Yukio Mishima’s Death

The facts of Yukio Mishima’s death are not in dispute.

Very early on the day he died, he completed and addressed to his publisher the final chapter of the fourth and last book of The Sea of Fertility. (The title refers to the moon’s Sea of Fertility, a cold and sterile place. It was his metaphor for the world.)

After that, he showered and carefully put on his uniform. He had designed it himself. The cap had a high crown. The tailored tunic and trousers fit closely to his slight, muscular body. The four other members of Tate No Kai – the Shield Society – who joined him that morning were dressed similarly.

The Shield Society was his own little army. It had about 100 members, all of them well-formed young men with clean features and fresh complexions. Most of them would have been about 25 years his junior. They met on a one-night-a-week basis, year-round. Mishima gave them foot drill, and tried to build them physically and mentally through martial arts and character-building lectures. They spent two weeks a year in a camp on the slopes of Mount Fuji. He said they were preparing to be able to help the armed forces in case there was some sort of armed leftist uprising in Japan.

That morning, the five of them went to Camp Ichigaya, the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan’s Self-Defence Force, to the office of the commanding general. There, they seized control. They tied the general to his chair and demanded that members of the Defence Force assemble on the square beneath the general’s window.

When some 800 of them had fallen in, Mishima got out of the window onto a balcony and delivered a long, emotional harangue about the spinelessness of the Defence Force. His purpose was to arouse the 260,000-man force into demanding a revision of the post-World War II Constitution. That document severely restricted the Force’s operational capabilities. It had been designed that way by the Allies so as to militate against a return to the militarism that had gripped Japan before the war.

The young servicemen who were listening to him seemed completely disinterested. They booed and heckled him.

Mishima left the balcony, and returned to his followers. I imagine he would have liked to exchange his uniform for the white kimono that is customary for the ceremony of seppuku – ritual suicide – but he did not.

He would probably have used a wakizashi, the shorter of the two swords samurais had been entitled to carry in years gone by. Half kneeling, half sitting on his legs, he would have pulled the blade into his abdomen and sliced from left to right, finishing with an upward jerk.

Dying from that kind of wound takes a long time, so people committing seppuku are entitled to have a helper, armed with the longer of the samurai’s two swords, called a katana. The job of the kaishaku, given a signal by the dying man, was to cut off his head with one swift, merciful stroke.

Mishima’s kaishaku was his young friend, the 21 year-old student leader of the Shield Society, Masakatsu Morita. He lacked Mishima’s self-discipline and missed with the three strokes he took, cutting Mishima’s back severely. A third student, Masayoshi Koga, stepped in and cut off Mishima’s head. Morita, too, tried to commit seppuku, but could not bring himself to make more than a very shallow cut. Koga stepped into the breach once again. Later, for his part in the affair, he was sent to prison for seven years. Mishima’s ghost owes him much for preventing his death from deteriorating farther into ugly farce than it did.

That’s how Yukio Mishima ended his life, at the age of 45. Why he ended it that way is not nearly as straightforward.

It would be easy to think he was just a silly little right-wing head case who got himself out on a limb and thought he couldn’t get down in any other way. But that would be well off the mark. For a start, he was far from being a little man.

A long article about him that appeared in the New York Times Magazine a short time before he died began this way: “Yukio Mishima…deserves and probably will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the next time Japan’s turn comes around…”

Mishima was a highly-respected writer, a man taken seriously the world round for his books, his plays, his poetry and his articles. His Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea were all books well-known and widely read in the West in the ‘60s. Reconstructions of the way he spent his time before his death show a man as busy as it is possible to be with the details of his life as a writer, as a husband, as a leader and as a literary figure of great stature.

The late Yasunari Kawabata, the grand old man of contemporary Japanese literature, a man who did win the Nobel Prize, in 1968, said, “Mishima has extraordinary talent, and it is not just a Japanese talent, but a talent of world scale. It is the kind of genius that comes along perhaps once every 300 years.”

Mishima did not see his little army as a group that deserved to be thought of as having the kind of shallow political significance that an American pressure group might have. He wanted to use it to push for a return, not to militarism, which he saw as a Western import, but to the martial spirit that characterised Japanese society until the Meiji period. He admired the samurai tradition and its rigid traditions.

“I am trying to get back to the ‘rough-soul’ tradition of the samurai warrior stories from the medieval age,” he said. “Since World War II, the feminine tradition has been emphasised to the exclusion of the masculine. We wanted to cover our consciences. So we gave great publicity to the fact that we are peace-loving people who love flower arranging and gardens and that sort of thing.

“It was purposely done. The Government wanted to cover our masculine tradition from the eyes of foreigners as a kind of protection.”

So is that it? Mishima was a kind of misogynist?

Don’t you believe it. This is a man whose personality peels like an onion, skin after skin after skin. This is a man who invented himself in the way he invented the characters of his books.

He told the New York Times that he was utterly a writer, and that all his other activities were in the service of his art, in no way interfering with it.

He seemed fascinated by suicide.

In Runaway Horses, the second of the books that make up The Sea of Fertility, he wrote about a failed samurai uprising in 1877, which resulted in about 80 of the survivors committing seppuku.

One of his earlier stories, Patriotism, was made into a film. It concerned young Lieutenant Takeyama and his wife, after a revolt by right-wing officers has been crushed, and its participants executed by order of the Emperor. Takeyama had been involved in the planning, but was left out at the last minute by his colleagues because he was newly married. He and his wife agree that they should live no longer than his colleagues, and both commit seppuku. Mishima, an accomplished actor, played the part of Takeyama in the film. Was he playing himself, his character, the character his character wrote…who?

The great psychological story about Mishima is that when he was a young man, he came across the famous Guido Reni picture of St Sebastian, driven to exhaustion, pierced by an arrow, and was moved to sexual ecstasy by it. He told that story on himself, of course.

But the really telling story about Mishima, I think, is less well known, and concerns the family into which he was born. Its members were, for class-conscious Japan, an extraordinary mixture of ranks, groups and cultures. His grandfather was the Governor of a Japanese Island, who was forced to retire because of an electoral scandal. His father was a sullen bureaucrat who compensated for his father’s improprieties with his own circumspect, faultless life. He was an unloving parent, forcing tests of endurance and will on his son. Mishima’s mother came from a family of Confucian tutors, part of the very backbone of middle-class Japanese logic and morality.

At some stage in Mishima’s young life, he was virtually kidnapped by his paternal grandmother, who was the aristocratic granddaughter of a daimyo – a feudal prince – and who kept Mishima with her, in luxurious circumstances, for years. This woman was an hysteric, suffering from attacks of rheumatism and the acute pain of cranial neuralgia.

“At the age of eight, I had a 60 year-old lover,” one of his biographers, Marguerite Yourcenar, quoted him as having said. In her suffocating care, he became a physically weak and sickly child, something he spent the rest of his life compensating for.

She loved him deeply, and undoubtedly planted in him the seeds of madness and of otherness that grew into genius. It must have been from her, I think, that he acquired his sense of being a part of a long-dead world of martial greatness. It must have been from his association with her that he acquired the ability to move effortlessly from reality to unreality and back again that made writing so easy for him. It also made it easy for him to write the script of his own life, and to invent the character who died that glorious death for him…Runaway Horses ends with this sentence: "As he plunged the knife into his stomach, the sun exploded behind his eyelids."

In Japanese, unlike English, there is an onomatopoetic sound for absolute silence. The Japanese word is sin, pronounced "sheeeen....." with the sound trailing off at the end. It is the sound of afterwards, when the bodies have been removed, when everything has been done, when everyone has gone home and only silence remains. At first, in the post-Mishima suicide sin, people worried that political unrest would follow, perhaps a coup. No such thing materialised, and their fear gradually subsided. Now, in Japan, the Mishima incident is regarded as silly and beneath consideration.

Copyright © 2003 Gavin Shorto