Mishima: You may think I’m an old fashioned classicist, but I don’t trust language without a logical structure.
Terayama: Then you couldn’t put up with a dog sitting on a book by Aristotle. I think it would be erotic if Brigitte Bardot was carrying Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
On the fiftieth anniversary of Yukio Mishima’s sensational death by seppuku (ritual suicide, vulgarly known as hara-kiri), it is worth looking back at the conversation he had with Shuji Terayama just five months earlier.
It was originally published in the July 1970 edition of Ushio magazine, and I am grateful to Professor Nobuko Anan of Kansai University for her English translation.
At the time, Mishima was a huge celebrity who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times. Ten years older than Terayama, he came from a super-privileged background – Gakushuin school, the Eton of Japan, then Tokyo University. Before becoming a full-time-writer, he had joined the Ministry of Finance, the bastion of Japan’s ruling elite.
Terayama, by contrast, came from Aomori Prefecture in the far north of Honshu, Japan’s largest island, and consciously maintained his strong regional accent throughout his life.
From Terayama’s autobiographical “To Die in the Country”
His father was a policeman who died of illness after being drafted to South East Asia. His mother sent young Shuji to live with relatives when she went away to work as a cleaner on a distant American military base.
At first sight, Mishima, the fervent nationalist who sought to revive Japan’s martial traditions, would seem to have little in common with Terayama, the pied piper of the Japanese counterculture.
In fact, as the published dialogue demonstrates, these two sacred monsters of post-war Japan shared several interests. They included writing for theatre, making experimental films, the possibilities of eroticism, mocking mainstream politics, breaking taboos and causing trouble.
Another point of similarity: they both died in early middle age, Mishima at 45, Terayama at 48. Mishima planned his death far in advance. Terayama suffered from an incurable illness. Awareness of their limited lifespans must have influenced their work and thinking.
The dialogue starts with an exchange of compliments. Mishima declares that he has seen several of Terayama’s plays and found them “quite interesting.” Terayama mentions that he sent Mishima a fan letter when he was young, but received no reply. That is quite plausible. Terayama often sent fan mail to writers and other prominent people he admired.
After a brief detour about theatre, Mishima compares the failure of the New Left’s street protests with his own strategy of forming a private army, the Tate no Kai (literally, “Shield Society”).
Mishima’s private army
“Theory is not meaningful unless it appears in action,” he asserts. “If theory doesn’t transform into action, it’s like the university teachers they despise…What connects theory and action is training. This is what soldiers do.”
The comment is in line with Mishima’s version of Wang Yangming Confucianism that preaches the unity of action and thought. It is also a hint that Mishima himself would not stop at words and empty gestures.
Terayama could not have had any idea what would happen on November 25th 1970, when Mishima and four Tate no Kai members would take a four star general hostage on a military base and attempt to incite a rebellion against the Japanese government.
But further hints appeared in the discussion about bodybuilding, which was one of Mishima’s obsessions.
Mishima: Here is the principle of bodybuilding. It’s to get rid of the involuntary muscles in your body.
Terayama: In short, getting rid of unpredictability from the body?
Mishima: You’re right. For example, look at my chest. I can move it freely to the music [he moves the muscles in his chest]. Does your chest move?
Terayama: I’m an unpredictable being.
Mishima: It may move all of a sudden one night.
Terayama: I can’t have any enjoyment without the fantasy that an unknown treasure may be hidden in my small body. Mishima-san, if you learn all about the structure of your body, you’ll find that it’s only water and fibre.
Mishima: You’ll live longer than me.
Much of the conversation consists of intellectual sparring in which the two participants hop from topic to topic and namedrop Genet, Kant, Poe, Paul Valery, Bertrand Russell, Socrates and others. After several detours, they return to the subject later.
Terayama: Mishima-san, the day will suddenly come when you can’t move your involuntary muscles, even if you throw out your chest.
Mishima: That day won’t come.
Terayama: Yes, it will. Eroticism overflows at a time like that.
Mishima: A day like that won’t come. Never.
The discussion about bodybuilding is a proxy for the larger philosophical differences between the two men. In art, life and politics, Mishima prizes control, predictability and structure and finds flexibility “scary”. He obsesses about the smallest details, such as the design of the uniforms for his private army.
Terayama prizes randomness, chaos and spontaneity and is frightened by the idea of pre-determination. He loves horseracing and writes a column on it for a sports newspaper.
Terayama: Mishima-san, you don’t gamble. Is it because you think it’s not logical?
Mishima: I don’t like accident…
Terayama: Don’t you think we were accidentally thrown into the universe?
Mishima: No. In short, necessity is god.
Strangely enough, it is the approach of the iconoclastic Terayama that seems more in tune with traditional Japanese aesthetics as expressed in calligraphy or Bizen ceramics and cultural practices such as I-Ching divination. All of these leave space for spontaneity and chance. Mishima, the political nativist, has a fixation on structure and control that seems classically Western.
After Mishima committed seppuku, Terayama – who was in hospital at the time – commented that he should have done it in the cherry blossom season.
That is sometimes taken as a sarcastic dig at Mishima’s reverence for tradition, but it may not have been. Terayama could have simply meant that a backdrop of cherry blossoms would have intensified the drama of Mishima’s act. As theatre men, they would have both appreciated that.
Mishima might have preferred a spring death, but he had a book to finish, the last volume in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy. He finished the manuscript in the early morning of November 25th 1970.
Terayama: Mishima-san, have you heard this story? There was a man who said “I’m an Edokko [inhabitant of pre-modern Tokyo] so I don’t accept the existence of trains” Then a train hit him straight on and ran him over. As he was dying, he said “there was no train.”