The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (45 page)

Yet such is prudery in Japan that even the merest mention of Mishima's sexual preferences has been known to cause a stir, as when Paul Schrader's film
Mishima
came out in 1985 and was promptly barred from distribution after Mishima's family expressed concern over a small scene where the actor playing Mishima is shown in a gay bar. As if in reaction to the movie, an authoritative book was published a few years later to set the record straight. Written by Takeshi Muramatsu, a close friend of Mishima's from childhood, this monumental 500-page study,
Mishima Yukio no Sekai
(“The World of Yukio Mishima”), sets out to show, as its central proposition, that Mishima was heterosexual.

Muramatsu summed up his case for me in conversations during the late 1980's, well before his work came out. He stridently maintained that Mishima was not a homosexual. When Mishima was very young, he had a first love, a girl who rejected him. Mishima was pained by the rebuff (echoes of this unhappy experience are found in
Confessions of a Mask
in the character of Sonoko). Thereafter, according to Muramatsu, Mishima opted for an ersatz brand of homosexuality—this was the “mask” of
Confessions of a Mask
. Mishima had gone through the rest of his life, apparently, posing as a sodomite. I would interpret Muramatsu's own motivations—I knew him well—in this fashion: One, prudery. Two, respect for the Mishima family. Three, Muramatsu was a conservative intellectual and ranked himself alongside Mishima, as his equal in intellect. He was distressed by the publicity over Mishima's sex life because it detracted from his politics, about which Muramatsu cared a great deal. Yet his book seemed to impress no one, as regards the issue of homosexuality, though it is in general a well-regarded work of scholarship.

Early in 1994—by that time Muramatsu was struggling with terminal cancer—I encountered one of Muramatsu's few close foreign friends, an American scholar. He raised the subject of Muramatsu's book and its improbable claims about Mishima's sexuality. The scholar regretted what he saw as a fatal flaw, because it tended
to invalidate the entire work—years of writing, decades of experience had come to nought. I am not sure that I accept this. Muramatsu knew more about many aspects of Mishima—including his close ties to politicians, which ranged up to the prime minister of his day via a web of backstairs intrigue—than anyone else in Japan. Muramatsu just could not deal with the sex. His attitude struck me as comparable to that of British worshippers of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in my youth. There was great reluctance at that time to consider his sexuality, as if T.E. had been made of wood. Yet Muramatsu never questioned the many references to Mishima's homosexuality in my biography. He hinted, but he did not press. Nor was there any objection from the Mishima family or anyone else after I returned to Tokyo as bureau chief for
The New York Times
in 1978. Seventeen years passed, and still no requests for a correction. This isn't conclusive. It doesn't verify my speculation that Mishima and Morita died in a gay
shinjū
. But it is further circumstantial evidence to that effect. Any well-informed Japanese reader of my book, Muramatsu included, could tell immediately who my sources were, as regards the
shinjū
matter. I did not name them then, and I do not wish to do so now, but a well-placed Japanese, reading my references to and quotations from two major sources, a police officer and a society lady, could easily determine their identities. My police source, who knew Mishima and his younger brother, Chiyuki, well, told me that Mishima and Morita were probably lovers but there would never be any final proof, he believed. In reaching this provisional conclusion, the police officer drew on a massive dossier that covered such matters as reservations at hotels by Mishima, with interviews with the maids, etc.—anyone who could see who had gone into what room at what time. In most countries such dossiers are a police force's crown jewels; they are not shared.

It just so happened that in this instance the police officer I knew not only was charged with the dossier and willing to speak to its contents but was an urbane, witty person who spoke perfect English. He was a fast-track insider who served as the conduit between the forces of the law and the press. To this man Mishima was no conundrum, no taboo figure, no mystery. Everyone knew that Mishima was gay . . . so what would he have been doing,
spending so much time with Morita? The officer told me the story of how, back in the late 1960's, Mishima had popped up at his office one day with a proposal for the Tatenokai to join the police in fighting the Zengakuren in the streets. “I turned him down flat!” said the policeman with a grin. He had been amused by Mishima's antics. This very man had set the entire police strategy for dealing with the Zengakuren behind the scenes, and he had won—by using tear gas. He was senior, though only forty years old. As a source, I thought him perfect, a little naively. Years later I realized that the police, like all officials, were happy to see the homosexual
shinjū
theory enlarge, thereby distracting the press from the politics of the Mishima incident.

And the society lady? Her credentials were impressive. She had known Mishima for a long time. Her family was rich and Mishima had sought her hand in marriage. Typically, able Japanese men without money who have rocketed up through the educational system, as Mishima had done, marry rich girls. It is par for the course. She had turned down his proposal (or her family had done so, much as did the Shōdas, the parents of Michiko Shōda—the present Empress of Japan). Mishima, however gifted, and not withstanding his track record in graduating from Tokyo University and entering the Finance Ministry, the ultimate accolade for a Japanese, had a peculiar streak, be it genius or madness. To marry him was a risk that some girls would not consider. My informant, a droll, quick-witted person, mentioned that she had received many letters from Mishima. She showed me part of the correspondence. (She might have been, I thought later, the original girlfriend of Mishima's whom Muramatsu had in mind, but Muramatsu declined to confirm this.)

I was not in touch with her in the past decades. Her health was not good and I was reluctant to bother her. Besides, she had spoken her piece. Her view, based largely on intuition (not on police files, perhaps, though she had access to their findings through her husband, a top politician), was that Mishima was deeply in love with Morita. Her sense of the matter is important. First, it went flat against any supposition that Mishima was “not a homosexual.” Second, she believed that Morita had exerted a huge influence on Mishima. There one came to the heart of everything.
Mishima, the lady believed (we met for lunch at a hotel), would never have gone it alone. Her view coincided with mine then, and it does so now. He wasn't a weak individual, but he needed to be buttressed—let's say in the way his mother had helped him, when he was very young and struggling to become a writer, and she took his manuscripts to publishers. Mishima had his limits. Seppuku hurts. To face that end alone—no matter how “insane” Mishima would become, as a matter of course, and he was quite capable in that regard, judging by his performance on the day—was something he would not do, could not . . .

The society lady's intuition fitted with the police findings pretty well. Morita, twenty-four years old, was the first to propose that the Tatenokai carry out a coup d'état, the police found. Morita made his move; he brought up the subject with Mishima late in 1969, and he was rebuffed. Mishima was not ready. Morita's concern was this: the Tatenokai was coming to nothing, people were saying (I believed that myself); it was just a writer's toy—the students involved were making fools of themselves. Morita pushed Mishima pretty hard, and he got nowhere until early 1970, when, for the first time, Mishima drew up a schedule allowing him to complete
The Sea of Fertility
that same year. It was then that Mishima decided to go ahead. He tapered off contacts with his oldest friends, Muramatsu included, to concentrate on the task at hand, his ultimate work of art, the house of Death and Night and Blood. Morita's remonstration with Mishima—
Hagakure
calls juniors to upbraid seniors if they are remiss—had had its effect. Mishima steeled himself. He ceased to receive phone calls from his friends. Everything was channeled through a newly appointed intermediary, the shadowy Kinemaro Izawa.

My memories of Morita are few and faint. My notes say that we met on Mt. Fuji in March 1969 when I was covering the Tatenokai for
The Times
, and that he spoke to me of Mishima and how they worked together and how he (Morita) “related” to the Emperor, the great chief, the man on a white horse of the wartime years, “through Mishima.” It was a far cry from Mt. Fuji in 1969 to Ichigaya in 1970—but when I look back on those years, everything fits, everything falls into place, with the suicides to follow. However macabre, however sordid, the ending had a certain dramatic
justice, as a drama shaped by a skilled playwright. In his last years Mishima excelled as a playwright.

3

Why did the Emperor have to make himself a mere human being?

Yukio Mishima,
The Voices of the Heroic Dead

Is Mishima's death, then, to be seen purely in the realm of aesthetics and sexuality, of Blood and Eros? I think not, as I have repeatedly indicated. There was a political element in what he did, on three levels. First, for anyone to march into a military base, sword in his hand, with a few companions to back him, and then and there take a four-star general hostage and demand that his officers summon the garrison to hear a speech on the Constitution, is beyond question an act with political implications! Second, Mishima had long received quiet backing from some of the most powerful politicians in Japan. Muramatsu was my main source on this matter, and he was an especially reliable one, because he had been on the one hand Mishima's friend and admirer and on the other a darling intellectual of certain ruling Liberal Democratic Party leaders of that time. Partly through Muramatsu, partly through others—for instance, the right-wing conservative Shintarō Ishihara—and partly on his own account, Mishima kept up contacts with such men as Eisaku Sato, the prime minister at the time of his death (a powerful politician who served as premier for eight years, up to 1972); Shigeru Hori, who served as Sato's right-hand man, holding the post of chief cabinet secretary; and, last but not least, Yasuhiro Nakasone, then a rising younger-generation politician who achieved a lifetime ambition when he was appointed defense minister in January 1970.

As fate ordained, the three cabinet members who had most at stake at the time of the Mishima incident were these three—Sato, Hori, and Nakasone. The full story of their links with Mishima will surely never be known. I became aware of their interest in
Mishima when I visited him and his family in Shimoda in August 1970. As I have mentioned, the three men sought out Mishima with phone calls to his hotel while he was on holiday, all in the space of a few days, if I understood Mishima correctly—he was perfectly open about the calls he received urging him to address gatherings of conservative supporters of the party leaders. By that time Mishima was totally disenchanted with the politicians, but there had been a time, only two years earlier, in 1968, again according to Muramatsu, when Mishima had sounded out the conservative political hierarchy—businessmen as well as politicians—on the possibility of getting funding for the Tatenokai. If Muramatsu is to be trusted on this matter (I had no reason to think he dissembled), the talks over finance for Mishima, which went partly through Muramatsu himself, hung fire for a couple of years, until 1970. Then, in that last year of Mishima's life, Sato pressed a button, ordering Hori to dispense cash to Mishima, if not directly, then through intermediaries. Muramatsu said that the amount Sato and Hori decided to give out of petty-cash funds at their disposal in the Prime Minister's office was 4 million yen ($47,000 at current exchange rates).

Muramatsu went into no great detail in his long book on Mishima; he was discreet. One wants to be careful in accepting what he said about the money. Were the funds disbursed in tranches? Did Mishima receive them? Did he accept them? By 1970 Mishima would not have been disposed to receive money from any politicians or outside sources. He had paid the main bills for the Tatenokai—perhaps 20–25 million yen over a three-year period (my guesstimate), the most costly item being the summer and winter uniforms of some seventy or more Tatenokai members. However, what counts is that Sato and Hori felt sufficiently eager to associate themselves with Mishima to offer the money. They had their reasons: Mishima was the intellectual in Japan who leaned toward the right, overtly so, at a time when almost all other writers, theater people, and many journalists could be counted on the left, including many of Mishima's friends. His fame, his dynamism, his volubility made him an attractive person for the politicians to invite to their gatherings as a guest of honor. The memory of the Zengakuren left-wing student riots was fresh in the politicians' minds and Mishima
had visited the strife-torn campus of his old university, Tokyo University, and challenged the students in direct debate. Absolutely no other intellectual had come forward like that, in direct opposition to the mainstream of intellectual life in the nation.

When the moment came and Mishima staged his last day at Ichigaya, the politicians, notably Sato, were quick not merely to disown him but to denounce him—Sato called him “mad.” The leaders of the nation had no other course of action open to them, it may be said. The press, however, never exposed government links to Mishima all these years, or barely touched on them. The politicians met the threat to their reputations mainly by selecting a scapegoat, General Mashita. He was fired from his post at Ichigaya—this unhappy general who had been bound and gagged in his office by intruders—and moved out to a sinecure at Haneda Airport. He died a few years later, without ever saying what he knew: that Mishima's status with the armed forces—there was vast indignation against Mishima within the Japanese military after the incident at Ichigaya (the feeling was that Mishima had betrayed a trust)—was dependent in no small measure on his cozy relations with the politicians. Indeed, Nakasone, on becoming defense minister early in 1970, was glad to let Mishima continue to use armed-forces bases for training purposes, to maintain the basic understanding whereby Mishima had a free pass to all military installations. In fairness to Nakasone, then a junior politician, it would have been hard for him to go against the senior members of the cabinet, Sato and Hori, known Mishima friends, if not overt supporters, and deny Mishima privileges he had had for several years.