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

Mishima’s autobiographical short story “Isu” (“Chair,” 1952), which describes the unhappy home life of a nine-year-old, would run crying to his mother when scolded by his severe grandmother. Ruthless scolding terrified and depressed him; but his grandmother would not let him stay with his parents and would insist that he return to her sickroom. Shizué could hardly bear the situation; on the morning of one such day she drew up her chair to a window on the second floor of the house and looked down at the sickroom where she knew her son must be sitting obediently beside his grandmother’s bed. “I saw his small head for a moment while he was waiting for his grandmother and her nurse to return from the lavatory.” The boy’s attitude was a little different from his mother’s: her sympathy for him (he must long to run about and be active like other children) was mistaken in some ways; he liked being with his ill grandmother, who loved him so desperately. He had many of the instincts of a child, “but something within me responded to the darkened room and the sickbed—even now I work at my desk all night long andwake up around noon.” As Mishima has it, while his mother was looking down at him and the nurse from the floor above, he was not sad; in fact, he was content. Only sometimes he felt a sudden hatred of the nurse, who “would play obscene jokes on me” (he does not say what these were); it frightened him that his mother might see. “It is hard for me to account for my hatred, for we usually want those close to us to know our pains and sorrows. I tried to hide the pleasure which I took in my pain.”
    Shizué resolved to take her son back from his grandmother, who was increasingly bedridden; and one day she asked a manservant to smuggle the boy out of Natsuko’s room while she was sleeping. It was late December 1934 and there was a cold wind; these were conditions under which the boy was not supposed to go outside, as he was still frail. Shizué took him to a photography studio to have his picture taken. “Afterward her hands were clammy with sweat and she spoke in an unusually pathetic voice. It seemed that she had made a plan to do something and then changed her mind on the way home.” A picture taken of the boy at nine shows a little fellow with a shaven head and the look of a wizened old man, prematurely aged; he has a sweet, sad expression.
    The following year, the Hiraokas moved. The family split up. Mishima went with his grandparents to one house, and the rest of the family moved into a separate residence a few streets away. The practice in Japan is for grandparents to move out of their children’s homes at a certain age; Jōtarō and Natsuko were following this tradition, known as inkyo. The time was approaching, however, when Natsuko’s health would no longer permit her to care for the boy. Two years later, in March 1937, when he completed the elementary school of the GakushÅ«in, he rejoined his parents. They had moved to another house closer to the middle school of the GakushÅ«in, which is in a different part of Tokyo from the elementary school. Natsuko fought to the last. “Day and night my grandmother clasped my photograph to her bosom, weeping, and was instantly seized with a paroxysm if I violated the treaty stipulation that I should come to spend one night each week with her. At the age of twelve I had a true-love sweetheart aged sixty.”
    After moving away from his grandmother, the boy honored the arrangement that he come and stay with her once a week; hewas also taken out on outings by her. Natsuko invited him to accompany her to the theater, and for the first time he went to the Kabuki, where he saw
Chūshingura
, the story of the Forty-seven Ronin who committed hara-kiri in 1704. They also went to the No. Mishima had an instinct for the theater which his family had encouraged, but until this