With Mifune Toshiro, 1983. donald richie
I see that Paul bites his nails now. Why do I find this engaging? Sign of weakness? No, a sign of something else, something more human. Paul presents such a reasoned and optimistic self that one welcomes something as human and doubtful as nail biting. Cutting him down to size? No, I don’t think so. Rather, something one recognizes, sees as authentic.
18 june 1983. Lunch with Francis [Coppola]. He is here to convince Mishima Yoko that a film on her late husband is a good idea—that the writer, director, and he himself, all are working for the proper picture. The difference lies in the interpretation. She wants the whitened sepulcher she has been daubing away at these last years. They want a commercial film that tells a bit of the truth. Consequently Francis is properly cynical, or as cynical as he ever gets.
“Is it true,” he wonders aloud, “that a director is only as good as his last few films? Is it really like a ball game? Three strikes and you’re out?” From anyone else, given Francis’ recent experiences, this would certainly sound like irony. But when he asks this, his eyes gentle, his large and infantile mouth questioning, one detects no cynicism. Just the kind of wonder that such a thing might, perhaps, after all, be possible.
Francis is very childlike. Having put on weight again, he is like a fat little boy, and he has all the gentleness and sudden wildness that one associates with youngsters. A bearded baby, he is given to quick enthusiasms, flights of fancy, and a kind of weighty wit—irresistible because, like a child, Francis does not take himself seriously.
All of his recent bad luck, so much of it brought down by himself, seems not to have affected him. As though it happened to a person named Francis Coppola, someone sitting right there, but not actually, somehow, the same.
He talks about a South American place he has bought—El Getaway, he calls it. It is really very convenient. “Only a couple of hours from Miami in your plane, got its own airstrip, and it has lakes and waterfalls and the ancient ruins right there on the property. The sea? Oh, it’s close. In a plane we can get there in a couple of minutes, about fifteen of them. Otherwise, it is days of hacking the jungle, of course. We could build this landing strip on the beach. Probably will.”
Probably will. He is like a little boy, living entirely in his imagination with the difference, the great difference, that what Francis imagines always comes true. Both the good and the bad. He will get his airstrip and his planes. But he also got a great disaster, his studio—all because of his imaginatively walking too near the edge.
Hope—that is what it is. And with hope, certainty. Success, failure, but some certainty. And if the latter, then it, too, has its uses. Francis may be up or may be down, but Francis survives. He survives as a child survives. He believes—irony yes, cynicism no. He believes in Francis but, more important, he believes in the world, and still finds it quite wonderful.
8 august 1983. Taken to dinner by Mifune Toshiro at an elegant Akasaka ryotei—fancy food, geisha dances, lively girls to sit beside you and pour. The occasion was the entertainment of Nancy Dowd and John Dark who are here to do her film, R&R, and I had suggested Mifune Productions and introduced Toshiro. Hence my being included.
Mifune is older, has lost some of his hair. His shape has changed but his eyes are the same. And his smile—that wonderful smile, seen so little in the films: charming, genuine, disarming.
The smile is little seen because it does not fit his solemn machismo screen persona. It does not suit it because it is boyish. And it is the boyishness of Mifune, now well over sixty, which so charms. That and his almost adolescent-seeming self-deprecation. Whether this is genuine or not, I do not know. But I do see that he makes very little use of it. He has nothing to gain from it but more charm, and he is already exuding that. No, I think Mifune has an enchantingly poor opinion of himself.
Certainly the pattern of his life is that of a man who doubts himself. The period with Kurosawa in which he allowed himself to be molded, then the number of failures which followed: as director, as husband, as businessman, and even as actor, since left to himself he plays roles like that in Shogun. Mifune always strikes me as ready for failure but attempting, gamely, to avoid it.
He is charming at the party. Nancy is quite swept away, not only with him, but also with her first glimpse at high-powered Japanese entertaining—the food, the drink, and the concern. The kimonoed young lady and I have a perfectly proper conversation about underwear, what is worn under the kimono. She wears no panties, as is common nowadays. It ruins the line of the kimono. So she does not—except, she reminds me, once a month, then smiles charmingly. Mifune, it turns out always wore something like BVD’s under everything, armor and all. The geisha dancer wears only a sheath of cloth under her kimono. Hers is red because she is an entertainer. The other girls’ were pink or, if older, white. Nancy rolls her eyes deliriously when I translate all of this.
Mifune is much at home in this milieu. I have long thought that he might be a bit prudish. Perhaps he is. Here, however, such talk is not considered anything but proper. It has the right light touch. One is not interested and not uninterested, and this is proper. Mifune has learned to be very good at this. And he never goes too far.
Then he makes a speech, a charming one. I am the peg on which he hangs it: our long acquaintanceship, and now my introducing these splendid people. His poor attempts at entertainment and, he hopes, their understanding. . . .
Actually, Mifune Productions would very much like the business and promises to do well. But not a word of that. Fortunately John and Nancy already know how Japan works, and they are now capable of appreciating nuances and subtleties that would have left them blind in London and L.A. Then John makes just the proper speech, almost committing himself, but not quite. Then Nancy talks, properly, to the point. Then I, as is my role, bow and thank and indicate that the happy evening is over.
How well the Japanese do this. The sordid necessaries of heavy financial encounters turn butterfly-like during these light and so personal-seeming encounters. And the sincerity is quite there—so far as it goes. It is this that so completely undoes the West.
I wonder how many parties like this Mifune has a week. More than a few, I would imagine. If he tires of them there is no indication. There he is, boyish as always, smiling as broadly as he did decades ago. Only occasionally, when he thinks no one is looking, or when he forgets, does the smile relax; he will look someplace, the corner of the room perhaps, and there is the inward gaze of a man looking into himself, seeing nothing outside. Of what is he thinking then, I wonder. Of himself? Of life?
Then, with that smile he turns, sake bottle in hand, to pour you another drink, to clown his way through a story, to listen with absolute intentness to whatever it is that you are saying.
Mifune the good guy, the straight arrow. It is all real, it is all there. It is all on the surface, too. Is there anything more than surface? Well, that is not a question profitably to be asked in Japan, where the ostensible is always the real, where there is nothing more.
And yet. Inside are the bandit, the samurai, the shogun, the gambler, the shoe magnate, and Red Beard himself. How can so consummate an actor be only this? But there I have my answer. By being this, he is a consummate actor.
14 august 1983. The Fukagawa Tomioka Hachiman Festival, held every three years: an enormously long procession of omikoshi, the large cross-beamed floats carried on the shoulders of the participants, in the center the ornate house of the god, bells, the golden phoenix atop. Fifty of these floats, each supported by a hundred near-naked men—fifty under the beams chanting and dancing, the other fifty waiting to take their turn, dancing alongside. Each float is from a different section of Fukagawa, and so the half-kimonos, originally worn but shortly discarded, carry the quarter’s name and its mon of a distinctive color. In fifty years, Fukagawa, completely destroyed by firebombs in 1945, has been rebuilt. Fifty floats, each with at least a hundred men—five thousand, and five times that number lining the
streets, watching.
A spectacular festival—its size, the number of people involved, that it is so uninhibited, and that so much flesh is so casually displayed. Also, that it is held in the heat of summer, on a day traditionally the hottest. Hence the shed clothing, the sweat, the reddened, sun-tinged flesh.
Hence also the water. It has for hundreds of years been customary for the houses along the way to have buckets of water, or hoses, or water pumps—all ready for the passing shoulder-carried, hundred-legged floats. Streams of water curl into the air, water flung hangs before it descends. From all sides, all at once, continually—water descending. The nearly naked men are drenched.
Most are wearing only a tucked-in loincloth. Their drenched hair begins to steam in the sun; water runs down arms and legs, puddles, and evaporates. The humidity around the floats rises as the water turns to steam. The loincloths, white cotton, turn transparent as the water courses. The god appears.
Fertility is what this festival, like most, is about. The jostled god in his dark little box atop the float is a fertility god, and he thinks only of procreation and the things that allow it: heat, water, and movement.
The men wear their nakedness as though it were a costume. No one jokes or laughs, and no one stares as the loincloths turn transparent and the jostling dance continues.
This spectacle is deeply erotic because it is not concerned with actualities, but with possibilities. Like the blossom hidden in the bud, eroticism lies always in the future. These small and visible gods are not, after all, standing erect. They are merely there, made visible by the magic of the festival—fertility promised.
With rhythmic shouts, one float after another sways down between the lines of spectators. The procession takes two hours to pass. Two hours of naked thighs and barely masked loins, pounding buttocks, strained shoulders, and faces turned skyward, chanting the rhythmic cry of the matsuri. A spectacle—something from Japan’s past, and something with us yet.
27 august 1983. Tonight I went again to Sumida Park. There is a grove on a hill, a still lake, paths that wind and rejoin. It is dark; a few street lamps cast pools and the stars are bright beyond the tracery of leaves.
The dark park, night—and I again relive my oldest dream. It occurred, several times it now seems, over half a century later. I was very young—six maybe. A park, perhaps, or a woods, and it was dark, late, and I was there alone. And from the shadows walked a man. I remember the man’s strong face, half in the shadow, and the soft touch of his hard hand. And the look he gave me in the half-light, loving, protective, when he told me not to fear, that he would take care of me. I turned in my dream and buried my face, and his chest was hard against my cheek. Then I woke up.
But did I? Here I am again in the dark in a park, and I am now near sixty. The intervening years have seen many dark parks and, living my dream, many hard men. Each I have pressed my head against.
I am looking for the original, for the man in the dream, you will say. Well, yes. But when you have found him hundreds of times and still go on looking, for what then are you searching? If you have not found him by now, you never will. Or, conversely, if you find him every day, you may be certain that he does exist only in dreams.
What was it he said? Yes, that he would take care of me, look after me, that I would no longer be alone. Though I am sixty now, no longer six, they—he—are still the same age, twenty-something. They, the inhabitants of the dream, have not aged—the same strong face, the same hard hands.
Sometimes I, an adult, have turned these strong men again into boys, and it is I who have looked after them, taken care of them. But in the dark I am again the child, and it is they who are adult. What could it all mean? Anything? Nothing? No, if only because things cause other things, there is probably a meaning—but it is not one with which I am concerned as I watch the shadows in the darkened park.
Each new man—he is the answer. It is he whom I first saw over half a century now past. It never is, to be sure, but I am always there waiting. I surmise my reason. I am entertaining—yes, that is the word—entertaining hope. Something that affirming, that health-giving. I stand in the dark, calm, assured, faithful, hoping.
25 november 1983. Dinner with Paul Schrader and Mary Beth Hurt. He is having some difficulties. Yoko, Mishima’s widow, has had second thoughts now that she has signed the contract and taken the money. For some time she has been cleaning up after her husband—suppressing his film Yukoku, [Patriotism], cutting off his ex-friends, denying things—in order to make him into the man she thinks he ought to have been. Now she sees that Paul wants to make a film about Mishima as he was. Very tempestuous luncheon the other day—tears, I understand.
The main problem is Mishima’s homosexuality. She, who should know it best, is now denying it. Paul wants to include a part of it since he could not well leave it out. Tears, because their daughter somehow got hold of a copy of the script and was instantly devastated. The reason was not the strength of the script, but that the daughter had been uneducated as to just what her father was like. A slight reference in script to a gay bar. Stunned daughter. The son several years ago read the masturbation scene in his father’s Confessions of a Mask. Trauma. Was Dad really like that?
I doubt this is true. Impossible to tell how much accuracy remains in all this, because it comes strained through the mother’s rendition, then Francis’s, then Paul’s. Also, because Yoko is so playing her role. Still, it is probably true that she has kept the kids in ignorance. Part of her plan—perhaps part of her revenge as well. I remember her as a neglected bride. She had to live with the monster. It is now that she has her way, and in so doing chooses to geld him.
It comes as no surprise to learn that Yoko particularly did not want Paul to see me. I know too much. Also, I am not on her side because I have been known to criticize the illustrious and now sainted author. Last time I saw her she smiled and said that I was just not to be trusted. That is perfectly true. But I knew Mishima as well, and I want to have no part in what she is doing to him now that he is helplessly dead.
2 march 1984. The opening of the Isamu Noguchi show at the Sogetsu Kaikan, in the indoor terraced stone garden that he himself designed for the building. Isamu there, brown, leathery, now nearly eighty, dressed in his Santa Fe best—big silver turquoise-studded belt. Though Japanese, he is very American, having been educated there, having lived there most of his life. He looks like Georgia O’Keefe now.
He has also gone into multiples—which is very American of him. The new work (hot-dipped galvanized steel) comes in editions, of eighteen or twenty-six. At the show was one of each, all twenty-six of them. One is encouraged to buy, or will be. The prices are not listed at the opening, however. Soft sell.
The pieces themselves are very Noguchi. They look as if made of silver cardboard, and fit into each other—their various parts have slits, like packing cases. The forms are “free,” kidney-shaped. A slight flavor of the Orpheus props. I cannot imagine anyone wanting one.
Here in the antiseptic Sogetsu interior—done by Tange, all of whose interiors are like the insides of iceboxes with the lights left on—they seem unimpressive. Perhaps in a garden, a real one, they would fare better.
But then Isamu has always talked better art than he made. He is inspiring to listen to, particularly when he starts on Japanese garden aesthetics. But then from all this comes the work, which is sort of preschool. And now we have these multi-copy prefab kindergarten objects.
Isamu very much in his element at the party. Lots of famous people. Teshigara Hiroshi, lion-maned and sleek, melts into the background discreetly taking pictures, determined that this is Isamu’s show and he will not, absolutely will not intrude. That clown Okamoto Taro, whom some perhaps still regard as an artist, here but subdued—though certainly not from modesty and a desire to defer to Isamu. Maybe he is still feeling the death of Miro, the man from whom he took his style. Kamekura the designer, some TV and screen folk, and a few favored foreigners. Not the beautiful peop
le—they go to Issey Miyake’s—but the in-people. And there are no models, though there are two white American shakuhachi players.
12 august 1984. With Eric to the last performance of the final annual obon exhibition of Japanese folk festivals, held at the grounds of the Meiji Shrine. About ten thousand attended and five thousand, it seemed, performed.
Other countries may show their festivals en masse like this—I remember a Moroccan festiva in Marrakesh, and a Yugoslavian showing at Dubrovnik of dances from all its provinces—but only in Japan would these be uncommercialized, by amateurs, by people from the provinces themselves. And only, I think, in Japan, with such vigor and enthusiasm.
Things I remember from this final evening: The platform in the center suddenly invaded by dozens of young men in breechclouts waving enormous ship’s flags, followed by a hundred or so young women in fishing wear, surrounded then by others in sea-blue kimono, and the drums and flutes and bells and voices doing the wonderful Tairyo Bushi. Then, at the last verse, those circling about suddenly produce long strips of blue cloth that are waved to simulate the sea.
The Kyogen Monkey-Skin Quiver, Nomura Troupe. Last row center: Lincoln Kirstein, Meredith Weatherby, Richie. nomura mansaku
Eight enormous floats from Shikoku, each fifty feet in height, held aloft and moved about by masses of young men from the island’s provinces. A mock fight, like galleons on a sea of people, and an obeisance to the audience, like a herd of trained elephants.
A huge illuminated portable shrine from Akita that, held aloft by dozens beneath, floated like an apparition across the crowds, the lights inside illuminating every tracery.
Fireworks, enormous ones, from Hyogo, each held by a young man, a row of them clasping these roman candles like kegs. The fire sprayed past their faces and drowned them in a burning rain. They stood there, rows of them, like fiery caryatids.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 26