On Yukio Mishima
“Telling Bobby Kennedy to go fuck himself at the White House is trivial indeed when compared to the high drama of cutting oneself open with a dagger and then submitting to decapitation before the army’s chief of staff.”
Imagine this:
There was an author who received three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was not only famous internationally but also an unofficial ambassador of his nation’s values and culture. Nearly every night, he ‘held court’ at his ornate home, his guests leading political and cultural figures. He waxed poetic in English just as well as his native tongue. And his countrymen, many of them loyal readers, pointed to him and said, “He stands for us. He represents who we are.”
And then, on a bright blue day in November 1970, the author attempted to overthrow the government before disemboweling himself.
November 25th, 1970
It’s been a while since I’ve thought about Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), but something happened a few days ago when I was walking through downtown Santa Rosa. Pride flags were up everywhere, and though it’s not a celebration that applies to me, it was hard to ignore all the rainbows. I walked into one of my favorite spots, Treehorn Books, to see if they had any new Japanese literature.
The only Japanese novel I found was a clean copy of Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask (1949). The book, which Mishima wrote at only 23 years old, details the life of a homosexual man coming of age during the Second World War. The conflict between his true self and society’s expectations leads to repression and mental illness. Remembering that the story was largely autobiographical, I couldn’t help but feel sad. I thought that Mishima was born at the wrong time, and if he’d come of age today, Pride flags and all, he might have lived a better life.
Maybe.
Mishima’s homosexuality was only one component of his nature that inspired his transformation from a lanky, intellectual novelist into a bodybuilder and ultranationalist leader of a private militia group. His obsession with beauty, his fear of physical decline…it’s hard to envision him going gracefully into that good night.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji) shortly after the 1950 fire.
Mishima understood his compulsions and fears perfectly well. He even found empathy for those who shared them. When 22-year-old Buddhist monk Hayashi Yoken burned down the 14th-century Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, Mishima believed the disturbed young man did so because of the temple’s beauty. Mishima’s Kinkakuji (1956) explores this hypothesis in a semi-fictional account of events. Mishima concludes that beauty inspires violence.
“To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It’s never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it’s on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It’s at a moment like this, don’t you think, while one’s vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this.”
Although Mishima did not interview the arsonist or research his life, his mission resembles the one Truman Capote undertook when writing In Cold Blood (1966). Both authors attempt to bring meaning to horrible real-life events by analyzing the perpetrator’s motivations.
Kinkakuji attracted renewed interest in summer 2019, when 41-year-old Shinji Aoba set fire to Kyoto Animation’s Studio 1 and killed 36 people. The two events’ similarities (occurring just miles apart, both perpetrators suffering from untreated mental illness, a three-story cultural landmark burning down) are unsettling, to say the least.
Considering the more recent of the two tragedies reveals another aspect of Mishima’s personality that made it difficult for him to live in postwar Japan. When Mishima was an adolescent, there was a neighborhood in Tokyo home to the political and military elite. Parade grounds and barracks projected Japan’s masculine strength. The neighborhood’s name referred to a fire-protecting deity, one the residents hoped would shield them from conflagrations like the one that leveled the area in 1869:
Akihabara.
Akihabara marks Japan’s transformation from a masculine to a feminine society.
Akihabara in 1970 was still a Mecca for transistor radio components, not Anime goods. However, Mishima was acutely aware of what had happened to his nation in years since the surrender in 1945. Japan was subordinate to American interests, the ‘wife’ in the two countries’ relationship. Femininity and submissiveness filtered through the Japanese national psyche like cancer. Debating leftist university students and forming the Tatenokai (Shield Society) militia in the late 1960s were Mishima’s attempts to return the country to its masculine roots.
Oh, and Mishima would have surely loathed modern Anime. He even alludes to one of the medium’s defining features in his writing:
“Of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.”
Mishima was obsessed with decay, and I’d argue that by the age of 40, he had decided to kill himself before aging’s effects destroyed the muscles and physical strength he prized. From that moment on, his life became a performance, one wherein the only ending was a knife in his stomach and a samurai sword’s decapitating blow.
The Sea of Fertility tetralogy: Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel
The centerpiece of this performance was The Sea of Fertility tetralogy - four novels detailing Japan’s transformation from 1912 to then future 1975. In the first novel, Spring Snow, a young Kiyoaki Matsugae falls in love with a girl from an aristocratic family. However, like many romantic stories, the relationship is doomed. Kiyoaki dies from a brief illness, leaving behind his best friend, Shigekuni Honda.
Kiyoaki’s death at the end of Spring Snow leads to his reincarnation three times over. Each time, Honda, progressively older, tries to save his friend’s reincarnation from ruin. He cannot. Kiyoaki’s once pure soul becomes corrupted, so much that the woman he loved decades before insists to an elderly Honda that she never knew him. It’s a haunting tale, made more so by the fact Mishima mailed the final chapter to his editor the day of his doomed coup. The date, November 25, 1970, proceeds the last line.
It’s been over 50 years since Mishima’s suicide. His philosophy resides, as it did at the end of his life, in history’s dustbin. Yet his reflections on beauty, innocence, and purity continue to inspire. Yes, each fades or corrupts, and there’s no way to preserve them. It’s a tragedy woven through much of Mishima’s fiction. But if we accept that fact, embrace it, we achieve something that Mishima could never do.
We live better for it.