Virginia Review of Asian Studies

Virginia Review of Asian Studies

Volume 17 (2015): 21-30

Metraux: Mishima

YUKIO MISHIMA: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS POLITICAL FICTION

Daniel A. Métraux Mary Baldwin College

When he died at the age of 45 in Tokyo in 1970, Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was recognized both at home and abroad as Japan’s pre-eminent postwar novelist. His many books and short stories captured the dark mood of a culture struggling with the profound social and moral dilemmas of adhering to its traditional values or rushing headlong into a confused mixture of Western and Eastern ideas and norms. Mishima, a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, was far more than a mere novelist and spokesman for his generation. He was also a bizarre political activist whose antics constantly kept him in the headlines. His appearances in gangster movies, his obsession with body-building and the martial arts, his political activism and his formation of a private army all contributed to his considerable fame and to his dark, heroic appeal.

Mishima’s dramatic suicide insured him permanent notoriety. On 25 November 1970 Mishima, together with several comrades, staged a raid on the Ichigaya military headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defense forces in Tokyo, seized the ranking officer, and began to deliver an impassioned speech denouncing the decadence of postwar Japan. When the young cadets listening to his words jeered and mocked him, he abandoned his speech and promptly killed himself by ritual seppuku.[1]

New York Times book and movie critic Michiko Kakutani, commenting on the 1985 movie Mishima, presents the following portrait of the Japanese novelist:

Although Mishima’s suicide was initially interpreted as a political act aimed at resur-recting Japanese militarism, biographers now agree that his death stemmed less from ideological principles than from esthetic and erotic impulses – his belief in “active nihilism” as a way of restoring purity to the world, his fascination with youth and beauty; his tendency to equate sexual ecstasy with pain and death; and perhaps most of all , his desire to become a man of action rather than a man of words. Since youth, he’d been obsessed with the idea of dying – “at 20,” he wrote, “I fancied myself as a genius destined for an early death” – and in his fiction, he’d romanticized both the untimely deaths of young men in war and in the more willful act of suicide as part of the old samurai code of honor. He seems to have believed that he could validate all those philosophical positions by taking his own life; and as portrayed in Mishima, his death becomes a way of uniting all the conflicts – between the body and the spirit, the martial and the esthetic, the “chrysanthemum and the sword” – that he’d been unable to reconcile in life, an act enabling him to write the conclusion to his own story, while transcending mere words.[2]

One can find substantial material in Mishima’s 40 novels and many shorter works of fiction to support Kakutani’s thesis.[3] Many of Mishima’s works qualify, at one level, as prime examples of political fiction. In these works Mishima offers the reader a clear picture of his own world view – especially his admiration for the traditional samurai ideals of honor, duty and sacrifice as well as his conviction that Japan must rediscover and then recover these lost ideals. But, at another level, Mishima’s personal politics are more mask than substance. He became an actor in his own imaginary world where he tried with some success to fuse his life with his art. His ritual suicide at a superficial level might be taken as a protest against the corrosive influence of Western materialism on Japanese society, but in a deeper sense his last act may have been an attempt to embody the actions of his heroic fictional heroes. Here Mishima autobiography becomes political fiction.

Commentators both in Japan and the West have often raised the questions of why Mishima committed suicide at the very height of his literary career. Certainly it was done to callattention to himself and to his beliefs. However, there is a deeper and stranger answer. His last words, shouted out to the throng of young soldiers below him, were “Long Live the Emperor!” He literally died for the Emperor, the institution and idea of the Emperor and probably not for the contemporary occupant of the Japanese throne. Indeed, it is said that he had a deep sense of contempt for the Showa Emperor who, in Mishima’s opinion, had thoroughly betrayed the failed reformist military coup of 1936 and who, a decade later, overly humanized the imperial institution. Thus, he died for an institution that symbolized traditional Japan’s rapidly disappearing cultural heritage.

Mishima distributed a manifesto before his “rebellion” and suicide wherein he stated that it was his hope to arouse the Japanese to an awareness of what he regarded as the hypocrisy and corruption prevalent in postwar Japan. He posed the question, “What has driven us to this ungrateful action?” His own answer:

Our love for the Self-Defense forces. You were our only haven in this lukewarm land where biting air could be breathed…We watched Japan become drunk on prosperity and fall into an emptiness of the spirit…Grinding our teeth we had to watch Japanese profaning Japan’s history and traditions…And we believed that only in the Self-Defense Force was the real Japan, the real Japanese, the true spirit of the samurai, preserved. When you awakened, we believed Japan would awaken with you…[4]

Mishima wrote that Japan should revise its existing “dishonorable” constitution in order to “restore” the Self-Defense Force, a weak “police organization,” to its rightful place as a glorious national army. He urged the troops to march with him to the national Diet to compel the lawmakers to revise the Constitution:

We will restore Japan to her true form, and in the Restoration, die. Will you abide a world in which the spirit is dead and there is only reverence for life? In a few minutes we will show you where to find a greater value. It is not liberalism or democracy. It is Japan! The land of the history and the tradition we love, Japan. Are none of you willing to die by hurling yourself against the constitution that has torn the bones and heart from that which we love? If you are there, let us stand and die together. We know your souls are pure; it is our fierce desire that you revive as true men, as true samurai, that has driven us to this action.[5]

One of the characters in Mishima’s late 1950s novel, Kyoko’s World, dramatically articulates Mishima’s radically conservative and nationalistic world view and activist political.

We Japanese must reveal the true form of our imperial land, in which the sovereign and the people are gloriously united. We must become an example of the freedom, the peace, the happiness, and the spiritual enlightenment desired by every nation in the world and every race. It is our heaven-sent mission to take our lives on our faith in the Emperor and to guard the prosperity of our Imperial Throne. Therein lies our greatness, our sublimity… We will clarify the ideals of empire, uplift the Japanese spirit, sweep Communism away, rectify capitalism, and revise the constitution imposed on us a defeated nation to our lasting humiliation. We will have the traitorous Communist Party outlawed, and promote rearmament in the name of peace, independence and self-defense. We will overthrow the ruling class in concert with the Communist traitors and providing their spawning ground, and we will establish a new order, a mutual prosperity in which the people shall thrive.[6]

Mishima believed that postwar Japan, the Japan at the start of the 1970s, had severed its ancestral roots and that young Japan had no real sense of what it means to be Japanese. At the heart of traditional Japan, he believed, stood the culture-infusing concepts of honor, duty and sacrifice, and that it was the enactment of these practices by samurai that epitomized Japan. In Mishima’s eyes, the disappearance of these values made contemporary Japan a shadow, indeed a mockery, of her former self.[7]

Was Mishima’s suicide a deluded and quixotic attempt to force the Diet to change the constitution? Was he sincere when he said that he wanted to prompt Japan to the recovery of the ideals of this noble past? The answer to these and many other questions about Mishima and his novels requires closer examination of the writer’s self-understanding and aspirations as revealed in his works.

Mishima was obsessed with the traditional role of the samurai as the living essence of traditional Japan. He refers to the samurai ideal in many of his works; and later in his life it is probable that he decided to act out the code of his romanticized samurai heroes. It would be a political fiction of sorts come to life. In his novels Mishima would become the noble samurai warrior who would die in a noble yet futile attempt to rescue the nation from its corrupt self and himself from corruption. Mishima would write political autobiography in the novel genre, wherein he controlled a moment of the Japanese political condition – indeed, its destiny, he fancied.

Mishima cherished the traditional concept of bushido, the Way of the Warrior, which figured vigorously in traditional Japanese culture although it was codified and analyzed only in the 17th century by scholars like Yamaga Soko. Yamaga believed that the samurai had a special role in life – to cultivate those arts and virtues that would allow him to serve as a role model and leader for the rest of society – he as to be an exemplar of high moral purpose for all Japanese. The most important function of the samurai was devotion to duty – to serve his lord with unquestioned loyalty and to place moral principle ahead of personal gain.[8] A samurai was to lead a life of austerity, temperance, and constant self-discipline, and had to be willing to die at any time in service to his lord.

The concept of bushido is best exemplified in Japanese literature in the early 18th century play Chūshingura, based on a 1702 event where 47 samurai revenge the death of their daimyo lord with the certain knowledge that they will have to kill themselves. This certainty of death is at the heart of the bushido ethic:

Know that the essence of bushido is to die. This means that the samurai when faced with a choice between life and death chooses death. It is as simple as that. To say that death which achieves nothing is death in vain –dog’s death as it is called – so long as you have chosen death it does not matter whether you have died “in vain” –death cannot be to your discredit. [9]

Death, violence, and self-sacrifice figure prominently in Mishima’s writings. Death, according to Mishima, brings life into focus and gives one a clearer understanding of reality. Life without death and destruction is an uneventful and meaningless continuum. By contrast, the death of a loved one forces one to put life into perspective – to seek meaning in a life. For Mishima, on is truly only truly alive in times of extreme danger and possible death. Death is the ultimate sacrifice and through death one shows one’s willingness to sacrifice everything, to prove one’s loyalty and devotion to duty. Death is the ultimate test of character for the warrior and, in Mishima’s writing, for Japan as a nation in its contemporary boring self-understanding.

Mishima had little patience with the dull monotony of peace in postwar Japan; he relished a return to the danger and uncertainty of life during World War II:

A gulf separates the “death” we felt so close to during the war…and today’s uneventful peaceful world. Suddenly we were driven from a life in which death was a reality into a world where death was no more than an idea. The sense of reality we enjoyed in a life that was close to death has now been transformed into an idea. Conversely, what was unmistakably fantasy during the War has become the reality of everyday life… [10]

Mishima described his preference for times of danger in his novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea:

Danger means something physical, getting scratched and a little blood running…Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it’s a crazy mixed up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the ear that chaos brings to recreate existence instant by instant…[11]

John Nathan notes that the nihilist’s or Mishima’s

Conviction that true reality is manifest only in that moment when the world is poised on the brink of destruction, during the War or in that final moment he constantly reassures himself is near at hand. The argument he represents…is that death, or the moment before death, is the only reality. Hence to live, to exist, to participate in reality, is to die.[12]

Mishima’s writing involves various dark erotic fantasies, including annihilation of the beautiful, youthful, and strong body, mortally pierced by the sharp blade of a dagger or sword. The American publisher of Mishima’s novel, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, proclaims that the story offers Mishima’s version of “the homicidal hysteria that lies latent in the Japanese character.” Worthy young men are to die violent deaths.

Mishima’s fascination with youth, beauty, death, and destruction is vividly presented in his ironically entitled early novel, Confessions of a Mask. The novel’s protagonist is visiting a sleazy dance hall with a young woman, Sonoko, when young man catches his attention:

He was a youth of twenty-one or – two, with coarse but regular and swarthy features. He had taken off his shirt and stood there half-clothed, rewinding a belly-band about his middle. The coarse cotton material was soaked with sweat and had become a light-gray color. He seemed to be intentionally dawdling over his task of winding and was constantly joining in the talk and laughter of his companions. His naked chest showed bulging muscles, fully developed and tensely knit; a deep cleft ran down between the solid muscles of his chest towards his abdomen. The thick, fetter-like sinews of his flesh narrowed down from different directions to the sides of his chest, where they interlocked in tight coils. The hot mass of his smooth torso was being severely and tightly imprisoned by each succeeding turn of the soiled cotton bellyband. His bare, sun-tanned shoulders gleamed as though covered with oil. And black tufts stuck out from the cracks of his armpits, catching the sunlight, curling and glittering with glints of gold.

At this sight, above all at the sight of the peony tattooed on his hard chest, I was beset by sexual desire.[13] My fervent gaze was fixed upon that rough and savage, but incomparably beautiful body. Its owner was laughing there under the sun. When he threw back his head I could see his thick muscular neck. A strange shudder ran through my inner-most heart. I could no longer take my eyes off him.

I had forgotten Sonoko’s existence. I was thinking of but one thing: Of his going out into the streets of high summer just as he was, half-naked, and getting into a fight with a rival gang. Of a sharp dagger cutting through that belly-band, piercing the torso. Of that soiled belly-band beautifully dyed with blood. Or his gory corpse being put in an improvised stretcher, made of a window shutter, and brought back here.[14]

The death that Mishima, then in his early twenties, fantasized for the young man in Mishima had been weak and sickly as a child and young writer, but by the early 1960s it is probable that he had decided to prepare himself , both physically and intellectually, for what he believed would be aesthetic self-destruction. He started a rigorous body-building regimen in the 1950s, and in the radical 1960s he adopted an extreme right-win political posture based on reverence for the Emperor. He even went so far as to create his own small private army. Columbia Professor of East Asian Studies Paul Varley notes that “Mishima transformed himself into a modern-day samurai, a warrior of pure spirit who would think only of one thing: ‘A sharp dagger…piercing [his] torso.’”[15] He chose to kill himself when he was at the height of his physical strength – when he would still be strong enough to endure the physically demanding death of a true samurai.

Mishima’s obsession with death – the ritual death of the courageous warrior fighting injustice and the depravity of a corrupt government and society – is lucidly depicted in his short story “Patriotism.” [16] The story was inspired by the February 26 incident of 1936 when a group of young army officers in the Imperial Army led about 1350 foot soldiers in an attempt to overthrow the national government. The officers complained about the corruption and weakness of the government and declared their intention to install a “reform cabinet” dedicated to a “Showa Restoration” which principally meant that the Emperor himself would gain supreme command over Japan’s military.[17]