The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (5 page)

“SHOOT HIM!”

Mishima jumped down from the parapet onto the balcony behind it. With Morita at his heels, he retraced his steps to the general's office. He stooped at the low window and went down into the room beyond, out of sight of the TV cameras. Then Morita, too, disappeared. The window was closed.

4

Hara-kiri

Mishima came down a little flight of red-carpeted stairs that led back into the general's office.

“They did not hear me very well,” he remarked to the students.

Morita followed him into the room.

Mishima started to undo the buttons of his jacket. He was in a part of the room, close to the door into the chief of staff's office, from which he could not be seen through the broken window by the men in the corridor.

The general's gag had been removed. He watched as Mishima stripped off his jacket. Mishima was naked to the waist; he wore no undershirt.

“Stop!” cried Mashita. “This serves no purpose.”

“I was bound to do this,” Mishima replied. “You must not follow my example. You are not to take responsibility for this.”

“Stop!” ordered Mashita.

Mishima paid no heed. He unlaced his boots, throwing them to one side. Morita came forward and picked up the sword.

“Stop!”

Mishima slipped his wristwatch from his hand and passed it to a student. He knelt on the red carpet, six feet from Mashita's chair. He loosened his trousers, slipping them down his legs. The white
fundoshi
(loincloth) underneath was visible. Mishima was almost naked. His small, powerful chest heaved.

Morita took up a position behind him with the sword.

Mishima took a
yoroidōshi
, a foot-long, straight-blade dagger with a sharp point, in his right hand.

Ogawa came forward with a
mōhitsu
(brush) and a piece of paper. Mishima had planned to write a last message in his own blood.

“No, I don't need that,” Mishima said. He rubbed a spot on his lower left abdomen with his left hand. Then he pricked the knife in his right hand against the spot.

Morita raised the sword high in the air, staring down at Mishima's neck. The student's forehead was beaded with perspiration. The end of the sword waggled, his hands shook.

Mishima shouted a last salute to the Emperor.
“Tennō Heika Banzai! Tennō Heika Banzai! Tennō Heika Banzai!
”

He hunched his shoulders and expelled the air from his chest. His back muscles bunched. Then he breathed in once more, deeply.

“Haa . . . ow!” Mishima drove all the air from his body with a last, wild shout.

He forced the dagger into his body with all his strength. Following the blow, his face went white and his right hand started to tremble. Mishima hunched his back, beginning to make a horizontal cut across his stomach. As he pulled at the knife, his body sought to drive the blade outward; the hand holding the dagger shook violently. He brought his left hand across, pressing down mightily on his right. The knife remained in the wound, and he continued cutting crosswise. Blood spurted from the cut and ran down his stomach into his lap, staining the
fundoshi
a bright red.

With a final effort Mishima completed the crosscut, his head down, his neck exposed.

Morita was ready to strike with the sword and cut off the head of his leader. “Do not leave me in agony too long,” Mishima had said to him.

Morita clenched his wrists on the hilt of the sword. As he watched, Mishima toppled forward on his face onto the red carpet.

Morita brought the sword crashing down. Too late. The force of the blow was great, but the sword smacked into the red carpet on the far side of Mishima. He received a deep cut in the back and shoulders.

“Again!” the other students called out.

Mishima lay groaning on the carpet, smothered in his own blood and twisting from side to side. Intestines slid from his belly.

Morita struck once again. Once more his aim failed. He hit Mishima's body, not the neck. The wound was a terrible one.

“Once more!”

Morita had little strength left in his hands. He lifted the glittering sword for the third time and struck with all his might at
Mishima's head and neck. The blow almost severed the neck. Mishima's head cocked at an angle to his body; blood fountained from his neck.

Furu-Koga came forward. He had experience in kendo, in Japanese fencing.

“Give me the sword!” he said to Morita.

With a single chop he separated body and head.

The students knelt.

“Pray for him,” Mashita said, leaning forward as best he could, to bow his head.

The students silently said a Buddhist prayer.

The only sound in the room was the sobbing of the young men. Tears ran down their cheeks. There was a bubbling from the corpse; blood pumped from the neck, covering the red carpet.

A raw stench filled the room. Mishima's entrails had spilled onto the carpet.

Mashita lifted his head. The students had not finished. Morita was ripping off his jacket. Another student took from the hand of Mishima, which still twitched in a pool of blood, the
yoroidōshi
dagger with which he had disemboweled himself. He passed the weapon to Morita.

Morita knelt, loosened his trousers, and shouted a final salute, as Mishima had done:
“Tennō Heika Banzai! Tennō Heika Banzai! Tennō Heika Banzai!
”

Morita tried without success to drive the dagger into his stomach. He was not strong enough. He made a shallow scratch across his belly.

Furu-Koga stood behind him, holding the sword high in the air.

“Right!” said Morita.

With a sweep of the sword Furu-Koga severed Morita's head, which rolled across the carpet. Blood spurted rhythmically from the severed neck, where the body had slumped forward.

The students prayed, sobbing.

Mashita watched. “This is the end!” he exclaimed.

“Don't worry,” one of the students said. “He told us not to kill ourselves. We have to hand you over safely. Those were his orders.”

“You must stop,” Mashita cried. “You must stop.”

The students unbound Mashita. He rose to his feet, massaging his wrists. On one hand he had a deep cut. Otherwise, he had been uninjured in the scuffle.

“Make the bodies decent,” he ordered the students.

They took up the men's jackets and spread them over the bodies, covering the torsos. They lined up the two corpses on the floor, feet pointing toward the main door of the office.

Then they took up the heads and placed them, neck down, on the blood-soaked carpet. The headbands were still in place.

The students prayed for a third time, before the two heads.

Then they rose to their feet and walked toward the main entrance. They dismantled the barrier and pulled open the door.

The students stood there, looking out. The police looked back. The yellow uniforms of the youths were lightly spotted with blood, their cheeks tear-stained.

No one moved.

An officer rushed to Mashita. “Are you all right, sir?”

The general nodded. But he was on the verge of collapse.

The police still did not move.

“Well,” an inspector cried out finally, “arrest them!”

The police doctors went into the room. At 12:23 they confirmed that Mishima and Morita had died by hara-kiri and beheading.

An announcement was made downstairs to the press. A crowd of about fifty reporters and TV cameramen were standing together in a small room; I was the only foreigner among them.

A Jieitai officer stood on a low rostrum at the front of the room. “They are dead, Mishima and one other,” he announced.

“What do you mean, ‘dead'?”

“Their heads are off, yes, off, their heads are off, off, I tell you, off.”

5

“Out of His Mind”

The first reaction to Mishima's action was complete incredulity. There had been no case of ritual hara-kiri in Japan since immediately after the war; most Japanese had assumed, if they ever thought about it, that the practice was extinct. And Mishima had been one of the best-known men in the country.

The police were very confused. Officers at the Metropolitan Police Headquarters in Tokyo did not believe the first reports. A senior officer was dispatched with the orders “If the body is still warm, do your utmost to save his life.”

The Japanese press were also at a loss. A reporter for the
Mainichi Shimbun
, a leading daily paper, phoned in his story from Ichigaya, just in time for a late afternoon edition. “Go back and check your facts,” the desk editor who took the call instructed him; and he drafted the headline
INJURED MISHIMA RUSHED TO HOSPITAL
.

At his home in the suburbs Azusa Hiraoka, Mishima's father, had been having a quiet smoke and watching television when the first report of the “Mishima Incident” flashed on the screen.

“Yukio Mishima . . . made an attack on the Jieitai camp at Ichigaya.”

Azusa's thought was: “Now I will have to go and apologize to the police and everyone else involved. What a bother!”

The next line read: “
Kappuku
” (cut his stomach). Azusa worried that his son's right hand might have been injured too. Modern surgery would take care of him otherwise.

The next announcement was: “
Kaishaku
” (beheaded).

“I was not particularly surprised,” Azusa said later. “My brain rejected the information.”

The first official comment on the affair was made by Prime Minister Eisaku Sato.

Sato, a stocky, handsome figure in a morning coat, emerged from the Diet, the parliament. He had been making a speech at
the opening of the autumn session, in the presence of the Emperor. Sato had known Mishima personally and had helped him, indirectly, to have his Tatenokai trained by the Jieitai.

Reporters gathered round the Prime Minister. “Would you comment on the Mishima Incident, Prime Minister?”

“He must have been
kichigai
, out of his mind,” Sato said. And he got into his big, black President car and was driven away to his office.

Shortly afterward the police announced the results of the autopsies on the bodies of Mishima and Morita. Mishima had a cut five inches long in his lower abdomen; in places, the wound was as deep as two inches. Morita had only a light scratch across his stomach; he had not had the great strength required to drive a dagger into his body.

What had led the two men to commit hara-kiri? The answer was not as simple as the Prime Minister had suggested.

TWO

Early Life (1925–39)

But my heart's leaning was for Death and Night and Blood.

Yukio Mishima,
Confessions of a Mask

1

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

One of the last remarks made to me by Mishima was that it was virtually impossible for a non-Japanese person to understand Japan. We in the West, he went on, consistently underrated the importance of the “dark” side of Japanese culture and chose instead to concentrate on the “soft” element in the Japanese tradition. This was a theme that Mishima often brought up late in life; he usually enlarged upon his point then by saying that there was too much emphasis in Japan itself on “the chrysanthemum” (the arts) and an insufficient understanding of “the sword” (the martial tradition). And in this context he had referred approvingly to the work of the American sociologist Ruth Benedict,
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
, a book known to all non-Japanese interested in the culture of Japan. Always, he insisted on the duality of the Japanese tradition, and he praised Benedict for having understood the nature of this duality.

I accept Mishima's point. Before and during the Second World War, Western commentary on Japan was almost exclusively preoccupied with the martial aspect of the Japanese tradition; it was said that the Japanese were soldiers at heart—ruthless, barbaric men who would not hesitate to commit the gravest atrocity as at the “Rape of Nanking” in 1937. After the war, Western scholars changed their thinking, and most writing about Japan since 1950 has dwelt upon the Japanese aesthetic. Writers on a variety of subjects—the classical literature of Japan, Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony—have delineated the Japanese sense of beauty. Neither school of thought gives a complete picture of Japan; the Japanese are heirs to a dual tradition of the literary and the martial arts.

I see Mishima both as a writer and as a “soldier.” To understand the man, one must study his aesthetic; his exploits in the field of military endeavor are intriguing and reveal that he had
something
of the soldier in him; but he devoted almost all his adult life to writing, not to the Jieitai and the Tatenokai. My purpose here is to explain Mishima's idea of beauty, which he developed during his adolescence.

My study of Mishima's early life relies largely on a single source, his autobiographical masterpiece,
Confessions of a Mask
(published by New Directions in 1958 in a translation by Meredith Weatherby). This novel is the most striking of Mishima's many works. It reveals more of his character and of his upbringing than anything else he wrote: it gives a crystalline account of his aesthetic.
Confessions of a Mask
describes the genesis of a romantic idea which impinges directly on his eventual decision to commit suicide: the notion that violent death is ultimate beauty, provided that he who dies is young. Thus Mishima drew on an ancient Japanese inspiration that beauty is temporary. This is a particularly Japanese idea and recurs often in the classical literature; for example, in the ancient chronicles, the eighth-century
Nihonshoki
and
Kojiki
, and in the monumental eleventh-century novel
The Tale of Genji
. Mishima, however, gave a romantic twist to the classical tradition; he had as much in common with contemporary culture in the West—for example, the cult of violence in Western rock songs and
in films—as with classical Japan. He was always, from an early age, accessible to Western ideas and to our childhood classics! One of the most striking features of his early life was the influence upon him of Western literature, from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen to the novels of Raymond Radiguet and the plays of Oscar Wilde. Mishima knew a great deal more about Western culture than his contemporaries in Japan; that is one reason he could make friends with foreigners so easily.