Music was Couperin, un souper du roi, then the Webern violin pieces (played twice); then the Ravel Duo, the best thing on the program. Food included ham, chicken, pheasant, aspic, Czech pancakes, Stilton, lots of chafing dish affairs only one of which I could identify, and a big almond cake with mounds of whipped cream for dessert.
Guests enjoying themselves. General agreement during dinner not to mention Webern. Lots of conversation, bright, animated, each sentence ending with, “don’t you think so, now?” I talked most of the time with Takemitsu [Toru].
Small, frail, big head, tiny body, enormous talent; is very pleased that the Chicago Symphony is doing something of his. Had the relative bravery (in avant-garde Japan) to side with me last year in finding Stravinsky’s Firebird still magnificent.
24 march 1960. Go with Gene [Langston] to Niigata, all the way across Japan, from one ocean to another in six hours and through three climates. Tokyo is rainy and warm, the Japan Alps have deep snow, and the plains on the other side are as cold as November, the Siberian winds sweeping across them.
I haven’t really spoken with Gene since his return. We sit quite companionably and have nothing to say at first; then bit by bit we remember, things come back; we end the journey jabbering. No one is less changed by the years than Gene. I notice a slightly awkward stoop and it makes me think of age, then I realize that Gene has always had this stoop. A laugh, slightly nervous, strikes me as a bit odd until I recognize it as that of fifteen years ago.
At the station is his friend and, for me, Ito [Sadao], whom I’ve not seen all year. He is a farm boy—sent to school in Tokyo, turned bad, brought back home, now works on the farm, and will all of his life. Wants to hear all the news from Ginza; follows Tokyo life on the TV and knows a number of things about it that I don’t.
On the bus going to the hot springs resort we pass houses like his. Stones to keep the roof on during the windy winter, an open front, barricaded in the winter, a cavernous interior with the single unblinking eye of the television set (everyone in Japan seems to have one now) staring out, half obscured by the heads of gazing children. That and the radio and, for the grown ups, alcohol and making babies—that is all there is. Ito gets into Niigata on weekends sometimes, has a drink at a bar, and has to catch the last bus (7:30 p.m.) home. Perhaps consequentially seems pleased at my visit.
We drive for hours and finally, at the foothills of the northern Alps find a small collection of hotels, and a hot spring, steam escaping. We take baths and drink sake, play games and talk, and I am happy. Happy with Gene, happy with Ito—all of me satisfied.
25 march 1960. In the train, going back to Tokyo, I write in my journal: The voluptuousness of another’s body, the joys of the fingers, the skin, the lips, the tongue. I burrow into the body, as though I will wear it, like another skin; I want to lose myself entirely in this other or else to make it completely mine.
It is only during this that I know I am real; I am naked, vulnerable, and the fact that I exist and the knowledge that I do for one blessed hour coincide. And yet I gain this only through losing myself, through attempting to sink into the body of another. The adoration of the body has its reasons, and like all true adorations its end is a kind of annihilation that becomes a realization.
Kissing his armpits, his chest, his stomach (not his lips for Ito, a good boy who is fond of me and who humors me, does not approve of our kissing; that is what men and women do, and though he would much prefer a woman, there are never any when I happen to be around and I am better than nothing), I draw nearer and nearer the very totem of my desire; I no longer stand aside and regard myself because I am myself, and I cannot then consider anything degraded or degrading which so naturally follows my desires and through which I become so free. A sense, too, of possession, and of power. Almost unaware of giving pleasure, then, so completely am I absorbed in receiving it.
The feel of skin, the odor of heat, tasting all the varied textures of the body; the exploration in the dark continues. I am burning like a candle—and even during the frenzy itself, this flame burns unwavering.
The tension, the tightening, known and memorized, yet forever new: then the pinnacle, the sudden relief, the body falling into pieces, the candle extinguished—I have been returned, and what might have been called lust might now be called compassion, for a wave of tenderness falls upon me, lifts me, holds me, returns me to shore. I was gone, vanished, merged—for all of five minutes.
Little by little the room comes back, the cool body, now only that, rests beside me. Now everything is normal. I too am normal. I begin thinking in the past and in the future again after my moment in the present. Must pull the covers up or he will be cold; must turn out the light. But he is asleep already, flat on his back, and it is time for me to sleep too.
13 april 1960. I go to the dress rehearsal of Mishima’s Salome, his adaptation of the Wilde play, given a lavish production by the Bungakuza at Toyoko Hall in Shibuya.
The writer turned director has not found a lot to change but much to emphasize. The attraction between the sentinel and the page is rendered more noticeable, and Salome’s kissing of the severed head of Jokannan is much prolonged. Also the platter that holds the head is filled with something very like blood, which is then encouraged to cascade out and onto the stage. Kishida Kyoko will be soaked during every performance.
After the rehearsal everyone stood around and talked. Mishima said that he had wanted to play Jokannan himself but that he felt he had done enough acting for a time. Just a month before, he had completed a film role, the gangster Takeo in Masumura Yasuzo’s Afraid to Die (Kazekara Yaro). Not only had he acted, but he also wrote the lyrics for its theme song, which he had now just finished recording commercially for King Records. So he had occupied the limelight quite long enough, and it was good to get back to literature.
I did not ask if he considered the Wilde literature because he obviously did. So I said that it was good to see something non-political, referring to the question of the new U.S.-Japan Security Pact, which is being strenuously debated. Oh, no, he said, Salome was political as well, in her own way. She stood against authority. Well, maybe, but if so in the same mottled way that Mishima does himself.
summer 1961. Mishima called me up and asked me to dinner at a new place he had found just across the street from the Tokyo Onsen, a place I went to but he could not because of his fame and his new respectability: a second child is about to be born. This time, however, he did not want to know what went on there. Instead he wanted, strangely, to talk about literature, usually the one thing we never talk about. Even more oddly, about Ernest Hemingway, a writer whom he had disliked to a marked degree, either because of, or in spite of, similarities.
Both are conscious stylists, both are romantics, both are given to macho posturing, and both are subscribers to obsolete codes. It turned out, however, that it was not the author’s work that Mishima wanted to talk about. It was the American’s recent suicide.
He might still dislike the man as a writer, Mishima said, but he had come to admire the man himself. It was the suicide that had earned his new regard, and the resolute manner in which it had been accomplished. The rifle in the mouth, the trigger pulled—with the big toe he had heard. Was that correct?
And as we ate and talked I again wondered why it was that, like Hemingway’s, Mishima’s best work is found in the stories and not in the novels. Hemingway’s novels are as flaccid as his stories are terse. Mishima’s novels are as verbose as his stories are laconic.
Maybe this is because in the short story an author is under no compulsion to “make” character. Ten pages is too short a span to fully characterize, but it is just right for the telling observation. Here both authors may sketch from life in their best impressionistic styles. And here both they and we are spared the hours of sheer toil with which “characters” are compulsively constructed.
Also, Mishima is the kind of writer who prefers to tell rather than to show. The major points of any Mishima work ar
e always related by the author, not by the characters. Here I will look up an example: “Kagawa felt an immense irritation at seeing what should have been a simple, unclouded decision to leave Jiro prey in this way to a moment’s clever calculations.” Kagawa shows us nothing because Mishima tells us everything.
Now, however, he is showing me something, though. He shakes his head. He is demonstrating thoughtful approval. He is thinking of the gun in the mouth, the toe on the trigger. He is still savoring Hemingway’s suicide. Then he asks if it was just one shot.
I did not know but thought one shot had probably been sufficient. He smiled and went back to his food and I knew that the complacency that had been shown was for me and not for Hemingway. It was not that Yukio particularly cared for my opinion but that I happened to be the only available audience to witness Mishima on Hemingway’s suicide. He was gauging his performance—something he so often does nowadays. And, since he does it, one notices and begins to doubt its authenticity. Then he changed the subject, asked what Tokyo Onsen had been like.
Richie wrote no more journals for four years. During that time he traveled, and finished or began a number of books: The Land and People of Japan (1961), Japanese Movies (1961), editions of the letters from Japan of Henry Adams and Rudyard Kipling, and the translation of six Kabuki plays with Watanabe Miyako. He also made a number of films—War Games (1962), Life (1962), Atami Blues (1962)— and began going to foreign festivals and arranging retrospectives of Japanese films: in Cannes, Venice, Berlin. In addition, he married Mary Evans in 1961—they would divorce in 1965.
20 december 1964. Thought for the day: “Love is what occurs when you become aware of the emptiness of your own life.” No, that is not precise. The “when” should be “if” and the “emptiness” should be “meaninglessness.”
The search for paradise, the turning over of lumps of fool’s gold, this fatal and noble assurance of meaning. As though meaning were something one just discovered, when the only meaning is the kind one makes. That is the kind one eventually agrees to find.
I make forms; I make patterns, as though they were ammunition in this continual war against meaninglessness. Form from chaos. But now I wonder about chaos. I think that it has been maligned. Is not chaos what I should be living with rather than form? I have proved to myself that I cannot tolerate continual form. But could I tolerate chaos? No, I think not.
23 december 1964. One of those days. I run off the track. I can see, when I look back, the plodding footprints in the desert behind me. Just where do I think I am going? Here I am a novelist who writes few novels, a critic who usually can’t even criticize himself, a husband who prefers sleeping with men. Yet, somehow all those unwritten novels were supposed to appear; my criticism was to strike every target; and marriage was to save me. But no, not at all—and marriage is killing me.
The reluctance to find oneself—the evasions. And the burden of it. No wonder I wanted someone to share it. But one does not drop one’s history any more than does the plodding turtle drop its shell.
But now, standing under the high glare of noon in the desert, I can sight the sun and guess where I am. Heading south, I would think. And there behind me lead my footprints, stretching from the cold north. And I feel a stir, life a fresh breeze in this airless waste. It is a twinge of interest. This is curious—what I am doing, standing here. I look around with opened eyes and I feel as though I had found a piece of amber in this desert. I am turning its smooth surface over and over, between my fingers. Strange stuff, amber. It makes electricity.
24 december 1964. A party here with Ted [Wilkes] and Eric [Klestadt] and Dick [Brown], Mary and myself, ending up by playing with that infernal book of Prince Leopold of Lowenstein and William Gerhardi, which no matter how you turn it always comes up with the right answers. Here is its truth about me:
In normal conditions people like you are none too well able to cope, but conditions may arise when they thrive and possibly imprint the mark of their personality on an entire age. It is difficult to see how you could ever form a true relationship in love. To be able to love means accepting and acknowledging the fact that the other person is a separate entity, a different and wholly individual unit, and not what we want or imagine. This act of recognition is very difficult for people like you who, after the manner of a nation at war, have substituted the contact of fighting for the more civilized contact based on mutual respect. And like a nation at war, you see the “other side” in the light of your own distorted projection. You might be fascinated and attracted by those figments of your imagination; you might indeed “fall in love” easily and often. But the disenchantment would follow swiftly, for all the time you are in fact dealing with counterfeit emotions.
I still can’t see how Lowenstein and Gerhardi do it. It is knowledge parceled out, with all allowances made for the unfairness of parcels, but the contents are useful. The above description describes me now. What they cannot account for is change and any criteria other than their own. They are interested in a person’s living well with his surroundings. But there are other criteria.
Yet, how close the description comes to me—and how it describes my life with Mary. I am impossible to live with and I know it. This is true, right now, but I am coming slowly out of the maze of myself, and I see the light. I will have lost her, that is true, but then I have lost so much. On the other hand, I have gained too, burning people alive like this, and Mary is merely the most charred.
27 december 1964. Dinner with Hani Susumu and his wife Hidari Sachiko. He just back from Africa and a new film; she fresh from film prizes, including the Berlin. I see them separately quite often. Together not often at all.
Theirs seems a very companionate marriage. Only occasionally do I see that Susumu wonders at his being married, only occasionally that Sachiko wonders why she is not with a man who would sweep her off her feet. Like Mary, she wants both and neither. Women do not want men as men want women. Men really want a woman they can turn off and on like a faucet. Women want in men a faucet that is never turned off tight and is always liable to dribble and spray. I think that women more than anything else want to be surprised.
Sachiko is venturesome. The kind of girl that when young would have done almost anything on a dare. I think of our meeting, some ten years ago, before either of us was married. How stupid I was, how naive. I know enough now to recognize the look that was in the beautiful Sachiko’s eyes. I didn’t then. The look is no longer there—I’m an old friend of her husband’s and that is that.
If I were a woman this would be fertile ground into which I would sow. Being a man I am confused by thoughts of friendship, ties, appearances, and such. What I like and loathe about women is that they never are—they merely give lip service to this morality that men really believe in.
30 december 1964. Over to see Dick [Brown]. He mixes a martini. He drinks because when he is plastered it doesn’t hurt so much to live. It is a local anesthetic against existence, against acknowledgement of emptiness.
“My only problem is sheerly technical,” he says; “I want to make an arrangement of some kind where I can have it in the quantity I want when I want it. If I want it now, then I can have it now.” That is a logical wish, not a person alive that doesn’t want just that. But what if you do it? What then? It is never enough. It can’t be, because it is the fire screen against the stray sparks of living. That is its function. It defends. So, when you realize your ambitions you work against yourself, and you find that the hot flames of life are nibbling at the ankles instead of just the toasty toes.
But Dick won’t ever get enough. He will instead say that there isn’t that much in the whole world. He’ll have to say it. He won’t let himself get enough. At the same time, he cunningly arranges that he gets less and less. He knows, deep down, what would happen if lots and lots continued. He would have to criticize the commodity itself. He cannot afford to do that, and so he somehow or other manages to get less and less.
This makes him very unhappy,
naturally. And this is what a neurosis is—this collision between mutually incompatible wishes. I don’t think that masochism has anything to do with it. He is like the diabetic whose main reason for existing is his sweet tooth.
31 december 1964. Tani comes up from Osaka for the holidays. We have ten years of memories we don’t bother to mention; a number of assumptions we decline to talk about; I listen to him and he listens to me; there is no competition, and that is a blessed state.
Further, I admire him. For two reasons. The first is that he carved his own empire, and it must have been like carving one out of basalt, and at the end of two years was a rich man. The other is that he borrowed a sum of money from me years ago and has now returned all of it.
We eat chicken à la Kiev and drink Neucastle and talk about the Aztecs and the Lost Continent of Mu and the Sargasso Sea—he envies my having actually seen the latter. It is this, perhaps, that made it possible for him in two years to become rich, and legally too—the kind of mind that finds the Lost Continent of Mu exciting.
With Mary Richie, 1963. yato tamotsu
I remember ten years ago this month. It was in Nara and he was a student in his black uniform and he came back and we stayed at my hotel and in the morning drank ozoni. He has not changed—his character was formed some time before this, maybe when he was a poor little boy on some farm far in the mountains.
1 january 1965. Am rewriting Man on Fire [an unpublished novel]. It was almost a year ago that I wrote it; it is strange to me now, leading a life of its own. Rewriting is a creative act. As I type I keep pushing the novel further away from me, trying to create that distance in which it can breathe.
Mary is also working on her writing in the next room, New Year’s Day though it is. My idea of domestic bliss is two people doing their work in separate rooms, aware of each other’s distant company. I don’t know that it is hers as well, but she thinks as highly of work as I do and we are never closer than when we are working separately.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 18
