Some Things About Yukio Mishima
Remembering a Literary and Political Conundrum, Fifty Years On
When I was growing up in Tokyo during the 1960s, my mother belonged to the College Women’s Club, which held monthly lunches with notable Japanese speakers. One of these was Yukio Mishima, who at the time occupied a similar position to Norman Mailer’s: as a serious man of letters with an outré persona that enhanced his fame while detracting from his work. As obnoxious as Mailer could be, Mishima was by far the weirder of the two. While Mailer was busy throwing punches and feuding with fellow writers, Mishima was obsessively pumping iron, establishing a coterie of young right-wing militarists and having himself photographed as St. Sebastian martyred by arrows. Not that I knew these things at the time, since I was eight. I had heard of Mishima, but it was my mother’s account of his speech that sparked my interest.
Mishima began his talk by calling the noon start time “the crack of dawn.” He then proceeded to describe his writing schedule. According to my mother he said, “I start at 10 pm by reading a few of my son’s comic books. Then I write all night and go to bed at dawn. After I get up in the afternoon, I go to the gym.” To me, a nascent night owl, this was enthralling news.
A year or two after his talk, my mother ran into Mishima at the Tokyo Philharmonic. She was there with my father; Mishima, a classical music buff, was there alone. “Everybody knew who he was but no one spoke to him,” she recalled the next day. Though the writer’s solitary attendance struck her as sad, going out alone was common among married Japanese men. For Mishima, a married father of two who was also gay, social freedom was the reward for social conformity. In my mind’s eye I saw him enjoying a solitary smoke at intermission, pointedly ignoring his fellow patrons as they pretended not to notice him. Mishima’s contentment in his own company was almost as cool as his writing schedule, I thought.
The next memory I have of him is not my mother’s but my own. On November 25th, 1970, I was in the kitchen baking cookies, a hard-won privilege that was resented by our cook, who allotted me only an hour in his domain that cloudy Saturday afternoon. I was happily dropping batter onto pans and singing along to the Top 40 when FEN Radio cut to breaking news. Yukio Mishima was holed up in a Japan Self Defense Forces barracks with his band of far-right disciples, making a fiery nationalistic speech to the jeering soldiers. This was an insurrection, and the fact that it was happening nearby made it all the more shocking. I was wondering how to react when our maid Kiyoko-san burst into the kitchen, crying.
“Doushitano?” I asked. “What happened?”
“Mishima-san is committing seppuku,” she wailed. “What will the Americans think of us?”
“Don’t worry,” I said in Japanese. “Americans won’t care.” I was sure that no one outside Japan would notice that one of the country’s most prominent writers had killed himself in spectacular fashion.
It wasn’t until much later that I learned the details of that day inside the JSDF garrison. As a student of Japanese history, I already knew how to commit seppuku: first a deep thrust of a short sword in the abdomen; then a long upward heave that slices through the intestines. Then comes the tricky part: once disemboweled, one must be swiftly beheaded from behind, a coup de grace that demands strength, nerve and skill with a sword. Mishima’s designated second (kaishakunin), Morita, might have possessed nerve but not the other qualities. After failing to behead his master with a clean stroke, Morita resorted to repeatedly hacking at Mishima’s neck until another follower, Koga, took over the task. Butchering Mishima took so much time that Morita had only just managed his own seppuku, with a beheading by the beleaguered Koga, when officers broke down the door.
Though dramatically grisly, the insurrection was a fiasco that failed to accomplish Mishima’s political goals: restoring the Emperor to power and returning Japan to an idealized samurai past. Seppuku had long been considered shameful, but his botched seppuku was disgusting, and the attempted coup was a national disgrace. For a few years, it was hard to separate Mishima the writer from Mishima the political fanatic. But as time passed, his shocking end was supplanted by his literary legacy and bolstered by numerous biographies, including two in English. There was even a well-made American biopic, though it has never been screened in Japan.
Fifty years later, I still re-read his books, especially After the Banquet, my favorite of his novels, but I rarely think about his lunatic ideas or violent death. I prefer to remember him as my mother described: a famous author in a suit and tie, only forty-two when he gave his talk at the Tokyo Women’s Club. I picture him getting up late and lifting weights in the afternoons. (A classic gym-bot, his workouts were all chest and arms and no legs.) I see him at the symphony and later in his study, writing furiously until dawn.
Most of all, I remember that Mishima, a preternaturally prolific writer, loved deadlines, which he set for himself in multiples. On Deadline Day—which, because his novels were serialized in magazines, came often--his various editors and publishers would gather at his door and wait. Then, at the appointed hour, Mishima would emerge with a stack of manuscripts and hand them out like cookies, one by one, to the assembled literati.
Because the Japanese language couldn’t be rendered by typewriter, all of Mishima’s manuscripts were written in the author’s neat hand. Although they were first drafts, the pages were generally free of corrections. Other Japanese writers’ manuscripts were studded with cross-outs and revisions, but everything Mishima wrote—thirty-four novels and numerous plays, short story collections and essays—flowed from his pen in final form, ready for publication.