MISHIMA: A VISION OF THE VOID - The New York Times

MISHIMA: A VISION OF THE VOID - The New York Times:




MISHIMA: A VISION OF THE VOID


BY Marguerite Yourcenar
Nov. 2, 1986







Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
November 2, 1986, Section 7, Page 1Buy Reprints
New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared.
SUBSCRIBE
*Does not include Crossword-only or Cooking-only subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.



IT is always difficult to judge a great contemporary writer: we lack the proper distance. It is even more difficult to judge him if he belongs to a culture different from our own, a culture colored by our fondness for or distrust of the exotic. The chances of misunderstanding him are compounded when, as in the case of Yukio Mishima, the elements of the writer's own culture and those of the culture of the West, which he had avidly absorbed -that is to say, for us, the commonplace and the bizarre - mingle in each separate book in different proportions and with varying effects and degrees of success. It is, however, this admixture that makes him, in many of his books, a true representative of a Japan which was, like Mishima himself, violently Westernized, and yet remained distinguished by certain immutable characteristics. The way in which, in Mishima, the traditionally Japanese elements rose to the surface and burst in his death make him, furthermore, a witness to and - in the etymological sense of the word - a martyr of the heroic Japan to which he had returned, so to speak, against the tide.

Our difficulty becomes even greater when the writer's life - no matter what his country or his culture - has been as varied, rich, impetuous and sometimes as knowingly plotted as his work, so that one is able to see in both not only the same faults, the same tricks, and the same imperfections but also the same virtues and finally the same greatness. Inevitably, an uneasy balance is established between our interest in the man and our interest in his books. Gone are the days when we could enjoy ''Hamlet'' and not interest ourselves in Shakespeare: vulgar curiosity about biographical anecdotes is a characteristic of our time. All of us tend to seek out not only the writer, who by definition expresses himself in his books, but also the individual, always necessarily manifold, contradictory and changeable, hidden in some places and visible in others, and finally -perhaps more than the other two - the persona, that reflection or shadow which sometimes the man himself (as was the case with Mishima) projects as a defense or out of bravado, but behind which the human being of flesh and blood lived and died in that impenetrable mystery which is part of every life.

The chances of misinterpretation are many. Let us go on, nevertheless, but let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work. However, while a film such as ''Patriotism,'' or a passage such as the description of Isao's suicide in ''Runaway Horses,'' sheds light on the writer's end and partly explains it, the author's death, at most, grants these works authenticity but does nothing to elucidate them. *** It is customary to begin an essay of this nature by placing the writer in his surroundings. If I have not done so, it is because that backdrop is of no importance until one has seen against it at least an outline of the individual. Much like any family which for several generations has succeeded in escaping the anonymity of the humbler classes, Mishima's family is striking for the extraordinary diversity of ranks, groups and cultures crisscrossing a milieu which, from the outside, seems relatively easy to understand. In fact, like so many European upper- and middle-class families of the same period, Mishima's, on his father's side, consists of peasant stock until the early 19th century, when a few members attain university degrees (rare at the time, and highly prized) and more or less distinguished positions as Government officials. The grandfather was governor of an island, but retired after an electoral scandal. The father, a ministry civil servant, appears to have been a sullen and correct bureaucrat, compensating with his circumspect life for the grandfather's improprieties. Only on three occasions is his behavior startling: three times, while taking his son for a walk in the fields along a railroad track, he holds the child in his arms - Mishima tells us -barely two feet away from the furiously charging express train, allowing him to be blown by the whirlwinds of speed; the child, already a stoic - or more likely petrified by fear - is incapable of crying out. Curiously, this unloving parent, who would have had his son follow a bureaucratic rather than a literary career, forces the child to undergo a test of endurance like those which Mishima would later impose upon himself.* The mother is more clearly defined. She

* I make no reference to psychiatric or psychoanalytical interpretations. First, because they have been explored several times, and then because they almost inevitably acquire, from a nonspecialist's pen, an air of ''drugstore psychology.'' At any rate, I have chosen other types of explanations. comes from one of those families of Confucian tutors who represent the very backbone of Japanese logic and morality, and was at first almost entirely deprived of her very young son by his aristocratic paternal grandmother, unhappily wedded to the island governor. It is not until later that she is able to reclaim her son, and then takes an interest in the writings of this adolescent intoxicated with literature. It is for her that at the age of 33, late in life in Japan to consider marriage, Mishima decides to call upon an old-fashioned matchmaker, so that his mother, who has been mistakenly diagnosed as suffering from cancer, should not experience the sorrow of dying without seeing the bloodline continued. On the eve of his suicide, he bid his parents what he knew was to be his last farewell, in their traditional Japanese house, a modest annex of his showy Western-style villa. The single noteworthy remark we have about this occasion is his mother's, typical in its maternal concern: ''He looked very tired. . . .'' Simple words that remind us how much his suicide was not a flamboyant and almost offhand gesture, as those who have never reached this point themselves imagine, but an exhausting climb toward what this man believed to be, in the fullest sense of the word, his proper end.


ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story




The grandmother is an intriguing character, born into a respectable samurai family, great-granddaughter of a daimyo (one might as well say of a prince), even related by intermarriage to the Tokugawa dynasty. The spirit of ancient Japan, half forgotten, lives on in her, in the guise of a sickly creature, somewhat hysterical, subject to attacks of rheumatism and cranial neuralgia, married somewhat late, for lack of anything better, to a low-ranking official.* In her quarters, where she kept the young boy, this disturbing and touching grandmother seems to have lived a life of luxury, sickness and revery far removed from that bourgeois existence in which the next generation sought refuge. The imprisoned child slept in his grandmother's room, was witness to her nervous breakdowns, learned very young how to dress her sores, accompanied her to the lavatory, wore the girl's dresses which on a whim she sometimes had him put on and was sent by her to the ritual spectacle of No, as well as the melodramatic and blood- thirsty Kabuki, which he was later to emulate. This fey spirit no doubt planted in him the seeds of madness once deemed necessary for genius; she certainly allowed him to move freely between generations, the birthright of a child who has grown up in the company of an elderly person. To this precocious contact with a sickly body and soul he owed, perhaps, an essential


* Mishima's father, in an unpleasant article published under his name after the writer's death, mentions that some of the grandmother's ailments were probably the result of venereal disease transmitted by the overly merry governor of the island. Mishima himself made a similar allusion. lesson: his first knowledge of the strangeness of things. Above all, it allowed him the experience of being jealously and madly loved and of responding to that great love himself. ''At the age of 8 I had a 60-year-old lover,'' he says somewhere. Much time is saved by such a start.

Unlock more free articles.Create an account or log in


No one would deny that the child who was to become Mishima was more or less traumatized by this bizarre atmosphere, as biographers oriented toward modern psychology will stress. Perhaps he was even more bruised and hurt by the financial problems of the family, the result of his grandfather's follies, by the undeniable mediocrity of his father and by the ''insipid family quarrels'' which he himself describes, that daily bread of so many children. And yet madness, slow decay and the inordinate love of an old, sick woman are what a poet would seek in this poet's life, a first image, a counterpart to that other one, brief and brutal, of his death.

It is not true that his other paternal ancestors belonged, as he chose to imagine, to the military clan of the samurai, whose heroic ethics he adopted toward the end. Here, apparently, is an example of those aristocratic family origins which a great writer (like Balzac, and to a certain extent Alfred de Vigny, or even Victor Hugo, dreaming up obscure Rhenish grandparents) sometimes confers upon himself. In fact, the world of officials and educators from which Mishima came seems to have adopted the ideals of fidelity and austerity of the ancient samurai without always feeling obliged to follow them in practice - as the grandfather proved. But it is clearly owing to the style and traditions of his grandmother that Mishima was able to depict in the Count and the Countess Ayakura in ''Spring Snow'' an already dying aristocracy. In France it happened often that a 19th-century writer's imagination awoke to aristocratic fantasies through the offices of an elderly woman. Such rapports typically involved a young man instructed by a mistress well advanced in age: Balzac re-created that aristocratic world according to the image offered to him, as on a coyly opened fan, by Mme. de Berny and by Mme. Junot. Proust's Marcel first expresses his thirst for aristocratic society by a romantic fixation upon Mme. de Guermantes, at least 20 years his elder. In Mishima's case, it is the almost carnal link between a grandchild and his grandmother which puts him in touch with a Japan of days gone by. *** ''Confessions of a Mask,'' an almost clinical description of an individual case, also fits all young people between 1945 and 1950, not only in Japan but almost everywhere else as well, and, to a certain extent, the youth of today. A short masterpiece on the theme of anguish and withdrawal, this book reminds one, in spite of its different subject and geographical location, of the nearly contemporary ''Stranger'' of Camus. By this I mean that both books contain the same autistic elements. An adolescent witnesses unprecedented historical disasters without understanding them - even supposing there was something to understand. He leaves the university and enters an arms factory. He roams the burned-out streets as he would have done had he lived in London, Rotterdam or Dresden instead of Tokyo. ''If it had gone on any longer, there would have been nothing to do but go crazy.'' It is only after sifting 20 years of memories that Honda, grotesquely outfitted in the gaiters of the civilian auxiliary, which he does not know how to wear, will see before him in all its vastness the panorama of Tokyo, with its burned beams and twisted water mains; the site, beyond recognition, of what was once the sumptuous park of the Matsugaes, now parceled out; and on a bench, like an old woman out of a Goya nightmare, the ninetyish geisha who was once a ''Juliet's nurse'' for Kiyoaki's mistress - heavily made up, eyebrows plucked, wearing a wig, famished and come to see with her own eyes that which no longer exists.

This summary leaves aside the very core of the book, the episodes of childhood and puberty discussed above in relation to Mishima himself, because this small book is one of those rare autobiographies which seem to spring straight from life, untouched by the craft of fiction. As is perhaps natural in any candid autobiography written with courage by a 24-year-old man, eroticism permeates everything. This tale of torture by frustrated and half-conscious desire could have been set anywhere during the first half of the 20th century, or, of course, earlier. The almost paranoid need to be ''normal,'' the obsession with social disgrace (of which the ethnologist Ruth Benedict has said so aptly that they replace in our cultures the obsession with sin, without any advantage to our freedom), are illustrated on almost every page as they would never have been in ancient Japan, which was more relaxed on the subject of one man's love for another, or conformed to other norms. Of course, the protagonist - and this is a classic symptom - believes himself to be the only one in the world to suffer in this way. A classic case to the end, this frail young man, neither as high on the social scale nor as rich as his fellow students at the Peers School, secretly and from afar falls in love with the most athletic and most highly esteemed of the students: this is the eternal Copperfield-Steerforth situation, more daring as concerns the erotic fantasies, which in any case remain in the book only fantasies. The daydream during which the beloved becomes the fare at a cannibalistic banquet is not a pleasant image, but it is enough to have read Sade, Lautreamont or, somewhat more pedantically, to think of the ancient Greeks sharing the flesh and blood of Zagreus, to see that the memory of a savage flesh-eating rite still hovers in our subconscious, a memory recaptured only by a few daring poets. And Japanese folklore is so full of pretas, greedy ghosts who devour the dead, that this lugubrious fantasy necessarily brings them to mind.

Editors’ Picks
Five Swipes on Exercising Outdoors
Larry David, Master of His Quarantine
The World’s Great Photographers, Many Stuck Inside, Have Snapped


ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story




One of Mishima's biographers takes care to list the names of 10 well-known Japanese writers who ended their lives by suicide during the first 60 years of this century. The number is hardly surprising in a country which has always honored voluntary death. But none of them died in the grand manner. Mishima's death, on the contrary, will be the traditional seppuku of protest and admonition, disemboweling immediately followed by decapitation with a sword when the presence of an aide permits it.

However involved Mishima is in his last act, he still regulates his life according to his writer's obligations: he is proud of never having missed the deadline for any of his manuscripts. Everything has been foreseen, even - supreme politeness toward his assistants, supreme desire to preserve the body's dignity to the very end -the use of cotton-wool pads to prevent the entrails from discharging excrement during the convulsions of agony. Mishima, who dined with his four associates at a restaurant on Nov. 24, 1970, leaves his companions that night like every night to work, finishes his manuscript or gives it the final touches, signs it and puts it in an envelope that a publisher's clerk will fetch some time during the next morning. Soon after sunrise, he takes a shower, carefully shaves, puts his Shield Society uniform on over a white cotton loincloth and his bare skin. Everyday gestures, which acquire the solemnity of that which will never be done again. Before leaving his desk, he places on the table a piece of paper: ''Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever.'' These words are characteristic of all beings passionate enough to be insatiable. After careful consideration, there is no contradiction between the fact that these words were written at dawn and the fact that the man who wrote them would be dead before the end of the morning.

He leaves his manuscript in sight on the hall table. The four associates await him in a new car. Mishima has in his leather attache case a precious 17th-century sword, one of his dearest possessions; the attache case also contains a dagger. On their way, they pass the school which the older of the writer's two children attends - an 11-year-old girl, Noriko. ''This is the moment when in a film we would hear some sentimental music,'' Mishima jokes. Proof of insensitivity? Perhaps of the opposite. It is sometimes easier to joke about what matters most than not to talk about it at all. No doubt he laughs, with that short noisy laugh attributed to him by his biographers, and which is characteristic of all those who do not give themselves over wholeheartedly to laughter. Then the five men sing.

Now they have arrived at their destination, the headquarters of the Eastern Army. This man, who in two hours will be dead by his own hand, has, however, one last desire: to speak to the troops, to denounce in their presence the disastrous state into which he believes his country is plunged. Does this writer, who has declared that words have lost their savor, believe that words will become powerful again? No doubt he wants to multiply the occasions to explain publicly the reasons for his death, so that no one will try, later, to disguise or deny them. Two letters written to journalists whom he had asked to be on the spot at this moment - without explaining why - show that he feared, with reason, this sort of posthumous distortion. *** ''He was mad,'' says the Prime Minister, questioned on the spot. The father, listening to the radio at midday, had heard the first reports, announcing Mishima's speech to the troops; his reaction was typical of most families: ''What troubles he causes me! We'll have to make apologies to the authorities. . . .'' Yoko, the wife, heard the news of his death at 20 past noon, in the taxi that was taking her to a luncheon. When questioned later, she replied that she had expected the suicide, but not for another year or two. (''Yoko has no imagination,'' Mishima had said one day.) The only heartfelt words are spoken by the mother as she greets the visitors who have come to offer their condolences. ''Don't grieve for him. For the first time in his life, he did what he wanted to do.'' No doubt she exaggerated, but Mishima himself had written, in July 1969: ''When I relive in my thoughts the past 25 years, their emptiness fills me with astonishment. I can barely say I have lived.'' Even during the course of the most dazzling and fullest life, what we really wish to do is rarely accomplished, and from the depths or the heights of the Void, things that have been, and things that have not, both seem shadows or dreams.



Marguerite Yourcenar, a member of the French Academy, is the author of ''Memoirs of Hadrian,'' ''The Abyss'' and most recently ''Oriental Tales.''
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 2, 1986, Section 7, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: MISHIMA: A VISION OF THE VOID. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe