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

urinated a lot more and mybrother said: ‘He will live now.’ ” “Auto-intoxication” is not a Western term, only a direct translation of
jikachudoku
. Kimitaké’s symptoms and treatment were these: “I vomited something the color of coffee. The family doctor was called. After examining me he said that he was not sure I would recover. I was given injections of camphor and glucose until I was like a pincushion. The pulses of both my wrist and my upper arm became imperceptible.” According to a Japanese pediatrician, Dr. Kiyoshi Nakamura, “the illness is usually found in children who are sensitive, intelligent, and overprotected, who have been trained by their mothers to be ‘good’ boys or girls.” The cause of Kimitaké’s illness is unknown, but my guess is that Natsuko, who had a violent temper, was responsible for the attacks, which the child suffered thereafter at regular intervals.
    He grew into an unusually delicate child, as one may see from a photograph of him in the summer of 1929. Kimitaké has been taken for a rare treat, an outing to a park. He is seated on a donkey and appears strangely absent, and collapsed, like a balloon running out of air; he lolls forward, dressed in a sailor suit, his chin on his chest. The child looks as if he will topple off his perch any second.
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    Fairy Tales and Fantasies
    Mishima described how his illness “struck about once a month, now lightly, now seriously.” There were many crises. “By the sound of the disease’s footsteps as it drew near I came to be able to sense whether an attack was likely to approach death or not.” Natsuko rarely allowed him out of the house; and his brief encounters with the world beyond the iron gates of the Hiraoka home assumed great importance. The tiny, pale boy was preternaturally sensitive and he endowed anyone he met, however briefly, with significance. “My earliest memory, an unquestionable one, haunting me witha strangely vivid image, dates from about that time [when he was four] . . . It was a young man who was coming down toward us, with handsome, ruddy cheeks and shining eyes, wearing a dirty roll of cloth around his head for a sweatband. He came down the slope carrying a yoke of night-soil buckets over one shoulder . . . He was a night-soil man, a ladler of excrement. He was dressed as a laborer, wearing split-toed shoes with rubber soles and black canvas tops, and dark-blue cotton trousers of the close-fitting kind called ‘thigh-pullers’ . . . The close-fitting jeans plainly outlined the lower half of his body, which moved lithely and seemed to be walking directly toward me. An inexpressible adoration for those trousers was born in me . . . His occupation gave me the feeling of ‘tragedy’ in the most sensuous meaning of the word.”
    The “tragedy” was Kimitaké’s. He was eternally excluded from the lives of ordinary men and women—for example, the drivers of
hanadensha
(trams decorated with flowers) and the ticket collectors with rows of gold buttons on their tunics, whom he saw on his rare excursions. His grief for the night-soil man was, in reality, profound concern about himself. “The so-called ‘tragic things’ of which I was becoming aware were probably only shadows cast by a flashing presentiment of grief still greater in the future, of a lonelier exclusion still to come.” Later in life, Mishima was to struggle against his alienation; he would identify with ordinary Japanese men—taxi drivers, bartenders, soldiers. But he could not escape his upbringing; as a Japanese proverb has it: “A man’s character is determined by the age of three.” Mishima was brought up with a false impression of Japanese society; being much influenced by Natsuko’s talk of her “old family” and by the snobbishness of other members of the