The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (16 page)

Thirst for Love
ends with a scene in the genre of the “murder theater,” in which Etsuko drives a mattock through the neck of Saburo. Her love for him turns to panic when she discovers that Saburo is attracted to her. As Flaubert was Madame Bovary, Mishima
was Etsuko. He, too, felt a compulsion to love and to hurt the object of his love; he, too, was repelled when the other responded to his approaches. His thirst, like that of Etsuko's, could not be quenched with love; to accept the love of another was the hardest thing that could be required of him.

The “basic proposition of the modern novel,” wrote Mishima, “is, as Dostoevsky said . . . the expression of diametrically opposed attitudes within human beings.” In his other major work of this period,
Forbidden Colors
, Mishima attempted to show “the discrepancies and conflicts within myself, as represented by two ‘I's.' ” The first “I” is Shunsuké, a writer of sixty-five, a celebrated novelist whose
Collected Works
are being published for the third time. Shunsuké is the “grinning old man” whom Mishima feared to find in himself: “This new collection of
The Works of Shunsuké Hinoki
would be his third. The first one was assembled when he was forty-five. At that point in time, I recall, he thought to himself that in spite of the great accumulation of my works acclaimed by the world as the epitome of stability and unity, and, in a sense, having reached the pinnacle, as many predicted, I was quite given over to this foolishness . . . a wild ability to handle abstractions, which threatened to make me misanthropic.” Shunsuké studies a brochure advertising his
Collected Works
, on which his photograph appears: “It was a picture of an ugly old man. That was the only way to put it. However, it was not difficult to see in it certain dim and delicate traces of the spiritual beauty so acclaimed by the world. The broad forehead; the clipped, narrow cheeks; the broad, hungry lips; the willful chin: in every feature the traces of long, hard work and of spirit lay open to the light. His face, however, was not so much molded by spirit as riddled with it . . . In its ugliness his face was a corpse emaciated of spirit, no longer possessing the power to retain its privacy.” (Mishima, in his disgust with old age, was ahead of his years, yet in touch with the mood of his time, as represented by the work of Tanizaki and Kawabata, whose books
The Diary of a Mad Old Man
and
The House of the Sleeping Beauties
expressed a horror of old age more vividly than did
Forbidden Colors
.)

The second “I” of
Forbidden Colors
is YÅ«ichi, a youth of exquisite beauty, first seen by Shunsuké as he emerges from the sea after a swim: “It was an amazingly beautiful young man. His
body surpassed the sculptures of ancient Greece. It was like the Apollo molded in bronze by an artist of the Peloponnesus school. It overflowed with gentle beauty and carried such a noble column of a neck, such gently sloping shoulders, such a softly broad chest, such elegantly rounded wrists, such a rapidly tapering, tightly filled trunk, such legs, stoutly filled out like a heroic sword.” Shunsuké sees YÅ«ichi's face: “Quick, narrow eyebrows; deep, sad eyes; rather thick, fresh lips—these made up the design of his extraordinary profile. The wonderful ridge of his nose, furthermore, along with his controlled facial expression, gave to his youthful good looks a certain chaste impression of wildness, as if he had never known anything but noble thoughts and starvation.” YÅ«ichi, unlike the protagonist of
Confessions of a Mask
, is an uncomplicated homosexual who enjoys the act of love. He is, however, much more of a narcissist than he is a homosexual—true to Mishima's own character in this respect. When YÅ«ichi makes his first appearance at a gay bar in Tokyo, “YÅ«ichi floated on desire. The look they gave him was like that a woman feels when she passes among men and their eyes instantly undress her down to the last stitch. Practiced appraisers' eyes usually do not make mistakes. The gently sloping chest . . . the potential lovely harmony between what one saw and could not see seemed as perfect as a product of the ratio of golden section.”

The novel was strongly misogynist; Shunsuké uses YÅ«ichi to wreak his revenge on several women whom he hates. In one scene Shunsuké, confronted with the drowned body of his third and last wife, who has committed suicide with her lover, presses a No mask onto the swollen face of his dead spouse, “until it buckled like ripe fruit.” The novel was also chauvinistic; the foreigners in the book are deliberately absurd. One such character has the custom of shouting “
Tengoku! Tengoku!
” (Paradise! Paradise!) when he reaches a sexual climax; another makes an assault on YÅ«ichi and, when repulsed, weeps and kisses the cross which hangs from a chain about his own neck.

Mishima's private life at this time resembled YÅ«ichi's. “He knew far more about boys than we did,” remarked one of his literary friends. He patronized Brunswick, a gay bar in the Ginza; there he met the seventeen-year-old Akihiro Maruyama, who had just
begun a golden career in the gay bars—from which he was to graduate to the theater, where he became the most celebrated female impersonator of his day. The two men danced together; but they did not have an affair, according to Maruyama, who “did not think him [Mishima] handsome, he was not my type.” Mishima had reservations about the gay bars, which are the haunts of scandal-seeking journalists and blackmailers and, like the whole of the Ginza, are under the protection of yakuza, of gangsters. He particularly disliked effeminate men (his own ideal was a masculine type), as is clear from this description of a gay bar in
Forbidden Colors
: “Men dancing together—this uncommon joke. As they danced, the rebellious smiles beaming from their faces said: ‘We aren't doing this because we are forced to; we are only playing a simple joke.' While they danced, they laughed, a spirit-destroying laugh.” Mishima wrote to a friend a little later: “I am not going to Brunswick any more.”

Like YÅ«ichi in
Forbidden Colors
, Mishima sought both male and female company. One of his girlfriends told me: “He liked women with long necks and round faces and he was very particular in some ways. When we went out together, he would specify what I was to wear. For the Comédie Française I had to wear a gown from Paris.” He was, in the Japanese phrase, a “bearer of two swords”; but he preferred men.

Shizué remained the center of his life. At night she would set out in the tatami room in which her son lived in their new home in Midorigaoka—a fashionable suburb of Tokyo—the things he needed in the evening: fresh paper, pen and pencils, tea, fruit, blankets, glasses, and so on. And Shizué was always the first person to see her son's writing. The family home was quiet and a good place to work. Chiyuki, Mishima's younger brother—an entirely different kind of man, unassuming and lacking in great ambition—had decided to take the diplomatic-service examination; he never disturbed his busy older brother. Only his father, still a grumbler, enjoyed disputes; Azusa picked quarrels over the domestic pets, and, as a lover of dogs, tried to insist that Mishima do away with his cats. Mishima had cut a little door in the wall of his room so that his cats could come and go. And when he traveled abroad, he would send postcards to the cats, adding postscripts in which
he urged his father to be more considerate to them. “Sometimes he would work away for hours with a cat sitting on his lap, it would drive me mad,” Azusa said. “Your brain must be like a dog's, Father,” Mishima would reply. “You can't understand the delicate psychology of cats.”

Late in 1951, with his father's assistance, Mishima made arrangements to travel abroad. Azusa had a friend at the
Asahi Shimbun
, the leading Japanese newspaper; and with this journalist's help Mishima obtained an appointment as a special correspondent without reporting duties but entitled to an issue of foreign exchange, available from the Ministry of Finance, his old ministry, only under the rarest circumstances (Japan was desperately short of foreign exchange). He left Yokohama on Christmas Day on the
President Wilson
, seen off by his parents, who waved goodbye from the pier. Mishima had been looking forward to this chance to travel overseas; as he recalled in
Watakushi no Henreki Jidai:
“I felt the strong necessity of traveling abroad . . . I was in the midst of an emotional crisis, I had to discover a new man within myself.”

On board ship he was happy. He mixed with the other passengers, abandoning “my long-held claims to the solitude of a writer and my contempt for the world.” He attended New Year fancy-dress parties with some Americans, tying a
hachimaki
, a headband, on his head, and during the day he sat on deck reading. Sitting in the sun, which he had been unable to do earlier in life, when his lungs were delicate, opened up a new world to him. “I found the sun for the first time. I had come out of a dark cave. How long I had suppressed my love of the sun! All day long, sunbathing on deck, I wondered how I should change myself. What did I have in excess? What did I lack?”
(Watakushi no Henreki Jidai)
. He concluded that he had quite enough sensitivity. “What I lack is an existential awareness of myself and of my body. I know how to despise mere cool intelligence. What I want is intelligence matched by pure physical existence—like a statue. And for this I need the sun, I need to leave my dark, cave-like study.”

Mishima's baptism in international travel was not unlike that of other Japanese. He tended to look back over his shoulder at Japan rather than at the life about him. In Honolulu he was struck
by the calm manner in which Nisei (American Japanese) who lived there received a concert by Yehudi Menuhin and Jascha Heifetz; by contrast, in Tokyo, there had been an enormous fuss over the musicians (to the amusement of people in Hawaii). In San Francisco, Mishima went to a Japanese restaurant and was given food of poor quality; he was “reminded of Japan in the most miserable fashion possible.” Traveling on to Los Angeles, visiting museums, he came across a work by Turner borrowed from London, and he greatly admired a first edition of William Blake's
Songs of Innocence;
he was also much intrigued by a case full of minutely detailed old cameos. New York made a deep impression on Mishima. This was “Tokyo five hundred years from now,” but Tokyo and New York had something in common: “in both cities, artists have a nostalgia for Paris.” He was shepherded about by a guide from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, on the introduction of Herb Passin, the American scholar, a friend of Mishima's in Japan. In New York he visited the museums (at the Museum of Modern Art, he admired Picasso's
Guernica
) and went to the theater and to the opera. Richard Strauss, he said, after seeing
Salome
at the Metropolitan Opera, was the “Wagner of the twentieth century.” And he was taken up to Harlem late in the evening for a round of the bars.

In New York he also met Meredith Weatherby, the American who was working on the translation of
Confessions of a Mask
. According to Weatherby's account in the
Asahi Shimbun
(1956): “We spent a whole day going over only two or three points. Mishima showed no sign of irritation. The translation was not published, but I learned a great deal from Mishima on that occasion. Translation of his works is harder than translating classical No. Sometimes it took me three hours to translate a single sentence. He always expressed the most subtle things in the most condensed sentences.” The translation was of course published eventually; its homosexual theme may have put off some American publishers forty years ago.

From America Mishima traveled to Brazil: “During a stay of one month in Rio de Janeiro at carnival time I was captured by the tropical sunshine. I felt as if I had finally come home.” Leaving Brazil, he continued his journey to Paris, where he was cheated
by a currency dealer on the street, and compelled to stay in a small pension for almost a month, with hardly any money. The pension was owned by a Japanese, and an acquaintance, the film director Keisuké Kinoshita, was also there; his situation was not desperate. While Mishima waited for news of his purloined traveler's checks, he wrote a play,
Yoru no Himawari
(“Sunflower at Night”). Then, after getting his money back, he traveled to Greece, alone. This was an important journey for him. Unlike other Japanese writers, Mishima had long been interested in Greek literature and in the classical tradition of Europe. Four years before, he had written a short story, “Shishi” (“Lion”), based on Euripides'
Medea
. Though Mishima's contemporaries in Japan paid little attention to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the Homeric epics, Mishima knew the classical literature well, having read it in translation. His interest in the Greek classics—and also in the authors of the grand siècle, notably Racine—matched his love of the Japanese classics, also a most uncommon taste for one of his generation in Japan.

When at last Mishima reached Greece, he “fell in love with the blue seas and the vivid skies of that classical land.” He traveled to all the famous places (Cape Sounion was an exception) and “felt completely intoxicated all day long.” He formed a theory about classical Greece. In ancient times there had been no “spirituality” (a “grotesque outgrowth of Christianity”), but there was an equilibrium between the body and the mind. It had been only too easy for the ancient Greeks to lose their equilibrium, and the very effort required to maintain a balance had helped them create beauty. Tragedy, in which arrogance had invariably been punished by the gods, had aided men to understand how to maintain an equilibrium. “My interpretation may have been wrong, but that was the Greece of which I stood in need.” Mishima found that which he had come to discover: “an ethical criterion according to which I could produce beautiful work and also make myself beautiful.” His visit to Greece, he maintained, healed him of “my self-hatred and liking for solitude.” In their place, he discovered a “will toward health”—this phrase he adapted from the Nietzschean expression, “will toward Power.” He returned to Japan “in good humor, full of confidence in myself, sure that I could no longer be hurt by others.” (He was guilty, so he would discover, of naïveté in this respect.)