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authorities were cleaning things up. Such relics as the Yami Matsuri did not look right in this new and modern age. Barbaric they seemed, and it couldn't have been good for the health of those poor boys jammed together in the shrine all night long.
    So hundreds of years of history were brought to an end, the chain of generations severed. The Festival of Darkness was stopped—I had attended, become a part of, the very last.
    Oh, Fuchu still has a Yami Matsuri of sorts—even now, forty years later—but it is not the real one and the kami is not, I believe, happy. This god is happy only when people return to their real state, when humans again become human, when we are as we truly are. And this can occur only in darkness and in trust.

Yukio Mishima
    We often met during the summer before his death. All of Mishima's friends saw more of him during that 1970 summer. He phoned more, wrote more letters, paid more attention to us. He was going away and would not see us again, but that we did not know then.
    One late summer day he called again and asked me to join him at the Tokyo Hilton, a hotel he liked. Here he could, apparently unrecognized, book a room for writing or for other purposes.
    He was not alone. With him was a young man whom I did not know but whose type I recognized. Limp, callow, probably literary—the kind of youth who resembled the young Mishima himself, the sort to whom the author now extended part of his patronage.
    We sat in the mirrored bar and talked, and it became clear that the youth, a literary major (French), was a present for me. I was to continue, to take over, the patronage. Mishima told me this while the young man looked modestly down at his folded hands.
    I laughed and said: Yukio, this will not do. You know me better than that. If you want to give me a present it should be someone from the other half of those you patronize.
    But he did not know me better than that, though we had known each other for almost twenty years. The reason was that he rarely took one's character into account, scarcely even noticed it. It was not important. What was important was the role one was to play in his life. Mishima himself decided what this was to be. Who one actually was, how one really felt, had little to do with it.
    Kawabata was to be the older protector, looking after the young author's interests, and was not to be hurt in the slightest when that relationship was falsified in Forbidden Colors. Donald Keene was to be major foreign critic, interested only in the work and allowed not a single glimpse, assuming he would have wanted one, into the private life. I, on the other hand, along with a few others, was to be of service only in the private life, and whatever opinions I might have of the work and the writer were not to be taken seriously.
    My refusal upset him. He frowned at himself in the mirror. I was not playing my assigned role, that of confidant to the hero. He is a very serious boy, he said seriously. I laughed, but there was no answering smile. Mishima, though he could be amusingly malicious, had no feeling for humor. Unlike many Japanese he also had little sense of the ridiculous. His great barking laugh was not infectious; it was a statement of amusement, not amusement itself.
    This conversation was carried on in front of its subject, but this embarrassed neither of us. For one thing, such is common in Japan; for another, we were speaking English, a language presumably not understood by the young man. That I had declined the gift, however, embarrassed Mishima, who had apparently been talking up my qualifications.
    The awkwardness was resolved by sending the youth away after he had enjoyed a glass of fresh orange juice, and then settling for a talk. I remember this talk in particular because it was literary, and Mishima and I almost never spoke of literature since that was not included in the province he allotted me.
    Sometimes we had strayed into the literary marshes surrounding our