November 12, 1972

Spring Snow

By HORTENSE CALISHER

SPRING SNOW By Yukio Mishima. SUN AND STEEL By Yukio Mishima.

n 1958 I made a trip to Southeast Asia as a cultural export of our Government, which at the time had the idea that persons of my persuasion were significant. In Tokyo I spent an unofficial evening with Yukio Mishima, who came to my hotel with Tsutomu Shimamura, of Chuo 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.

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 that life? 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) in "Sun and Steel," an extraordinary essay of the most compelling clarity published early in 1970, the year of his death, and now "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 as aware as any of us, rises pre-eminent.

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 an assumption into the tragic life, for us an echo. Perhaps he attained the nonreflection 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 wrote, including even photo captions, as well as a separate edition of those novels he wrote as potboilers. Assessment of his full work must wait for translation; English has merely a small part of the 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 the fixed, internal stare of the diarist--is in some ways peculiarly fit for Western eyes. The violence we 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 his was a cross-cultural death.

I came to Japan knowing only the clichÈs, mistrusting these for being that, and having read a few modern novelists that Donald Keene, my mentor in all this for years to come, 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 nonconsecutive); at the time, Mishima had published here only "The Sound of Waves," his early prize novel, and his "Five Modern No Plays."

This was all our literary world knew of his work.

Actually at that time, in 1958 Mishima, a prodigy at 19, and then 33, had behind him 12 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 other score, wouldn't get here for another 10 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 "seen" rather than the seeing, but the novels' 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. Mishima, even this early, is never limited enough to treat of sex alone. (This novel would have a poor reception here.)

Mishima, born in 1925, educated at the Peers School, where the Spartan fires of militarism still burned, graduating as its highest honor student mid-war, spent half his youth under the clangor of historical glory, and all his manhood with the American conqueror standing sentinel at every street corner of Japan's culture. Grounded deeply in is his own literature, he was widely read in Western (classical and modern) and evidently far beyond that French influence, so marked in writers like Kawabata and Dazai, which was now waning, though it would linger in him in his debt to their diarists, from Amiel to Gide and the early Sartre. Eventually he would range and adapt at will, from the Greeks to De Sade. All the while his novels and stories swell with the most intimately proud mapping of his own country's topography, the people in it, on farm or shore, in town or temple, forever referentially hemmed in by whatever hills face where, and what weathers come from them. Behind all, always localized like another hill, is their ancestry.

"Spring Snow," on the surface the story of two young classmates at the Peers School in 1912, the illicit love affair of one Kiyoaki, a marquis's son whose pride "like a silvery mold. . .would spread at the slightest touch," and of Honda, his witness, begins under the shadow of the Russo-Japanese War, ended when both were 12. A photograph, "Memorial Services for the War Dead; Vicinity Tokuri Temple," showing thousands of soldiers in the mountain setting, hands over Kiyoaki's youth like a scroll and over the book like an epigraph. His grandmother places unopened on the shrine her Government pension for his two uncles killed in the war; but he himself, beautiful, sensitive, melancholically distant from contemporaries he thinks coarse, feels "I'll never shed real blood. I'll never wound anything but hearts."

When he falls in love, it is with Satoko, daughter of Count Ayokara, in whose court family, nobler than his own, he has been reared. Honda, who will help the affair serving both as Laertes and scholar of the new, observes, "Although the Matsugaes seemed to lead a Westernized life and although their house was filled with objects from abroad, the atmosphere. . .was strikingly and traditionally Japanese." In Honda's own household "the day-to-day life as a rule might be Japanese, but the atmosphere had much that was Western in spirit."

Two themes dominate the affair, the friendship, the separate path of Kiyoaki's attempted progression out of himself and every social scene in the book: the decline of the aristocratic spirit from the nobly martial to the merely elegant, and the rise in it of the West. As lector at the Imperial Poetry Recitation, Count Ayakura ends with the poems of the empress and crown prince, who "graced him with their attention as the . . .beautifully modulated voice sounded. . . . No tremor of guilt blurred its clarity. . . . What poured smoothly from his throat was the very essence of elegance, impervious to shame. . . ."

The marquis, Kiyoaki's father, on the other hand, is ignobly sunk in a love of Western food and wine, extravagance and ostentation, though his full Kagoshima-style celebration of the Doll Festival is renowned, to Europeans and Americans as well, he also shows films. "Trying to settle the choice. . .gave the marquis some agonizing moments. There was one from PathÈ, featuring Gabrielle Robin, the star of the ComÈdie FranÁaise. . .the Electric Theater in Asakusa had begun to show films made in the West, the first of which, 'Paradise Lost' had already become wildly popular. . . . Then there was a German melodrama filled with violent action. . . . The marquis finally decided the choice most likely to please his guests was an English five-reeler based on a Dickens novel." One of the guests, Baron Shinkawa, owns the second Rolls Royce ever purchased in Japan and wears a smoking jacket. And all through the book two visiting Siamese princes, one engaged in a proper court love affair and sorrow, serve as the rest of Asia's eyes watching Japan's Western calisthenics, just as they watch the two Japanese boys actually performing these. "In the eyes of the princes, this modern, totally self-centered penance was the funniest thing in the world."

We tend even now to forget, under the stereotypes we have managed to maintain ever since Commodore Perry's expedition that this Westernization of spirit and object has been going on since the roughly coincidental Meiji restoration of [missing text]. In the continuous dialogue between the two young men, Honda, whose father is a Supreme Court justice trained to respect German logic, and who is a law student (like Mishima himself, who graduated from the School of Jurisprudence) says at various times, of history and of Kiyoaki: "To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious of its style. . . . The testimony of your contemporaries has no value whatever. . . . You detest that bunch on the kendo team, don't you?" In the midst of the turmoil of history, each man builds his own little shelter of self-awareness. . . . "You have one characteristic that sets you quite apart; you have no trace whatsoever of will-power. And so I am always fascinated to think of you in relation to History."

This seems to be Kiyoaki's function; his love affair cannot vie with it and perhaps is not meant to in the perspective of the books to come. It is a stylized affair; some of its attitudes, particularly those of Satoko and her old attendant Tadeshima, must be intentionally of the period; but Kiyoaki's inner life, as a male marked by beauty and on his way from the "beautiful" emotions to the "ugly" ones, bears many reverse resemblances to the marked men of Mishima's other books, notably "Golden Pavilion's" stuttering monk, who incapable with women, convinced that the world finds him repellent, confides to his crippled opposite, a warped philistine to his warped mystic, that beauty is his enemy; his conception of it has stuttered him. And it is the women who always make the advances, to him as to Kiyoaki; the latter's girl cousin laying her head on his lap exactly as the girl in "Confessions of a Mask" (the sister of its narrator's friend), lays hers on his; but Kiyoaki will wait for Satoko's oblique taunts and clear invitations. Mishima's heroines of a certain sort are often the more erotic for their sisterliness. Or perhaps only more available.

Satoko to the end remains impenetrable both to him and to us; one reminds oneself how many romantic heroines do. Yet Etsuko, the obsessed widow of "Thirsty For Love," for all her long inner monologues, remains more mysterious there than in her acts, which are grossly reasonable. Mishima's old women are satisfying character actresses; his middle- aged ones often sharp socio-sexual portraits, like Mr. Kaburagi in "Forbidden Colors," or big-blonde funny like Kazu in "After the Banquet," but no younger one functions as more than muted background or is reported with more than 19th century heroic emphasis: "the way they all nodded alike, as though each had a finely wrought gold hinge in her smooth white neck. . . ." Their inner regions are not seriously available, and we do not feel with them, are not intended to.

Meanwhile, until the rest appears, we read "Spring Snow" for its marvelous incidentals, graphic and philosophic, and for its scene-gazing, in whose emotional alliance with nature, emancipated altogether out of the West's idiot "pathetic fallacy," Mishima remains most consistently Japanese. Now and then, in a description of a 1912 Ford or a lecture on the Laws of Manu, there is a touch of that retrospective love of detail which afflicts the historical novelist, reminding us that this is such a novel, no doubt partially researched, but the author's vitality and native omniscience are triumphant. "The brilliant color of the sliding Genji door gave it a kind of suffocating, painting sensuality, as though the room itself were a picture rolled up within a forbidden scroll."

Or we may read in another context. Honda, dreaming of men seen each as "a single vital current," postulates a "theory of the unity of life and self-awareness" in which "the whole sea of life. . .the vast process of transmigration called Samsara in Sanskrit would be possessed by a single consciousness." He tells Kiyoaki, "The age of glorious wars ended with the Meiji era. . .this is the era for the war of emotion. . .and just as in the old wars there will be casualties." Honda makes clear that his friend, in his final fate, is one of these. Each, as if corresponding to one half the current that was the man Mishima-- and like each of his books, where one has only to tally the blood-images against the metaphysical one and find the balance--leads straight to the testament of "Sun and Steel."

Mishima's first account there concerns a child, himself, who, as if it were the opposite of one of Bettelheim's autistics, refused to perceive the body and was let into reality through words. In time "words" however useful and powerful a fetish, become the corrosive evil, and "ideas" foreign to that romantic ideality of the body which he craves. In his attempt to straddle and manipulate the two, he becomes the novelist but only increasing further his "thirst for reality and the flesh." In this small book, most certainly a classic of self- revelation, his pursuit of that "second language" is examined with such dispassion and self-insight that paraphrase must only distort; we are in the range now of a metaphysics where every sentence counts. "As a personal history it will, I suspect, be unlike anything seen before," he says, and he is right. In his journey from the black Styx of the inner life to the blue sky of the outer as reflected in ordinary men's eyes, he sees at every point the parable of his own life. He is taking us down that psychic canal, in very nearly complete consciousness.

Having experienced all the glorification that the verbal arts can give, he seeks "the essential pathos of the doer" and "the triumph of the nonspecific," learning that for him "the tragic pathos is born when a perfectly average sensibility momentarily takes unto itself a privileged nobility" and "endowed with a given physical strength, encounters that. . .privileged moment especially designed for it." Imagination is now arrogance; he is intent on pursuing the words through the body, whose muscles will elucidate the mystery. To combine action and art is to combine the flower that wilts and the flower that lasts forever--"the dual approach cuts one off from all salvation by dreams." He is led to explore the lapsed concept of courage that we now call primitive, and to reverse the concept of consciousness as passive.

He will seek to replace imagination by duty; since that word has so faded in Western form, I take it in the more Japanese sense of "obligation." Concluding that what dignifies the body is its own mortality, he seeks the sought death that will give the most solemn proof of life. And finds that "the profoundest depths of the imagination lay in death. . . . I could not help feeling that if there were some incident in which violent death pangs and well-developed muscles were skillfully combined, it could only occur in response to the aesthetic demands of destiny. Not that destiny often lends an ear to aesthetic considerations." That is everywhere the tone of an ego stretching beyond itself to an appreciation of what the ego is. And giving us, in that so human extra, the one thing that Mishima himself may not see.

It happens, I think, at some juncture in his own painfully exact report of the romantic attraction a beautiful, doomed death comes to have for him. At some false jointure of the samurai gesture with a misconceived ideal of Christian martyrdom--"I yearned for the twilight of Novalis"--the analysis begins to serve the yearning. Up to then, he has pursued his own awareness, as he says, as one pursues erotic knowledge--both in this book and elsewhere. Set a group of graduate students, perhaps, to count the blood- images which beset every book, to clock where the blood begins--is its psychological source in that dream in "Confessions of a Mask" where the narrator eats the entrails of the boy who is a belly suicide, does the bloodbath culminate in "Patriotism," in the mad formality of the marital double seppuku? "There in my murder theater" they will find Mishima before them. No doubt a legion of psychiatrists with whips (for each other) could attribute it all: the black-mass sadism of "Madame de Sade" (madame!), the sexual-sensual transliteration which makes a mortally ill man die "groaning like a bride," the lack which makes woman a bas-relief or a ritual--to the arrestment of a homosexual personality. Such simplification won't do. In "Confessions of a Mask" Mishima has already said: "The thought that I might reach adulthood filled me with foreboding"--and much more. Just as in "Sun and Steel," he is mortally aware of what "the destruction of classical perfection" must in practice mean to him.

We tend to think of writers outside the Western framework, if not as "simples" or "originals," then as the primitive genii of other anthropologies or though-systems which attract us for their qualitative difference--as Buddhism does the solid Madison Avenue matron or the floating intellectual--rather than for their intelligence. In dealing with "Sun and Steel," as with all Mishima's work, one must never forget that one is encountering a mind of the utmost subtlety, broadly educated, a man in whose novels, for instance, the range may even appear terrifying or cynical, to those who demand of a writer steadily apparent or even monolithically built views. These are there, indeed touchable at every point in his work, but the variation of surface, and seeming reversals of heart or statement, sometimes obscure them. And the Western split may have done that, in his work as in his life. So that, as he foresaw, his death better explains both. Leaving us to review the explanation.

Mishima's Western scholarship is very touching, all the more for the possibility that as he rejected words for body, dead literature for live action, or tried to bring the two down to the "average" coherence, he was also denying the Western impurities that had early poisoned him. For everywhere, his references to our literature, ourmartyrs, are reverent to what he borrows or admires, and sometimes as old- fashioned as our own youth. He takes our classics as seriously as we did once, as a matter for life and death. And death he does illuminate and widen for us, but--in a paradox he might well have anticipated--only when he takes his own unique path of experience and learning, not ours. For though he makes analogues with the martyrs of a Christianized West, in the end the once-proud grail of Western existence, addled and dusty as it has come to be, eludes him. What does not occur to him is that the sought death may be as artificial as imagination, against the sought life.

Still, he is telling us that death is one of life's satisfactions. We may not be able to believe it, or may wish that death had not so enhanced itself for him. But he tells us how he came to this pass, and crosses cultures to do it, to tell us how a man bent on seppuku might came to it by way of St. Sebastian.

Can Westerners understand such a death as easily as they understand dying like a pricked gray flab in a hospital? Or accept the artist who tosses his life in the balance as easily as they do those who jerk to the very end of the galvanizing money-string or distill their life- knowledge only in teaspoonful of ipecac for the applause of a liverish coterie? Mishima is explaining his life and death in admirable style, in words that hold their breath, so that the meaning may breathe. In a low voice just short of the humble. On the highest terms of that arrogance which decrees him the right to. His soul and ours may not be cognate, but he makes us feel again what it is to have one. And understand the persuasion of his. If he had been otherwise in his youth--a porter, a woman, a dancer--the tower of his symbols might have built another way. But to ask him to break out of the mystic cage of his logic is like asking it of a Thomas ý Kempis or an Augustine, or to be a Catholic praying for the conversion of the Jews.

What he is telling us is that he is a priori this kind of man and that, insofar as we cannot break out of the cage of our bones, so are we. Here is not a man with an opinion; he is telling us how he was made. To paraphrase him in words not his, or with muscles not his, is to try to build a china pagoda with a peck of nails. "Sun and Steel's" power is that it is a book one must experience step by step, led as if by a monk, or by a great film master, from inner tissue to outer and back again, along his way. It is not necessary to accept that way. But only the frivolous will not empathize with what is going on here; this is a being for whom life--and death too--must be exigeant. And were.

Hortense Calisher's most recent books are "Standard Dreaming" a novel, and "Herself," an autobiography.

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