The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  All of Mishima’s friends had seen more of him than usual. He phoned more, wrote more notes to us, paid more attention. When he and I met we gossiped much less. Instead he talked about writers and writing. I said that he ought to run for office. He made a face. “A writer cannot be like a politician. Look at Ishihara Shintaro. He is neither. All a writer can do is show something.”

  As Mishima more and more became the man he wanted to become, he more and more saw himself—as an artist must, I suppose—as an exemplar, a model. I refused to take seriously signs of this awareness. I made fun of his private army, the Tatenokai. I called it Mishima’s Boy Scouts. He did not object to this, merely wanted to know what was the matter with Boy Scouts.

  “With these few Boy Scouts,” he said, “I have at least a core of order.” I asked if he could possibly mean civic order and he solemnly nodded. “You are impossible,” I remember saying. “You are more imperial than the Emperor.” I said this as a joke but he did not smile. “So I am,” he said.

  And so he proved. The Emperor did not kill himself, which is what Mishima did. He truly hated the rationalizing, pragmatic, conciliatory ways that had become those of his country. “Japan,” I remember his saying, last summer, “Japan is gone, vanished, disappeared.”

  “But surely,” I said, “the real Japan must still exist someplace or other if you look around for it.” He shook his head.

  “Is there no way to save it?” I wondered. “No,” he said, “there is nothing left to save.”

  When I learned of his suicide that is what I first remembered—that he already knew that there was nothing more to save. His may have been a political statement, an aesthetic statement, but it was also a despairing personal statement.

  I also thought of Saigo Takamori. The last time I saw Mishima, several weeks before his death, he took us—Meredith, Tamotsu, and myself—to dinner at The Crescent, a restaurant he liked and where he would have his last supper with the Tatenokai. We spoke of many things, but Mishima returned again and again to Saigo, the final suicide, and the faithful friend who dispatched him before killing himself. Saigo had seen, he said, that the revolution had failed. He had thought he was reestablishing stern and ancient virtues, but he now saw this new government delivered over to accommodating bureaucrats.

  I remember that he spoke at length of the beauty of Saigo’s actions—that gesture when all had failed, when there was no more hope. “Saigo,” I remember his saying, “was the last true samurai.” But as he said this he knew, I now see, that it was he, himself, who would be the last.

  In this Mishima was intensely romantic. His death was indeed so romantic that its seriousness alone saves it from melodrama. But, as Mishima might have asked, what is the matter with melodrama? It too is a form of drama, and drama is life. And it is true that a real romantic is he who compares things as they are with things as they ought to be and then has the strength of character to live by those standards which he himself finds better.

  When he also has the strength to die by them we no longer know what to say. We have no words for such an event. Those crazy enough to say he was insane merely show us that their vocabulary cannot encompass such an extraordinary act.

  And such a logical one. Now that the fact is accomplished it suddenly strikes everyone as inevitable. One could trace a pattern, invisible until the moment of death, which began on the first pages of the Confessions, which made Patriotism prophetic, each new work adding its weight, incising this inescapable pattern seen in his recent single Kabuki, in the Noh plays, in the various dramas and psychodramas of the later works, extending right onto the balcony of the headquarters of the Self-Defense Forces. Mishima’s suicide, then, was the final stone in the arch of his life.

  And so it must be viewed. It was a single, personal, creative act. It did not mean a resurgence of militarism, a reversion to wartime ideals, or anything of the sort because—and this Mishima must have known so well that the jeering of the soldiers he was addressing could not have surprised him—his suicide was entirely ritual. It had few connections with and little meaning for contemporary Japan. And it was just this that created the consternation that accompanied the shock of his death, and the means through which it had been crafted.

  I remember asking him what he was to do after he had finished this very long novel he was working on. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I have said everything I can.” He was silent, then said, “This novel I am finishing now is hard work. I don’t know how it is going to end. I have no idea. I don’t know how to do it.”

  Upon my saying nothing, he continued, “And it is strange, but I am afraid to end this book.” I had been surprised to hear Mishima, he who was always so sure of everything, speak of unsureness. Now I was amazed because I had never once heard Mishima speak of fear.

  “What are you afraid of?” I asked, adding, “After all, it is just ending a long book.” And Mishima then said something I have since thought of: “Yes, I know, but I’m afraid and I don’t really know why.” Was it a clue? Was I intended, after the fact, to remember the fear, just as I was to recollect that, no, it was Mishima who was the last samurai? I knew I was an actor in the drama of Mishima’s life, not one of the main ones—even occasionally comic relief—but still a person who could be relied upon to ponder the meaning of the remains. Was this yet further manipulation by this master director?

  Or was it more a glimpse of what lay behind the mask and its various confessions? I now think it was. I want to think that a very human moment through which I saw, perfectly clearly, the honest, and very private man who had always been there, at the heart of this courageous life that he had created.

  The last thing that Mishima wrote was a note, left on his desk. It read: “Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever.” And so, I suppose, he does.

  The above entry, with some earlier entries, is a fuller version of the essay on Mishima based on these journals and published in both the Japan Times and in Partial Views. What follows is, again, a long period for which there are no continued journals. During this time Richie wrote The Japanese Movie (1965), The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965), The Erotic Gods (1966), Companions of the Holiday (1968), The Inland Sea (1971), the book on George Stevens, and the translations of Rashomon, Ikiru, and Seven Samurai. He also made a number of films: Dead Youth (1967), Nozoki Monogatari (1967), Boy with Cat (1967), Five Filosophical Fables (1967), A Doll (1968), Khajuraho (1968), and Cybele (1968). He directed Marlowe’s Edward II (1968) and wrote and directed his Three Modern Kyogen (1969). He also began painting, later studying under his friend Maurice Grosser. Also, from May 1969 to April 1972, he was Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art. During one of his summers in Japan, he met Mizushima Fumio, who would become another lifelong friend.

  1 january 1973. I think of Kawabata. The translation of The House of the Sleeping Beauties appeared, and I saw that Kawabata had been as true to his vision of Asakusa as I had been to mine. Yumiko, or her daughter, was now in this strange house in Kamakura where old men could find their youth in these sleeping girls, in that firm and dormant flesh.

  And then, one day last year, a quarter of a century after he and I had stood on the Asakusa tower and thought of Yumiko, I saw his face flashed onto the television screen. The avian profile flew past—noted author dead, a suicide.

  I did not believe it. Dead, yes, but not a suicide. How could anyone who so loved life, flesh, Asakusa, kill himself? No, it was an accident. The bathroom. The body had been found there, the water running. He had been going to take a bath. He had used the gas hose as a support. He pulled it loose, was overcome. This I wanted to believe. I could hear the water running and I remembered the silver of the Sumida and the muddy bronze of the Sukiyabashi Canal.

  But in time I too have come to believe that this was suicide. The gas-filled arsenic kiss had been chosen. Naked, free, Kawabata had stepped into the water just as Yumiko had slipped into the boat.

  24 september 1973. Went to Kamakura
to the exhibition there. I’ve taken that hour-long ride so often over the years to see Suzuki Daisetz, loaded with PX Ritz crackers and Kraft cheeses, to go sit at Engakuji. Here already are Hodogaya, Ofuna; they have much changed, and what used to be valleys filled with groves and paddies are now valleys filled with parking lots and bowling alleys. Only Kita-Kamakura is unchanged because the cliffs come so near the line that nothing can be built.

  Kamakura was always seedy. Now that the double row of cherries leading to the Hachiman Shrine is accompanied by a quadruple line of traffic, it isn’t all that much worse. The main change is that, like all famous places in Japan, it has become self-conscious. There are lots of fake rustic shops selling kamakura-bori at inflated prices, and there has been apparently some attempt to make the place into an artists’ colony, or at least an artistic colony.

  Streets full of little stores selling Modigliani reproductions, little coffee shops done in that rough-hewn Swiss chalet style for which little girls have such fondness, little boutiques with “Madame Aki” or “L’Etoile” on the window. The Great Buddha is up the street and round the corner. I don’t go. Have never liked it. From the first it looked like a big incense burner to me.

  I do go for a bit along the street leading to it, however. A quarter of a century ago I was wandering here and found a record store where I saw a single disc—the old Bernac recording of Ravel’s Sainte. I came from Tokyo two or three times to try to persuade the owner to sell it me. It was the only record in the shop he would not sell, and he had no machine on which I could hear it. I had to wait twenty years to hear that song, and I have still never heard Bernac sing it. I search for the shop. It is no longer there. Now there is the Grande Passion Fruits Parlour; next door, a small and ratty restaurant with a single sign in the window: “A Nice Dish—Japanese Sukiyaki”; on the other side a Honda motorcycle store with young aficionados tuning up their machines, and Madame Kazuko’s “Salon de Mode.”

  Went to the museum to see the Odilon Redon show. I spent some time over the 1910 Char d’Apollon but the other viewers liked the flowers better and enormous clumps gathered about the asters and poppies. As always, the Japanese viewer is surprisingly knowledgeable. “You know,” I heard a longhaired student tell his girlfriend, “He has something of Gustave Moreau in him.” “Who?” she asked, and was enlightened.

  Space empty in front of Bouddha à sa Jeunesse. The Japanese don’t really like it when they find Asia in Western hands. The Van Gogh copy of Hiroshige is all right because it is only a copy, and a bad one at that. But anyone showing any real understanding, or anyone making any use of creative imagination (The Youth of Buddha), embarrasses.

  25 september 1973. Eric [Klestadt] and I talk of why we found Japan attractive, restricting ourselves to its emotional aspects. We both agreed that the ease and the general lack of complication appealed to us, that the impossibility of what is grandly called “a real relationship” is refreshing, and that the general lack of consequence is winning. He adds that it is also because we find Asiatics attractive. I add that it is because we still, in our deepest, dankest, darkest hearts regard them as an inferior folk. He—Jewish, refugee from the Nazis—is shocked for a second. But only for a second. We know very well that it is the Japanese who think us foreigners the truly inferior folk.

  28 september 1973. [Mizushima] Fumio’s younger brother died early in the morning—twenty-one years old, stomach cancer, six months in the hospital, until shortly before the end he believed, as he had been told, that it was ulcers and that he would recover.

  The wake is far out in Tsurumi, near Yokohama, a place rented for the evening: a plain room, the doors removed, with one end banked in chrysanthemums, an altar, a picture of the deceased, and the coffin hidden beneath the flowers. The family in a semicircle, a table on the left with refreshments for the guests. It is like a stage—such serious rituals as marriages, baptisms, and deaths resemble theater.

  This drama is simply staged because Fumio’s family is poor and most of the money has already been used up on hospital and doctors’ bills. The food is rice balls; the drink is cider or orange juice. Usually sake is served but Fumio’s mother is Christian, as was her dead son, and so there is none. Also, though the service looks Buddhist there is no incense. The offering to the dead is the single cut white chrysanthemum that one places on a tray before the altar.

  I sign my name in the death-book and offer my envelope on which is my name and a condolence message. Inside is another envelope containing money, the amount (a Japanese touch) plainly written. I give these to Miss Shibuya [Yasuko], Fumio’s long-time girlfriend, a pretty twenty-three-year-old with the wry and smiling deprecation of girls who have been born in the country and brought to the big city. He will marry her. Already he lives with her on the days he doesn’t live with me, and they have been cohabiting since he was eighteen. I liked her from the first, and she liked me. We have much in common—Fumio.

  Having practiced and asked advice, I know what to do. From the entryway I make a low bow to the family. Fumio bows in return. He is dressed up. The first time I have ever seen him in suit and tie. And on his sleeve a band of crepe held in place by a safety pin. He introduces me to his mother whom I am meeting for the first time. We bow and I look at this strong woman who, deserted by her husband when Fumio was a child, managed to bring up, educate, feed, and dress eight children. More, managed to give them a good, sound morality, and a proper degree of pride.

  Then the eldest son, Nobuo, is introduced, a big man, sorry they can offer me no sake, apologetic to the other guests because there is no incense, “but he was Christian, you see.” I know him only as the Soka Gakkai brother and have heard of his earlier efforts to convert Fumio—efforts which came to nothing because Fumio is neither Buddhist nor Christian nor Shinto nor Soka Gakkai. He is nothing—like me.

  Then the other brothers. The one I already know, Ritsuro, the truckdriver brother, has been crying. He bows very low and we both remain crouched on the tatami for a time. Then the youngest, the one I know as the newspaper-delivery-boy brother. He has cried the most and his face is puffy.

  But now the time for crying is over because a wake, even after such a young death as this, is a dignified occasion. This family has been more than touched by death, they have lived with it daily for over half a year. But now tears and hope and resignation have all been put aside. The atmosphere is helpful and warm. The smell of life continuing is as strong as the scent of the chrysanthemums.

  I bow to the bier, put a flower on the lacquer stand, and then fold my hands as though in prayer. The picture of the dead boy is a school picture from several years before—probably the only picture of him they had. It has been blown up large, and this small picture had consequently faded and blurred. The boy looks lost, as though already a ghost. Then I bow again and, ritual over, am invited to the table to drink and to talk with the others.

  From the conversation, I learn that Fumio, in accounting for me in his life, has invented several stories. Unfortunately they have been varied, told to different people, and now all the people are in one room together and all meeting me. I learn that I am an English teacher and also a drama teacher; that I am at the same time somehow high in the Christian church, and simultaneously deeply interested in Buddhism; that I am still married but my wife cannot leave America; that I am also a widower with two children, also that my two children are quite dead—auto accident. Fumio has been lavish with his accounting and now sits uncomfortably and listens to all of it. I acquit myself well and agree to all the accounts, offering connecting links when one or the other becomes too unlikely.

  Only Miss Shibuya knows the truth. I told Fumio to go see Sunday, Bloody Sunday because it was our story—his, hers and mine. He didn’t go, but repeated what I had said to a classmate who had seen the film and thereafter gave Fumio strange looks and a wide berth.

  I do not stay, but drink a glass of juice and then begin the farewell bows. How well the Japanese live with death, and consequently
life. There was no hypocrisy in this simple ceremony I have taken part in: neither the hypocrisy of exaggerated respect, nor that of unnatural solemnity; there was no talk of a better life he had gone to; no talk of well, seeing as how he was so sick perhaps it was better so, etc. No such talk at all and—consequently—compassion.

  2 october 1973. Fumio came over after school to stay the night. Told me how his brother died. On the day of his death he told his mother to call the family, all eight children, and to call all of his friends. They tried to dissuade him but, for the first time, he gave orders and would tolerate no refusal. Distant friends who pleaded off with a cold were sternly ordered (brothers telephoning, sisters telegraphing) to appear. By evening everyone was on his or her way to the hospital. They started coming in about six in the evening, and kept on coming until midnight. He said farewell to each, held their hands, thanked them for their gifts, all of which he remembered, begged pardon for dying. They could only tell him not to die, to struggle on—as Japanese do when one is ill. But his mother understood. She said, no, he had struggled enough, he need struggle no longer. He, who had been ashamed of his wasted body, now pulled off the covers to expose his legs. This much I have struggled he said, showing them—this much. About midnight the friends left. He had thanked each one. Then, and only then, his death agony began. His eyes remained open, and the strain of the day had made the muscles so stiff that after he was dead they could not close the eyes. He looked at the ceiling, and his breath became more labored. The doctor said he could still hear. His mother talked to him and tears formed in his almost lifeless eyes, forever locked, never again to move. The family pressed around. If you can hear, just nod your head, he was told. He slowly nodded and the collected tears ran down his cheeks.