Mishima: A Vision of the Void 0226965325

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s . =

Mishima A

Vision

of

the

Void

MISHIMA A VISION

OF

MARGUERITE

THE

VOID

YOURCENAR

Translated by Alberto Manguel in collaboration with the author and with a new Foreword

by Donald Richie

The University of Chicago Press

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Translation copyright © 1986 by Alberto Manguel Foreword copyright © 2001 by the University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Originally published in French under the title, Mishima, ou la vision du vide

© 1980 by Editions Gallimard

English translation first published in the United States in 1986 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux University of Chicago Press edition 2001 Printed in the United States of America 05 04 03 02 O1 65 43 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yourcenar, Marguerite. [Mishima, ou, La vision du vide. English]

Mishima : a vision of the void / Marguerite Yourcenar ; translated by Alberto Manguel in collaboration with the author ; and with a new foreword by Donald Richie. pcm. ISBN 0-226-96532-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mishima, Yukio, 1925—70.

2. Authors, Japanese—

20th century—Biography. I. Title: Vision of the void. II. Manguel, Alberto. III. Title.

PL833.17 Z98713 895.6’35—dc21 [B]

2001 00-054480

@ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

MISHIMA:

A

VISION

OF

THE

VOID

BY

MARGUERITE NOVELS

AND

YOURCENAR

SHORT

STORIES

Alexis ou le traité du vain combat, 1929, in English, Alexis, 1984

La nouvelle Eurydice, 1931 Nouvelles orientales,

1938; revised edition, 1963,

1978;

in English, Oriental Tales, 1985

Le coup de grace, 1939; in English, Coup de Grace, 1957 Mémoires d’Hadrien, 1951; in English, Memoirs of Hadrian, 1954 L’oeuvre au noir, 1968; in English, The Abyss, 1976 Denier du réve, 1934; revised edition, 1959; in English, A Coin in Nine Hands,

1982

Comme l'eau qui coule, 1982; in English, Two Lives and a Dream, POEMS

AND

PROSE

POEMS

Feux, 1936; in English, Fires, 1981 Les charités d’Alcippe, 1956 DRAMA Thédtre I, 1971

Théétre II, 197] ESSAYS

AND

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Pindare, 1932 Les songes et les sorts, 1938 Sous bénéfice d'inventaire, 1962;

in English, The Dark Brain of Piranesi, 1984 Discours de réception de Marguerite Yourcenar a l’Académie Royale belge, 1971 Le labyrinthe du monde I: Souvenirs pieux, 1973 Le labyrinthe du monde II: Archives du nord, 1977 Discours de réception a l’Académie Francaise de Mme. M. Yourcenar, 1981 Mishima ou la vision du vide, 1980;

in English, Mishima: A Vision of the Void, 1986 Le temps, ce grand sculpteur, 1983

1987

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Grove Press, Inc., for per-

mission to reprint excerpts from Madame de Sade by Yukio

Mishima, translated by Donald Keene, copyright © 1967 by Grove Press, Inc.; to Farrar, Straus & Giroux for permission to reprint excerpts from The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by

Henry Scott Stokes, copyright © 1974 by Henry Scott Stokes; to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, copyright © 1974 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., from Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima, translated by Alfred H. Marks, copyright © 1968 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., from Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima, translated by Michael Gallagher, copyright © 1973 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., from Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima, translated by Michael Gallagher, copyright © 1972 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., from The Temple of Dawn by Yukio Mishima, translated by E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle, copyright © 1973 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima, translated by Ivan Morris, copyright © 1959 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; to Kodansha International Ltd. for permission to reprint excerpts from Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima, translated by John Bester, copyright © 1970 by Kodansha International Ltd.; to Little, Brown and Company for permission to reprint excerpts from Mishima: A Biography by John Nathan, copyright © 1974 by John Nathan; to New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint excerpts from Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima, translated by Meredith Weatherby, copyright © 1958 by New Directions Publishing Corporation.

_-

gS gee

Foreword How pleased, how impressed, Yukio Mishima would have been that Marguerite Yourcenar, a writer he so admired, had devoted a whole book to

him. In 1956 Mishima had read, shortly after the English translation appeared, The Memoirs of Hadrian, and thereafter considered it one of his favorite books. He even thought of translating it himself (the eventual translation, Hadorianu-tei no Kaiso [1964] was the work of Shinako Tada)

and he once told me he also wanted to make some

sort of stage or screen version of it. The work was important to him.

At about the same time, in 1958 when the En-

glish translation of Confessions of a Mask ap-

peared, Yourcenar was also becoming aware of

Mishima. She read it and contemplated, she later told me, a translation of it into French. (Eventually she did translate—twice—Mishima’s

Five Noh

FOREWORD Plays.) Neither of the proposed translations had ever been made, but a relationship had been conceived.

Yet they never met, never even corresponded.

When in 1983, long after Mishima’s 1970 suicide,

Yourcenar visited Japan, she had already finished

her book on him though this English version had not yet appeared (and no Japanese translation has

yet appeared). Once there she discovered that the dead author was still under taboo for having so embarrassed modern conciliatory Japan by his stub-

bornly old-fashioned ending. Sales were down, the

name of Mishima was not much heard, later Paul Schrader’s 1985 film was to be denied local distribution and there was a stubborn campaign to

clean up his image. Yourcenar visited the widow. This was more of a

diplomatic call because diplomacy was required. Yoko Mishima wanted her husband remembered as a man

of letters. Consequently some attempt

was made to suppress other facets—the acting and singing, the movie-making, the body-building, the toy army, much of the author’s emotional life and,

of course, the famous suicide itself.

Yourcenar, however, was interested in just these aspects, particularly in Mishima’s emotional life

1X

and suicide. She was interested in the army,

though she met none of the survivors. She wanted to meet some of his special friends, though none materialized. She wanted to be taken where the

Kabuki onnagatta “played” after their pertormances. But since there is no such place, with

reigning onnagatta barely speaking let alone playing, she was instead taken to one of the more ex-

pensive of Tokyo’s transvestite bars. Death and love. These were interests which the two authors shared, which had indeed brought them together. For Mishima, the beautiful and beloved Antinous’ suicide was a proper end. He

would have approved of Hadrian’s reflection that “everything, in the end, is a decision of the spirit,

but [one] which also demands the approval of the body.” And, though he had not read the work of Zeno, Mishima would in The Abyss certainly have

admired Zeno’s thought before his suicide: “Not to

learn, but to experience.” For Yourcenar,

Mishima

came

to represent

a

person who (like Antinous and like Zeno) had ac-

tually carried through with these precepts. Fur-

ther, he had integrated them: “Mishima’s carefully

premeditated death is a part of his work ... [It]

was not the flamboyant and almost ofthand ges-

FOREWORD ture, as those who have never reached this point themselves imagine, but an exhausting climb toward what this man believed to be, in the fullest

sense, his proper end.”

Details of the climb compose the body of the book and, knowing well that experience forms

character, Yourcenar begins rather near the beginning—with Mishima’s highly unusual childhood.

Of it Mishima himself wrote that “at the age of eight I had a 60-year-old lover,” referring to his possessive grandmother. Yourcenar, having already written Alexis (the hero of which could have been an alternate Mishima), writes of this love affair that “much time is saved by such a start.” She should know. Yourcenar’s own childhood

“lover” was her equally elderly father. A book such as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask could follow such experience as easily or as complexly as Feux

could follow Alexis and La Nouvelle Eurydice. At

the same time she discovers similarities, however,

Yourcenar found in Mishima many differences.

He was, for example, “a true representative of Japan,” even a paradigmatic one, in his mixture of “the elements of the writer’s own culture and those of the West.” She does, however, share his doubt of

the mixture. “When one thinks of what ‘progress’

x1

was to bring [to] Japan in less than a century,” she

writes, “one is no longer tempted to ridicule those samurai who isolated themselves out of hatred of

foreign modernization.” Mishima, despite his Spanish-style villa with its half-size replica of the Apollo Belvedere in the courtyard, with its famous staircase that went nowhere and existed only that he could walk down

it, was perhaps otherwise much like these samu-

rai—but, Yourcenar thought, with the difference that he could no longer believe in what they presumably had.

After all, Mishima had heard the emperor's radio speech relinquishing his status, an occurrence

“as shocking for the Japanese people as it would be for Catholics to hear the pope renounce his infallibility and cease to consider himself a representa-

tive of God.” Mishima, deprived, seems to have felt

that he had no recourse but to construct a life which would lead to a desired end. Yourcenar is, of course, aware that this life was, “sometimes as knowingly plotted as his words, so that one is able to see in both the same faults, the same imperfections, but also the same virtues and finally the same greatness.” Does the greatness rest in the words alone, or in

FOREWORD the suicide alone? Or in both, or in neither? Cer-

tainly Yourcenar is not unaware of the spotty nature of some of Mishima’s work and, having before

her the ungrateful task of making something of the final tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, she cannot but observe that “it is as if the author, in a

hurry to finish both his work and his life, had thrown in haphazardly the few explanations neces-

sary for the reader, if not for himself.” On the other hand, she finds The Temple of the Golden Pavil-

ion “a masterpiece.” So is the story “Patriotism” (Yukoku, not Togoku as the text here gives it), as

well as the film that Mishima made of it (of which

the Mishima estate is still trying to track down

copies), in which Yourcenar says that, “Mishima envisioned a certain kind of death and made of it

his masterpiece.” (The fact that she took the story literally can perhaps account for something astonishing she said to me. “Well,” she said, “Yoko could

not have loved her husband very much.” When I asked why, she answered: “She did not kill herself after he did.” One should not, I believe, read this

remark as naive or flippant or appalling; rather,

one should see in it Yourcenar’s belief in death as responsibility.) Behind Yourcenar’s remark is an assumption

X1i1l1

about suicide. Though the common notion is that

killing yourself is a wanton act, inconsiderate and unjustifiable, there is another less common way of thinking which suggests that you can be as respon-

sible for your own death as you presumably are of your life. To exit with consideration and forethought could be seen as accountable. Many traditions have thought so—including the Greco-

Roman to which both authors were so dedicated. To commit suicide for aesthetic reasons is less common but, certainly, in her view that the author's suicide was his true masterpiece, Yourcenar is cor-

rect. It is the most successful of Mishima’s “works” in that it turned out precisely as envisioned. There

is none of the customary division between intent and accomplishment. It is there, complete, perfect, just as purposed. Then Yourcenar remembers the

piece of paper he left on his desk that morning:

“Human life is limited, but I would like to live for-

ever.” Perhaps that is what the suicide accom-

plished. He killed himself in order to live forever. Yourcenar savors the irony. It is doubtful that

the work alone could have contrived the immortality which Mishima so coveted. When a death is thus chosen, when one takes this amount of re-

sponsibility for it, one cannot help but feel (among

FOREWORD other things) admiration. It could be said that one

of the marks of a truly responsible life is a voluntary death.

Hadrian thought so. He wrote, as the last sentence of his Memoirs: “Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes. . . .” Mishima knew

this page well and he followed its advice. And in this book Yourcenar succeeds in making Mishima

understandable on terms very close to his own. This book is thus a true merging of spirits, a real

coincidence of interests. Despite differences in culture and experience, of gender and age—she

was to die open-eyed at age 84 in 1987—these two people come together and the encounter is a very moving one.

As Yourcenar wrote, “there are two kinds of

human beings: those who keep death out of the

thoughts to live better and more freely, and those who, on the contrary, feel their existence more

wisely and more strongly when they watch for the signals death gives. . . . These two kinds of spirits

do not mingle. What one calls a morbid mania is for the other a heroic discipline. It is for the reader to make up his own mind.” Donald Richie

Energy is Eternal Delight. WILLIAM BLAKE The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

But if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? MATTHEW

5:13

Die in your thoughts every morning and you will no longer fear death. Hagakure

t is always difficult to judge a great contemporary writer: we lack the proper distance. It is even more difficult to judge him if he belongs

to a culture different from our own, a culture

colored by our fondness for or distrust of the exotic. The chances of misunderstanding him are compounded when, as in the case of Yukio Mishima, the elements of the writer's own culture

and those of the culture of the West, which he had avidly absorbed—that is to say, for us, the commonplace and the bizarre—mingle in each separate book in different proportions and with varying effects and degrees of success. It is, however, this

admixture that makes him, in many of his books,

a true representative of a Japan which was, like

Mishima himself, violently Westernized, and yet remained distinguished by certain immutable char-

acteristics. The way in which, in Mishima, the

MISHIMA traditionally Japanese elements rose to the surface and burst in his death make him, furthermore, a witness to and—in the etymological sense of the word—a martyr of the heroic Japan to which he had returned, so to speak, against the tide. Our difficulty becomes even greater when

the

writer's life—no matter what his country or his culture—has been as varied, rich, impetuous, and sometimes as knowingly plotted as his work, so that one is able to see in both not only the same

faults, the same tricks, and the same imperfections

but also the same virtues and finally the same greatness. Inevitably, an uneasy balance is established between our interest in the man and our interest in his books. Gone are the days when we could

enjoy Hamlet and not interest ourselves in Shakespeare: vulgar curiosity about biographical anec-

dotes is a characteristic of our time, increased tenfold by the methods of a press and media

addressed to a public more and more incapable of

reading. All of us tend to seek out not only the

writer, who by definition expresses himself in his books, but also the individual, always necessarily

manifold, contradictory, and changeable, hidden

in some places and visible in others, and finally—

perhaps more than the other two—the persona,

H /5 that reflection or shadow which sometimes the man himself Cas was the case with Mishima) projects as a defense or out of bravado, but behind which

the human being of flesh and blood lived and died

in that impenetrable mystery which is part of every life.

The chances of misinterpretation are many. Let us go on, nevertheless, but let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer’s work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima’s carefully premeditated death is

part of his work. However, while a film such as Patriotism, or a passage such as the description of Isao’s suicide in Runaway Horses, sheds light on the writer’s end and partly explains it, the author’s

death, at most, grants these works authenticity but does nothing to elucidate them. Undoubtedly, certain anecdotes of childhood and youth which seem revealing deserve to be retold in a brief summary of Mishima’s life, but

most of these traumatic episodes are recounted in Confessions of a Mask, and they recur, scattered

about in many different guises, in his later works of fiction, promoted to the rank of obsessions, or as

starting points for an inverse obsession, definitively

MISHIMA rooted in that powerful plexus which controls in

us all our actions and emotions. It is interesting to watch these ghosts wax and wane within the soul of a man like the changing phases of the moon in

the sky. And without question, certain contemporary accounts which are more or less anecdotal, certain opinions uttered on the spur of the moment,

like a sudden snapshot, sometimes help to com-

plete, verify, or contradict the self-portrait which Mishima himself has made from these incidents or

traumatic moments. And yet it is thanks only to the

writer himself that we can hear the deep reverberations of these moments, as we all hear deep within us our own voice and the throbbing of our own

blood. Curiously

enough,

many

of these emotional

crises in Mishima’s childhood and adolescence are prompted by an image in a book or in a Western film to which the young man, born in Tokyo in

1925, was exposed. The child who falls out of love

with a handsome illustration in his picture book

because his nurse tells him that it is not a knight,

as he had believed, but a woman called Joan of Arc, feels he has been cheated and that his young

masculinity has been offended. For us, the interesting fact is that it was Joan of Arc who inspired

this reaction, and not one of the many heroines of

/7 the Kabuki theater disguised as a man. In the famous scene of his first ejaculation before a photograph of Guido

Reni’s St. Sebastian, the excite-

ment derived from the Italian Baroque painting is

the more understandable insofar as Japanese art, even in its erotic engravings, never indulged, as did

Western art, in the glorification of the nude: That

muscular body driven to exhaustion, collapsed in

the almost voluptuous abandon of agony, would

not have appeared in any depiction of a samurai

put to death. The heroes of ancient Japan love and die within their shells of silk and steel. Certain other haunting memories are, on the

contrary, exclusively Japanese. Mishima highlights that of a handsome “night-soil man,” a poetic euphemism meaning an excrement-collector, a young, well-built figure coming down a hill in the twilight. “This very image is the earliest of those that have kept tormenting and frightening me all my life.” And the author of Confessions of a Mask

is certainly not wrong in linking the euphemism hurriedly explained to a child with the notion of an obscure Earth Mother both dangerous and deified.* But any European child could become

* In English, at least in the American variety, the word soil is

used both in the sense of the verb to soil, to dirty, to make impure,

and in the sense of earth, as in gardening soil.

MISHIMA

attached in the same way to a strong garden boy

whose

exclusively

physical

activity and

whose

clothes, hinting at the shape of the body, are a change from his too well-mannered and too straitlaced family. In the same category, but shattering

like the onslaught it describes, is the scene in

which, on the day of a procession, the young bearers of the shrines of the Shinto gods, which

sway from one side of the street to the other on the bearers’

strong

shoulders,

rush

in through

the

garden gates; confined within the family order or disorder, the child feels for the first time, excited and frightened, the great outdoor wind; its gusts carry with them everything that will continue to matter to him—youth and human strength, tradi-

tions regarded up to then as spectacle or mere

routine but which now suddenly spring to life, the gods who will later reappear in the guise of the

“harsh god” of which Isao in Runaway Horses becomes the incarnation, and later still in The Decay of the Angel—until the vision of the great Buddhist Void wipes out all.

Already in the early novel Thirst for Love, whose protagonist is a young woman half mad from sensual frustration, the lovesick woman thrust

against the naked torso of a young gardener during

/9 an orgiastic village procession finds in that contact an instant of violent bliss. But it is mainly in

Runaway Horses that this memory reappears, distilled, almost phantasmal Clike those autumn crocuses which grow an abundance of leaves in the

spring and then reappear unexpectedly, slim and perfect, toward the end of autumn), in the form

of young men tugging and pushing with Isao the carts full of sacred lilies picked inside a sanctuary,

and whom Honda, the visionary voyeur, sees now, like Mishima himself, from a distance of over

twenty years. In the interim, the writer had himself once experienced the intoxication of physical effort, of

fatigue, of sweat, of joyfully mingling with the crowd, when he, too, decided to wear the headband of the bearers of sacred shrines during a pro-

cession. A snapshot shows him, very young, and

for once laughing, his cotton kimono open at the

chest, very like the rest of his companions. Only

a young Sevillian years ago, before organized tourism followed in the steps of religious fervor, might

have known a little of that same drunken rapture confronting, in the white Andalusian streets, the platform of the Macarena and that of Our Lady

of the Gypsies. The same orgiastic image reappears

MISHIMA

yet again, but this time in the secondhand account of a witness: Mishima himself, during one of his

first long journeys, hesitated for two nights at the sight of the human magma of the Carnival of Rio, and decided only on the third night to plunge into the human sea, caught and kneaded by the dance.

But what is important above all is that initial moment of refusal or fear, a moment which will belong to Honda and to Kiyoaki as well, fleeing the wild cries of the kendo fencers which Isao, and

Mishima himself, later let out at the top of their lungs. In every case, retreat or fright precedes wild abandonment or exacerbated discipline, which are

one and the same.

It is customary to begin an essay of this nature by

placing the writer in his surroundings. If I have

not done so, it is because that backdrop is of no

importance until one has seen against it at least an

outline of the individual. Much like any family

which for several generations has succeeded in escaping the anonymity of the humbler classes,

Mishima’s family is striking for the extraordinary diversity of ranks, groups, and cultures crisscrossing a milieu which, from the outside, seems relatively easy to understand. In fact, like so many

European upper- and middle-class families of the

#/11 same period, Mishima’s, on his father’s side, consists of peasant stock until the early nineteenth century, when a few members attain university

degrees (rare at the time, and highly prized) and more or less distinguished positions as government ofhicials. The grandfather was governor of an island, but retired after an electoral scandal. The

father, a ministry civil servant, appears to have been a sullen and correct bureaucrat, compensating with his circumspect life for the grandfather's improprieties. Only on three occasions is his behavior startling: three times, while taking his son

for a walk in the fields along a railroad track, he holds the child in his arms—Mishima tells us— barely two feet away from the furiously charging

express train, allowing him to be blown by the whirlwinds of speed; the child, already a stoic—or more likely petrified by fear—is incapable of crying out. Curiously, this unloving parent, who

would have had his son follow a bureaucratic rather than a literary career, forces the child to undergo a test of endurance like those which Mishima would later impose upon himself.* * I make no reference to psychiatric or psychoanalytical interpretations. First, because they have been explored several times, and then because they almost inevitably acquire, from a nonspecialist’s pen,

an air of “drugstore

psychology.”

I have chosen other types of explanations.

At any rate,

MISHIMA

The mother is more clearly defined. She comes from one of those families of Confucian tutors who

represent the very backbone of Japanese logic and morality, and was at first almost entirely deprived of her very young son by his aristocratic paternal

grandmother, unhappily wedded to the island governor. It is not until later that she is able to reclaim

her son, and then takes an interest in the writings

of this adolescent intoxicated with literature. It is for her that at the age of thirty-three, late in life in Japan to consider marriage, Mishima decides to call upon

an old-fashioned matchmaker,

so that

his mother, who has been mistakenly diagnosed as suffering from cancer, should not experience the

sorrow of dying without seeing the bloodline continued. On the eve of his suicide, he bid his parents what he knew was to be his last farewell, in

their traditional Japanese house, a modest annex

of his showy Western-style villa. The single noteworthy remark we have about this occasion is his mother’s,

typical in its maternal

concern:

“He

looked very tired . . .” Simple words that remind

us how much his suicide was not a flamboyant and

almost offhand gesture, as those who have never reached this point themselves imagine, but an exhausting climb toward what this man believed to

be, in the fullest sense of the word, his proper end.

# / 13 The grandmother is an intriguing character, born into a respectable samurai family, great-

granddaughter of a daimyo (one might as well say of a prince), even related by intermarriage to the

Tokugawa dynasty. The spirit of ancient Japan,

half forgotten, lives on in her, in the guise of a

sickly creature, somewhat hysterical, subject to attacks of rheumatism and cranial neuralgia, mar-

ried somewhat late, for lack of anything better, to a low-ranking official.* In her quarters, where she

kept the young boy, this disturbing and touching grandmother seems to have lived a life of luxury,

sickness, and revery far removed from that bour-

geois existence in which the next generation sought

refuge. The imprisoned child slept in his grand-

mother’s room, was witness to her nervous breakdowns, learned very young how to dress her sores, accompanied her to the lavatory, wore the girl’s dresses which on a whim she sometimes had him

put on, and was sent by her to the ritual spectacle of No, as well as the melodramatic and bloodthirsty Kabuki,

which

he was later to emulate.

This fey spirit no doubt planted in him the seeds * Mishima’s father, in an unpleasant article published under his

name after the writer's death, mentions that some of the grand-

mother’s ailments were probably the result of venereal disease transmitted by the overly merry governor of the island. Mishima himself made a similar allusion.

MISHIMA

of madness once deemed necessary for genius; she

certainly allowed him to move freely between gen-

erations, the birthright of a child who has grown up in the company of an elderly person. To this

precocious contact with a sickly body and soul he

owed, perhaps, an essential lesson: his first knowledge of the strangeness of things. Above all, it allowed him the experience of being jealously and madly loved and of responding to that great love himself. “At the age of eight I had a sixty-year-old lover,” he says somewhere.

Much

time is saved

by such a start. No one would deny that the child who was to become Mishima was more or less traumatized by this bizarre atmosphere, as biographers oriented toward modern psychology will stress. Perhaps he

was even more bruised and hurt by the financial

problems of the family, the result of his grandfather’s follies, by the undeniable mediocrity of his father, and by the “insipid family quarrels” which he himself describes, that daily bread of so many

children. And yet madness, slow decay, and the inordinate love of an old, sick woman are what a poet would seek in this poet’s life, a first image, a counterpart to that other one, brief and brutal, of his death.

/ 15 It is not true that his other paternal ancestors belonged, as he chose to imagine, to the military clan of the samurai, whose heroic ethics he adopted toward the end. Here, apparently, is an example of

those aristocratic

family

origins which

a great

writer (like Balzac, and to a certain extent Alfred de Vigny, or even Victor Hugo, dreaming up ob-

scure Rhenish grandparents) sometimes confers upon himself. In fact, the world of officials and educators from which Mishima came seems to have adopted the ideals of fidelity and austerity of the

ancient

samurai

without

always

feeling

obliged to follow them in practice—as the grand-

father proved. But it is clearly owing to the style and traditions of his grandmother that Mishima was able to depict in the Count and the Countess

Ayakura in Spring Snow an already dying aristocracy. In France it happened often that a nineteenth-century writer's imagination awoke to

aristocratic fantasies through the offices of an el-

derly woman. Such rapports typically involved a young man instructed by a mistress well advanced in age: Balzac re-created that aristocratic world according to the image offered to him, as on a coyly opened fan, by Madame de Berny and by Madame

Junot. Proust’s Marcel first expresses his thirst for

MISHIMA aristocratic society by a romantic fixation upon Madame de Guermantes, at least twenty years his

elder. In Mishima’s case, it is the almost carnal

link between a grandchild and his grandmother

which

puts him in touch with a Japan of days

gone by. Through a reversal hardly uncommon in

literature, the grandmother in Spring Snow is also an eccentric character within the Matsugae family structure, but there she represents the rustic origins of a rising nobility; this robust old woman who

refuses to touch the pension bestowed upon her by the state for her two sons dead in the RussoJapanese War, “because they only did their duty,”

represents a peasant loyalty that the Matsugaes have long left behind. The brittle Kiyoaki is her favorite, as the weak Mishima was the favorite of his grandmother; both women live in the atmo-

sphere of a time past.

Confessions of a Mask, an almost clinical description of an individual case, also fits all young people between 1945 and 1950, not only in Japan but almost everywhere else as well, and, to a certain extent, the youth of today. A short masterpiece

on the theme of anguish and withdrawal, this

book reminds one, in spite of its different subject

$e /17 and geographical location, of the nearly contem-

porary Stranger of Camus. By this I mean that

both

books

contain

the same

autistic elements.

An adolescent witnesses unprecedented historical disasters without understanding them—even sup-

posing there was something to understand. He leaves the university and enters an arms factory.

He roams the burned-out streets as he would have done had he lived in London, Rotterdam, or Dres-

den instead of Tokyo. “If it had gone on any longer, there would have been nothing to do but go crazy.” It is only after sifting twenty years of memories that Honda, grotesquely outfitted in the

gaiters of the civilian auxiliary, which he does not know how to wear, will see before him in all its

vastness the panorama of Tokyo, with its burnt beams and twisted water mains; the site, beyond

recognition, of what was once the sumptuous park of the Matsugaes, now parceled out; and on a bench, like an old woman out of a Goya nightmare, the ninetyish-year-old geisha who was once a “Juliet’s nurse” for Kiyoaki’s mistress—heavily made up, eyebrows plucked, wearing a wig, famished, and come to see with her own eyes that which no longer exists.

This summary leaves aside the very core of the

MISHIMA

book, the episodes of childhood and puberty discussed above in relation to Mishima himself, be-

cause this small book is one of those rare auto-

biographies which seem to spring straight from

life, untouched by the craft of fiction. As is per-

haps natural in any candid autobiography written

with courage by a twenty-four-year-old man, eroticism permeates everything. This tale of torture by

frustrated and half-conscious desire could have been set anywhere during the first half of the twentieth century, or, of course, earlier. The almost paranoid need to be “normal,” the obsession

with social disgrace (of which the ethnologist Ruth

Benedict has said so aptly that they replace in our cultures the obsession with sin, without any advantage to our freedom), are illustrated on almost

every page as they would never have been in an-

cient Japan, which was more relaxed on the subject of one man’s love for another, or conformed to other norms.

Of course, the protagonist—and

this is a classic symptom—believes himself to be the only one in the world to suffer in this way. A classic case to the end, this frail young man, neither as high on the social scale nor as rich as his

fellow students at the Peers School, secretly and from afar falls in love with the most athletic and most highly esteemed of the students: this is the

se / 19 eternal Copperfield—Steerforth situation, more daring as concerns the erotic fantasies, which in any

case remain in the book only fantasies. ‘The day-

dream during which the beloved becomes the fare at a cannibalistic banquet is not a pleasant image, but it is enough to have read Sade, Lautréamont,

or, somewhat more pedantically, to think of the ancient Greeks sharing the flesh and blood of

Zagreus, to see that the memory of a savage flesheating rite still hovers in our subconscious, a memory recaptured only by a few daring poets. And

Japanese folklore is so full of pretas, greedy ghosts

who devour the dead, that this lugubrious fantasy

necessarily brings them to mind, as well as one of

the admirable Tales of Moonlight and Rain written in the eighteenth century by Uyeda Akinari:

“The Blue Hood,” in which a necrophiliac and

cannibalistic priest is healed and saved by a Zen

colleague. Here, no healing and no salvation occur

for the young dreamer; only the usual slow reabsorption of the fantasies of adolescence when the

dreamer is on the verge of adulthood.

The hesitant and sterile relationship of the hero

of Confessions of a Mask and his childhood girlfriend—now married to another man—their fortuitous, almost secret, meetings in the street or in coffee shops, could occur in Paris or New

York

MISHIMA

as well as in Tokyo. This young Japanese woman, herself ill at ease with life, speaks of being bap-

tized, just as a young American of today might

speak of turning to Zen. We recognize the stealthy glances the young man, a little tired of his affable

and rather tedious companion, casts at the hand-

some toughs assembled at the bar. On this suggestion, the book ends. Before Confessions of a Mask, Mishima had known only critical, not popular, success. His first book, The Forest in Full Bloom, written in his sixteenth year, had been inspired by the poetic Japan of old; now and again, stories on the same subject

and in the same style recur in Mishima’s more and more resolutely modern output. His knowledge of classical Japan was, we are told, far superior to that

of most of his contemporaries,

except,

of course,

the scholars. His familiarity with European litera-

ture was also great. He read the European classics and it seems he had a

predilection for Racine.*

* Shortly before his death, he was to appear one last time on stage, as one of the guards in a production of Britannicus, whose

Japanese translation he had supervised. Henry Scott Stokes, in his biography of Mishima (New York, 1974), mentions that the two other guards, as captured in a photograph, had that artificial

and vacant expression ordinary extras so often have. Only Mishima has the hardened features and the stance demanded by the occasion.

/ 21

After his return from Greece, he began to study the Greek language and he became so immersed in it as to infuse that short masterpiece, The Sound

of Waves, with the balance and serenity which

we call Greek. More than anything else, he read modern European literature, from near-contemporaries like Swinburne, Wilde, Villiers de 1’IsleAdam, and D’Annunzio, to Thomas Mann, Cocteau, and Radiguet, whose precocity, and no

doubt death in the flower of youth, dazzled him.* He mentions Proust and quotes André Salmon in * The two names most frequently cited by critics when discussing

Mishima are D’Annunzio and Cocteau, and rarely without a certain disparagement in mind. In both cases, there are points in common. D’Annunzio, Cocteau, and Mishima are all great poets.

They also knew how to orchestrate their own publicity. D’Annunzio’s grand baroque style can be compared to Mishima’s, especially in certain of Mishima’s early books, inspired by the

refinements of the Heian dynasty; D’Annunzio’s taste for sports resembles, at least on the surface, Mishima’s passion for body-

building through athletic discipline; the eroticism (but not the

Don Juan attitude) of D’Annunzio can be found in Mishima, and even more so the thirst for political adventure, which will

lead the former to violent action in Fiume, the latter to stage a public protest and to his death. But Mishima escapes the long reclusive years and house detention camouflaged as honor which turn D’Annunzio’s last days into a pitiful tragicomedy. Thanks to his extraordinary versatility, Cocteau perhaps resembles Mishima somewhat more, but heroism was not one of Cocteau’s characteristics—other than the secret heroism of the poet, which we must never forget. Furthermore (and the difference is great), Cocteau’s art is the art of the sorcerer and Mishima’s that of the visionary.

MISHIMA Confessions of a Mask, and it is in the somewhat dated work of Dr. Hirschfeld that he seeks for a

catalogue of his own sensual compulsions. Mishima

seems for a long time to have established links with

European writers less through the contents of their work,

which

frequently

reinforces and confirms

his own, than by what they reveal to him as new and unexpected in form. Between 1949 and 196], and even earlier, as we shall see, the structure of

his greatest books, and of the lesser ones as well, will be far more European

than Japanese.

(but not American)

After the extraordinary success of Confessions of a Mask, a writer is born; he is now forever Yukio Mishima.* He gives up the bureaucratic job which his father had made him accept; convinced

by his son’s royalty statements, his father no longer deplores the audacity of the book. Mishima thus assumes his role of a brilliant and uneven, almost

too gifted, and excessively prolific writer less

through complacency or nonchalance than because he needs to earn enough for himself and his * His real name was Kimitake Hiraoka. The pseudonym was chosen by the adolescent writer at the time of the publication of

his first book, The

Forest in Full Bloom.

Mishima

is the name

of a village at the foot of Mt. Fuji; the sound of the name Yukio makes one think of snow.

$B / 23 family to live on, and he will achieve this only by working part-time for pulp magazines and women’s

publications. This mixture of commercialism and literary genius is not uncommon among great writers. Not only did Balzac write his share of bread-and-butter novels which

are now best for-

gotten, but it has also become impossible to untangle, within the enormous mass of The Human

Comedy, what was created in order to increase sales and what sprang from his creative fire. The

same ambivalence exists in Dickens: Little Nell, Young Dombey, the angelic Florence, Edith and

her adultery contrived but never accomplished (so that the reader would not be shocked), Scrooge’s

misgivings, and the innocent joys of Tiny Tim are born not only of a desire to offer the honest middle class which reads novels fare suitable to its taste but also of the urge to give free rein to almost visionary powers.

The practice of serializing novels in magazines

—so common in nineteenth-century Europe and still very much the custom in Mishima’s Japan—

and the demands of magazine editors, which took

precedence over those of book publishers and the public itself, frequently encouraged the commer-

cialization of the literary product. Even solitary

MISHIMA artists like Hardy and Conrad, much

alienated

from the subculture of their time, consented

to

adjustments in some of their work to make it more popular; such great novels as Lord Jim were evidently composed

quickly and compulsively from

start to finish, both to express one man’s deepest sense of life and to pay his household bills. The

young and still unknown writer, it seems, had no alternative, and once success came, his road had

already been chosen for him. The most one can

say, in the case of very great writers, is that the need for money, which is almost always injurious to the creation of a work of art, forces the dreamer

out of his habitual inertia and helps him to create that vast magma which resembles life.

Mishima’s case is somewhat different. The stream of money was channeled, so to speak, by

severe discipline. Sickly and diagnosed as suffering

from tuberculosis in his early youth, Mishima, whatever the occupations and distractions which

filled his life, allotted two hours a day to physical

exercise intended to rebuild his body. This man,

whom the flow of alcohol in bars and at literary

parties did not manage to intoxicate, would shut

himself up in his room, by midnight at the latest,

to devote two hours to pulp literature, thereby

/2.5 raising the number of volumes in his complete works to thirty-six, though six or seven would have

earned him glory. The rest of the night and the hours before dawn were dedicated to “his books.”

It seems impossible that the mediocre, the false, and the prefabricated in literature produced for the

enjoyment of the reading masses—the reading but unthinking masses, who expect the writer to give

back to them their own image of the world, con-

trary to the demands of the writer’s own genius— should not frequently seep into his true works of

art, and this is a problem that we must try to

resolve when reading The Sea of Fertility. But the

reverse experiment has never been tried: since

none of the minor works intended for popular con-

sumption have been translated, we cannot search

in that tangle of themes better developed elsewhere —and it would in any event be a waste of time to do so—for dazzling or sharp images, episodes pregnant with truth, which would have found their

way into these works as if inadvertently, and which .

belong instead to his “true works of art.” It seems, however, unimaginable that the two endeavors remained isolated.

So

SEA

e shall not attempt to examine each

of the novels, of varying type but for

the most part of undeniable quality or

interest,

which

came

between

Confessions of a Mask and the beginnings of that great project which The Sea of Fertility was for Mishima. His plays will also be but briefly mentioned; and the only novel by Mishima which

failed to sell well, Kyoko’s House, will have to be ignored, because it has never been translated into

any European language. These apparently disparate works, which alone would have sufficed to

attain for the author a place of honor among the writers of his time, mark the several roads a great

writer takes before tackling exclusively, and with the necessary scope, his own few essential themes,

which, if we look closely, can already be glimpsed in his first works.

MISHIMA Because of his eagerness to base his stories on

true-life events thinly disguised, certain of the young Mishima’s narratives belong to that very rare type of fiction snatched from the immediate present; throughout all his work we find this need to capture the fleeting moment. Others of them

stoop now and then to journalism or, worse, to overly hasty fictionalized accounts. In almost every one, the European style predominates, whether in the lyrical realism of Thirst for Love and The Tem-

ple of the Golden Pavilion or in the sharp bite of

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. It could almost be said that by the age of forty this man, whom

the war had not touched (at least he

believed it had not),* accomplished within himself

an evolution that reflected that of Japan as a whole,

passing quickly from battlefield heroics to passive acceptance of occupation,

redirecting its energies

into those other forms of imperialism which are

Westernization carried to the extreme and eco-

nomic development against all odds. The photo-

graphs of Mishima in tuxedo or tails, cutting the

first slice of his wedding cake at International

House in Tokyo, sanctuary of Americanized Japan, * He himself said that the death of his sixteen-year-old sister from typhoid fever in 1943 had a far greater impact on him.

$2 / 31 or even of Mishima giving lectures in an impec-

cable three-piece suit, convinced that an intellectual should be the equal of a banker, are all char-

acteristic of their time. But beneath the surface of his books, the obsessions, the passions, the aversions

of adolescence and adulthood continued to tunnel like labyrinthine caverns. The photograph of Mi-

shima as St. Sebastian is not far off; nor is that of a man bending over an enormous rose, which

seems, in turn, to devour his face. And I reserve for the last pages of this essay a photograph even more traumatic.

Forbidden Colors is a novel apparently so hastily

put together that one suspects only the novel’s subject saved it from being labeled a commercial

production. As always with Mishima, stylistic calculations abound, but only to yield sum totals

which seem erroneous. We are in the “gay” world of post-war Japan, but the presence of the occupier is seen only through a few rare puppet-like figures in search of pleasure; the quasi-sacrilegious Christ-

mas party given, with plenty of whiskey, by a very rich American could take place in New Jersey just

as easily as in Yokohama. The bar in which in-

trigues evolve and devolve is like any other bar.

Yuichi, the young man become an object, wends

MISHIMA

his way through

improbable tangles, beset by

marionettes of both sexes. Little by little, we realize

that this documentary novel is really a kind of fantasy. A famous and rich writer, exasperated by the unfaithfulness of his wife, uses Yuichi as an

instrument

of revenge

against

both

men

and

women.” The story has a happy ending at the appropriate level: Yuichi inherits a fortune and,

elated, goes off to have his shoes polished. As we shall see in the third volume of The Sea of Fertility, and elsewhere, our discomfort is born

of uncertainty: the uncertainty of not knowing

whether the writer condones his characters’ moral slackness or whether he regards them with the

detachment of a painter. The answer is not sim-

ple. The novelist does not endow the places he

describes with the dusky poetry of a Genet. Some

of his abbreviated descriptions make us think of

the quick sketches in the Satyricon: easy friend-

ships with a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches

placed beneath the pillow, conversations drawn

* We should note, in this book devoid of any romantic poetry, a

detail of almost unbearable

tragic beauty:

the famous

writer,

confronted with the corpse of his unfaithful wife, who has thrown herself into the river, places upon the dead woman’s face

a No mask, which cannot contain the bloated flesh showing on all sides from below.

/ 33 from sports magazines, boasts of athletic pertorm-

ances which remind one of gym class at school. Two scenes centered on the female condition go

further: In one, Yuichi takes his young wife to a

gynecologist to confirm her first pregnancy Cfor Yuichi is married, and this is one of Mishima’s

astute touches), and the celebrated doctor pays the perfect young couple compliments both banal and

naive. In the other, Yuichi, who has been allowed into the delivery room, assists the long labor of his

wife. “Yasuko’s lower body moved like the mouth

of a person vomiting.”* The female organs, which up to then had seemed to thejyoung man nothing

but “irrelevant pottery,” reveal under the scalpel their truth of flesh and blood. A scene of initiation, like every death and every birth, that conventions throughout the world contrive to cover with a sheet, and from which we discreetly turn

our eyes. Compared to this novel, creaking like the wheels

of a badly greased vehicle, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is in its own right a masterpiece. We perhaps best realize this upon rereading, when * Mishima will use the same image for the tragic description of seppuku in the short story “Patriotism.” The belly cut open, letting the entrails fall out, also seems to vomit.

MISHIMA

we place it within the entire body of Mishima’s

work as a part in a polyphony. As happens so many times in his books, the plot is based on the immediate present, on a real-life episode: in 1950, a

young monk undergoing his novitiate at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion—a holy place renowned not only for its architectural beauty but also for its

situation at the edge of a lake near Kyoto—set fire

to the five-centuries-old building full of glorious memories of the Yoshimitsu era. The pavilion was later rebuilt, while for his part Mishima, helped by the evidence given at the trial, reconstructed

the motives and the course of the crime. Typically,

the writer preserves only one of the guilty man’s

motives, in which frustrated ambition and rancor

seem to have had a part: hatred of Beauty, exasperation at this overpraised jewel, the Golden

Pavilion, steadfast in its secular perfection. As in

the case of the real-life incendiary, his stutter and

his ugliness isolate the novice from human friendship: bullied and made

fun of, he has as com-

panions only a candid young boy, whose love

suicide will be disguised by his parents as an acci-

dent, and an evil and cynical clubfoot, who uses his infirmity to garner pity from and then to seduce women. Again, the Buddhist ecclesiastical circle

# / 35 holds fewer surprises than we would have believed:

a Huysmans at the turn of the century, a Bernanos

about the time when the Golden Pavilion was set

aflame, could have described the same dusty semi-

nary, the antiquated studies, the prayer reduced to simple routine, the friendly superior who from time to time, disguised in a felt hat and a scarf,

goes into town in pursuit of girls. A Catholic seminarist in those years, indignant at the “decay of religion,” and setting fire to an old, venerated

church, is not unthinkable in the West. The medi-

ocre novice who recounts his uneventful life seems glaringly true-to-life; at the same time, through

the sleight of hand which is at the heart of all

literary creation, the author has invested him not

only with some of that sensibility which has allowed him to understand and re-create the character but also with the gift of voicing and modulating what

he feels, which is the privilege of the poet himself. This realistic novel is in the end a lyric poem. The ambivalent love-hate of the novice toward the Golden Pavilion is also an allegory. A European critic has seen in this book, and I believe mistakenly, especially given the date the text was

written, a symbol of the body, to which Mishima

attaches a kind of supreme value, precisely because

MISHIMA

it is destructible, and above all, perhaps, on the condition that it be destroyed by one’s own hand. This opinion, sophisticated yet crude, like so many uttered by the critics of our time, does not take into consideration the specific moment a book occupies

in an author's life, and tries to tie the author to his work by cables instead of hair-thin threads. Under

the threat of air raids, the novice’s feeling for the

Golden Pavilion is of love; both are threatened together. Later, after a nighttime typhoon during

which the pavilion, “the Golden Temple, which

prescribed the very structure of my world,” finds

itself miraculously protected from the storm which passes over the lake without breaking, the soul of

the novice is somehow torn in two, half siding

with the masterpiece and half siding with the wind. “Stronger, stronger! .. . Put more strength into it!” Western romanticism has known the same

temptations, which are those of a human being pushed to his own limits. “Rise, long-wished-for tempest, who must take René to the outer spaces of another

life!” Afterwards,

as the novice’s mind

grows embittered and darker, the temple, secure in its perfection, becomes an enemy. Nevertheless, as a series of meditations steeped in Tantric Buddhism make clear, the temple is for the defeated young

Re / 37 man

at the same

time the symbol

of himself.

The sick-hearted adolescent manages to imagine a Golden Pavilion no longer immense, embracing

within itself all the beauty of the world, as first he had seen it, but tiny, which in the end amounts to the same thing, a molecule which he carries within

himself like a germ. At another moment, the pebble

idly thrown into the pond by the innocent Tsurukawa breaks up and disperses, in traveling waves,

the reflection of that perfect object: another Buddhist image of a world where nothing is fixed. The more the desire to destroy the masterpiece grows within the novice, the more the spirit of the Zen patriarchs’ paradoxical advice echoes in our minds,

approving the burning of the Buddha’s holy images

as firewood, or the famous admonition of the Rinzairoku:

“When

ye meet

the Buddha,

kill the

Buddha! When ye meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor! . . . When ye meet your father and mother, kill your father and mother! . . . Only thus will ye attain deliverance.” Dangerous advice, but not unevocative of certain evangelical admonitions. It is always necessary to superimpose on the prudent

and everyday wisdom by which we live, or in which all of us vegetate, the dangerous but revivifying wisdom of a freer fervor and a fatally pure absolute.

MISHIMA

“I was there alone, and the Golden Temple—the

absolute, positive Golden Temple—had enveloped me. Did I possess the temple, or was I possessed by

itP Or would it not be more correct to say that a

strange balance had come into being at that mo-

ment, a balance which would allow me to be the

Golden Temple and the Golden Temple to be me?”

Indeed, as soon as he has lit the fire, the in-

cendiary’s first wish is to allow himself to be con-

sumed by it. He tries, without success, to open the door of the sanctuary, which has become a furnace,

but draws back, suffocated by the swirls of smoke which have transformed his envisioned agony into a coughing fit. In the end, he will be arrested atop

the hill that looms above the temple, stuffed with a surfeit of cheap cakes that overburden his stomach accustomed to the meager post-war rations.

This pitiful Erostratus, who simply wishes to live,

has renounced his planned suicide, for which he had already bought a knife.

After the black masterpiece, Confessions of a Mask, and that scarlet one, The Temple of the

Golden Pavilion, The Sound of Waves is a sunny

masterpiece, typical of those happy books a writer

often writes only once in his life. It is also one of

/39 those books whose immediate success soon ruins them in the eyes of hard-to-please readers. Its

perfect clarity is deceptive. Like the Greek stat-

uary of the Golden Age, which avoids on the sur-

faces of the human body the more pronounced

hollows and curves that would spoil the subtle effect of light and shade, to better allow hands and

eyes to perceive the infinite delicacy of the modeled

form, The Sound of Waves is a book beyond any academic criticism. This idyllic story of a young

boy and girl on a Japanese island, with no other

occupation for the men than deep-sea fishing, and

for the women, during a short season of the year,

than diving for mother-of-pearl abalone, depicts a certain way of life, not destitute but limited to strict

essentials, and a love hindered only by the narrow class difference between the son of a poor widow,

an abalone fisherwoman, and the daughter of a small-time shipowner who seems to the other vil-

lagers a very rich man. The author had recently returned from Greece at the time he began this short novel, and his enthusiasm for this newly dis-

covered Greece insinuated itself into his descrip-

tion of a tiny Japanese island. To risk a comparison

that might seem excessive, War and Peace has all

the characteristics of a Slavic epic, yet we know

MISHIMA

that in writing it Tolstoy drew his inspiration from Homer. By its subject alone, that of young love,

The Sound of Waves seems at first glance one of the many versions of Daphnis and Chloé. But here we should add that—leaving aside all superstitious

veneration of antiquity, and of decadent antiquity at that—of the two, the melodic line of The Sound

of Waves is infinitely purer. Not only is each episode treated with sober realism, without the few romantic or traditionally melodramatic incidents that

Longus permits himself, but, and above all, noth-

ing in Mishima’s novel betrays any wish to titillate the reader with the artificially prolonged sexual games of two children experimenting with love

without discovering orgasm. The famous scene in which the boy and the girl, drenched by the rain, take off their clothes and warm themselves, separated by a bonfire, hardly exceeds the bounds of

probability in a country where the erotic nude was for a long time a rarity, but where the ordinary nude—for example, that of the baths in which both sexes partake—is a common sight even today

in places not overly Westernized.

These

timid

games at the edge of the flames emit in The Sound

of Waves beautiful sparks and reflections which bring to mind those of the Shinto ritual fire. A

$e / 41 scene like that in which the abalone fisherwomen, naked, frozen, trying to bring warmth to their young or old bodies on the beach, while casting

covetous glances at the plastic handbags offered to

them by a peddler, is far removed from Utamaro’s

Abalone Divers, in whom charm overcomes weariness. Here one can discern a theme which will

reappear in The Sea of Fertility: the contrast between hard and pure elementary forces and the

sorry luxury of a corrupted world. The final scene

in which the young man gains the good graces of the owner of the cargo boats by throwing himself

into the sea during a typhoon, and successfully tying the loose rope which anchors the ship at port, is both

mythological

and real. That

white

and

naked body, caught in the tortuous swells of the black water, struggles to catch a breath, better than

any legendary Leander trying to rejoin his Hero. It seems that in this couple—of the two, as in the

couples of the animal kingdom, the young girl is

the less colorful and the boy the more striking—

the poet finally achieves an image of androgyny split into two beings. After the Banquet, which cost its author a libel suit, is another example of Mishima’s passion for basing his fictions on real events—in this case,

MISHIMA political and social events—as we have already mentioned. For the reader, its interest lies above

all in Mishima’s ability to bring to life, in the char-

acter of a proprietress of a fashionable restaurant, a

certain type of tough femininity, a seductress and at the same

time a crafty businesswoman,

who

appears time and again in his novels. We find her,

on a higher social level, as the Keiko of The Sea

of Fertility, and, slimmer and more stylish, as the young widow, owner of an elegant Yokohama

boutique, in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. This long novella, icy like the thin blade of a scalpel, appears late in Mishima’s work, and

already touches on alarming themes which we shall discuss later. Again, the cold violence, the

sterility of a relatively elegant and relatively easy life, are everywhere characteristic of our time: an English film set this bleak adventure in an English landscape with English actors, without changing

much in this tale of a love affair between a dreamy

sailor and a sensual young widow, or in the deeds of a gang of vivisecting children. We have reached at last the plane of indescribable horror.

Most of Mishima’s plays, as successful in Japan as were his novels, and sometimes even more so,

/ 43 have not been translated;* we can refer, therefore, only to his Five Modern No Plays, from the fifties, and to Madame de Sade, written toward the end of his life. To give a modern equivalent of the No play presents more or less the same dangers and

attractions as transposing a Greek tragedy from the ancient to the modern world: the attraction of a theme already worked out, known to everyone, a theme which has moved generations of poetry

lovers, and whose form has been, so to speak, polished over the centuries; it carries the danger of

falling into flat pastiche or exasperating paradox.

Cocteau,

Giraudoux,

Anouilh,

and

D’Annunzio

before them, as well as a few others in our time,

conducted this experiment, with varying success.

The difficulty with No plays is the greater in that * “Onnagata,” one of Mishima’s best short stories, touches on the theater by subtly bringing to life the plight of a traditional Kabuki actor playing exclusively female roles and forced by custom to speak, eat, and walk like a woman in everyday life, for fear of not seeming natural on the stage, but who nevertheless continues to feel, and to make others feel, in him the hidden

presence of a man observing and imitating women. The subject reaches deep into the relationship between art and life. It seems that, thanks to his long friendship with the famous onnagata Utaemon, Mishima discovered Diderot’s “paradox of the actor,” and, at the same time, that of the theater. Mishima himself, however, in his wholly modern plays, eschews the use of the classical transvestite.

MISHIMA

they are works steeped in the sacred, an element

which in Greek drama is hardly felt by us, since it belongs to a religion which the spectator believes dead. No, on the contrary, mingling Shinto mythology and Buddhist legend, is the product of two religions which are still alive, even if their influence today seems to be waning. Its beauty comes,

in part, from its combining before our eyes living

creatures and ghosts, who are practically the same

thing in a world where impermanence is the rule,

but who rarely seem convincing in our modern

mental setting. In most cases, Mishima succeeds. In The Lady Aoi, it is difficult to remain unmoved when Prince Genji (who here has become a rich

and important businessman), standing in the room

of a clinic where his wife, Aoi, is dying from a

severe shock, sees a ghostly yacht glide through one

door and exit through another. Bewitched, almost

against his will, he climbs aboard it with a mistress from the past, Rokujo, the very same “living phan-

tasm” who slowly submits the unfortunate Aoi to

torture and death. Even more extraordinary, if

possible, is the setting of The Damask Drum: a blue empty space, a chasm of sky seen between the

top floors of two buildings. The one on the left is a fashion designer’s salon, patronized by a cold and

/ 45 frivolous woman customer; that on the right is a

law office where an old love-sick employee sits at the window, watching. As in the original No, the

“damask drum,” which is sent to the old man as a

joke, emits, as one might guess, no sound—a symbol of the beautiful woman’s indifference when faced with the innocent old lover, who exhausts

himself in vain, beating harder and harder on the drum, like a wild heart about to burst.

Madame de Sade is a tour de force. Composed,

like Racine’s plays, only of dialogue, with no action

except offstage or as reported by the characters, the play is built entirely on a counterpoint of female voices: the loving wife; the conventional mother-

in-law upset by the excesses of her daughter’s hus-

band; the sister who has become the mistress of the guilty and persecuted man; a discreet maid; a

pious woman, friend of the family; and, less agreeable to listen to than the other women, a female Sade, a follower of the Marquis, a sort of more

violent Madame de Merteuil reeling out cynical

monologues written, it would seem, to impress the

spectator. The play has the strange fascination of any novel or drama centered on a character who

does not appear. Sade is invisible to the very end,

as is the Percival worshipped and loved by all the

MISHIMA other characters in Virginia Woolf's The Waves. The faithful wife who, for love Cor for some other,

darker reason?.), ends by taking part in a cruel and

degrading orgy moves us, even though we grow uncomfortable listening to her glorify Sade as a kind of hypostasis of Evil destined to create new

values, as a grandiose and maligned rebel, some-

what like Satan in the eyes of Baudelaire and

Bakunin. This almost Manichaean opposition of Good and Evil, alien to Far Eastern thought, has,

for the modern Western reader, been entirely exhausted in this form: we have seen the real powers

of darkness at too close range to be still excited by a romantic evil. The Europeanized Mishima, playing his theatrical trumps, seems thereby to fall into

easy rhetoric. But the scene that follows is a great moment of theater: the wife, who has not failed to visit the prisoner behind bars in the darkness of his cell, who has read Justine with passion, and who

has just delivered to us an ardent encomium to its

author, is interrupted by the arrival of the maid, announcing to the ladies that Monsieur le Marquis de Sade, freed by the revolutionaries (we are in

1790), is at the door. “I hardly recognized him. He is wearing a black woolen coat with patched elbows and a

shirt with a collar so dirty—excuse

He / 47 me for saying so—I took him at first for an old beggar. And he’s become so stout! His face is puffy and looks deathly pale, and his body’s grown so fat

that his clothes are too small for him . . . You can

see when he mumbles that he’s only got a few

yellowish teeth left in his mouth.

But when

he

gave his name, it was with dignity. He said. . .

T am Donatien-Alphonse-Frangois, Marquis de Sade.’ ”” Madame de Sade’s reply is that the Mar-

quis should be refused entry and told she will never

see him again in her life. On this verdict, the

curtain falls.

What has happened? Does Madame de Sade,

who has loved in him the ideal of Evil Incarnate, dimly glimpsed in the darkness of a cell, not want

anything more to do with this fat and flabby man? Does she believe it is wiser—as she stated a few moments earlier—to retire to a convent and pray at a distance, not for the soul of her husband, as

a pious friend suggests, but for him to continue

the career of cursed demiurge which

God has

chosen for him? Or is she simply afraid, now that prison bars no longer separate them? The mystery, deeper than before, closes on Madame de Sade.

ith The Sea of Fertility, everything

changes. First, the rhythm. The novels we have glimpsed follow one

after the other from 1954 to 1963;

the writing of the four volumes of the tetralogy

takes place in the fateful years 1965 to 1970. Legend, if we can already speak of legend, tells us that

the last pages of the fourth volume, The Decay of the Angel, were written by Mishima on the very morning of November 25, 1970, a few hours, that is, before his end. This claim has been disputed:

one biographer assures us that the novel was completed in Shimoda,

a seaside resort where

each

year the writer spent the month of August with his wife and two children. But to finish the last

page of a novel does not necessarily mean that this book is done:

a book can be considered finished

only the day it is put in an envelope and sent to

MISHIMA the publisher, which is what Mishima did on that

morning of November 25; it is finished the moment it definitively separates from the vital pla-

centa where books are conceived. Even were the

last pages not written, or at least retouched, that

morning, they nevertheless bear witness to Mishima’s final state of mind, which in any case antedates, by a great length of time, the holiday

at Shimoda, during which he apparently fixed the date of his ritual suicide, of his seppuku. The

four volumes of The Sea of Fertility are his testament. The title, above all, proves that this man,

so violently alive, has distanced himself from life. It is borrowed from the ancient selenography of

the astrologer-astronomers of Kepler and Tycho

Brahe’s time. ““The Sea of Fertility” was the name

given to a vast plain visible in the center of the moon; we know now that it, like the whole of our

satellite, is a lifeless desert, with no water and no

air. There can be no better way of indicating at

the very outset that from the turmoil provoked by four successive generations

one after the other,

from so many ventures and counterventures, from so many false successes and true disasters, what finally comes is Supreme Nothingness. It still remains to be seen whether this Nothingness, which

a /53

perhaps resembles the Nada of the Spanish mystics, fully coincides with what is in English called “nothing.”

More important, both structure and style have now changed. Instead of books born separately of the author’s imagination (whatever connections we might see or presume to see among them), these four volumes constitute a series, evidently directed

from the very beginning toward very specific ends. Instead of a Western writer’s prose, such as Mishima might have been inspired to write—be it in the relaxed style of Forbidden Colors, the subjec-

tive voice of Confessions of a Mask, the sober balance of The Sound of Waves, the luxurious manner of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, or the laconic tone of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea—we are now confronted with

a denuded style, sometimes almost flat, restrained even in lyrical moments, crisscrossed with furrows

intended, it seems, to make us stumble. Even in

the excellent English translation, the breaks in

continuity

are disconcerting,

and perhaps even

in the original they leave the reader perplexed. The perspectives found in European art make way for those other, plunging ones which appear in

Chinese painting, or for the flattened designs of

MISHIMA Japanese prints in which the horizontal lines, conventionally representing encroaching clouds, erase part of the scene and partition the space. As with

any very deliberate writing or thinking, the book irritates or disappoints the reader who has not

accepted the work’s originality for what it is. To these defects, or specific qualities, we must add a very ordinary kind of literary shortcoming.

It is not infrequent that a great writer (Thomas Mann’s correspondence with the scholar Karl Kerenyi bears witness to this) turns to scholarly

or semi-scholarly handbooks for the background of his work; in most cases, however, he at least tries

to dress this ready-made data in a style of his own.

Here, on the contrary, heavy-handed explications

of the principles of natural law studied by Honda as a young law student, of Buddhism, of the belief in reincarnation at different moments of history, interrupt the story instead of blending with it, as

if they have been neither thought out nor experi-

enced anew by the author himself.”

* Mishima’s religious emotions apparently stem mostly from Shinto belief. One of his most beautiful passages is the description in Runaway Horses of the divinatory rite performed by the samurais before their rebellion and mass suicide. The reader will remember Honda pining for the pure simplicity of the Shinto rites in the midst of a terrible and holy India: “He craved a ladle

ae / 55 One is amazed that Mishima, still a law student not long before, did not resort to his own experi-

ence to describe the forging of Honda’s mind; one

is less surprised that, as a Japanese man born in 1925, he had little knowledge

of Buddhist the-

ology, just as a Frenchman of those same years might be ignorant about Catholicism. But The

Temple of the Golden Pavilion had proved that

Mishima had an almost meticulous knowledge of the day-to-day practices of Buddhism, and that he

was able to make his own, certain of the Buddhist techniques of contemplation. It is therefore diffcult to explain the pedestrian and heavy-handed of clear, cool Japanese water.” The description of a libertine crowd visiting, as tourists, a Shinto temple after a night of orgy has the same import. At times, Mishima himself seems to accept the notion of certain Shinto masters who reproached Buddhism for having emasculated the Japanese soul. An absurd reproach, since Japan is the land where Buddhism, in its Zen form, openly recognized the code of the Bushido warriors. Little by little, the great Buddhist notions of detachment, impermanence, and the Void grew within him, but it seems that up to the very end Buddhist compassion was lacking. Mishima wanted to steel himself in hardheartedness. Let us remember,

however,

that in certain writers considered

“cruel,” the very description of evil is an act of compassion, which does not need to be expressed with exclamation marks. Flaubert chronicles with clinical aloofness Emma Bovary’s death; we know that he felt for her, and even, identifying himself with her,

loved her.

MISHIMA

presentation of Buddhism in the first three volumes of the tetralogy. It is as if the author, in a hurry to finish both his work and his life, had thrown in,

haphazardly,

the few explanations necessary for

the reader, if not for himself.

Spring Snow, the first volume of the tetralogy, begins with a long look at a photograph, still recent at the time the two adolescents, Honda and Ki-

yoaki, stand staring at it, though it will one day

seem to Honda as phantom-like and prophetic as it has become for us. It shows a platform around an open-air altar, with hundreds of soldiers grouped on both sides: a glimpse of an episode in the Russo-

Japanese War, which has already ended at the time the book begins, but a war in which Kiyoaki’s uncles have died, and a conflict which will herald

the rise of an imperialism fated to lead Japan into Manchukuo, to the war in the Pacific, to Hiro-

shima, and finally to the aggressive industrial im-

perialism of a new age of peace—that is to say, to

the successive Japans in which the characters of this long novel move and which they incarnate.

This photograph is of sepia hues, typical of snap-

shots taken at the turn of the century, and its

effects of storm and eclipse seem well suited to

ghosts. For they are certainly already ghosts, these

¥ /57 soldiers standing in this rust-colored atmosphere, or they will be ghosts one day soon, even if not already fallen on the battlefield, and well before the end of the long life of he who is now the

adolescent Honda.

Furthermore, the cult of the

sun dynasty celebrated at this altar will die before

many of these men. But, in 1912, Kiyoaki and Honda are as indifferent to this image of a victorious war as Mishima himself was in 1945 in

the face of defeat. They take no part in it, as they

take no part in the howlings of kendo contests, nor do they allow themselves to be taken in by the patriotic admonitions at the Peers School. It is not

that these well-off students are, properly speaking,

revolutionaries, but that they are at an age when,

luckily perhaps, a cocoon of dreams, emotions, and personal ambitions protects most young beings and softens the blows of external events. Throughout

the book, Honda, as a good friend and a plodding student, seems the gray shadow of the adventurous

Kiyoaki. But it is Honda who figures in these books

as the seer’s eye. Between Kiyoaki and Satoko, the lover and his mistress whom he strives to serve,

Honda innocently begins to play his future role of

voyeur. Not only are these two intelligent young people barely marked by the decisive events of

MISHIMA

their time, but they even tell themselves with some sadness that history, which pays attention only to multitudes, will one day confuse them with the

common herd, which has neither thought nor dreamed as they have. Throughout, omens abound, undecipherable as they always are at the one mo-

ment they might be useful: snapping turtles hidden in the mud of a pond in the Matsugae park, a dead animal near the school athletic field, a dog trapped and drowned among the rocks of the artificial waterfall that the marchioness shows the visitors,

and for whom a dignified abbess utters a longdrawn-out prayer. Within this net of appearances lies the diary of dreams kept by Kiyoaki Matsugae, a

number of which will come to pass after the young man’s death, without ever ceasing to be dreams. The difference in experience between Honda, who has eighty years to live, and Kiyoaki, dead at twenty, will, in the end, be nonexistent:

the life

of one will crumble as the life of the other will vanish into thin air. These two youths live in a society already strongly Westernized, but in the English manner,

and only among the upper classes. ‘The American

influence on the masses is still to come, and Paris

is for Marquis Matsugae and Count Ayakura a

se / 59 river of champagne into which the Folies Bergére

beauties plunge. Honda’s father, a man of law,

lives in a house lined with European books on jurisprudence. The Matsugaes have added a sumptuous Western-style house to their elegant Japanese dwelling; men and women separate in Victorian

fashion after dinner; and during the Cherry Blos-

som Festival they hold an exhausting series of re-

ceptions that include geishas, an English film based

on a Dickens novel, and a monumental dinner in which the menu is written in French and ends with créme caramel. Recently titled, the Matsugaes

have entrusted Kiyoaki to the Ayakuras, impover-

ished aristocrats, who teach him the manners of

the court. Dressed in velvet pants and a shirt with

a lace collar, the child will carry, during a cere-

mony, the train of a princess, and yet his first erotic sensation will be typically Japanese, the same as is

experienced before Utamaro’s and Eisen’s prints: a female neck seen through the opening in a kimono, as stirring as the sight of breasts in European

paintings.

Satoko, the playmate and fellow student who

slowly becomes Kiyoaki’s mistress, is steeped in the atmosphere of ancient Japan. Not far from the old and almost rustic family palace, we see, at the

MISHIMA bottom of a lane, the humble two-story house, half brothel, half cheap lodging for officers of nearby barracks, managed from the start by a man

already along in years. It is there that, on a rainy day, Count Ayakura will glance over one of those scrolls of ancient paintings in which the taste for eroticism and sinister burlesque, on the one hand,

and Buddhist disdain for the mirage of the flesh,

on the other, combine to depict the lower depths

of a charnel hell. It is there that, excited by these

images, the count the elderly geisha daughter, and will paternal advice on

will enjoy the stale charms of in charge of bringing up his give his servile partner strange the education of a child not yet

of age, who must be taught to seem a virgin when she is one no longer (an easy task), and, in case a

seducer would dare boast of having had her first, not to seem a virgin while she still is one. Later on, when Kiyoaki, after a stylized game of hesitations, secrets, and lies, almost sacrilegiously desires the

girl, now betrothed to an imperial prince, it is in

this almost magical place that she gives herself to

him amid the disarray of cast-off clothes and sashes uncoiled on the ground. The author has tried to

give us here the equivalent of a shunga, a “spring

painting”; in other words, an erotic print of the Edo era. He has succeeded admirably.

$e /61 Life at the Peers School is only vaguely sketched. We meet no other student, except, in a brief encounter, a crippled boy reading Leopardi, in whom

we recognize, in a more moving guise, the equiva-

lent of the clubfooted character in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The dullness of all social contacts is such that the author does not make the effort—traditional

in

France,

and

constant

in

Proust—to season them with witty comments or

irony. Their total insipidity somehow reduces them to nothingness. The holidays during which

Kiyoaki invites two young Siamese princes, his fellow students, to his parents’ villa share the same insignificance, and the reader does not suspect at

what point this almost meaningless episode will later become important in the book’s taut structure. But beneath this surface of banal amenities, young love continues on its road to disaster. Kiyoaki persuades the girl to spend the night with him on the beach, thereby affording us, in the brilliant moonlight, an image of the naked lovers lying in the narrow shadow of a prow moored on the sand, and

their sensation of being carried by the tide, along with the ship, to sea. After that moment in which life, with all its exaltation and plenitude, is never-

theless felt as the perpetual leave-taking it really is, Honda, who has delivered Satoko to her rendez-

MISHIMA

vous, drives her back by car—a means of locomotion still unusual at the time—and will, for his part, have nothing but the presence at his side of

a young woman in a white piqué dress, European-

style, who is discreetly taking off her shoes to let out the sand. At that time,

the

spring

snow,

penetrating

through the canopy of an old-fashioned rickshaw drawn by two men, left upon the faces and hands

of a still undecided boy and girl riding through the suburbs of Tokyo only a kind of fresh and damp

softness. But, once beneficent,

nefarious. After the family has Satoko undergo an abortion, the still pledged to a prince of royal vantage of a few days spent in

the snow

turns

decided to have young woman— blood—takes adthe convent near

Nara, where her mother has taken her to disguise

her stay at a nearby clinic, to cut her abundant

dark hair and request to take the tonsure of a Buddhist nun. For the first time, her shaven head feels

the deep cold of the autumn air; her beautiful plaits uncoil on the floor, inevitably reminding the reader of the sashes unknotted during the lovemaking, and almost immediately take on the re-

pulsive aspect of dead things. But the family is not discouraged by these trifles. They need only to

$8 / 63 decide to whom they will secretly entrust the making of the wig—or rather two wigs, one Japanese, the other European—that will be worn by

Satoko on her wedding day. While this useless

chatter continues behind closed doors in a Tokyo drawing room, Satoko has crossed a threshold.

Everything takes place as if the satisfaction ob-

tained once and for all, the wrenching felt in the

very depths of her being, and the forced farewell to Kiyoaki in the presence of parents mundane to

the very end have at last effected a total rupture.

She has renounced not only her lover; she has also renounced herself. “We've had farewells enough.” But Kiyoaki, watched carefully by his family yet spurred on by love since it has become love of

the impossible, leaves Tokyo thanks to a little money Honda has lent him, takes a room in a

miserable inn in the vicinity of Nara, and, in a cold, late-winter snow, climbs up and down

the

exhausting hill that leads to the convent. Each time entry is cenied him, and each time he persists, refusing the ride up offered by a rickshaw driver,

superstitiously believing that the greater the effort of his lungs, shaken by a bad cough, the greater his chance of seeing Satoko again—Satoko, whom he at first loved only a little and then madly.

MISHIMA

Finally, lying stricken by illness in his poor lodgings, he calls upon Honda, and Honda’s parents allow the youth to join Kiyoaki in spite of his upcoming exams, thus teaching him that a service rendered to a friend is more important

than the obligations and tribulations of a career. Honda, charged with the role of supplicant and go-between, climbs the snowy hill, but is received

only to hear the definitive “no” pronounced by

the abbess, even though this “no” breaks the last thread which had attached Kiyoaki to life. Kiyoaki and Honda take the express train to Tokyo, and Honda, in the Pullman car, his ever-present law manual in his hand, by the light of a weak lamp

leans closely over his feverish companion to hear

him whisper that they will meet again one day “beneath

the falls.” It is common

in Japanese

literature, and even in conversation, to allude in this way to the tree in whose shade lovers once sat,

to the water drunk together during the course of another existence. Here it seems that the waterfall—that waterfall of which ancient Japanese

paintings frequently offer a vertical image, the

cascading streams taut as the strings of a musical instrument or a bow—is

not only the artificial

waterfall of the Matsugaes,

or that other, more

65 sacred one which Honda will one day go to see, but life itself. For the average reader the stumbling block (but also, for reasons we shall see, the supreme virtue) of this tetralogy is the notion of reincarnation

which underlies the entire work. Here let one point be made clear. We shall, for a start, eliminate

from consideration the popular superstitions to

which Mishima unfortunately grants an important

part—perhaps because it seemed to him an easy

device, perhaps because these superstitions, which flourished in traditional Japan, are no more disturbing than is an allusion to Friday the 13th or spilled salt to a European reader. The insistence

throughout the four volumes of The Sea of Fertility on the three beauty spots which appear at the same place on the pale skin of Kiyoaki, the swarthy skin of Isao, and

the golden

skin of the Thai

princess irritates rather than convinces the reader.* One is forced to ask if here there is not a kind of

dark sensual arousal, whether because Kiyoaki’s

* The Japanese tales of Lafcadio Hearn are full of examples of instances of reincarnation confirmed by a mark on the body,

which seems to indicate that this kind of folklore was common in Japan in the nineteenth century.

MISHIMA

odious tutor denies having seen the sign, for he did not dare lay eyes upon the body of the young master,

or because

Honda,

on the contrary,

in-

discreetly seeks for it upon the naked skin of the exotic little princess. The simplistic statement of

dogma bothers the reader more than do these folk-

loric leftovers. In Mishima, it bears witness to an ignorance of religion which, in our time, is not

exclusively Japanese. The theory of reincarnation,

which Honda begins to study after he has been struck and almost suffocated by what seems to him its living proof, does not appear in the second

volume

of the tetralogy, except in the form

of

some scholarly summary quoting here and there Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Campanella. The truth is that on this point, as on so many others,

Buddhism is of such subtlety that its doctrines

themselves are difficult to grasp, and even more dificult to hold in our minds without unconsciously forcing them to undergo that transformation which we inflict on ideas too foreign to our own.

Even Hinduism, which places at the center of each individual the reality of Being, insists on the formula

“Only

the Lord himself transmigrates,”

thereby leaving the individuality we hold so dear

a / 67 as threadbare as a piece of old cloth. With Buddhism, which ignores or denies Being, and believes only in perpetual passage, the notion becomes more subtle still. If all is passage, the elements which

exist in a transitory state are nothing but forces

which have, so to speak, traversed the individual,

and which, by a law roughly similar to that of the

conservation of energy, somehow subsist—at least

until energy itself is annihilated. What remains

is at best the residue of experience, a predisposi-

tion, a more or less durable agglutination of molecules, or, if one prefers, a magnetic field. None

of these vibrations is lost entirely: they reenter the

alaya of this world, the store of facts, or rather

of experienced sensations, just as the Himalayas

are the store of the almost eternal whiteness of

winter. Yet, in the same way that Heraclitus could

not twice enter the same river, we do not twice hold in our arms—it in any case melts like a snowflake —the same human atom that once existed. An-

other common image is of the flame that passes from candle to candle, a flame that is impersonal yet nourished by the candles’ individual waxen flesh.

Whatever Mishima’s beliefs, or absence of beliefs, on this point might have been, we perceive

MISHIMA

that—even though Kiyoaki is not Isao, and neither of them is the Siamese princess—a kind of driving force runs through them which is the stuff of life

itself, or perhaps it is simply youth successively

incarnated in the most ardent, the hardest, or the most seductive of forms. More profoundly, as well

as more subjectively, we feel we are witnessing a

phenomenon comparable to love, and this even if we cannot properly give the name of love to Honda’s total devotion to the two young men,

Kiyoaki and Isao, or if, should something akin to the emotion of love have blossomed there, the author has not told us about it. On the other hand, the dark, almost senile desire which makes Honda

want to possess, or rather see, the young Siamese

girl perhaps resembles love even less. But in these three cases, the marvel of love has in fact taken

place: because of a mental mechanism common to us all, Honda’s parents, his fellow students, his

wife,

his colleagues,

the guilty criminals

over

whom, as a judge, he holds the power of life and

death, the thousands of passersby encountered in

the street or on the trolleys of Tokyo and Osaka,

have not existed for him except as perceived and

experienced with varying degrees of indifference,

vague resentment or weak sympathy, and more or

g / 69 less distracted attention. on which his voyeur’s people. On only three part of this group only

Even the mediocre objects eyes will rest will not be occasions—for Satoko is because Kiyoaki has loved

her—will three beings exist for him with the in-

tensity bestowed, it is true, on every living creature, but which we do not perceive except in those who, for one reason or another, have stormed

through our lives. A chain is formed of people different one from the other, who are united, incomprehensibly, because we have chosen them.

Runaway Horses, the second volume of the te-

tralogy, opens on the bleak existence of Honda at about age forty, so anodyne and dull that even the adjective bleak seems an exaggeration. From the social point of view, however, he is a success, be-

cause Honda, young for a judge, has been appointed to an Osaka court, and he possesses a docile, though somewhat sickly wife who is at the same time a perfect housekeeper and hostess. Honda is almost abnormally content with what he has and with what he is. But a strange symbolic image appears at the beginning of the account of this

ordinary life: one day when, almost without consciously registering the noise, Honda hears a trapdoor opening beneath the feet of a condemned

MISHIMA

man in the prison next to the courthouse (“I don’t think it was a good idea to put the gallows close to

the wall there”), he idly takes the key to a tower recently built by an ambitious architect, no doubt

to add to the prestige of the European-style palace of justice—a tower entirely hollowed out inside. A dusty and somewhat flimsy spiral staircase leads him to the top, from which he will have only a

drab view of the city in wet weather. But, from these very first pages, a leitmotiv begins assailing our ears: that aimless climb reminds us of Honda’s

courageous and useless climb to the convent, his

footsteps in the snow following Kiyoaki’s tracks. We cannot but think of Proust noticing in Stendhal this same motif of height, whether in Father Blanés’s bell tower, in the fortress where Fabrice

is locked up, or in the one which becomes Julien Sorel’s prison.

Soon,

indeed,

a new

climb

will

begin, in which this inquisitive man is only mildly

interested, because the hill he ascends is a sacred

hill and Honda is not a believer.

The chief justice of the tribunal has asked Honda to take his place at a kendo tournament in a Shinto temple to honor the “harsh god,” and the almost-forty-year-old magistrate has agreed without

enthusiasm to attend one of these violent spectacles

a /7 1 which he so detested in his youth. On this day the dazzling display of a young kendo fencer in his traditional black robe, veiled, his feet naked, and his face masked with a grille, awakens the unenthusiastic spectator’s interest. Isao—for the fencer

is Isao—will be seen again by the judge, in the

afternoon of that very same torrid day, naked beneath a waterfall, engaged in the ritual ablution

which must be performed during the ascension of the sacred hill; Honda, haunted by the memory

of Kiyoaki, does not hesitate to recognize in this

young athlete—beautiful only in the vigor and

simplicity of his youth—the delicate Kiyoaki now twenty years dead: it is as if the ardor of one had become the strength of the other. This absurd conviction, born of Honda’s private emotion, knocks him over like a wave; he will emerge from his night at the Nara hotel with

his entire outlook as a reasonable man and judge shaken.

Soon his colleagues find that he is no

longer the perspicacious and diligent magistrate he had

been,

and,

shrugging

their

shoulders,

will

theorize, as is customary, that he is mired, to his own great detriment, in some banal love affair. In no time, in a gesture of abnegation which seems to him perfectly simple, Honda renounces his post at

MISHIMA

the tribunal and once again registers with the Tokyo bar association, thereby allowing himself

the possibility of defending Isao, charged with having plotted against the members of the industrial establishment,

the zaibatsu,

and

of having

premeditated the murder of a dozen of their number. Honda will obtain the acquittal of the young

man, but will not be able to save him, because

soon after he is freed Isao will carry out at least one of his murderous projects and, immediately

afterwards, the ritual suicide which was part of his plan.

It is in this harsh book that we find perhaps the

strangest and sweetest passage in the whole tetralogy. In preparing his plot, Isao has sought backing

from the military, in particular from one officer who lives in an old hovel at the bottom of a lane,

not far from his barracks. This man in turn intro-

duces him to his superior, the imperial prince once

betrothed to Satoko. For one moment, barely reg-

istered through the alcohol, cigarettes, and niceties

of convention, a lowering of the temperature, an

inexplicable drawing back occurs, on which the author barely dwells. However, upon entering the garden of the house at the bottom of the steep lane,

the tough-skinned Isao, in whom no emotion of

/7 3 this kind has ever surfaced, suddenly feels he is swooning with delight, as if something of the

happiness once felt here by Kiyoaki possessing

Satoko had reached him through the maze of time. He won't think of it again, and he will never know its cause. But everyone betrays him: the oflicer,

who, when he sees danger coming, asks to be sent

to Manchukuo; the prince, who fears his name

will be publicized; the young woman—a brilliant and fashionable poet—to whom he feels a vague

attachment and whom he considers the group’s mascot, but who, during the trial, lies to prove his innocence

without

concern

that her lies debase

the young man, reducing his political passion to a

whim and dishonoring him in the eyes of his com-

panions. Isao is no less betrayed by an old stu-

dent, his father’s assistant, a sort of bohemian who

is also an agent provocateur, and by his father himself, a right-wing fanatic and the principal of a

small school run according to the best principles of loyalty to dynastic traditions, but which is in fact secretly subsidized by members of the zaibaisu, the group Isao wishes to destroy as nefarious both

to Japan and to the Emperor. During the trial, the

exact dates and the number of meetings between

the young man and the officer, who has by then

MISHIMA

left for Manchukuo, become of great importance to the prosecution. The old landlord is summoned to see if he will recognize Isao on the bench of the accused. The elderly cripple, leaning on his stick,

approaches the young man, examines him, and in a cracked voice answers in effect: “Yes, he came to my house with a woman some twenty years ago.

Isao’s age is twenty. The old man is laughed out of the room. Only Honda’s hand, at the defense table, trembles on the sheets spread before him. This old man so close to death has felt as one the

heat of two burning youths.

One can already see how, whatever its psychological or metaphysical value, this notion of trans-

migration allows Mishima to present Japan between 1912 and 1970 from a new angle. All great

novels which cover four successive generations (Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks is no doubt the most accomplished) use as their starting point the family, and as models a series of brilliant or medi-

ocre beings, all united by blood or by marriage,

functioning within the same genetic group. Here the successive reincarnated characters permit the abrupt passage from one plane to another: what was at one time tangential later appears at the very

ge /75 center of the plot. Isao is the son of the ignoble linuma,

tutor in the Matsugae

home,

and of a

maid in the same household. In The Temple of Dawn, the third volume of the tetralogy and by

far the most difficult to judge, the sudden appear-

ance of Ying Chan, the little Siamese princess, has been prepared far in advance by the rather luster-

less story of the two Siamese princes, friends of Kiyoaki, and by the incident of the emerald ring,

lost, or perhaps stolen from one of them. In his dream diary, Kiyoaki had noted a dream in which

he wore this stone on his finger and saw in it the face of a young girl in a tiara. Honda will give

the recovered emerald—found after the war in the hands of a recently impoverished prince turned antique dealer—to Ying Chan, who is now a stu-

dent in Tokyo, and it will be consumed in the fire at the luxurious villa of the old lawyer, who has

become the rich adviser to one of the most powerful trusts of the zaibatsu against which Isao had

fought. After this bourgeois conflagration—which reminds the reader of the funeral pyres that Honda

went to see in Benares on the eve of the war in the Pacific—Chan herself will appear no more. It is

only by chance that we learn of her death, on an uncertain date, in her native land. And yet Chan

MISHIMA

—the daughter of one of the two princes once welcomed by Kiyoaki—is hereby almost mythically linked to the betrothed of one of the two young men and the sister of the other, both also dead very young. In the meantime, in prison, the hard and austere

Isao, who is still a virgin, dreams of a young un-

known woman dozing on a very hot day, remind-

ing him somewhat—perhaps because of the longing she stirs in him—of Makiko, the woman

who is

about to betray him. Then, by one of the sudden changes of key so frequent in a dream, he suddenly

feels he himself is a woman. It seems to him that

his vision of the world has shrunk; he no longer

constructs grand, abstract schemes, but seems to enter into softer, more intimate contact with things

themselves; instead of penetrating the young un-

known woman, he becomes her, and his pleasure is born of this metamorphosis. Nor is Honda unaware that Isao, who has got drunk for the first

time and finds repugnant this pit of corruption

and false testimony in which he feels trapped, has

some time before his death muttered in his drunken

sleep words about a hot country to the south and the coming of a new dawn.

When a business trip takes Honda to Bangkok

ee / 77

in 1939, he will not be too surprised that a little

princess of six clutches at him, crying, insisting

she’s Japanese and asking to be taken away by the stranger. This is for any European reader, or for any “modern” reader, an unbelievable episode and,

one would say, rather heavy-handedly emphasized.

However, let us not forget that a few serious spe-

cialists in parapsychology,* such as Ian Stevenson,t

maintain that in the jabbering of very young chil-

dren we can find the clearest traces of life before life—supposing that such traces exist—and that we can follow them. In any case, Chan conforms to the parapsychologist’s model; she forgets com-

pletely that childhood whim, or remembers it only from vague allusions made by her governesses. Visiting Japan as a student after the war, she seems to dislike her new home, but her feelings are never

strongly expressed. In Tokyo, the Honda,

exquisite

Chan—in

however, in a moment

whom

of insight, dis-

* Here the adjective serious poses, as always, a problem. But let us not, out of cowardice or inertia, reject the mass of parapsychological phenomena with a “no” as conventional as the believer’s

“yes” to dogmas he can neither prove nor explain. Only careful observation can make us pierce the “mystery” which is in large part born of our ignorance. t Ian Stevenson, M.D., Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (New York: Society for Psychical Research, 1966).

MISHIMA

covers a touch of “Chinese-type shallowness’— leads, without particular enthusiasm, the dissipated

life of the merry days of American occupation and easy money. The young girl rebuffs the clumsy advances of the old Honda and barely avoids being raped by a young man in the group, an attempt

sanctioned and surreptitiously observed by the old man. Later on, through the same opening in the woodwork of a bookshelf, he will watch Chan’s

“frail beauty” embrace the “strong beauty” of an experienced and more mature Japanese woman. New symbols pursue us, as inscrutable as they are in our dreams: in the nightclub where Keiko, well-

endowed seductress, Honda, Chan, and her young

and carefree pursuer dine together in the almost ritual darkness of that sort of place, Honda, cut-

ting his medium-rare steak before raising it to his

false teeth, sees in the plate a pool of blood which

has turned the color of night. And in Runaway

Horses—more incomprehensible and leading our

minds to unknown depths—the barrel of oysters from Hiroshima that Isao decides to give Makiko

as a farewell present, and in which the imprisoned mollusks plash and knock against one another in the black water.

In The Temple of Dawn, Honda—observer and

2/79 visionary—sinks to the level of a plain voyeur. A

painful evolution, but not unexpected, since his wretched eye contacts with naked flesh no doubt

become for the old man his only link to the

world of the senses, from which he has been remote all his life, and to the reality that, more and more, escapes him in his eminent, rich man’s

milieu. Already in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, a child voyeur has initiated a crime, and we should not forget the moving treat-

ment of the same subject in The Temple of the

Golden Pavilion: the future novice and incendiary,

lying in the single room typical of Japanese houses, feels the mosquito net’s motions and realizes that his mother, stretched out so close to him, has given

herself to a man, a vague relation who has come

to spend the night. But the child, who watches

without understanding, feels suddenly a wall of flesh interposing itself between this spectacle and his eyes: the hands of his father, who has also seen

but does not want his son to see. Here, on the

contrary, the theme of the voyeur is associated with

impotence and old age. In Bangkok, Honda wishes to see the little girl urinate; later, on the snake-

infested lot next to his brand-new villa, he builds a swimming pool in the sole hope of seeing Chan,

MISHIMA as naked as she will be in her elegant swimsuit,

dive into it. The celebration of the completion of

the pool offers us one of those scenes of social in-

anity in which Mishima excels to the point that he appears to enjoy them.

A prince, a country neighbor, plays in the water

with a ball; a bitter and very rich grandmother,

also a neighbor, oversees from the edge her swarm

of grandchildren; a literary gentleman whose con-

versation is surrealistically sadistic exhibits his flabby anatomy beside that of an unpleasant mis-

tress, also a literary lady, who repeats in tears, as an erotic stimulant, the name of her son killed in the war. Voyeurism is undoubtedly as contagious

as the flu, for Makiko, who in Runaway Horses

perjured herself and lied, perhaps out of love,

watches with a cold eye the feeble contortions of the couple. The ghosts of cannibalism, served up

after dinner by the sponging literary gentleman,

are an ignoble echo of the bloody daydreaming of

the young man in the now distant Confessions of a Mask. When the couple, too drugged to escape, die in the fire at the villa, one has the impression

that Mishima is heaping burning coals on what he himself might have become. Keiko, Chan’s robust

partner, has taken as her lover a simple and solid

#/ 81

American officer who helps out by serving cocktails and washing glasses; she takes advantage of this relationship to shop in a store reserved for the occupation forces and to connect her electricity to

that of the military camp. The last sound to be heard from Chan, back in her own country and

bitten by a snake, will be her inane little laugh, as if this vain Eve had been playing lovingly with the reptile.

In The Temple of Dawn, the easy life seems to

erode the characters, and even the author’s intentions: beside this Tokyo of pleasure and business,

the devastated Tokyo of 1945, where Honda found among the ruins the almost-hundred-yearold geisha, still contained some vestiges of hope. In the last volume,

The

Decay

of the Angel,

hope—and with it the successive incarnations of refinement, enthusiasm, and beauty—is now dead.

Sometimes one even has the impression of seeing dry white bones piercing decaying flesh. The title, Tennin Gosui, brings to mind a Buddhist legend

according to which the Tennin—who are none other than divine essences personified, jinns or angels—instead of being immortal or, rather, eternal, are limited to a thousand years of existence in

MISHIMA

this form, after which they see the flowers of their garlands wither, their jewels grow lackluster, and a fetid sweat emanate from their bodies. This Angel, whatever human

aspect he assumes here,

seems to be Japan itself, and by extension, for us Western readers, a symbol of contemporary catastrophe wherever it may occur. But let us leave this aside for the moment.

Honda,

grown

very old, does what a Japanese who has the necessary means does today: he travels. ‘The time when,

not long ago, he felt himself a second-class tourist in British India is well gone. Keiko, an imposing

woman in her seventies who from time to time picks up partners for her pleasure, accompanies him and is amused to see that the old man is still tied to the past by the least expected object: the

funeral tablet of his wife carefully packed in his suitcase, even though his wife herself never meant anything to him. But Honda no longer has his old

visionary gifts. The two elderly companions dine together at embassies (this is how they learn of Chan’s death)

and together sip their alcoholic drinks in the eve-

nings. Keiko takes her old friend on excursions to the more important sites of ancient Japan, in

which, through a kind of inverted snobbery, this

$e / 83 Americanized Japanese woman now declares herself interested. This is how they arrive at the edge

of the sea, at the place where the most famous of all No

plays,

Hagoromo,

is set, and where

the

Angel of the ancient poem performed his angelic

dance for the dazzled fishermen before reascending to heaven. But everything is in decay: garbage is strewn on the sand; the venerable old pine which

witnessed the Angel’s dance, now more than half withered, shows less bark than cement in the scars from its fallen branches. The road leading to the celebrated spot is a sort of amusement-park alley,

with curio shops, souvenir stalls, photographers

posing their customers against fake or burlesque

backdrops. The prim gentleman and the lady too picturesquely dressed, in American fashion, in well-cut trousers and wearing a felt sombrero, are

followed by an admiring mob

who

think they

are aging movie stars.

The following day finds them in a region of the

coast where strawberries are grown beneath plastic shelters. Here Honda makes the penultimate of his symbolic climbs, this one adjusted to his old man’s legs. At the edge of a river polluted by the rubbish of almost sinister tides, an observation tower has

been built from which the port authorities can be

MISHIMA

apprised by phone of the arrival, name, approximate tonnage, and nationality of ships sighted while still on the high seas. The very young ofhcial who trains his telescope on the cargo ships approaching the shore, and then transmits the information, is an adolescent barely out of secondary

school, an orphan, a dedicated worker, with intel-

ligent and cold eyes, but across whose face Honda

sees flit—barely perceptible, a reminiscence rather than

a presence—the

indecipherable

smile

of

Chan. This time, however, the old man’s perspi-

cacity betrays him. Unconsciously, Honda wants

the miracle to be repeated; what is more, obscure

selfish motives

mingle

with

those purely emo-

tional ones of his former quest, and, so to speak,

muddy the waters. Because he is immensely rich,

his business advisers constantly counsel him not to wait any longer to choose an heir. Why not this

disciplined young man, a hard worker, and unencumbered with a family? Over whiskey, he tells Keiko of his decision, and

she expresses her amazement; so as to prove that this is not, as she is tempted to believe, the rash

desire of an old man instantly captivated by a

youth, and even less a pure and simple whim, he

slowly, awkwardly spreads before her that fabric

$e / 85 of dreams and of events associated with dreams which somehow constitutes the secret side of his life. Though Keiko is the most materialistic and least imaginative of women, something in his tale overcomes her incredulity, or at least shows her

for the first time the past existence of her old friend Cand perhaps of every human life) from other angles and in a different light. Also for the first

time, shapeless reality seems to acquire a sense,

however absurd or mad this sense might be. The inquiries of private detectives testify to the perfect honesty, good manners and grades of this young man, who divides his time between working and

reading; one is moved by the hours he dedicates, no doubt out of kindness, to a somewhat deranged

girl his own age whose ugliness makes her the butt

of village jokes. Toru—for this is the young man’s name—is adopted, enrolled at Tokyo University, and takes the surname of his adoptive father. Im-

prudent for the first time, Honda overlooks the fact

that the boy’s date of birth, vouched for only by neighbors, is uncertain, as is the date of Chan’s death. The adolescent, on whose flank, through long tears in his shirt, Honda believes he has seen

the three fateful beauty spots, will be the very last choice of his life.

MISHIMA Toru is a monster, and becomes more monstrous still through his inhuman intelligence. ‘This

robot created by a mechanized society will know how to take advantage of his good fortune. With

no genuine interest in learning, he studies; he even accepts lessons in the social graces from

Honda, who teaches him to sit at the table the European way.” But the old man inspires Toru with only disgust, scorn, and hatred. Honda, for his part, sees into Todru’s motives with cold lucid-

ity, but now he lacks the energy to undo what he has done. During a walk in Yokohama, Toru is

tempted to push the old man, who is standing precariously at the far end of a quay; only prudence stops him from doing so. He brutally abuses the

housemaids; he cuts down the beautiful shrub that

is Honda’s delight; he divulges the political conf-

dences of his teacher, a communist to whom Honda would not have entrusted his adoptive son

had he known of his opinions. Just as, in order to impress her, Kiyoaki had written Satoko, before * It is curious to note that in the last months of his life Mishima took his wife and his young companion, Morita—with whom he had already made the death pact which was to be carried out

some months later—to dine at a Tokyo restaurant in order to

learn European table manners. on this point with Toru.

Here we recognize Honda,

strict

He / 87 their affair, an account of erotic adventures he had

not actually had, Toru dictates to the unfortunate young fool—who, thanks to an arrangement made by Honda, has become Toru’s betrothed—a letter that she copies without seeing that its contents

dishonor her and the tiresome family of magistrates from which she comes. But the deceits of the past,

not lacking in grace, give way to pure evil. When

sorrow and loneliness awake in Honda vague sensual needs, and when the old voyeur is picked up

by the police during a raid on a public park, Toru orchestrates the scandal and then takes advantage

of it to request that the old man be put away in a

home for the senile.

Sometimes a comforting thought occurs to Honda: the three members of the dazzling line have died young; if Toru is a link in the chain, no doubt the same will happen to him. This curious

notion, derived perhaps from a popular Japanese superstition, helps Honda to be patient, but noth-

ing in Toru indicates the slightest inclination to

die at age twenty. Surely Honda is mistaken. “The

movements of the heavenly bodies had left him aside. By a small miscalculation, they had led Honda and the reincarnation of Ying Chan into separate parts of the universe. Three reincarnations

MISHIMA had occupied Honda’s life and, after drawing their paths of light across it (that too had been a most improbable accident), gone off in another burst of light to an unknown corner of the heavens. Per-

haps somewhere, some time, Honda would meet the hundredth, the ten thousandth, the hundred millionth reincarnation.” We see that Honda stands outside of time; generations and centuries mean

nothing to him now. He is already very close to final deliverance. Honda’s immediate deliverance will come from a decision by Keiko. Just like Kazu in After the Banquet, who supports with her money and her

energy

the politician, Noguchi,

whom

she has

married; just like Satoko in Spring Snow, who

takes the drastic step of retiring from the world, leading Kiyoaki to his death; just like Madame de

Sade in the play of the same name, who by her refusal to see her husband again brings down the curtain on the unbearable drama, this amoral but wise woman of the world is a dea ex machina.

One should take note of this taste in Mishima for

women endowed with both sagacity and strength.

Under the pretext of a great Christmas dinner to

which she has invited Tokyo’s elite, Keiko receives Toru

in private—Toru,

who

has had a tuxedo

$e / 89 made for the occasion. The American-style Christmas dinner is served for two in Keiko’s sumptuous dining room, hung with Aubusson tapestries; the

old woman in a splendid kimono and the young man dressed to the nines share these foreign foodstuffs bought frozen or in cans, culinary symbols of a liturgical feast which is nothing to them. After

dinner, Keiko tells ‘Toru everything about Honda’s life of which he has been ignorant, and in particular the reason for his having been chosen.

One expects this extraordinary phantasmagoria to leave Toru indifferent: he is, on the contrary,

taken aback. Everything of which he was certain

—his adoption due to his real and feigned qualities, his power to manipulate circumstances—falls

in on him like a house of cards. He demands proof: Keiko advises him to borrow from Honda Kiyoaki’s dream diary, where so many incidents and events —future, present, then finally past—have

taken

place, without, for all that, ceasing to resemble

dreams. Toru burns this diary “because he has

never dreamt,” and tries to commit suicide on the spot. For a man who, at the time he was writing this,

was meticulously preparing, two or three months ahead, his own seppuku, the aborted suicide of

MISHIMA Toru was no doubt the worst disgrace that he could have inflicted upon his character. Earlier, in describing Iinuma, who, after having overindulged in Honda’s whiskey, displayed to him, beneath the white hairs on his chest, the scar from a knife with which he had stabbed himself after his son’s death,

without, however, ceasing to justify his act of betrayal, Mishima showed his disgust at halfhearted suicides. The reader nevertheless wonders whether, on the contrary, this suicide attempt, motivated by

Toru’s regret at not being the unscrupulous selfmade success he imagined himself to be, is not the only claim of the pitiful young man to belong to the ideal line of which Honda believes him to be

the most recent representative. Mishima refuses Toru this prerogative, as he refuses him the manly use of a knife blade to achieve his ends. The poison which Toru has tried to drink doesn’t kill him, but

the fumes leave him blind, with self-evident sym-

bolism. From now on, Honda is again master of his home and of his life. Toru, on the contrary—

eliminated from the race for pleasure, money, suc-

cess, and deprived by his blindness of his capacity to harm—lives confined to a pavilion from which

he does not want to move. His only companion is

the crazed and hideous woman, idiotically sure that

/91 she is beautiful, whom Toru had in earlier times

protected because of his delight in ruling over

another human being. Furthermore, this female

monster has grown obese, and a pregnancy makes

her fatter yet. The decaying angel neglects himself, refuses to change his linen and his clothes,

and lies in bed all day long, next to the madwoman, throughout the hot summer, in the room stinking of sweat and withered flowers. Honda, coming to cast a last look upon the couple, muses with bitter pleasure that all his possessions, the possessions of

a reasonable, intelligent man, will one day belong to imbeciles. For Honda at eighty-one is ill: medical exami-

nations have revealed a tumor. And yet he has one last desire: to see Satoko again, Satoko with whom,

sixty years earlier, after the young woman had spent the night on the beach with Kiyoaki, he shared the intimacy of the return journey in the

limousine, while she spoke to him of her loves, let-

ting the sand drain discreetly from her shoe. Satoko is now the abbess of the convent where long ago she took the veil; Honda decides to use his remain-

ing strength to visit her there. He takes a room in a Kyoto hotel, and notices during the car ride to Nara the proliferation of cheap buildings, tele-

MISHIMA

vision antennae littering the ancient and pure landscape, gas stations and cemeteries of abandoned cars, ice cream and Coca-Cola stands, bus stops beside small factories devoured by the sun. Then,

at Nara,

in this one preserved place, he

finds for a moment the ancient Japanese calm. At the foot of a hill, he leaves the car, even though

the route now climbs steeply to the top. This will

be his last climb. Followed by the disapproving gaze of the chauffeur, the old man sets off on the

rough road lined with cryptomeria, on the ground

striped with white bands of sun and dark bands of

shadow cast by the tree trunks. Exhausted, he lets himself fall on every bench along the way. But

something tells him that he must repeat on this hot afternoon not only the climb he had once undertaken for Kiyoaki in the snow but also the ascension, reenacted many times, of the exhausted Ki-

yoaki himself. He is received at the convent with

exquisite courtesy and soon he has before him

Satoko, who in her eighties has remained surprisingly young in spite of her wrinkles, which shine

as if recently scrubbed. “For Honda it had been sixty years. For Satoko had it been the time it takes to cross a garden bridge from shadow into sun-

light?”

He / 93

He finds the courage to speak to her of Kiyoaki, but the abbess doesn’t seem to know the name. Is she deaf?* No, she repeats that Kiyoaki Matsugae is unknown to her. Honda reproaches her for this denial, which he sees as hypocrisy. “No, Mr. Honda. I have forgotten none of the blessings that were mine in the other world. But I fear I have never heard the name Kiyoaki Matsugae. Don’t you suppose, Mr. Honda, that there

never was such a person?”

“. . . Why then do we know each other? And the Ayakuras and the Matsugaes must still have family registers.” “Yes, such documents might solve problems in

the other world. But did you really know a person called Kiyoaki? And can you say definitely that the two of us have met before?” “I came here sixty years ago.” * A European friend of Mishima’s tells me that the writer, shortly before

his death,

took

him

to Nara

to visit the octogenarian

abbess of a convent, and that she was indeed very deaf. She was, no doubt, the prototype of the aged Satoko, and perhaps the almost metaphysical deafness of the former mistress was inspired by this deafness in real life. However, this seems one of those unfounded details that abound in the lives of writers. The charming and dignified abbess and former acquaintaince of Mishima’s, when I visited her in 1983, was no more than in her

late middle age.

MISHIMA

“Memory is like a phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too far distant to be seen, and sometimes it shows them as if they were here.”

“... If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no

Isao. There was no Ying Chan, and who knows,

perhaps there has been no I.”

“ , . That too is as it is in each heart,” said the

abbess. And before saying farewell, she leads the old man into the interior court of the convent, blazing in the sun, whose walls frame nothing but a marvelous empty sky. Thus ends The Sea of Fertility.

@

a ne

AS

ae

&:

Neat, |

miphabeeee Sa aa aweit

ae

ee its eit

nie eA

.

:

he e

eee ae

8

hat we shall now try to find is by

what sequence of events the brilliant Mishima, lauded or (what amounts to the same thing) detested for his

provocations and successes, slowly became a man

determined to die. Of course, this quest is partly futile: love of death is common in beings endowed

with an avidity for life; we find traces of it in Mi-

shima’s very first works. What is important is to spot the moment in which he envisioned a certain kind of death and made of it, as we said at the

beginning of this essay, his masterpiece. Some have suggested that the turning point was the disappointment suffered in 1959, when for the first time one of his novels, Kyoko’s House, of which he was very fond, was a failure; but for a writer so full of finished works and future projects

these things are promptly forgotten. Much later—

MISHIMA too late for the question we are now trying to answer—exactly a year before his death, we know how disheartened he was to see the Nobel Prize,

which he expected, go to his friend and master, the old and great Kawabata, a writer wholly dedicated to depicting in an exquisite impressionistic manner aspects of Japan wherein a trace of the past was

preserved. For a man almost childishly eager for foreign honors, this is an understandable reaction,

all the more so because his decision to die very

soon precluded any other chance, yet this regret

certainly occupied only the more superficial side of his being; we know for a convey his congratulations old master, who considered now nearing completion—a

fact that he hurried to and best wishes to the The Sea of Fertility— masterpiece.

There had been other disappointments in his

life: a certain stay in New York and another in Paris, with work and money problems and evenings

of almost deadly solitude, were low points in his life, exacerbated by the fact of being almost unknown abroad, whereas in Japan he was a celebrity, and because visitors whom he had warmly received in Japan now, in their own homes, kept

their distance.* A certain admission of total des-

* We would perhaps do best to omit the accusation of snobbishness every time a foreigner takes pleasure in meeting a well-

He / 99

pair in the face of everyday complications, in a country whose customs and language he knows only slightly, is one any traveler might make after a nerve-racking day; in this man who wished him-

self strong, however, it reveals the wounds of a raw

sensibility. We don’t know what new complexities, enriching or painful, marriage brought him. We are told that on the eve of his marriage Mishima

burned his private diary: a common precaution

that scarcely changes the facts of life: with or without a diary, life goes on. The little we know shows, in any case, that Mishima allowed his wife a larger

place—tfrom the social and public point of view—

than was allotted to the wives of most Japanese in-

tellectuals in the sixties; we can also see, from his

daily schedule, that he managed freedom as a writer and as a man. battle for dominance seems to have right until the end between the mother. A libel case was brought

to preserve his But a wordless been carried on wife and the by a politician

known person whom he has known through books and who excites or interests him as would a famous landscape. “What a snob! He liked to dine with the Rothschilds . . .” This phrase would have us believe that a table full of Rothschilds assembled to receive Mishima. The truth is that he visited with Philippe

and his wife, Pauline—he, a subtle translator of Elizabethan poets; she, born in America—whom he had received in Tokyo

and would certainly want to see again in France.

MISHIMA who recognized himself in After the Banquet; attacks and death threats came from the extreme right (an amusing fact, considering that the writer was viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a “fascist’); a

minor scandal was caused by a collection of quasi-

erotic photographs, most of them very beautiful,

and because the writer, anxious also to become a

movie actor, had performed with dubious success

in a very bad American-style gangster film; a more personal

threat of blackmail

left him,

it seems,

more annoyed than shaken. All this would not need to be mentioned had others not mentioned it

before. However, the nausea and feeling of nothingness grew: a nothingness that was not yet the perfect Void of the abbess’s garden, but the void of every life—whether it has been a success or a failure, or

both. The writer’s strength had not diminished:

these years bubbled with work, from his best to his

worst. All tests of endurance or discipline attract him now, and no matter what has been said, less

for sensational reasons than as a road to visceral

and muscular knowledge. “The exercise of the muscles elucidated the mysteries that words had

made,” he says in Sun and Steel, an almost de-

lirious essay composed in 1967. (A little further

#/101 on, he elaborates: he speaks of “my morbidly blind faith in words’”—which is truly a danger for any writer.) Physical training, “similar to the process of acquiring erotic knowledge,” becomes a route to spiritual knowledge glimpsed in flashes, but

which a certain inaptitude for thinking in abstract terms forces him to translate into symbols. “Even the muscles themselves no longer existed. I was

enveloped in a sense of power as transparent as

light.” ‘The experimentation which had led to this had been undertaken for very simple reasons, which, for once, Mishima expresses simply: “Thus the physical disciplines that later became so neces-

sary to survival were in a sense comparable to the way in which a person for whom the body has been the only means of living launches into a frantic attempt to acquire an intellectual education when his youth is on its deathbed.” Slowly he realizes

that the body, during athletic training, “could be

‘intellectualized’ to a higher degree, could achieve

a closer intimacy with ideas, than the spirit.” It is

impossible not to think of certain alchemical ad-

monitions which similarly place physiology at the very heart of knowledge: ot paBew, &dda rabew,* * Ou mathein, alla pathein.

MISHIMA “Not to learn, but to experience.” Or, in an analogous Latin phrase: Non cogitat qui non experitur.*

But even at the heart of experiences which modern technology alone has made possible, myths arise anew from the oldest depths of man, and words again become necessary to express them. The parachutist, inside an F-104, describing lyrically the

aircraft's maneuvers, says that he will finally know

the sensations of the spermatozoon at the moment

of ejaculation, thereby corroborating the grafhiti scribbled on countless walls as well as the many colloquial expressions in which every powerful machine is phallic. Another image, taken from the

parachutist’s experience of jumping from the top of a tower, relates to the Marchen of Romanticism: “Beneath the summer sunlight, I had seen

. . . people’s shadows sharply etched and firmly attached to their feet. I had jumped into space from the summit of the silver tower, aware as I

went of how the shadow that I myself would cast

among them the next instant would lie isolated

* It is difficult for the author of Memoirs of Hadrian (a book which

Mishima,

in one

of his last interviews

with

a French

journalist, said he liked very much) not to recall] certain thoughts ascribed to the Emperor regarding his own method: “Everything, in the end, is a decision of the spirit, but slow, insensible, and which also demands the approval of the body .. .”

% /103 like a black puddle on the earth, untied to my body. At that moment I was, beyond all doubt, freed from my shadow . . .” The sensation is one

a bird might feel, could it know that the shape that follows its flight is its shadow. The astronauts’

decompression chamber reveals the conflict between

the spirit, which

knows

what

a man

is

exposed to, and the body, which does not; but finally anguish seizes the spirit itself. “My spirit

had known panic before now. It had known apprehension. But it had never known this lack of an essential element that the body normally supplied

to it without being asked . . . [At a simulated alkti-

tude of] forty-one thousand feet, forty-two thou-

sand feet, forty-three . . . I could feel death stuck fast to my lips. Soft, warm, octopus-like death . . .

My brain had not forgotten that training would

never kill me, yet this inorganic sport gave me a

glimpse of the type of death that crowded the earth

outside . . .” Sun and Steel ends, all contradictions resolved, with perhaps the oldest image in the world, that of a reptile encircling the planet, a reptile which is, as it were, both the cloud-dragon

of Chinese paintings and the serpent-biting-its-tail of ancient occult treatises. In Runaway Horses, Isao quotes, during his

MISHIMA trial, the philosopher

Wang

Yang-ming,

whose

ideas on this point Mishima had embraced: “To know and not to act is not yet to know.” And,

indeed, this almost Tantric quest—which lies be-

hind the alarming or disturbing photographs of Mishima, bare-chested, in the traditional head-

band, brandishing a kendo sword or pointing toward his abdomen the dagger that will one day

eviscerate him—ends in an act, which

inevitably and irrevocably

is proof both of its efhcacy and

of its danger. But what act? The purest—that of

the wise man given to the contemplation of the

Void, that void which is also manifest Fullness, perceived by Honda as a violently blue sky—demands

perhaps

patient

training

over

centuries.

Barring that, there remains unselfish devotion to a

cause, provided that one can believe in a cause, or

pretend that one believes. We shall examine this point more closely later. As for the more banal

forms in which pure energy may be expended,

Mishima had known them and, what is more, had described most of them. Money and apparent re-

spectability had not made Honda anything more

than a “miserable bundle of straw” in the teeth of

the destroying gods. Success decays like the Angel. Debauchery, if one allows that this self-controlled

# /105 man ever sunk in it completely, had been transcended. ‘The quest for love touches upon the quest

for the absolute: the heroine of Thirst for Love kills and Kiyoaki dies, but it seems, as far as one

dares judge these things, that for Mishima love rarely played an essential part. Art, in this case the art of writing, seems to have absorbed to its

own benefit this unconditional energy, but “words” lost their savor, and Mishima no doubt knew that he who dedicates himself entirely to writing books does not write good books. Politics—with its ambi-

tions, its compromises, its lies, its sordid deals, or

its crimes more or less disguised as state necessities

—surely seems the most deceptive of all possible activities; nevertheless, Mishima’s last acts and his

own death will be “politicized.” It is this sordid aspect of politics that the writer, from 1960 on, had noted, casually, in the electoral

dealings in After the Banquet and later, more melancholically, in one of his most famous plays, Tenth-Day Chrysanthemums,* where old Mori, a former Minister of Finance, honest servant of order

and the establishment, nevertheless feels sympathy

* The festival of chrysanthemums takes place on September 9.

Tenth-day chrysanthemums are therefore perceived as a symbol

of that which is too late and useless.

MISHIMA

for the young idealists who have tried to assassinate him. Here we recognize, from the opposite angle,

the young Isao resolved to kill a group of business leaders and end their control of the state. More

biting is the description of police intrigues in The

Harp of Joy, where the disturbances attributed to

the left are in fact the work of professional provocateurs, and where the only man who hears, as if in a hallucination, the delicate sound of the Japanese harp is also the only one with a pure heart. My Friend Hitler—which precedes the author's death by about a year, and in which the title words are ironically placed on the lips of Roehm, who

will be killed—is more violent, but marred by a lyrical eroticism intended to match

the inflated

language of the Hitler Youth but unworthy of an

author no less adolescent.* None of these plays is, properly speaking, revolutionary, any more than * It goes without saying that the title itself is a provocation, all

the more so because Mishima, pushing irony to the point where it becomes transparent, had printed on the programs the following statement:

“The dangerous ideologue Mishima

dedicates an evil

ode to the dangerous hero Hitler.” This text ended with a somber and true phrase: “Hitler was a dark character, as the twentieth century is a dark century.” The impression of daring was thus only reinforced, the more so because the Japan of the war in the Pacific had been Hitler’s ally and did not wish to be reminded of this fact.

§/107 Musset’s

Lorenzaccio

is an attack against the

Medicis. Life itself, and its routines or follies, is its subject. In Runaway Horses, young Isao, shortly before his violent death, asks himself how much

longer he will know the somewhat dirty pleasure

of eating. There is another remark, disdainful, of an almost astonishing realism, concerning the sex-

ual organs which human beings carry dangling

about beneath their clothing. Life has ceased to be

regarded as anything but a useless, and somewhat

warped, toy.

ft

rte

tee eat cae RNS

ae

tine

oe

Sees _ a

ue

nd yet, from his very disgust at the political confusion of the times and, no doubt, from the particular situation of

Japan, yoked by treaties to its former

enemy, a partisan was born. To speak of fascism,

as do critics who love both to simplify and to discredit, is to forget that in the West a fascist—a

thing and a term essentially Mediterranean in origin—is defined as a member of the upper-middle

or middle class on the offensive against what he

believes to be left-wing aggression, relying heavily

on industry and high finance and, where they still

exist, on powerful landowners;

chauvinism and

imperialism quickly become part of the game, if only to rally the masses, to offer a field of expan-

sion to big business, and later to sustain shaky dic-

tatorships. Nazism, a German phenomenon, black from the start with its obscene racist element, devi-

MISHIMA ates, because of this obsessive side, from the more

pragmatic fascism which nevertheless served it as

an example, but both arms of the pincers end

by meeting. In Mishima, the axis lies somewhat differently. Everything happens as if the events which pre-

ceded, accompanied, or followed the defeat of his country (which, as we have seen, he several times denied had affected his adolescence in the least) —the hecatombs or the mass suicides of soldiers

and civilians on the conquered islands; Hiroshima,

mentioned by him in passing; the bombardments

of Tokyo, described in Confessions of a Mask as one describes the effects of a monstrous storm or

an earthquake; the political trials in which the

“vyictor’s justice” was frequently dispensed iniqui-

tously—were simply blows unperceived or rejected

by the intellect and self-conscious sensibility of a

young man of twenty. The sacrifice of the kami-

kaze, aiming their aircraft stripped of landing gear at the smokestacks and boiler rooms of enemy ships,

had at the time, it seems, scarcely moved Mishima,

who had left the conscription office happy that

he had been invalided, accompanied by his patriotic father, who, nevertheless, was also happy. It was the same with the Emperor’s radio speech

#%/113 relinquishing his status as representative of the sun dynasty, an abdication as shocking for the Japanese

people as it would be for Catholics to hear the Pope renounce his infallibility and cease to consider himself the representative of God. The overwhelming need to be done with the war had tempered the blow for the young writer, as it did for the Japanese masses. It is only in 1966, in the first of his clearly politicized writings, The Voices of the Heroic Dead, that Mishima realizes, or at least says out

loud, that the kamikaze—from the viewpoint of

ancient Japan, which was their Japan—had died for nothing, the Emperor’s renunciation of his role as divine symbol having deprived these heroic

deaths of all sense. “Brave soldiers died because a god has commanded them to go to war; and not six months after so fierce a battle had stopped instantly because a god declared the fighting at an end, His Majesty

announced,

‘Verily, we are a

mortal man.’ Scarcely a year after we had fired

ourselves like bullets at an enemy ship for our

Emperor who was a god! . . . Why did the Emperor become a man?” This poem (for this prose text is a poem), which angered equally the left and

the extreme right, offended by its criticism of the

MISHIMA Emperor,

is contemporary with another piece in

which Mishima denounces the “full-bellied” Japan

of his time and notes that “pleasure itself has lost its savor” and “innocence is sold at the marketplace,” because the ancient Japanese ideal has been

betrayed. The great voices of our lives frequently cross a zone of silence before reaching us. For the writer disgusted at the slackness of the era, these young kamikaze voices, barely twenty years old, became in that interval what Montherlant would

have called “voices from another world.” The American occupation and its long aftermath of treaties holding Japan within a zone of Yankee influence likewise do not seem to have upset him for a very long time. The occupation, as we have

seen, had been evoked in Forbidden Colors only through a few debauched clowns; in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, only by that devastating scene of the uniformed American giant, more than

half drunk, forcing the terrified seminarian to walk on the belly of a girl for the price of two packs of cigarettes. But this incident could have been chosen without xenophobic intent by any novelist

fond of strong scenes. In The Temple of Dawn,

which is set in 1952, the occupation itself is kept in the background, yet very much in evidence

%/115

are the petty profits made by those who know how

to take advantage of the situation, and the prosti-

tutes’ laughter as they look, from across a canal of the Sumida River, which runs, polluted, through

a modern Tokyo of pleasure and business, at the

grounds of an American hospital where, on deck chairs, lie the crippled and handicapped veterans

of the Korean War.

Let us turn back to consider, this time solely

from the political point of view, Runaway Horses, Mishima’s first novel centered on a revolutionary and set in the landscape of inflation, rural

poverty, uprisings, and real political murders of Japan in 1932. Mishima, aged six, was of course barely aware of the troubles of that year, and of

the failed coup of 1936 which was to inspire that admirable film, Patriotism, aware only enough so that these incidents, kept in reserve, would reemerge from deep in the consciousness of a forty-

year-old man. In Runaway Horses, Isao plots to bombard, with the help of an Air Force pilot,

strategic points in Tokyo, then renounces this in favor of a plan, hardly less dangerous, to distribute from the air proclamations denouncing the corruption of a Cabinet ruled by businessmen, and promising its immediate replacement by another, under

MISHIMA

the Emperor’s direct command. The coup also entails the occupation by force of power plants, the Bank of Japan, and—the supreme goal—the assassination of the twelve most influential members of the zaibatsu. When this scheme cannot be carried

out, he contents himself, before dying, with the

murder of just one man, old Kurahara, a senti-

mental creature who cries easily and in whom hides

a terrible shark. These projects and this crime certainly make Isao an authentic terrorist, yet place

him miles away from the Western fascist, whom we have yet to see kill a banker. A scene typical of Mishima, of a purposely flat and at the same time piercing irony, shows us the

most important figures of the zaibatsu at a dinner

at one of the members’ houses, while all their

bodyguards, who look like murderers, dine in the next room. In counterpoint to the insipid conver-

sation of the ladies, the men discuss inflation as

both a necessary and a clever maneuver (“It’s simple, you have only to place your money in commodities and raw materials”) and deem the tragedy

of the peasant class, haunted by famine or expropriation, one of those marginal historical facts that

one has simply to accept. A young viscount, who

still has some sensitivity left, perhaps because he

#/117 has not yet secured any official post, quotes a letter written by a soldier from Manchukuo to his father,

expressing his desire to die on the battlefield because, at the time, he would be just a mouth to

feed in the village.* It is pointed out to the young

idealist, quickly embarrassed by his own audacity,

that high politics cares nothing for individual cases. Among these diners are the remnants of the titled and monied aristocracy of the beginning of the

tetralogy. The Marquis Matsugae, the father of Kiyoaki, blushes when, in spite of his position in

the House of Peers, his lack of importance is such that the police do not supply him with a bodyguard.

These same descriptions of the “ruling class” and these same terrorist projects could as easily have come from a writer of the extreme left, and

Mishima was not unaware of this fact. And before

1969 he agreed, not without courage (for there

had been terrorist threats from left and right), to

a public debate with a powerful group of communist students at Tokyo University. A polite

* It is interesting to compare Runaway Horses with two books by a young communist writer, Takiji Kobayashi, killed by the police in 1933: The Factory Ship and The Absentee Landlord also have as their point of departure the misery and the famine in rural areas. Narayama (1958), by Shichiro Fukazawa, is also a great poem on hunger.

MISHIMA

debate, all in all, and without the element of obtuse

incomprehension which in Europe usually characterizes both left and right when they confront each other. After the meeting, Mishima contributed his honorarium to the party’s funds, with a courtesy

recalling the gesture of kendo warriors saluting one another after battle. I borrow from one of Mishima’s Western biographers, Henry Scott Stokes,

these remarks the writer made following the meeting: “I found we have much in common—a rigorous ideology and a taste for physical violence, for example. Both they and I represent new species in

Japan today . . . We are friends between whom

there is a barbed-wire fence. We smile at one another but we can’t kiss . . . What the Zengakuren students and I stand for is almost identical. We have the same cards on the table, but I have a

joker—the Emperor.” The Emperor . . . Tenno Heika Banzai! (Long

live the Emperor!) will be the dying Mishima’s last cry, and also that of the companion who will

die with him. He cares little that Hirohito, faithful to the role to which circumstances have reduced him, is a fairly mediocre monarch (though during his reign, goaded perhaps by his advisers, he

#/119 made two decisions which Mishima could only disapprove of: the crushing of the military coup of

1936 and the renunciation of his status as sun

deity). In the same way, a passionate partisan of

papal power cares little whether the pontiff of his time is a mediocre Pope or not. In fact, the Em-

peror was all-powerful in Japan only in legendary

times. The Heian emperors, held on a leash by

their ministers from the two important rival clans,

abdicated young, ordinarily leaving a child as heir

to the throne, which would guarantee the true rulers all the advantages of a regency. Later on, the

shoguns, military dictators who gradually prepared the ground for modern Japan, ruled over Kama-

kura and later over Edo

(the Tokyo

of today),

surrounded by a court to which ambitious and

crafty men flocked, while the Emperor and his entourage led in Kyoto a life enveloped in prestige but limited to cultural and ritual activities. Finally,

closer to our time, the Meiji emperor was installed

in Tokyo in 1868 with increased powers, subordinated, however, to the almost irresistible forces of

modernization, industrialization, parliamentarism, to all that foreign imitation which a group of revo-

lutionary samurai, revered by young Isao, de

nounced

in

1877.

CWhen

one

thinks

of what

MISHIMA

“progress” was to bring Japan in less than a century, one is no longer tempted to ridicule these samurai, who isolated themselves out of hatred of

foreign modernization, covering their heads with their metal fans when passing beneath telegraph wires.) The restoration of the Emperor to the rank

of a monarch both effective and mystical, protector of the humble and the oppressed, was in Japan

frequently the “great design” of idealists concerned with the state of the world, even though, in order

to accomplish it, they had to attack the imperial

“establishment” itself. Isao, watching a dark sun

about to set, mutters to his companions:

“There

in the evening sun is the face of His Majesty the Emperor . . . And His Majesty's face is troubled.” This loyalist is right-wing because of his fidelity to the Emperor, left-wing because of his attachment to the oppressed and hungry peasants. In prison,

he is ashamed of being better treated than the communists, who are viciously beaten up. It was while he was finishing Runaway Horses

that Mishima, now swept away by what he called

the River of Action, founded the Shield Society, the Tatenokai, a group of one hundred men (a number which, if we are to believe him, he had preestablished) to whom he offers, at his own ex-

/121 pense, paramilitary training. This always dangerous

type of militia springs up almost inevitably in every

country limited by treaties to a weak army and to

policies following in the footsteps of their former

enemy. Did the Shield Society confine itself to

those martial exercises in which Mishima himself

took part, under the aegis of a regular army regiment quartered at the foot of Mt. Fuji? This Shield (Mishima did not mind the designation of the

Society,

in English,

by

the

letters

“SS,”

even

though he was not unaware that they evoked atrocious precedents) is, we know, in the mind of the

Society’s leader, “the Shield of the Emperor.” In many secret societies the precise goals (other than

those, in this case, of a sort of Scout troop for

adults) remain hidden, not only from the public

but also from its members and perhaps from its leader himself: “The SS is a stand-by army. There

is no way of knowing when our day will come. Perhaps it will never come; on the other hand, it may come tomorrow. Until then, the SS will remain

calmly at the ready. No street demonstrations for

us, no placards, no Molotov cocktails, no lectures,

no stone throwing. Until the last desperate mo-

ment, we shall refuse to commit ourselves to action. For we are the world’s least armed, most spiritual

MISHIMA

army.” This spirit, however, does not show itself

except in dull patriotic student songs composed by Mishima, with verses which prove to what extent

a group of a hundred men is already a mob and expects, as such, its fodder of clichés.*

It is almost impossible that the man who, at the same time, was describing Isao in search of accomplices for a coup d’état should not himself have had something similar in mind. However, in October 1969, at the moment of the ratification of the new

American treaties, on which occasion there had been fear of strong opposition from the left, which did not in fact materialize

(the extreme

right,

which disapproved equally of the treaties, did not

stir either), the tiny leadership of the Tatenokai had met in a Tokyo hotel; Morita, Mishima’s aide,

who one year later would become his companion in death, proposed occupying parliament, just as

Isao himself had done—Isao, who was just about Morita’s age. Mishima opposed this, saying that it * The word imperialist, often employed by Mishima’s biographers, leads to even greater error than the word fascist. Neither Isao, so indifferent to the war in Manchukuo, nor Mishima himself in his

manifesto of November 25, 1970, is, properly speaking, an imperialist. They are loyalists and nationalists of the extreme right. That imperialism would have reemerged, had the dream of imperial restoration and denunciation of the treaties been realized, is probable, but beyond our scope.

#/123 would only lead to failure. He had learned from

his own description of Isao’s disaster. It is easy to mock the theatrical uniform chosen

by the Shield Society. A photograph shows Mishima in his jacket with its double row of buttons

and his visored cap, sitting surrounded by lieutenants dressed in the same manner. To his right is Morita, whom some have called a fool and others

a man born to command and by far the best of the

lot, very handsome in his youthful strength, with

the smooth and full face of certain Asiatic bronzes

of the seventeenth century;* behind them, three

young men who will one day serve as witnesses to the suicide: Furu-Koga, Ogawa, and Chibi-Koga.

These young men

(most of Mishima’s followers

came from the student ranks) give an impression of immaturity and frailness, but Furu-Koga would

a year later demonstrate his skill with a sword. In spite of the Japanese physiognomies, the stiff uniforms make one think of Germany and old Russia. But we should perhaps expect a celebrated playwright, promoted to man of action, or trying to be

one, to drag behind him bits and pieces of cos* This beauty is visible above all in a photograph where, his head uncovered, Morita’s face resembles, as has been noted before, Omi, the school idol in Confessions of a Mask.

MISHIMA tumes and theater props, just as a university lecturer brings into the political arena his professorial style. The Tatenokai was dissolved immediately after Mishima’s death, and on his orders, which does not necessarily prove that it was nothing but a toy,

cleverly fashioned and then broken solely for his

pleasure by an exhibitionist or a megalomaniac.

This handful of organized men seemed insignificant to their contemporaries, if not silly, or some-

what ridiculous, but it is not certain that we can

still judge them in this manner. We have seen too well how many countries, believed Westernized, or about to become Westernized, and apparently content with being Westernized, are full of sur-

prises, and how, in each case, the upheavals are

the work of small groups at first disdained or treated with irony. If a national and reactionary

revolution ever triumphs, even briefly, in Japan—

as has happened now in certain Islamic countries —the Shield Society will have been its forerunner.

The serious mistake of the forty-three-year-old

Mishima, like that of twenty-year-old Isao in 1936, which is more excusable, consists of not having

seen that, even if His Majesty’s face were to shine

again in the rising sun, the world of “full bellies,”

#/125 “giddy” pleasure, and “sold” innocence would remain the same or would reappear in a new guise,

and that even the zaibatsu, without which a modern state would not be able to exist, would once

again take its preponderant place, whether under

the same name or some other. These things are

obvious but always useful to restate, and more pertinent than ever at a time when it is not only a

group, a party, or a country that suffers a kind of

pollution, but the earth itself. It is strange that a

writer who had described so well in The Sea of

Fertility a Japan that has undoubtedly arrived at

the point of no return should have believed that a violent gesture could have changed anything. But his acquaintances, both Japanese and European, seem to have been even more incapable than we of

judging the depth of despair whence his actions came. In September 1970, three months before

the seppuku, Mishima’s English biographer is surprised to hear him say that Japan is under a curse:

“Money and materialism reign; modern Japan is

ugly,” he said. And then he resorted to a metaphor.

“Japan,” he continued, “is a victim of the green

snake. We shall not escape that curse.” The journalist-biographer continues: “I didn’t know

what to make of his remarks. After he left . . . [one

MISHIMA of us] said he'd just been in his pessimistic mood.

We laughed. But I joined in the laughter halfheartedly. Green snake, indeed.”

This green snake, the symbol of an evil which has become irreversible, is evidently the snake which, visible in the pale light of dawn, escapes from Honda’s burnt villa, while the survivors, prudently seated at the far edge of the American-style swimming pool, whose waters reflect the barely

extinguished ruins, smell the stench of burnt flesh and think of the drunken couple caught in the fire,

and while the chauffeur goes down to the village to get them breakfast as if nothing had happened.

It is also the snake which bites the foot of the

inconsistent Chan and kills her. The image of a reptile representing Evil is as old as the world. One asks oneself, however, if this snake, more biblical perhaps than Far Eastern, does not come from

Mishima’s European reading. In any case, from the very first volume of the tetralogy, in the apparently simple anecdote of the lost emerald, the green of the gem already reflects the beast.

One of Mishima’s biographers takes care to list the names of ten well-known Japanese writers who

have ended their lives by suicide during the first

$e /127 sixty years of this century. The number is hardly surprising in a country which has always honored

voluntary death. But none of them died in the grand manner. Mishima’s death, on the contrary,

will be the traditional seppuku of protest and ad-

monition, disemboweling immediately followed by

decapitation with a sword when the presence of an aide permits it. CThe last grand suicides in the

anguish of defeat, twenty-five years earlier—those

of Admiral Onishi, leader of the kamikaze units; of General Anami, Minister of War; and of some twenty officers who, after the surrender, committed

seppuku on the threshold of the Imperial Palace or on a drill ground—all seem to have done without the help of an aide and the final beheading.)

Descriptions of seppuku now fil all Mishima’s work. In Runaway Horses it is the mass suicide of the samurai who revolted in 1877 and whose ad-

venture inspired Isao. Defeated by the regular

army, the eighty survivors ritually slit their bellies,

some on the road, others on the top of a mountain

holy to the Shinto cult. Sometimes these sui-

cides are truculent, as is that of the glutton-hero,

who stuffs himself before opening his belly; others are made more moving by the presence of wives

who also decide to die: this incredible cascade of

MISHIMA blood and entrails horrifies and at the same time excites like any spectacle of total courage. Some-

thing of the pure simplicity of the Shinto rites, which these men performed before entering battle, hovers over the spectacle of this butchery, and the soldiers following the tracks of the rebels climb the

mountain as slowly as possible to allow them time to die in peace.

Isao half fails in his suicide attempt. In a hurry,

on the point of being arrested, he does not reach

the

sublime

moment

of

which

he

has

often

dreamed: “At the top of a cliff at sunrise . . . while looking down upon the sparkling sea, beneath a tall, noble pine.” The sea is there, black in the night, but no guardian pine tree rises behind him

and he cannot wait for the rising of the sun. With

an intuition of genius in this domain, so un-

fathomable, of physical pain, Mishima grants the

young rebel the equivalent of the sunrise which

will come too late for him: the flashing pain of

the dagger in his entrails is the equivalent of a ball of fire; it spreads through him like the rays of a red

sun. In The Temple of Dawn we find, in the guise of animal sacrifice, the equivalent of the last act of

a traditional seppuku, decapitation. In Calcutta, in

ge /129 the temple of Kali the Destroyer, Honda contemplates with controlled curiosity and nausea the sacrificer cutting off with one stroke the head of a goat, which one second earlier stood trembling, resisting, bleating, and now lies motionless, abruptly

changed into a thing. Besides Patriotism, to which we shall return, other rehearsals take place: on

stage, in a Kabuki play in which Mishima had a smal] part as a samurai who commits suicide; in a

film, in which as an extra he performs the same

act. Above all, finally, in a last volume of photo-

graphs published posthumously, less voluptuous than those of the first volume, Torture by Roses,*

and in which we see him suffering several kinds of death: drowning in mud, which is certainly a

symbol; being run over by a truck carrying cement,

which is perhaps another; in several instances, performing seppuku; and as St. Sebastian, pierced by

arrows, a poignant and justly famous photograph. One may choose to view these images as exhibitionism, an unhealthy obsession with death, cer* Knowing that Mishima supervised the Japanese translation of D’Annunzio’s The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, and was behind

its performance in Tokyo, we may ask ourselves if the title was

not inspired by the passage where—in this striking play too long and too lyrical for the stage—the Emperor suggests smothering Sebastian under a mound of roses.

MISHIMA tainly the easiest explanation for a Westerner or even for a Japanese of today; or, on the contrary, one may see in them a methodical preparation for

confronting the end, as is recommended in the famous Hagakure, a treatise instilled with the eighteenth-century samurai spirit, and which Mishima had read more than once:

Each day await death so that when the time

comes, you may die in peace. When it happens it

is not as awful as we think... Work each morning to calm your spirit, and imagine the moment in which you will be cut to pieces or mutilated by arrows, fire, spears and sabers, carried away by enormous waves, cast into the flames, struck by lightning, battered by an

earthquake, fallen over a precipice, or dying of an illness or during an unforeseen event. Die in your

thoughts every morning and you will no longer fear death. HOW TO DEATH,

BECOME

or THE

ACQUAINTED

ART OF DYING

WITH

WELL.

We

can find in Montaigne similar injunctions (and also their exact opposite) and what is even more curious,

at least one paragraph in Madame de Sévigne,

meditating as a good Christian on her own death,

which has somewhat the same ring. But these are from a time when humanism and Christianity

/131 looked without blinking upon our end. In the

Hagakure, however, it is less a question of facing death on a firm footing than of imagining it as one of many events, whose shape we cannot foresee, in

a world in perpetual movement of which we are all a part. The body, this “curtain of flesh” which ceaselessly trembles and stirs, will end up torn in two or worn thin, no doubt to reveal that Void

which Honda has perceived, too late, just before

dying. There are two kinds of human beings: those

who keep death out of their thoughts to live better and more freely, and those who, on the contrary,

feel their existence more wisely and more strongly when they watch for the signals death gives through our senses or the hazards of the external

world. These two kinds of spirits do not mingle. What one calls a morbid mania is for the other a heroic discipline. It is for the reader to make up his own mind.

“Patriotism” (Yukoku), one of the most remarkable stories Mishima ever wrote, was made into a film, directed by and featuring the author, on a No set adapted to the modest style of a bourgeois home in 1936. The film, more beautiful and even more overwhelming than the story it epitomizes,

has only two characters: Mishima himself in the

MISHIMA role of Lieutenant Takeyama, and a very beautiful

young woman in the role of his wife.

The film takes place on the evening of the day

on which a revolt by right-wing officers has been crushed on the Emperor’s order; the rebels are to

be immediately executed. The lieutenant belonged

to this group but was excluded at the last moment,

out of sympathy for his being newly married. It

begins with

the everyday gestures of the young

woman, who has just learned the news from the papers, knows that her husband will not want to outlive his comrades, and has decided to die with him. She busies herself before his return with carefully packing certain trinkets which are dear

to her, and writing on the parcels the addresses of

her parents and a few former schoolmates for whom these are intended. The lieutenant arrives. His first gesture is to shake the snow from his cape, which

the young woman

hangs up; the second, equally

prosaic, is to take his boots off in the hall, leaning

against the wall, staggering a little as one does in

such situations. Not for an instant, save one which

is very brief, does the actor-author act his role in

the drama; he makes the necessary gestures, that is all. We see the lieutenant and his wife again,

sitting face to face on a mat, beneath the ideogram

LOYALTY which decorates the naked wall, and one

# / 133 is tempted to think that this word would be a better title than Patriotism for both the story and the film, since the lieutenant will die out of loyalty to his comrades, and the young woman out of loyalty

to her husband, whereas patriotism, strictly speak-

ing, enters into the story only at the moment when

they both pray briefly for the Emperor before the domestic altar—which is even in this case, after the suppression of the revolt, a form of loyalty. The lieutenant announces his decision, the young woman hers, and for an instant—and this time Mishima acts the role—the man casts upon

the woman a long look, tender and melancholy, clearly revealing his eyes, which during his agony

will always be shaded by the visor of his uniform,

a little like one of Michelangelo’s statues whose eyes are hidden by a helmet. But this tenderness

does not last long. His next gesture is to show the young woman, for he has no one else to help him in the ritual decapitation, how to force in the dagger with which he will try, with the feeble

strength left him, to cut his throat.* Then, naked, * One of Mishima’s biographers, John Nathan, finds the lieuten-

ant’s attitude toward his wife “abnormal” because he demands that she assist in his death and help him deliver the final blow. No Stoic would have thought the same, and Montaigne would

have numbered Reiko, the wife, with his “three good women” (Essays, Book II, chapter 35).

MISHIMA they make love. We

do not see the man’s face;

that of the woman is tense with pain and joy. But there is nothing pornographic here: the image is

fragmented to show hands plunged into a forest

of hair, the hands which, at the beginning of the film, like caressing ghosts, have held the young

woman during her final preparations, reminding

her of he who was absent; parts of the body appear and disappear: the somewhat sunken belly of the young wife, over which the man’s palm passes and

repasses tenderly, at the spot where he will shortly stab himself. Then we see them dressed, she in the white kimono of suicide, he in his uniform and

visor. Sitting before a low table, they write the few lines that will explain their gesture. Then the horrible task begins. The man allows the trousers of his uniform to slide down his thighs, meticulously wraps three-quarters of the sword’s blade in the humble silk paper used as tissue in

the house, thereby avoiding cutting the fingers

that must guide the blade. Before the final operation, he must try one last thing: he cuts himself

slightly, with the tip of the sword, and the blood spurts, an imperceptible droplet, which, unlike the

streams that will follow—necessarily a theatrical

imitation—is

authentically

the actor’s and “the

ge / 135 poet’s blood.” The wife watches him, holding back her tears, but we know he is alone, as we all are

at important moments, locked in those practical details which constitute, in each person’s case, the mechanisms of fate. With surgical precision, but not without effort, the blade cuts the resisting

abdominal muscles, and then rises to complete the

opening. The visor preserves the face’s anonymity, but the mouth twitches, and then, more wrenching than the mass of entrails, like those of a

wounded corrida horse, which now fall to the floor, the trembling arm lifts itself with immense effort, seeking the base of the neck, then pushes in the tip of the blade, which the young woman, according to her orders, presses deeper. The young widow

then goes into the next room, solemnly touches up

her thick white makeup of a Japanese woman of another era, and returns to the place of suicide. The

hem of her white kimono and her white socks are soaked in blood; the long train seems to sweep the

floor and draw characters on it. She bends over, wipes the bloody spittle from the man’s lips, and then, very quickly, with a stylized gesture—for we

could not bear a realistic agony twice—cuts her

throat with a small dagger she pulls out of her

sleeve, just as Japanese women learned to do in

MISHIMA the old days. The woman falls diagonally on the

prostrate body of the man. The humble setting disappears. The mat becomes an expanse of sand or

fine gravel, wrinkled, it seems, like a No cloak, and, as if on a raft, the dead pair float away, borne

toward that eternity in which they are already. The

sole hint, from time to time, of the external world on this winter evening, and an allusion to the tradi-

tional setting of the No plays of long ago, is a small pine tree covered in snow, seen outside, for

an instant, in the modest garden surrounding this

drama of blood and courage.

f I have spent so long on this film—which is in a sense a preview—it is because comparing

it with Mishima’s seppuku allows us better to

define the distance between the perfection of art, which shows, in the dark or clear light of eternity, the essential, and life with its incongru-

ities, its failures, its baffling misunderstandings

due to our inability ever to reach, at the right moment, inside beings and to the very bottom of

things. Yet this inability itself is often born, as all

deep

experience

proves,

from

the

incalculable

strangeness of “raw” life, or, to use what is already

a cliché,

existential life. As in Pasolini’s The

Gospel According to St. Matthew, where Judas, running toward his end, is no longer a man but a

whirlwind, from these last moments in Mishima’s

life is emitted the ozone odor of pure energy.

About two years before his death, Mishima bene-

MISHIMA fits from that good fortune that always seems to

present itself as soon as life attains a certain speed and a certain rhythm. A new character enters: Morita, twenty-one years old, a provincial student at a Catholic school, handsome, somewhat thickset,

burning with the same loyalist Hame as the man whom he will soon call Master (Sensei.)—an hon-

orific term given by students to their instructors. It

has been said that Mishima’s longing for political adventure grew in proportion to the young man’s

ardor; we have, however, seen him restrain his cadet from a terrorist venture in 1969. One would almost like to believe that certain disagreeable aspects of the seppuku of the two men* came

from the imagination of the younger, perhaps fed on violent films and novels—but Mishima hardly needed prompting in this direction. At the most,

we may believe that his enthusiasm was revived

upon

finally finding (Morita was the last to be

accepted into the Shield Society) a companion and perhaps long-sought disciple. We are shown this energetic young man, so full of endurance that

from the very start he had taken part in the Tatenokai exercises, dragging his broken leg in a cast

* I am thinking of the terrorist-type incidents in the offices of the Eastern Army.

2/141 after a sports accident, “following Mishima everywhere like a betrothed” (a phrase with special meaning when we think that the word betrothal means “the act of engaging one’s faith,” and that we can engage it no further than in promising to

die). A biographer who bases his explanation of Mishima almost exclusively on erotic facts has overemphasized the sensual side—hypothetical, of course—of this attachment; it has been used to turn

this seppuku into a shinju, the double suicide so

frequent in Kabuki plays, generally that of a girl from a brothel and a young man too poor to buy her or keep her as his mistress, and most frequently by drowning.” It is not believable that Mishima,

who for six years had been preparing his ritual death, should have mounted this complicated scenario of speaking to the troops and making a public announcement prior to his death with the sole

intention of setting the stage for a double departure. Simply—and he explained this point in his debate with the communist students—he had come to believe that love itself had become impossible in * The double suicide attempted by Saigo, the great liberal agitator of the nineteenth century, with his friend the priest Gessho, also by drowning and mainly for political motives, failed, because Saigo was brought back to life. This is one of the rare

known examples of a shinju planned by two men.

MISHIMA a world bereft of faith, and compared two lovers to the two angles at the base of a triangle; the Emperor whom they revere is the third. Replace

the word Emperor with the word cause, or God,

and you will arrive at the notion of a belief in transcendence necessary to passionate human love, which I have discussed elsewhere. Morita, because

of his almost naive loyalty, did answer this demand. This is all that can be said, except perhaps that it is natural for two beings who have decided to die together, and one at the hands of the other, to want

to meet in bed at least once, and this is a notion to

which the ancient samurai spirit would not have

objected.

Everything is ready. The seppuku

November

25,

is set for

1970, the day on which the last

volume of the tetralogy is promised to the publisher. However involved Mishima is in his last act, he still regulates his life according to his writer's obligations: he is proud of never having

missed the deadline for any of his manuscripts. Everything has been foreseen, even—supreme po-

liteness toward his assistants, supreme desire to preserve the body’s dignity to the very end—the use of cotton-wool pads to prevent the entrails

from discharging excrement during the convul-

g / 143 sions of agony. Mishima, who dined with his four associates at a restaurant on November 24, leaves

his companions that night like every night to work, finishes his manuscript or gives it the final touches,

signs it, and puts it in an envelope that a pub-

lisher’s clerk will fetch some time during the next morning. Soon after sunrise, he takes a shower,

carefully shaves, puts his Shield Society uniform on over a white cotton loincloth and his bare skin.

Everyday gestures, which acquire the solemnity of

that which will never be done again. Before leav-

ing his desk, he places on the table a piece of paper: “Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever.” These words are characteristic of all

beings passionate enough to be insatiable. After

careful consideration, there is no contradiction between the fact that these words were written at dawn and the fact that the man who wrote them

would be dead before the end of the morning.

He leaves his manuscript in sight on the hall

table. The four associates await him in a new car bought by Morita; Mishima has in his leather

attaché case a precious seventeenth-century sword, one of his dearest possessions; the attaché case also

contains a dagger. On their way, they pass the

school which the older of the writer’s two children

MISHIMA attends—an the moment sentimental sensitivity?

eleven-year-old girl, Noriko. “This is when in a film we would hear some music,” Mishima jokes. Proof of inPerhaps of the opposite. It is some-

times easier to joke about what matters most than

not to talk about it at all. No doubt he laughs, with

that short noisy laugh attributed to him by his biographers, and which is characteristic of all those

who do not give themselves over wholeheartedly

to laughter. Then the five men sing. Now they headquarters in two hours however, one

have arrived at their of the Eastern Army. will be dead by his last desire: to speak

destination, the This man, who own hand, has, to the troops, to

denounce in their presence the disastrous state into

which he believes his country is plunged. Does this writer, who has declared that words have lost their savor, believe that words will become powerful

again? No doubt he wants to multiply the occa-

sions to explain publicly the reasons for his death, so that no one will try, later, to disguise or deny

them. Two letters written to journalists whom he had asked to be on the spot at this moment—without explaining why—show that he feared, with reason, this sort of posthumous distortion. Having

managed to infuse the Shield Society members

$e /145 with something of his own ardor, he perhaps also believes that it is possible to achieve the same with

the few hundred men stationed here. But only the general who is commander in chief can give him

the necessary authorization. They have requested

an appointment, under the pretext of allowing the

commander to admire the beautiful sword signed by a famous armorer. Mishima explains away the presence of the uniformed cadets by saying that they must afterwards attend a meeting of the group. While the general admires the delicate, almost invisible design running along the polished metal, two of the Shield Society members tie his arms and

legs to a chair; the two others and Mishima him-

self quickly barricade the doors. The conspirators talk with the men outside. Mishima demands the assembly of the troops to whom he will speak from

a balcony; the general will be executed if this is refused. It seems more prudent to agree, but sometime later there is an attempt to resist, and Mishima

and Morita, who are keeping the door ajar, wound seven orderlies. ‘Terrorist procedures—to us, all the

more detestable because we have seen them used overmuch and almost everywhere during the ten years that separate us from this incident. But Mi-

shima wants to play his last chance to the very end.

MISHIMA The troops assemble below, about eight hundred

men little pleased at having been called away from their work routine or off-duty pastimes by this unexpected command. The general waits patiently.

Mishima opens the French window, goes out onto the balcony, and jumps, like a good athlete, onto

the balustrade: “We see Japan reveling in pros-

perity and wallowing in spiritual emptiness . . .

We shall give it back its image and die in doing

so. Is it possible that you value life, given a world where the spirit is dead? . . . The army protects

that very treaty* which denies its right to exist . . .

On October 21, 1969, the army should have taken

power and demanded the revision of the constitution . . . Our

fundamental

Japanese values are

threatened . . . The Emperor no longer has his

rightful place in Japan . . .”

Obscene insults, curses fly up to him. The last

photographs show him, his fist in the air, openmouthed, with that peculiar ugliness of a scream-

ing man, a play of the physiognomy that denotes a desperate effort to make oneself heard, but which also painfully reminds one of dictators or demagogues, whatever

their convictions,

who

for the

* The Japanese—American accords, renewed a year earlier.

§/ 147 past half century have poisoned our lives. One of

the sounds of the modern world quickly adds itself to the imprecations: a helicopter is heard above

the courtyard, of its blades.

drowning

everything

in the roar

With another jump, Mishima stands on the balcony once more; he reopens the window, fol-

lowed by Morita

carrying an unfurled banner

with the same protests and the same demands; he

then sits on the floor, about a meter away from the general, and executes, point by point, with perfect control, the gestures that we have seen him per-

form in his role as Lieutenant Takeyama. Was the atrocious pain what he had foreseen, what he had

tried to instruct himself in when he mimicked death? He had asked Morita not to let him suffer too long. The young man lowers his sword, but tears blind his eyes and his hands tremble. He

barely manages to inflict on the dying man two or three horrible cuts on the neck and shoulder. “Give

me the sword.” Furu-Koga dextrously takes the sword and with a single blow does what must be done. Morita sits on the floor, meantime, but does not have the strength to do more than deeply

scratch himself with the dagger which he has taken from Mishima’s hand. This possibility had

MISHIMA been foreseen in the samurai code: the suicide too young or too old, too weak or too disturbed to make the correct cut, is to be decapitated on the spot.

“Go ahead.” And Furu-Koga does. The general leans forward as much as his bonds

allow him, and murmurs the Buddhist prayer for the dead:

“Namu

Amida

Butsu!” This general,

from whom no one expected anything, behaves with perfect correctness foreseen drama of which continue the butchery; young people answer in

in the atrocious and unhe is a witness. “Don’t it’s useless.” The three one voice that they have

promised not to die. “Cry to your heart’s content, but be calm when the doors are opened.” A somewhat dry admonition, but better, in view of their sobs, than a brutal order not to cry. “Cover the

bodies decently.” The three hide the lower half of

the bodies with the jackets of their uniforms and,

weeping, replace the two severed heads. Finally, a question perfectly understandable from a commander: “Are you going to let my subordinates

see me tied up like this?” They untie him. The doors are unlocked and the barricade cleared away;

the three young men allow themselves to be hand-

cuffed by the policemen; journalists flock into the room full of the smell of a butcher’s. Let us leave

them to their job.

a /149 Now

the audience.

“He was mad,” says the

Prime Minister, questioned on the spot. The father, listening to the radio at midday, had heard the first

reports,

announcing

Mishima’s

speech

to the

troops; his reaction was typical of most families: “What troubles he causes me! We'll have to make apologies to the authorities . . .” Yoko, the wife,

heard the news of his death at twenty past noon, in the taxi that was taking her to a luncheon. When

questioned later, she replied that she had

expected the suicide, but not for another year or two. (“Yoko has no imagination,” Mishima had

said one day.) The only heartfelt words are spoken

by the mother as she greets the visitors who have come to offer their condolences. “Don’t grieve for

him. For the first time in his life, he did what he

wanted to do.” No doubt she exaggerated, but Mishima himself had written, in July 1969: “When

I relive in my thoughts the past twenty-five years,

their emptiness fills me with astonishment. I can barely say I have lived.” Even during the course of the most dazzling and fullest life, what we really wish to do is rarely accomplished, and from the

depths or the heights of the Void, things that have been, and things that have not, both seem shadows or dreams.

We have a photograph of the family seated in a

MISHIMA long row of chairs, during the funeral, which, in

spite of an almost general disapproval of this

seppuku, attracted thousands of people. (It seems that this violent act profoundly disturbed people in a world they imagined was without problems.

To take Mishima seriously would have been to

deny their adaptation to defeat and to the progress

of modernization, as well as to the prosperity which

followed. It was best not to see in this gesture more than a heroic and foolish mixture

of literature,

theater, and the need to have people talk about him.) Azusa the father, Shizue the mother, Yoko the wife, no doubt each had his or her own opinion or interpretation. We see them in profile: the

mother bending her head a little, hands together,

looking sullen from the pain; the father sitting upright, probably conscious of being photographed;

Yoko, as beautiful and impenetrable as always; and

nearer to us, in the same row, Kawabata, the old novelist who had received the Nobel Prize the preceding year, master and friend of the dead man.

The old man’s emaciated face is highly refined; sadness can be read on it as if it were transparent.

A year later Kawabata himself will commit suicide, with no heroic rites Che simply turned on the

gas), after having been heard to say that during

that year he had received a visit from Mishima.

/151 And now, left for the very end, the last and most disturbing image—so

disturbing that it has

rarely been reproduced. On the carpet, no doubt acrylic, of the general’s office, two heads placed one next to the other as if they were skittles, al-

most touching each other. Two motionless heads,

two brains in which blood no longer flows, two computers stopped in their work, no longer select-

ing and no longer decoding the perpetual flow of

images, impressions, stimuli, and responses which

by the millions pass each day through a human

being, constituting what we call the life of the

spirit, and even the life of the senses, triggering

and directing the movements of the rest of the

body. Two severed heads, “gone to other worlds

where other laws reign,” arousing, when we look at them, more awe than horror. Value judg-

ments, be they moral, political, or aesthetic, are,

at least for the moment, reduced to silence in their presence. The idea which imposes itself is

more disconcerting and simpler: among the myriads of things which exist and have existed, these two

heads have been; they are. What fills those sightless eyes is no longer the unfurled banner of political slogans, or any other intellectual or carnal

image, not even the Void which Honda had con-

templated, and which suddenly seems nothing but

MISHIMA

a concept or a symbol too human in spite of every-

thing. ‘T'wo objects, the already almost inorganic debris of destroyed structures, which, once passed

through the flame, will be no more than mineral

residue and ash; not even subjects for meditation,

because we lack the knowledge to meditate on

them. Two stones, rolled along by the River of

Action, which the immense wave has for a moment left upon the sand, and which it then carries

away.

Translated

With

by Alberto

a new Foreword

Manguel

by Donald

ISBN

Richie

O-22b-96b538-5 | 90000

9"780226"965321