In 1970, Yukio Mishima was giving a lecture. Visual China|Figure
Lake Yamanaka in September, the summer heat has not faded. My memories of the surroundings were gone, and I didn't even feel a sense of attachment. In 2008 and 2014, I visited this place in the summer. The new sense of this scenery shows the size of the lake in the mountains, and the sloppy skin of the previous horses. Visitors here are usually for Mt. Fuji. This is a beautiful place to see Mt. Fuji. At that time, the Yukio Mishima Literature Museum in the "Forest of Literature" in Lake Yamanaka, which opened in 1999, was already there, but I didn't know it was there.
On September 5, 2023, Dr. Tan Weidong and I took a highway bus from Tokyo to Lake Yamanaka to visit the Yukio Mishima Memorial Museum.
I departed from Shinjuku Station in Tokyo early in the morning and arrived at Lake Yamanaka more than two hours later, and I liked the name of the hotel I stayed in, which was called "Okagoya". This "cage" is quite chic and interesting. Of course, I didn't live in a cage, just a normal motel on the side of the road. Speaking of which, this is the first time I have stayed in a motel hotel in Japan, similar to a motel in other countries, with an L-shaped two-story building, facing an open space for parking, and the hotel lobby is very simple, with coffee and tea buffet. In the afternoon, we went to the nearby "Flower Capital" park and walked around, where the yellow flowers were everywhere, and the scenery and charm of Mt. Fuji in the sunset in front of you were quite unforgettable. The star of Lake Yamanaka's landscape is "Red Fuji". The so-called "red Fuji" is when the setting sun turns the top of Mt. Fuji red. The yellow grass flowers stretching out freely on the field, I checked, called "sulfur chrysanthemum".
I think of the beginning and the process of this trip as a way of approaching. The longer and more winding the approach, the more flavorful it is to reach your destination. For me, the delayed enjoyment type, it's quite palatable. Early in the morning of September 6th, I waited for a bus at a stop sign called "Ioribara". In the early morning, the thick clouds, gray and white, hung directly to the ground. Get on the country bus and drive to the cloudy end. After a few stops, you will arrive at the "Forest of Literature" station, walk into a quiet hill, climb the stairs, and spiral gradually.
The Yukio Mishima Literature Museum is located in the "Forest of Literature" in Lake Yamanaka. Courtesy of the author
To get close to Mishima, for me, a long approach was required.
I started reading Yukio Mishima when I was in high school, and I still reread it often, and I have read a lot of biographies and reviews about Mishima. Until now, as soon as I find something new and related, I will immediately look for it and read it. I've been on a mystery, Mishima-related relics since I started my journey to trace Japanese literature and art more than a decade ago, and I've been to Kinkaku-ji Temple in Kyoto a few times, and I've also been to the Kamakura Literature Museum in Kamakura (a prototype site of Spring Snow). I also went to the Reinisho Museum of Art on Inujima Island in the Seto Inland Sea. This museum is a themed museum created by architect Hiroshi Sanizoni and artist Yukinori Yanagi based on Mishima's work "Sun and Iron", and the museum uses a number of installation works created from various raw materials such as doors, windows, and tables from Mishima's old house.
Just two days before this trip to Lake Yamanaka, my friend Mr. Hu Ang, a professor of architecture at the University of Tokyo, took me and Dr. Tan on a tour of the Higashi Okoma Campus, and when we walked to an old auditorium, Hu Ang introduced us to the famous Lecture Hall 900, which Yukio Mishima came to in 1969 to debate with the students of Tokyo. "The smell of gunpowder is very strong in the students of Tokyo, and Mishima is very courageous to confront so many students single-handedly. It is said that he secretly hid a short knife on his body. ”
Later, I checked the records of the situation. It was May 13, 1969, when the University of Tokyo's "All-Gongdo" (United Front of Students) challenged Yukio Mishima, who was at odds with his political affiliation, to debate in Lecture Hall 900 on their home turf, the Higashi-Okomaba Campus. Dressed in over-the-top pants and a black knit sweater, Mishima wrapped a traditional hashimaki around his waist (wrapped tightly around his abdomen with a long cotton cloth to protect against the impact of sharp weapons), and a short knife and an iron fan wrapped around his belly. When Mishima arrived that day, he saw a poster for the event at the entrance of the lecture hall, which depicted him as a shirtless man holding a barbell and carrying a katana, and wrote the phrase "Todai Zoo Special Exhibit 'Modern Gorilla'". Mishima entered the lecture hall, which was filled with about a thousand enthusiastic students. The debate lasted for two and a half hours, and a small number of the students shouted insults at Mishima from beginning to end, but most of the students were curious and even adored Mishima, and the first student addressed Mishima as "sir" (teacher) when he asked a question, and then the student said, "I just called you 'sir', which doesn't seem right and doesn't fit the occasion." However, I think that you, Mr. Mishima, are more qualified to be called a teacher than those Todai faculty members who are hanging around us these days. As soon as these words came out, they received a round of applause. This debate on the subject of the imperial system was inconclusive, and each said his own thing. Mishima's publisher, Shinchosha, recorded the entire event, and a month later published a collection of debates. Mishima gave half of the manuscript fee to Todai's "All Together".
In fact, in Japan, it is difficult for readers of Yukio Mishima to find the possibility of finding the land, and his former residence and cemetery are not open to the public. The only memorial museum in Japan related to the three islands is Lake Yamanaka.
For me, Mishima is the one who stands at the end of my life as a writer, and has had a great influence on me in terms of starting point and aesthetic standpoint. He has always been present in my reading life, his talent, his beauty, his violentness, his aesthetics and nihilism, too rich and complex to be absent for forty years. I agree with this opinion: Yukio Mishima is the most complex writer in the world – and this means that Margaret Yourcenar.
Yamanakako Bunganon-no-Mori Park is located on the south shore of Yamanakako Village, Nantoru-gun, Yamanashi Prefecture. Speaking of which, Mishima has nothing to do with Lake Yamanaka, and when he served briefly in the Self-Defense Forces, he once crossed the mountains near Lake Yamanaka during training, and the name of the place also appears in several of his novels, nothing more. In 1996, Yamanakakomura spent 300 million yen to buy out the Mishima materials treasured by the Hiraoka family (Yukio Mishima's real name is Hiraoka Konoi). On July 3, 1999, the Yukio Mishima Literature Museum was opened, and more than 6,000 volumes of related materials were preserved in the museum, including the first editions of all his works, a large number of manuscripts, letters, etc. The collection also includes materials such as Mishima's childhood compositions and paintings, as well as his juvenile essays, which shows that his mother, Bunshige, has been carefully preserved.
In the "Forest of Literature", the road on the hill twists and turns, curving and lengthening the route to the destination. The foliage covers the top and the road is verdant, dotted with red fruit trees. The fruits are ripe and the size of eggs, like lychees. Check it, this kind of fruit tree is called Sizhaohua, native to North Korea and Japan, and later planted in the southeastern provinces of China, can be used as medicine, has the purpose of clearing heat and detoxifying, and can also make wine. On the side of the trail, there are three steps and five steps of a sentence stone, and there are haiku engraved with Matsuo Basho, Tomiyasu Kazeo, Maeda Yudu, Kaneko Mitsuharu, and Ito Sachio singing about Mt. Fuji and Lake Yamanaka. Halfway along the road, there is also a haiku museum "Fusei-an" that is famous in modern times. Speaking of which, Mishima's works are quite far from haiku, and his continuation of the classics is directly tied to the gaudy and lingering literature of the Heian Dynasty. In his works, the beauty, sorrow and dullness of "Spring Snow" is, in my opinion, in line with the atmosphere of "The Tale of Genji". In this way, I read haiku all the way and went around to the Mishima Literature Museum deep in the forest. If spring arrives, the surrounding scenery will surely correspond to Mishima's debut novel "Forest in Full Bloom", which was released at the age of 16.
Yukio Mishima Literature Museum. Courtesy of the author
The Mishima Literature Museum is a gray-brown three-story building. It is a very square building, which looks more serious and uninteresting from the outside, with large walls and relatively small windows. There is a nameplate embedded in the brick of the outer wall of the entrance, on which are the words "Yukio Mishima Literature Museum". The exhibition hall is on the first floor (no photographs are allowed), and in addition to the display of various books, materials, documents, and other items, there is also a video hall where various documentaries about Mishima are shown on a rolling basis. The museum also hosts a variety of literary events related to Mishima from time to time.
There is a garden in the front and back of the Literature Museum, and a marble statue of Apollo stands in the backyard opposite the entrance, which is a replica of the statue of Apollo in the garden of Mishima's former residence. Somewhat bizarrely, the statue's abdomen has a slit that splits from the center to the right. It is said that there were no cracks when the statue was installed, but it began to crack gradually. I didn't see this at the time at the time, I read it in hindsight when I read other people's travelogues.
After becoming a famous writer, Mishima built a house in Magome-cho, Ota-ku, Tokyo, and built a baroque-style garden villa. The former residence is still not open to the public. For this place, there are two photographers' photo books that can be used as a conduit for understanding. The first is Hideko Hosoe's "Torture of the Rose" (filmed in 1963), and the other is "Yukio Mishima's Home" (1995) by Norinobu Sasayama, the former is a collection of photographs of Mishima's characters with Mishima as the protagonist, and the latter is a collection of scene-themed photographs, from the entrance of the mansion to the garden, living room, study, and bedroom...... to the various details of Mishima's daily life, such as pens, manuscripts, mirrors, chandeliers, and books in his collection (including a series of works by Yasunari Kawabata), and so on. The photo book "Yukio Mishima's Home" has received the full assistance of Mrs. Yaoko Mishima. On the left is an old photo of Yaozi's collection, Mishima's photos of various scenes at home, and on the right is an empty shot of the same scene, and the building is empty. In the Mishima Literature Museum, these photographs are also part of the presentation.
In March 1970, Yukio Mishima was at his home in Tokyo. Visual China|Figure
The unnatural death of a writer is not a particularly uncommon occurrence. But Mishima's death is particularly regrettable. If he hadn't committed suicide, he would have been 98 years old in 2023. Maybe he is still alive and has become an old immortal, or maybe he has died, just like an ordinary old man. In any case, such a rare genius died at the age of 45, the most proficient and refined, how many works have been written.
Looking at the chronology of his work, the intensity of his creative output, John Nathan, the translator and biographer of his works, concludes, "He wrote forty novels, eighteen plays (all of which were staged), twenty collections of short stories, and an equal number of collections of literary criticism." He is a director, an actor, a skilled swordsman, and a muscular athlete; He flew F-102 fighter jets and conducted symphony orchestras; He has traveled around the world seven times and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize three times. In addition, he is an international celebrity, and he is known to love life and always seems to be able to fully enjoy the rewards of exceptional talent and superior will. A few days before committing suicide, which he had been preparing for a year, he told his mother that none of the things he had done in his life were what he really wanted to do. ”
In March 1970, Yukio Mishima was working out. Visual China|Figure
I've read a lot of biographies about Mishima, most recently John Nathan's "The Biography of Yukio Mishima". In 1964, John Nathan, a 24-year-old American student at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tokyo, translated Yukio Mishima's novel "Afternoon Dragging", after which he became Mishima's translator and guest, spending a lot of time with him. After Mishima's death, he relied on his familiarity with Mishima's family to conduct in-depth interviews with Mishima's widow Yaoko and Mishima's parents, especially Mishima's mother, Bunshige.
John Nathan argues, "I insist that the driving force behind Mishima's seppuku suicide stemmed from the longing for death that haunted him since childhood, and the intermittent fear of that longing; And the 'patriotism' he preached in the last decade of his life provided him with a passport to realize his long-cherished desire to be martyred. "As a veteran Mishima reader, I agree with John Nathan's argument.
Yukio Mishima is a natural lack of existence, and everything he does cannot make up for his lack of existence. The more you do and the more you gain, the deeper the abyss of existence becomes. From this point of view, he is indeed the same kind of person as Osamu Dazai, whom he dislikes on the surface but cherishes on the inside. There is a passage in Zhian that comments on Yukio Mishima and Osamu Dazai, "The former (Mishima) is afraid that he will not be successful enough in life, and the latter (Osamu Dazai) is afraid that he will not fail enough in life, and they both finally completed their life pursuits in their own special way of suicide." "Zhuangzi" believes that to achieve an act to the extreme—in layman's terms, it is to make a career, and the suicide of the two can probably be described in this way. ”
A part of the Mishima Literature Museum is a reproduction of his study as it is, which is quite neat. In addition, I saw a large number of manuscripts from Mishima, including the manuscripts of "Kinkakuji" and "Sea of Plenty" (tetralogy). This is my favorite Mishima work. Mishima wrote it word by word, and his mind was fixed to the manuscript paper through the end of the pen, as if such an object carried his body temperature and breath. At the scene, in the face of these manuscripts, I suddenly had palpitations.
Mishima's manuscript is beautifully handwritten, the pages are neat, and the manuscript paper of 400 words per page has a beautiful sense of craftsmanship. Any editor would be delighted to see such a manuscript. At the same time, he is an exemplary person who follows the rules of the industry, always delivers on time or ahead of schedule, and is the kind of author that all editors trust the most.
On the surface, Mishima and Haruki Murakami are the same kind of writers, they are both Capricorns, workaholics, highly self-disciplined, and have a clear and fixed sense of order. The difference is that Mishima pretends to love social life and loves the guests of the big banquet. But in the heat of the night, Mishima would definitely leave at 11 p.m., because he was going to go into his study to write. In contrast, Murakami's life is quite real. He refuses to socialize, does not mingle, and admits that he is a low-energy person in interpersonal interactions. Some people need to recharge in a crowd, and some people can only recharge in solitude. Mishima is the latter. So, how did playing the role of a social expert over the years hurt his heart?
Also a nihilist, Haruki Murakami fully accepts his natural void realm, while Yukio Mishima is on a dead end. The implications seem to be comparable from the perspective of survival, but if you discern them at a more complex level, there is no answer.
Dusting
Editor-in-charge: Xing Renyan