I once owned a photograph of Yukio Mishima squatting in the snow, dressed in nothing but a skimpy white loincloth, brandishing a long samurai sword. Mishima’s torso is buffed from years of bodybuilding, his legs almost spindly by comparison. The expression on his face is perfectly described in one of the Mishima tales that appear in a new volume of his work, “Voices of the Fallen Heroes: And Other Stories” (Vintage International), edited by Stephen Dodd. After a young man is possessed in a séance by the spirits of kamikaze pilots:
This was the countenance that Mishima adopted in many photographs taken of him in the sixties. A man who had been turned down by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War for being too sickly had transformed himself into a beefcake, often pictured nude, or nearly so, and with a sword in hand, desperately trying to look fierce. Some of these images were stranger than the one I owned. The fashion photographer Kishin Shinoyama took a series of pictures, in 1970, that came to be known as “The Death of a Man.” In one image, the novelist has a hatchet in his skull; in others, he is drowning in mud, or has been run over by a cement truck, or—posed like St. Sebastian—has been tied to a tree and pierced by arrows.
The Shinoyama photographs were taken just months before Mishima, accompanied by members of his private army of ultra-right Emperor-worshippers, entered a military base in Tokyo, hoping to stir up an imperialist coup. When the soldiers, instead of rising up, jeered at him, Mishima killed himself in the classic samurai fashion: performing hara-kiri, or seppuku (as the Japanese more commonly call it), by plunging a sword into his abdomen before a uniformed disciple sliced his head off. Quite a few famous writers have taken their own lives. None have done so in such a theatrical fashion.
One might see Mishima’s violent end as an extreme but still traditional expression of Japanese culture, or at least as a kind of bloody protest—in materialist, pacifist, Americanized postwar Japan—against the denial of his country’s heroic past. This is no doubt how Mishima would have liked us to remember his final coup de théâtre. Marguerite Yourcenar, who wrote an interesting book titled “Mishima: A Vision of the Void” (1980), took him at his word. To her, Mishima was a true rebel responding to a modern Japanese malaise. Most Japanese at the time did not see it that way. They were shocked, baffled, and horrified by his act.
John Nathan, a translator of Mishima and the author of “Mishima: A Biography” (1974), maintained, plausibly, that the writer’s suicide must be understood in the light of his aesthetic imagination. A combination of death and eroticism saturates almost all of Mishima’s novels, short stories, and plays, as well as his short film “Patriotism,” from 1966, in which Mishima, portraying a radical military officer in the nineteen-thirties, engages in an agonizingly slow seppuku, accompanied by Richard Wagner’s “Liebesnacht.”
Death and beauty, or, more precisely, the beauty of death, are certainly leitmotifs in the Vintage collection of Mishima’s short stories, which features various translators and a preface by Nathan. The words “beautiful” and “death” each appear more than fifty times in the collection. As in Noh plays, which Mishima loved, the spirits of the dead often haunt the living. A hipster imagines his death in a disused mock-Gothic church; a fancier of peacocks wishes to kill his beloved birds because “peacock killing was not a rupture but the sensual intertwining of beauty and destruction”; a couple is stabbed to death because “they were beautiful and real.” And then there are those spirits of kamikaze pilots who vent their anger in a séance because they feel that modern Japan has betrayed their ideals.
There is nothing uniquely Japanese about the aesthetic fetishizing of violence and death. Mishima, like many other twentieth-century Japanese writers—Junichiro Tanizaki, for example—was greatly influenced by Western artists and novelists. As a bookish youngster, he was an avid reader of Wilde and Rilke. In Mishima’s autobiographical novel, “Confessions of a Mask” (1949), perhaps his best work, he, or his narrator, describes how he experienced his first ejaculation as he gazed at a reproduction of Guido Reni’s painting of St. Sebastian’s martyrdom. (He then cites the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s remark that images of the saint hold a particular attraction to gay men, and surmises that “the inverted and the sadistic impulses are inextricably entangled with each other.”) Along with many members of the Japanese art scene in the fifties and sixties, Mishima was an admirer of French decadent literature, not least Raymond Radiguet’s posthumous novel “Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel” (1924). In a wonderful episode of Edward R. Murrow’s television talk show “Small World,” which aired in 1960, we see Mishima in conversation with a rather inebriated Tennessee Williams, holding forth on the exquisite bloodiness of Elizabethan drama.
Nor is there anything uniquely Japanese about a literary figure who wishes to be a man of action. Ernest Hemingway’s suicide lacked the flamboyance of Mishima’s, but the American writer was also obsessively engaged in displays of masculinity. The Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio offers an even closer model for Mishima’s political fantasies of martial sacrifice and exalted nationalism. An exponent of decadent literature, D’Annunzio, too, raised an army, in 1919, and even tried to establish an independent state in a part of what is now Croatia. (Mishima, aptly enough, supervised a Japanese translation of D’Annunzio’s play “The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.”) But none of these men turned suicidal imaginings into a deadly work of performance art. So, if culture and politics are not enough to explain Mishima’s extraordinary actions, what was it that possessed him to kill himself in this manner?
To understand Mishima—as a writer, a poseur, and a self-destructive man of action—one must consider his childhood, which is described in detail in “Confessions of a Mask” and in biographies by Nathan and by Henry Scott Stokes, the author of “The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima” (1974). Mishima, a frail, effeminate child, grew up in the clutches of his possessive grandmother Natsu, a proud aristocrat who felt she had married beneath her station. She would not allow her delicate grandson to consort with other boys. Mishima played with girls’ toys in the hothouse of his grandmother’s room, which he rarely left and where he later withdrew into a world of books, mooning over stories of handsome knights, Christian saints, and noble princes, all dying glorious deaths. Entranced by a picture of Joan of Arc, he was horrified to find out that she wasn’t a man—a rude disturbance of his fantasy life.
In “Confessions of a Mask,” Mishima subjects his sentimental education to a kind of poetic psychoanalysis. The only companions that the boy, Kimitake (Mishima’s real first name), is allowed by his grandmother are three female cousins. They play a “game of war” in which Kimitake is the one to suffer a violent death. In middle school, he falls hopelessly in love with an athletic, not very bright bully named Omi. Still too fragile to take part in swimming lessons and other hearty pursuits, Kimitake admires Omi at a distance, dreaming that he, too, might one day be like his crush: a tough guy who speaks in rough masculine slang and exudes an air of effortless, unthinking virility. Coarse working men glimpsed in the street inspire his early erotic reveries, culminating in what he calls his “evil habit.” During the war, when Tokyo is the target of devastating bombing raids and other boys of his age are drafted into the Army to die for the Emperor, he fantasizes about perishing splendidly, but is terrified every time the air-raid alarm sounds.
The odd thing, given Mishima’s later ultranationalism, is that he appeared to be relatively unfazed by Japan’s defeat and the American occupation that followed. Actual on-the-ground politics weren’t his thing, perhaps not even when he came into his revolutionary phase. In his first novel, “Thieves” (1948), he delves deeply into his death-soaked fantasy world. A young man and woman, each rejected by a yearned-for lover, decide to kill themselves together on their wedding night. The suicide pact is the ultimate expression of their longing for their lost loves, and yet it’s a longing that Mishima describes as an illusion, a cultivated act of self-deception. The idea that aesthetic perfection can be realized only by destroying it before decay sets in runs through all his works. “Just before the pinnacle when time must be cut short is the pinnacle of physical beauty,” he writes in “The Decay of the Angel,” a novel that was the fourth of a tetralogy titled “The Sea of Fertility” and was handed in literally on the day of his own death.
Again, this sentiment would have been understood by Wagner and other Romantics. But there is also a Japanese tradition, much influenced by the Buddhist notion of impermanence, that delights in the fleetingness of beauty, as with the cherry blossom that swiftly loses its bloom. Not for nothing was “cherry blossom” used to refer to kamikaze pilots during the war. In Mishima’s novel “Forbidden Colors,” published in 1951, an aging and embittered writer loathes his ugliness and physical decay. He mentors and manipulates a witless but stunningly beautiful young gay man, as an instrument of his vengeance against women. In the youth’s beauty lie “all the dreams of the ugly writer’s young days.” The writer also reflects on artistic expression and physical action. There is only one thing, the writer muses, in which “expression and action might be possible simultaneously. . . . That is death.”
Mishima began to work on his own physical beauty in 1955, when, at thirty, he started lifting weights. A photograph taken of him a year earlier, sitting on the floor of his book-lined study, depicts a pale, thin, intense, almost pretty young man. But now he resolved to look more like the school bully of his youth. For the next fifteen years, Mishima, who travelled a great deal, worked out in gyms wherever he happened to be in the world. The arms bulged; the torso and face hardened. His oddly proportioned figure was much photographed, and he enjoyed showing himself off as a dying action hero in yakuza movies, and as a human sculpture in a film version of a play of his, “Black Lizard” (1968), starring the cross-dressing chansonnier Akihiro Maruyama as a shape-shifting jewel thief.
Mishima’s physical exertions were in line with much that went on in the Japanese avant-garde during the sixties. Theatre artists rebelled against the Westernized high culture that had been adopted in Japan since the eighteen-seventies. Both wartime Japanese propaganda and American-influenced postwar rhetoric about capitalism and democracy had made artists of Mishima’s generation skeptical about language. They turned to raw physical expression to find a way back to earthy, sensual Japanese dramatic traditions that had been buried under layers of Western and Japanese high-mindedness. Although his later political extremism was not exactly fashionable in artistic circles, Mishima worked closely with artists such as the Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, who loosely adapted “Forbidden Colors” as a bawdy dance performance, in 1959, featuring, among other things, a young man suffocating a live chicken between his thighs.
There was a permanent tension in Mishima between his longing for physical action and his literary ambition. Despite his forays into gangster pictures, he never rejected high culture. More than most other writers of his generation, he knew the classical Japanese tradition well; he even wrote fine modern Noh plays and works for the Kabuki theatre. At a teach-in with radical left-wing students in 1968, he declared that he had once believed in the supreme importance of art. But, he said, “there was something inside me that couldn’t be satisfied with art alone. It occurred to me that what I needed was action with which to move my spirit. . . . I realized I would have to move my body first.” He didn’t just want to be remembered as a great writer; he wanted to be remembered as a physical embodiment of the samurai tradition.
One of his favorite books was “Hagakure,” an eighteenth-century guide to the Bushido, the way of the warrior, written at a time of peace, when there was no call for military action. The contents of the treatise could be described as a form of dandyism for idle samurai, and Mishima was a modern samurai dandy. He loved the legend of the Chinese general whose face was so beautiful that he disguised it in battle under a ferocious mask. (It makes an appearance in one of the stories in the new Vintage collection.) But what most appealed to Mishima about “Hagakure” was its basic message: “The Way of the Samurai is found in death.”
Given Mishima’s decision to build his own private army and to sacrifice his life for the greater glory of an imaginary imperial Japan, one might interpret his attraction to the samurai death cult as the result of his political convictions. Some of his late writings do indeed contain strong political sentiments. Isao, the beautiful young hero in “Runaway Horses” (1969)—the second novel of the series “The Sea of Fertility”—is a right-wing terrorist fired up by illusions of reviving the divine spirit of imperial Japan by murdering corrupt businessmen and politicians. The rebellion fails, and Isao dies by seppuku: “The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.” In “Voices of the Fallen Heroes,” a short story published three years earlier, we hear the spirits of real-life radical soldiers who staged an aborted coup in 1936, with the aim of installing the Emperor as a sacred generalissimo. They convey their horror at what postwar Japan has become: “A passionate and heroic spirit has vanished. / Our blood is tainted and stagnant with ‘peace.’ / The pure blood that should spurt forth has quite dried up.”
What the fallen heroes resent goes beyond the greed for “foreign gold” and the “ugly lusts” of modern life. They had been willing to die for their divine Emperor, and they felt deceived when the Emperor, in a rare intervention, ordered the rebellion to be put down. Like the kamikaze pilots in the same story, whose deaths lost their sacred meaning once Emperor Hirohito renounced his divinity after the war, the plotters in 1936 worshipped not a man but a deity. Mishima was quite aware that their reverence was based on a beautiful illusion, just like the lost loves of the suicidal couple in “Thieves.” The chorus of kamikaze spirits in the story ask, “Even if the past ages were ‘a false conception,’ and the present age is true, why did not His Majesty, even if only by himself, deign to guard that bitter, painful, false conception for the sake of those who had died?”
A natural inference is that Mishima was himself prepared to die for an illusion. He had no hope, in 1970, of persuading the Japanese armed forces to rise up against the democratic government and restore the Emperor to his former divine status. But he had been cultivating illusions all his life. His erotic dream world was at the center of his work, his life, and his death. His demise was immediately followed by the voluntary death of his favorite acolyte, a handsome provincial student—rather like Isao in “Runaway Horses”—named Morita, and so Henry Scott Stokes argues in his biography that the whole thing should be seen as a lovers’ suicide. This might be carrying things too far—we don’t know whether they were lovers—but Mishima did tell a visitor, in 1970, that he considered seppuku to be the “ultimate masturbation.”
After the event, Mishima’s mother stated that her son had done what he had always wanted to do. And Mishima had long insisted that he wanted to die for a noble cause. In a 1966 interview on NHK television, the national broadcasting network, he lamented that it was impossible to die a heroic death in modern times, and said that he felt he had been born in the wrong age. He was petrified by the thought of dying of cancer or some other disease whose senselessness disgusted him. The prospect of his body’s slow decline frightened him just as much. In an essay written in 1966, he sees something “tragic” in how certain writers continue showing off their virility even in their late works. He mentions Hemingway and Norman Mailer as examples, but, he writes, “I shudder when I think of myself.” What Mishima set out to do in his final decade was to devise a cause to die for, a cause that had historical precedents but was still a figment of his richly morbid imagination.
There remains something contradictory about the cause he adopted. A man who chose to die as an emperor-worshipping ultranationalist, intent on protecting his country against Westernization, Mishima lived much of his life in the Western manner, loved European culture, often dressed like an American hipster, had many Western friends, and craved fame in the West. (He’d been distressed, in 1968, when the Nobel Prize in Literature went not to him but to Yasunari Kawabata.)
Mishima’s choice of a samurai suicide was almost a pastiche of Japanese tradition, a Kabuki fantasy, another illusion. In his seppuku, he found the perfect confluence of his erotic preoccupations, his search for an honorable death, his aesthetic ideal of destroying a thing of beauty (in this case, his own body) before it decays, and his love of drama. Despite his claim that the sword was superior to the pen, he died more as an artist than as a political activist. There’s a reason that the Japanese didn’t take his politics seriously.
Serious or not, however, Mishima’s political posturing was extreme. Did it taint his work? It’s tempting to brush aside the question. Other great writers have had extreme political views. Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote poems about the glory of war and physical ruthlessness, calling for a “revolution of the body.” Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote odious antisemitic pamphlets and supported fascism, but these activities did not mar his masterpiece, “Journey to the End of the Night” (1932), which was misanthropic but not fascistic. Antisemitic sentiments slipped into some of T. S. Eliot’s work, and one of the most egregious examples, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1920), is still considered a great poem.
Mishima’s morbid eroticism gave his best novels their peculiar power. His ideal of beauty destroyed is elegantly rendered in “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” (1956), in which a young Buddhist acolyte is so obsessed with the fading beauty of the gilded temple in Kyoto that he sets it on fire. (The novel was based on a real case of arson in 1950, when a novice monk burned down the Golden Pavilion; it exists now as a carefully reconstructed replica.) The pathos of the young author trying to go straight by pretending to be in love with a young woman, while fantasizing about beautiful men tortured to death, lifts “Confessions of a Mask” above mere kinkiness into a wonderful expression of emotional complexity. (Mishima himself chose to wear a mask in 1958, when he married a respectable woman named Yoko Sugiyama, with whom he had two children.)
The real trouble started in the sixties, when Mishima not only took up a political cause but also politicized his literary work. This was when his baroque aesthetic vision could curdle into kitsch. “Voices of the Fallen Heroes” is the longest story in the Vintage collection and provides the book’s title, but it is compromised by its political sentiments, which are overwrought and absurd. The same is true of passages in “The Sea of Fertility,” with their exultation of unthinking action and sacrificial death. Then, there is “Patriotism,” published in 1961, about the officer who dies by seppuku out of loyalty to the young fanatics of 1936 who failed in their military coup. His devoted wife then pushes a dagger into her throat. Marguerite Yourcenar deemed this “one of the most remarkable stories Mishima ever wrote,” and judges the short-film version that Mishima directed and starred in to be “more beautiful and even more overwhelming than the story it epitomizes.”
It’s hard to share her rapturous response. The endless double suicide, though gory and hard to watch, is too macabre to be truly moving, and setting it to Wagner’s “Liebesnacht” gives the scene a strong whiff of camp. Yourcenar called this work a rehearsal of the author’s own death, almost as if Mishima and his disciple Morita were breaking the fourth wall, but the film remains a fantasy, an illusion, an artistic exercise. The actual details of Mishima’s suicide—in the office of a military commander who was tied to a chair—took place in another realm.
The final act was theatrical, to be sure, but hardly a work of art. In fact, it was messy and brutish. Morita tried to take off his master’s head with a sword, but made a botch of it; another disciple had to finish the job. Then Morita failed to disembowel himself before he, too, was decapitated. And so one of the greatest Japanese writers of the twentieth century ended his life in a pool of blood, with his severed head plonked onto the floor next to that of a deluded disciple. The real tragedy of Mishima lies not in the bathetic, blood-soaked spectacle of his death, nor in the humiliating failure of his effort to inspire revolution, but in the way his aesthetic vision finally collapsed under the weight of his fantasies. ♦
An earlier version of this article misidentified the music that accompanies the officer’s seppuku in “Patriotism.”
Comments
Leave a Comment