Herself (19 page)

And so home, where I fell heavily into bed at five—partly time-trouble, and partly a case of traveler’s trots. Woke at one—to what time am I really waking—to N.Y.C., or to Italy-Tehran where Curt must have arrived? This journal will eviscerate letters, I cannot do it twice—shall be reduced to tell him how I miss him, recording itineraries etc. And must not write this at such length. What, still no Monuments! I shall blame it on the Japanese—if I put down so much trivia it is partly because of being in a country which has made such a delicate art of arranging trivia to look
significant
—and perhaps of the reversed

Well, the week began with a vengeance yesterday—no more vacuum—I expect I shall pine for latter shortly. Embassy car picked me up at 9:15, spent an hour or so with Mr. Boylan, head of the Exchange Service in Japan who showed me their publications, explained their aims, delicately tried to help me understand that things might be difficult since the J.’s did not know who I was and prefer the “top” in everything—no symphony orchestra will do here, except the Boston; they have accepted the advent of the Cardinals (instead of the Yankees) as a second-rate team—Martha G.’s dance team no reception, etc., etc. This I know. Then saw Frank Tenney, the regional field supervisor of the USIS. Said I wanted to meet some one who cd tell me what was taught in colleges, wanted to meet with P.E.N. Club, in other words I
wanted
. Things started rolling. (Lunched in snack-bar, met a man who has a record agency here and have folder, plan to get some samisen and Kabuki records when get to Iran, N.B.) Then at last met X, an interesting man, good friend of Mishima, and of all things of Ben Santos. I spose specially interesting because he knows my work—is himself a critic. Extremely helpful—Later sent a note he wished to introduce me to Hiroo Mukai, who had studied with Stegner. Noted critic. Works with International House. (Has written few articles for
Pacific Spectator,
translated J. short stories. Knows Angus.) (N.B., Later found out Miss D. loathes X. Homosexual, with wife and child, says she.)

Rushed home to meet with Prof. Ichiro Nichizaki of Waseda and Ochanomisu U.’s. Typical prof—armed with catalogues, literature lists, etc., but exactly what I wanted. Presented me with a Jap. book, one of the 20 vol. set on Amer Lit which Leo Picon of the Embassy is editing (spent time with latter in morning—doing fine job)—in which N. had a trans. Asked him to sign it of course—now how can I throw away! Also presented me with a vol. of letters of Faulkner he had exhumed from the
Times-Picayune
and edited. Later took me to the bookshop street, woodblock, print store—loved this—as he said, the Charing Cross of Tokyo. How nice to be doing this so soon! Nichizaki taught last year at U.C.L.A.
Send book
.

Then home, feeling ill again—the trots—fell dead on bed, but had to call Mishima, who thru X I had found was at the Hyo Tei restaurant to judge a litry contest of the
Chud Koron
, the
Partisan Review
of Japan. He asked to bring a friend—arrived earlier than planned, took them to the Skoal bar downstairs. Friend was Tsutomu Shimamura, ed. of the
Chud Koron
(looks all of twenty-five at most.) They charmed me, and, I think, I them. We laughed and had a great time. Shimamura has trans. Capote—their veiled laughter about Truman was funny—Mishima has met Mailer, was on extended tour of U.S., Europe and Mexico last year. Brilliant I’m told, highest scholar ever at the Peers school—his
Nō Plays
may be produced on B’way. I like them both extremely. They both wanted to help me in every way, say Kawabata does not speak Eng., but Ooka does, and some of the others French—I am to get in touch with them when return on the 22nd. They are pleased of course, at how much I am impressed with the new J. writers—well I can say that with honesty.

And so to bed, after packing, washing etc. Tomorrow, lunch and meeting with Lit. (Amer.) Society of Waseda U. (private U.), then off to Kyoto in the evening—overnight by JNR (Japanese Nat’l Railroad).

Travel plans would prevent our meeting again in Japan, though I would briefly meet Mishima once more in the States at the time the
Nō Plays
were produced. Later, after his death, I would write in a review for
The New York Times
:

In Tokyo I spent an unofficial evening with Yukio Mishima, who came to my hotel with Tsutomu Shimamura of
Chud Koron
, a leading intellectual review. We got on; the memory must affect what I write here. But that alone does not entitle me to brood on his life and works. His death however was a public act and the work a public offering; the world is invited, commanded to brood. The way we live now, our deaths are seldom even personal acts, much less publicly declarative ones, nor are they much expected to have a direct consonance with our lives. To be otherwise, death must be constantly present in a life—a familiar. As for acts, writers of any power crave them, always under the anxiety that writing may not be one—or one which can have temporal and above all immediate influence. Some take to religion as an act of faith or community, some to politics; some canonize their lives through excess, of illness perhaps, or of sex, alcohol, drugs. And some, letting their lives simmer or sputter, put all the balance on the work.

Mishima’s ritual death, as the culmination of years of training for such an act, side by side with a body of work increasingly invested with the idea of death as the ever-present blood-beneath-the-skin and the possible grail of action, asks us to put his life on the level of his art, and
past
it. What does it mean when a writer wants to transcend words? And knows to the end that we must and will re-examine his? Mishima’s death
and
words put these matters once again in their vital juxtaposition. Even if one ascribes his suicide to a certain madness, either by occidental terms or modern Japanese ones—as I do not—there are few writers at the moment of whom one can say the same. Re-reading all the novels and plays available in English, plus the “confidential criticism” as he called it, of
Sun and Steel
, an extraordinary essay of the most compelling clarity published early in 1970, the year of his death, and
Spring Snow
, the first volume to be translated of the tetralogy
The Sea of Fertility
, whose final words were written on the day of it—one conclusion, of which he was aware as any of us, rises preeminent. Visualize that extravagantly formal, mutedly blood-slippery act, as one will, as most of the world has, even aided by a few pre-lim shots on television. Scrutinize that last day of his, plotted for a hero. Place his suicide in the Western context or the Japanese one—or in both, where I think it most significantly belongs. Trace his progression toward it, hear in every book its pure, fell sound. True, only his last act has given us this after-event wisdom. But has he succeeded in that final coincidence of flesh and mind he hoped for, of dual chariots whose crash was to be the final bloom of existence? For himself, perhaps as assumption into the tragic life, for us an echo. Perhaps he attained the non-reflection he wanted. He leaves us with his lifetime of reflection. The words—to the end his avowed snare, yet as much his weapon as the dueling staves he used in
kendo
—are what remain most clear.

The world usually puts an artist’s work ahead of however pertinent a life. Equating them, one enters the realm of saint and hero, and finally—myth. This too must have been part of his intent—can a spectacle-death ever be without it? The Japanese are now republishing everything Mishima ever wrote, including even photo-captions, as well as a separate edition of those novels he wrote as potboilers. Internationally, his facts at the moment overshadow him. Assessment of his full work must wait for translation; English has merely a small part of 228 works, which include the 20 long novels he considered “literary,” 13 articles, 143 short stories, 21 full-length dramas and 31 one-act plays.

The work we do have—for the most part grave, somberly exciting, formidable with self-analysis, able to canvas the crowd and the ages, but more often with fixed, internal stare of the diarist—is in some ways peculiarly fit for Western eyes. The violence we so mouth over, but would relegate to the atom-ashheaps of the military, and are facing with such difficulty, hypocrisy or extravagance in our daily life and art, he gives us simply, domestically, in all its subcutaneous horror and myth. Like the Greeks, he pours the blood that is there. And taking into account the samurai gestures surrounding his end, and so at variance with the exquisite sanity of his self-explanation, I have come to believe that, as often with us, his was a cross-cultural death.

I came to Japan knowing only the clichés, mistrusting these only for being that, and having read a few modern novels that Donald Keene, my mentor for years to come in all this, had hastily listed as available: Tanizaki, Kawabata, Ooka. The gap between a writer’s place in his own country and abroad is often between fame on the one side, near oblivion on the other, and foreign publication is often non-consecutive; at the time, Mishima had published here only
The Sound of Waves
, his early prize novel, and his
Five Modern Nō Plays
. The first, a tale of island lovers, told in the “legendary” manner that an educated and probably urban young man might adopt, had an authoritative finish—Mishima had struck the absolute tone of such people and such telling, hewn but not rude, a bas-relief that moved lyrically in nature without introspection. What was most impressive was the natural description, detailed, exact, even studied, the emotional motive behind it somehow more than beauty as the West would have it … and less than pantheism, as if the Japanese psyche had some formal relationship to the natural scene, whose conventions the writer could play upon and enlarge. The
Nō
Plays, returning to a classical mode as we perhaps might go back to all those early seventeenth century marvels that were
not
Shakespeare—to Dekker, Webster, Fletcher, and Massinger, those mordant players of funeral lays and darker madrigals—did seem to show just such a dark modernity cloaking itself in past models. This was all our literary world knew of his work.

Actually at that time, in 1958, Mishima, a prodigy at nineteen and then thirty-three, had behind him twelve novels as well as many other works. Of these
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
(surely one of his best and among those we have, along with
Confessions of a Mask
, closest related to the progress of his own philosophy as set forth in
Sun and Steel
) would be published here, to praise, the next year.
Forbidden Colors
, written in his twenties and remarkable on any score, wouldn’t get here for another ten years, in what is plainly an inept translation, and touted as “an invitation to the world of homosexuality.” I would find its subjects and worlds complex, dealt with by an appetite and expertise consciously on its way to the Olympian, and spanning from the bisexual hero’s friendship with a famous writer (very possibly a partial portrait of Kawabata) to an account of the young man’s presence while his wife gives birth, in a childbed scene comparable to none I know. Yuichi may be in part or at first that beautiful youth beloved of homosexual male writers, who in Mishima’s own division is the “seer” rather than the “seeing,” but the novel’s sexual worlds are several. Old and young, married or inverted, innocent or “decadent,” the people revolve in their other social statuses as well, with an easy, Trollopian illumination from behind; Mishima, even this early, is never limited enough to treat of sex alone. This novel would have a poor reception here.

We had met once before Tokyo—in New York at a Gotham Book Mart party for James Baldwin, where Mishima had looked as anyone does under such circumstances: tentative, interestedly afloat on a sea of foreign contexts whose base-game is second nature to him. This second time, I had brought Keene’s wedding-present to him, and introduction. To this I could add only my awareness that a writer’s presence is always less subtle than the actuality. We did not really talk of literature. He was a handsome man I thought, with a coherence of face and form; though I felt very tall in Japan and he was shorter, he did not appear small. Though Japanese faces had already lost their “masks” for me and begun dissolving into types, I couldn’t tell whether his face was as guarded a one to other Japanese as it seemed to me; some triangular proportion in it, broadbased at the brows, made one look at eyes and mouth separately. Hindsight sees how such a face might empathize alternately, as his work would, with both the ugly and the beautiful. We laughed a lot that evening, and most of it was laughter over intramural jokes, not embarrassment or an occidental misinterpretation—reading the glinting humor of
After the Banquet
five years later, I remember this. When he and his friend kept saying how Oriental I looked, I told them how my daughter’s boardingschool had surreptitiously asked her was I Eurasian; we sat bright-eyed, sympathetically comfortable, language-hampered. The one remark I never forgot he made with utter seriousness. He told me was building “a Dutch Colonial house.” It had its pertinence.

Very shortly, as my journal shows, I was to be sick with what the world glibly calls cultural shock. Though this was the first time I had been enclosed within a language not cognate to mine, that was minor. As the weeks passed, always in meeting many people very fast, as the state-sponsored visitor does, I kept thinking that it was really our souls, American and Japanese, which were not cognate. An ancient sailor-joke I had picked up somewhere—that in Oriental women the slit ran the other way—kept returning to me. If there were a canal—I visualized it—throat-to-groin of any human, carrying not that being’s alimentation, respiration, or circulation but the psychic equivalent by which that same being persevered, then here was a country of beings in whom such a path ran some other way. A Japanese professor to-whom I put the question of why I felt this difference—in my travels from Tokyo to Fukuoka I was always putting it—answered: “It’s because we lack your
Christian
sense of sin.” But though this helped, in revealing what he knew about us, both of us, smiling at each other in our excellently cognate English knew that there was more—the whole, massive anthropological past, more imperial even than empires, which yet could localize itself in two people at a table, whose closest rapport lay in that both were aware of it. I have spoken much in my journal of the smells; perhaps because my family’s business had been perfume, that sense was developed in me, and its imagery very accessible. I kept analysing a smell of the country, to me as clear as the unique odor of a person, into what its components might be: food, hair-oil and the specific soap, open drains? All the time I knew what it was, but hadn’t the wit to say. I was smelling the sweat of the dragon-fight, that odor of burnt ideologies, smoked-out shrines, commingled loins and potsherds, which down the ages must hang invisibly over those silent, inner battlegrounds wherever two civilizations are trying to engorge one another. I was seeing how a nation under occupation was dealing with its “conqueror,” and how we dealt with them.