The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (10 page)

Standing by my window
I waited each evening
For strange events.
I watched for evil omens
A sandstorm surging across the street
A rainbow at night.

After his death, a critic, Jun Etō, maintained that this nihilistic work “held the clue to all Mishima's literature.”

The young Mishima, it seems, remained passively homosexual. He had admired Ōmi from afar, and he did not embark on affairs at the Gakushūin; he was too timid, and as he did not board at the school, his opportunities were much more limited than those of other boys. There was a good deal of adolescent homosexuality at the Gakushūin, as at any boys' boarding school; but the main interest was heterosexuality, as Mishima made clear in
Confessions of a Mask:
“The period called adolescence—I had my full share of it so far as burning curiosity was concerned—seemed to have come to pay us a sick visit. Having attained puberty, the boys seemed to do nothing but always think immoderately about women, exude pimples, and write sugary verses out of heads that were in a constant dizzy reel.” He realized that he was different from other boys; they seemed to derive unusual excitement from the mere word “woman.” “I, on the other hand, received no more sensual impression from ‘woman' than from ‘pencil.' ” But he did not appreciate how different he was: “In short, I knew absolutely nothing about other boys. I did not know that each night all boys but me had dreams in which women—women barely glimpsed yesterday on a street corner—were stripped of their clothing and set one by one parading before the dreamers' eyes. I did not know that in the boys' dreams the breasts of a woman would float up like beautiful jellyfish rising from the sea of night.” Mishima was uneasy about his own sexual feelings. He became “obsessed with the idea of the kiss,” and to delude himself that this desire was animal passion, he had to undertake an elaborate disguise of his true self. An unconscious feeling of guilt stubbornly insisted that he play “a conscious and false role.”

Schoolwork, literature, and adolescent passions—he maintained
an emotional correspondence with Azuma—preoccupied Mishima. Meanwhile, the international situation was rapidly deteriorating; Japan was moving swiftly toward war with Britain and America. In July 1940, numerous British residents in Japan were imprisoned as “spies,” and in the autumn Japan entered into the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. This was followed by a neutrality treaty with Russia, which was concluded in April 1941. There had been two conflicting views in the Japanese military establishment during the 1930's. One side believed that the main threat to Japan was from the Soviet Union, and they advocated a strike north; but they had been virtually eliminated after the Ni Ni Roku Incident of February 1936. Their opponents, who favored a strike south against Britain, Holland, and France, gained control of the government. After the success of Nazi Germany in 1940, events played into the hands of the strike-south party; their strategy seemed correct. America, however, was a problem. To inflict a military defeat on the United States was impossible. The Japanese hoped that the Roosevelt Administration would settle for a stalemate in the Pacific, that Britain would be crushed by Hitler and Japanese forces would penetrate as far as Australia and India to complete the destruction of the British Empire. With this aim in mind, the Armed Forces, which had dominated all governments after 1930, planned to deliver an initial crushing blow against the U.S. Navy by making a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The enemy was to be put off-guard by diplomatic negotiations right up to the eve of the attack. Following the appointment in October 1941 of General Tojo as Prime Minister, Home Minister, and Defense Minister, the stage was set for war.

At this moment Mishima, aged sixteen, was publishing his first work,
Hanazakari no Mori
(“The Forest in Full Bloom”), in installments in a literary magazine,
Bungei Bunka
, which his teacher, Shimizu, helped to edit.
Hanazakari no Mori
was the first flowering of Mishima's talent; he displayed a gift for language—he wrote a rich, romantic Japanese—which astounded his elders. Zenmei Hasuda, a schoolteacher friend of Shimizu, commented in the September 1941 edition of
Bungei Bunka
: “The author of
Hanazakari no Mori
is a very young man. We want to keep his identity secret for a while . . . This young writer is the blessed child of
Ancient History.”
Hanazakari no Mori
, praised by Hasuda in this Hegelian manner, is a remarkable work. Its theme is ancestry; it consists of five parts, in which Mishima described the lives of “ancestors” of aristocratic lineage from widely separated historical periods. One section, for example, relates the experiences of a duchess of the Meiji period (the late nineteenth century) who divorces her husband and spends the ensuing forty years of her life in retirement. Another part describes the religious experiences of a lady of the court who has visions of God. What appealed to Hasuda, a vehement nationalist, was Mishima's evocation of a historical Japan totally different in character from the crude modern age, in which the philistinism of the military leaders of Japan was sweeping all before it. The beauty of his language—full of nostalgia for the past—was the more striking in view of Mishima's youth. His Japanese was more distinguished than that of his elders—and all his life Mishima was to display a love of rare characters which distinguished him from his contemporaries.

Hanazakari no Mori
was not merely Mishima's first published work and one which contained the seeds of all his writing; it also marked the evolution of his mature thinking, which was pessimistic. At the end of the book, an old acquaintance comes to visit an aged friend, a woman of aristocratic family who lives alone in her retirement. The visitor attempts to revive their common memories of the past, but the aged woman will have none of it. “It's strange,” she remarks, “but it's all gone away somewhere.” The scene is very similar to that at the end of Mishima's last work,
The Decay of the Angel
, written almost thirty years later.

In
Hanazakari no Mori
, Mishima adopted the nom de plume he was to use for the rest of his life: Yukio Mishima. The decision was taken at Shimizu's house in Mejiro, at a meeting in the late summer of 1941. Shimizu proposed that the boy use a pen name, as he was still so young. He suggested the name Mishima: the view of the snowy summit of Mt. Fuji is best seen from the town of Mishima, which lies directly between Mt. Fuji and the sea to the south. Shimizu derived the first name, Yukio, from the Japanese for snow—yuki. The two then discussed which characters they should use to write the name; there is a considerable choice. “Mishima” was easy; they chose the characters used in the place name:
. “Yukio” was more difficult. The young writer proposed
. And Shimizu suggested a literary flourish: changing the third character to
. His idea was to give the pen name a romantic flavor; and
had been selected by a romantic poet, Sachio Itō, as the last syllable of his first name. (Mishima's hostile father later said that his son had selected the pen name by flicking through a telephone directory and making a stab with a pencil. He was wrong.)

In the month in which the last installment of
Hanazakari no Mori
was published, the war started. The root causes of the Pacific War, which began on December 7, 1941, when carrier-borne aircraft attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, remain a matter for debate. Mishima once told me: “We were forced to go to war.” This is a view with which many Japanese would agree today, though at the time that Mishima said it—early 1966—it was still hard to find a Japanese who spoke openly about the war, such was the trauma of the defeat of 1945, following the first and only use of nuclear weapons in battle. Many Japanese believe that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a “defensive measure” intended to break the siege of the ABCD alliance (America, Britain, China, and the Dutch). President Roosevelt had announced that he would cut off Japan's oil, and the response was a “defensive” assault on Hawaii and on British colonies in the Far East. Whatever the causes of the war, its effect on the career and the suicide of Yukio Mishima was profound. As Bunzō Hashikawa, a contemporary of Mishima's and a historian, remarked: “The easiest way to explain Mishima's suicide is by reference to his experiences during the war, when he was in his teens.” The war brought no immediate change in the boy's situation, but he and the other students at the GakushÅ«in lived in the belief that conscription and almost certain death awaited them at the end of their school years.

2

The “Irony” of It All

The war at first made little difference to the Hiraoka family. Azusa Hiraoka was forty-seven, too old to be drafted, and when he resigned from his ministry job in March 1942—he had risen in rank as far as he could—he began a small law practice. His father, Jōtarō, aged eighty, died in August, and this was the most important event in the Hiraoka family that year.

Mishima, who was seventeen, moved up from the middle to the senior school at the Gakushūin in March 1942. His record had been excellent academically. For three years he had ranked second out of sixty boys in his class; he had top grades in all subjects but physics, in which he had dropped a grade in a single term. His school report showed: