The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (18 page)

The long conversations in
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
, translated by Ivan Morris and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1958, are dominated by Kashiwagi, a fellow student of Mizoguchi at a Buddhist seminary, an evil man. “His most striking characteristic was that he had two rather powerful-looking clubfeet. His way of walking was most elaborate. He always seemed to be walking in mud: when finally he had managed to pull one foot out of the mud, the other foot would appear to be stuck. At the same time there was a sprightliness about his whole body. His walk was a sort of exaggerated dance, utterly lacking in anything commonplace.”

Kashiwagi harasses Mizoguchi, using the aggressive conversational technique of a Zen priest:

“ ‘Stutter!' he said. ‘Go ahead and stutter!'

“I listened in sheer amazement to his peculiar way of expressing himself.

“ ‘At last you've come across someone to whom you can stutter at your ease. That's right, isn't it? People are all like that, you know. They are all looking for a yoke fellow. Well now, are you a virgin?' ”

The clubfooted fellow follows up this attack on Mizoguchi with a reference to his physical ailment and his use of the deformity to intrigue women and lure them into bed. Mizoguchi, who is a virgin, is hypnotized by Kashiwagi's aphorism: “ ‘The special quality of
hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail. And to see all that in the pitch darkness.' ”

Kashiwagi gives a demonstration of his technique of seducing women. As the two students walk along a path, Kashiwagi catches sight of a beautiful girl approaching them. At the critical moment he lurches and falls with a pitiful cry, attracting the attention of the girl, who helps him to his feet and takes him to her home, close by, to bandage his (unhurt) leg. The two have an affair. Kashiwagi later gets rid of the girl, after teaching her how to disguise the fact that she has lost her virginity—she is going to marry.

One day Mizoguchi steals some irises from the garden at Kinkakuji and brings them to Kashiwagi's lodging as a gift. While the latter makes a flower arrangement in a dish in his room, Mizoguchi questions him about the girlfriend he has just disposed of. Kashiwagi replies:

“ ‘Do you know the famous words in the chapter of Popular Enlightenment in the
Rinsairoku
? “When ye meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha! When ye meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor! . . .” '

“ ‘ “When ye meet a disciple of Buddha,” ' I continued, ‘ “kill the disciple! When ye meet your father and mother, kill your father and mother! When ye meet your kin, kill your kin! Only thus will ye attain deliverance.” '

“ ‘That's right. And that was the situation, you see. That girl was a disciple of Buddha.'

“ ‘And so you delivered yourself?'

“ ‘Hm,' said Kashiwagi, arranging some of the irises that he had cut, and gazing at them, ‘there's more to killing than that you know.' ”

Kashiwagi then introduces the Zen koan (riddle), “Nansen Kills a Kitten.” One day a beautiful kitten is found in the neighborhood of two temples. The monks of the two temples dispute among themselves as to who should look after it. Nansen ends the dispute by asking them to tell him why he should not kill the kitten, and when they cannot reply, he kills it. When his chief disciple, Joshu, who has been out, returns to the temple, Nansen tells him what has happened. Thereupon Joshu takes off his muddy
shoes and places them on his head. “If only you had been here,” Nansen says, “then the kitten could have been saved!” “ ‘You see,' continued Kashiwagi, ‘that's what beauty is like. To have killed the kitten seemed just like having extracted a painful decayed tooth, like having gouged out beauty. Yet it was uncertain whether or not this had really been a final solution. The root of the beauty had not been severed, and even though the kitten was dead, the kitten's beauty might very well still be alive. And so, you see, it was in order to satirize the glibness of this solution that Joshu put those shoes on his head. He knew, so to speak, that there was no possible solution other than enduring the pain of the decayed tooth.' ”

Mizoguchi is very much frightened by this “completely original solution” of the koan. He asks:

“ ‘So which of the two are you? Father Nansen or Joshu?'

“ ‘Well, let's see. As things are now, I am Nansen and you're Joshu. But some day you might become Nansen and I might become Joshu. This problem has a way of changing—like a cat's eyes.' ”

As Mizoguchi watches Kashiwagi at work on his arrangement of irises, he has a premonition of approaching disaster: “There was something cruel about the movement of his hands. They behaved as though they had some unpleasant, gloomy privilege in relation to the plants. Perhaps it was because of this that each time that I heard the sound of the scissors and saw the stem of one of the flowers being cut I had the impression that I could detect the dripping of blood.”

The story ends with Mizoguchi's destruction of Kinkakuji—Mishima's story is based on a real event, the burning down of Kinkakuji by a psychopathic monk in the summer of 1950.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
won high praise. The
Asahi Shimbun
said that Mishima had “outgrown the smart young writer and has evolved as a mature observer of human nature.” The
Yomiuri
newspaper awarded Mishima a prize; and Kon Ichikawa, one of the best of the postwar directors, filmed the book. Its publication in the translation by Ivan Morris was to seal Mishima's reputation overseas. (Only one criticism was made. Hideo Kobayashi, probably the most powerful critic in postwar Japan, said he doubted if
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
was a novel; it was a poem, he said, which revealed the author's attitudes too directly. A photograph taken of Kobayashi and Mishima having dinner together in January 1957 shows Mishima with his head uncharacteristically bowed, as he listens to his critic.)

To many writers their reputation is secondary. To Mishima it was cardinal. With the publication of
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
, he established himself as the leading writer of his generation in Japan. His claim to this title, as novelist, playwright, and critic, was strong: his style was superior to that of his contemporaries. Mishima was not content with this success, however. As Keene has remarked: “He wanted to conquer the world with his books.” By 1956–7 this ambition was within the realm of the possible. There was a boom in the West in Japanese literature—many of the leading authors of the twentieth century were being published in America; this was essential for Mishima's success. Moreover, Mishima was in a better position than any other writer to exploit the surge of interest in Japanese literature: his books were Western in structure, unlike, for example, those of Kawabata, in which mood is all-important and which are often difficult for a Western reader to appreciate. Also, Mishima's work was very varied—over forty books of his had been published—and from this wide range could be selected half a dozen books with appeal to the West. Finally, Mishima was personable and eager to communicate with Western audiences, whereas other Japanese writers either were too elderly to care much or were simply indifferent. His major problem was that he was not fluent in English.

Early in 1957 he received two invitations which sealed his determination to overcome this handicap. The first came from Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher in New York, who asked him to travel to America for the publication of
Five Modern Nō Plays
, a collection translated by Keene. (The previous year, Knopf had brought out
The Sound of Waves
, which had been successful for a Japanese author: 10,000 copies were sold.) The second invitation was to deliver a speech at Michigan University, on the subject of modern Japanese literature. Mishima accepted both invitations, and settled down to learn English with characteristic determination. A friend told me: “He bought tapes and earphones for his
tape recorder, and sat down with the machine for hours every day. He went over the same tapes again and again, battering the unfamiliar sounds into his head.”

On July 1, Mishima boarded a plane at Haneda to begin his second world trip. Anyone who saw him that day would not have taken him for a writer. He had his hair cut short, and he wore a blazer and white shirt and tie; he radiated good health. One might have thought he was a sports coach, with his thick neck and physical flamboyance. For two years he had been working at building up his body and he had transformed his physical appearance. In place of the spindly, white arms of his youth, he had strong, muscular arms and shoulders. He had turned into a healthy, sun-tanned specimen of Japanese manhood.

In the lecture which he gave at Michigan, Mishima discussed the work of Kawabata (the heir to the Japanese classical tradition), Ooka, Takeda, and Ishihara. He also spoke of himself, his association with the Nippon Roman-ha during the war—he referred to the movement's
uyoku kokusuishugi
, its right-wing chauvinism—and his love of the classics. In the future, he said, there would be “an entirely new kind of reunion between modern literature and the classics” in Japan, and in it, he implied, Mishima would play a role.

His stay in America lasted nearly six months. He traveled in the South, visiting New Orleans, and then on to the West Indies—in Port-au-Prince he saw a voodoo ceremony—arriving in New York in late summer. He wished to see his No plays—which were free adaptations, in modern settings, of the classical plays and were exciting interest in many parts of the world—performed in New York.

He stayed in a first-class hotel and waited. Weeks went by, his money began to run out, and he received no news. He moved to a third-class Greenwich Village hotel, which he likened to a yoroin, an old people's home; it had many elderly, permanent residents. Waiting in vain for a performance of his No plays, and with little money (Japan still had severe foreign-exchange control), Mishima became very gloomy. He was not good at managing abroad by himself. He described his feelings in an untranslated autobiographical
essay “Ratai To Isho” (“Nakedness and Clothing”): “In a foreign country everything is a source of fear. You cannot go to the post office or to the bank, as you are frightened of going by yourself. You don't know how to get about, whether by bus or by underground. All around you is a mystery, so much so that you cannot tell one man from another, who is good and who evil.”

Donald Keene was in New York at the time—he was then an assistant professor of Japanese literature at Columbia University. He remembers: “I wanted to see him and to encourage him, but I was busy with lectures and did not invite him out. One day Mishima came to my apartment, unannounced, and said, proudly, that he had taken the subway. I was about to go out and told him this. Then, in a hesitant manner, speaking in a low voice, he asked if I would permit him to stay behind a little longer, alone.” Mishima lacked self-confidence and was unable to stop himself from showing his weakness to others. “It was an incredible scene,” remarked Keene, “if one considers the man he was in the 1960's.” In the end there was a private performance of one No play,
Hanjo
, and Mishima left for home, dispirited, at the end of the year, returning by way of Europe. He arrived just before his thirty-third birthday.

In Japan it is rare for a man to remain unmarried. Most people marry in their twenties, the girls in their early twenties, the men a little later. Not to marry is considered odd, especially if one comes from the upper middle class. That Mishima had not married in his twenties was surprising, for he was guided in what he did by a strong sense of duty, particularly to his parents. He had been held back, however, by his close relationship with his mother; Shizué did not press him to get married. Early in 1958, on his return from abroad, Mishima learned his mother had cancer and would probably die. He immediately made up his mind to find a wife, so that Shizué would see him safely married before she died. Having no particular girl in mind, he opted for an arranged marriage, a common practice in Japan, and he began to take part in many omiai—formal meetings with girls found by family friends and acquaintances.

One of Mishima's first omiai was with Michiko Shōda, the
beautiful daughter of a flour-company president—who subsequently married Crown Prince Akihito. Possibly, Mishima's ideas about the person he wished to marry were too much for Miss Shōda and her family. He stipulated that his bride must be neither a
bungaku shojo
, a bluestocking, nor a
yūmeibyō kanja
, a celebrity hunter. And he had five other requirements: 1. His bride must wish to marry Kimitaké Hiraoka, the private citizen, not Yukio Mishima, the writer. 2. She should be no taller than her husband, even in heels. 3. She must be
kawaii
(pretty) and have a round face. 4. She should be eager to take care of Mishima's parents and capable of running the house efficiently. 5. She must not disturb Mishima while he worked. These were the guidelines given to the intermediaries who had the task of finding suitable candidates.

His choice settled finally on Yōko Sugiyama, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a well-known traditional painter; Mishima chose her partly because she was the daughter of an artist. And also, according to the magazine
Young Lady
: “I could not help choosing someone from a spot I did not know . . . someone who was not interested in my writing.” Yōko was two inches shorter than Mishima—she was just over five feet tall—and she was
kawaii
and round-faced; and, according to the confidential reports that the Hiraoka family received from the marriage counselor, she was thoroughly competent. Mishima met Yōko in early April and after two meetings made up his mind: they were engaged early in May 1958. He asked Kawabata to act as
baishaku-nin
—the “go-between” who officiates at the dinner party that follows the marriage ceremony, a Shinto service. He wanted to rush ahead with the wedding—“it is not a good idea to delay, while people whisper advice into one's ear”—and would have liked to get married in May. This proved to be impossible, however, as the couple could not find a
taian
, a lucky day, and Yōko's three wedding dresses were not ready (the bride at a Japanese wedding appears in kimono, Western wedding dress, and ball dress). They were married on June 1.