan—in a couturier’s establishment, a law firm, a psychoanalyst’s office, and so on. Implicit in these borrowings was the belief that the themes treated in the old plays still had relevance today, as well as his belief that the freedom with which the nō playwright used time and space could enrich the modern stage. He also wrote plays based on the Greek tragedies; his respect for Japanese tradition did not imply a rejection of non-Japanese traditions.