Persona

A Biography of Yukio Mishima

Naoki Inose, Hiroaki Sato

• Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781611720082
• eBook ISBN: 9781611725247
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

A critical biography of a modern Japanese literary giant, whose brilliant career ended in a spectacular ritual suicide.




Yukio Mishima (b. 1925) was a brilliant writer and intellectual whose relentless obsession with beauty, purity, and patriotism ended in his astonishing self-disembowelment and decapitation in downtown Tokyo in 1970. Nominated for the Nobel Prize, Mishima was the best-known novelist of his time (works like Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion are still in print in English), and his legacy—his persona —is still honored and puzzled over.

Who was Yukio Mishima really? This, the first full biography to appear in English in almost forty years, traces Mishima's trajectory from a sickly boy named Kimitake Hiraoka to a hard-bodied student of martial arts. In detail it examines his family life, the wartime years, and his emergence, then fame, as a writer and advocate for traditional values. Revealed here are all the personalities and conflicts and sometimes petty backbiting that shaped the culture of postwar literary Japan.

Working entirely from primary sources and material unavailable to other biographers, author Naoki Inose and translator Hiroaki Sato together have produced a monumental work that covers much new ground in unprecedented depth. Using interviews, social and psychological analysis, and close reading of novels and essays, Persona removes the mask that Mishima so artfully created to disguise his true self.

CHAPTER ONE

Peasant Ancestors and Grandfather

Long Live the Emperor!

—Mishima’s will upon receipt of induction order

“The earth around here is quite solid,” Funae Fujio said. One of the many who wrote down what they remembered about Mishima after his sensational death, Funae was asked about the characteristics of the Kako River Basin, in the Banshū (Harima) Plain, northwest of Kobe. “So much so that when there was talk of moving the capital in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake, this area suddenly attracted a great deal of attention.”

Funae was right. The calamity that struck on the first day of September 1923 and claimed more than one hundred thousand dead or missing, prompted some to consider moving the seat of government out of Tokyo, even though the government itself announced the capital would stay where it was. In particular, the army, which had long feared the indefensibility of Tokyo in case of war because of its closeness to the Pacific Ocean, conducted a top-secret study led by Maj. Imamura Hitoshi, on the General Staff. Imamura, one of the few honorable and admired generals to come out of the war two decades later, finally came up with three candidates: Ryūzan (today’s Yongsan, Korea; Japan had annexed the country in 1910); Hachiōji, west of Tokyo; and the Kako River Basin.¹

But the government stuck to its promise not to move. And the army’s fears would prove correct. The US air raids on the night of March 9, 1945, alone would incinerate one hundred thousand people—although, of course, by then the long-range aircraft developed in the meantime had rendered the distance from the Pacific Ocean or any ocean pointless.

Taking Draft Physicals

In May 1944, the nineteen-year-old Hiraoka Kimitake—he had been given the penname Mishima Yukio two years earlier, but we will use his real name for the time being—left Tokyo to go to the town of Shikata to take physicals for those of draft age. After Kobe, his train chugged along across the Banshū Plain until it crossed a large bridge shortly after Kakogawa and arrived at Hōden Station. Hōden, “treasure palace,” is somewhat unusual as a place name. The novelist Shiba Ryōtarō has a description of it in a long, drawn-out, fictionalized account of one of the region’s more famous characters, the Christian warrior-commander Kuroda Yoshitaka, commonly known as Kuroda Kanbē (1546–1604).

“The Banshū Plain, probably because the foreign-born Hata family originally developed the area, retains some of the things that the Japanese sensibility nurtured after the Nara Period finds hard to fathom,” wrote the exceedingly popular and prolific writer of historical yarns and travel reports. “What is called the Stone Treasure Palace, located east of Himeji, is one of them. It is a box shape carved out of a huge granite rock. The stone itself is as large as some kind of building structure, but apparently the work was abandoned midway, and you can’t tell what they were trying to make.”

Shiba assumed that the Hata family came from the Korean Peninsula, bringing their own deity, which became the prototype of the various deities of the region.²

The Ōshiko Shrine that deifies this giant rock is placed behind the innermost building and is on the Inland Sea side of Hōden Station. Hiraoka, then a senior at the Higher School Division of the Peers School, walked out of the other side of the station. Rice paddies spread before him. There weren’t many houses. A road two yards wide stretched straight north. The area was dotted with irrigation ponds and a number of low hills. He took the bus for the about two and a half miles from the station to the center of Shikata—at the time part of Innami County, now merged with Kakogawa City, of Hyōgo Prefecture. Only this section of the town had businesses: a sake store, a timepiece store, a drugstore, a stationery shop, a tobacco shop, a rice shop.

Hiraoka turned right at the crossroads and came upon an imposing, dignified, old house with a latticed front. It had roof tiles and, on its second floor, hole-like windows that suggested a storehouse. It was the residence of the wealthy Kōta family his grandfather knew well. He stayed there that night. The Hiraoka family’s “domicile” or legal permanent residence was located only several hundred yards east of the center of town, but he did not visit it. The next morning, provided with a guide, he went to the Shikata Elementary School to attend the orientation that the local veterans association held for the physicals scheduled two days later in the Town Hall, in Kakogawa City.

The men who had to take draft physicals that year, 1944, were those born in 1924 and 1925. Normally, only those born in a single year had to have them as they reached the conscription age. But by then the war that had started with a series of spectacular victories had reaped one stupendous defeat after another, creating enormous casualties, and that had forced the military to come up with replacements fast.

Shikata was small enough to need just one elementary school, and most of the young men who gathered, about a hundred, recognized one another. But Funae Fujio did not know Hiraoka. In fact, it was because he was a stranger among the familiar locals that Funae remembered to write about him after his death.

Before the orientation started, the young men stood around in small groups chatting, having fun with one another—in the playground, in the roofed corridor connecting buildings, and so forth. Funae was a third-year student at the Tomioka Higher Commercial School. But only a handful went from grammar school to junior high school and even fewer from junior high to higher school. Most started to work for their family businesses as soon as they were done with grammar school or junior high school. The area was mainly agricultural, though many households were in the thriving knitting industry that had started at the end of the preceding century. Most of the youths gathered there were deeply tanned, with well-developed muscles, obviously farmers.

Funae, in any case, spotted a man standing apart, all alone, at the entrance of the auditorium. What struck him first was his pale face. Then, he thought the man’s dark-blue jacket that resembled that of the navy officer’s uniform was incongruous with the gaiters that covered the lower halves of his legs. The moment he noted the incongruity, Funae had a whiff of Tokyo. He had never been to the capital.

While casting a furtive glance at the stranger, Funae overheard a schoolteacher saying to him, “I’ve never seen you before. Where are you from?” In the ensuing exchange, he heard the pale-face man say, “Gakushūin” (Peers School) and “Hiraoka.” He quickly grasped the situation. The name Hiraoka, mentioned along with the school that immediately conjured up the image of Tokyo, could only mean that he was a relative of the greatest man the region had produced in recent memory: Hiraoka Sadatarō,³ who became administrator of the Karafuto Agency.

The recipient of glances of rude curiosity directed to an outsider, the student looked defenseless. Funae decided he had to be protective of him. When the gathered youths went into the auditorium, he casually took a seat behind him. The instructions members of the veterans association gave weren’t of much importance, such as “Put on clean underwear” and “Do some setting-up exercises beforehand.” The young man from the Peers School sat ramrod straight and nodded at each instruction.

The physicals were held two days later at Kakogawa Town Hall, a solid, surprisingly modern four-story structure with its front window adorned with stained glass reminiscent of a Christian church. It has since been renovated to serve as the city’s public library, but Funae said its appearance had changed little since it was built in 1935. On one side of the building grew a single pine tree leaning to one side. The spread of its branches also had changed little over the years. Lined up in front of the pine tree, the young men were tested for their strength. The aim was to lift a farmer’s rice bag. It had sand instead of rice in it, and that made it weigh forty kilograms or ninety-seven pounds. Taking their jackets off, many of the young men readily raised the bag above their head, with a shout. Funae managed to do that, too.

It was Hiraoka’s turn. He took his jacket off. His skinny chest made his ribcage prominent. Probably never exposed to sunlight, it was white and looked unhealthy. Again, Funae found something incongruous: ample black hair on his chest. Not many Japanese males have body hair. Chest hair is rarer.

The eyes of all the hundred or so men were turned to Hiraoka. He tried to lift the bag with his thin arms. The bag wouldn’t leave the ground. His face reddened with exertion. He struggled with the bag for a while and gave up. He would describe this experience in the book that would bring him fame only five years later, Confessions of a Mask: “Farm youths lifted the rice bag as many as ten times as if it were something light, but I couldn’t pull it up even to my chest and merely won a sneer from the examiner.” Funae distinctly remembered the scene that day. No one “sneered” at Hiraoka. Funae himself watched him, worried. “‘Not even pulling it up to my chest’ was an overstatement. The rice bag wouldn’t budge,” Funae said. “As if glued to the ground, it wouldn’t rise an inch.”

Next day they gave a simple written test and a vision test. Then the announcement was made orally: “Funae Fujio passes in Class A!” There were three passing grades: Class A, First Class B and, far below them, Second Class B. During the Taishō Era (1912–26), though Japan was involved in the First World War, passing draft physicals in the Class A category did not mean induction, which was often determined by lottery. There was a surplus of soldiers, especially following the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 that forced not just the navy but also the army to cut troop strength sharply.

Now, in 1944, Japan was getting closer to defeat in a total war. Even those who would be regarded as physically unfit in other times “passed,” in the Second Class B category. Only those who were myopic or handicapped or suffered from tuberculosis were dropped on the spot. Though he was “fairly myopic,”⁴ Hiraoka Kimitake passed as Second Class B, which meant, as he wrote in Confessions, he’d “some day receive an induction order, in the end getting inducted into a crude countryside army unit.”

About this turn of events, there obviously was a miscalculation on the part of Hiraoka’s father, Azusa. Confessions says: “Because feeblebodied men like me weren’t rare in cities, father came up with this shrewd notion that my feebleness would be more pronounced if I were examined by an army unit in a rural area—and our domicile was in such an area—and I would therefore be more likely to be rejected. In consequence, I was undergoing examinations in H Prefecture, in the Kinki Region, where our domicile was.”

As a rule, anyone who received a draft notice took the physicals in the place of his domicile. But you could change the place to the municipality of your actual residence by taking certain steps. Instead of taking those steps, however, Azusa sent his son, Kimitake, more than four hundred miles west of Tokyo in the midst of war—thirteen hours from Tokyo to Kobe, one hour from Kobe to Kakogawa by train, and another hour by a different train from Kakogawa to Hōden—hoping for a greater possibility of his son’s rejection among brawny, robust farm boys.

Even while waiting for his turn in the rice-bag-lifting test of strength, Hiraoka had stayed apart from the rest of the young men. After some hesitation, Funae walked up to him. It was partly because he thought the man might need someone to talk to, but partly because he wanted to talk to someone from Tokyo where he might be going soon. Hiraoka was reading something that looked like a newspaper under a tree as if what was taking place not far from him was of no concern. Approaching him, Funae saw he was reading the Nihon Dokusho Shinbun. So he’s brought a book-review monthly to the draft physicals! Funae marveled. He started to open his mouth but couldn’t think of anything pertinent to say.

“Sir, you are a grandson of Mr. Hiraoka Sadatarō, former administrator of the Karafuto Agency, aren’t you?” He found himself blurting out. “And you are from the Peers School.” Hiraoka seemed to hesitate. Funae asked, “That means you are studying with Princess Teru, doesn’t it?”

That was an odd question to ask, Funae admitted. Princess Teru was the first child born to the then ruling monarch, Hirohito, and his wife, Nagako. She was followed by three girls, then by a boy, Akihito. But because she was the first child, Funae, who was born on October 13, 1924, had even remembered the date of her birth: December 6, 1925. And because she was only about a year younger than himself, Funae had simply assumed that Hiraoka, who was from the Peers School, might have seen her up close.

Princess Teru, whose personal name was Shigeko, had married Morihiro, the first son of Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, a year earlier, and would have three sons and two daughters but die prematurely, in 1961, at age thirty-five. As it would develop, her father-in-law would play a notable historical role.

A French-trained general who was commander-in-chief of air defense at the time, Prince Naruhiko would become prime minister following Japan’s defeat. He thus would become the only imperial prince to assume prime ministership—an ironic fate for a man who had been considered for that position in an attempt to avert the war but set aside so as not to involve someone in close imperial lineage in such a momentous role.⁵ Assuming office two days after defeat nonetheless, he would send imperial emissaries to various lands to forestall any military unit from resisting surrender, and carry out the total disarmament as demanded by the victors.

To Funae’s question, Hiraoka responded politely, “Yes, I know her.” He apparently wasn’t eager to pursue the conversation further. But Funae persisted, “That’s the Nihon Dokusho Shinbun you’re reading, isn’t it?” Hiraoka said, “Yes, it is,” with a courteous smile. Finally, Funae found what he thought would be a common topic, which was also a pressing one. “I’m a third-year student at the Takaoka Higher Commercial School. Last month I applied for ‘short duty.’ You have, too, haven’t you?”

The “short duty” was the navy’s Short-term Active Duty Program that was created in the mid-1930s as the arms race set in, to make up for the extraordinary shortage of officers as a result of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty that reduced armament. The navy’s Accounting School administered the program in its Tsukiji branch, in Tokyo. If accepted, you trained for two years and were commissioned as an ensign. If you were then assigned to the navy’s budget section, you were relatively “safe.”

“No, I haven’t. I plan to move on to the Imperial University in the fall,” Hiraoka replied. By “the Imperial University,” he meant the Imperial University of Tokyo. It was the most prestigious institution of higher education in Japan, and the graduates of the Higher School Division of the Peers School were expected to move on to it.

Still, Hiraoka’s re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Persona
• Prologue
• Chapter One: Peasant Ancestors and Grandfather
• Chapter Two: Samurai Ancestors and Grandmother
• Chapter Three: “The Boy Who Writes Poems”
• Chapter Four: Literary Correspondents
• Chapter Five: First Love
• Chapter Six: The War and Its Aftermath
• Chapter Seven: To Be a Bureaucrat or a Writer
• Chapter Eight: Confessions
• Chapter Nine: Boyfriends, Girlfriends
• Chapter Ten: Going Overseas
• Chapter Eleven: The Girlfriend
• Chapter Twelve: The Kinkakuji
• Chapter Thirteen: Overseas Again
• Chapter Fourteen: Marriage
• Chapter Fifteen: Kyōko’s House
• Chapter Sixteen: The 2.26 Incident, Yūkoku
• Chapter Seventeen: Assassinations
• Chapter Eighteen: Contretemps
• Chapter Nineteen: The Nobel Prize
• Chapter Twenty: Shinpūren, Men of the Divine Wind
• Chapter Twenty-One: “The Way of the Warrior is to die”
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Death in India
• Chapter Twenty-Three: The Anti–Vietnam War Movement
• Chapter Twenty-Four: Sun and Steel
• Chapter Twenty-Five: The Shield Society, Counterrevolution
• Chapter Twenty-Six: The Yakuza
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Wang Yangming: “To know is to act”
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Constitution
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Hailstones, Ghouls, Golden Death
• Chapter Thirty: Toward Ichigaya
• Chapter Thirty-One: The Seppuku
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index