The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (31 page)

The principal character is a politician, a former Finance Minister named Mori, who had once, before the war, in the 1930's, been the target of an assassination attempt by right-wing terrorists. Mori's attitude toward the incident is brought out during a visit
paid him by Kiku, the faithful maidservant who saved his life sixteen years before, who has not seen him since the assassination attempt (described in the play as if it were a minor detail in one of the numerous unsuccessful coups d'état of the 1930's). The old man states that the most honorable day of his life—which he prizes more highly than the day on which he was appointed Finance Minister, his highest office—was the day on which patriotic youths tried to kill him. The most fortunate accident that can befall a statesman, Mori implies, is to be struck down by the hand of an assassin. Death in the service of the nation and the Emperor is to be preferred to life, if that life has no meaning. Mori spends his days pursuing a lonely hobby, the growing of cacti; his activities as a cactus fancier are much dwelt upon in Mishima's play. The old man is depicted as one who, like the cactus, has no blood; his existence is without meaning. The political background to the play is the murderous struggle which took place in the 1930's between those whose prime objective was order—politicians, men of business, and civil servants—and those who put a premium on honor. Mori has belatedly realized that he belongs, at heart, to the latter camp. In Mishima's play, Kiku gives Mori short shrift at their meeting.
Tōka no Kiku
may be read as an assault upon sentimental conservatism; the dramatic action favors such an interpretation. The playwright himself, however, had a streak of sympathy for Mori's attitudes; the play was based on the Ni Ni Roku Incident of February 26, 1936, carried out by rebel army officers with whom Mishima later claimed he had much in common.

Not that
Tōka no Kiku
is a political play. The dramatic interest lies in the relationship between Kiku and her former master and employer, Mori. The part of Kiku was taken by Haruko Sugimura in the production given by the Bungakuza in November 1961, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the theatrical group, and this was one of the most distinguished performances by an actress generally regarded as the finest of Shingeki players. How far the Bungakuza, whose dominant personality was Miss Sugimura, was from regarding
Tōka no Kiku
as an ideological drama was made apparent two years later when the group rejected a fairly mild play of Mishima's on ideological grounds, precipitating a furious quarrel between the Bungakuza and Mishima
that ended in his resignation from the group with which he had worked, almost exclusively, for nearly a decade. Had
Tōka no Kiku
been sympathetic to the right in the eyes of the Bungakuza, it would scarcely have been selected by them for performance at an anniversary.

The play which caused a rupture between Mishima and the Bungakuza was
Yorokobi no Koto
(“The Harp of Joy,” 1963), and it is not one of Mishima's important works. It is set in postwar Japan and is based on the Matsukawa Incident—the derailment of a train in 1949 by saboteurs whose identity was never established, although the authorities believed for a time that they were from the left. The principal character is a senior police officer, Matsumura, a veteran who is popular with his subordinates, one of whom, Katagiri, he instructs to investigate the derailment of a train (the Matsukawa Incident is not identified as such in the play). The zealous Katagiri arrests several men and is astonished by their immediate release, when it has been ascertained that they are rightists. There are frequent left-wing demonstrations in the streets, the object of which is to show popular discontent with a government which is trying to pin the blame for the train derailment on the left, without any proof. A strange incident then occurs at the police station where Katagiri and his men work. A young policeman says he has heard the sound of a koto (a classical musical instrument) while on duty. The others laugh at him—how, in the midst of noisy demonstrations, could he have heard such a thing? Shortly afterward the investigation of the sabotage takes a totally unexpected turn. Matsumura, the man who is carrying out the police inquiry, is himself accused of having organized the sabotage; the police chief is said to have been an undercover Communist agent. The faithful Katagiri is shattered by this. Later the charges against Matsumura are shown to have been fabricated by the right; nonetheless, the younger man loses his faith in his superior. One day, when Katagiri is on duty in the streets, with demonstrators surging about him, he hears the beautiful sound of a koto. A man who had placed his faith in absolute authority, in the immutable system of the law, seeks refuge in fantasy after the collapse of his belief in order.

The turning point in the play comes when Katagiri realizes
that Matsumura, his revered leader, has exploited him for his own ends—though these are not political. The Bungakuza, after starting rehearsals of
Yorokobi no Koto
in mid-November 1963, and following the return of Haruko Sugimura from travels in China, suddenly suspended rehearsal and informed Mishima that the production was off. Some of the actors, it was explained to Mishima by a succession of delegations which visited him at his home to give reasons for the suspension of rehearsals, objected to the right-wing lines spoken by the policemen in the play. Mishima was incensed. His angry rebuttal of the Bungakuza was printed as an open letter to the group; it appeared in the
Asahi Shimbun
a few days later, following his resignation from the Bungakuza. It read in part: “Certainly
Yorokobi no Koto
is quite different from my other works and includes an element of danger. But what have you been thinking about me all this while that you should be astonished by a work such as this? Have you been making a fool of me, saying that Mishima is a playwright . . . who writes harmless dramas which gather large audiences? You set up such safe criteria as ‘Art' and conceal within yourselves a vague political inclination [to the left], dropping the phrase ‘art for art's sake' from time to time . . . Isn't this just hypocrisy and commercialism? I would like you to understand this: there is always a needle in art; there is also poison; you can't suck honey without the poison too.” The break was complete. Shortly afterward, Mishima joined another theatrical group, the NLT (New Literature Theater). It was a sad moment. Mishima never again found a group as effective to work with as the Bungakuza and the Bungakuza lost their best playwright.

The quarrel is a puzzling one. Within three years Mishima was to profess political beliefs which would have fully justified the Bungakuza in breaking with him. He was to assert that
Tōka no Kiku
was in fact a play about the Ni Ni Roku Incident. He was also to state that he shared the patriotic attitude of the fanatically imperialist young officers who staged the Ni Ni Roku Incident. But his imperialism did not surface clearly in his writing until the summer of 1966, when he wrote
Eirei no Koe
(“The Voices of the Heroic Dead”). Nevertheless, there was a surprising violence to the quarrel. Mishima had very few squabbles with people or with organizations during his life. There were disagreements, but Mishima
avoided public hostility on almost all occasions. Like many Japanese—and however un-Japanese he may have been in many respects—he abhorred public fracas.

Madame de Sade
, the next play, again showed Mishima to be far more interested in problems of structure than in political matters. He wrote it after becoming intrigued with the problem of why the Marquise de Sade, who was absolutely faithful to her husband during his many years in prison, left him the moment he was free. The play was an attempt to provide a solution to the problem; it was “Sade seen through women's eyes.” All six characters are women and the action is controlled exclusively through dialogue. Mishima intended that visual appeal would be provided by the rococo costumes of the women; the five characters must form a precise, mathematical system around Madame de Sade. Keene has described the debt owed by Mishima to Racine: “Mishima's classicism . . . is given its most extreme expression in the play
Madame de Sade
 . . . Here he adopted most of the conventions of the Racinian stage—a single setting, a reliance on the
tirade
for the relation of events and emotions, a limited number of characters each of whom represents a specific kind of woman, and an absence of overt action on the stage.”

Madame de Sade
was a considerable success in Tokyo, although the subject matter was a little too recherché. After its translation into English, Mishima hoped that it would be produced on Broadway and pressed his agent in New York, Audrey Wood, to find a theater for it.
Madame de Sade
, however, proved to have no appeal to American actresses; the absence of overt action on the stage was the major problem. Quite possibly, none of Mishima's long plays will ever be performed on the Western stage. Certainly, it is unlikely that Mishima's subsequent major plays,
Suzaku Ke no Metsubo
(“The Fall of the House of Suzaku,” 1967)—a play based on Euripides—and
Wagatomo Hitler
(“My Friend Hitler,” 1969), would have great appeal to Western audiences. The latter is set in Germany in 1934; in it Mishima describes the events before and after the Night of the Long Knives. It makes the point that Hitler steered a “neutral” course between the Brownshirts and the conservative forces—the regular army and big business—on that occasion. Mishima neither praises nor criticizes Hitler; nor does
he develop the character of the dictator in the play. Mishima treats the Night of the Long Knives as an incident in a struggle for power, a technical operation. The title of the play refers to Roehm, the head of the Brownshirts, one of Hitler's victims on the Night. In the play Roehm believes the Führer is “my friend”—until it is too late. At the première, held in Tokyo on January 19, 1969, Mishima distributed a note to the audience: “The dangerous ideologue, Mishima, dedicates an evil ode to the dangerous hero, Hitler.” His intention was to mock the critics and the vaguely leftist neutralism of Japanese intellectuals. Neutralism, the play said, can lead anywhere.

Mishima's last play for the modern theater was
Raiō no Terasu
(“The Terrace of the Leper King,” 1969). He invited me to the première and I remember how he looked that evening—he was wearing all-white evening attire and was accompanied by Yōko. Tennessee Williams was supposed to put in an appearance and there was an empty seat next to Mishima where he should have been. The performance itself went well enough.
Raiō no Terasu
is an untranslated play about the Khmer king Jayavarman III, the builder of the temple of Bayon at Angkor Wat. The monarch suffered from leprosy; Bayon is his monument. Mishima used the tale to make the point that the material triumphs over the immaterial, the Body over the Spirit—Bayon alone remains. He was especially proud of the last scene, an exchange on the steps of the newly constructed Bayon between the Body—the youthful image of the king—and the Spirit, represented by the voice of the dying, leprous king (a sepulchral, tape-recorded voice in the Teigeki production we saw).

BODY
: King, dying king. Can you see me?

SPIRIT
: Who is calling me? I remember the voice. That brilliant voice.

B
:  It's me. Do you see?

S
:  No. Of course not. I'm blind.

B
:  Why should the Spirit need eyes? It has been your source of pride that you see things without using your eyes!

S
:  Such harsh words. Who are you?

B
:  I'm the king.

S
:  Absurd! That's me.

B
:  We share the same name. King, I am your Body.

S
:  Who am I then?

B
:  You are my Spirit. The Spirit that resolved to build this Bayon. What is dying is not the Body of the king.

S
:  My Body was rotten and has vanished. You cannot be my Body, speaking so proudly and boldly.

The actor who played the part of the Body was heavily suntanned and wore a short tunic with straps across his bare chest. As he spoke his lines, he strode about the terrace of the temple, flourishing his arms. Behind him was a giant face made of foot-high blocks of stone, one of many such faces at the temple of Bayon. The actor, Kinya Kitaoji, was slightly overweight; his voice boomed out cheerfully, while the groaning Spirit endeavored to reply:

B
:  It's not true. Your Body was never rotten. Your Body is here, shining with youth, full of vigor, like an immortal golden statue. The cursed illness is an illusion of the Spirit. How could such a triumphant king as I be affected by illness?

S
:  But what could the Body achieve? What imperishable things can he construct? It is not stones that planned and constructed this imperishable Bayon. Stones are nothing but materials. It's the Spirit that made this.

B
:  
(laughing aloud with pride)
: The Spirit cannot see Bayon any more, because even the Spirit depended on the Body.

S
:  No. I don't need to see it. The finished Bayon shines in my spirit.

B
:  Shining? It's only a small streak of light, which is about to be put out. Think, if it is enough to be shining in the Spirit, why was it necessary to construct Bayon with such an enormous quantity of stones?

S
:  The Spirit always longs for a shape.

B
:  That's because you are shapeless. Shape always takes its model from a beautiful body like me. Did you use as a model of this temple the rotten body of a leper?

S
:  Rubbish! The body of a leper is nothing.