The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (44 page)

Such was the man—a critic of the all-prevalent “emptiness” of modern Japan, but also one who at times embodied that “emptiness,” a synonym for ugliness and in his case for something more drastic, a yearning for Blood—who went to his death on November 25, 1970. It still makes the mind boggle. Twenty-five years later I wish I could report that someone in Tokyo had stumbled across a cache of letters, a diary, a commonplace book, anything that would give one access to his meta-stable mind in those last twenty-five days. There were no new discoveries. Mishima comes across today much as he did in the aftermath of his suicide with Masakatsu Morita, as one whose motivation, in the words of a prominent Asahi journalist, Junrō Fukashiro, might be summed up as “a gorgeous mosaic of homosexuality, Yōmeigaku, and Emperor worship.” A unique pattern! I used that remark in my 1974 biography without attributing it to Fukashiro, who had spoken to me in private—he died
of leukemia not long afterwards, a great loss to journalism in Japan.

Twenty-five years later I still struggle—with a helping hand from Fukashiro—to make sense of what Mishima did. Mishima acted entirely by himself, with his group, so the prosecutors established after his death. How did he happen upon the scenario he used, though? Most Japanese went back in time, to the 1930's, to find a model for Mishima's action. He, Morita, and the three other young men took upon themselves the mantles of “double-patriots,” to use a phrase coined by the late Richard Storry of Oxford University, a scholar who lived in Japan during those years of exploding militarism. The 1930's was an era of “government by assassination,” to quote the title of a book by a dedicated British journalist who lived in Tokyo at the time, Hugh Byas. What an age that was! Double-patriots appeared on the scene, almost from nowhere; these ultra-nationalist zealots assassinated government leaders and thrust Japan toward war with the West, always in the name of the Emperor. Such was the atmosphere in which Mishima reached his adolescence at the GakushÅ«in (the Peers School).

Still, one may ask, how many Japanese reared in the 1930's stepped into the foreground in the post-1945 years as double-patriots? A seventeen-year-old, Otoya Yamaguchi, stabbed to death the socialist leader Inejirō Asanuma on a public platform in 1960 (the news photo of that stabbing ranks as one of the most dramatic action shots taken in Japan after World War II, together with the picture of Mishima making his last speech from the general's balcony at Ichigaya). Yet neither the misguided boy Yamaguchi, who committed suicide in prison—he was too young to have experienced the 1930's—nor the double-patriots of that era are fully on a par with Mishima and his companions. The Mishima incident culminated in two suicides and in no acts of homicidal violence, unless one counts Furu-Koga, who beheaded Mishima and Morita, as a murderer, and Mishima also as a murderer, by intent, in that he planned Morita's death to follow his own.

Some good judges of character see Mishima in that light. One of my American journalist colleagues in Tokyo has told me that in his view Mishima, indeed, committed murder. A common-sense retort would be that Morita was willing to die, and in fact pushed Mishima to go forward, as we shall see. In the end I am not sure
how to regard this interpretation. Mishima surely had murder in his heart and in his head at times;
Confessions of a Mask
, with its elaborate descriptions of a “murder theater,” makes one aware of this. One learns from that book how Mishima put “Circassians” (white boys) to the sword by the dozen in his dreams. To know him in person was to be forcibly made aware of this
outré
side of the man. I recall a dire night at Mishima's home in 1969, when Mishima showed to me and to Peter Taylor, a friend from Thames TV in London, his prize collection of samurai swords, including, no doubt, the weapon which was to be used to cut off his head (altogether, he had a small armory of blades, wrapped up in cloth, that he brought in to show us). I remember Mishima asking me to kneel on the carpet on the floor of his little sitting room upstairs to show Taylor, he said, how the
kaishaku-nin
, the ceremonial beheader, prepared himself to cut off the head of someone who commits seppuku, and I recall how the hairs stood out on the back of my neck all of a sudden and I scrambled to my feet with a suppressed shout of
No!
to find Mishima standing there, with three feet of steel in his hand, with a strange look on his face. He was gloating. Holy Mother of God, I thought, not a man to fool about with, this Mishima.

2

Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, most men find their beauty in Sodom. Did you know this secret?

Dostoevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov

That Mishima was in a gigantic hurry was obvious, the last time I saw him. It was the night of November 12, 1970, about 9 p.m. We had just had dinner at a French restaurant on the top floor of a Tokyo hotel. Literally my last sight of him came as he plunged into an elevator, crushed a banknote into the suddenly outstretched hand of the astonished elevator attendant (no one tips in Japan), swiveled on his toes and faced toward me with a slight bow of his
close-cropped head. It was the exit of a man with a lot to do. Nine days earlier, although no one outside his group knew this, he had made his last big move, with Morita, the student leader of the Tatenokai, prior to the events of November 25. On November 3 they had advised the three youngest members of their group—the two Kogas and Ogawa—that only the two leaders would die by seppuku. The other three would witness the proceedings (Furu-Koga would cut off Morita's head after Morita had decapitated Mishima) and testify at the subsequent court trial, and go to prison.

Most descriptions of the debacle that was to follow at Ichigaya emphasize Mishima's daring, as does my first chapter, and are given from his point of view, whether approvingly or not. Here, I would consider others. One can imagine the shock and confusion of the three young survivors-to-be that night of November 3 in the seedy sauna club in Roppongi—the neighborhood is a prey to gangsters, as Mishima would have been the first to know; he was completely familiar with that world, though it would have been unknown territory to the others. The two Kogas and Ogawa were in their early twenties and had seen little of life; they had lived with their families or relatives, barely ever making decisions of their own. A couple of years earlier they had found their way, along different routes, to the Tatenokai, after Mishima had created his mini-army on February 26, 1968, inaugurating it with a blood-oath ceremony.

All summer and early autumn of 1970 they had lived under the assumption that they were to die later in the year; that was what Mishima and Morita had told them all along. They had pledged themselves to die. It was to be for the Emperor. Weeks passed, then months, and with just twenty-two days to go, at the last moment, they had been asked to forget what they had been told. They must live on. Mishima and Morita hadn't thought through the life-and-death issue for the others until they were all five entering the valley of the shadow of death. Did Mishima and Morita cajole them along, knowing what they would do in the end? Probably not. The two leaders' failure to be clear on the essential was a reflection of the great haste they were in, or so I surmise.

Whatever the truth, the outcome was crucial to the interpretation of the Mishima incident made in Japan—of the motivations
involved. The weekly magazines, which have the greatest freedom to make snap judgments, all but universally portrayed the double suicide as a homosexual
shinjū
, or lovers' suicide. Twenty-five years later that is still the standard interpretation in Japan. Mishima's well-known vision of a union of Eros and Blood, as an ultimate in his aesthetic, all but compelled that reading of events by the press. The key evidence was considered to be the fact that Mishima and Morita had decided to die, leaving the others in limbo, in the lurch. There is a verb in Japanese to describe such a plight as the survivors had to endure. It is
iki-nokoru
, to be left hanging on in life. If the noblest ideal in samurai lore, still so powerful a force on the Japanese imagination and sense of drama, is to die, the worst fate is to fail to die when the moment has arrived.

Such thinking guided the strategy adopted by the group in the early summer of 1970. For many Japanese, the only possible way to interpret what Mishima and Morita did was to conclude that they were swept away by self-concerned lovers' passion to the point where the others became mere instruments to the realization of the lovers' apotheosis. Sex was the key to Mishima's action at Ichigaya, so a senior Japanese government official, a vice minister, a top career official at one of the great departments of state, informed me a couple of years ago. He telephoned my office in Tokyo to make the point after I presented him with a copy of my biography, translated into Japanese. The official was one of those in charge of government information—of dictating preferred lines of thinking—and I took the call to be an official declaration, almost. I didn't agree with the interpretation—one had to take politics into account as well—but I was impressed by the confidence of the opinion that sex covered the case.

Mishima and Morita left no diaries or letters to support the now standard view that they were lovers. They destroyed everything that might betray how they planned their demise. The three survivors shed no light on the matter that I know of. Again, one has to bring in samurai teaching and mores to fully understand this. The Japanese go back to the old teaching for comfort. Among other things, it called upon the samurai to love one another, as a high ideal, and never to disclose a relationship. That is what Mishima did. He used to describe
Hagakure
(“Hidden
among the Leaves”), the once secret work of Jōchō Yamamoto, a samurai who lived in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as his favorite reading toward the end of his life. The universal assumption in Japan today is that
Hagakure
, to Mishima a manual of homosexual love, was the most influential book in his life.

For decades, I refrained from looking into
Hagakure
(feeling that I had had enough of the subject matter), but not long ago, when I was visiting Saga prefecture, the home of Jōchō Yamamoto, I was taken by my hosts to a local antiquities museum and shown one of the earliest known copies—the sacred original does not exist any more. It was a slim, yellowing manuscript, kept under glass for protection. The seriousness of my hosts impressed me; it was as if I was being shown the Dead Sea Scrolls. On returning to Tokyo, I sought out
Hagakure
. I got hold of a modern translation made in 1978 by Kathryn Sparling of Columbia University, and I stumbled on this remark, which the translator highlighted in the introduction: “In a fifty-fifty life-or-death crisis, simply settle it by choosing immediate death. There is nothing complicated about it. Just brace yourself and proceed . . .” Having known Mishima in his last years, I could sense immediately how such words would have braced him. To know their truth, as in Yōmeigaku, he must
act
. It would not have been enough for him to gaze at the words in the safety of his study at home. Simple as this interpretation is, I believe it is fundamental.
Hagakure
is a fount of direct, simple statements. There is “nothing complicated” about it.

To read
Hagakure
is to “read” Mishima's personality—at least one crucial aspect of it. In his essay on
Hagakure
he noted: “I began reading it during the war, when I kept it always on or near my desk, and if there is one single book that I have referred to continually in the twenty years since, rereading a passage now and then according to the occasion, never failing to be moved anew, that book is
Hagakure
. In particular, it was after the extraordinary popularity of
Hagakure
, after its wartime preeminence as socially obligatory reading had ended, that its light began to shine within me. Maybe
Hagakure
is, after all, fundamentally a book destined to paradox. During the war,
Hagakure
was like a luminescent object in broad daylight, but it is in pitch darkness that
Hagakure
radiates
its true light.” One turns to the original, to a passage headed “The Way of the Samurai is a mania for death.” It reads, in part: “One cannot accomplish feats of greatness in a normal frame of mind. One must turn fanatic and develop a mania for dying. By the time one develops powers of discernment it is already too late to put them into effect. In the Way of the Samurai loyalty and filial piety are superfluous; all one needs is a mania for death” (Book One).

One also finds this remark: “The ultimate love I believe to be secret love. Once shared, love shrinks in stature. To pine away for love all one's years, to die of love without uttering the beloved's name, this is the true meaning of love.” Mishima summed up
Hagakure
's core teaching in this respect: “Of course you must not straddle the two Ways—love for men and love for women. Even while you are in love with a man, you must concentrate your energies on the Way of the Warrior. Then homosexual love goes very well with the Way of the Warrior.” One might compare these passages with Mishima's descriptions of the gay world in Tokyo in the two volumes of his long novel
Forbidden Colors
, written in 1951–3, when he was not yet thirty years old. There is a tawdriness, a wryness, a comical sadness here. One is worlds away from
Hagakure
, in the gay clubs of Roppongi. Yet in the back of his mind he must always have had that other shining model.

If I here underline the point that Mishima was indeed gay, it is because some have dissembled, others have published denials. It never occurred to me, twenty years ago, that anyone would dispute the obvious in private, let alone take issue on the matter in public. After completing the 1974 biography in Europe, I returned to Tokyo to work on a book on Japanese finance. It was during that trip that I encountered, for the first time, a member of the gay community in Tokyo who wanted to acquaint me with Mishima from the viewpoint of other gays. Mishima, according to this person, who had known Mishima for decades, favored two very distinct types as sexual partners: the tender GakushÅ«in-style intellectual student with a taste for literature—one may turn to Mishima's short story “Tobacco,” which was translated by John Bester and published in his collection
Acts of Worship
, for a description of the Peers School world that produced such boys—and swarthy,
hirsute men, gangster types. The rough-trade sort is described on many pages of
Confessions of a Mask
.