Richard Oyama

Mishima

They drove north on the 1. Outside the car window, the huge sprawling darkness slid by on the freeway that estranged one neighborhood from another. They exited at a green sign saying Topanga and scaled a hillside along switchbacks. David felt sick. Michel stopped in front of a two-story Tudor house with a movable backboard to its left and a wooden walkway built into the hillside dirt that led to the entrance. Dogs barked menacingly. The wife answered the door, platinum-blonde and brittle. “Hi Cindy,” Michel said.

She ushered them into a house littered with rubbery pet toys. Two dogs romped, yelping and sniffing asses, a tall Dobermann and a black Lab. Cindy said they had put the two boys to bed. She went into the kitchen for beer.

The husband came into the kitchen. He was six feet two, 230 pounds with a Prince Valiant cut and a handlebar mustache like an exile from Castro Street. He wore a leather vest, sleeveless teeshirt, snakeskin belt with a buckle that said Lone Star and faded jeans. He was unsmiling. He had known Michel from a former life, but it wasn’t clear to David what that former life was. No one deciphered it. They had crossed the big country and were deracinated of language. The husband’s name was Brock Hess. He was doing a literature dissertation at UCLA.

“Its title is ‘Yukio Mishima: The Pen and the Sword: Unpacking the Metaphysics of Action,’” he said, prowling the living room amid the battleground of toys with a tumbler of whiskey, spilling its contents onto the red shag. “My thesis is that Mishima wedded contradictions in art and life—East and West, married and a fag, a Japanese nationalist and a lover of European literature, an intellectual and a heroic man of action.”

Hess moved across the room like a domesticated tiger in a sybaritic canyon, mildly drugged yet emanating a pent-up rage. The more he drank, the louder he got, and the more extreme his vision became. The three of us slumped on the couch, phasing in and out of a consensus reality, though at times Shimamura slipped into a primitivist state that was postliterate. They were in a cave among shadows.

David had read Mishima. Exhausted though he was, the pedant in him rose up. As a New Yorker, he was spoiling for a fight.

“I prefer Kawabata,” he said.

“You what?” Brock yelled.

“I prefer Yasunari Kawabata, Mishima’s mentor,” he said. “Kawabata’s effects are more impressionist and poetic.  Mishima is a tortured hodgepodge of Western literature and Buddhist notions of impermanence and reincarnation.” 

Brock gagged on his whiskey, stomped over to the well-stocked mini-bar, and refilled his glass. He would not be challenged, especially in his big house in the Southland by a hyphenated American who had an imposter’s knowledge of Japanese culture as opposed to a Caucasian Japanophile whose immersion had been total, since he was not conflicted by the ambivalence of identity.

“Look, nobody can write a tetralogy of novels without possessing masculine force,” he growled, jabbing a thick finger at David.

“Or, as Mailer said, a writer must at least have the remnants of his balls?” David asked. “How does that apply to women writers?”

“I’m reading Baudelaire,” Tom said, apropos of nothing.

“We’re talking Mishima, dude, not politically correct generalities. Mishima was a transformational figure, someone who reinvented himself, appeared in movies, blurring art and life, sometimes messily.”

“I agree with that,” David conceded, “some of the key male cultural figures of that epoch were marked by a chameleonic spirit, swift metamorphoses, violent repudiations—Dylan, Muhammad Ali, Godard, Amiri Baraka. But with Mishima, there was something vaguely fascistic about the primitive cult of the body as early as The Sound of Waves. It found terminal expression in the ritual act of seppuku by the militaristic Self-Defense Forces to restore Japan to its former imperial glory.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Hess stood over him, glass in hand, chin pugnacious as Mussolini, lurching forward and back. In David’s residually stoned condition, it seemed Brock was a ship’s mast tilting in sea-blow, no, rather the room itself was tilting like the rotating box Tobe Hooper used with a stationary camera for “Poltergeist.” Maybe the entire canyon was constructed on burial grounds and the ghosts of dead Indians would erupt from David Hockney pools and casting couches, grotesque skulls a-shimmer. How many holocausts had the nation committed in the name of manifest destiny, the slave trade, white supremacy, and exceptionalism, making the world safe for democracy against communism and terrorism? He did not want to tote that bale. 

“Nothing, if the way a writer reconciles his self-contradictions is through hyper-nationalism, the totalitarian mind, and imperial nostalgia. Myself, I don’t think it works.”     

“Shit,” Brock said dismissively, “you’re one of those bleeding-heart liberal apologists, a nervous nelly. Mishima was no more a fascist than our president is. So unfair.”

“Isn’t he?”

“Brock, are you coming to bed?” Cindy asked, framed in the doorway, her hourglass shape silhouetted in a translucent nightgown. Wes Craven had composed the titillating shot.

“In a minute, babe.”

“He always gets famished late at night, you know.”

“Cindy, stop.”

“It’s true. Just before bedtime, you have this insatiable craving for a PB and J. Two of them.

“Cindy.”

“It’s an oral thing,’ she said with a sort of fatalism and retired to bed.

“No,” Brock said, “the president isn’t a fascist. To be a fascist you need to have a coherent ideology.”

“True enough,” David said, “the president is authoritarian by instinct and silver-spoon birthright.” The image of red, white, and blue balloons from a convention hall roof, falling upon delegates like a hard rain, came to him. The gold lame curtains in the Oval Office were a classy touch.

“You’re so full of shit my toilet would overflow,” Brock said, exiting stage right.

He walked down the hill past silent houses that flickered with a bluish glow from a laptop and across which figures moved like cut-outs, forms backlit like a cloud against a black sun. Dogs yowled in agony and heat. He had a terrific urge to pee and scrambled into the underbrush on the steep bank. Feet slipping, he thudded on his buttocks on a bed of pine needles and leaves. He sat upright, then positioned himself opposite a tree. He thought of Lana Turner in white shorts holding a tennis racket. The stream came out of him like a rainbow, a breath, a coda. He was alone in the moonlight and felt his dogness as though this emanation would somehow elegize him in this new territory. It was like carving one’s name upon a rock. Someone in a hockey mask was riffling leaves with a handheld camera. Sexually active teenagers were hard at work. It was the stalker shot. The Family was decamped in an abandoned movie ranch, choreographing orgies on acid. Susan Atkins stabbed flesh like air. He continued past a pocket park with a multicolored jungle gym and workout equipment, a barnlike general store intended to be quaint and to be the entrance of the canyon. The sea air possessed a grainy quality like a cancerous particulate above a speedway dispersed in the dark. It was not unpleasant. He got to the highway. Something told him that people did not cross on foot. He would risk it. He looked leftward and could see for some distance until the road receded. There was a walking pier that jutted out into space. He looked right but the road curved around was a roadhouse with blinking lights at the verge.  The sky was bruised purple. The moon hung against a backdrop like a noose. He called upon something feral in himself and bounded across the road. A red Porsche 550 Spyder lunged out of nowhere. It was testing the limits of its speed before breaking apart. The hum of its motor commenced complaining. As he crossed over to the other side of the road, he felt an invisible wind flutter his green shirt and move left. The beach was uninhabited, the lifeguard tower a sentinel for ghosts. He crossed the narrow strip of sand and wondered what had happened. Where was the beach? Who were these machines? How does one live? None of these were fully shaped thoughts. They were half-articulate. He walked to the skim of the water that merged into nothingness. The pier could not be seen. There was a sibilant disturbance in his head. It was an echo of drowned voices, the shelleywinters of his discontent.

No one slept. The house vibrated with paranoia. The collective mind was hyper-alert. In mystical accord, they gathered up their sleeping bags and stole off into the dead of night, heading toward Big Sur.

Richard Oyama’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, The Nuyorasian Anthology, Breaking Silence, Dissident Song, A Gift of Tongues, About Place, Konch Magazine, Pirene’s Fountain, Tribes, Malpais Review, Anak Sastra, Buddhist Poetry Review and other literary journals. The Country They Know (Neuma Books 2005) is his first collection of poetry. He has an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Oyama has taught at the California College of Arts in Oakland, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of New Mexico. His first novel, A Riot Goin’ On, is forthcoming. He is currently at work on a young-adult novel and a full-length poetry collection.