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subject: his lifelong admiration for Huysmans; his monograph on Saint Sebastian and his translation of the drama about him by D'Annunzio; his favorite modern novel, Hadrians Memoirs ; and of course his own Confessions of a Mask , a work I thought his best, indeed—though I never told him this—his only successful work.
    Today, however, he talked about Hemingway. This rather surprised me. He was a writer whom Mishima had disliked to a marked degree, either because of, or in spite of, similarities: both of them conscious stylists, both romantics given to macho posturings, both subscribers to obsolete codes. As it turned out, however, it was the American's suicide that interested the Japanese. He might still dislike him as a writer, he said, but he had come to admire the man. He now found him consistent, he said, "all of a piece"—and this he found admirable.
    As indeed he might. Mishima himself, ever since I had known him, had been engaged in creating a person called Mishima who would be all of a piece. This new person was to be predicated on everything that the old person was not. The stutterer would become fluent in languages; the introverted adolescent, a Kendo champ; the ninety-seven-pound weakling, a body-builder and father of two children. It was a most impressive achievement. But death was needed, finally, to make a man all of a piece.
    And this was what we were talking of, though at the time I did not know it. From Hemingway he moved the conversation to Takamori Saigo, the nineteenth-century military hero who had sought to reestablish ancient virtues by reinstating the emperor, who saw the new government handed over to accommodating bureaucrats, and who had come to understand that, for him, the revolution had failed. He spoke of his admiration for Saigo, of his final act, ritual suicide, of the faithful friend who dispatched him before committing suicide himself. He spoke of the beauty of Saigo's act, of that one superb gesture.
    Lest I miss the point—one I was to comprehend only several months hence—he then spoke of how he, like Saigo, hated the rationalizing, pragmatic, conciliatory ways that had become those of Japan in our time.
    - Japan, he said, has gone, vanished, disappeared.
    - But, surely, the real Japan must still be around if you look for it?
    He shook his head sternly.
    - Is there no way to save it then? I asked, probably smiling.
    He looked past me into the mirror: No, there is nothing more to save.
    Then, like the playwright who artfully anticipates the climax in the first, casual-seeming allusion, like the novelist who skillfully introduces an oblique reference to the revelation to come, he said: He was the last true samurai.
    I was to consider this only in the most literal sense: Saigo was the last samurai. Later, however, I was to realize with much fuller comprehension that this had been told me by the last true samurai himself.
    With another person, even another writer, one would not be so certain of this. One might have called this early reference unconscious or something of that kind. Not with Mishima. Just as he chose the cast in the drama of his life according to his wishes, he also arranged its form according to his liking. I was to be astonished on that coming day in November—in fact, my exclamation of surprise was to be the final line of my role in his life.
    Later, friends of Mishima's gathered and spoke of the noted suicide. We had all, it transpired, been given similar hints. The earliest dated from two years before the event. Together we comprised the chorus—flabbergasted, as at the denouement of a Euripidean tragedy.
    But, back then in the Hilton bar, I was not supposed to guess and so I didn't. Rather, somewhat mistrustful of the stern turn our talk had taken, certain that he would next begin on "purity," a subject I had heard enough about from him to want to avoid, I attempted to introduce some levity into the conversation and told him that I quite