By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble
To both historians and literacy critics alike, Yukio Mishima
remains an extremely divisive figure. Even after the fifty years since his
death, people remain divided over his legacy as both a writer and a public
figure. On one hand, Mishima was an incredible writer; only beaten to a Nobel
Prize for Literature by his fellow countryman and teacher Yasunari Kawabata. Yet
on the other, he represents those in Japan’s Post-War years who refused to
abandon the old traditions of the Imperial era. The three main themes that
permeate Mishima work, closeted homosexual characters, a strongly romanticised
understanding of suicide and staunch right-wing political views, are all deeply
intertwined within his own life. This combination of thoughts and beliefs created
a type of writer that Japan had never seen before and may never see again.
Born in Tokyo in January 1925 as the oldest son of a
government official, Mishima spent the first twelve years of his life living
with his grandmother, Natsuko, and extended family. Natsuko was extremely
strict and refused to allow Mishima to play sports or with other boys his own
age. This meant he spent a lot of his time either alone, or with his female
cousins. When he moved in back with his family, Mishima was enrolled in the gakushūin,
an elite school originally for the children of Japanese nobility and other
upper-class families. During his school days, Mishima read both Japanese and
Western mythology, as well as joining the editorial board of his school’s
literary society. This was Mishima’s first taste of literature. However, like
his grandmother, Mishima’s father was extremely strict, and refused to accept
Mishima’s love of writing. Support for Mishima’s new passion came from two sources:
his mother, Shizue, and fellow member of the literacy society’s editorial board
Zenmei Hasuda. It was at the literacy society that Mishima began to hone his
voice as a writer. Mishima’s work relied upon complex vocabulary and a heavy
use of metaphors, alongside themes of the natural world and the supernatural,
often intertwined with a right-wing flavour. Mishima is understood to be a part
of the nihon rōman ha, the Japanese Romantic School, of the 1930s.
In April 1944, around six months before he graduated high school,
Mishima received his draft notice from the army. However, due to poor health,
Mishima was incorrectly diagnosed with tuberculosis by army doctors and
declared unfit for duty. Like many young men at the time, Mishima had assumed
that he would be able to fight, and possibly even die, in the on-going war with
China and the West. His parents were extremely relieved to know that their son
would be spared conscription, but Mishima’s reaction was less positive. Mishima
had been strongly influenced by the ultra-nationalist philosophy that had
gripped Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. He held a deep love for his country and a
strong, perhaps even fanatical, devotion and reverence to the emperor to such a
great extent that he wrote in his diary that he wished to join the tokkō,
or ‘Special Attack’, units of the Japanese army. These units included the
infamous kamikaze; Japanese suicide pilots instructed to crash their
planes into British and American ships during the Pacific War. It’s speculated
that Mishima’s guilt stemming from the failure to die his idealised ‘glorious
death’ in the war combined with his weak constitution as a child, lead to an
overcompensation by the prevalence of traditional Japanese culture in his later
works.
After the war ended, Mishima joined the Law Department at
the University of Tokyo, at the suggestion of his father, despite his wish to
study literature. Despite this, Mishima
managed to juggle both his writing and law studies and graduated in 1947. He
then joined the treasury department and began working as a government
bureaucrat. After a year at the treasury, however, it was obvious where
Mishima’s true passions lay. After persuading his father to let him leave his
job in the civil service and pursue writing full-time, Mishima made a name for
himself with his breakthrough novel Confessions of a Mask (1949). Confessions
of a Mask follows a young boy named Kochan, a physically weak boy who was kept
away from boys his own age and later becomes obsessed with the male physique
and an almost erotic-sense of the macabre. Later in the story, Kochan develops homosexual
feelings towards one of his male friends. He attempts to suppress these urges
and tries to force himself to love a woman, Sonoko, though he admits he never
truly can. These hidden feelings are the titular ‘mask’ that Kochan believes everyone
hides behind. It doesn’t take Edogawa Ranpo to figure out who Kochan was a stand
in for.
By the late 1950s, Mishima had risen to celebrity-level
fame. His major works at the time included his break-out novel Confessions
of a Mask as well as; Tobacco (1946), Middle Ages (1946), Forbidden
Colours (1951), The Sound of Waves (1954), The Temple of the
Golden Pavilion (1956) and Kyoko’s House (1959). By 1960, however,
Japanese society had gone through some quite radical changes. The conservative Liberal
Democratic Party had cemented itself as the strongest political force in the
country since the merger between Shigeru Yoshida’s Liberal Party and Ichirō
Hatoyama’s Japan Democratic Party in 1955. Meanwhile, the Japanese Communist
Party had lost some of its impact since the days of the Mountain Village
Operation Units earlier in the decade. Now under the control of the more
moderate Kenji Miyamoto, the JCP aimed for more peaceful and democratic means
of achieving their revolution and they regularly competed in elections. The position
of Japan’s most radical leftists had fallen, instead, to the zengakuren,
a left-wing student organisation that had already proved their commitment to the
socialist cause in the Sunagawa Struggle. They were complemented in the diet by
the Japanese Socialist Party, which had been in opposition since 1948. Since
the end of the war, the left had made major gains in both their political and
public presence. The big issue facing Japan in 1960 was the US-Japan Security
Treaty, or anpo, which would allow permanent US military bases in Japan.
The treaty, that was being put through the Diet by the current LDP prime
minister Nobusuke Kishi, was met by firm opposition from a wide section of the
public and by left-wing opposition groups, particularly the Socialist and Communist
parties. In June 1960, hundreds of thousands of protesters, including members
of the zengakuren, socialists and communists, marched to the National
Diet in Tokyo. The protesters smashed their way in the Diet but were beaten
back by a mixture of police and right-wing thugs secretly hired by the
government. Hundreds of people were injured and a Tokyo University student and member
of the zengakuren, Michiko Kanba, was killed by the police. In the
literary world, these protests highlighted the widening gap between left-wing
and right-wing writers. To Mishima, the protests had been hijacked by
socialists and communists, and he regularly contributed newspaper articles on
the anpo debate to the mainichi shimbun. Although he didn’t particularly
agree with the treaty, he would rather support a strong right-wing figure like
Kishi than the leftists, and was therefore often critical of the protesters
themselves, rather than the cause they were actually protesting about.
This wasn’t the only time, though, that politics had spilled
over into the literary world. In November 1960, a magazine called chūō kōron
published Shichirō Fukazawa’s short story The Tale of an Elegant Dream (1960).
The Tale of an Elegant Dream tells the story of a socialist revolution
that sweeps Japan and contains a scene where Emperor Shōwa, Empress Kōjun and
the young Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko are publicly guillotined
in front of a jubilant crowd. Rightists were outraged. They thought it was treasonous
to depict the imperial family in such a graphic way. Both Fukazawa and chūō kōron
received countless letters of complaints, some even going far as to mail in
death threats. The magazine argued that they were allowed to publish whatever
they wanted on the grounds of their right to freedom of speech and artistic freedom.
Tensions boiled over in February 1961 when a seventeen-year-old
ultra-nationalist by the name of Kazutaka Komori broke into the house of the
magazine’s president Hōji Shimanaka in an attempt to assassinate him. In the
commotion, Komori killed Shimanaka’s maid and severely injured his wife. Concerned
that writers had now become a target for political fanatics, the police put
Mishima and a few other writers on round-the-clock police protection. Although he
did not agree with the narrative, Mishima had recommended Fukazawa’s story to
the editors of chūō kōron on the grounds of its literary merits. To
rightists, this meant that Mishima had a become valid target.
All of the political chaos that had engulfed Japan in the
late 1950s and 1960s, manifested itself in Mishima’s work. Patriotism (1960)
is a piece of historical fiction set during the ‘February 26 Incident’, an attempted
coup by a rogue faction of the Japanese army that sought to take control of
both the military and the government. The story follows a young army lieutenant
who is ordered to execute his fellow soldiers for their role in the rebellion. Unable
to kill his fellow soldiers, both the lieutenant and his wife commit harakiri.
The two major themes in Patriotism are suicide and right-wing politics. Two
other of Mishima’s stories share these two themes: The Sound of Waves and
The Middle Ages. In a way, these three stories foreshadow Mishima’s own suicide.
On November 25th 1970, under the pretence of a
meeting with an army commander, Mishima and four members of a nationalist
paramilitary group, the Tatenokai, barricaded themselves in an office of
Camp Ichigaya, a JSDF military base. Whilst wearing a white headband bearing
the red sun of Japan that was strongly reminiscent of fanatics of the Imperial
era, Mishima went out to a balcony to address a group of soldiers and hopefully
inspire a military coup to overthrow the civilian government and restore the emperor
to direct power. Mishima’s speech was not well met by the soldiers, and he was repeatedly
heckled and jeered. Knowing that his coup would never come to fruition, Mishima
returned to the office where, using a traditional Japanese sword he’d bought on
a previous holiday to Kumamoto, committed ritual suicide, or seppuku. Mishima
had finally died the glorious death he’d written about for more than twenty
years and had craved since he was a teenager. His dream was complete, and he
was engraved forever in the pages of both Japanese and literary history.
