A Japanese Mirror Read online

  Although girls’ comics in the West are full of impossibly beautiful young men with long eyelashes and stars in their eyes, they are still unmistakably men; they drive around the Riviera in sports cars and get the lucky girl in the end. In Japan, as we have seen, they are more ambivalent, and sometimes get each other. The word for these androgynous young heroes is bishonen, beautiful youths.

  Covers of girls’ comics – and sometimes boys’ comics too – often feature bishonen. Takarazuka heart-throbs are often bishonen. And teenage television talentos in their frilly shirts and dimply smiles are bishonen. A famous artist called Takabatake Kasho, currently back in vogue, drew nothing but bishonen and his work can still be seen in popular comic-books. A typical Kasho picture is of a bishonen in a short kimono or sailor-suit being instructed by an older boy in horse riding or fencing. Another popular motif is the bishonen in distress, bullied by older boys, for instance, or caught in a frightful storm at sea. He is invariably rescued by an older mentor who puts his protective arm around the boy’s willowy waist. When the pretty youth is pictured alone, he is playing a flute like Adonis, or staring dreamily at the moon, or taking a bath, or lying down in the grass, a book of poetry in his sensitive hands.

  The atmosphere in these pictures seems unmistakably homoerotic; and so, of course, it is. One girls’ comic, called June, is quite explicit, showing decadent English aristocrats in velvet dinner jackets seducing exquisite bishonen under the crystal chandelier. This magazine is rather exceptional in that it represents the extreme fringe of girls’ tastes, but it is suffused with the same heady combination of high romance and fascinating evil that characterizes those girls’ comics which do not feature naked boys having sex with decadent old men.

  One example will, I think, suffice to make the point. Rather cryptically entitled Ribbon on the Clock this story is about a bishonen who loses his mother when he is only twelve years old and lives off prostitutes at the age of fourteen. He goes on to marry a rich countess, but then decides that men are more in his line and becomes a gay gigolo.

  It is hard to say what goes through the young minds of readers of this comic (readers who are not overtly homosexual, that is). Letters from the readers do not tell us much either, though one girl gives us a hint by writing that ‘this fantasy world sends pleasant shivers up my spine’. Obsessed as the Japanese are with appearances irrespective of the real meanings behind them, we can perhaps assume that many of these youthful dreamers are much more innocent than the contents of their dreams would suggest. As innocent, at any rate, as the crowds of schoolboys buying souvenir chains, fishnet tank-tops and other paraphernalia of New York’s gay underworld during the first Tokyo screening of the film ‘Cruising’. They thought it was kakko ii a Japanese expression almost untranslatable in English. The Italians have a word for it: bella figura, to cut a dash.

  Possibly many young girls – and to a lesser extent young boys – feeling that their natural inclinations are being slowly crushed by an adult world that forces them to be calculating and conformist, find an outlet in homosexual fantasies, too remote from their own lives to be threatening: a faraway romantic ideal like ‘the Paris of our dreams’. Bishonen, homosexual or not, are treated in a similar way to vampires and creatures from outer space. Outcasts all, they are the pure, eternally young victims of adult corruption.

  To be sure, homoerotic fantasies, in more or less disguised forms, are common among adolescents everywhere. Certainly it is much less of a taboo in Japan than in the West. Homosexuality has never been treated as a criminal deviation or a sickness. It is a part of life, little discussed, and perfectly permissible if the rules of social propriety – getting married, for instance – are observed.

  Homosexuality as an ideal form of love goes back further than girls’ comics or the Takarazuka theatre. For many centuries homosexuality was not just tolerated, but was actually encouraged as a purer form of love. As in Sparta and Prussia, to name the two most obvious examples, this was part of the warrior tradition: gay lovers make good soldiers, or so it was hoped. At the height of samurai power during the Kamakura period (1185–1333) women were despised as inferior creatures, ‘holes to be borrowed’ for producing children. Only manly love was considered worthy of a true warrior.

  By the beginning of the Edo period, at the start of the seventeenth century, the wars were over, the battles fought. The two-and-a-half centuries of Tokugawa rule were a time of frustrating peace during which the samurai had hardly any recourse to use their weapons at all, except to cut an uppity peasant or merchant down to size. The ideal Way of the Warrior, however, stayed long after it had served its purpose. It was further refined as a form of dandyism. This includes the ideal of manly love and the cult of the bishonen. Its manifestations were rather like the belated chivalry of European knights in the middle-ages, which also became fashionable when knights had little else to do but organize jousts and pine after unattainable ladies.

  Nothing was thought to be purer than the torment of unfulfilled love. In the words of one of the last troubadours:

  And now I see with its own fulfilment

  that love dying which once wounded sweetly.12

  Knabenliebe among the samurai is possibly the closest thing the Japanese ever had to this Western ideal of romantic love. The Hagakure, an influential eighteenth-century treatise on samurai ethics, teaches that ‘once love [for a boy] has been confessed, it shrinks in stature. True love attains its highest and noblest form when one carries its secret into the grave’.13 In an essay on this text Mishima Yukio wrote that ‘the bishonen embodies the ideal image – he lives an ideal of undeclared love’.14 This is quite different from the sexual passions ending in romantic suicides in Chikamatsu’s plays, or the maternal sentiments of golden-hearted prostitutes.

  To be sure, homosexual chivalry, like the love of knights for their ladies, was based on sacrifice, or more precisely, it being Japan, death. Because loyalty could no longer be proved on the battlefield, the ideal of sacrificial suicide took its place. The difference with Chikamatsu’s love suicides is that there death was often the only way out of a socially impossible match. While between males it was more a sign of pure loyalty and honour – or so it was presented.

  There are many tales of bishonen following their older mentors in death by slitting their bellies in various ways, one of which was to make an excruciatingly painful incision in the shape of the friend’s name. This kind of self-torture was in fact probably quite rare, but the many stories about it attest to the power of the ideal.

  The ideal is still alive in various more or less disguised forms. Movie heroes in gangster films such as Takakure Ken and Takahashi Hideki, for example (their golden age was the late 1960s and early 1970s), came close to fitting the bishonen ideal: very young, very handsome, very pure of heart, devoted to their mothers – Ken-san in particular would always talk about his mother – frightfully sincere, endearingly naive and full of what the Japanese call stoisizumu (stoicism), meaning that they rejected female love.

  Instead, they had each other. They would almost invariably perish together in a splendidly suicidal last stand against an impossible majority of enemies. Often this orgasmic finale is the only time one sees them looking happy. One such film, starring Takahashi Hideki, lasts about 90 minutes but during 80 of them the hero looks miserable, pining and straining and plunged in the depths of some vague despair. His instinctive sincerity and naive purity are constantly repressed and trampled on by the bad, bad world. But in the end salvation comes: he is allowed to die.

  Joined by his best friend, another melancholy desperado, he sets off to face certain death at the hands of the superior forces of the enemy. The title-song swells on the soundtrack and the two heroes swap jokes, indulging in happy horse-play like schoolboys on the way to a fair. Laughing they slip off their kimonos to reveal fierce tattoos. They rush into the enemy headquarters and after about five minutes of brave and savage butchery they are both felled in the mud, half-naked and covered in blood
. They link arms and croak out their last sweet nothings; they are happy at last.

  The point of this is that the tradition in Japan of homosexual chivalry helps to explain the homoerotic overtones which are evident in popular romance even now. Certainly, the cult of the beautiful youth is not limited to young girls and homosexuals in Japan. The bishonen ideal is as much a part of Japanese aesthetics as the geisha and the female impersonator, and in a way all three are linked.

  The writer Nosaka Akiyuki once said that a true bishonen has to have something sinister about him. The vision of pure youth, because of its fragility perhaps, reminds one of impermanence, thus of death. It is no coincidence that the film ‘Death in Venice’, after Mann’s novel, continues to be a huge success in Japan.

  On the Kabuki stage the bishonen is played by an onnagata, just as Peter Pan is traditionally acted by a woman. This is Mishima’s description of a traditional female impersonator in a short story:

  Masuyama sensed … something like a dark spring welling forth from this figure on the stage, this figure so imbued with softness, fragility, grace, delicacy and feminine charms … He thought that a strange, evil presence, the final residue of the actor’s fascination, a seductive evil that leads men astray and makes them drown in an instant of beauty, was the true nature of the dark spring he had detected.15

  In one of his most famous novels, Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours),16 Mishima created the archetypal evil bishonen, his male version of Tanizaki’s Naomi. Yuichi is the perfect male work of art. He is taught by an old misogynistic novelist how to feign emotions, to pretend to love women – ‘an impersonation is the supreme act of creation’ – in order to destroy them. His beauty is both natural and totally artificial, like that of an onnagata. But it cannot last long and this is precisely the point.

  Inagaki Taruho, scholar and connoisseur of Knabenliebe, wrote that ‘female beauty matures with time. But the life of a young boy is just one day in summer, the day before the blossoms come out. The next time you see him, he’s just an old leaf. As soon as he becomes a young man, smelling of genitals it’s all over.’17

  In The Great Mirror of Manly Love (1687) Saikaku wrote: ‘If only young boys could stay the way they are, it would be truly wonderful. Enshu, the great rake, used to say that young boys and potted trees should never grow.’ The bonsai, the artificially dwarfed tree, tortured and twisted in its infancy to prevent it from growing up, is an aesthetic symbol sometimes used to describe the Japanese themselves. Be that as it may, it is certainly connected to the dream of stopping youth for ever in its fleeting moment of purity. But unlike Americans who try to hang on to the illusion of youth as long as is medically possible, Japanese on the whole resign themselves more gracefully to its fleeting nature. In fact, youth is beautiful precisely because it is so short-lived. The cult of cherry blossoms, which only last about a week in Japan, is the same as the worship of the bishonen, and the two are often compared.

  Taken one small step further it is the cult of death. According to the Hagakure the ‘ultimate meaning of the cult of young boys is death’. And one of Saikaku’s homoerotic tales begins: ‘The fairest plants and trees meet their death because of the marvel of their flowers. And it is the same with humanity; many men perish because they are too beautiful.’ In the same story the young hero, dressed in a white silk kimono embroidered with autumn flowers, says to himself: ‘Beauty in this world cannot endure for long. I am glad to die while I am young and beautiful and before my countenance fades like a flower.’ He then proceeds to rip his stomach open with a dagger. Whatever one may think of Mishima’s rather laboured looks, similar thoughts were certainly in his mind when he undertook his extraordinary suicide.

  The sacrifice of kamikaze pilots in the prime of their youth spoke to the popular imagination for the same reason. Still celebrated in comics and films, they are always compared to cherry blossoms. Indeed the explosive coffins they crashed into American battleships were called cherry blossoms (Ōka).19 The songs and poems they left behind are full of blossom images, such as this haiku written by a 22-year-old kamikaze pilot just before his final departure:

  If only we might fall

  Like cherry blossoms in the spring

  So pure and radiant.20

  Death is the only pure and thus fitting end to the perfection of youth. Bishonen heroes in history, legends and modern pop culture almost always die. One contemporary example, again from a girls’ comic, is Angeles. He is a very Japanese hero despite his blond locks and the fact that he is only half-human (the human half being his father, a Japanese ‘descended from the gods’, and his vampire half coming from his mother, a German and thus responsible for his ‘impure blood’).

  The only one to understand the purity and beauty of Angeles is a young girl who ‘loves Heine, Byron, Shakespeare and love’. Her mother is evil and the story ends with a terrible battle with the mother and the police on one side and the girl and Angeles on the other. The vampire/bishonen dies in the girl’s arms, watching his castle burn in a surrealistic blaze: ‘That castle was our youth’, are his last, anguished words.

  The most famous bishonen in Japanese history is arguably Japan’s most popular hero, immortalized in numerous plays, films, books, comics and television dramas. Quite recently he was played on television by the feyest of talentos, Sawada Kenji. He was born in the twelfth century and his name was Minamoto no Yoshitsune. Like many bishonen Yoshitsune was raised by an older man, in his case a fatherly monk in a Buddhist temple near Kyoto – monks, one would believe, had a special fondness for taking good care of bishonen.

  Despite his fey good looks, in the legend at least, Yoshitsune became a skilled and enthusiastic sword-fighter. One of the most famous legends of his early years is his first encounter with Benkei, the giant warrior monk. It is said to have taken place on the Gojo bridge not very far from where the main Kyoto railway station is now.

  Benkei needed funds for his temple and to this end he promised to rob a thousand passers-by of their swords. He got as far as 999 with relative ease when he saw a slender, effeminate youth approaching, playing a melancholy tune on his flute. At first the giant monk refused to fight this girlish boy who was looking up at him through his long, curled eyelashes. But he needed the money badly and drew his sword. As if by some miracle, however, he was completely outclassed. With a few elegant flicks of his slender wrist Yoshitsune managed to knock down the giant with his painted fan.

  This is a typical detail in bishonen legends, for there is always some sinister power hidden under the beautiful exterior, almost something supernatural. Young boys or simpering onnagata smashing an overwhelming opposition of sword-wielding fighters by waving their pretty fans or ornamental daggers like fairy wands is one of the clichés of Kabuki drama.

  Japanese audiences are fascinated by the idea of spirit overcoming force, and skill overcoming brawn. Not for nothing is judo a Japanese invention. Little Davids are forever meeting brutish Goliaths in boys’ comics, perhaps because many Japanese like to see themselves as spiritual Davids in a world of boorish giants. Many were convinced that the show of pure spirit of kamikaze fighters would shock the enemy into defeat. And people were literally crying in the streets when the giant Dutchman Anton Geesink beat a smaller Japanese at judo during the Tokyo Olympic Games: an old, especially cherished illusion was shattered.

  Benkei was so impressed by his bishonen adversary that he swore to servehim for the rest of his life as a retainer. This also fits a common pattern: every Don Quixote needs a Sancho Panza and behind every winsome bishonen stands a strongman. The Kabuki play Suzugamori, for instance, opens with a fight in the execution ground between the bishonen Shirai Gompachi and a gang of rough palanquin-bearers. His easy, flick-of-the-wrist victory so impresses Banzuin Chobei, the legendary protector of the slum-dwellers of Edo, that this encounter is, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.21

  At first Yoshitsune and Benkei enjoyed some notable successes, culminating in the victory over the T
aira clan at the battle of Dannoura in 1185. But this also marked the beginning of their downfall. Yoshitsune’s youthful high spirits and recklessness, which made him so popular ever after, evoked the disapproval of his scheming, cautious brother Yoritomo, who wanted him dead.

  Yoshitsune, followed by Benkei and the rest of his faithful retinue was forced to retreat and this was really the part of his life about which people still get excited. The battle at Dannoura is for history books but his downfall is the stuff for legends. It was also, typically, the most passive part of his life. In the No version of the legend Yoshitsune is played by a child actor, and on the Kabuki stage by an onnagata. All the heroics are henceforth performed by his retainers, most of all Benkei.

  One episode in particular is still celebrated on the stage.22 In order to pass through the road-blocks set up by Yoritomo, Benkei is disguised as a monk and Yoshitsune as his humble porter. At one point they draw the suspicion of the officer in charge, who makes Benkei recite the subscription list that monks would normally carry with them. Of course Benkei has no such thing, but he wildly improvises a history of Todai temple, filled with arcane theological references.

  This splendid piece of bluffing works, and the party starts to move off. But then, suddenly, somebody recognizes Yoshitsune, who has been lagging behind. Benkei, realizing that all is lost, takes one final, extreme measure: screaming abuse, he starts to beat the porter (his own master), scolding him for causing this delay. Seen in the context of his time, this was almost as painful as a devout Catholic priest trampling on an image of Christ. This demonstration of desperate loyalty so moves Yoritomo’s officer that he lets them go. Pity for the underdog (hōganbiiki) gets the better of him.