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

a bullet, there would surely be no pain.”
    Mishima’s comment on this scene is a reflection on his entire life, and on his death. “What people regarded as a pose on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my own true nature and . . . it was precisely what people regarded as my true self which was a masquerade. It was this unwilling masquerade that made me say: ‘Let’s play war.’ ”
    4
    School and Adolescence
    The 1930’s was a decade of violence in public affairs in Japan, but the Hiraokas were little affected by the events of these years.Mishima’s father continued in his ministry post and received a promotion; and the boy knew little of the upheavals which took place in Tokyo. One morning in 1936, when he was on his way to school, he heard bugles in the far distance—the start of the Ni Ni Roku Incident, the greatest of the numerous coups that shook Japan in the 1930’s. The boy remembered that there was snow on the ground—it was in February; and later in life Mishima associated snowy streets with revolution. The Hiraokas, however, were secure in their upper-middle-class existence; life went on as before.
    Mishima began school in April 1931, when he entered the GakushÅ«in, the Peers School. He was still under the control of his grandmother; Natsuko showed no inclination to surrender him to his mother. According to Shizué: “After Kimitaké had entered elementary school, I was allowed to take him there myself every day. I was so happy to be with him, picking up acorns in the park and singing songs with him in the park at Yotsuya.” She bought him ice cream, to which he was partial; and she induced him to go to the dentist, by offering him ice cream before each visit. Natsuko set the daily program of her grandson; when he came back from school with his mother he had to have his
osanji
(three o’clock tea) with Natsuko, and he must then do his homework by her bedside. She was particular about being given priority over his mother. “If he called out to me ‘Okāsama’ [Mother] before speaking to her first, addressing her as ‘Obasama’ [Grandmother], she would be most unpleasant. At other times she would criticize both of us if he showed an inclination to do something with me.”
    The GakushÅ«in, a school for the children of the rich and the aristocracy—it was also attended by members of the Imperial family—had a liberal tradition. There was swimming at the beach in the summer, a luxury by the austere standards of prewar schools. But Natsuko would not allow the boy to go on these excursions; he expressed his disappointment in a composition he wrote in 1932:
    ENOSHIMA EXCURSION
    I did not go on the school outing.
When I woke up that day I thought: “Now everyone must be at Shinjuku Station, on the train.”
I easily think of things like that.
I went to my grandmother and my mother. I wanted so much to go. Just at that moment they would all have arrived at Enoshima.
I wanted to go so much because I had never been there.
I was thinking of it from morning until evening.
When I went to bed I had a dream.
I
did
go to Enoshima with everyone else, and I played there very happily. But I could not walk at all. There were rocks.
Then I woke up.
    According to his mother, his first school excursion was to Kashima Shrine. “He was so happy that time. He sent a card to Mother, but he rarely sent cards to me.” All his life Mishima was to take delight in going to places that he had never visited before; he loved to go to newly opened restaurants, to climb to the top of new skyscrapers in Tokyo—if possible, before anyone else he knew. His childlike enthusiasm, suppressed when he was a child, burst out in later years. When teased about this, he would become angry. “Oh, don’t say that!” he would say and turn away.
    Life at home was often difficult. The boy, as told in