Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist

Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait, by Andrew Rankin. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018).

The front cover of Andrew Rankin’s Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist, condenses the book’s central thesis into a single image. At the top of the cover is a photograph of Yukio Mishma (taken from the book Ordeal by Roses) smelling a flower. Beneath this is a fainter, inverted version of the same picture, suggesting a reflection of the first. It is as if Mishima is gazing into a pool of water, like the mythic figure Narcissus, relishing his own reflected appearance. The implication is that Mishima, like Narcissus, was self-obsessed.

Rankin’s book effectively argues that Mishima’s self-obsession was expressed through his life-long aspiration toward a “solid identity” (p. 8). This ultimately culminated in his anachronistic identification with the samurai tradition; an identification that both embodied a by-gone era and that allowed for the final, symbolic purgation of that era when, in 1970, Mishima committed suicide by seppuku. According to Rankin, Mishima was not born Mishima; he had to become Yukio Mishima through a lifetime of self-obsessed reflection and effort (something that I have also argued in Chapter Nine of my book Cinematic Nihilism, “Yukio Mishima and the Return to the Body”). This process began with a talented and intellectually brilliant Japanese boy named Hiraoka Kimitake who, in living through World War II and in experiencing the defeat and humiliation of his country by the West, sought to understand his place in a confusing world from which he felt alienated. Hiraoka Kimitake would, only after the war, become Yukio Mishima, a literary figure who strained against the limitations of the written word while striving to transform the abstractions explored in his books into concrete reality.

Rankin suggests that it is the problem of beauty that drove Mishima’s quest for a self. This problem is illustrated in what is perhaps one of Mishima’s greatest works, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. In this story beauty is characterized as an impossible goal that always eludes concrete realization. A monk named Mizoguchi becomes obsessed with a Buddhist temple that, while it is supposed to be the most beautiful of structures, nevertheless strikes him as falling short of its ideal. It is painfully shocking to the monk that the temple fails to live up to its promise, and he concludes that its physical existence is what holds back the manifestation of true beauty. Consequently, Mizoguchi resolves to burn down the temple in order that the pure, abstract form of its magnificence might be liberated.

Rankin’s analysis of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is very good, avoiding what I think are some of the mistakes made by many other interpreters of this particular work. He recognizes correctly that the problem with the temple in the story is not that it is too beautiful, but that it can never be made beautiful enough to express perfect, ideal beauty. It is the tangible nature of the building that holds back and degrades the ideal of beauty, and thus the only solution is destruction of its physical structure. Rankin applies this interpretation of the book to Mishima’s life, arguing that he was like both Mitzoguchi and the temple. In his turn toward body-building, Mishima attempted to make his own physique into a fleshy “temple” that he then suicidally destroyed in order to liberate his own self-created, ideal identity. In this quest both to create and annihilate himself, Mishima exhibited an extreme kind of aestheticism that was all consuming, narcissistic and decadent.

Mishima’s narcissism, however, was of a unique sort, according to Rankin. Whereas the original Greek myth of Narcissus has the central character unknowingly falling in love with his own likeness, Mishima instead was, all along, knowingly obsessed with himself. In the myth, Narcissus happens upon his reflection in a pool of water. When he realizes that what he sees is only a reflection – and thus is incapable of being possessed – he dies of a broken heart. When Mishima retells this myth, however, he replaces the pool of water with a “mirror image” (p. 75). This is an important difference, stresses Rankin, since while reflections in pools of water are natural phenomena that can deceive us, mirrors are unnatural, man-made implements that we already know cast our appearances back to us. Looking into a mirror, you know that you are looking at yourself. You know that the image has no substantial existence apart from your own body. There is, thus, no delusion when gazing at a mirror. You do not think you are engaging with other people. The mirror image, in this way, reinforces self-conscious self-involvement. This was Mishima’s frame of mind, according to Rankin. Mishima was a man who didn’t really care about interacting with others since he served as his own audience. His writing was a tool for him to create his own, self-enclosed world; a world that he eventually externalized in body-building. Lifting weights, Mishima watched his own muscles grow, becoming ever more self-obsessed with the transformation of his skinny, sickly body into a muscular, strong body. All the while, he knew that it was his own self that was both being transformed and observed. It was this dual, narcissistic process that came to dominate Mishima’s life. He was “intoxicated” with his own illusions (Chpt. 5).

Transforming his body eventually became part of a larger, public project of reactionary activism that, as Rankin writes, alienated him “from people on both sides of the political spectrum”:

Those on the left objected to what they saw as his crass glorification of wartime militarist dogma and emperor-centered fascism. Those on the right objected to his eroticization of the sacred imperial institution and to his ad hominem criticisms of the reigning emperor. Within a short time, so it seemed, the flippant aesthete had become a dedicated subversive. Hostile critics began to speak of Mishima as a “dangerous thinker,” a label that pleased him enormously (p. 121).

Being called a “dangerous thinker” no doubt was pleasing to Mishima in part because this is precisely the kind of thinking advocated by one of his philosophical idols, Friedrich Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Mishima was concerned with the advent of nihilism, and he became determined to find a way to combat and overcome this condition. Nietzsche had claimed that nihilism as a cultural disease results from an overabundance of the formal, structured and logical Apollonian force when it comes to dominate over the life enhancing – but potentially destructive – Dionysian force. Likewise, Mishima (inspired by anthropologist Ruth Benedict) diagnosed Japan’s cultural nihilism as stemming from an imbalance between the “chrysanthemum and the sword” (p. 126). The chrysanthemum, like Nietzsche’s Apollonian force, symbolizes tranquility and the gentle side of Japanese culture, while the sword, like Nietzsche’s Dionysian force, symbolizes Japan’s violent and cruel side. For Mishima, the chrysanthemum had come, after WWII, to dominate Japan at the expense of the sword. What was thus needed was a reaction against civilized softness through the cultivation of samurai viciousness. This project took the form of what Mishima would call “aesthetic terrorism” (p. 146).

The Shield Society was a militia formed by Mishima, consisting of himself and a group of about 100 young followers. Sanctioned and supported by the Japanese government, the stated purpose of the group was to protect the Emperor and to assist Japan’s security forces in combating violent insurrection. In reality, The Shield Society appears to have been viewed by authorities as a bit of a joke; the narcissistic project of Japan’s greatest author. From the perspective of Mishima himself, it seems to have been part of his own preparation for a spectacular death. Rankin writes that it was shortly after the formation of his militia that Mishima began to use the phrase “aesthetic terrorism” to describe various violent, but beautiful, political actions, rebellions, and assassinations from Japan’s past. In associating terrorism with beauty, Mishima seems to have been anticipating his final work of art, a performance piece in which violence, politics and art were combined in one spectacular event that would not only be the culminating point of Mishima’s identity, but would also be the final conclusion to his life. On November 25, 1970, Mishima carried out his final act of aesthetic terrorism, storming the office of the commandant of the Self Defense Forces along with four of his soldiers, and then committing seppuku. This act, both shocking and awe-inspiring, was his last and most stunning work of art, according to Rankin. It was, he writes, “the logical culmination of his life’s work and of all the aspects of his thinking that we have investigated in this book” (p. 172).

I really enjoyed Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist. It is well-written and well-researched. One of it’s greatest strengths is the fact that the author is fluent in Japanese, and so has been able to consult Mishima’s original texts, many of which remain untranslated. Rankin’s insights into these works offer fresh support for his analysis of Mishima’s psychological and artistic development, resulting in an unusually full and satisfying account of the Japanese author’s life-long struggles with self-identity. It is a well-argued and carefully assembled book that makes good use of previously neglected material. I agree with Rankin’s conclusions and admire his diligent research.

I have two criticisms, one having to do with the book’s tone and the other having to do with its philosophical content. First, while Rankin himself is impatient with what he thinks is a “dismissive” attitude toward Mishima by other scholars, the Introduction to his own book, I think, strikes its own unnecessarily dismissive tone toward English language writing that does in fact take Mishima seriously. The author sweepingly proclaims most English language accounts of Mishima as “lightweight” (p. 6). In a footnote he abruptly discounts Roy Starr’s book Deadly Dialectics as “unsatisfactory” (p. 175, fn 7), and he fails even to mention Damian Flanagan’s book Yukio Mishima (Reaction Books, 2014). While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of these other studies, they certainly don’t deserve to be summarily dismissed or ignored.

Second, while I do appreciate the serious attention Rankin devotes to Mishima’s own writings and ideas, the book exhibits a lack of depth when it comes to exploring some of the connections between those ideas and Mishima’s philosophical influences. Rankin is obviously an expert when it comes to the Japanese literary tradition, but his study lacks detail when it comes to the wider philosophical tradition of which Mishima was a part.  In particular, Rankin’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophy is quite thin, missing important subtleties about how the Nietzschean dynamic of nihilism  is replicated in Mishima’s obsession with the conflict between the ideal and the concrete. Ironically, this is something that might have been addressed had Rankin engaged more charitably with Roy Starr’s book.

Overall, however, I would enthusiastically recommend Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist to anyone fascinated by Yukio Mishima’s writing, his life, or his psychological development. It is an exceptional book.

The Frolic of the Beasts

First published in 1961, Yukio Mishima’s novel The Frolic of the Beasts (Translated by Andrew Clare. New York: Vintage Books. November 2018) was only recently translated into English in 2018. It is a short work, reminding me of Mishima’s more well-crafted novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, which was first published in 1963 and then translated into English two years afterwards. Both stories deal with themes of aberrant love, moral transgression, murder and nihilism, but whereas The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea exhibits an elegant and graceful style, The Frolic of the Beasts is rather clunky and jagged in form. Since I don’t read Japanese, I’m not sure how much of this has to do with the original text and how much is related to the English translation.

The story begins with a prologue describing a photograph of three smiling figures – Yuko, Ippei and Koji – whose apparent happiness, we are told, conflicts with a “wretched incident” that will take place only a few days later. The photo was snapped at the harbor of a fishing village where the three characters live. Yuko and Ippei are married and own five greenhouse gardens near the village where they grow plants and produce for sale. Koji works for them; but there seems to be something secret and unspeakably intimate about the relationship he shares with his employers. This intimacy is confirmed by the photograph and then, at the close of the prologue, with the description of three grave markers that have been erected, against the wishes of villagers, in the local cemetery. Ippei’s grave lies on the right, Koji’s grave is on the left, and Yuko’s grave sits between them as a “reserved monument.” Ippei and Koji, it appears, have died, while Yuko is still alive, but anticipating death; and there is some sort of outrage involving the three that has scandalized the village residents.

The story unfolds through flashbacks and flash-forwards as the hidden secret alluded to in the prologue is slowly revealed. In Chapter 1, Koji is released from prison and returns to the fishing village of Iro where he is met by Yuko at the port upon his arrival. On the boat ride to Iro, Koji repeatedly thinks to himself “I have repented,” but when he meets Yuko, her first words to him are, “You haven’t changed.” She repeats this phrase as the two of them stop for lunch. “You haven’t changed one little bit,” she says to Koji, and he thinks to himself, “They were frightening words” (p. 22). The reader starts to understand that Koji has committed some sort of crime that has disrupted not only his own life, but the course of Yuko’s life as well. Koji longs for an assurance that he is different than he was before his incarceration – that he is reformed – but Yuko sees in him the same person that was always there: someone capable of violence. And yet, she is not afraid or repulsed by him. Rather, she seems protective of, and in fact attracted to, this young man. Yuko has even insisted upon becoming Koji’s legal guardian upon his release.

The two of them walk through the village, and while Koji starts to feel a sense of shame, Yuko commands him to hold his head high as they pass by the villagers who know about his crime. Eventually, they arrive at Yuko’s house where a fearful Koji is greeted by Ippei.

Ippei was a German literature scholar who once worked as a lecturer before inheriting his parents’ ceramics shop in Ginza. Koji was one of his students, hired to work in the shop. Upon becoming his employee, Koji discovered that Ippei, who is married to Yuko, was involved in a number of extra-marital affairs; something that his wife knew about but tolerated. In Koji’s eyes, “Ippei had everything.” In addition to having a beautiful wife and girlfriends, he was educated, intelligent, wore expensive Italian suits and went to exclusive hair salons. On the other hand, Ippei admired Koji for his youth; in particular his “ability to fight and express anger.” “Old age is all that awaits you. There is nothing other than that,” (p. 29) he told Koji, seemingly encouraging his young employee to grab hold of life while he could. Indeed this is what Koji did, falling in love with Yoku and beginning a secret affair with her.

While out with Yoku one day, Koji discovered a heavy, black wrench laying on the ground. Not really understanding why, he picked it up and put it in his jacket pocket. Reflecting upon this later while imprisoned, he interprets the incident as having some sort of metaphysical importance. Koji concludes that it was not he who actually decided to pick up the wrench, but rather that the wrench itself was a manifestation of some primal “will” that had become concrete and which sought to throw the order of reality into chaos. This section of Chapter 2 immediately brought the ideas of Schopenhauer to mind. Schopenhauer, of course, considered all things in the world to be manifestations of an underlying, unitary will, but this cosmic will was neither benevolent nor moral. Rather, it was energetic, violent and cruel. It would make sense that Koji, a student of German literature, would be familiar with these ideas and thus come, in retrospect, to understand the black wrench as the embodiment of a force that seeks to disrupt his world.

And this wrench does indeed change the course of things. When Yoku and Koji walk in on Ippei and his lover Machiko engaged in a romantic rendezvous, Yoku becomes upset and Ippei strikes her across the face. Koji’s inner feelings are confused as he observes all of this. “…he wasn’t sure whom he hated” (p. 49). He longs for this confrontation to lead to some sort of epiphany, a pulling away of the veil that will lead to the revelation of the raw perversity of human nature, but instead all he sees is “nothing other than things he had grown utterly tired of seeing: the mediocre concealment of human shame, the irony of keeping up appearances” (p. 47). This disappoints him. The concrete discovery of her husband’s infidelity, which Yoku knew about all along, is not greeted by her with the “delight” of one who has finally revealed a long suspected truth; instead she reacts in the stereotypical way that a spurned wife is expected to act. At this, Koji recoils instinctively and finds himself compelled to correct things by taking an action that will impart lasting and profound significance to this moment. He reaches into his pocket, grabs the wrench and strikes Ippei repeatedly in the head.

In Chapter 3 we learn about the aftermath of the attack on Ippei. The blows he delivered caused severe brain damage, reducing Ippei to a passive and persistently grinning idiot who needs to be cared for by his wife. This is the crime for which Koji was incarcerated, and though he tells himself that he has “repented,” he nevertheless also feels as if this act of violence was a necessary corrective to the ugly, stupid and senseless reality that would otherwise have been the destiny of these three people:

At the time, I could no longer endure that putrid world; a world bereft of logic. It was necessary that I impart some logic into that world of pig’s entrails. And so you see, I imparted the cold, hard, black logic of iron. Namely, the logic of the wrench. (p. 51).

The “logic of the wrench” defies the nihilistic meaninglessness of reality. It is an attempt willfully to alter the course of nature so that these three characters will no longer be doomed to the mediocrity of conventional, forgettable lives. While they may be demonized, pitied and reviled by others, “the logic of the wrench” assures that they will not be easily forgotten as boring, faceless, run-of-the-mill drones that are merely part of the herd.

Following his incarceration, Koji settles into life with Ippei and Yoku, working in their greenhouses alongside Teijiro, one of the couple’s other employees. One day, he accompanies Yuko and Ippei on a hike to a waterfall in order to make an offering at a sacred shrine. Koji thinks about how happy he is in this peaceful setting, but the hike is rather strenuous, Ippei becomes tired, and Yoku, upon their arrival at the shrine, begins to speak and act disrespectfully and sacrilegiously. She complains that the shrine itself is “dull” and “small,” and then starts to taunt her husband by asking him if he even understands the concept of sacrifice. Ippei seems confused, but Yuko persists, trying to get him to pronounce the word “sacrifice.” When he is unable to do so, she asks him if he understands what a “kiss” is and then grabs Koji, embracing him passionately as her husband watches. This enrages Koji, who slaps Yoku across the face and then turns to face Ippei, who stands passive and silent, that ever present grin fixed to his face. It is a look that terrifies Koji, and in order to escape this fear, he once again embraces Yoku.

Chapter 4 begins with Koji drinking alone one night in the only bar in Iro. It is here that he meets up with two young men – Matsukichi and Kioyshi – and the beautiful daughter of his co-worker Teijiro; a young woman named Kimi. Kimi is on vacation from her factory job, but oddly she does not stay with her father, nor does she spend any time with him. In the past, after the death of her mother, she had seemed to be quite happy living together with her father, but then, quite suddenly Kimi left home, and it became apparent that there had been some sort of falling out.

Koji sits with his three friends in the bar, becoming more and more drunk. Finally, the three young men leave with Kimi and take a row boat out to a small island where they go swimming and then dry off by a campfire. Matsukichi and Kioyshi steal Kimi’s ukulele, which they see as a symbol of her love, and row away, leaving Koji and Kimi stranded on the island together. At the campfire, Kimi tells Koji that she knows he really loves Yuko, but that “just for this one night she was prepared to make a sacrifice and act as a stand-in” (p. 99). But as they have sex, Koji thinks to himself how the experience is “nothing but a poor imitation,” not of Yuko, but of the idealized sexual images that he had conjured up in his imagination while in prison. Here we find yet another indication of the nihilistic theme at the center of the story.

The nihilist considers all existent things to be substandard and flawed when compared to the superlative ideals that human beings are capable of imagining. On earth, there is no such thing as perfect Truth or Justice or Beauty, and so reality as it exists is always defective, ugly and deficient. The only perfections that exist are idealizations, and, disappointingly, the ideal is always incapable of becoming real. Thus, Kimi’s actual beauty is a “poor imitation” of real Beauty, and at the end of the chapter Koji reflects on how the sandals she has left on the island will eventually decay, being “transformed into a dwelling place for an infestation of sea lice,” finally melting “into the great multitude of unearthly, formless material phenomena that exist on earth” (p. 101). Reality is a raw, unformed, ugly, meaningless mass of matter. As Jean-Paul Sartre would say, the world of physical existence is an existence that is “in-itself.” It is a vast absurdity that means nothing at all until human beings exert their willful interpretational efforts to make something out of the nothing; just as Koji did with his wrench. But even those human interpretations are ephemeral, doomed to decay and to die along with the people who formulated them. Nature is ugly and meaningless, and the best thing that a human can do in life is to commit crimes against nature in defiance of its absurdity.

The ugliness of reality is further unveiled in Chapter 5. Before Kimi leaves to go back to her factory job, her father, Teijiro, proudly confesses to Koji that shortly after the death of his wife, he raped Kimi, his own daughter, and this is why she hates him. Teijiro produces a photograph that he bought in Tokyo of a young school girl and a young school boy having sex. Smiling, he says to Koji, “What do you think? It looks a bit like her, doesn’t it?” (p. 108). Teijiro – like Ippei and Koji – is a criminal. In confessing his own crime, he expects Koji, who has also slept with Kimi, to participate in his perverted sexual titillation. It is an attempt to share a bond of corruption with Koji in whom he recognizes a kindred, aberrant spirit. But Koji is still resistant. He is still convinced that he has “repented.”

When Kimi stops to say goodbye, Yoku is present, and Koji senses that she is jealous. But, as it turns out, she is not at all jealous of the sexual affair that he has had with Kimi. She is jealous of Koji’s crime:

Yuko’s jealousy was directed not at Kimi, who was of no importance. It was directed, she said, at Koji’s crime.

The anguish she felt at not having a crime to her name like the one he committed had grown in intensity. Ever since the picnic that day at the waterfall, this thought had rooted itself blackly in her mind – she wanted to compete with Koji’s crime, to somehow be able to own a crime like his in order to at least stand beside him. (p. 119)

Yoku is the only one who possesses no crime of her own, and because of this, she feels lacking and weak. She is the only one in her household who has not willfully challenged the conventional course of life, but rather has simply allowed herself to be swept along by the actions of others. In order to correct this, she must commit a willful transgression against morality.

The story comes to a crescendo when, on a walk with Ippei, Koji confronts his former teacher and accuses him of being a “hollow cavern,” and an “empty hole” (p. 140) around which the entire household revolves. This former scholar has lost all inner thought. He is a perpetually grinning nothing that everyone else must cater to. He has become a being-in-itself, a dumb, ugly force of nature, propelled by inertia and necessity rather than by willful desire. Like a black hole, he sucks everyone around him into his orbit, in the process also sucking the energy out of their lives. However, as Ippei becomes increasingly agitated, it becomes apparent that there is some sort of willful, inner consciousness still alive within him. “What is it you want?” Koji asks, and finally Ippei responds, “Death. I want to die” (p. 144).

The book ends with a first-person epilogue in which a researcher recounts his visit to the town of Iro and his meeting with a priest who recounts his memories of Yuko, Ippei and Koji. The priest recalls how at dawn on a particular day, Yuko and Koji appeared at his temple, hand-in-hand, looking like a bride and groom. They confessed to him that they had strangled Ippei to death. The priest shows the researcher the photograph described in the book’s prologue, and explains that Koji had given it to him the day before the murder. This was used as evidence of premeditation in his court trial, and so Koji was sentenced to death, while Yuko was sentenced to be imprisoned for life. While in prison, Yuko and Koji requested that the priest arrange for three graves to be established in which Yuko would be buried between Ippei and Koji. The priest gives the researcher a photograph of the grave markers, and he in turn visits Yoku in prison, passing the photo along to her. She now can be assured that she has committed a crime that justifies her lying alongside her husband and her lover for eternity.

The Frolic of the Beasts echoes themes that are found in many of Yukio Mishima’s major works, like The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and the Sea of Fertility. Like these other books, it is a nihilistic tragedy in which the main characters struggle, suffer and ultimately die in the vain attempt to impose their ideals onto a meaningless and resistant world. Their actions take the form of crimes against conventional morality precisely because it is conventional morality that serves to keep individuals tied to an everyday, normal and unexceptional way of life. In order actively to break free from passive mediocrity, the characters in Mishima’s stories find that they must challenge the world as it has been given. The given world – the world in-itself – is an ugly, meaningless nothing that absorbs and dissipates all human effort. It is like the ocean, which provides a dark and threatening backdrop to The Frolic of the Beasts (as well as to The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea). The ocean serves as a symbol of Being itself; a dark, formless and flowing reality giving rise to, and then reabsorbing, all worldly phenomena. Like waves that erupt on the surface of the sea and then melt back into the depths, individual human lives erupt forth from Being, struggle for a short time to make something of their short existence, and then are inexorably vanquished back into the formless void.

In Mishima’s stories, just as in his own life, individual perversion, crime and depravity become acts of defiance against a meaningless world. Though human existence is impermanent, at least crimes against nature can potentially leave a lasting scar on the face of Being.

 

Cinematic Nihilism Presentation at College of Marin

On October 26th I delivered a presentation on my new book, Cinematic Nihilism, at the College of Marin. This video of the presentation is about 56 minutes long and includes a group discussion at the end. Thanks to David Patterson, who both organized and filmed the event, as well as to everyone who attended!

APA Blog Post

I have written a guest blog post for the American Philosophical Association’s website detailing the arguments from my book Cinematic Nihilism: Encounters, Confrontations, Overcomings. It includes an excerpt from “Chapter 9: Yukio Mishima and the Return to the Body.”

You can read it here:

American Philosophical Association

Cinematic Nihilism: Encounters, Confrontations, Overcomings.

I’ve signed a contract with Edinburgh University Press for the publication of a collection of essays to be titled Cinematic Nihilism: Encounters, Confrontations, Overcomings. The completed manuscript is due to the publisher by the end of January 2017.

The peer review process has so far been quite rigorous (and sometimes stressful!), but I think this has helped to shape and clarify the aims and purposes of the book. I’m excited about the result.

The collection consists of essays addressing nihilistic themes in an international variety of popular films. Some of the essays have previously appeared in journals such as Film and Philosophy, Film International, Screen Bodies, The Journal of Popular Culture, and The International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen. Other pieces new to this collection include an introductory essay addressing the philosophical history of nihilism and its relation to film; an updated and revised treatment of nihilistic themes in George Romero’s Dead films; an essay on Fight Club; and an essay exploring the nihilism of Yukio Mishima.

Part of the fun of working on this project includes selecting screen grabs from the various movies discussed in the book as illustrations. I also get some say in the cover design. Currently, I’m thinking that the image above, from David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome, would make a great cover!

The Decay of the Angel

Conflicting feelings overcame me as I finished reading The Decay of the Angel, the fourth and final novel in Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy. On the one hand, I experienced a sense of satisfied completion at having come to the end of the cycle. The story of Honda’s own journey through life, his tragic decline, and his encounters with the various incarnations of his friend Kioyaki reach a point of fulfillment in this book. The story ends by coming full circle, with Honda, now a disgraced old man, making his way back to Gesshuji monastery in order to pay a final visit to Satoko, Kioyaki’s love from the first book, Spring Snow. There is a clear effort on Mishima’s part to tie together the various characters and themes that were introduced in the previous three books, demonstrating that the dramas of decline and decay were all part of an unchanging reality, a nothingness at the heart of Being that can only be glimpsed by looking past the particular superficialities of history (both individual and collective) and taking in everything “with an unoccupied heart.” (p. 232) There is a strange, nihilistic serenity at the end of the novel as Honda enters the monastery garden to find a place of emptiness, “a place that had no memories, nothing.” (p. 247) I closed the cover of the book feeling that this calm nothingness was an appropriate ending to the saga.

On the other hand, I also experienced feelings of disappointment. While the plot of this installment is simple and well structured, there are sections that are rushed and overly schematic; especially in comparison to the previous book, Temple of Dawn, which perhaps went too far in the other direction, with its long and complicated meditations on eastern and western philosophy. The Decay of the Angel involves the fourth (apparent) incarnation of Kioyaki/Isao/Ying Chan. He is a sixteen year-old boy by the name of Toru Yasunaga who is adopted by Honda, and who then in turn attempts to dominate and humiliate his adopted father. It all unfolds too quickly and impatiently, however, and Toru ends up lacking the sort of psychological and philosophical depth found in other characters appearing in the tetralogy. He is, in fact, almost forgettable. This flaw is probably a result of the fact that Mishima was preoccupied with other matters as he rushed to finish this particular book. The completed manuscript was delivered to his publisher on the very day that he himself commited seppuku after unsuccessfully attempting to rouse the Japanese army to revolution. His distraction shows.

The Decay of the Angel starts off with the image of the ocean, which in Mishima’s novels often is utilized as a metaphor for Being itself. Toru Yasunaga works as a watchman, sighting and calling in the arrival of ships as they approach port. He is a solitary figure, gazing over the waters of the sea, occasionally visited by Kinue, an incredibly ugly girl who lives under the delusion that she is actually incredibly beautiful.

The ocean that Toru watches over is a churning nothingness that “called up all the evil in nature.” (p. 7) It is a “nameless sea” that is “absolute anarchy” (p. 7) evoking the “absurdity of existence” and suggesting that “the loss of the universe is not worth taking seriously.” (p. 9) In the beginning pages of The Decay of the Angel, Mishima thusly establishes his metaphysical point of view. Nothing that happens has meaning, nor does anything in the universe have value. As Honda later articulates to himself, “Everything was the same. From start to finish.” (p. 32) These observations anticipate the final pages of the novel where Honda enters the garden at Gesshuji monastery and is engulfed by a vast nothingness. The central insight around which this entire story revolves is this particular, nihilistic insight: all of the suffering, all of the passion, all of the logic, all of the joy, all of the drama; everything that happens in the course of individual and collective human life reduces to the same thing. That is to say, all of these phenomena are merely aspects of the meaningless nothing that is Being itself. In the previous novel, Temple of Dawn, this same thought is articulated in the theory of “alaya consciousness” that Honda comes to endorse after his studies of Buddhist philosophy. There is no past or future. There is only an eternal “now” in which all things merge as one. The universe is like the ocean whose surface appears torn by violence and turmoil, while in its true depths it is really just one deep, unified, unfathomable abyss.

Honda is now in his late 70’s and more keenly aware than ever of his own impending death. His wife has passed away and he now has formed a very close friendship with Keiko, his neighbor who, in the previous novel, he had watched through a peephole as she had sex with Ying Chan. Keiko and Honda now spend time traveling together, visiting places that Keiko has read about and longs to see. Having just read a book titled Robe of Feathers, Keiko tells Honda that she would like to visit the Mio channel, a dangerous Japanese waterway that serves as the book’s setting.

In Robe of Feathers, fishermen encounter an angel who exhibits the five signs of decay, and so is unable to fly back to heaven. During their discussion of the tale, Honda explains to Keiko that while different literary sources identify a variety of greater and lesser signs, there is general agreement that among the main indications of an angel’s decay are the following five major symptoms: 1. Its flowered crowns fade. 2. Its robes become soiled (from sweat). 3. It gives off a fetid smell. 4. It becomes shrouded in darkness. 5. It lingers in one spot and is no longer happy. These signs serve throughout the rest of the story as indications of the connection between Honda and Toru, the two characters who are the final focus of tragic downfall in the tetralogy.

Honda and Keiko visit Mio, where they encounter Toru manning his watchtower. Upon meeting the boy, Honda immediately realizes that there is something significant about him. When their eyes meet, Honda recognizes that Toru is his “duplicate down to the finest detail.” (p. 67) While Honda is very old and the boy is very young, what Honda sees duplicated goes deeper than mere surface appearances. There is a profound, abyssal evil that Honda finds perfectly mirrored between himself and the boy. This evil is related to their shared decline and decay. While Honda’s own body has aged, withered and become old, this boy clearly exhibits the signs of an angel’s decay. When Honda and Keiko first enter the watchtower, Toru is wearing wilted and worm eaten flowers in his hair; a gift from Kinue, his insane friend. He is sweating profusely, wiping his armpits and neck. He also lingers in this one spot – his watchtower – working, sleeping, eating and receiving guests in a single place. All of these indications reinforce Honda’s conviction that there is something uniquely important about this boy; something that connects the two of them together in the tragic drama of life. Honda’s mistake, however, is to jump to the conclusion that Toru must also be the latest incarnation of Kioyaki/Isao/Ying Chan.  He notices, through Toru’s white t-shirt, three moles on his left side, and takes this as adequate evidence that he has been reunited with his old friend once again. He thus makes the abrupt decision to adopt this boy and raise him as his son.

Honda teaches Toru western manners, sends him to school, writes him into his will and is repaid for all of this with Toru’s resentment and hatred. The boy contrives to take over Honda’s home, physically threatening and humiliating the old man. He enacts a plot to get out of a marriage arranged by Honda, disgracing his fiance and then moving his insane friend Kinue into the family home. He sleeps around and arrogantly plans to have Honda declared incompetent so that he can take over the old man’s fortune. The only thing that offers Honda a thread of hope is the possibility that at the age of 20, Toru will die if he is indeed of the same substance as Kioyaki/Isao/Ying Chan.

Toru does not die at 20, but due to Keiko’s intervention, he is put back in his place. Keiko, who Mishima identifies as an “angel killer,” (p. 211) reveals to Toru the reason why he has been adopted, reinforcing the fact that if there is indeed anything special about him, he will soon be dead. She insists, however, that there really is, in fact, nothing special at all about Toru:

There is no special right to happiness and none to unhappiness. There is no tragedy and there is no genius. Your confidence and your dreams are groundless. If there is on this earth something exceptional, special beauty or special evil, nature finds it and uproots it. We should all have learned the hard lesson, that there are no ‘elect.’ (p. 212)

Toru, unable to endure the thought that he is just an ordinary person, drinks poison, failing in the commission of suicide but going blind. Because of his blindness, he is unable to complete his plan to take over Honda’s household and so instead moves into a guest house with Kinue, who now, in addition to being ugly, has become incredibly fat. The two of them plan to get married, presumably to linger in one another’s presence until they die, living in one dark room, wretched, pathetic and taken care of by Honda.

Many readers remain unsatisfied and confused by Toru’s character in this book. He doesn’t fit neatly into the most obvious narrative arc, which, at least on the surface, tracks the various incarnations of a single “soul” over a variety of lifetimes. But Mishima’s tetralogy is not about surfaces. It is about the deep nothingness at the heart of Being, and its discovery by the one character who appears in all four of the novels: Shigekuni Honda. He is the real focus of the cycle, not Kioyaki/Isao/Ying Chan/Toru, and so to understand the significance of Toru in this last installment, one needs, I think, to shift focus away from the idea of reincarnation and shift focus toward Honda’s own psychological and spiritual development. In fact, I think that what is going on over the course of this entire cycle of novels is really a reflection of Honda’s own mental processes, and is not indicative of an objective cycle of reincarnation at all. Reincarnation is, I think, simply a comforting myth in this story; a reflection of Honda’s own naive and hopeful mental projections that serve to keep him insulated from the true, vast, meaningless nothingness of the universe.

Honda’s fascination with Buddhist philosophy (and the vast amount of space that Mishima devotes to its explication in the third novel) can easily mislead readers into thinking that The Sea of Fertility is earnestly endorsing these ideas. However, it seems to me that just the opposite is the case. In Temple of Dawn, there are passages emphasizing that Buddhism was a foreign import to Japan, and that the doctrine of reincarnation was not original to Buddhism or to Japanese culture at all, but was initiated by western systems of belief like Pythagoreanism and ancient Greek Orphism. Whatever the historical truth is, Mishima’s concern with this issue highlights the fact that for him Buddhism is a system of belief that has been contaminated by the western world, and thus is a form of decadence that exercises a weakening influence on the Japanese spirit. The doctrine of reincarnation is an artificial and westernized lens through which a person like Honda finds order, comfort and a chain of consistency in a universe that is really chaotic, meaningless and unfathomable.

At the end of Decay of the Angel, it is the false nature of reincarnation that is finally revealed to Honda as he emerges into the monastery garden. The first novel in the cycle, Spring Snow, ended when Honda and his friend Kioyaki travel to the Gesshuji monastery in the hope that Kioyaki could see his lover Satoko, who had renounced the world and become a nun. He is denied an audience with her, and at the end of that book Kioyaki dies. At the end of Decay of the Angel, Honda reenacts the final journey of his friend, climbing the long path to the doors of the monastery, hoping to speak with Satoko, who has become the abbess of the monastery. Now that he is an old man, the hike up the mountain path is almost too much for Honda, and as he makes his way toward the doors of Gesshuji monastery, he himself starts clearly to exhibit the signs of the decay of an angel:

• The first indication of this is his observation that the path forward is wrapped in shadows. “There was a reason for the shadows, but Honda doubted that it was in the trees themselves.” (p. 236) This is the fourth sign described by Honda himself earlier in the novel.
• The next indication is when he begins to encounter withered “dew flowers” along the path: “everything was ominously, threatening dry.” (p. 238) This is the first sign earlier described by Honda.
• The next indication is when he feels the “sweat coming through his shirt and soaking the back of his suit coat.” (p. 239) This is the second sign Honda described. Presumably, as he sweats, Honda begins to smell, which is the third sign of decay.

All along the path, a white butterfly leads Honda on his way, but strangely the butterfly, Honda notes, flies unusually low and near to the ground. Could this be an indication of the pull of the earth on all creatures, and of the looming reality of death? Like the wings of a decaying angel, the butterfly’s wings are unable to transport it very far away from the earth or toward heaven.

When Honda does reach the monastery, he is admitted to an audience with Satoko. After all of these years she is clearly older, but unlike Honda she does not appear deteriorated. “Age had sped in the direction not of decay but of purification.” (p. 243) Satoko, in this final scene, seems to represent the alternative to Honda’s decline. While the flesh must age, one’s perspective on this process is what determines whether it is borne as decline or as purification.

In the case of Honda, he has, over the course of the four novels, grown older anxiously searching for signs that death leads to something more; that when one’s body dies, the spirit, the true essence of a person, is somehow reincarnated into another body to live again. His entire life has consisted of a search for signs that might justify the finitude of this embodied existence by looking to its repeated continuation in further and further incarnations. It is as if living this one life is not enough. Without another life, and another, and another – into infinity – existence seems meaningless to Honda. The appeal of the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation is that it offers hope that friends will meet again, that the universe is moving in a particular direction, and that there is some sort of enduring essence to “you” that can never be destroyed.

On the other hand there is Satoko, who has been cloistered in a monastery for the same period of time Honda has been searching for his reincarnated friend. She is completely unconcerned with the idea of reincarnation, and when Honda mentions Kioyaki’s name, she does not even know who he is. She suggests to Honda that, perhaps, there never was such a person; an idea that would undermine the chain of events that has been the driving motivation of Honda’s entire life.

Upon considering this possibility, Honda wonders if he himself is an illusion, and when shown to the south garden of the monastery, he finally arrives at a place where there are “no memories, nothing.” (p. 247) In reaching this place, Honda, I think, has come to terms with the finitude of existence and now can avoid the distraction of other worldly hopes and dreams. He himself is a decayed angel who once aspired toward a kind of “heaven,” but now finds himself bound to the earth.

So in the end, The Sea of Fertility is a cycle of novels not about Buddhism or about reincarnation. It is, rather, about a man who cannot endure the thought that life is a one-shot deal. It illustrates that without passionate purity and commitment, human beings have a tendency to continually defer and postpone their projects out of fear, weakness and the misplaced hope that they will always have another chance to get things right. Like Honda, most of us give in to our weaknesses, watching the world go by while admiring others who act according to the courage of their convictions, devoting their lives to an ideal by writing “a line of poetry with a splash of blood.”

The Temple of Dawn

The third book in Mishima’s Sea of Fertility Tetralogy, The Temple of Dawn, differs in many ways from the first two installments in the series. For one thing, the plot of The Temple of Dawn is much less focused and economical than are the plots of Spring Snow and Runaway Horses. Unlike the previous two books, The Temple of Dawn meanders here and there, following a very crooked path to its inevitable denouement. In this book Shigekuni Honda, now in his 50’s, becomes the central character. He is struggling with his own increasingly acute anxiety about death and human finitude at the same time that he finds himself entangled in  a lifestyle of decadent wealth and perverse passion. His story leads us from Thailand – where he first becomes acquainted with a young princess – to India, and then back to Japan as he studies Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, striving to understand the mysteries of samsara in an effort to conquer his own suffering. While in the end it all ties together, the storyline becomes unwieldy enough at points that one gets the feeling Mishima was himself perhaps unsure of how all of the themes and action should interconnect.

Another major difference between this story and the preceding ones is that Honda, who previously served as a symbol of reason and logic, now becomes a figure gripped by perverse sexual passion. In middle age, he has developed into a voyeur who not only spies on young lovers at outdoor parks, but also on the female guests at his own home. This change in character is startling and depressing, making Honda seem like an immature youth who lacks self control. The second half of the book finds him in retirement from his career as a lawyer, and so for the first time in his adult life he is in a position where he no longer needs to rely on logic or reason in his daily routines. Instead, he has ample free time during which he travels, throws parties, spies on young couples, and contrives a plot to deflower the young Thai princess who he first met in Bangkok when she was a little girl. Honda has now become the passionate one, but unlike young Kioyaki (from Spring Snow) or Isao (from Runaway Horses), Honda’s passion is not pure but decadent; the result of living too long and having too much free time. In middle age he has become an old pervert who lusts after young bodies that he can never possess except with secretive looks.

While many critics claim that it is in the character of Isao, from Runaway Horses, that we find a confession of Mishima’s true self, I get the feeling that in The Temple of Dawn we also get to see a deep part of Mishima’s psychology; but one that he was vigorously fighting against. While the physically disciplined and ideological Isao perhaps represented the ideal that Mishima aspired toward, with Honda I think we find the actual reality Mishima feared he was descending into as he grew older. The descriptions of Honda’s perverse lust in The Temple of Dawn are very detailed and convincing, leading readers to imagine that the author himself may have been in the grips of precisely these same feelings. The book is filled with detailed, erotic descriptions of young lovers groping at one another lustily, of Honda’s voyeuristic joy at watching, through a peep hole, as three of his guests engage in a threesome, and of Honda’s lascivious responses to the young Thai princesses’ budding sexuality. All of this culminates in an extremely graphic description of the Thai princesses’ lesbian encounter with Keiko, Honda’s neighbor, as Honda secretly watches.  At the same time that it seems as if Mishima takes a great deal of pleasure in describing these erotic scenarios, there is also an abject atmosphere of gloominess and misery that accompanies them. This wretchedness is connected to the fact that it is through the perspective of Honda, an old man, that we get these accounts. His own aging flesh possesses none of the erotic attraction that he finds in the flesh of those he lusts after, and his voyeurism thus becomes something “disgusting” and “repugnant”:

It was outrageous that his pleasure might disgust others and thereby subject him to their everlasting repugnance and further that such disgust might one day grow to be an indispensable element of pleasure.

Chilling self-disgust fused with the sweetest allurement…the very denial of existence joining with the concept of immortality that can never be healed. This unhealable existence was the unique essence of immortality. (p. 271)

Honda’s reality, as well as Mishima’s, is a wounded one in which pleasure and self disgust intermingle, opening up a gash in the fabric of Being. To look at the suppleness and innocence of youth – to long for it, but to be separated from it by one’s own aging body – symbolizes the nihilistic fissure that characterizes all of existence. Our bodies are impermanent but our minds wish for infinity; or as Mishima himself wrote in his final note before committing suicide: “Human life is limited, but I want to live forever.” It is this despairing sentiment that strikes me as the central theme in The Temple of Dawn.

The scenes of voyeurism in this novel recall scenes from an earlier Mishima book, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, in which a young boy watches through a peep hole as his mother masturbates and then later has sex with a visiting sailor. In the case of the earlier novel, the boy’s youth at least partially excuses his indiscretion, while in the later novel Honda’s advanced age merely makes the impropriety seem more perverse and inexcusably aberrant. Regardless of this moral difference, the logic played out in both stories charts a similar trajectory. In The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, the young boy’s voyeuristic pleasure leads to the idealization of the sailor, who must ultimately die so that he does not contravene the image of perfection he inspired in the boy’s mind. In The Temple of Dawn, Honda similarly comes to the realization that the pleasure he achieves through voyeurism is related to a desire to disappear completely, to see without being seen, and thus to die to the world around him:

…Honda’s ultimate desire, what he really, really wanted to see could exist only in a world where he did not. In order to see what he truly wished to, he must die. When a voyeur recognizes that he can realize his ends only by eliminating the basic act of watching, this means his death as such. (p. 277)

But Honda does not die, and this is what makes him imperfect, ugly and flawed. His role throughout the Sea of Fertility is to be the one who remains embedded in the world of physical existence, watching others who are more beautiful and pure than himself shatter into puffs of nothingness. In his own life, Mishima, in the end, made the decision not to live like Honda, but to follow a destructive path to perfection. He willingly ceased to exist when he committed seppuku, leaving his readers behind as witnesses who, like Honda, would take perverse pleasure in safely beholding his passions from a distance.

Years ago, when I asked his opinion of Mishima’s works, a professor of mine told me that Mishima was nothing more than a “pervert.” I still recall the uncomfortable atmosphere in the seminar room as I exchanged embarrassed glances with fellow graduate students upon hearing this dogmatic pronouncement from our respected teacher. But in a sense my teacher was right; and I think that Mishima might even have agreed with the criticism. In his later life, the Japanese author engaged in all sorts of “perverse” activities, from being photographed in the nude to engaging in weird death-tinged sex play, to carrying on secretive homosexual affairs both at home and abroad. As he aged, he became more and more obsessed with his physical appearance – most famously taking up body building – while also struggling with the reality that all things physical ultimately decay. His perversion, however, was not rooted solely in the fact that he was allured by youthful bodies or in his narcissistic desire to make his own body beautiful, but also (and perhaps more importantly) in his temptation to continue indulging such obsessions into old age; into a period of life when the forces of nature irreversibly lead to the progressive corrosion of one’s physical splendor, making it appear sad and inadequate when brought into contrast with unblemished youth. An old body and a young body contradict one another, and just as an old body threatens to corrupt the innocence of the young, the young body serves to highlight the signs of decline in the old. To blind one’s self to this contradiction is what is perverse, and I suspect that as he was writing The Temple of Dawn, Mishima was, perversely, struggling with the implications of this contradiction for his own life.

Part One of The Temple of Dawn begins in Bangkok where Honda meets the young princess named Ying Chan, who is thought by her family to suffer from some form of mental illness, as she insists that she is not Thai at all, but Japanese. Honda takes this as an indication that the princess may in fact be the reincarnation of Kioyaki and Isao, his friends from the previous novels. In order to confirm this, he seeks opportunities to observe the princess naked so that he can look for three tell-tale moles that should appear on the left side of her body, as they did on both Kioyaki and Isao. When she is a young girl, Honda is unable to make this confirmation, and so in the second part of the novel – years later, when the princess matures and visits Japan – Honda again becomes obsessed with observing her in the nude, and this obsession quickly takes on absurd proportions: he constructs a swimming pool at his vacation home for the sole purpose of seeing the Thai princess undressed and he arranges for her seduction so that he can spy on her through the peep hole in his study. It is only at the end of the story – while Ying Chan is having sex with another woman as Honda secretly watches – that the confirmation is finally made:

Ying Chan’s whole side was exposed. To the left of her bare breast, an area her arm had previously concealed, three extremely small moles appeared distinctly, like the Pleiades in the dusky sky of her brown skin that resembled the dying evening glow. (p. 299)

Ying Chan, it turns out, is of the same essence as Kioyaki and Isao. This is the revelation that Honda had been looking for from the beginning of the book, and as if the power of this truth is too much to be contained, a fire breaks out, burning down Honda’s home and killing two of his other guests, Mr. and Mrs. Imanishi. Ying Chan and her lover, Keiko, escape the flames along with Honda and his wife Rie.

In a short, concluding chapter, it is reported that upon going back to Bangkok, Ying Chan died at the age of twenty, just like Kioyaki and Isao. She was bitten on the thigh by a cobra and died before any medical help could be administered. This report of her decease brings the story to an abrupt end, and while it is a conclusion consistent with the plots of the first two novels, strangely Mishima takes much less interest in the Thai princesses’ death than he does in the deaths of either Kioyaki or Isao. In the case of the characters from the first two books, their deaths come as passionate crescendoes to their lives, while in The Temple of Dawn, Ying Chan’s demise is reported merely as an afterthought. The passionate crescendo in this book, instead, is reached in the long, explicit lesbian encounter between the princess and Keiko that Mishima describes in loving and minute detail. I think his intention in this explicit closing section may be to recall a passage from the book’s opening chapters, in which it is noted that the crematory in Benares was situated next to the “Nepalese Temple of Love, on which the sculptures honored the thousand postures of sexual intercourse.” (p. 58) Sex and death, in other words, are two sides of the same coin. However, I am puzzled as to why Mishima did not take the opportunity, then, to have the princess perish in the fire that consumes Honda’s home, as this would have been a fitting way of uniting her death and her sexual passion. It would also have created an economical connection to a theme that Mishima obviously did want to draw attention to: the parallel between the conflagration at Honda’s home at the end of the novel and the funeral pyres encountered by Honda during his trip to India at the beginning of the novel.

At the beginning of the story, Honda wanders from Thailand to India, studying Buddhist and Hindu philosophy; in particular trying to understand how it is that in an impermanent world, where the self is an illusion, it would make the least bit of rational sense to claim that the transmigration of souls is a reality. In Buddhism, there is the rejection of a distinct substance comprising the human self. The doctrine of anatman (“no soul”) holds that our “selves,” our identities, are temporary and ever changing conglomerates of feelings, thoughts and sensations. There is no real substance underneath it all, and “quite like a jellyfish devoid of bone, there is no innate essence in all of creation.” (p. 20) Honda puzzles over the question that if this is so, then “what is the transmigrating substance?”(p. 20)

Honda’s studies lead him to examine the connections between various forms of Buddhism, ancient Greek philosophy, modern European philosophy and Hinduism. He notes the similarities between Buddhist ideas on the world’s impermanence and the ideas of Heraclitus, the ancient Greek thinker who claimed that the world was in constant flux, much like the flickering motion of fire. The world forms a unity, but it is a “transitory unity” (p. 99), and like a flame, events come and go in a burning cascade. The phenomena of reality are like the fire that is passed from one torch to another, except that unlike with torches, there is nothing underlying the flames themselves. The world just is the burning. It is pure process with no permanent substance supporting it all. This wisdom, shared by thinkers in both the east and the west, leads eastern and western traditions of philosophy to differing conclusions about the meaning of our universe, Honda discovers. In the case of ancient Buddhism and Hinduism, the world’s impermanence leads to feelings of jubilation and liberation. In the case of western philosophy (starting with Pythagoras and Heraclitus up through Vico and Nietzsche), the impermanence of the world provokes feelings of pessimism, sadness, longing and loss. This is the fundamental difference between east and west.

While in India, Honda becomes fascinated by the “consciousness only” doctrine found in the Yuishiki theory of Mahayana Buddhism, which he comes to think resolves the conflict between the idea of anatman and the transmigration of souls. If we think of our “selves” as comprised not of a substance, but more like a flux, a “foaming waterfall” (p. 111) that is “perfumed” by “seeds” containing all of the energies of the universe, then transmigration comes to make sense as something that is not indicative of some sort of underlying, personal substance circulated from past to future. Instead, like the odor of perfume, what we perceive as our “self” is more like an ever present trace that permeates the very fabric of reality. A transmigrated “self” is like an odor that can be smelled lingering in the air.

According to this view, there is no past, present or future. All that exists is the “vast flow of alaya consciousness” (p. 115), which itself is infused with the seeds of karmic disturbance. These disturbances are always within the universe, which is created and destroyed at every instance. As in Hindu philosophy, which teaches that the universe is like a vast churning and flowing ocean, in the Buddhist ideas embraced by Honda, our own consciousness is like sea foam whose source is the ever present depths of the abyss. Transmigration is, thus, not the literal exchange of a substance across time, but simply a state of the universe’s being in which some element of the eternal process has churned to the surface.

It is in the funeral pyres at Benares that Honda comes to his epiphany. The burning of human bodies returned them to their “seeds,” and in this destruction, something was also created. “There was no sadness. What seemed heartless was pure joy.” (p. 61) This fiery joy was akin to the “sun” that Isao saw behind his eyelids in Runaway Horses as he sliced into his own stomach as he committed suicide, and it also turns out to be akin to the feeling that Honda experiences at the end of The Temple of Dawn as he watches his own house burn to the ground:

Flames reflecting in the water…burning corpses…Benares! How could he have dreamed of recapturing the ultimate he had seen in that holy land?

The house had turned into kindling and life had become fire. All triviality had turned to ash and nothing but the most essential was important, and the hidden, gigantic face had turned up its head abruptly from the flame. Laughter, screams, sobs were all absorbed in the clamor of the flames, the crackling of wood, the distorted panes of glass, the creaking of the joints – sound itself was enveloped in an absolute quiet.” (p. 306)

Destruction and creation appear to Honda as two sides of the same flowing, burning process by which the phenomena of reality become present to our senses. The essential nature of the universe just is the flow and movement from one state to another, and in this, destruction and creation become one; or more accurately, they cease to make sense as distinct or separate states of being. The universe is whole and complete: an “absolutely quiet” unity. When all things trivial and non-essential are set aside, and when one regards our world in terms of its deep continuities rather than in terms of superficial discontinuities, a vast, quiet nothingness is revealed at the heart of it all. This implies that Kioyaki, Isao and Ying Chan were all parts of one, ongoing process, and that it was only from Honda’s detached observer’s perspective that they appeared as separate incarnations.

But doesn’t this also imply that Honda is a part of the whole process himself? If his role in these first three novels is to act as an eyewitness to the drama of birth and death, and if the unity of the world is grasped only by looking past concrete particulars into the dark, unchanging process of flow that connects all things, then the looker, the observer is an indispensable aspect of the process by which the Truth of the universe is revealed. Things must first be broken apart before they can be put back together; unity must first be destroyed before it can be reestablished. That is part of the ongoing flow of existence itself, and perhaps Mishima’s message in The Sea of Fertility is that a spectator like Honda – a voyeur who stands apart from the world and who strives to see things as if he is not a part of it all – is a necessary aspect of the very process by which the idea of unity comes to make sense. Purity requires decadence. Unity requires plurality. Passion requires aloofness. Life requires death. In order to understand all of this, there must be someone to distinguish and compare the two sides of each dichotomy. The observer is folded into the process of becoming, like butter into a cake mix.

I’ll make one last set of observations about The Temple of Dawn. The title of the book refers to Wat Arun in Bangkok, Thailand. In the beginning of the story, Honda visits Wat Arun, and his guide, Hisikawa, offers a narration of the significance of the evening glow falling upon the temple:

…evening glow is expression. And expression alone is the function of evening glow. …In this great operation the colors of human intestines, ordinarily invisible, are externalized and spread over the entire sky. The most subtle tenderness and gallantry are joined with Weltschmerz, and ultimately affliction is transformed into a short-lived orgy. The numerous bits of logic which people have so stubbornly cherished during the day are all drawn into a vast emotional explosion of the heavens and the spectacular release of passions, and people realize the futility of all systems. In other words, everything is expressed for at most ten or fifteen minutes and then it’s all over. (p. 11)

As he listens to his guide speak in poetically melancholy terms about the evening sunset, Honda thinks to himself:

Yet there stood the Temple of Dawn! (p. 11)

When I first read this novel as a teenager, I had no idea that much later in my own life I would also visit The Temple of Dawn. Rereading this book now, the sensations that I had when I was there in Bangkok looking at the temple, climbing to its top and walking around its grounds all rushed back to me and triggered a pair of thoughts, both of which have “perfumed” my current experience of this particular book.

First of all, it strikes me as profound that a great writer like Mishima, a man I never met but have long admired, stood in the same place I did, looked at the same structure and came to contemplate some of the same ideas with which I have also become obsessed. The Temple of Dawn stood long before Mishima or I were born. It continued to stand after Mishima died, and it will continue to stand long after I die. It’s stability feels like an anchor; and yet it is a temporary anchor. Like all things, it too is impermanent. But it has lasted long enough to provide a point of contact between Mishima’s writing and my thoughts. I feel a tinge of wonder and gratitude at this fact.

The second thought, with which I shall close, is that when I first set eyes on Wat Arun I was filled with an irrational and inarticulable feeling of sublime awe. The simple and stark immensity of the temple, jutting into the sky on the shore of the Chao Prya River, upsetting and yet complementing the horizon, struck me as both beautiful and terrifying. Silhouetted against the evening glow, it appeared as a dark, almost featureless monolith, calling attention not to itself so much as to the point of interpenetration between open sky and solid earth. The finite touched the infinite at that point where the temple pierced the heavens.

What Mishima’s books do with words, The Temple of Dawn does with stone.

Runaway Horses

Runaway Horses is volume two in Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility Tetralogy. It tells the story of Isao, the son of Shigeyuki Iinuma, Kioyaki Matsugae’s tutor from Spring Snow. At the end of Spring Snow, Kioyaki, as he lay dying, told his friend, Honda, that the two of them would meet again, “Beneath the falls.” Runaway Horses picks up on this thread, and 18 years later, Honda recognizes his reincarnated friend – now living as the young Isao Iinuma – purifing himself during a Shinto ritual beneath a waterfall at the Konomiya Shrine.

Honda is now 38 years old, married with no children, and working as a judge in the Osaka Court of Appeals. In Spring Snow, Honda’s budding, legal mind was positioned as the rational foil to his best friend’s romantic, passionate nature. While Kioyaki died a young death, withering away from the despair of being permanently separated from the woman that he loves, Honda continued forward in life, systematically pursuing his career until, in Runaway Horses, he achieves a respected position that is the logical culmination of his efforts. As he himself reflects, early on in the story: “…I represent reason for the nation. A height upheld by logic, like a tower formed of steel girders.” (p. 19) Honda, as in the previous volume, will in this story serve as the tempered, rational and reasonable witness to the passionate drama that is about to unfold as Isao, gripped by patriotic frenzy, leads a right-wing revolt against the representatives of capitalism that he and his followers see as indicative of the forces leading Japan down the path of decadence, decay and corruption.

Isao is a student at his father’s “Academy of Patriotism,” a right-wing school that teaches traditional Japanese values, and that rejects the modernizing influences of the west. Isao is one of the school’s most respected students, excelling in Kendo, but held in high esteem primarily due to the purity of his spirit. There is no cynicism or irony in Isao’s manner. He is authentically and uniquely committed to a life in which his values are actualized in every word, every gesture, and every action that he undertakes. Whereas in Spring Snow, Kioyaki represented the purity of tragic love, in Runaway Horses, Isao represents the purity of action. At their core, however, both Kioyaki and Isao are the same insofar as it is a commitment to perfected integrity that defines their essence. In Isao, this perfection is exhibited visibly in his demand that Shinto rituals be carried out with spotless precision, in his excellence at Kendo fighting, as well as in his decorum while in the presence of authority figures. Ironically, it will be this meticulous commitment to tradition that also brings Isao into conflict with the conservative, ruling forces of his own nation. Since these forces – consisting of his father, military leaders, the legal system, and the royal emperor himself – have been infected by the spirit of compromise, submitting to the realities of life in a modern, westernized world, Isao finds himself betrayed by the very institutions that he so passionately desires to reinvigorate. His ideals, it turns out, are too dangerously pure for contemporary society, and so his revolutionary actions are destined to culminate in tragedy. In all of this, the reader who is familiar with Mishima’s own life will see an unmistakable parallel. Isao seems to be playing out the same sort of drama that Mishima himself would enact years later when, after a failed attempt to overthrow the Japanese government and reestablish the Emperor, he killed himself in an act of ritual seppuku. In fact, many commentators detect in this very novel Mishima’s mental rehearsal for his final action.

Isao is fascinated by a story titled The League of the Divine Wind, by Tsunanori Yamao, which recounts an event from the 19th Century during which a group of Japanese patriots mounted a rebellion against the westernized and “Americanized” institutions of the new Japan, which had begun to draw boundaries between religion and government in direct contradiction of the tradition  of “government and worship as one.” (p. 66)  The rebellion was undertaken by a small group who were pure of spirit, utilizing only traditional edged weapons. Such a strategy doomed the rebellion to military failure. However, just as the physical battle was lost, the spiritual statement made by the League in their tragic deaths by seppuku powerfully reasserted the vigor of samurai values. It is this aspect of the story that captures Isao’s imagination, as in it he sees an inspiration for his own life mission.

Isao passes a copy of this story to Honda, who in response writes him a long letter confessing his own emotional admiration for the patriots. But Honda also cautions Isao against the romantic lure of passion. He tells Isao about Kiyoaki, and how his passion destroyed him. Honda, of course, suspects that he is, in fact, writing to his old best friend, and he is desperatly seeking to avert yet another tragic scenario. Thus, he warns Isao that while the tragic beauty of this particular story is undeniable, it is also a fantasy out of touch with modern day reality. In line with his own logical perspective on the world, Honda points out the contradictions, the incongruities and the inconsistencies within the story, closing by advising Isao that he should avoid “the blurring together of purity of resolve and history.” (p.118) The content of the letter, of course, does not please Isao, and he is further puzzled by why it is that a relative stranger like Honda would take the trouble to write such a heartfelt and passionate letter to him about this matter. It is at this point that Isao decides he will seek the help of those in the military in order to plan and carry out an attack modeled after the events in The League of the Divine Wind.

The relationship between Honda and Isao develops into one of intense friction as Isao becomes increasingly passionate and committed to an early death while Honda increasingly despairs over what he sees as the futility and sadness of a world in which all things pass. In Isao, as pointed out by Roy Starrs in his excellent book Deadly Dialectics, we find the force of active nihilism as he vigorously seeks perfect oblivion in a tragic act of self-destruction. In Honda, on the other hand, we find the force of passive nihilism, which seeks preservation and stasis in an attempt to stop the dynamic flow of an ultimately meaningless world. While Isao pursues action by using violence, Honda pursues stability through logic and reason. Isao follows Dionysus. Honda follows Apollo.

This distinction between the two characters is further emphasized by the fact that Isao is a follower of the Shinto faith. In Shintoism (at least as depicted by Mishima), the point is scrupulous adherence to ceremony. The entire focus of the faith converges on ritualistic action and the rejection of any speculative ideas concerning an afterlife. Everything is focused on action in this world, and not on some other world. Honda, by contrast, is fascinated by Buddhism, which teaches the perpetual transmigration of souls. The soul, according to Buddhism, really is nothing at all in the end, and so there is a passive sadness and despair written into the core of the religion, summed up in a line from a No performance that obsesses Honda: “Drawing our brine cart along, how briefly we live in this sad world, how fleetingly!” (pp. 210 & 216) Human beings suffer in life, only to die and become reborn into a world in which they suffer and die once again. The whole process is one of ceaseless and vain sorrow, leading one of Isao’s mentors to declare the Buddha a “foolish man” who teaches “a philosophy of evil that reduces everything to nihilism.” (p. 241) Isao and his right-wing followers thus reject Buddhism, an institution, like capitalism, that is a foreign import sapping the vital health of the Japanese nation, reducing them to passive decadence.

As Runaway Horses reaches its crescendo, Isao is first betrayed by the military leaders who had promised him support for his samurai rebellion, and then by his own father, who not only turns his son in to the authorities, but who reveals that his own Academy of Patriotism has been funded by one of the very capitalists who Isao had intended to assassinate. When Isao and his comrades are imprisoned and brought up on charges of treason, Honda resigns his position in the Osaka Court of Appeals in order to take on the role of defending attorney for his reincarnated friend.

Isao, lingering in his cell, philosophizes about the essence of his situation, concluding, “It is in the nature of authority to fear purity more than any sort of corruption. Just as savages fear medical treatment more than disease.” (p. 335) He is correct, of course. Authority fears those who are pure precisely because those who are pure cannot be controlled through threats or intimidation. Like Socrates, they are motivated by ideals alone and thus are apt to resist those who try to use them for corrupt purposes. And like Socrates, they can’t be silenced. They can only be eliminated, taken out of this world so that they will never again interfere with the pragmatic operations of managing and maintaining a functioning society. By their very nature, those who are pure of spirit are immune to the law and can’t be controlled by it. As Isao muses:

The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man’s desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written in a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such a desire. The law, therefore, of its very nature is aimed at a tiny minority of mankind. (p. 337)

The outcome of Isao’s trial, is that while he and his co-conspirators are found guilty, their punishments are dismissed, with the proviso that punishment might be reinstated depending upon circumstances. With this threat hanging over their heads, the young men are released. The judge’s ruling considered the patriotism behind their motives and their youthfulness, being handed down with seeming confidence that the perpetrators would be relieved to escape punishment and be eager to get back to their lives, families and future careers. For all but Isao this is an accurate calculation.

As soon as he is able, however, Isao travels to the opulent, Western-style home of the businessman Busuke Kurahara, who earlier in the story had blundered in his performance at a Shinto ritual. Isao stabs the capitalist to death for profanation of the Grand Shrine of Ise and then flees to a spot on the nearby cliffs. It is there that Isao sits down and disembowels himself as he overlooks the ocean. “The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.” (p. 419) Isao dies by ritual seppuku, ending this volume of the story, but opening the way to the third part of the tetralogy, The Temple of the Dawn.

The first time that I read Runaway Horses was about 30 years ago, and out of all the books in the Sea of Fertility Tetralogy, this is the one whose details have remained most vivid in my memory. This might be, perhaps, partly due to the fact that portions of the story are dramatized in Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, or that in much of the scholarly literature on Mishima and his life, this book is highlighted as an important window into the state of his mind in the years leading up to his suicide. The specifics of the story have, in these ways, been reinforced in my mind again and again. Nonetheless, it is still the case that rereading the book today, I find a unique simplicity and purity in Runaway Horses that makes it unforgettable on account of its own merits; even without secondary cinematic and scholarly reminders of its content. The characters have already been established in the previous novel, Spring Snow, and so the reader is not saddled with the burden of becoming acquainted with a whole new set of protagonists. Additionally, we have been primed by the first novel to be prepared for the tragic trajectory of the unfolding tale, and so we need not waste any optimistic hopes wondering if the story will turn out to have a happy ending. The story is also very simply structured, taking us from the introduction of Isao, to his plan for action, his capture, his trial, and finally to his suicide. It is a story that Aristotle would no doubt praise for its well-structured complexity and proper magnitude. The reader can easily hold the entire plot in his or her head all at once, appreciating the aesthetic unity of the tragic drama as a whole. All of these structural aspects free the reader to be swept along with the story-telling.

But the most powerful part of the story still remains the simple dynamic (repeated from the first novel) between Honda and Isao. On the one hand, I felt myself attracted to the logical and reasonable thought process of Honda, our guide through this series of novels. On the other hand, I was utterly entranced by the destructive purity of Isao. The tension between these two ever-present forces in human life – logic and passion – are beautifully and clearly illustrated in Runaway Horses, and in the end I was left unsure as to which of the two I myself believe to be the more admirable. A life of reason and logic can quickly devolve into a life devoid of passion, while a life of passion is always in danger of introducing unreasonably needless suffering and turmoil into the world. Should we side with Apollo or Dionysus? Is it better to think or to act?

Spring Snow

It was over 30 years ago, when I was a student at community college, that I first read Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility Tetralogy. My memory of the first two books in the cycle remained most vivid over the years while the details of second two books faded into vague impressions. At the time, I was mostly focused on the dramatic relationships between the characters and not necessarily the deeper philosophical message of the narrative as a whole. To me at that time, the Sea of Fertility was primarily a story about reincarnation. It all started with Kioyaki Matsuagae, who after dying young was reincarnated as Isao Iinuma, who then, after dying by seppuku, was reincarnated as a Thai princess. I didn’t remember much about the final novel in the cycle, other than that the spirit of the Thai princess reappeared in yet a further incarnation.

Recently I have begun rereading the Sea of Fertility as part of a project I am working on that involves the development of Mishima’s philosophical nihilism. Having now finished the first novel in the cycle, Spring Snow, I find myself wondering whether as a teenager I was attracted to the themes in this book because I already was a nihilist, or whether the book played a role in shaping my youthful worldview. This is an impossible issue to decide unequivocally, of course, as the chains of cause and effect are forever buried in an irretrievable past. However, it is undeniable that this particular book has in some way become woven into my consciousness, affecting the way that I think about and experience the world.

Spring Snow is a tragedy that takes place in the early 1900’s. It tells the story of Kioyaki Matsuagae, the teenaged son of a Japanese nobleman. Kioyaki is a bright, sensitive, good looking yet melancholy young man, accustomed to being catered to and taken care of. However, Kioyaki comes to realize that the life of privilege he leads rests with being born into a noble family whose title and lifestyle are symbols of a more general period of cultural decadence and decline.  Fifty years before, his family had been samurai, living simply and with dignity, but now they have become increasingly westernized, amassing land, wealth and “elegance” as indications of their modernized extravagance.  In this era of cultural decay, capitalism and westernization are inexorably undermining the traditions of the old Japan. Swept up in the tide of history, Kioyaki feels he is doomed passively to submit to his given role as the son of a Marquis, accepting his place in life without any aspirations toward greatness or individual distinction. But part of his passive attitude also includes the conviction that he is fated somehow to violate and disobey the traditions and expectations of his family. He feels that he is a conduit, born to channel the energies of Japan’s social and cultural decline, acting as an instrument for the downfall of his era. At once, he is both a symptom and a vehicle of nihilism:

His elegance was the thorn. And he was well aware that his aversion to coarseness, his delight in refinement, were futile; he was a plant without roots. Without meaning to undermine his family, without wanting to violate its traditions, he was condemned to do so by his very nature. And this poison would stunt his own life as it destroyed his family. The handsome young man felt that this futility typified his existence. (p. 13)

In characterizing Kioyaki thusly, Mishima is, at the beginning of this novel, setting the stage for the rest of the tetralogy. This will be a story of nihilism in both the collective, cultural sense and in the individual, spiritual sense. This Sea of Fertility is to be a tale of both cultural and individual decline. It brings to mind both Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Oswald Spengler’s complex characterizations of nihilism in which individual, concrete human beings come to embody the cycles and rhythms of the periods in which they live. To exist in a time of cultural decline is to participate in that decline and to become its tool. In this sense, the purposes and goals of the individual are in fact the purposes and goals of the universe as a whole. Each of the characters that we are introduced to over the course of these novels are, in this way, passive vessels for the expression of a cosmic project.

Kioyaki’s best friend is a boy by the name of Shigekuni Honda. Honda’s role in this novel (and the rest of the cycle) is to serve as a witness to the successive incarnations of Kioyaki’s “soul” as well as to embody the spirit of reason and logic that both contrasts with Kioyaki’s emotional nature and that acts as a symptom of the emerging modern era. Honda aspires to become a lawyer, advocating the view that all humans are equally accountable to objective and knowable principles that transcend convention and social status. Whereas Kioyaki represents the sad and melancholy sense of an era’s passing, Honda represents the optimistic conviction that behind the cycles of history there is a universal and eternal principle of natural law that never changes. In this, he is influenced by western thinkers like Aristotle (p. 365), and thus Honda also stands as a symbol of the incursion of western thought into eastern culture. He, like Kioyaki, is a product of his times. At one point, the two boys converse about their place in history, and Honda suggests that despite their differences in temperament – Kioyaki being emotional; Honda being logical – future generations will lump them together, along with everyone else in their culture, as part of the same people. “You and I, you see, must be immersed in some style of living or another, but we’re like goldfish swimming around in a bowl without ever noticing it.” (p. 91) So, despite their contradictory natures, both boys are in fact complementary embodiments of an era that is itself full of contradiction, strife and friction. But whereas Kioyaki is tied to a way of life that is coming to and end, Honda is tied to a way of life that is on the ascent. For this reason, Kioyaki himself must tragically pass away while Honda must endure and bear witness to the future as it unfolds.

The central conflict in the novel concerns Kioyaki’s doomed love for Satoko Ayakura, a beautiful young woman beside whom Kioykai has grown up. Satoko loves Kioyaki, but he instinctively rejects any show of affection from her. The reasons for this are connected with Kioyaki’s own pride and his impatience with having to “endure people making a fuss over his looks.” (p. 18) Nonetheless, it is apparent that Kioyaki is obsessed with Satoko, but that he is unable honestly to express his feelings for her. Instead, he writes her an insulting letter in which he falsely claims to have slept with a prostitute; presumably to inspire jealousy and to demonstrate his own position of dominance in relation to her. There is anger in his letter directed toward women in general, suggesting that they are no more than “plump, lascivious little animals” (p. 46) His words are obviously intended to wound, but they also appear to be a desperately emotional expression of Kioyaki’s confused feelings of sexual attraction to Satoko. He loves her, just as she loves him, and in fact, everyone around them assumes that the two of them are destined to be married. Kioyaki, nonetheless, is too emotionally agitated to agree to marriage, and so when Satoko is offered a proposal for marriage from the Imperial Prince of Japan, Kioyaki offers no objections. He spitefully claims that he has no interest at all in Satoko.

The involvement of the Imperial family introduces a pivotal and fateful factor into the relationship between Kioyaki and Satoko. Marriage to a prince is not a matter of individual affection, but rather a ritual that has more to do with tradition and matters of state than it does with love. When Satoko reluctantly accepts the proposal of marriage from the prince – after repeated attempts to reconcile with Kioyaki – she sets into motion a chain of events that can not be interrupted without extremely damaging consequences to the reputations of herself and her family. Forces much larger than the wills of two people are now in effect.

It is only at this point in the story that Kioyaki expresses his desire to be with Satoko. He arranges – with the help of Honda, his own attendant, and Satoko’s attendant – a series of clandestine, romantic liaisons, which result in Satoko’s pregnancy. Why is it that Kioyaki feels compelled to finally express his passionate love only after Satoko has been promised to the prince? I think there are two answers to this question, each corresponding to one level of the collective and individual nihilistic rhythms embodied in this story. On one level, this illicit love affair is one that promises to further the decline and fall of the noble families that are involved in the scandal. This is a circumstance that promotes the fated mission Kioyaki has been assigned by the course of history itself. In defying the traditions of the Imperial Emperor, he plays his key role in the nihilistic decline and decay of traditional Japanese customs and expectations; a role that early on he recognizes as part of his unchosen destiny. The other answer operates on the individual, rather than the cultural level. Kioyaki throws himself into his love affair with Satoko only at the point at which the relationship promises to yield tragic beauty instead of conventional happiness. As Honda suggests to him, “From the very beginning you’ve been bewitched by impossibility…You were drawn in precisely because the whole thing was impossible.” (p. 267) It is only when their love becomes an impossibility that Kioyaki finds value in the relationship. To become married and to perpetuate the life of his parents would chafe against the aesthetics of one who sees the world through the lens of decay and decline. The only appropriate love for a person who is a conduit for the spirit of nihilism is a tragic, impossible love. And for this reason Kioyaki’s passions for Satoko are inflamed precisely at that point in time when their love becomes doomed.

And doomed it is. Satoko is forced to undergo an abortion by her parents, who contrive to hide her indiscretions so that the marriage might proceed. Instead, Satoko cuts off her hair and joins a convent, renouncing the world forever. Kioyaki, travels to the convent but is repeatedly denied a meeting with Satoko. He becomes deathly ill, and when his friend Honda comes to his side, he makes one last attempt to contact Satoko. This request too is denied, and and so the pair of friends depart back to Tokyo, where Kioyaki dies two days after his return home. Mishima makes a point of emphasizing that even in the throes of death, his face, though contorted in pain, is tragically beautiful:

Despite the contortions, however, it was beautiful. Intense suffering had imbued it with an extraordinary character, carving lines into it that gave it the austere dignity of a bronze mask. (p. 374)

So it is that the tragic downfall of Kioyaki, predicted at the beginning of the novel, reaches its sadly beautiful conclusion. His last words to Honda, “I’ll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls,” (p. 376) set the stage for the next novel in the cycle, Runaway Horses.

Kioyaki’s tragic story provides a background against which many other characters appear over the course of Spring Snow; their stories entangled and intertwined with that of the main character. There are a pair of Thai princes who stay with Kiyoaki while they study in Japan. One of them learns of the death of his fiancé – who is also the sister of the other prince – and they both return home to mourn her loss. There is Kioyaki’s tutor and attendant Iinuma, who is dismissed from his post when he becomes involved in a forbidden love affair with a servant from the Ayakura household. He is a pivotal character in the following book, Runaway Horses, in which he appears as an influential right-wing author whose son, Isao, becomes involved in a terrorist plot against the government. There is also Tadeshina, Satoko’s attendant, an aging geisha, who is instrumental in organizing the clandestine meetings between Kiyoaki and Satoko that lead to the disgrace of both the Matsuage and the Ayakura families. Her actions, it turns out, have been inspired by the long forgotten suggestions of Count Ayakura himself, who had at one point in the past instructed Tadeshina to secretly encourage his daughter to lose her virginity before marriage as a way to spite the Marquis Matsuage, Kioyaki’s father, with whom he carries on an unspoken rivalry.

All of these relationships (and more!) unfold over the course of Spring Snow. While trying to keep track of them can sometimes be as confusing as tracing the associations between characters in a Russian novel, what ultimately ties them together is a message of fated doom and the decline of familiar, old ways of life. Nihilism, in both the collective/historical and individual/existential varieties, is the undercurrent of most of Mishima’s novels and, as in Spring Snow, these currents complement and augment one another. As particular characters find themselves swept along with the tides of history, the dramatic interest of the stories emerges from how each individual experiences the suffering of decline and decay in their own unique, yet connected ways. In Mishima’s world, happiness is never attained by anyone. However, there is a sort of fulfillment and satisfaction that obtains in watching these tragic destinies play themselves out to an aesthetically beautiful completion.

Yukio Mishima: 1925 – 1970.

I first became acquainted with the works of Yuiko Mishima at around the same time that I started reading Nietzsche. Just out of high school, I was in my first year of college and in a period of life when the issue of nihilism was increasingly becoming of great concern to me. Like many young men in their late teens, I was struggling to overcome various emotional injuries and insults incurred over the course of learning my place in the social pecking order. With high school behind me,  it was time to move forward into a future life and an identity that I had trouble conceptualizing, but which required that I repair my self-esteem, establish some meaningful goals and start working to build a world around myself. I needed guidance, and for better or for worse, I found that guidance in the nihilistic philosophies of authors such as Nietzsche and Mishima.

Nietzsche loomed in my life at that time like a mythic presence from the past. He was long dead; a sage from the 19th century whose respected place in the philosophical cannon was already secure. Mishima, on the other hand, died when I was 6 years old. He had been alive during my own lifetime. People still remembered him and his dramatic suicide, and there continued to be disagreement about how seriously he should be taken as an intellectual figure. As a writer he was obviously talented, but there was much debate about whether or not the content of his philosophy was coherent or simply the product of a perverted and damaged mind. Nietzsche was my respected philosophical guide. Mishima was more like a troubled older friend who fascinated me, but threatened to lead me down a very bad path.

Mishima killed himself when he was 42, and now that I am almost 50 years old, I find myself in the weird position of encountering Mishima as his elder rather than as a young admirer. While for Mishima time stopped in 1970, I’ve continued to grow and develop philosophically, and this puts me in a position to regard my hero from a new perspective. When I was a youngster in my teens, the Mishima I saw was a Nietzschean Übermensch. Though initially a frail child, in adulthood he overcame his weaknesses in order to rebuild himself according to an ideal of his own imagining. His life was his work of art, and my young mind saw in his life project a hopeful path toward the obliteration of regret, embarrassment, and indeed, the complete destruction of an identity rooted in the past. Mishima, to my teenage mind, demonstrated the possibility of creation ex-nihilo. I regarded him as a superman who became what he was by forgetting his past and willing himself to emerge as something completely new. To my younger self, this was hopeful and exhilarating as it suggested that anything was possible and that I also could potentially escape from the fears and wounds of my own history.

From my current perspective as a 50 year old man, I see a different Mishima. To me now, he appears not as someone who has created himself out of nothing by rejecting and overcoming his past, but as someone who is bound to his past, who can’t let go of it, and who has been shaped by the weaknesses that he wanted to leave behind. Nietzsche wrote in various places about the virtue of forgetting, which allows people to free themselves from the chains of resentment. I don’t think Mishima ever mastered this virtue. The fear that gripped him throughout his life was that he would revert back to that scared, fragile, weakling of his early years. Instead of overcoming and leaving this fear behind, it now looks to me as if Mishima’s life consisted of a creative remolding of this fear, which continued to manifest itself in various guises. He resented the world. He thought it was an ugly, awful place because of his own position within it. At birth he had been thrown into a subordinate, “feminized” role as a result of his own frail physical constitution and because of his dependence on a domineering grandmother, a loving but ineffectual mother, and an intellectually superficial father.  His greatest wish was to refashion his reality into something beautiful by turning things upside down and becoming the master, the one who was in control and who could command and rule.

I have known two different Mishimas. When I was young, he was a hero who proved that nihilism could be overcome. Today he appears to me as yet another example that nihilism is never overcome.

Mishima’s life is the subject of two recent critical biographies, proving that he continues to fascinate authors and readers today. The first book, written by the govenor of Tokyo, Naoki Inose, is titled Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima. The other, titled simply Yukio Mishima, is by Damian Flanagan, and was published as part of the series Critical Lives from Reaktion Books. Though they contain few new insights into Mishima’s ideas or the details of his life, these works nonetheless are of interest to anyone, like myself, who is continually drawn to revisit Mishima’s story, as if it is some sort of classical mythic drama in which one can find the reflections of one’s own nihilistic struggles.

Naoki Inose’s book is a monumental tome at over 850 pages in length. For a reader beguiled by the details of Mishima’s life, there is, nevertheless, nothing superfluous here. In fact, upon finishing it I was left a bit unsatisfied and disappointed with how little attention was actually paid to the final day of Mishima’s life. I wish that the book had been longer, with more description of the drama that unfolded at the self-defence headquarters on November 25th, 1970.

A notably unique detail about Inose’s account is his willingness to pass an approving judgement on the quality of Mishima’s seppuku. Chapter 31 ends with the following account:

The wound Mishima made by disembowelment started 1.6 inches below his navel, 5.5 inches long from left to right, and 1.6 to 2 inches deep. Twenty inches of his intestines came out.

It was a magnificent seppuku. (p. 729)

This is an unusual, and I think a brave, admission of admiration. Typically, accounts of Mishima’s suicide adopt a tone of disapproval, as though the act clearly was a terrible and twisted thing. This author’s recognition that Mishima’s death lived up to the aesthetic ideals of a noble samurai disembowelment bravely eschews superficial mainstream moralizing and acknowledges the tremendous – and startling – nature of Mishima’s resolve. What he did really was quite amazing. It was not an act of insanity. It was a disciplined and fully thought out act of aesthetic rebellion. Mishima would have liked to live forever. However, this being impossible, he seized the next best alternative: to grab a hold of his finitude and form it into something of his own choosing. Instead of allowing the impersonal and meaningless forces of nature to take their course, Mishima insisted upon a conclusion to his life that would forever shape the world’s understanding of who he was. He was not the same as the average folks of the world who simply grow old, age and die. He was more like Socrates, another man who chose to die as an act of rebellion against the world in which he lived. His death was a fitting conclusion to his life. Just as there would be no Socrates without his death by hemlock, and just as there would be no Jesus without his death on the cross, likewise there would be no Mishima without his death by seppuku.

In his book, Damain Flanagan notes that on the day of his death, Mishima left a note on his desk which read:

Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever. (p. 236)

I see this as an indication of Mishima’s unresolved (and unresolvable) nihilism. The truth of the world is that we can never overcome our imperfections, our finitude, or our missteps. We are thrown into a world and we build our identities from the raw material of the past, which forms the foundation upon which we leap into an undetermined future. Mishima recognized the absurd impossibility of living forever, of being perfect, of being a consummate master of life, and yet he also was unable to give up on the desire for immortality, perfection and complete mastery. Part of the issue here rests with the fact that while we can choose our own projects and interpretations of life, the one thing we cannot choose is the facticity, the givenness, of that which has already transpired. Mishima wanted to obliterate his past, first through novelistic reinterpretation, and then finally through bodily discipline. But in the end, he failed. Neither his novels nor his transformation into a body-building samurai make any sense apart from the concrete facts of his early life. Mishima was a man who, like all of us, could not escape the past. He could merely transform it into something bearable.

I like the fact that Flanagan highlights preoccupation with time as a chronic theme in Mishima’s life. As a child, daily imprisoned in his grandmother’s room, the young Mishima became intensely attuned to the passage of minutes. As a young man during World War II, he became intensely aware of the inevitability of death and the shortness of life. After the War, he became preoccupied with leaving a mark on the world. This required quick and determined action against a backdrop of the passage of time and the irreversible aging of the body. Time conspires against us, threatening to undermine and destroy all of our efforts to create something permanent, beautiful and lasting. This was the problem faced by Mishima, but the reason why his art appeals to so many of us is that it is also the problem we all face.

In his cycle of novels, The Sea of Fertility Tetrology, the final volume of which was completed on the very day of his suicide, Mishima integrated Buddhist ideas about the transmigration of the soul. But Mishima was not a Buddhist in his heart. Buddhism teaches that the suffering of life can be overcome by relinquishing desire, and this is something that I believe Mishima never could do. To the Buddhist, the world is fine the way it is. It is our own yearning that makes the world appear substandard. To Mishima – as to all nihilists – the world always falls short of what it should be, and the only recourse that we have as human beings is to mold reality into a form that more closely resembles our own subjective vision of perfection. The tragedy is that wishing does not make it so, and the objective world continues to resist our efforts.

As the anniversary of Yukio Mishima’s death approaches this month, he would no doubt be pleased that we still remember him and his nihilistic efforts to inject some purity into an impure universe.