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

who has known the Hiraokas for thirty years described to me the effect upon the boy of being handed over to his mother at the very moment that his adolescence was beginning: “When Mishima started to live with his mother he fell in love with the poor, beautiful woman who had been so cruelly treated by her awful mother-in-law. As they had been separated for such a long time, the reunion between mother and son was scarcely normal. Mishima was at a most sensitive age, the start of his adolescence.” Later in life Shizué would refer to her son as a“lover.” (After his suicide she said, “My lover has returned to me.”) Mishima reciprocated her feelings; he loved her deeply and probably never had a really close relationship with any other person. His mother, he said, “protected me ever since I was a child,” taking his manuscripts to established writers and giving him secret encouragement to pursue his writing. She hid her actions from her husband, as Azusa wanted his sons to follow the family tradition of government service and thoroughly disapproved of literature as a career for the boy. Shizué, the protector, aroused these feelings in her son: “My mother has been very good-looking since her youth. It may sound odd if I say so, but I was proud of her youth and beauty. I felt superior to others, when I compared my mother to those of my friends” (“Ajisai no Haha,” “Hydrangea Mother,” 1953).
    After his death, Shizué wrote these impressions of her son’s relationship with her after World War II:
    â€œIf ever I was in bed with flu or something, Kimitaké really worried about me, as if I were on the point of dying. He brought
hanebuton
[feather cushions] and ordered dishes from Hamasaku and Fukudaya [the best restaurants in Tokyo], proposed that I should have a Western-style lavatory or wanted to buy a new air-conditioner instead of the noisy one we had. While he was still single, he would sit by my bedside, working at his papers and taking care of me.
    â€œWhenever flowers were sent to him, he would have the maid bring them over to me [from his house next door]. One day he admired one of my flower arrangements greatly; it was ‘Seven Flowers of Autumn.’
    â€œIf he went on a trip he would never fail to bring back
omiyage
[presents] for the family and for the maids. When he was traveling in Japan he would phone from wherever he was, on arrival, chat about the trip and say exactly when he was coming back.
    â€œOnce he proposed that we should go to Nara for the Saegusa Matsuri [a festival] saying that there would be masses of sasayuri [lily decorations]. [I could not go and] I was delighted when he brought back a single, thin, pink lily all the way from Nara, carrying it himself although he had masses of luggage that day.
    â€œKimitaké invited me to plays, foreign operas, interesting exhibitionsand so on, every month, and also to new restaurants. I saw all these places thanks to him.”
    His mother was the first person to see his writing, which appeared regularly in the school magazine,
Hōjinkai Zasshi
, after the boy had entered middle school in 1937. He got on there much better than he had in the junior school, where his teachers had regarded his compositions as adventurous (he used rare characters and unusual constructions); and as his health improved steadily, his grades also got better. He was no longer an absentee at the Gakushūin.
    His father, however, resisted Mishima’s literary ambitions and thus came in conflict with the boy’s mother. Azusa’s ministry had sent Azusa to Osaka for two years, where he lived apart from his family, and on his return to Tokyo in 1939 he was disturbed to find how quickly his older son’s interest in writing had developed. On one occasion Azusa stormed into the young Mishima’s room and seized the manuscript he was working on, tearing it into pieces, which he scattered