Unbearable Tensions: The Life, Work, and Bizarre Death of Yukio Mishima

We are in the centennial year of one of Japan’s most admired and controversial writers, Yukio Mishima. Born into a well-to-do Tokyo family on January 14, 1925, Mishima lived through some of the most dramatic events of his nation’s history — though he avoided service on the front lines in the Second World War — and became a fixture of literary circles, forming a fast friendship with Donald Keene, the American translator who would introduce his works to the West. In a relatively brief career, Mishima turned out novels, stories, and plays at a fast clip until he got sidetracked into a quixotic crusade for physical and cultural purity against a regime that he and contemporaries felt had sold out to a global order prizing docile consumerism with no regard for the nation’s spiritual and cultural heritage. On November 25, 1970, the author committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, after a failed military coup by his ragtag bunch of extremist kooks.

To celebrate his actual cultural achievements, the New York-based Japan Society has organized a fall program featuring events focused on Mishima’s life and work. It has hosted a production of Kinkakuji, a play based on the 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and has included more theater performances on its calendar. The talks, screenings, and stage productions carry on the organization’s work of educating Western audiences about modern Japan’s enigmas and the literary firebrand who came to embody them.

The Japan Society’s efforts complement, but cannot take the place of, the insights that come from engagement with the scholarly and biographical work on Mishima and, of course, from diligent reading of his own work itself. One of the most intriguing accounts we have is Henry Scott Stokes’s The Life & Death of Yukio Mishima, which presents its subject’s life as one of conflicting personal, professional, and literary imperatives that crippled Mishima’s mental health and finally pushed him over the edge.

From the start, Mishima’s upbringing was fraught with tensions, Stokes relates. Born in his grandparents’ home as Kimitake Hiraoka, the boy spent his early years under the influence of a grandmother who looked back with reverence to Japan’s samurai traditions and had little respect for the father, a prim civil servant in the ministry of agriculture and forestry.

Stokes draws many parallels between Mishima’s early life and that of the narrator in the author’s breakthrough 1949 novel Confessions of a Mask. Reading Stokes’s account, which quotes Mishima’s recollections at length, we learn how the grandmother literally abducted the boy from his mother, keeping him beside her sickbed on a lower floor. The boy’s father wanted him to follow a professional path, but the grandmother had no respect for such a way of life. The tensions were severe. In the end, the sickly and aesthetically-inclined boy went his own way. Already a voracious reader of fairy tales at age five, Mishima soon broadened his tastes as his fascination for literature grew. As a student at the Gakushuin, or Peers’ School, in Tokyo, he wrote pieces that appeared in its literary magazine.

During the war, Mishima worked for a time in a factory that made planes for use in that ultimate expression of militant nationalism, kamikaze attacks on Allied forces. But notwithstanding this vocation — or his exposure to a nationalist and militarist ideology at the hands of his grandmother — Mishima lied to a medical examiner about his health and succeeded in disqualifying himself from active service. Yet even if he survived the conflict that took the lives of so many of his young countrymen, Mishima was not entirely happy about having avoided service. As Professor Julia Hansell Clark’s September 17 talk at the Japan Society emphasized, Mishima’s novels are full of vivid accounts of the aftermath of Allied attacks on civilians.

He burned with nationalist fervor. The gulf between what he believed his national, spiritual, and racial destiny required, and what he could bring himself to do, is far from the only malaise that Stokes explores. Mishima had conflicted feelings about his sexuality and about his identity as a writer. He felt gratified at receiving the tutelage of Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, but in Stokes’s view, his affinities with his contemporary, the novelist and short story writer Osamu Dazai, were even stronger.

“Both men were snobs; both desired to create a sensation and be heroes of the general public; and both were obsessed with suicide,” Stokes relates. Indeed, both ended up taking their own lives.

Dazai had a well-deserved reputation as an eloquent, powerful young novelist, and one might expect Mishima to have appreciated knowing such an accomplished man of letters. Yet, seeing in Dazai something like his own reflection in a distorted mirror, Mishima did not at all like the sight that greeted him. Stokes relates an incident where, in the course of a drinking session at a Ginza restaurant, Mishima told Dazai to his face that he hated Dazai’s writing. Dazai responded with a vicious quip about how, if that were true, Mishima would not have lowered his dignity to join the restaurant party. “The remark stung Mishima, presumably because it had an element of truth,” Stokes observes.

While Stokes stresses the primacy of Confessions of a Mask as a guide to understanding what made Mishima tick, the plays are no less essential. Mishima’s life and work are a study in contradictions, and, on many levels, are emblematic of the uncertainties and contradictions of Japan’s modern identity. To further audiences’ grasp of these themes, the Japan Society on October 24 and 25 will host the North American premiere of dance-theater performance of Le Tambour de Soie, or The Silk Drum. It is an adaptation of Mishima’s interpretation of a Noh theater play. Its title, in Keene’s translation, is The Damask Drum.

For anyone interested in understanding Mishima’s fixation with a society changing at breakneck speed and the moral and spiritual confusion afflicting it, few works could be as engaging. The Damask Drum’s antihero is an aging janitor named Iwakichi, who has been relying on the favors of a girl named Kayoko to relay love letters to the object of his infatuation, a lady named Hanako Tsukioka. Kayoko is an office worker in a building across the street from where Madame Tsukioka lives and works, and appears to want to help Iwakichi out of pity. Sadly, others are not nearly as kind.

Iwakichi is a tragic figure. The sincerity of his professions of love for the woman is matched only by the disdain of other characters, including a teacher, Shunnosuke Fujima, and an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kaneko, for the idea that someone with a station in life as humble as the janitor’s could aspire to be worthy of Madame Tsukioka. The others jeer at the old man in secret and decide to play a cruel prank. They will proffer a silk drum to the janitor and tell him to beat it. The sounds he makes on the drum will affirm his ardor for Madame Tsukioka. As one of the plotters acknowledges, the implication here is that, if the janitor makes no sound on the instrument, his dream will go unrealized.

Of course it is not possible to make noise by beating on a silk drum — or at least sounds loud enough to reach across the street to the building that the plotters occupy. Iwakichi is doomed to unworthiness and humiliation, much like the young monk in Kinkakuji. The dice are loaded against the aging man with his traditional values and yearning for a partnership that comports with old-fashioned ideals. He tries and fails to make his voice register on the device that modernity has held out to him.

No one will miss the significance of the fact that one of the people who have it in for Ichikawa has a high-level post at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — he’s an official not unlike Mishima’s father — and hence plays a role, in this postwar era, in opening up Japan to the globalizing winds that cast aside nostalgia for Heian glory that have survived through the ages. Ichikawa is a dinosaur. Global corporations and a tech-driven society are the future. Not everyone has a place in the new society coming into being, and some Japanese, tragically in Mishima’s view, are all too cozy with that reality.

At the end of the play (mild spoiler), Ichikawa does not do anything as dramatic as burn down a temple, like the distraught youth at the center of Kinkakuji. But his plight is as poignant as that of the monk whom Major Curda brought to life in a brilliant performance in that production. The Japan Society’s celebrations of Mishima have cast a light on the deep complexities of an idiosyncratic society in radical transition, while conveying the tensions that make his work compelling, even if the Nobel committee passed him over.

But, in the end, the only source who can cast light on that brilliant but troubled writer who became Yukio Mishima is Yukio Mishima.