The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (23 page)

In the midst of these activities he completed a dozen minor literary works. These are listed together with the months in which they were published, or began to appear, in the case of serial works:

Two of these works,
Eirei no Koe
and
Taiwa Nihonjinron
, belong to Mishima's “committed” literature and will be mentioned later. A great many of the pieces were for women's magazines
(Josei Jishin, Fujin Kōron, Josei Seven, Mademoiselle)
, publications that paid well and demanded light fare. In this year alone, however,
Shinchōsha, Mishima's chief publishers, brought out three new volumes and also published an essay in their house magazine,
Shinchō
. The list excludes new and luxury editions of Mishima's works. This was the pace which he kept up throughout the 1960's.

Most men would have collapsed after a few weeks of living under this pressure; yet he rarely looked tired. As luck would have it, the only occasion on which I saw him that year—it was the first time I set eyes on him, at the dinner at the Foreign Correspondents' Club at which he was guest speaker—he looked distinctly wan. Usually he had a deep suntan, but on that particular evening he appeared pale and a little nervous. That was an exception. Normally, when he was in public, he affected high spirits and dominated any gathering in which he took part: gesturing, joking, and laughing the raucous, rather ugly laugh which he is said to have been taught by his overbearing grandmother. His mask was firmly in place; a stranger might have classified him as a former amateur boxing champion turned nightclub owner or band leader. For there was something coarse about his mask; he projected an air of deliberate vulgarity which deceived all but those who knew him well. What is truly remarkable is that he was able to go through with this act—that is what it was—although he was under the most terrible strain. This is reflected in his writing; for example, in the autobiographical work
Sun and Steel
, which he began late in 1965 and which appeared regularly over three years in a small magazine,
Hihyō
(“Criticism”), founded by a right-wing friend, the critic Takeshi Muramatsu, and supported among others by Mishima himself.
Sun and Steel
is a work which he classified as “confidential criticism,” and it affords glimpses into the inner man of a far more intimate nature than those who knew him only superficially were able to obtain by meeting him and talking to him.

The key to this work—which is central to an understanding of his suicide—is the author's definition of tragedy. From this definition springs the whole of the remainder of
Sun and Steel
, an essay of eighty pages: “According to my definition of tragedy, the tragic
pathos
is born when the perfectly average sensibility momentarily takes unto itself a privileged nobility that keeps others at a distance, and not when a special type of sensibility vaunts its own special claims. It follows that he who dabbles in words can create tragedy,
but cannot participate in it. It is necessary, moreover, that the ‘privileged nobility' finds its basis strictly in a kind of physical courage. The elements of intoxication and superhuman clarity in the tragic are born when the average sensibility, endowed with a given physical strength, encounters that type of privileged moment especially designed for it. Tragedy calls for an anti-tragic vitality and ignorance, and above all for a certain ‘inappropriateness.' If a person is at times to draw close to the divine, then under normal conditions he must be neither divine nor anything approaching it.” There is much to criticize in this statement. Mishima's notion of a “privileged nobility” is repulsive; his idea that he must abandon his keen sensibility and settle for a “perfectly average sensibility” is absurd. What matters most, however, is that Mishima yearned to be a hero—so much is clear from his definition of tragedy; he also believed that he must abandon his role as a writer, one “who dabbles in words,” in order to become a tragic hero.

In this essay, Mishima described a scene in which he becomes convinced of his aspiration to be a tragic figure. One summer day, heated by training, “I was cooling my muscles in the breeze coming through an open window. The sweat vanished as though by magic, and coolness passed over the surface of the muscles like a touch of menthol. The next instant, I was rid of the sense of the muscles' existence, and—in the same way that words, by their abstract functioning, can grind up the concrete world so that the words themselves seem never to have existed—my muscles at that moment crushed something within my being, so that it was as though the muscles themselves had similarly never existed . . . I was enveloped in a sense of power as transparent as light. It is scarcely to be wondered at that in this pure sense of power that no amount of books or intellectual analysis could ever capture, I should discover a true antithesis of words. And indeed it was this that by gradual stages was to become the focus of my whole thinking.” From this point, it is not a long step to the conclusion that it was death that he desired.

With the aid of “sun and steel”—by sunbathing and weight lifting—Mishima had discovered his body and created his muscles. Thereafter, he “glimpsed from time to time another sun quite different from that by which I had been so long blessed, a sun full of the fierce dark flames of feeling, a sun of death that would never
burn the skin yet gave forth a still stranger glow.” Mishima's conclusion, as he described it toward the end of 1966, was this: “The goal of my life was to acquire all the various attributes of the warrior.” It was thus that he arrived at the romantic idea of death as a samurai. If
Sun and Steel
is to be trusted, Mishima cared nothing for ideology; his was to be strictly a non-political action. And the essay is in fact persuasive, more so than Mishima's “political” writing.

Mishima was well versed in Nietzsche, as one sees from the internal evidence of the passage just quoted. The model which he chose for his life style at this point in his life—and which he faithfully followed for the last four years of his existence—was, however, a Japanese one, which Mishima adapted from feudal times. The ideal samurai pursued his life (and death) according to the ancient practice of Bunburyōdō, the dual way of Literature (Bun) and the Sword (Bu); he was expected to cultivate the literary and the martial arts in roughly equal proportions. In practice, very few of the ancient knights of Japan lived up to this demanding standard. Nonetheless, it was the ideal and was encouraged by the authorities from the seventeenth century onward, when peace had finally settled upon Japan and it was desirable that the samurai class no longer unsheathe their weapons at the slightest pretext. Mishima had long been intrigued by the feudal ideal of Bunburyōdō—
ryōdō
may be translated as “dual way”—as he recounts in
Sun and Steel
: “During the post-war period, when all accepted values were upset, I often thought and remarked to others that now if ever was the time for reviving the old Japanese ideal of a combination of letters and the martial arts, of art and action. For a while after that, my interest strayed from that particular ideal; then, as I gradually learned from the sun and the steel the secret of how to pursue words with the body (and not merely pursue the body with words), the two poles within me began to maintain a balance, and the generator of my mind, so to speak, switched from a direct to an alternating current . . . [These two poles] gave the appearance of inducing an ever wider split in the personality, yet in practice created at each moment a living balance that was constantly being destroyed and brought back to life again. The embracing of a dual polarity within the self and the acceptance of contradiction and collision—such was my own blend of ‘art and action.' ”

It is at this point in his essay that Mishima begins to describe the stress under which he lived—the strain which he so faithfully hid behind his mask. “Why,” he asks, “should a man be associated with beauty only through a heroic, violent death?” His answer: “Such is the beauty of the suicide squad, which is recognized as beauty not only in the spiritual sense but, by men in general, in an ultra-erotic sense also.” He does not argue the point. He states it as a fact of his consciousness (certainly not of “men in general”). Thereafter, he veers out of control—there was indeed “an ever wider split in the personality”: “The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in . . . No moment is so dazzling as when everyday imaginings concerning death and danger and world destruction are transformed into duty . . . To keep death in mind from day to day, to focus each moment upon inevitable death, to make sure one's worst forebodings coincided with one's dreams of glory . . . the beautiful death that had earlier eluded me [in the war] had also become possible . . . I was beginning to dream of my capabilities as a fighting man.”

His reaction to loss of control was to discipline himself still more rigorously than before. Bunburyōdō then became more than a life style for Mishima; it became the “plan for life” for which he had been so anxiously casting about for almost five years. And it had very specific objectives in the fields of art and action. His long novel was his main endeavor in art; and in action his aim became nothing less than “the beautiful death . . . as a fighting man.” The greater the stress upon him, the more furiously Mishima fought to control himself. Bunburyōdō came to mean for him that every time he completed a stage of his novel, a new volume, he must simultaneously commit himself one step further on the road to martial action—and death. As he completed
Spring Snow
in the autumn of 1966, he submitted an application to the Jieitai for permission to train at army camps.

Not inappropriately, the second volume of Mishima's long novel, which he began early in 1967, depicts what Mishima called
masuraoburi
, the way of the warrior. Its hero, Isao, is a right-wing terrorist who commits hara-kiri after stabbing an aged businessman
to death. The action of this book, entitled
Runaway Horses
, takes place in the early 1930's, twenty years after the death of Kiyoaki; Isao dies, also, at twenty. The young man, who is nineteen at the outset, is a brilliant swordsman and kendo performer who already holds the rank of 3-dan. He is a student at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo—an institution at which many nationalists have been trained—and is the son of Kiyoaki's former tutor, Iinuma, a cunning, corrupt rightist. Isao, a sturdy youth quite unlike Kiyoaki in appearance, has sharp, furious eyes and firm-set lips. He is keen and “pure”; his father, however, takes money from tainted sources (i.e., business). Honda, who is now a judge at an Osaka court, attends a kendo match in which Isao appears; he knows nothing of the boy, apart from the fact that he is the son of Iinuma. After the match, which Isao wins, Honda climbs a nearby hill with a priest; the latter persuades him to bathe in a waterfall on the way down. Isao, too, is bathing there, and seeing him under the falls, Honda suddenly notices, as he raises his arms above his head, that the boy has three moles on the left-hand side of his chest. The youth laughs as he tumbles in the water, but Honda is terrified by what he sees, remembering the last words of Kiyoaki: “I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.” Isao, then, must be Kiyoaki's reincarnation. Honda feels that his way of life, his dry-as-dust rationalism, is threatened.

Isao is reading a pamphlet which impresses him deeply, “The League of the Divine Wind” by Tsunanori Yamao. It describes the Shinpuren Incident of 1877, one of the last times in Japanese history when samurai appeared in action. Mishima gives the pamphlet so much importance in his novel that it takes up nearly fifty pages out of just over four hundred in the translation by Michael Gallagher published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1973. It begins one summer day in 1873 when “four stalwart men of high ideals” gather to pray at Shingai Village close to Kumamoto Castle, led by Tomo Otaguro, adopted son and heir of the former chief priest, the late Oen Hayashi. The four men are Harakata Kaya, “at the height of his powers”; Kengo Ueno, over sixty; and KyÅ«zaburo Saito and Masamoto Aiko, in their fifties. All have swords with them; all are believers in Sonno Jōi (“Revere the Emperor and Expel the Barbarians”), and all hate Western culture. After praying, they wait for the priest Otaguro
to perform the Ukei divination ceremony. They wish to put two questions to the gods: whether they might present a petition to the authorities, calling for Kamiyo (the rule of the Emperor) and then commit hara-kiri; and if not, whether the gods would permit them to assassinate the villainous retainers ostensibly acting for the Emperor in their district. All four men eagerly desire the restoration of Kamiyo, the practice of Kōdō (ancient morality), and the unity of shrine and state. Their teacher has been Oen Hayashi.