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

about the room. The boy wept and his mother comforted him with tea; thereafter Mishima hid his stories so that his father could not find them.
    Shizué was literally her son’s “protector”; it was not just a matter of encouraging him to write. Her own interest in literature stemmed from her scholarly family. She did not write herself but would have liked to, and Mishima was her proxy. Shizué did not have the pronounced character and definite literary taste of her mother-in-law (Natsuko had had a high regard for the ghostly, mysterious tales of Kyōka Izumi, a turn-of-the-century writer), but she was far more attuned to literature and the arts than was her husband. Azusa still wanted his son, who showed intellectual promise, to make a career in government. He could not imagine that anyone could make a living by literature, and in fact, before World War II, this was virtually impossible; writers needed patrons. Relations between father and son were never close, yet Azusa had an influence on the boy and exerted a steady pressure on him in his teens. As the oldest, and most gifted, child, Mishima was intended by his father to take the lead in the family; the other two children—Mitsuko, a strong, cheerful, unimaginative tomboy of a girl, and Chiyuki, a quiet, gentle boy—were supposed to follow.Such is the role of the elder son in a traditional Japanese family.
    One may only conjecture what would have been the reaction of his father had he known the thoughts and adolescent dreams of his oldest boy—who was to all appearances a normal, even exemplary, child. Ironically, Azusa played a part in Mishima’s discovery of an image that haunted him all his life, St. Sebastian on the tree of martyrdom. “One day, taking advantage of having been kept from school by a slight cold, I got out some volumes of art reproductions, which my father had brought back as souvenirs of his foreign travels. [Azusa had been to Europe, to represent his ministry on fishery problems; and, like most educated middle-class Japanese, he was a sampler of Western culture.] . . . Suddenly there came into view from one corner of the next page a picture that I had to believe had been lying in wait there, for my sake.” It was a reproduction of a late Renaissance work, Guido Reni’s
St. Sebastian
.
    Mishima described the painting in
Confessions of a Mask
: “A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk of a tree. His crossed hands were raised high, and the thongs binding his wrists were tied to the tree. No other bonds were visible, and the only covering for the youth’s nakedness was a coarse white cloth knotted loosely about his loins . . . Were it not for the arrows with their shafts deeply sunk into his left armpit and right side, he would seem more a Roman athlete resting from fatigue . . . The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh, and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy.” The boy’s hands embarked on a motion of which he had no experience; he played with his “toy”: “Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication . . . Some time passed, and then, with miserable feelings I looked around the desk I was facing . . . There were cloud-white splashes about . . . Some objects were dripping lazily, leadenly, and others gleamed dully, like the eyes of a dead fish. Fortunately, a reflex motion of my hand to protect the picture had saved the book from being soiled.” This was the first occasion on which Mishima had an ejaculation. How deep an impression the image of St. Sebastian made on him! Twenty-five years later, Mishima posed for a photographer as St. Sebastian; he had “a coarse white cloth knotted loosely abouthis loins” and three arrows planted in his suntanned torso, one of which was embedded in his