The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (15 page)

Confessions of a Mask
was hailed by the critics as a work of genius. The book established Yukio Mishima, as he was known thereafter, as one of the foremost writers of the younger generation. Few of the critics, however, sensed the existence of the profound conflict within the personality of Yukio Mishima, and the nature of his struggle against weakness—a struggle out of which
Confessions of a Mask
was born.

Among the many comments on Mishima's work, one searches in vain for a criticism with the accuracy of a remark of Yasunari Kawabata's in his introduction to an earlier, unsuccessful novel by
Mishima,
Tōzoku
(“Robbers,” 1948). “I am dazzled by Mishima's mature talent,” Kawabata wrote. “And at the same time I am disturbed by it. His novelty is not easy to understand. Some may think that Mishima is invulnerable, to judge from this work. Others will see that he has deep wounds.” Kawabata had seen into the young writer's being; he knew how vulnerable his protégé was. In this he was almost alone among Mishima's associates and friends. No wonder, then, that when Mishima put an end to his life twenty years later, Kawabata felt an overwhelming responsibility for his death. Who knows, though, whether jt was within his power to have helped Mishima to avoid disaster? The wounds were so deep and the end had been so well rehearsed.

Confessions of a Mask
had another revealing aspect: Mishima had nothing to say in it about political events that had influenced his life. He made no attempt to analyze the crucial event of his youth—his experience during the war and the collapse of Japanese imperialism in 1945. He was regarded as apolitical by his contemporaries, although an emissary from the Japanese Communist Party, Hajime Odagiri, did once try to persuade him to join the party. It was not until the 1960's that Mishima attempted to write about the Emperor and the defeat of 1945. His long silence on these great national topics may be interpreted as a sign that he was not politically involved or as evidence of his depth of feeling. I believe that both theories are tenable: Mishima felt no involvement in politics in a mundane day-to-day sense; but his experience during the war—and the teaching of the Nippon Roman-ha—made a deep impression on him. He
was
an imperialist of a kind.

FOUR

The Four Rivers (1950–70)

I want to make a poem of my life.

Yukio Mishima

Suicide is something planned in the silence of the heart, like a work of art.

Albert Camus

1

Pictures at an Exhibition

Shortly before he killed himself, Mishima organized an exhibition devoted to his life. It was held at the Tōbu department store at Ikebukuro in Tokyo between November 12 and 19, 1970. In an introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition, he wrote: “Just as I was about to complete my tetralogy,
The Sea of Fertility
, after six years of work, the Tōbu department store asked me for permission to do a retrospective exhibition on my literary life. I have been writing for nearly a quarter of a century and should like to reexamine the paths I have trod. A writer, once he begins looking back on his past works, drives himself into a dead end, but what is wrong with letting others arrange his past? I made only one suggestion: that was to divide my forty-five years of life—a life so
full of contradictions—into Four Rivers, ‘Writing,' ‘Theater,' ‘Body,' and ‘Action,' all finally flowing into
The Sea of Fertility
.”

The exhibition was a great success. There were one hundred thousand visitors, the great majority of whom were men. “It seems that I am not popular with the ladies,” Mishima wrote in a letter to his old teacher from the GakushÅ«in, Fumio Shimizu. Among the visitors was Shizué Hiraoka. She was astonished to see so many materials on display which Mishima had not previously shown to the public—pictures, for example, of Shizué herself as a young woman. She was also surprised by the exhibition as a whole; the hall was hung with black curtains.

“What does it mean?” Shizué asked her son at home. “Why are all the pictures surrounded by black?”

“It's just so that you can see them properly, to provide contrast,” he replied.

The exhibition was Mishima's farewell to the general public. In a prominent position was the sword made by Seki no Magoroku, the two-handed, three-foot-long weapon with which Masakatsu Morita was to cut off Mishima's head on November 25.

In the black-bound catalogue, Mishima wrote: “The visitor will be able to choose just those Rivers that interest him and avoid being swept away into a River that he dislikes. I shall be grateful to those who follow all four Rivers of my life but I cannot believe there will be many such visitors.”

2

The River of Writing

This River helps me to cultivate my fields with the mercy of its waters, supports my living and at times floods and nearly drowns me in its prolific streams. The River also demands from me infinite patience and daily hard labor through the changing seasons and passing time. How alike are writing and farming! One's spirit must be on guard at every moment against storms and frosts. After such a long and vigilant watch over my field of writing, and after such endless toil of imagination and poetry, can I ever be sure of a rich harvest? What I have written departs from me, never nourishing my void,
and becomes nothing but a relentless whip lashing me on. How many struggling nights, how many desperate hours, had to be spent on those writings! If I were to add up and record my memories of such nights I would surely go mad. Yet I still have no way to survive but to keep on writing one line, one more line, one more line . . .

Yukio Mishima, Catalogue to the Tōbu Exhibition

P
ART
O
NE
    1950–54

Yukio Mishima described his first years as a professional writer in his untranslated autobiographical work,
Watakushi no Henreki Jidai
(“My Wandering Years,” 1964). He was not the kind of writer who “rushed ahead with his work on inspiration.” He had gained confidence personally, gave an impression of extraordinary liveliness, and attracted a great deal of attention to himself, but in his method of work he considered himself to be like a banker. (Perhaps he had been influenced by his year in the Banking Bureau at the Ministry of Finance.) Imagine, he wrote, a bank with a large, cheerful display in its window—there are such banks in Japan—and that would give a picture of his style. Mishima regarded Thomas Mann, who had remarked that “writers should look like bankers,” as his model. Mann's “Teutonic stubbornness and unnecessary meticulousness” were far from Mishima's original character, but he had been “captured by the dramatic quality” of Mann's writing and had been attracted by “the unique character of tragedy in German literature.” Mishima, like other Japanese writers, sought to incarnate the style of the Western writer whom he most admired at this time. When he gave lectures to literary societies, he dressed in three-piece suits, had his hair cut short, and looked every inch the prosperous, able young banker or Japanese industrialist.

And yet he was not at peace with himself. “In 1950 I went up and down, from a peak of happiness down to the pit of melancholy.” During this period, and up to the time of his departure on his first world trip at the end of 1951, he was “emotionally more unstable than at any other time of my life.” The smart young Mishima was “constantly lonely, and I was jealous of the mediocre youth of
others”; he thought of himself as “a peculiar, grinning old man aged twenty-five.” And he was ill. He had taken up riding, shortly after leaving the ministry, as he felt that he was in need of exercise. He had joined an exclusive riding club which used the grounds of the Imperial Palace, and there he had his photograph taken, sitting astride a white mare. But this exercise was insufficient to bring him back to health. “I was continually troubled by stomach ache.” Mishima decided that he must at all costs get out of Japan; he made inquiries about booking passage on an Antarctic whaler; even this proved impossible to arrange. The degree of his nervousness is evident from
Watakushi no Henreki Jidai
: “I decided to divide my energy between two worlds: my work and my everyday life. I would no longer trouble myself with the intermediate existence, ‘association with others.' ” He hated “others.”

Early in the autumn of 1950, as he was standing outside a large bookshop in Tokyo inspecting a poster for an exhibition of mummies from the ChÅ«son temple, it suddenly crossed his mind that the people he saw entering and leaving the bookshop were themselves mummies. “I detested their ugliness. How unattractive intellectuals are!” Out of this experience came a bold resolution. Spurred by “uncontrollable hate,” he decided that he must travel to Greece, “the land of my dreams.” This classical aspiration, he related, was generated by “a keen passion for harmony and a deep antipathy to disharmony and exaggeration.” Later, with the benefit of hindsight, he changed his self-diagnosis: “I was probably mistaken. My antipathy for intellectuals was a reaction against my own enormous, monstrous sensitivity. That is why I wanted to become a classicist.” “Travel,” he said, not without self-contradiction once more, for he was ignorant of nature, “consoled me and I experienced a sensual attraction toward scenery . . . Descriptions of nature have an importance in my literature similar to that of love scenes in the work of other men.”

Mishima, who was Western in many respects, was encountering in his mid-twenties the difficulties of many young romantic writers of the same age in the West. It was a crisis period that affected his work. During 1950–1 he wrote a novel that he described as a failure:
Mashin Reihai
(“Worship of Evil”). And he wrote a second novel,
Ao no Jidai
(“Blue Period”), the construction
and style of which he analyzed as “miserable.” A third novel,
Forbidden Colors
, was “unnecessarily confused.” Others thought he was writing well, but the pace of his work had been disturbed: “I don't like to write like that.” His successful novel of this time (Mishima was writing two or three books a year) was
Thirst for Love
. It was written, he said, under the influence of François Mauriac. “Surely,” wrote Mishima, “there can be no foreign author as much to Japanese taste as Mauriac.” According to Donald Keene, who wrote the first long essay on Mishima's writing to be published in the West (it is in his collection
Landscapes and Portraits
, published by Kodansha International in 1971): “He explained this [the influence of Mauriac] in terms of a Japanese fascination for details—the expression on a woman's face when, on the point of weeping, she holds back her tears; just how far back one can see in a woman's mouth when she smiles; the pattern the wrinkles make in her dress when a woman turns round. Mauriac is a master of such details, but, according to Mishima, American novels afford little pleasure of this nature and therefore have never had much appeal for the Japanese.”
Thirst for Love
, Keene observes, “abounds in such details; they suggest not only Mishima's indebtedness to Mauriac but his place in the tradition of Japanese literature.”

The central character in
Thirst for Love
is Etsuko, a woman in her early thirties, who has gone to live with the family of her husband, in the country near Osaka, after his death. The novel is set in the immediate postwar period, a time of great social upheaval. Mishima describes Etsuko in a scene at the beginning of the book: “Etsuko passed her hand through the handle of her shopping bag. The curving bamboo scraped down across her forearm as she lifted her hands to her face. Her cheeks were very warm. That was a common occurrence with her. There wasn't any reason for it; of course, it wasn't a symptom of any illness—it was just that suddenly her cheeks would start to burn. Her hands, delicate though they were, were calloused and tanned, and because of that very delicacy seemed rougher. They scratched her cheeks and intensified the burning.” Etsuko walks “as if she were pregnant,” with “an ostentatiously indolent walk. She didn't realize it; she had no one who might see it and set her right; but like the slip of paper that a
mischievous boy has surreptitiously affixed to a friend's back, that walk was her involuntary sign and seal.” She comes from a middle-class family in Tokyo and does not like the rural life about her. As she walks home from a shopping expedition: “Lights were burning in the rows of government housing. There were hundreds of units—of the same style, the same life, the same smallness, the same poverty. The road through this squalid community afforded a shortcut that she never took.” (In this description, Mishima's own feelings about postwar
demokurashi
are evident.)

Etsuko is secretly in love with a farm boy, Saburo, who also lives with the family. And in the autumn there is a festival which gives her a chance to come physically close to him after months of longing. Saburo and the other village youths, wearing only
fundoshi
(loincloths), dash about in front of the village Shinto shrine, in pursuit of a lion's head borne on a standard. For this, Etsuko prepares herself as if she were going to a chic reception in Tokyo: “She wore a scattered-chrysanthemum silk kimono, of a kind rare outside the city, under a shiny, black haori, tailored slightly short. The scent of her treasured Houbigant wafted faintly about her—a cologne that had no place at a country festival, obviously put on for Saburo alone.” On the way to the festival she tears her haori, her jacket, but does not notice. Her thoughts are on the fiery scene ahead. She arrives at the shrine and sees the young men dancing around the lion's head, back and forth, as bamboo firecrackers explode, and suddenly rushes toward them, having recognized Saburo in their midst. “Etsuko stumbled forward, pushed by the throng, and collided with a bare back, warm as fire, coming from the opposite direction. She reached out her hands and held it off. It was Saburo's back. She savored the touch of his flesh. She savored the majestic warmth of him. The mob pushed again from behind her, causing her fingernails to gouge into Saburo's back. He did not even feel it. In all the mad pushing and shoving he had no idea what woman was pressing against his back. Etsuko felt the blood dripping between her fingers.”