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 “Liebestod.”
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.
“Age ain’t nothing but some letters.”
Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby
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.
