There we stood, rooted like trees. And I was terrified, seeing myself trapped here forever. There was no pushing my way free, no climbing over heads and shoulders or crawling between legs to find a way out. To sink to the ground could only mean a final, hopeless fall.
Thus my imagination gripped me. But since there was truly no escape, I just stood there and, with the other trees, endured. Then, as the hours passed, I felt rather than heard a new chant—low, soft, rhythmic, a measured breathing. With it came, at first almost indiscernibly, a gentle movement, as though this packed and standing forest was being swayed by a distant breeze.
As the chant gained, the swaying grew. Damp, hard limbs, a hip perhaps or a shoulder, rubbed me like a branch. And as the night deepened, we chanted—yu-sha, yu-sha, yu-sha.
I felt my fear depart. It lifted slowly and I thought no more about our differences. We were now a single mass crammed into this narrow vessel, and there was no telling us apart.
Cradled, we were slowly merging. This I knew, looking up at the dusty stars, losing all feeling in arms, in legs, smelling the hot rice odor which was now mine as well. I, the man I thought I knew, was gone, become a thousand others. I let my head drop.
It fell across a shoulder or a neck and I realized that I was floating. My feet were no longer on the ground. The pressure had pushed me up, and I was being held aloft by this tight network of bodies, swaying but supporting.
There was no more fear of falling. For the first time I no longer fought for my inch of earth. I lay back and with this came support as more and more of those swaying bodies accepted more and more of me. Or so I felt. But at the same time I knew, an ear suddenly against my cheek, that I was in turn supporting them. And then...
And then, I suppose, I must have slept. The deity had had his way with us. His darkness had made us one. Perhaps we all slept, slung in the air, soles off the ground—whole thousands levitating.
I remember only, after a long, long time, raising my head and seeing that pale glow which is earliest morning. Seeing also the breathing profile of the boy asleep beside me, turning and looking deep into his armpit, for his arm was flung about my neck. And I shut my eyes again, not wanting to move, to wake up. I shut my eyes as one pulls the covers over one's head, unwilling to rise.
What had terrified me now consoled me. How secure, how safe, how warm, those bodies molding mine, those several near, those hundreds farther off. This was as it should have been. Like cells we were within a single form, all breathing, all feeling together. And now it was being alone I dreaded—once more, exposed.
Yet, one by one, all of us were waking up. And those at the farthest ends, whole miles away it seemed, were now stumbling off; slowly the pressure was growing less. I was standing on the ground, the earth strange against my soles, and shortly I could turn and even stoop to retrieve parts of my trampled clothing, the jeep keys still there in the pocket, safe.
The man in front whose back I knew so well stirred and turned. The man behind released me, his flesh becoming separate. The boy whose armpit I had studied was now a plain farmhand who gave a sleepy smile, turned to look for his lost loincloth, searched, gave up.
Then, completely naked, or with dirty loincloths newly tied, or, in my case, the rags of a shirt and most of a pair of trousers, we moved slowly away from each other and out into the brightening day.
We walked, stumbled, streaked with sweat, with dirt, as though newborn and unsure on our feet, as though our eyes, blinded by the dark so long, were not fully open. There was no smell—except for that of urine, pungent, but not unclean. And now I could see, revealed in the gaps in the thinning crowd, that we were making for the font, the great stone urn in front of every shrine, where we could drink.
When my turn came I pushed my whole head into that cold, holy water, taking great gulps as though I were breathing it. I came up dripping and the farmboy led me off to a veranda.
There, on the edge of this large but ordinary shrine, we sat, uncovered in the morning light, and watched the others, our comrades, ourselves, vanish into the empty streets, each alone, silent, surrounded now only by space.
I felt lost, as though my family were deserting me, as though the world were ending, and when an old priest in his high lacquered hat came by, saw the white foreigner, stopped, surprised, then smiled, I asked: And is the kami happy?
He nodded, affirmed. The kami was happy.
It did not occur to me to ask, as it certainly would have twelve hours before, just what this ceremony was all about anyway and why we should stand there all night and why nothing had happened, or had it?
And so we sat there, recovering, and the priest with his little acolytes, either up early or up all night, brought us small cups of milky ceremonial saké; and the farmer's son, whose raw young body I knew as well as I knew my own, turned with a smile, not at all surprised that I spoke, and asked me my name.
I told him, then asked his. He told me. What was it? Tadao ... Tadashi? Nakajima ... Nakamura?
But before long the sun was up, the streets were emptying. Cleansed, tired, staggering, satisfied young men were going off by the hundred, their shadows long behind them. And I found the jeep just as I had left it, and was surprised that the engine turned over—that the gasoline had not evaporated during my century asleep—and drove back to Tokyo, disheveled, content, at peace.
Over the following year I often thought of this experience. And of the single person it had somehow become: Tadashi Nakajima ... was that his name? Somehow it now seemed to belong to the whole experience, it was the name of everything, of everybody.
And a year later I went back, not because of young Tadashi, whose face I had quite forgotten, whose very name was blurred. No, because of this experience and what it had meant to me.
But now it was 1947, and already the local authorities were cleaning things up. Such relics as the Yami Matsuri did not look right in this new and modern age. Barbaric they seemed, and it couldn't have been good for the health of those poor boys jammed together in the shrine all night long.
So hundreds of years of history were brought to an end, the chain of generations severed. The Festival of Darkness was stopped—I had attended, become a part of, the very last.
Oh, Fuchu still has a Yami Matsuri of sorts—even now, forty years later—but it is not the real one and the kami is not, I believe, happy. This god is happy only when people return to their real state, when humans again become human, when we are as we truly are. And this can occur only in darkness and in trust.
Yukio Mishima
We often met during the summer before his death. All of Mishima's friends saw more of him during that 1970 summer. He phoned more, wrote more letters, paid more attention to us. He was going away and would not see us again, but that we did not know then.
One late summer day he called again and asked me to join him at the Tokyo Hilton, a hotel he liked. Here he could, apparently unrecognized, book a room for writing or for other purposes.
He was not alone. With him was a young man whom I did not know but whose type I recognized. Limp, callow, probably literary—the kind of youth who resembled the young Mishima himself, the sort to whom the author now extended part of his patronage.
We sat in the mirrored bar and talked, and it became clear that the youth, a literary major (French), was a present for me. I was to continue, to take over, the patronage. Mishima told me this while the young man looked modestly down at his folded hands.
I laughed and said: Yukio, this will not do. You know me better than that. If you want to give me a present it should be someone from the other half of those you patronize.
But he did not know me better than that, though we had known each other for almost twenty years. The reason was that he rarely took one's character into account, scarcely even noticed it. It was not important. What was important was the role one was to play in his life. Mishima himself decided what this was to be. Who one actually was, how one really felt, had little to do with it.
> Kawabata was to be the older protector, looking after the young author's interests, and was not to be hurt in the slightest when that relationship was falsified in Forbidden Colors. Donald Keene was to be major foreign critic, interested only in the work and allowed not a single glimpse, assuming he would have wanted one, into the private life. I, on the other hand, along with a few others, was to be of service only in the private life, and whatever opinions I might have of the work and the writer were not to be taken seriously.
My refusal upset him. He frowned at himself in the mirror. I was not playing my assigned role, that of confidant to the hero. He is a very serious boy, he said seriously. I laughed, but there was no answering smile. Mishima, though he could be amusingly malicious, had no feeling for humor. Unlike many Japanese he also had little sense of the ridiculous. His great barking laugh was not infectious; it was a statement of amusement, not amusement itself.
This conversation was carried on in front of its subject, but this embarrassed neither of us. For one thing, such is common in Japan; for another, we were speaking English, a language presumably not understood by the young man. That I had declined the gift, however, embarrassed Mishima, who had apparently been talking up my qualifications.
The awkwardness was resolved by sending the youth away after he had enjoyed a glass of fresh orange juice, and then settling for a talk. I remember this talk in particular because it was literary, and Mishima and I almost never spoke of literature since that was not included in the province he allotted me.
Sometimes we had strayed into the literary marshes surrounding our subject: his lifelong admiration for Huysmans; his monograph on Saint Sebastian and his translation of the drama about him by D'Annunzio; his favorite modern novel, Hadrians Memoirs; and of course his own Confessions of a Mask, a work I thought his best, indeed—though I never told him this—his only successful work.
Today, however, he talked about Hemingway. This rather surprised me. He was a writer whom Mishima had disliked to a marked degree, either because of, or in spite of, similarities: both of them conscious stylists, both romantics given to macho posturings, both subscribers to obsolete codes. As it turned out, however, it was the American's suicide that interested the Japanese. He might still dislike him as a writer, he said, but he had come to admire the man. He now found him consistent, he said, "all of a piece"—and this he found admirable.
As indeed he might. Mishima himself, ever since I had known him, had been engaged in creating a person called Mishima who would be all of a piece. This new person was to be predicated on everything that the old person was not. The stutterer would become fluent in languages; the introverted adolescent, a Kendo champ; the ninety-seven-pound weakling, a body-builder and father of two children. It was a most impressive achievement. But death was needed, finally, to make a man all of a piece.
And this was what we were talking of, though at the time I did not know it. From Hemingway he moved the conversation to Takamori Saigo, the nineteenth-century military hero who had sought to reestablish ancient virtues by reinstating the emperor, who saw the new government handed over to accommodating bureaucrats, and who had come to understand that, for him, the revolution had failed. He spoke of his admiration for Saigo, of his final act, ritual suicide, of the faithful friend who dispatched him before committing suicide himself. He spoke of the beauty of Saigo's act, of that one superb gesture.
Lest I miss the point—one I was to comprehend only several months hence—he then spoke of how he, like Saigo, hated the rationalizing, pragmatic, conciliatory ways that had become those of Japan in our time.
- Japan, he said, has gone, vanished, disappeared.
- But, surely, the real Japan must still be around if you look for it?
He shook his head sternly.
- Is there no way to save it then? I asked, probably smiling.
He looked past me into the mirror: No, there is nothing more to save.
Then, like the playwright who artfully anticipates the climax in the first, casual-seeming allusion, like the novelist who skillfully introduces an oblique reference to the revelation to come, he said: He was the last true samurai.
I was to consider this only in the most literal sense: Saigo was the last samurai. Later, however, I was to realize with much fuller comprehension that this had been told me by the last true samurai himself.
With another person, even another writer, one would not be so certain of this. One might have called this early reference unconscious or something of that kind. Not with Mishima. Just as he chose the cast in the drama of his life according to his wishes, he also arranged its form according to his liking. I was to be astonished on that coming day in November—in fact, my exclamation of surprise was to be the final line of my role in his life.
Later, friends of Mishima's gathered and spoke of the noted suicide. We had all, it transpired, been given similar hints. The earliest dated from two years before the event. Together we comprised the chorus—flabbergasted, as at the denouement of a Euripidean tragedy.
But, back then in the Hilton bar, I was not supposed to guess and so I didn't. Rather, somewhat mistrustful of the stern turn our talk had taken, certain that he would next begin on "purity," a subject I had heard enough about from him to want to avoid, I attempted to introduce some levity into the conversation and told him that I quite envied him his toy army.
This was a mistake. He glared at his reflection. I was absolutely wrong, I was told. Nothing of the sort at all and I could keep my suspicions to myself because I was completely in error.
So I was, and ought to have known it. Given the final role of the toy army and its members, Mishima, so careful a casting director, would certainly not have confused parts to the extent I was suggesting. Its role was to be deadly serious.
Then, smiling his humorless smile, Mishima himself attempted to lighten our talk. He had been reading a book about Elagabulus, whom he rather admired—or, frankly, envied. Leaning toward me he told me some of the more salacious gossip recorded in the book. He was going to write about the ruler, as Camus had written about Caligula, as he himself had written about Sade and Hitler. Astonishing, he said, the power that man had had.
Later, when it was all over, when the coup de théâtre had had its desired effect and the curtain been rung down, I was at one of the memorial services, and up came the young literary student.
It was sensei's last wish that we be friends, I was told.
- I know, I said: But sometimes last wishes can't be granted.
I did not say that the only parts we had really played were those of stage properties in sensei's last housecleaning.
- Nevertheless, he added (keredomo, a non sequitur quite built into the Japanese language itself): Sensei was a truly extraordinary man.
And I couldn't but agree.
Sada Abé
After the war, released from prison, she got herself a job in Inari-cho, in downtown Tokyo: at the Hoshi-Kiku-Sui—the Star-Chrysanthemum-Water—a pub.
There, every night, workers of the neighborhood—for it was a taishusakaba, a workingman's pub—would gather to drink saké and shochu and nibble grilled squid and pickled radish. And every night around ten, Sada Abé would make her entrance.
It was grand. She descended the staircase—itself a large affair which ended right in the middle of the customers. Always in bright kimono, one redolent of the time of her crime, early Showa, 1936, Sada Abé would appear at the head of the stairs, stop, survey the crowd below, and then slowly descend.
From where, one never knew. Some said that her lair was up there on the second floor, full of old photographs and overstuffed furniture. Others said that the staircase went nowhere at all, that she had to clamber up it from the back before she could arrive in public. In any event, the descent was dramatic, with many pauses as she stared at her guests below, turning a brief gaze on this one and that. And as she did so, progressing slowly, indignation was expressed.
It always appeared. It was part of the s
how, the entrance. Ostensibly it was provoked by the actions of the men below. They invariably placed their hands over their privates. Fingers squeezed tight, they would then turn and snicker. Above, the descending Sada Abé would mime fury, casting burning glances at those below who squeezed and giggled the more. She slapped the banister in her wrath, and merriment rippled.
This pantomime was occasioned by the nature of Sada Abé's crime. Twenty years before, she had cut off her lover's penis. This was after he was dead, of course. And he was dead because the two had discovered that if she squeezed his neck hard enough his weary member achieved new life, but one day she squeezed too hard and killed him.
It was these events to which her customers now, two decades later, referred by hiding their own penises and snickering. And it was these that she also acknowledged by pretending wrath.
At the bottom of the stairs she would stop and rake the room with her blazing gaze. There, in the growing hush, she would stand and glare.
The giggling stopped. Some of the men hunched lower, as though truly frightened. Perhaps they were, for this woman was a creature already legendary. She was a murderess. She had served a prison sentence. She had written a book about her exploits. And she might, they perhaps thought, be capable of doing the whole thing all over again.
Like a basilisk she stood. The last snicker died away. Silence, utter. Then, and only then, as though she had received the homage she desired, did Sada Abé smile. It was a cordial, welcoming smile and it accompanied her as she went about pouring drinks and slapping backs.
Like many a pub woman she became manly, just one of the boys. Unlike many, however, she had actually choked a man to death and then cut off his member. There was a consequent frisson when Sada Abé slapped your back.
- Hello there, you back again? You like this place here, eh? she asked, looking down at me and adding: Nothing but the best here, boys. Let's all drink up now.
Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People Page 4
