The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes Read Free Book Online

in the tokonoma.” (The tokonoma is the alcove in the traditional Japanese room and is reserved for precious objects.) Almost all of Mishima’s childhood memories, however, were unhappy. He did not like the house where he was born, which was in the Yotsuya district of Tokyo: “There were two stories on the upper slope and three on the lower, numerous gloomy rooms and six housemaids.” He blamed his grandfather. Jōtarō had resigned from his post as governor of Karafuto, taking responsibility for a scandal in the administration, and “thereafter my family had begun sliding down an incline with a speed so happy-go-lucky that I could almost say that they hummed merrily as they went—huge debts, foreclosure, sale of the family estate, and then, as financial difficulties multiplied, a morbid vanity blazing higher and higher like some evil impulse.”
    THE HIRAOKA FAMILY

    Mishima’s grandfather attempted to be a businessman after his return to Japan, but he was not successful; he was obliged to sell his ancestral estates at Shikata, near Kobe, where his forefathers had farmed since the seventeenth century. By the time of Mishima’s birth in 1925, the Hiraokas had been reduced to living “in not too good a part of Tokyo, in an old rented house.” Mishima described this residence, which no longer stands, as “a pretentious house on a corner, with a rather jumbled appearance and a dingy, charred feeling. It had an imposing iron gate, an entry garden, and a Western-style reception room as large as the interior of a suburban church.”
    Mishima was undoubtedly gloomy about his childhood. The causes of his unhappiness were not limited to Jōtarō’s failures and the decline in the Hiraoka fortunes. The fundamental problem was the tension in the family home, which is to be attributed to Natsuko, Mishima’s grandmother; she “hated and scorned my grandfather. Hers was a narrow-minded, indomitable and rather wildly poetic spirit.” Natsuko was much the strongest personality in the Hiraoka family and she overrode not only Jōtarō but her son Azusa. Her hate of her husband was generated by scorn for his lack of pride; he lacked the samurai spirit of her ancestors; he was a jolly man with a frivolous streak, which Mishima inherited. Natsuko had a second reason for detesting Mishima’s grandfather: “A chronic case of cranial neuralgia was indirectly but steadily gnawing away her nerves and at the same time adding an unavailing sharpness to her intellect. Who knows but what those fits of depression she continued having until her death were a memento of vices in which my grandfather had indulged in his prime?” Natsuko, according to Takeo Okuno, a Japanese biographer of Mishima, had contracted syphilis from Jōtarō; her brain was affected by the disease. The unfortunate woman also had a gouty hip and had to use a stick to walk.
    The birth of Kimitaké galvanized Natsuko. Disappointed by the commonplace success of her son—Mishima’s father had obtained a post in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and was nothing more than a highly competent civil servant—she pinnedall her hopes on her first grandson. She resolved to take personal responsibility for his upbringing and virtually kidnapped the little boy from his mother: “My parents lived on the second floor of the house. On the pretext that it was dangerous to bring up a child on an upper floor, my grandmother snatched me from my mother’s arms on my forty-ninth day.” In a traditional Japanese family, a mother-in-law had powers of life and death over her son’s wife; and Shizué, only twenty years of age and frail in health, could not rescue the baby, whose bed was placed in his grandmother’s sickroom, “perpetually closed and stifling with odors of sickness and old age, and I was reared there beside her sickbed.” A nursemaid changed his linen and