The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima

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

Book: The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes Read Free Book Online
Authors: Henry Scott Stokes
saw to his needs during the night.
    Shizué’s position had not been entirely usurped. She still fed the child, but Natsuko kept her in her place, as Mishima’s mother recalled after his death (in
Segare Mishima Yukio
, “My Son Yukio Mishima,” a memoir by his parents published in
Shokun
magazine in 1972). “We lived upstairs, while Mother [Natsuko] kept Kimitaké with her all the time, ringing an alarm every four hours, loud enough for me to hear upstairs. Kimitaké’s feeding times had to be precisely every four hours; and the duration of the feeding sessions was exactly fixed in advance.” Then Shizué was sent upstairs again. This situation existed for a year and her hopes of winning back the child were dashed when an accident of precisely the kind her mother-in-law had predicted actually happened.
    â€œOne day,” according to Shizué, “Mother was out at the Kabuki and Kimitaké fell down the stairs, banging his head and losing a good deal of blood. We took him to the hospital and called Mother on the telephone. When she returned home, she shouted out: ‘Is he past help?’ Still to this day I cannot forget the terrifying look on her face.” Mishima describes the scene only a little differently in
Confessions of a Mask
:
    â€œWhen she arrived my grandfather went out to meet her. She stood in the hallway without taking her shoes off, leaning on the cane she carried in her right hand, and stared fixedly at my grandfather. When she spoke it was in a strangely calm tone of voice, as though carving out each word:
    â€œ ‘Is he dead?’
    â€œ ‘No.’
    â€œThen, taking off her shoes and stepping up from the hallway, she walked down the corridor with steps as confident as those of a priestess . . .”
    Natsuko had occult powers and thereafter she frustrated all Shizué’s plans for regaining possession of her child. Curiously, she brought up Kimitaké as a little girl, not as a boy. He was always attended by a nursemaid, although this annoyed him greatly; he was not allowed to run about in the house, but he was forbidden to go out; and he must stay on the ground floor all the time, usually with his grandmother or the maid. He was not permitted to play as he wanted. “Kimitaké liked to brandish rulers and other long things [as we read in his mother’s account], but Mother always confiscated these on the grounds that they were dangerous. Kimitaké would obey her meekly. I felt so sorry for him.”
    These restrictions were imposed for Natsuko’s sake: “Mother’s hip made her very nervous of sounds, especially when the pain started. Toys like cars, guns which clicked metallically, and so on, were all banned.” But she countered with hostility any threat to her control of the child: “When it was bright outside, I would try to take him out. But it was always in vain. Mother would wake up like a bolt and forbid it. So Kimitaké was kept inside in her dark, gloomy room, full of sickness and ill health.”
    In February 1928, Mishima’s mother had a second child, a girl whom they named Mitsuko. Natsuko made no attempt to take over the girl and it was nonsensical that one child should be confined to the ground floor and the other to the second floor; that, however, is what happened.
    If Shizué had hopes of recovering Kimitaké, they were destroyed by the onset of a grave illness. On New Year’s Day 1929 the little boy had a sudden collapse. According to his mother, “Kimitaké became ill with ‘auto-intoxication’
[jikachudoku]
 . . . The illness was critical and all our relatives gathered at the house. I put together his toys and clothing, ready to go into the coffin. My brother, a doctor at Chiba Medical University, came in at that moment; and he suddenly exclaimed: ‘Look! He’s urinating; maybe he’ll be all right.’ And after a while he

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