Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Rushed home to meet with Prof. Ichiro Nichizaki of Waseda and Ochanomisu U.’s. Typical prof—armed with catalogues, literature lists, etc., but exactly what I wanted. Presented me with a Jap. book, one of the 20 vol. set on Amer Lit which Leo Picon of the Embassy is editing (spent time with latter in morning—doing fine job)—in which N. had a trans. Asked him to sign it of course—now how can I throw away! Also presented me with a vol. of letters of Faulkner he had exhumed from the Times-Picayune and edited. Later took me to the bookshop street, woodblock, print store—loved this—as he said, the Charing Cross of Tokyo. How nice to be doing this so soon! Nichizaki taught last year at U.C.L.A. Send book.

  Then home, feeling ill again—the trots—fell dead on bed, but had to call Mishima, who thru X I had found was at the Hyo Tei restaurant to judge a litry contest of the Chud Koron, the Partisan Review of Japan. He asked to bring a friend—arrived earlier than planned, took them to the Skoal bar downstairs. Friend was Tsutomu Shimamura, ed. of the Chud Koron (looks all of twenty-five at most.) They charmed me, and, I think, I them. We laughed and had a great time. Shimamura has trans. Capote—their veiled laughter about Truman was funny—Mishima has met Mailer, was on extended tour of U.S., Europe and Mexico last year. Brilliant I’m told, highest scholar ever at the Peers school—his Nō Plays may be produced on B’way. I like them both extremely. They both wanted to help me in every way, say Kawabata does not speak Eng., but Ooka does, and some of the others French—I am to get in touch with them when return on the 22nd. They are pleased of course, at how much I am impressed with the new J. writers—well I can say that with honesty.

  And so to bed, after packing, washing etc. Tomorrow, lunch and meeting with Lit. (Amer.) Society of Waseda U. (private U.), then off to Kyoto in the evening—overnight by JNR (Japanese Nat’l Railroad).

  Travel plans would prevent our meeting again in Japan, though I would briefly meet Mishima once more in the States at the time the Nō Plays were produced. Later, after his death, I would write in a review for The New York Times:

  In Tokyo I spent an unofficial evening with Yukio Mishima, who came to my hotel with Tsutomu Shimamura of Chud Koron, a leading intellectual review. We got on; the memory must affect what I write here. But that alone does not entitle me to brood on his life and works. His death however was a public act and the work a public offering; the world is invited, commanded to brood. The way we live now, our deaths are seldom even personal acts, much less publicly declarative ones, nor are they much expected to have a direct consonance with our lives. To be otherwise, death must be constantly present in a life—a familiar. As for acts, writers of any power crave them, always under the anxiety that writing may not be one—or one which can have temporal and above all immediate influence. Some take to religion as an act of faith or community, some to politics; some canonize their lives through excess, of illness perhaps, or of sex, alcohol, drugs. And some, letting their lives simmer or sputter, put all the balance on the work.

  Mishima’s ritual death, as the culmination of years of training for such an act, side by side with a body of work increasingly invested with the idea of death as the ever-present blood-beneath-the-skin and the possible grail of action, asks us to put his life on the level of his art, and past it. What does it mean when a writer wants to transcend words? And knows to the end that we must and will re-examine his? Mishima’s death and words put these matters once again in their vital juxtaposition. Even if one ascribes his suicide to a certain madness, either by occidental terms or modern Japanese ones—as I do not—there are few writers at the moment of whom one can say the same. Re-reading all the novels and plays available in English, plus the “confidential criticism” as he called it, of Sun and Steel, an extraordinary essay of the most compelling clarity published early in 1970, the year of his death, and Spring Snow, the first volume to be translated of the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, whose final words were written on the day of it—one conclusion, of which he was aware as any of us, rises preeminent. Visualize that extravagantly formal, mutedly blood-slippery act, as one will, as most of the world has, even aided by a few pre-lim shots on television. Scrutinize that last day of his, plotted for a hero. Place his suicide in the Western context or the Japanese one—or in both, where I think it most significantly belongs. Trace his progression toward it, hear in every book its pure, fell sound. True, only his last act has given us this after-event wisdom. But has he succeeded in that final coincidence of flesh and mind he hoped for, of dual chariots whose crash was to be the final bloom of existence? For himself, perhaps as assumption into the tragic life, for us an echo. Perhaps he attained the non-reflection he wanted. He leaves us with his lifetime of reflection. The words—to the end his avowed snare, yet as much his weapon as the dueling staves he used in kendo—are what remain most clear.

  The world usually puts an artist’s work ahead of however pertinent a life. Equating them, one enters the realm of saint and hero, and finally—myth. This too must have been part of his intent—can a spectacle-death ever be without it? The Japanese are now republishing everything Mishima ever wrote, including even photo-captions, as well as a separate edition of those novels he wrote as potboilers. Internationally, his facts at the moment overshadow him. Assessment of his full work must wait for translation; English has merely a small part of 228 works, which include the 20 long novels he considered “literary,” 13 articles, 143 short stories, 21 full-length dramas and 31 one-act plays.

  The work we do have—for the most part grave, somberly exciting, formidable with self-analysis, able to canvas the crowd and the ages, but more often with fixed, internal stare of the diarist—is in some ways peculiarly fit for Western eyes. The violence we so mouth over, but would relegate to the atom-ashheaps of the military, and are facing with such difficulty, hypocrisy or extravagance in our daily life and art, he gives us simply, domestically, in all its subcutaneous horror and myth. Like the Greeks, he pours the blood that is there. And taking into account the samurai gestures surrounding his end, and so at variance with the exquisite sanity of his self-explanation, I have come to believe that, as often with us, his was a cross-cultural death.

  I came to Japan knowing only the clichés, mistrusting these only for being that, and having read a few modern novels that Donald Keene, my mentor for years to come in all this, had hastily listed as available: Tanizaki, Kawabata, Ooka. The gap between a writer’s place in his own country and abroad is often between fame on the one side, near oblivion on the other, and foreign publication is often non-consecutive; at the time, Mishima had published here only The Sound of Waves, his early prize novel, and his Five Modern Nō Plays. The first, a tale of island lovers, told in the “legendary” manner that an educated and probably urban young man might adopt, had an authoritative finish—Mishima had struck the absolute tone of such people and such telling, hewn but not rude, a bas-relief that moved lyrically in nature without introspection. What was most impressive was the natural description, detailed, exact, even studied, the emotional motive behind it somehow more than beauty as the West would have it … and less than pantheism, as if the Japanese psyche had some formal relationship to the natural scene, whose conventions the writer could play upon and enlarge. The Nō Plays, returning to a classical mode as we perhaps might go back to all those early seventeenth century marvels that were not Shakespeare—to Dekker, Webster, Fletcher, and Massinger, those mordant players of funeral lays and darker madrigals—did seem to show just such a dark modernity cloaking itself in past models. This was all our literary world knew of his work.

  Actually at that time, in 1958, Mishima, a prodigy at nineteen and then thirty-three, had behind him twelve novels as well as many other works. Of these The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (surely one of his best and among those we have, along with Confessions of a Mask, closest related to the progress of his own philosophy as set forth in Sun and Steel) would be published here, to praise, the next year. Forbidden Colors, written in his twenties and remarkable on any score, woul
dn’t get here for another ten years, in what is plainly an inept translation, and touted as “an invitation to the world of homosexuality.” I would find its subjects and worlds complex, dealt with by an appetite and expertise consciously on its way to the Olympian, and spanning from the bisexual hero’s friendship with a famous writer (very possibly a partial portrait of Kawabata) to an account of the young man’s presence while his wife gives birth, in a childbed scene comparable to none I know. Yuichi may be in part or at first that beautiful youth beloved of homosexual male writers, who in Mishima’s own division is the “seer” rather than the “seeing,” but the novel’s sexual worlds are several. Old and young, married or inverted, innocent or “decadent,” the people revolve in their other social statuses as well, with an easy, Trollopian illumination from behind; Mishima, even this early, is never limited enough to treat of sex alone. This novel would have a poor reception here.

  We had met once before Tokyo—in New York at a Gotham Book Mart party for James Baldwin, where Mishima had looked as anyone does under such circumstances: tentative, interestedly afloat on a sea of foreign contexts whose base-game is second nature to him. This second time, I had brought Keene’s wedding-present to him, and introduction. To this I could add only my awareness that a writer’s presence is always less subtle than the actuality. We did not really talk of literature. He was a handsome man I thought, with a coherence of face and form; though I felt very tall in Japan and he was shorter, he did not appear small. Though Japanese faces had already lost their “masks” for me and begun dissolving into types, I couldn’t tell whether his face was as guarded a one to other Japanese as it seemed to me; some triangular proportion in it, broadbased at the brows, made one look at eyes and mouth separately. Hindsight sees how such a face might empathize alternately, as his work would, with both the ugly and the beautiful. We laughed a lot that evening, and most of it was laughter over intramural jokes, not embarrassment or an occidental misinterpretation—reading the glinting humor of After the Banquet five years later, I remember this. When he and his friend kept saying how Oriental I looked, I told them how my daughter’s boardingschool had surreptitiously asked her was I Eurasian; we sat bright-eyed, sympathetically comfortable, language-hampered. The one remark I never forgot he made with utter seriousness. He told me was building “a Dutch Colonial house.” It had its pertinence.

  Very shortly, as my journal shows, I was to be sick with what the world glibly calls cultural shock. Though this was the first time I had been enclosed within a language not cognate to mine, that was minor. As the weeks passed, always in meeting many people very fast, as the state-sponsored visitor does, I kept thinking that it was really our souls, American and Japanese, which were not cognate. An ancient sailor-joke I had picked up somewhere—that in Oriental women the slit ran the other way—kept returning to me. If there were a canal—I visualized it—throat-to-groin of any human, carrying not that being’s alimentation, respiration, or circulation but the psychic equivalent by which that same being persevered, then here was a country of beings in whom such a path ran some other way. A Japanese professor to-whom I put the question of why I felt this difference—in my travels from Tokyo to Fukuoka I was always putting it—answered: “It’s because we lack your Christian sense of sin.” But though this helped, in revealing what he knew about us, both of us, smiling at each other in our excellently cognate English knew that there was more—the whole, massive anthropological past, more imperial even than empires, which yet could localize itself in two people at a table, whose closest rapport lay in that both were aware of it. I have spoken much in my journal of the smells; perhaps because my family’s business had been perfume, that sense was developed in me, and its imagery very accessible. I kept analysing a smell of the country, to me as clear as the unique odor of a person, into what its components might be: food, hair-oil and the specific soap, open drains? All the time I knew what it was, but hadn’t the wit to say. I was smelling the sweat of the dragon-fight, that odor of burnt ideologies, smoked-out shrines, commingled loins and potsherds, which down the ages must hang invisibly over those silent, inner battlegrounds wherever two civilizations are trying to engorge one another. I was seeing how a nation under occupation was dealing with its “conqueror,” and how we dealt with them.

  What are artists for, if not to embody this? There had always been those of whom it would afterwards be said that they were born for it. Or are spewed up by these life transferences? To have more than national ideas swaying their heads, yet these doomedly vying there.

  Mishima, born in 1925, educated at the Peers School where the Spartan fires of militarism still burned, graduating as its highest honor student mid-war, spent half his youth under the clangor of historical glory, and all his manhood with the American conqueror standing sentinel at every streetcorner of Japan’s culture. Grounded deeply in his own literature, he was widely read in Western, classical and modern, and evidently far beyond that French influence, so marked in writers like Kawabata and Dazai, which was now waning, though it would linger in him in his debt to their diarists, from Amiel to Gide and the early Sartre. Eventually he would range and adapt at will, from the Greeks to De Sade, while all the while his novels and stories swell with the most intimately proud mapping of his own country’s topography, the people in it, on farm or shore, in town or temple, forever referentially hemmed in by whatever hills face where, and what weathers come from them. Behind all, always localized like another hill, is their ancestry.

  We tend even now to forget, under the stereotypes we have managed to maintain ever since Commodore Perry’s expedition (and even under a war, seventy-five years on, that has all but completed his task) how Westernization of Japanese spirit and object has been going on since the roughly coincidental Meiji restoration of 1867. In the continuous dialogue between the two young male classmates of Spring Snow, Honda, whose father is a Supreme Court justice trained to respect German logic, and who is a law student (like Mishima himself, who graduated from the School of Jurisprudence) says at various times, of history and of Kiyoaki: “To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious of its style … The testimony of your contemporaries has no value whatsoever … You detest that bunch on the kendo team, don’t you?” … In the midst of turmoil, each man builds his own little shelter of self-awareness. … You have one characteristic that sets you quite apart; you have no trace whatsoever of willpower. And so I am always fascinated to think of you in relation to History.”

  Mishima’s first account in Sun and Steel is of a child, himself, who, as it were the opposite of one of Bettelheim’s autistics, refused to perceive the body, and was let into reality through words. In time “words” however useful and powerful a fetish, become the corrosive evil, and “ideas” foreign to that romantic ideality of the body which he craves. In his attempt to straddle and manipulate the two he becomes the novelist, but only increasing further his “thirst for reality and the flesh.” In this small book, most certainly a classic of self-revelation, his pursuit of that “second language” is examined with such dispassion and self-insight that paraphrase must only distort; we are in the range now of a metaphysics where every sentence counts, and delivers its poignant message with a kinesthetic shock. “As a personal history, it will, I suspect, be unlike anything seen before,” he says, and he is right. In his journey from the black Styx of the inner life to the blue sky of the outer as reflected in ordinary men’s eyes, he sees at every point the parable of his own life. He is taking us down that psychic canal, in very nearly complete consciousness.

  Having experienced all the glorification that the verbal arts can give, he seeks “the essential pathos of the doer” and “the triumph of the non-specific,” learning that for him “the tragic pathos is born when a perfectly average sensibility momentarily takes unto itself a privileged nobility …”? and “endowed with a given physical strength, encounters that … privileged moment especially designed for it.” Imagination is now arrogance; he is intent on pursuing the
words through the body, whose muscles will elucidate the mystery. “To combine action and art is to combine the flower that wilts and the flower that lasts forever … the dual approach cuts one off from all salvation by dreams.” He is led to explore the lapsed concept of consciousness as passive. He will seek to replace imagination by duty; since that word has so faded in Western form, I take it in the more Japanese sense of “obligation.” Concluding that what dignifies the body is its own mortality, he seeks the sought death that will give the most solemn proof of life. And finds that “the profoundest depths of the imagination lay in death. … I could not help feeling that if there were some incident in which violent death pangs and well-developed muscles were skillfully combined, it could only occur in response to the aesthetic demand’s of destiny. Not that destiny often lends an ear to aesthetic considerations.” That is everywhere the tone—of an ego stretching beyond itself, to an appreciation of what the ego is. And giving us, in that so human extra, the one thing that Mishima himself may not see.

  It happens, I think, at some juncture in his own painfully exact report of the romantic attraction a beautiful, doomed death comes to have for him. At some false jointure of, the samurai gesture with a misconceived ideal of Christian martyrdom—“I yearned for the twilight of Novalis”—the analysis begins to serve the yearning. Up to then, he has pursued his own awareness, as he says, as one pursues erotic knowledge—both in Sun and Steel and elsewhere. Set a group of graduate students to count the blood-images which beset every book, to clock where the blood begins—is its psychological source in that dream in Confessions of a Mask where the narrator eats the entrails of the boy who is a belly suicide? Does the bloodbath culminate in “Patriotism,” in the mad formality of the marital double seppuku? “There in my murder theater” they will find Mishima before them. No doubt a legion of psychiatrists with whips (for each other) can attribute it all: the black-mass sadism of Madame de Sade (madame!), the sexual-sensual transliteration which make a mortally ill man die “groaning like a bride,” the lack which makes woman a bas relief or a ritual—to the arrestment of a homosexual personality. Such simplification won’t do. In Confessions of a Mask Mishima has already said: “The thought that I might reach adulthood filled me with foreboding”—and much more. Just as in Sun and Steel, he is mortally aware of what “the destruction of classical perfection” must in practice mean to him.