The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  2 january 1965. Mary tells me that when I try to impress I lose my natural manners, I revert to my Ohio accent; I do not act according to what I know now but what I thought I knew then. So, tonight, guests here, I try not to impress; I listen rather than talk. Apparently it sits well upon me. Apparently this is me.

  But also I miss something. I miss the bad manners; I miss the thrust. I want to be attractive, I want to be liked, and so I will keep on trying. Something new will come out. Right now, however, I feel that something is missing.

  3 january 1965. An endless Sunday. All Sundays are endless. It was on Sundays that my mother and father always had their exhibitions, put on their displays for the children, for the neighbors. Now that I am married I find an all too natural disposition for pain on Sunday.

  I think of Gide and his Emmanuelle. The parallel is not precise. I do not have Gide’s rigor; Mary does not have Emmanuelle’s selfishness. A closer parallel might be with Lincoln [Kirstein] and Fidelma [Cadmus Kirstein]. But, no—theirs is more the André-Emmanuelle relationship. Mary and I are different.

  Poor Mary. She married someone she loved and then she never saw him again. I am quite different with her. It is wrong of me, and yet it is wrong of her too. It takes two to fight—even though (alas) we never fight.

  This is our last Sunday. We have had about two hundred of them. More, because some of the weekdays were Sundays, too. Now that she is going, she allows herself criticism, complaint. At once the air clears. Why didn’t she before? Why didn’t I?

  4 january 1965. I keep turning my marriage over and over in my hands, looking at it, trying to see what shape it is, pushing things here and there: why didn’t it work? What went wrong with the mechanism? It is a certainly a very odd shape—corners where one doesn’t expect them, hidden drawers, concealed buttons.

  Mary does the same. But she handles it differently. She asks it questions. What does it want? That is the question she asks it most often. Silly question. As though it could answer. So there, with our hands full, we part.

  She left today. Now she is gone. She had tears in her eyes, I in mine. Oh, what is it, what is it? We cannot live with each other; we cannot live without each other.

  Now I have returned to the house. It is a different place now. Quiet. I like it—so still, all mine. I call her name. Silence. Sadness at this but pleasure, too. These qualities are not antithetical. Maybe all emotions must be double, like this. Love and hate? This is what all couples must feel, must learn to live with if they are to stay together. We couldn’t.

  7 january 1965. I find Mary’s journal—accidentally left behind, just like in a Japanese novel. Entries beginning as late as November—after our wedding anniversary.

  That I should brood because he was angry with me for being late, that I should be depressed all throughout dinner remembering similar incidents. Why is he always angry with me before others for lateness or other lapses? To seem to dominate, to disassociate himself from me? To express, as he dares not, as I dare not privately, a resentment?

  I (blamed? scolded? can’t make it out) him for triumphing in trivial accomplishments (the two-minute film, the great journey he was starting). Of course I was severe and very harsh and unfeeling, so that when he blew his nose in bed I thought maybe he was crying and I felt regret. I harden my heart against him so easily. Why? Blaming him. Disassociating myself, I guess, as he has himself.

  Then this morning he wanted me to kiss him goodbye and I kissed him only on the cheek, and again at the door he wanted to be kissed, and again I kissed only his cheek. And when he had gone I cried, and felt lonely and unwanted and ugly.

  Then she draws a shrewd portrait of me:

  Donald, I must admit he is intelligent, quick, gifted by nature, and very affectionate, but ruined as a boy and so afraid of affection, easily unsure, so amused by the trivial, or is it that only the topical and prankish seems to him “interesting”—he wants to see authority flouted because authority threatens him, wanting so to be loved, and is so afraid of love, a boyish loving, a suspicious, retrospective (destructive?) side—severe with himself and yet unable to go forward, very liberal in theory, in practice needs an unchanging child’s world, which, like a growing child, he must (flaunt?) and escape often; home must be rigid order, emotion all in place. Thus he can say that I can have other men, but at any such talk he turns hypochondriac. For me this order without warmth and passion and support, is terribly hard. I am a threat to him; I won’t keep my place.

  An honest picture, well observed, a good likeness, but there is one thing left out. She thinks that this me exists apart from her. She does not know that it is she who built this me. I tell her it is OK to go with men (as though she needed me to tell her that), and when she does I become childish and get ill. Well, so be it. What she wants is either a firmly permissive yes or an equally strict no. Of course, it is because she doesn’t really want things that way. She wants a lover as a husband, and a husband as a lover, and I just wonder if she’ll ever find that. Isn’t her problem with me her problem with life?

  Nakano Yuji, 1965. cbs

  She knows this: “To accept that one might be loved, that makes me feel so vulnerable. I am so afraid of admitting my vulnerability, so I give love as an attack. To feel fulfilled in loving what is less than one, to love what is more than one, would this be unpleasant?”

  No, it would not be. And in fact, that is love—not this evenly matched boxing match. After all, we are very much alike although she would never admit to being afraid of love, as I do. She is terrified of it and the above is the closest I have ever seen her coming to admit it. We are twins. That is why our marriage won’t work.

  She wanted to know what went wrong. I don’t know but I do have some historical anecdotes, some little tableaux from our mutual past that indicate to me several of the turnings on the wrong way:

  First, the honeymoon. I prattled on and she knew it would not work. But what kept her silent—until recently—and what kept her at it? Simply: I’m not going to let him win in this, I’m not going to let this get me down; I’m going to see it through. A dandy way to begin a marriage.

  Next, the famous day she caught me trying to take Zushiden away on a trip and leaving her behind. She knew before I went. But again her pride kept her silent—until I returned. She hadn’t been long in finding out that I was very unsure, as she notes, of my love life with boys. She turned it into a game that we two could make fun of.

  Then, sex itself, or the lack of it. What she says of my fears, of my terrors, this is quite true. But she didn’t want to rape me. She didn’t want me that way. She never saw that that was the only way—at first. After that I might have proceeded on my own steam.

  I’m a type who must be raped in order to get it up. That, at least, is my slender heterosexual history—LaVerne, chanteuse in New Orleans, then my female philosophy teacher at school, then others, then Marian—strong women all, they knew what they wanted, saw it, took it: and I lay back. Whether she liked it or not, Mary I thought knew this, but now I wonder.

  Still, she knew part of my sexual history almost as well as I did. She knew what was likely to have an effect and what not. She must have remembered my trust when on our honeymoon in Athens. I was confident that somehow Perikles [Stamous] would help and we would be loving friends all three—or even in Tokyo, when I wanted Zushiden right in there.

  I look at myself incredulously. Did I really expect her to understand? Yes, because she proposed to me only after she had heard all the details. But I forgot that to merely know about something is very different from having to learn it, again and again, day after day, having to live with it. This was her lot with me.

  8 january 1965. [Nakano] Yuji comes to stay for a few days before going to Osaka. Delighted to find himself in novel surroundings, he shows what a good boy he is by doing the dishes while we are still eating off them.

  A real proletariat barbarian. Cannot bring him to a necktie, cannot make him hang up his clothes—no, he folds them
and wrinkles them because he has always folded and wrinkled. Cannot make him use soap and hot water on the dishes because he has never had soap or hot water. Finds his ideal of luxury when he discovers that I have liquor in the house. Imagine that, a whole bottle right in the kitchen; and he always thought people only went out to drink.

  9 january 1965. Yuji has been so battered, so bruised by life. First reform school at sixteen; then life in Sanya and selling his blood to make a living; then selling his spirit to Soka Gakkai (and taking it back)—and yet all of this having his face rubbed into the grime of life’s backside has not ruined him. He tries, continues to try, though he has so far seen only failure. He picks himself up, starts all over again. “I’m not smart,” he says. This is true. “I’m bad,” he adds. This is not.

  I fear that at the last moment his new job in Osaka will just seem too good to be true, or that he will doubt, or that he will disappear. I will breathe more easily when he is put onto the train. [Richie had gotten his friend Tani to give Nakano a construction job.]

  10 january 1965. I breathe more easily. Took him down and put him on the super-express with his suitcase, so small, weighing so little, all he owns in the world packed into one square foot. He waves, is pulled from sight.

  I will miss him. My doctor [Anne Kaemmerer; Richie had been in analysis, off and on, for several years], upon hearing of my satisfaction at having finally found him a job, says that it must mean I am ready finally to help (though for years I always said that I was helping, yet never once succeeded in getting anyone a job)—well, that’s so, I guess.

  11 january 1965. Dr. K. also says, “What I have never been able to understand about you is your ambitions, your goals, what you want to do, what you want to be—how strong they are and where they are leading you; whether they are indeed you, or whether they are indeed not.”

  I answer that this is the process of living, isn’t it? That I will find this out as I live it. Yes, that is so, but how much then of this do I already know and how much is hidden from me?

  12 january 1965. To supper at Meredith’s. I have known him for over fifteen years now and have watched him change. Tall, courtly in the Texas manner, he collected prints, traditional Japanese carpenter’s tools, and cultivated a gentrified air—vests, a dog, eventually a cane which was not needed. He knew Japanese, had translated a Noh play already, and would go on to translate Mishima, and found a publishing house, Weatherhill.

  He also was a fine stylist and was concerned about mine. Much of what I acquired I learned from him. Once he gave me a double present—two books, which indicated his breadth, one he was recommending to me: Fowler’s The King’s English and Doughty’s Arabia Deserta.

  I also remember when he would race taxi drivers—eyes glowing, rage itself—if they cut in front of him. I remember when he became furious when a subservient person used the simple anata with him, not giving him he thought his due of dignity. I remember when life with him was impossible because he always thought that one ought to know what he wanted. There were these moral laws which he observed and which you ought to too, only you never knew what they were.

  But now (he is ten years older than I, he is fifty) he is more at rest. [Yato] Tamotsu always calls him kimi—much more familiar than the resented anata—and he makes jokes about himself. Ten years ago, compulsion ceased. He says it is because he thought about it and decided. Well, that is one way; that is the cleanest, and in many ways the best—if it is possible.

  1 march 1965. Up at six. Then, not sleepy, I look at these journals, read pages here and there, from twenty years back, fifteen, ten years back.

  I always seemed to be doing something I didn’t want to do; I always seemed to be worrying that what I was doing was right. I wonder why I didn’t enjoy myself; I wonder why I thought something had to be “right.”

  Then I remember a recent lunch with Karl Deutsch and we were talking about the Buddhist idea of repeating the sinful action endlessly. He mentioned that some Christian hells were also shown as compulsion, that the true punishment is compulsion.

  It is true. Compulsion is hell. Old ideas rerun to tatters. The new relationship, the deeper relationship, the new coupling of ideas—that is life; that is to be alive and human.

  I am reading the Sartre autobiography [The Words], which much moves me. I wish I had written it. Perhaps I will.

  april 1965. Some time ago Mishima called up and said he had a question. It was about Richard Wagner. He wanted a recording of Tristan und Isolde, but one without any voices. Was such a thing possible? He had heard of recordings of non-vocal excerpts from the Ring and there was, of course, the Liebes­tod of Isolde, but he needed something longer.

  I told him about the “symphonic synthesis” that Leopold Stokowski had made years ago with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It should contain the half-hour of music that he required. Curious, I asked what it was for and he said it was still a secret but would let me know in time.

  Today he asked me to the Daiei film studio. There, in a set built to look like a Noh stage, was Mishima in a prewar army uniform, his hat pulled low over his forehead, pretending to commit harakiri. This was the final rehearsal of the final scene.

  The movie, The Rite of Love and Death, based on his short story Patriotism, was already more than half completed and this was the second day of filming. A container of pig intestines stood ready, and after rehearsal these were packaged inside Mishima’s trousers. When the sword seemed to enter the author’s abdomen it would actually cut into the plastic sack containing the guts. These would then ooze realistically down into Mishima’s lap.

  Mishima Yukio. Roppongi, 1967. yato tamotsu

  This climax was filmed without mishap and Mishima, laughing, making light of the accomplishment, was cleaned up and prepared for facial close-ups. In between he told me that the mixing in of the music was going to take place at the Aoi Studios next week and that I must be there, since I was the “musical director.”

  undated, 1965. Someone on the staff had finally located a copy of the old 78-rpm Stokowski recording, and it was this that was to be the soundtrack for the film. As befit my position as “musical director” I was seated next to Mishima, and so together we watched this first merging of image and sound.

  Slowly, as ritualistic as the Noh itself, the film unfolded, black and white, sparse as the calligraphy—Mishima’s own—that scrolled across the screen at the beginning. At the same time, the Tristan prelude began its slow ascent. And the two kept pace. As the drama increased, the music tightened, climaxing in the harakiri scene.

  Climaxing in another sense as well. I had not remembered how sensuous, how sexual the music was. The tentative sliding gestures, motifs half articulated, rising higher and higher, then seeming to lose all control as the climax approached, fragments tossed, repeated, tempo increasing, flooding into final ecstasy—just as the pig guts were loosened and flooded the crotch of the director. Wagner thus illustrated the identity of sex and death, an idea that consumed both composer and writer/director.

  This experience is strong. There was silence in the screening room after it was over and the lights came on. Mishima had tears in his eyes. He too had been impressed. And he both showed and excused this with a typical reaction. Turning to me he said, humbly and sincerely, “Thank you for having made this picture beautiful.” Giving credit where none was due, transferring his own emotion into gratitude, he then turned with a smile to the others and shook his head as though to say that it wasn’t half bad.

  winter 1967. Today, back in my old room for the afternoon, from my old window overlooking the garden I watch [Yato] Tamotsu taking pictures of Yukio in the snow. The photographer is bundled up with scarf and sweater; the author is naked except for a white loincloth. He also brandishes a sword and tries various poses.

  All these gestures illustrate some samurai extreme. Kneeling, sword in hand, he is expressing dedication. On his back in a drift, he is still valiantly defending himself. Or, already dead, he sprawls in the snow, t
he sword still gripped—a samurai faithful to the end.

  These photos are designed to show the author as a man of action, one unconcerned with discomfort (lying naked in the snow) and pain (the coming coup de grâce ), a man of sheer sensation who even in these extremes does not forget the dedication of the warrior.

  Yukio rolled about and Tamotsu snapped while I looked down on them and remembered myself as a child playing in the snow. We used to lie on our backs and move our arms to make snow angels. Mishima, however, was tracing something more serious.

  And then I remembered Omi—the black footprints the narrator follows until he discovers the big schoolboy tracing his name—O–M–I—in the snow. The narrator is still wearing the woolen gloves of boyhood, but Omi has grown-up gloves. These he thrusts into his face.

  Later I look up the passage. “I dodged. A raw carnal feeling blazed up within me, branding my cheeks. I felt myself staring at him with crystal-clear eyes. . . . From that time on I was in love with Omi.”

  winter 1970. I’m to write something about Mishima’s suicide for the Japan Times but I don’t know what to say. The paper is waiting for its copy, for what they hope will be a human-interest story, but I have no idea how even to begin it.

  I suppose I should again recall the day, now a couple of weeks ago, when he and his faithful followers took captive a general, held him to ensure that the troops gathered would listen to the author addressing them, exhorting them: “Rise with us, and for righteousness and honor, die with us.” But they didn’t listen, they jeered—so Mishima shouted, “Long live the Emperor!” three times, then retreated and committed harakiri with a short sword, slitting open his abdomen. His assistant, young Morita Masakatsu, long sword aloft, charged with the duty of ending the agony by cutting off the head, made two chops, which failed to accomplish this. One of the larger cadets then took the sword and concluded the process. Morita knelt and, as was his duty, pushed his dagger into his belly, and was himself promptly beheaded. The theatricality of this sort of death, as melodramatic as the plots of any of Mishima’s plays, was a necessary piece in the life so spectacularly terminated. That is what I thought when I learned of Mishima’s suicide. There was no surprise. He had so often spoken of suicide before he committed it that I was more or less used to the possibility. He talked more about it because we had met much more often.