The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (32 page)

B
:  Nothing? You suffered for so long.

S
:  No, nothing. The Spirit is everything.

B
:  What are they, the rotten, the shapeless, and the blind? They are the shape the Spirit takes. It's not you that suffered from leprosy. Your very existence is leprous. You are a born leper.

S
:  Sharpness, clarity, and the power to see through to the bottom of this world constructed Bayon. The Body cannot have such power. You are only a slave captured by the Body.

B
:  You say that you are more free than me? Are you? More free because you cannot run, cannot jump, sing, laugh, or fight?

S
:  I run through one hundred years. You run only in space.

B
:  There is light in space. Flowers bloom, bees hum. A beautiful summer afternoon stretches ahead. But what you call time is a damp and dark underground tunnel.

S
:  Oh, Bayon, my love.

B
:  Why do you leave it here? Bayon is the present. The forever-shining present. Love? Were you ever so beautiful as to be loved?

S
:  I'm dying. Each breath is agony. Oh, my Bayon.

B
:  Die! Perish! . . . You planned and constructed. That was your illness. My breast, like a bow, shines in the sun. Water flows, sparkles, and is still. You didn't follow me. That was your illness.

S
:  My Bayon . . .

B
:  The Spirit perishes, as a kingdom perishes.

S
:  It's the Body that perishes. The Spirit is imperishable.

B
:  You are dying . . .

S
:  Bayon . . .

B
:  You're dying.

S
:   . . .

B
:  What has happened?

S
:   . . .

B
:  No answer. Are you dead?

S
:   . . .

B
:  You are dead.
(The sound of bird song)

Look. The Spirit has died. A bright blue sky! Beautiful birds, trees, and Bayon protected by all these! I will reign over this country again. Youth is immortal. The Body is imperishable. I won. It is I that am Bayon.

Early in 1970, Mishima surprised his friends by announcing that he would write no more plays. The drama had been such an important part of his life for so many years that his decision was incomprehensible: some put it down as a foible; others believed that he was tired by his struggle with
The Sea of Fertility
and had decided to concentrate all his strength on that single novel.

Not long before he killed himself, Mishima arranged a shelf of objects in his upstairs sitting room at home in Magome. These were a Greek vase, a small bronze nude of himself, a collection of translations of his books, and a stage model for the last scene of
Raiō no Terasu
. One evening he showed this display to some friends. “How do you like it?” he asked them in an ironic tone. “This really sums up my life, don't you think?” And he burst into laughter.

4

The River of Body

This is a young River that suddenly began flowing at the midpoint of my life. I had been dissatisfied for quite some time by the fact that my invisible spirit alone could create tangible visions of beauty. Why could not I myself be something visibly beautiful and worthy of being looked at? For this purpose I had to make my body beautiful.

When at last I came to own such a body, I wanted to display it to everyone, to show it off and to let it move in front of every eye, just like a child with a new toy. My body became for me like a fashionable sports car for its proud owner. In it I drove on many highways to new places. Views I had never seen before opened up for me and enriched my experience.

But the body is doomed to decay, just like the complicated motor of a car. I for one do not, will not, accept such a doom. This means that I do not
accept the course of Nature. I know I am going against Nature; I know I have forced my body onto the most destructive path of all.

Yukio Mishima, Catalogue to the Tōbu Exhibition

Mishima was physically a small man. He was 5′ 4½″, somewhat below the average for Japanese men of his generation, though the Japanese as a race are physically smaller than other Asian peoples. He was slim. Even after he had taken up body building—at the age of thirty—he did not spread out very much. In a suit, he looked a man of average build for one of his height. His shoulders did not seem large, nor did his chest bulge out. He held himself straight, in the manner of a professional soldier. He had, however, a fine, well-proportioned, strong body. Shoulders, arms, and legs were heavily muscled, and the muscles lay well on his small-boned frame. His waist was slim, the stomach perfectly flat and strong, and his chest—showing the signs of training with weights—was well developed and powerful. Unusual for a Japanese, he had a lot of black hair on his body, mainly on his chest—for which he was teased by other Japanese. His body had one defect: the legs were much too short in relation to the trunk—a not uncommon feature among Japanese men and women. This was one subject on which Mishima, who often mocked himself, was never known to make jokes. He considered himself to be beautiful, and when he stated, in an introduction written for a book containing pictures of young Japanese body builders—
Young Samurai
—that he was the ugly duckling among them (he also appeared in the volume), he was in fact trying to say the opposite, that he was the finest-looking of them all. Actually, he was right. Professional body builders, with their masses of bulbous muscles, are not beautiful. By comparison, the amateur Mishima was sleek and trim.

In his book
Sun and Steel
, Mishima gave the genesis of his decision to take up physical training. He warned his readers that his explanation would be hard to follow. “Thanks to the sun and the steel, I was to learn the language of the flesh, much as one might learn a foreign language. It was my second language, an aspect of my spiritual development. My purpose now is to talk of that development. As a personal history, it will, I suspect, be unlike
anything seen before, and as such exceedingly difficult to follow.”

In essence, what Mishima had to say was this: early in his life he felt a loathing for his body; he put all his emphasis on words, on the pursuit of literature; words tended to corrode his being—as if white ants were eating into his person—and he sought a second language, “the language of the flesh.” It was the sun that opened his eyes to this possibility. During the war he had “longed for Novalis's night and Yeatsian Irish twilights” and rejected a sun which he associated with destruction: “It was the way it gleamed so encouragingly on the wings of planes leaving on missions, on forests of bayonets, on the badges of military caps, on the embroidery of military banners; but still more, far more, it was the way it glistened on the blood flowing ceaselessly from the flesh, and on the silver bodies of flies clustering on wounds. Holding sway over corruption, leading youth in droves to its death in tropical seas and countrysides, the sun lorded it over that vast rusty-red ruin that stretched away to the distant horizon.” Not long after the war, he had learned to see the sun differently: “It was in 1952, on the deck of the ship on which I made my first journey abroad, that I exchanged a reconciliatory handshake with the sun. From that day on, I have found myself unable to part company with it. The sun became associated with the main highway of my life. And little by little, it tanned my skin brown, branding me as a member of the other race.”

Mishima's discovery of the sun led to his decision to take up body building three years later: “The sun was enticing, almost dragging, my thoughts away from their night of visceral sensations, away to the swelling of muscles encased in sunlit skin. And it was commanding me to construct a new and sturdy dwelling in which my mind, as it rose little by little to the surface, could live in security. That dwelling was a tanned, lustrous skin and powerful, sensitively rippling muscles . . . It was thus that I found myself confronted with those lumps of steel: heavy, forbidding, cold as though the essence of night had in them been still further condensed.”

Mishima started intensive physical training in 1955—according to an article he wrote for
Sports Illustrated
(December 1970). During a trip to America he had heard about body building and
one day in the summer of 1955 he came across a picture in a Waseda University magazine which carried the caption: YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE THIS. He got in touch with Hitoshi Tamari, the coach at Waseda, and when they met, in a hotel lobby in downtown Tokyo, the coach was “able to astound me by the feat of so rippling his chest muscles that their activity was apparent even beneath his shirt.” When Tamari insisted that “you yourself will be able to do the same thing someday,” Mishima put himself under the guidance of the coach. Tamari came to his house three times a week and Mishima bought some barbells and an exercise bench and thus began “to provide cartoonists with material for years to come.” The start was painful. His tonsils became chronically swollen and he worried that he had ruined his body. He had X-rays taken, and there was nothing wrong with him; he had to persist. Day by day he grew in strength, and the realization that his muscles were increasing in size strengthened his resolve to carry on. After a year he realized one day that the stomach pains which had bothered him for many years had ceased. At the end of the first year Mishima found a second coach, Tomo Suzuki; and he made Suzuki's slogan of “exercises for everyday life” his own. Suzuki was a colorful character, and amused Mishima greatly. “See, Mr. Mishima,” he said one day, pointing to an exemplary trainer under his command, “in a sound body you'll find a sound spirit. Look at the perfect suppleness of his body, the dexterity of his movements. There's a real human person for you.” Somewhat later the model youth absconded with Suzuki's earnings from the gym. “Even now,” Mishima wrote, “I have to smile every time I recall Suzuki's sour expression when I joked with him afterward about a sound body ensuring a sound mind.”

In addition to training at the gym, Mishima engaged in a number of other physical activities. In the summer of 1956 he joined a team of local youths in the district of Jiyugaoka, the outlying part of Tokyo where the Hiraoka family lived. The function of these young men was to carry about the heavy
omikoshi
, the portable shrine, on the occasion of the summer festival. Escorted by a Shinto priest and attended by crowds of children with their own little
omikoshi
, the procession went up and down the narrow streets of Jiyugaoka, with Mishima jostling and struggling amid the youths
who carried the shrine. For the occasion he wore a
hachimaki
around his head and a light tunic; a photograph shows Mishima with an expression of childlike glee on his face. The ambition to carry an
omikoshi
on a summer's day had been with him since childhood when he had first seen such a spectacle and had been fascinated by the raw, sweaty men who had stampeded in and out of Natsuko's front garden in the house at Yotsuya where Mishima was born (the scene described at length in
Confessions of a Mask
): “Now the shrine itself came into view, and there was a venomous state of dead calm, like the air of the tropics, which clung solely about the shrine. It seemed a malevolent sluggishness, trembling hotly above the naked shoulders of the young men carrying the
omikoshi
. And within the thick scarlet-and-white ropes, within the guardrails of black lacquer and gold, behind those fast-shut doors of gold leaf, there was a four-foot cube of pitch-blackness.” Mishima's exploit at the summer festival was reported in the gossip magazines in Tokyo. It was the start of a stream of publicity given to his non-literary exploits, a stream which became a torrent in later years.

Mishima also began to make stage appearances. He appeared briefly as a gardener in a production of
Rokumeikan;
and in a production of Racine's
Brittanicus
, the translation of which he had supervised, Mishima played another small part—that of a soldier carrying a spear. A photograph was taken of him in the second role, standing together with two fellow soldiers on stage. Mishima is in front of the other two and has a set expression on his face. Behind him are two taller men, professional actors with a softness about the jowls. The picture is intriguing. It is among the first of many group photos of Mishima in which he appears to be the same stature as tall men with him. In fact, he would arrange that the photographer shoot from a low angle—or use some other device to give the impression that Mishima was the same height as his companions. One of the best ways he devised for the purpose was to wear an extraordinarily tall pair of
geta
, wooden shoes.
Geta
, which are wooden platforms on two parallel, rectangular sections of wood—one under the heel, the other under the ball of the foot—can easily be made taller. On one occasion Mishima appeared in a duel scene with Shintaro Ishihara—a tall, graceful figure—
treading on
geta
five inches high, and waving his sword vigorously.

Mishima's great ambition was to become an athlete, and in the autumn of 1956 he took up boxing at a gym run by Nippon University. There he had a third coach, an austere trainer named Tomo Kojima. Mishima loved the gym itself: “We were housed in an old and dirty building. The odor of the lavatory encroached upon the shower room. Trunks and sweat shirts were draped over the ring ropes. Torn punching bags hung from the ceiling. Of such stuff, I reflected, were sports epics made. All these props symbolized a kind of barbaric elegance I had not previously experienced.” But boxing was too hard for him. During a sparring session a novelist friend, Shintaro Ishihara, appeared with an 8-mm. movie camera and recorded Mishima's performance on film. “Sometime later, when the literary crowd gathered at my house, he showed his film to a mambo accompaniment (the mambo was in fashion at the time), to the hilarity of all. And, indeed, my on-screen figure making its desperate evasive actions to the Latin rhythm seemed like something out of a cartoon.” In the end he gave up boxing.