East is East

It was luck, it was fate, it was magic. Hiro stood bewildered before the rack the shop owner pointed him to—twenty, twenty-five, thirty Mishima titles in duplicate and triplicate and more taking a good slice out of the wall. It was as if his hand was guided: the first book he chose, the very first, was The Way of the Samurai. He slipped it off the shelf, pleased by its glossy cover and the drawing of dueling swordsmen that seemed to dance across it. He never even glanced inside: the cover was enough. That and the poster. He laid down his money for the laconic shopkeeper and ducked out the door with his treasure, one eye on the cruel photo of the martyred author.

Like most Japanese boys, Hiro knew the mythos of the samurai as thoroughly as his American counterpart knew that of the gun-slinger, the dance-hall girl and the cattle rustler. The wandering samurai, like the lone man on the horse, was a mainstay of network TV, the movie theater, cheap adventure novels and lurid comics, not to mention classics like The Forty-Seven Ronin that were on every school reading list. But after a period when he was eight or nine and ran around all day with a wooden sword and a hachimaki

looped round his head, he’d outgrown his fascination with the whole business of topknots and swords: samurai, he could take them or leave them. Still, when he opened Mishima’s book, it brought him back. He didn’t know then of Mishima’s right-wing politics, of his homosexuality and grandstanding, or even of his ritual suicide—all he knew was that he’d entered another world.

The book puzzled him at first. It wasn’t a story. There were no swordfights, no hair-raising tales of samurai derring-do and acts of redemptive heroism. No. It was a study, a commentary actually, by this man, this Mishima with the arrows in his groin, on Jōchō Yamamoto’s ancient samurai code of ethics, Hagakure. Hiro didn’t know what to make of it. I

discovered that the Way of the Samurai is death, he read. And: Human beings in this life are like marionettes … free will is an illusion.

He read that it was acceptable for a samurai to apply rouge if he woke up with a hangover and that wetting the earlobes with spittle would control nervousness in any situation. It all felt faintly ridiculous.

But he stuck with it, though it was like a textbook, a manual, like something he might read in a science or navigation class. He kept seeing the picture of the martyred author—only later did he realize it was a pose, Mishima’s masochistic homage to an Italian painting of a martyred saint—and he plowed through the book as if it were written in code, as if it were his personal initiation into the arcane rites and ancient secrets that would make their master the equal of anyone. It was a game, a puzzle, a conundrum. Hagakure—Hidden Among the Leaves—even its title was mysterious. In the following weeks he went back to the shop several times—the poster was gone, replaced by a life-size cutout of an old man with the face of a bird and a shock of white hair—to sample Mishima’s other books. They were novels, for the most part, and he enjoyed them, but none of them had the tug of the first. There was something there, and he didn’t know what it was. Over and over he read the cryptic passages, over and over. And then one day, in the way that the sun suddenly breaks through the clouds in the midst of a storm, he had it.

They’d ganged up on him at the ballfield—six or seven of them—and they’d slapped him around and flung his Yomiuri Giants cap into the sewer. He was in a rage, but the rage gave way to despair. When would it end, he asked himself, and the answer was never. He barely spoke to his grandparents that night, and he was restless: he didn’t want to watch the game shows, didn’t want to listen to tapes on his Walkman, he didn’t want to study or read. Finally, out of boredom, he picked up his dog-eared copy of Hagakure, opened it at random and began to read. The passage was about modern society, about how corrupt and weak it had become, and all at once, as if a switch had been flipped inside his head, Mishima’s words made perfect sense. All at once he understood: the book was about glory, and nothing less.