The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (20 page)

Mishima's taste in women was evident in his descriptions of Kazu. He had a traditional Japanese liking for white flesh and a dislike of suntans: “Kazu's rich shoulders and breasts had lost nothing of their beauty, despite all the summer's exertions. Her sunburned neck, however, emerging light-brown, like a faded flower, from the snow-white skin below, showed the effects of the election campaign. The sunlight striking the surface of the mirror still kept a lingering summer intensity, but Kazu's white shoulders and breasts were an icehouse. The fine-grained, saturated whiteness repelled the light, suggesting that it concealed within a cool, dark summer interior.”

After the Banquet
was a brilliant success for Mishima; it is also the work by him which I like most as entertainment (
Confessions of a Mask
is compelling enough, but it is gloomy reading). But he was never satisfied with his successes. He had been put off by the applause for
The Sound of Waves
, and the great triumph of his career in the 1950's,
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
, had also not provided him with lasting satisfaction. What did he want of life? 1960 was without doubt a crucial year in his life. He does not appear to have known what he wanted; once more he was deep in a personal crisis, as he had been in 1950–51, just before his first travels abroad. But in the fifties something had changed. Ten years had gone by—his “classical” period lay behind him—and he seemed, to himself at any rate, to have nothing to show for that decade. Worst of all, he had failed as a novelist—with
Kyōko no Ie
. This failure, I believe, made a very deep mark on Mishima. One has to remember that he had had almost no experience of failure—and, at the same time, he set an enormous premium on success. He had thrown everything, he said, into
Kyōko no Ie
. All his accumulated experience—as a man, as a craftsman, and as a novelist—was contained in that long book, the longest novel of his career (the two volumes of
Forbidden Colors
excepted). And he had had the book virtually cast back in his face. The critics were extremely harsh in their treatment of the novel; scarcely anyone—Takeo Okuno was an exception—expressed a liking for it. Some reviewers said that this was Mishima's “magnificent failure”; he instantly sensed that beneath the sycophancy was a barely concealed sense of triumph: the brilliant young Mishima had fallen
flat on his face. Under such circumstances, the success of
After the Banquet
did not console Mishima. What he wanted, urgently, was to reestablish himself; and for the first time in his life, he found that he lacked the thrust, the energy to do so. As a novelist, Mishima experienced his gravest crisis in 1960; it was not until 1965 that he attempted another major novel—when he embarked on his monumental
The Sea of Fertility
.

It may be, however, that he felt a still deeper sense of failure at this time in his life. Not only was he beset by difficulties as a novelist—they may have acted as catalyst—but the position in which he found himself seems to have been far graver than the failure of
Kyōko no Ie
alone would have justified. I do not know exactly what was going on in his mind, but judging by his actions, Mishima was in profound despair. In the autumn of 1959, presumably after he learned the bad news about
Kyōko no Ie
, he decided to play a part in a movie. There was nothing extraordinary about this. Why should he not amuse himself a little? (He said that he would “like to be a jazz singer, to be eighteen again.”) But the movie he chose to appear in was bad. It was an ugly, irresponsible, yakuza (gangster) movie in which Mishima played the part of an insignificant hood who gets himself murdered—and is, indeed, a nasty little specimen. Had Mishima chosen to play in a good film, one would not be surprised; this was his first movie and the experience was plainly one that someone of his temperament would enjoy. But why
Karakkaze Yarō
(“A Dry Fellow”), a grubby tale of prison, of betrayed girlfriends and broken trust, with no redeeming features? It is as if Mishima, at the end of
Confessions of a Mask
, in that famous scene with Sonoko in the cheap dance hall, had risen from his seat, leaving his friend at the table, and gone over to the group of yakuza standing in the sun winding their bellybands around their hot torsos, and spent the afternoon carousing with his new friends—having left his girl to find her own way home, without even saying goodbye.

He had, of course, every reason to lead his life in his own way; he was free. But by taking on the part in
Karakkaze Yarō
Mishima alienated people of good sense (of whom Sonoko stands as a symbol in my parable). What had he to gain? His decision to enter the world of the cinema in this fashion was equivalent to an
announcement to society that he no longer recognized the conventions. If the critics did not care for his novel
Kyōko no Ie
, so much the worse for them; he didn't need them. I have no quarrel with Mishima's dislike of the critics; the Bundan strikes me as a pitiful society which is inimical to talent. But Mishima was not simply saying “Boo!” to the critics. He was turning his back on quiet people—friends, family acquaintances, people he had never met but who could have become close to him, people of no great power or influence, whose collective disapproval, however, would go against him in the long run. Ten years before, he could have got away with an action like this (in a sense he did: parts of
Forbidden Colors
are in dreadful taste). At the age of thirty-five, with an enormous critical reputation (despite
Kyōko no Ie)
, and a great following from the general public, he could not afford to cut such a caper as his appearance in
Karakkaze Yarō
represented. To be an immature romantic at twenty-five is understandable. At thirty-five? No.

I take Mishima's decision to appear in the yakuza movie—he had the lead—as indicative of his parlous state of mind at this time, as a sign that he was losing control. And it was not the only indication that he was in a serious state. Here let us jump ahead to the summer of 1960. As installment after installment of
After the Banquet
appeared in a monthly magazine, it became apparent that he was satirizing an extremely well-known public man in his portrayal of Noguchi, the lover of Kazu in the book. His target was a former Foreign Minister, a man of liberal views, Hachirō Arita. I do not imagine that Mishima had a personal grudge against the man; still less that he had any objection to his politics. But he made a complete fool of Arita.
After the Banquet
was a thinly disguised, brilliant, witty account of Arita's affair with a restaurant owner, the proprietress of the Hannya-en in Tokyo. Why did Mishima take such a risk? The libel laws in Japan are weak—by Western standards they are a farce—but Mishima was going much too far. Each successive installment of
After the Banquet
sank another, only too accurate shot into a man who had already virtually failed in public life. What the Arita family thought about this can be imagined; and they found much sympathy among friends, influential people in Tokyo, and even editors and publishers in the city.

In the end Arita was provoked to the point where, discarding normal Japanese rules of behavior (in cases of libel it is usual for the disputing parties to settle their quarrel through intermediaries who may not even be lawyers), he brought a suit against Mishima. It was an unprecedented case which came to public notice early in 1961; Arita's complaint was that his privacy had been invaded. The libel suit—for this is what it was in Western eyes, though Japanese law scarcely makes provision for such a thing—attracted much public interest.
Puraibashii
(or “privacy,” as it is spelled in Japanese too—the word has been adapted directly from English into the Japanese language) instantly became a vogue word and was accepted as a neologism by the Japanese at large. And Mishima lost the suit; it took many years, but in the end Arita's lawyers nailed him down. The key factor, I suspect, was that people with influence in Tokyo felt that the novelist had behaved monstrously. In the absence of a precedent, their opinion must have affected the court, which had no specific guide as to the law.

Mishima was succeeding in antagonizing a good number of people at this time. He was, of course, a charming person, when he was in form. He was entertaining, more than a little witty at his own expense, and, above all, intelligent. He had, say what he might about the Bundan, very many friends in the literary establishment. About this time in his life, however, he reached a parting of the ways with one particular group of people that he had associated with happily for nearly a decade; these were the members of a little literary club called the Hachi no Ki Kai (Potted Cherry Tree Club). They were a powerful group: Tōson Fukuda, a playwright; Mitsuo Nakamura, the
Asahi Shimbun
critic; Shōhei Ooka, the novelist; and Ken-Ichi Yoshida, a rare instance of a Japanese man of letters. Mishima had got on well with these people for many years; when they started a magazine, they printed his work right away (the first installments of
Kyōko no Ie)
. But for the most part the Hachi no Ki Kai was a social affair; the members met for dinner, enjoyed drinking together, and indulged in merry gossip at the expense of others. By 1960, however, Mishima's relations with this group had begun to deteriorate. A member of the Hachi no Ki Kai once told me of an incident at one of their dinners: “I had had
much too much to drink, I expect, and for some reason I was feeling antagonistic and decided to give Mishima a piece of my mind. I don't know what exactly I said but the others told me afterward that I spoke with unwonted frankness: I suppose I told Mishima he was a snob who took himself too seriously.” Whether it was on this or on some other occasion that Mishima finally took offense, I do not know; but certainly the time came when he severed his ties with the Hachi no Ki Kai, the only literary group with which he had ever got on well and with whom he sustained a link over many years. He was foolish; he
was
a snob and he
did
take himself too seriously: he should have listened and not taken umbrage.

These were small matters in their way—the gangster movie, the quarrel with Arita, and the parting with the Hachi no Ki Kai—but it was through such incidents that Mishima found himself increasingly isolated in 1960. And, as luck would have it, this was the year in which political events impinged on his life, for the first time since 1945. Just at a point in his literary career when he was vulnerable, Mishima came under pressure.

The story is a complex one. During the late 1940's, terrible years for Japan, Mishima had paid no attention to political matters. After the end of the Occupation, during which momentous decisions had been made about the future of Japanese society, Mishima still did not respond to events on the political scene. Throughout the 1950's he contented himself with his literary pursuits. He was thought by his contemporaries to be vaguely leftist, a man inclined toward acceptance of the popular creed of political neutrality between the Western world and the Communist bloc. He was even approached once by a critic who belonged to the small Communist Party, and asked if he would become a member. By 1960, however, his interest in politics was coming to life.
After the Banquet
is not a political novel, but it shows that Mishima had learned more about politics in Japan than many of his friends and fellow writers. It is a classic description, in its way, of the alliance between money and power in Japanese society.
After the Banquet
was the first sign that Mishima was curious about the political world. The second was his interest in the huge demonstrations against the government in May and June of that year—the most spectacular political demonstrations
in postwar Japanese history. Mishima went out onto the streets to see the “demos” and wrote articles for the press about them.

What was at stake, essentially, was the neutralist vision; intellectuals, students, labor-union leaders—even the opposition parties at last—had finally awakened to a realization that the ruling conservative party, the Liberal Democratic Party, which had governed Japan without a break, almost, since 1945, had all along been making a nonsense of the ideals of the left. While subscribing to neutralist tenets—refusing, for example, to play a direct, military role in the Korean War—the conservatives had given the public the impression that the Liberal Democratic Party would keep Japan on the path of neutralism for the indefinite future. By 1960, however, the conservatives, under the leadership of Nobusuke Kishi, a strong reactionary, had made up their minds to challenge the popular assumption that they were, in effect, prisoners of the ideological left. Kishi and his ministers decided to strengthen the alliance with the United States—enshrined by the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty—by revising that treaty to make the ties between America and Japan closer, above all in the economic field. Mishima was not interested in these issues. However, he was curious about the demonstrations, which became more violent during the early summer; and he reacted very strongly, it seems, to the new political atmosphere. The story “Patriotism” is evidence of this.

At this point the latent imperialism in him suddenly burst forth. “Patriotism” describes an act of devotion to the Emperor, the hara-kiri of a young army lieutenant at the time of the Ni Ni Roku Incident. It is not so much Mishima's imperialism that impresses, however; it is the reemergence of his old aesthetic, the longing for “Death and Night and Blood” that characterized his adolescence as described in
Confessions of a Mask
. Gone is his “classical aspiration.” In its place is a sensuous, anti-rational, romantic longing. What the object of that longing might be, no one could know; certainly Mishima had no concrete idea, no notion of what he himself would do. The theoretical ideal was clear enough, however; it was death. Thus Mishima resolved the crisis that he faced in 1960, by a reversion to romanticism.