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Thread: Yukio Mishima

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    WE'RE ALL GOING HOME HERO's Avatar
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    Default Yukio Mishima

    Mishima: ILE-Ti?

    - from The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting by Alice Miller (Translated from the German by Andrew Jenkins); pp. 64-67 [I – SAYING AND CONCEALING (5 – The Imprisoned Child and the Necessity of Denying Pain: Yukio Mishima)]:

    Like Rimbaud, the famous Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who committed hara-kiri in 1970 at the age of forty-five, often spoke of himself as a monster because he felt within him an inclination toward things morbid and perverted. His fantasies revolved around death, the dark side of the world, and sexual violence. On the other hand, his poems indicate an unusual sensitivity that caused him immense suffering, suffering that derived from the tragic experiences of his childhood.

    Mishima was his parents’ first child. When he was born, in 1925, they were newly married and living in his grandparents’ house – there was nothing unusual about this in Japan at the time. Almost from the very beginning he was quartered in the room of his fifty-year-old grandmother. His cot stood next to her bed, and he lived there for years, cut off from the outside world and exposed exclusively to her needs. Mishima’s grandmother suffered from severe depression. Occasionally she alarmed the boy with outbreaks of hysteria. She had nothing but contempt for her husband and for her son, Mishima’s father, but in her own way she worshipped her little grandson and wanted him to belong to her and no one else. In his autobiography, Mishima recalls the oppressiveness and the fetid smell of the room he shared with his grandmother. But he tells us nothing of any rage or revulsion that he felt about his situation, because it appeared normal to him. At the age of four, he developed a severe illness, diagnosed as “self-intoxication,” which later proved to be chronic. When he first went to school, at the age of six, it was the very first time he had had any contact with other children, and he felt strange and alien in their midst. Naturally enough, he had difficulty relating to these other children, who were emotionally more uninhibited and spontaneous, since they had experienced entirely different treatment and surroundings in their own families. When he was nine, his parents moved into an apartment of their own, but they did not take their son with them. It was at this time that he started writing poems, actively and enthusiastically encouraged by his grandmother. When he finally moved in with his parents, at the age of twelve, his mother was proud of what he had written, but his father tore up the manuscripts, and Mishima was forced to carry on writing in secret. At home he found neither understanding nor encouragement. His grandmother had tried to make a girl out of him, whereas his father attempted to turn him into a “real man,” which involved severe beatings. As a result he frequently visited his grandmother, who represented a refuge from the cruelty of his father. Around this time, she took him on his first visit to the theater. This opened the door to a whole new world: the world of feelings.

    I understand Mishima’s suicide as the expression of his inability to experience his early feelings of revolt against, anger toward, and indignation at the behavior of his grandmother. This inability was a direct result of the gratitude he felt toward her. In his loneliness, and in comparison to the way his father behaved, his grandmother was bound to appear to him as a savior figure. His true feelings remained pent up in the prison of his attachment to this woman, who exploited the child from the outset for the gratification of her needs, including (presumably) her sexual cravings. But his biographers draw a veil of silence over all this, and right to the very end Mishima himself made no reference to it. He never faced up to his own truth.

    All kinds of reasons have been advanced to explain Mishima’s hara-kiri. But the most convincing reason is hardly ever mentioned. After all, it is quite normal for us to owe a debt of gratitude to our parents and grandparents (or the people standing in for them), even if the treatment we experienced at their hands was sheer unadulterated torture. This is an integral part of morality, as we understand it. But it is a species of morality that consigns our genuine feelings and our own personal truth to an unmarked grave. Severe illnesses, early death, and suicide are the logical consequences of subjection to the laws that we call morality, although in fact they suffocate our true lives. This will continue to be the case, all over the world, as long as we show greater reverence to these laws than to life itself. The body rebels against such treatment, but the only language at its command is the language of illness, a language that is rarely understood as long as the denial of true feelings in childhood remains unrecognized.

    Many of the Ten Commandments can still claim validity today. But the Fourth Commandment is diametrically opposed to the laws of psychology. It is imperative that there be general recognition of the fact that enforced “love” can do a very great deal of harm. People who were loved in childhood will love their parents in return. There is no need of a commandment to tell them to do so. Obeying a commandment can never be the basis for love.


    Here are the pictures:

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...shima_1931.gif

    http://dannarhitect.files.wordpress....pg?w=500&h=421

    http://dannarhitect.files.wordpress....io-mishima.jpg

    http://nndb.com/people/963/000113624...ainclothes.jpg

    http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/...es/1009739.jpg

    http://faculty.washington.edu/kendo/mishima.jpg

    http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/gnmodo8...shimaknol9.jpg


    Here are the quotes:

    - from Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima (Translated from the Japanese by Alfred H. Marks); pp. 254-256 [(Chapter) 22 – The Seducer]: It would be well to say that Kyoko Hodaka did not love Yuichi in the slightest. Her frivolous heart was exceedingly pliant. In the lightness of her feelings there was an elegance that fell short of any standard of purity. Once in the depth of her heart a fairly sincere yearning for self-deception had suddenly flared up and then gone out, without any awareness on her part. Kyoko had one resolve, one self-imposed, indispensable, easily fulfilled duty: never to keep watch over her own heart. “I haven’t seen him for a month and a half,” she said. “That seems like a day. In that time I haven’t thought of that man once.”

    One and a half months! What in the world did Kyoko do with herself? Countless dances. Countless movies. Tennis. Shopping. All kinds of Foreign Office parties she had to attend with her husband. The beauty parlor. Drives. A fantastic number of useless arguments about various loves and infidelities. Countless notions and whims encountered in the course of keeping house.

    The oil landscape painting, for instance, that graced the wall of the stairway landing had been moved during that time to the wall of the entranceway. Then it was taken to the guest room. Then she changed her mind and hung it again on the landing where it had been originally. She rearranged the kitchen and found fifty-three empty bottles. She sold them to the junkman and with the money, supplemented by some of her pocket money, bought a table lamp made from a curacao bottle. She soon decided she didn't like that and gave it to a friend, receiving in exchange a bottle of Cointreau. Then the shepherd dog she was raising got distemper. He frothed at the mouth, trembled in all four legs, and without making a sound died with what looked like a smile on his face. Kyoko cried for three hours; the next day she had forgotten it.

    Her life was filled with immeasurable amounts of stylish rubbish. It had been like that since her girlhood, when she was infected with a bug for collecting safety pins, and filled lacquer boxes with safety pins large and small. The same kind of fever that is referred to in poor women as being “the fever of their existence” motivated the life of Kyoko. But if hers was an earnest existence, it was marked by an earnestness which did not in the least stand in the way of her frivolousness. An earnest existence that knows no distress is apt to have trouble finding an outlet.

    Like a butterfly that flits into a room and flutters madly about when it can find no open windows, Kyoko, too, lived her restless inner life. Not even the zaniest butterfly, however, is apt to believe that the room into which it has flown is its own. Sometimes, indeed, exhausted butterflies collide with forests on painted landscapes and fall unconscious.

    No one saw clearly the state of stupefaction into which Kyoko, like that butterfly, would sometimes fall—a wide-eyed, confused absence of mind. Her husband would think to himself only: It’s started again. Her friends and her cousins would think nothing more than: She’s in love again—for a half day, no more.


    - pp. 258-260: They went along the side of the stables and entered a dark, shaded path. They locked arms. Before their eyes there was a slight rise, with an earthen bridge built in conformity with the uphill slope. Ramparts surrounded the hill area. Near the summit there was a single cherry tree in the very center of a group of pines.

    A one-horse carriage reserved for court use came down the hill and scuttled past the two pedestrians. The horse’s mane fluttered in the wind; the sixteen-petaled gold chrysanthemum passed resplendently before their eyes. The two climbed the hill. From the plateau of the old third circle they could look for the first time at the panorama of the city on the other side of the stone wall.

    With what freshness did the whole city come together to strike the eye! The slippery comings and goings of the shining autos – what animated life they bore! The businesslike afternoon prosperity of Nishikicho across the moat! The revolutions of the countless anemometers on the meteorological station! With what loving exertion they lent their ears to the many winds passing through the sky, offering them such charms! How indefatigably they spun about!

    The two went out through the Hirakawa gate. They had not walked enough yet; so they strolled along the edge of the moat for a time. As they did so, there in the very middle of this aimless afternoon walk, in the very middle of the auto horns and the earth-shaking rumble of trucks, Kyoko came to savor something close to a real sense of what life is.


    In the Yuichi of that day there was certainly that “real sense,” strange though the phrase is. It was almost as if he were convinced that he was impersonating the man he most wished to be. This consciousness of beauty, this endowment with substance, as it were, was to Kyoko particularly essential. Until now this beautiful youth had seemed to comprise only bits and pieces of sexuality. His sharp brows, his deep set eyes, the marvelous ridge of his nose, his artless lips, had always brought Kyoko joy, but after the simple enumeration of these parts, there had been the feeling that the most important thing was missing.

    “You certainly don’t look like a married man!” Kyoko opened her innocently incredulous eyes as she burst out with this.

    “Yes, somehow I feel like a bachelor.” They looked at each other and laughed at this rejoinder.

    Kyoko never touched upon the subject of Mrs. Kaburagi, and Yuichi too made it a point never to broach the subject of Namiki, who had gone to Yokohama with them. This courtesy helped them to get on well together, and the reflection in Kyoko’s mind that he had been jilted by Mrs. Kaburagi just as she had been thrown over by Namiki served only to make her feel closer to the youth.

    At the risk of being prolix, however, it must be said that Kyoko no longer loved Yuichi in the slightest. There was in this meeting with him only an undiscriminating joy, a delight. She drifted. Her truly light heart drifted like a plant seed carried by the wind, tufted with white thistledown. A seducer doesn’t always go after a woman he loves. A woman like this, weighed down by nothing spiritual, standing on tiptoe within herself, as much a dreamer as she was a realist, was the ripest bait for the seducer.


    - p. 261: The blood-red sloe gin fizz she had imbibed imparted a drunken glide to Kyoko’s dancing. She leaned against Yuichi, her body lighter than a feather, feeling as if her feet barely touched the floor as she danced. The basement dance floor was surrounded by tables on three sides. Facing it in the darkness was an orchestra stand with a scarlet drapery hung behind it.


    - p. 262: In the bottom of her heart she believed that the plight of all men in the world was an unfortunate one. It was a religious prejudice with her. The only thing she had managed to see in Yuichi was his common everyday youthfulness. But since what we call beauty is basically so far removed from originality, surely there was nothing original to be found in this beautiful youth! Trembling in sympathy, Kyoko felt like shedding conventional tears at the loneliness of men, at the animal hungers and thirsts of men, at all the shackles of desire that make man seem so tragic.


    - p. 263: The light of the tall neon signs coming through the window onto her face cradled in his arms flowed into the corners of her eyes. There was in all the rapidity of that flow a current that did not move. The youth realized that it was tears. She realized it, too, at about the same time, when she felt the cold flow on her temple. Yuichi touched it with his lips and with his lips drank a woman’s tears...She stole a look at the stiff nape of the neck turned toward her by the middle-aged driver. Her conventionally virtuous heart saw in the back of that ancient blue suit the symbol of all society turning its back.


    - p. 264: Kyoko kept suggesting they go, and kept on drinking.

    She went on thinking about one thing after another. As she thought about each, she forgot what she was thinking about...

    ...As she looked at him a dark joy burst its bonds inside her and came welling up.

    This heart of hers, still certain that she was not in love with this beautiful youth, was fully aware. However, she realized that she had never felt this same deep sense of surrender with any other man. The compelling beat of the bass drum in the Western music drove her into a state of rapture.

    This feeling of receptiveness—that one must call almost a natural impulse—brought her heart close to a kind of universality. That feeling, like evening coming over the moor, with long shadows thrust out by thick undergrowth, hill and valley bathed each in its own shadows – that feeling of wishing to be wrapped in ecstasy and twilight – transfigured Kyoko.


    - p. 265: The musicians broke into a fast rumba. The lights went off. Lights glowed on the dressing room door. Then the catlike forms of the rumba dancers, a man and a woman, glided out of the half-open door.

    Their silk costumes fluttered in great pleats. Countless tiny, embroidered, round metal scales shimmered, green, gold, and orange. The hips of the man and woman, shining in silk, were like lizards in the grass. They drew together. Then they separated.

    Kyoko rested her elbows on the tablecloth, held her throbbing temples with painted fingernails that seemed as if they would penetrate into her head, and watched. The pain caused by the fingernails was as pleasant as peppermint.


    - p. 266: Kyoko’s eyes were open. She looked at the lights outside the window; she looked at the cloudy night sky. Suddenly she had the strange power to see everything as worthless. Another day was ending without incident. Only capricious, dispirited memories – lackadaisical, intermittent, and perhaps based on nothing other than weakness of imagination – would be left. Only the daily routine of life, assuming some strange, blood-curdling shape, would be left.


    - p. 268: Even now she did not have the courage to touch the real Yuichi. His form was the incarnation of joy. In it were indescribably blended greenness and wisdom, youth and mastery, love and scorn, piety and sacrilege. Even now not the slightest resentment or guilt sufficed to dull Kyoko’s joy; even her slight hangover could not alter it.


    - p. 270: “...The humiliation and the ugliness you’re thinking about are all imaginary. For surely we’ve seen something beautiful. It’s certain that we have, the two of us, seen something of the quality of a rainbow.”


    - p. 271: The whistle of a freight train crossing the nearby iron bridge reverberated in the night. It was an endless, monotonous, stumbling repetition. After a time, from the other side of the bridge it had just crossed, the train flashed a long whistle and then was silent...

    ...The conduct of Shunsuke, who from the beginning had had no hope, was marked by not the slightest mercy, by nothing of what society calls humanity.

    Kyoko was silent. She was sitting straight up, without making a sound. To this flighty female, such a long period of silence was something that had never occurred before. Once she had learned this quietness, perhaps it would become the way she naturally comported herself. Shunsuke, too, kept his mouth closed. They seemed to believe they could go on here until dawn without saying a word. When night came to an end she would take the little tools out of her bag, make herself up, and return to her husband’s house. It would be a long time, though, until the river whitened; the two people suspected this night would go on forever.


    - pp. 48-49 [(Chapter) 4 – Forest Fire in the Distant Twilight]: The outward peace of the Minami household was like an accusation leveled against him. The smiling face of his mother, who, fortunately, was not suffering because of her kidney condition and had not been hospitalized; Yasuko’s misty smile that hovered on her face night and day; this repose . . . Everybody was asleep; he was the only one awake. He felt uneasy that he should be living with a sleeping family. He was tempted to arouse them deliberately out of their sleep. But if he did . . . indeed his mother, Yasuko, even Kiyo would wake up. And from that instant they would hate him. It was a kind of betrayal for one to be awake while the others slept. The night watchman, however, guards by betrayal. By betraying sleep he protects sleep. Ah, this human watch, maintaining truth beside the sleeping! Yuichi felt a hatred toward the night watchman. He hated his human role.

    It was not yet time for exams. All he had to do was look over his notes. Economic history, public finance, statistics – all his notes were arranged there, transcribed meticulously in tiny characters. His friends were amazed at the preciseness of his notes, though it was a mechanical precision. Mornings in the sunlit autumn classroom, amid the rustling agitation of hundreds of pens, the machine-like character was what particularly marked Yuichi’s pen. What made his passionless jottings look almost like shorthand was his habit of treating thought as nothing more than an exercise in mechanical self-discipline.

    Today he had gone to school for the first time since the wedding. School was a refuge.


    - p. 52: Returning from his unhappy thoughts to the present, Yuichi gazed from the window. The tower windows opened on a view of the Tokyo horizon on the other side of the trolley tracks and the shantytowns where the factory chimneys bristled. On clear days, that horizon seemed to ascend just a bit higher thanks to the smoke. Nights – perhaps from the night shift, or perhaps, too, from the faint glow of neon lights – the skirts of the sky in that vicinity were tinged from time to time with red.

    Tonight’s vermilion, however, was somehow different. The edge of the sky was quite clearly intoxicated. Since the moon had not yet risen, that drunkenness stood out in the light of the faint stars. Not only that, the faint vermilion was fluttering. Striped in smoggy apricot, it looked like a mysterious flag fluttering in the wind.

    Yuichi recognized it as a fire.

    At the same time there was a darkening of the white smoke around the flame.


    -pp. 32-33 [(Chapter) 2 - Mirror Contract]: It grieved Yuichi's mother to see her son stick his nose into the household account book as if he enjoyed it; besides, as he said lightly, it was a practical application of his schoolwork in economics. In truth, it appeared to her that his present activity was somehow brought on by her earlier frank discussion with him, and fearing that he was taking her words to mean something she had not wished to suggest, she said to him once, apparently for no good reason, "It seems to me that there's something abnormal about a student's developing an interest in the household account book."

    Yuichi grimaced fiercely. His mother was content that her words of vexation had roused her son and evoked a reaction, but she did not know which of her words had cut him so. Anger, however, had set Yuichi free from his usual sense of decorum. He felt that the time had come to blast some of the idle romantic fancies his mother cherished on his behalf. They were fancies completely without hope, so far as he could see. Her hopes were an affront to his despair.


    - from The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima; pp. 5-6: As the sky clouded over, the sea fell into sulky contemplation, studded with fine nightingale-colored points. It bristled with wave-thorns, like a rose branch. In the thorns themselves was evidence of a smooth becoming. The thorns of the sea were smooth.

    Three ten. There were no ships in sight.

    Very strange. The whole vast space was abandoned.

    There were not even wings of gulls.

    Then a phantom ship arose and disappeared toward the west.

    The Izu Peninsula was shrouded in mist. For a time it ceased to be the Izu Peninsula. It was the ghost of a lost peninsula. Then it disappeared entirely. It had become a fiction on a map. Ships and peninsula alike belonged to “the absurdity of existence.”

    They appeared and disappeared. How did they differ?

    If the visible was the sum of being, then the sea, as long as it was not lost in mist, existed there. It was heartily ready to be.

    A single ship changed it all.

    The whole composition changed. With a rending of the whole pattern of being, a ship was received by the horizon. An abdication was signed. A whole universe was thrown away. A ship came in sight, to throw out the universe that had guarded its absence.

    Multiple changes in the color of the sea, moment by moment. Changes in the clouds. And the appearance of a ship. What was happening? What were happenings?

    Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.

    Happenings are the signals for endless reconstruction, reorganization. Signals from a distant bell. A ship appears and sets the bell to ringing. In an instant the sound makes everything its own. On the sea they are incessant, the bell is forever ringing.

    A being.


    - pp. 32-33: Worn out from looking, Toru, who had no occupation but to look, leaned against the windowsill to the northwest and looked at the Sunday-morning bustle in the new houses beyond the orange grove. Dogs barked. Sparrows flitted among the orange branches. On south verandas men who finally had houses of their own were sprawled on rattan chairs reading newspapers. He caught glimpses of aproned women inside. The newly tiled roofs were a violent blue. The voices of children were like splinters of glass.

    Toru liked to look at people as at animals in a zoo.


    - from The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting by Alice Miller (Translated from the German by Andrew Jenkins); pp. 64-67 [I – SAYING AND CONCEALING (5 – The Imprisoned Child and the Necessity of Denying Pain: Yukio Mishima)]:

    Like Rimbaud, the famous Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who committed hara-kiri in 1970 at the age of forty-five, often spoke of himself as a monster because he felt within him an inclination toward things morbid and perverted. His fantasies revolved around death, the dark side of the world, and sexual violence. On the other hand, his poems indicate an unusual sensitivity that caused him immense suffering, suffering that derived from the tragic experiences of his childhood.

    Mishima was his parents’ first child. When he was born, in 1925, they were newly married and living in his grandparents’ house – there was nothing unusual about this in Japan at the time. Almost from the very beginning he was quartered in the room of his fifty-year-old grandmother. His cot stood next to her bed, and he lived there for years, cut off from the outside world and exposed exclusively to her needs. Mishima’s grandmother suffered from severe depression. Occasionally she alarmed the boy with outbreaks of hysteria. She had nothing but contempt for her husband and for her son, Mishima’s father, but in her own way she worshipped her little grandson and wanted him to belong to her and no one else. In his autobiography, Mishima recalls the oppressiveness and the fetid smell of the room he shared with his grandmother. But he tells us nothing of any rage or revulsion that he felt about his situation, because it appeared normal to him. At the age of four, he developed a severe illness, diagnosed as “self-intoxication,” which later proved to be chronic. When he first went to school, at the age of six, it was the very first time he had had any contact with other children, and he felt strange and alien in their midst. Naturally enough, he had difficulty relating to these other children, who were emotionally more uninhibited and spontaneous, since they had experienced entirely different treatment and surroundings in their own families. When he was nine, his parents moved into an apartment of their own, but they did not take their son with them. It was at this time that he started writing poems, actively and enthusiastically encouraged by his grandmother. When he finally moved in with his parents, at the age of twelve, his mother was proud of what he had written, but his father tore up the manuscripts, and Mishima was forced to carry on writing in secret. At home he found neither understanding nor encouragement. His grandmother had tried to make a girl out of him, whereas his father attempted to turn him into a “real man,” which involved severe beatings. As a result he frequently visited his grandmother, who represented a refuge from the cruelty of his father. Around this time, she took him on his first visit to the theater. This opened the door to a whole new world: the world of feelings.

    I understand Mishima’s suicide as the expression of his inability to experience his early feelings of revolt against, anger toward, and indignation at the behavior of his grandmother. This inability was a direct result of the gratitude he felt toward her. In his loneliness, and in comparison to the way his father behaved, his grandmother was bound to appear to him as a savior figure. His true feelings remained pent up in the prison of his attachment to this woman, who exploited the child from the outset for the gratification of her needs, including (presumably) her sexual cravings. But his biographers draw a veil of silence over all this, and right to the very end Mishima himself made no reference to it. He never faced up to his own truth.

    All kinds of reasons have been advanced to explain Mishima’s hara-kiri. But the most convincing reason is hardly ever mentioned. After all, it is quite normal for us to owe a debt of gratitude to our parents and grandparents (or the people standing in for them), even if the treatment we experienced at their hands was sheer unadulterated torture. This is an integral part of morality, as we understand it. But it is a species of morality that consigns our genuine feelings and our own personal truth to an unmarked grave. Severe illnesses, early death, and suicide are the logical consequences of subjection to the laws that we call morality, although in fact they suffocate our true lives. This will continue to be the case, all over the world, as long as we show greater reverence to these laws than to life itself. The body rebels against such treatment, but the only language at its command is the language of illness, a language that is rarely understood as long as the denial of true feelings in childhood remains unrecognized.

    Many of the Ten Commandments can still claim validity today. But the Fourth Commandment is diametrically opposed to the laws of psychology. It is imperative that there be general recognition of the fact that enforced “love” can do a very great deal of harm. People who were loved in childhood will love their parents in return. There is no need of a commandment to tell them to do so. Obeying a commandment can never be the basis for love.



    - from The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima (Translated by Meredith Weatherby); pp. 18-19 [Chapter 2]: Talk of this girl and the image of the girl he had seen on the beach yesterday immediately took fast hold of each other in Shinji’s mind. At the same instant he recalled, with a sinking heart, his own poor condition in life. The recollection made the girl whom he had stared at so closely only the day before seem very, very far away from him now. Because now he knew that her father was Terukichi Miyata, the wealthy owner of two coasting freighters chartered to Yamagawa Transport – the hundred-and-eighty-five-ton Utajima-maru and the ninety-five-ton Harukaze-maru – and a noted crosspatch, whose white hair would wave like lion whiskers in anger.

    Shinji had always been very level-headed. He had realized that he was still only eighteen and that it was too soon to be thinking about women. Unlike the environment of city youths, always exploding with thrills, Utajima had not a single pin-ball parlor, not a single bar, not a single waitress. And this boy’s simple daydream was only to own his own engine-powered boat some day and go into the coastal-shipping business with his younger brother.

    Surrounded though he was by the vast ocean, Shinji did not especially burn with impossible dreams of great adventure across the seas. His fisherman’s conception of the sea was close to that of the farmer for his land. The sea was the place where he earned his living, a rippling field where, instead of waving heads of rice or wheat, the white and formless harvest of waves was forever swaying above the unrelieved blueness of a sensitive and yielding soil.


    Even so, when the day’s fishing was almost done, the sight of a white freighter sailing against the evening clouds on the horizon filled the boy’s heart with strange emotions. From far away the world came pressing in upon him with a hugeness he had never before apprehended. The realization of this unknown world came to him like distant thunder, now pealing from afar, now dying away to nothingness.

    A small starfish had dried to the deck in the prow. The boy sat there in the prow, with a coarse white towel tied round his head. He turned his eyes away from the evening clouds and shook his head slightly.


    - pp. 33-34: Whenever he returned from fishing he always looked all along the beach for her, but on the few occasions when he caught sight of her she was busy working and there was no chance to speak.

    There was no such thing as that time when she had been alone, leaning against the "abacuses" and staring out to sea. Moreover, whenever the boy resolved that he was sick of it all and that he would put Hatsue completely out of his mind, on that very day he was sure to catch sight of her among the bustling crowd that gathered on the beach when the boats came in.

    City youths learn the ways of love early from novels, movies, and the like, but on Uta-jima there were practically no models to follow. Thus, no matter how he wondered about it, Shinji had not the slightest idea what he should have done during those precious minutes between the observation tower and the lighthouse when he had been alone with her. He was left with nothing but a keen sense of regret, a feeling that there was something he had utterly failed to do.


    Here's a link:

    http://anotherlostshark.com/2010/01/...etry-of-death/
    Last edited by HERO; 01-15-2018 at 09:54 AM.

  2. #2
    you can go to where your heart is Galen's Avatar
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    I recall him sounding super Ni and being super Ej. ENFj doesn't seem right, so Ni-ENTj it is.

  3. #3
    Exodus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Galen View Post
    I recall him sounding super Ni and being super Ej. ENFj doesn't seem right, so Ni-ENTj it is.
    yeah, super-Ni for sure. I think ILI > LIE though.

  4. #4
    Dance Magic Dance CloudCuckooLander's Avatar
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    I don't know, that whole overdramatic coup d'etat attempt seemed fairly Fe to me. Then again, the reception of his speech would potentially be indicative of a distinct lack of Fe (though that would be an assumption of the speech in a vacuum, in isolation from the political and social currents of the time, Japan in the early 1970s). I could honestly see LIE, ILI, or IEI (EIE, I would agree, does not sound right at all).
    2-subtype system: IEI-Fe
    8-subtype system: D-IEI-Fe
    16-subtype system: IEI-ESE

    IEI-Fe 2w3 > p6w5 > 8w7 sx/so

    "He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living." - Edmond Dantes (The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas père)

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    Quote Originally Posted by CloudCuckooLander View Post
    I don't know, that whole overdramatic coup d'etat attempt seemed fairly Fe to me. Then again, the reception of his speech would potentially be indicative of a distinct lack of Fe (though that would be an assumption of the speech in a vacuum, in isolation from the political and social currents of the time, Japan in the early 1970s). I could honestly see LIE, ILI, or IEI (EIE, I would agree, does not sound right at all).
    But he's so boring, lol...

    I guess LIE could work, hmm.

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    I feel me when I see him.



    It's a kind of "solid brightness" that makes me feel like I'm looking into a mirror.
    But, for a certainty, back then,
    We loved so many, yet hated so much,
    We hurt others and were hurt ourselves...

    Yet even then, we ran like the wind,
    Whilst our laughter echoed,
    Under cerulean skies...

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    Quote Originally Posted by Ashton2 View Post
    In 1968, he started a private army—the Tatenokai—which he commanded and trained himself alongside the JSDF.
    Wow. He seemed like an all-rounder, considering that he was an author and actor as well.

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    Going off what I learned about him from Paul Schrader (by which I mean to suggest my view should be taken with a handful of salt):

    He was sickly as a boy, and didn't get to join in all the other reindeer games. Not Se Ego. His bodybuilding, and his private army were attempts to transcend his natural weakness and become powerful. Se-HA.

    That leaves us with ENTj and ENFj.

    Here are descriptions of the Beta Ni + Fe and Gamma Ni + Te:

    extraverted ethics blocked with introverted intuition:
    This quadra encourages dramatic self-expression with elements of theatricism and melodrama. They enjoy finding artistic means to express romantic, abstract ideals and feelings.

    They believe that apathy is a significant cause of societal problems, and work to fight against it.

    extraverted logic blocked with introverted intuition:
    This quadra believes that ideas and fortuitous events should be turned into something profitable and marketable — something that does some kind of work for people.

    Gamma types tend to give more value to ideas and concepts that are firmly connected to factual information.

    I'm not trying to suggest that LIEs can't be authors, and that EIEs can't be CEOs, but...in the same breath, the path to fame is usually being a strong embodiment of your archetype. I mean, think about it, is Mishima more a humanitarian, with "literary" interests, or a researcher, with an "apparent 'lack of interest in people'"?

    EIE. Or, coincidentally, by its other name, the Actor.

    (Plus, can you think of anything more aristocratic than the samurai?)



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    My typing of him is ILI 4.

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    WE'RE ALL GOING HOME HERO's Avatar
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    He was definitely no Kevin O'Leary or Jack London (so probably not Te-ENTj), but I still think Yukio Mishima could definitely be either Ni-ENTj or Ni-ENFj -- otherwise, maybe INTp, although he seems to have quite a rational/judging face, and he seemed to be more of a Choleric/Exploitative/Leader Ej temperament as opposed to a Phlegmatic/Receptive/Observer Ip temperament. He was quite active and prolific. I have no strong reason to believe he wasn't extraverted and rational.

    Forbidden Colors is one of my favorite novels after The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.


    Here are some paragraphs that may help shed light on his personality:


    - from Forbidden Colors; p. 49: It was not yet time for exams. All he had to do was look over his notes. Economic history, public finance, statistics – all his notes were arranged there, transcribed meticulously in tiny characters. His friends were amazed at the preciseness of his notes, though it was a mechanical precision. Mornings in the sunlit autumn classroom, amid the rustling agitation of hundreds of pens, the machine-like character was what particularly marked Yuichi’s pen. What made his passionless jottings look almost like shorthand was his habit of treating thought as nothing more than an exercise in mechanical self-discipline.

    Today he had gone to school for the first time since the wedding. School was a refuge.


    pp. 32-33: It grieved Yuichi's mother to see her son stick his nose into the household account book as if he enjoyed it; besides, as he said lightly, it was a practical application of his schoolwork in economics. In truth, it appeared to her that his present activity was somehow brought on by her earlier frank discussion with him, and fearing that he was taking her words to mean something she had not wished to suggest, she said to him once, apparently for no good reason, "It seems to me that there's something abnormal about a student's developing an interest in the household account book."


    - p. 309: As Yuichi saw it, economics was an extremely human subject. To the extent that it was connected directly and deeply with human desires, the activity of its organization was strengthened. At one time, in the developing years of free enterprise economics, it exhibited autonomous faculties, thanks to a close connection with the desires—the self-interest—of the rapidly rising bourgeoisie. Today, however, it was in a period of decline, owing to the fact that its organization had been separated from desire and mechanized, thus bringing about the attenuation of desire. A new system of economics had to find new desire.

    The greatest evil, certainly, lies only in reasonless desire, objectless desire. Why? Love with the object of propagating children, selfishness with the object of distributing profits, passion for a revolution of the working class with the object of attaining Communism are virtues in the various ruling societies.

    Yuichi did not love a woman, and the woman bore Yuichi a child. At that time he saw the ugliness, not of Yasuko’s will, but of objectless desire in life. The proletariat also, without realizing it, are probably born from desire of this kind. Yuichi’s economic studies had thus brought him to a new concept of desire. He conceived the ambition to make himself over into that desire.

    Yuichi’s outlook on life was not, as one would expect in a young man, marked by impatience to resolve matters. When he looked at the contradictions and the uglinesses of society, he had the strange urge to take their place. Confusing his instincts with the objectless desire of life, he wished for the various gifts of the industrialist. If Shunsuke had heard his wishes, he would have averted his eyes at the thought that Yuichi had become captive to common ambition. Ages ago, the beautiful Alcibiades, also accustomed to being loved, had become in the same way a hero of vanity. Yuichi began to think he would take advantage of Kawada’s good offices.


    - from Confessions of a Mask: pp. 216-218: That night I wrote a letter of indirect refusal, which sounded artificial even to me. I wrote that it was a very sudden thing and that as yet my feelings had not gone quite that far.

    On my way back to the arsenal next morning, I stopped by the post office to mail the letter. The woman at the special-delivery window looked suspiciously at my trembling hands. I stared at my letter as she took it up in her rough, dirty hands and stamped it swiftly. I found comfort in seeing my unhappiness handled in such an efficient, businesslike manner.


    'My grief resembled that of a fainthearted student who has failed an examination: I made a mistake! I made a mistake! Simply because I didn’t solve that X, everything was wrong. If only I’d solved that X at the beginning, everything would have been all right. If only I had used deductive methods like everyone else to solve the mathematics of life. To be half-clever was the worst thing I could have done. I alone depended upon the inductive method, and for that simple reason I failed.'



    - from Confessions of a Mask; pp. 202-208: “You will come again, without fail, won’t you?”

    She spoke easily, in a tone of complete confidence. It somehow sounded as though she had confidence not so much in me as in something deeper, something beyond me. Her shoulders were not shaking. The lace on her blouse was rising and falling as though proudly.

    “H’m, perhaps so, if I’m still alive.”

    I was disgusted with myself as I spoke the words. Intellectually, I would have preferred by far to be saying: “Of course I’ll come! Nothing could keep me from coming to you. Never doubt it. Aren’t you the girl who’s going to be my wife?”

    At every turn this sort of curious contradiction cropped up between my intellectual views and my emotions. I knew that what made me adopt such lukewarm attitudes—like that “H’m, perhaps so”—was not some fault in my character that I could change, but was the work of something that had existed even before I had had any hand in the matter. In short, I knew clearly that it was not my fault.

    But for this very reason I had formed the habit of treating those parts of my character that were in any way my responsibility to exhortations so wholesome and sensible as to be comical. As a part of my system of self-discipline, dating from childhood, I constantly told myself it would be better to die than become a lukewarm person, an unmanly person, a person who does not clearly know his likes and dislikes, a person who wants only to be loved without knowing how to love. This exhortation of course had a possible applicability to the parts of my character for which I was to blame, but so far as the other parts were concerned, the parts for which I was not to blame, it was an impossible requirement from the beginning.


    http://www.socionics.com/articles/ic47.htm

    So perhaps Yukio Mishima was an irrational/perceiving type. According to Sergei Ganin, irrational/perceiving types “Often feel the need but find it rather difficult to maintain a steady balance between the emotional and intellectual self.”


    Here's another excerpt that may illustrate this conflict or attempt to balance the emotional and intellectual self (or the dynamic or interplay between the two):


    "The world that gathered at Rudon’s supported no more life than the torrid zone, a life like that of practically exiled colonial administrative employees. In short, there was nothing more than the bare essentials of sentiment, the violent discipline of sentiment in that world. And if this was the political fate of the tribe, who could resist it? There, plants of extraordinary tenacity grew; it was the jungle of sentiment.

    The man who lost his way in that jungle became affected by noxious exhalations and eventually turned into a kind of unsightly monster. No one has a right to laugh. The difference is only a matter of degree. In the world of homosexuality, no man has the power to resist the mysterious force that drags people down willy-nilly into the wallow of sentiment. A man might, for instance, resist by turning to a busy occupation, or intellectual pursuit, or art, and cling to the higher intellectual levels of the masculine world. No man, however, can withstand the flood of emotion that cascades into his life . . . ." (Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors)



    For now I think he might have been Ni-ENFj (EIE-ILI), although I wouldn't rule out some irrational type like INTp, or even ENTj-INFj (if he really was an LIE).
    Last edited by HERO; 01-15-2014 at 09:38 PM.

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    I was obsessed with Mishima when I was 19. I'd say Ej through and through and agree with LIE-Ni. I've always thought about the coup as Mishima first and foremost looking for an honourable way to die alongside the hope that his suicide would affect the world around him in a non-immediate way. I don't find the idea that he genuinely thought his speech would inspire a coup right then and there believable.

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    bump

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    ILI or ILE

    - from Mishima’s “The Temple of Dawn”; p. 11-7:

    On the opposite bank, the sun was sinking behind Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn. An all-pervading evening glow filled the vast sky over the flat vista of the Thon Buri jungle, broken only by two or three spires silhouetted against the horizon. Like cotton the green of the forest absorbed the glow, changing it to a truly emerald hue. Sampans passed by, crows gathered in great numbers, and a soiled rose color lingered in the river water.

    “All art is like the evening glow,” said Hishikawa, watching as he always did when he was preparing to express an opinion, for the effect his words would have on his listener. Honda felt annoyed by these points of silence even more than by Hishikawa’s continuous chatter.

    Hishikawa’s profile with its cheeks of Siamese swarthiness and the non-Siamese pasty, taut skin gleamed in the last rays of the sun that came from the opposite bank.

    “Art is a colossal evening glow,” he repeated. “It’s the burnt offering of all the best things of an era. Even the clearest logic that has long thrived in daylight is completely destroyed by the meaningless lavish explosion of color in the evening sky; even history, apparently destined to endure forever, is abruptly made aware of its own end. Beauty stands before everyone; it renders human endeavor completely futile. Before the brilliance of evening, before the surging evening clouds, all rot about some ‘better future’ immediately fades away. The present moment is all; the air is filled with a poison of color. What’s beginning? Nothing. Everything is ending.

    “There’s nothing of substance in it. Of course, night has its own intrinsic nature: the cosmic essence of death and inorganic existence. Day too has its own entity; everything human belongs to the day.

    “But there’s no substance in the evening glow. It’s nothing but a joke, a meaningless, but impressive joke of form and light and color. Look . . . look at the purple clouds. Nature seldom offers a banquet of such a lavish color as purple. Evening clouds are an insult to anything symmetric, but such destruction of order is closely connected with the breakup of something much more fundamental. If the serene white daytime cloud may be compared to moral exaltation, then these riotous colors have nothing to do with morality.

    “The arts predict the greatest vision of the end; before anything else they prepare for and embody the end. Gourmets and good wines, beautiful forms and sumptuous clothes—every extravagance human beings can dream up in one era is crammed into the arts. All such things have been awaiting form. Some form with which to pillage and destroy in the shortest time all of human living. And that is the evening glow. And to what purpose? Indeed, for nothing.

    “The most delicate thing, the most fastidious aesthetic judgment of the minutest detail—I refer to the indescribably subtle contours of one of those orange-colored clouds—is related to the universality of the vast firmament; its innermost aspects are expressed in color, and uniting with external aspects, they become the evening glow.

    “In other words, evening glow is expression. And expression alone is the function of the evening glow.

    “In it, the slightest human shyness, joy, anger, displeasure is expressed on a heavenly scale. 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 the 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.

    “The evening glow is swift and possesses the characteristics of flight. It constitutes perhaps the wings of the world. Like the wings of a hummingbird which change into rainbow colors as it flutters about sucking the honey from flowers, the world shows us a brief glimpse of its potentiality for soaring; all things in the evening glow fly rapturous and ecstatic . . . and then in the end fall to the ground and die.”

    As Honda listened desultorily to Hishikawa’s words, the sky above the opposite bank was already slowly sinking into dusk, leaving a faint gleam on the horizon.

    Had he claimed that all art was evening glow? Yet there stood the Temple of Dawn!



    Honda had crossed over to the other bank on a hired boat early the previous morning and visited the Temple of Dawn.

    He had done this precisely at sunrise, a most fitting time. It was still darkish, and only the very tip of the pagoda caught the first rays of the rising sun. The Thon Buri jungle beyond was filled with the piercing cries of birds.

    As he approached, he realized that the pagoda was all inlaid with countless fragments of Chinese porcelain of either red or blue glaze. Each tier was marked by a balustrade; the one on the first story was brown, on the second green, and on the third a purplish blue. Countless porcelain dishes that had been placed there formed flowers: yellow ones represented the cores from which extended petals of plates. Some had a core of inverted lavender wine cups and here colorful golden dishes formed the petals. Chains of such flowers ascended to the summit. The leaves were all tile; and from the top, four white elephant trunks hung down at the four cardinal points.

    The repetitiveness and the sumptuousness of the pagoda were almost suffocating. The tower with its color and brilliance, adorned in many layers and graduated toward the peak, gave one the impression of so many strata of dream sequences hovering overhead. The plinths of the extremely steep stairs were also heavily festooned and each tier was supported by a bas-relief of birds with human faces. They formed a multicolored pagoda whose every level was crushed with layers of dreams, expectations, prayers, each being further weighted down with still other stories, pyramid-like, progressing skyward.

    With the first rays of dawn over the Menam River, the tens of thousands of porcelain fragments turned into so many tiny mirrors that captured the light. A great structure of mother-of-pearl sparkling riotously.

    The pagoda had long served as a morning bell tolled by its rich hues, resonant colors responding to the dawn. They were created so as to evoke a beauty, a power, an explosiveness like the dawn itself.

    In the eerie, yellowish brown morning light reflecting ruddily in the Menam River, the pagoda cast its shining reflection, presaging the coming of still another sweltering day.


    “I’m sure you’ve had enough of temples. Tonight I’ll take you someplace amusing,” said Hishikawa. Honda was gazing absently at the Temple of Dawn, now completely enveloped in darkness.

    “You’ve seen Wat Po and Wat Phra Keo. And when you went to the Marble Temple, you were lucky enough to see the Regent’s visit. And yesterday morning you saw the Temple of Dawn. There’s no end to temple-visiting if you’ve got a mind for it, but I think you’ve had enough.”

    “Hm. I suppose I have,” Honda replied vaguely, reluctant to let the thoughts in which he was so deeply absorbed be interrupted.

    He had been musing about Kiyoaki’s old Dream Diary, which he had not glanced at for so long, but which he had brought along in the bottom of his suitcase, thinking he might read it again to help pass time during his journey. Because of the intolerable heat and his weariness, he had not had the opportunity to do so until now. But the brilliant tropical colors in the description of a dream about which he had read long ago were still vivid in his mind.

    Indeed, being so busy, Honda had not accepted the trip to Thailand for purely business reasons. In his school days, at a most sensitive age, he had, through Kiyoaki, become acquainted with two Siamese princes and had witnessed the pathetic end of Chantrapa’s love story and the loss of Prince Pattanadid’s emerald ring. Because of the overwhelming realization that he was destined to be an observer, the hazy picture in his memory had been ultimately preserved in a strong and solid frame. Long ago he had firmly resolved that he must visit Siam one day.

    Yet on the other hand, Honda at forty-six had become most wary of his slightest emotions; unconsciously he had fallen into the habit of detecting deceit and exaggeration in them. He mused that his last passion had been for saving Isao, the boy whom he had discovered to be the reincarnation of Kiyoaki. He had even given up his judgeship. It had led to naught, and he had experienced only a shattering failure that had borne home to him the total futility of altruism.

    Having abandoned altruistic ideals, he had become a much better lawyer. No longer having any passions, he was successful in saving others in one case after the other. He accepted no assignment unless the client was wealthy, no matter whether the case was civil or criminal. The Honda family prospered far more than in his father’s time.

    Poor lawyers who acted as though they were the natural representatives of social justice and advertised themselves as such were ludicrous. Honda was well aware of the limitations of law as far as saving people was concerned. To put it candidly, those who could not afford to engage lawyers were not qualified to break the law, but most people made mistakes and violated the law out of sheer necessity or stupidity.

    There were times when it seemed to Honda that giving legal standards to the vast majority of people was probably the most arrogant game mankind had thought up. If crimes were often committed out of necessity or stupidity, could one not perhaps claim that the mores and customs upon which such laws were based were also idiotic?

    After the incident with the League of the Divine Wind in the Showa period that ended in Isao’s death, many similar events had taken place, but internal turmoil in Japan had stopped with the events of February 26, 1936. The China Incident, which had begun shortly thereafter, remained inconclusive even after five years of fighting. And now the pact binding Japan, Germany, and Italy had provided a strong stimulus; and the danger of war between Japan and the United States had become a frequent topic of discussion.

    But as Honda was no longer interested in the passage of time, political battles, or the imminence of war, he no longer felt any emotion about them. Something had collapsed in the innermost recess of his heart. He knew that he was powerless to arrest events which went storming on like rain squalls, drenching every insignificant person, beating indiscriminately upon the individual pebbles of fortune. But it was not clear to him whether all fortunes were ultimately pathetic. It was history’s wont to progress by granting the wishes of some and by denying those of others. No matter how distressing the future might prove to be, it did not necessarily disappoint everyone.

    However, one must not suppose that Honda had become a complete nihilist and cynic. Compared to the past he was quite cheerful and gay.


    - p. 20-26:

    His age enabled him to use the laws taught him by experience as measurements, and he could foretell the outcome of most situations. Actually, except for natural calamities, historical events occurred, no matter how unexpected they might seem, only after long maturation. History is as hesitant as a young maiden before a romantic proposal. For Honda there was always a hint of the artificial in any event that corresponded precisely to his own wishes and that approached at a pleasing speed. Therefore, if he wanted to entrust his actions to the laws of history it was always best for him to adopt a reserved attitude toward everything. He had seen too many instances where one could get nothing one wanted and where determination had ultimately been quite futile. Even things which one should have been able to obtain if one had not craved them managed to slip away simply because they had been coveted too much. Suicide seemed so completely dependent on one’s own desire and resolve, yet Isao had had to spend a whole year in prison in order to carry it out successfully.

    However, on reflection, Isao’s act of assassination and his suicide seemed like brilliant evening stars, harbingers, in a night filled with glittering constellations, that led the way to the February Twenty-Sixth Incident. To be sure, the assassins had hoped for dawn, but what materialized was night. And now, be the times what they may, that night was almost spent, and an uneasy, stifling morning had settled in, one that none of those activists would have imagined.

    The treaty drawn up by Japan, Germany, and Italy had angered a segment of the nationalists and those who were pro-French and pro-English; but the great majority of those who liked Europe and the West and even the old-fashioned proponents of a pan-Asia were pleased about it. Japan was to be married, not to ******, but to the German forests; not to Mussolini, but to the Roman pantheon. It was a pact joining German, Roman, and Japanese mythology: a friendship among the beautiful, masculine, pagan gods of East and West.

    Honda, of course, had never submitted to such romantic prejudice, but he sensed that the times were somehow tremulously ripening and it was clear that some dream was forming. And now that he was here, away from Tokyo, the sudden rest and leisure resulted curiously in fatigue, and he could do nothing to prevent this plunge into reminiscing about things past.

    He had not abandoned his idea, the one he had stressed long, long ago when talking with the nineteen-year-old Kiyoaki: the will to engage oneself in history is the essence of human purpose. Yet the instinctive fear that a nineteen-year-old boy has about his own character turns out, at times, to be extremely prophetic. While proclaiming such a concept, Honda at the time was in reality expressing despair in his own makeup. This despondency increased as he grew older and finally became a chronic ailment. But his personality had never changed in the slightest. He recalled a most terrifying passage from the chapter on the Three Recompenses* in the Treatise on the Establishment of Reality, which was among the two or three Buddhist texts recommended by the Abbess of the Gesshu Temple:

    “That one takes pleasure in doing evil
    Is because that evil is not ripe.”

    *That is, recompensation in the present life for deeds already done, in the next rebirth for deeds now done, and in subsequent lives. (Translator’s note.)

    Thus, Honda took a listless, tropical pleasure in the gracious reception he had met in Bangkok, in what he heard and saw, and even in what he ate and drank. But that was not really proof that he had been guiltless of evil acts in the nearly fifty years of his life. His evil was surely not yet so ripe as the fragrant fruit ready to fall of itself from the branch.


    In Thai Theravada Buddhism with the artless concept of causality found in the Southern Buddhist Canon, Honda recognized the causality of the Laws of Manu that had impressed him so deeply in his youth. Throughout, Hindu deities show their grotesque faces. The sacred naga-serpent, the mythical garuda, half giant, half eagle with golden body, white face, and red wings, which adorn the eaves of the temples, still recount the stories of the Nagananda, the seventh-century Indian epic, and the filial piety of garuda is acclaimed by the Hindu Vishnu.

    Since coming to this land, Honda’s former intellectual curiosity had been piqued, and he was eager to discover how Theravada Buddhism explained the mystery of transmigration. It was this concept that provided him the opportunity of casting aside half a lifetime of rationality.

    According to scholars, Indian religious philosophy is divided into six periods:

    1. The period of the Rig Veda.

    2. The period of the Brahmanas.


    3. The period of the Upanishads, which extends from the eighth to the fifth centuries B.C., an era of self-conscious philosophy, establishing as its ideal the unity of Brahma, the ultimate ground of all being, and atman, “self.” The idea of a cycle of births and deaths—samsara—appeared clearly for the first time in this period, and when linked to the concept that acts (karma) bring inevitable consequences the law of causality came into being. By coupling that with the idea of atman, a philosophical system emerged.

    4. A period of schism among various schools of thought.


    5. The period of perfection of Theravada Buddhism, occurring between the third and first centuries B.C.

    6. The ensuing five hundred years which saw the rise of Mahayana Buddhism.


    The problem is the fifth period, in which the Laws of Manu were compiled. Honda had been surprised when in his youth he had discovered that the concept of samsara was applied even to law codes. The idea of karma as it appears later in Buddhism was distinctly different from that in the Upanishads: the difference lay in Buddhism’s denial of atman, for such denial is the essense of this religion.

    One of the three characteristics which differentiate Buddhism from other religions is that of the selflessness of all the dharmas. Buddhism advocated selflessness and denied atman, which had been considered to be the main constituent of life. It followed that Buddhism rejected the idea of “soul,” which is the extension of atman into the hereafter. Buddhism does not recognize the soul as such. If there is no core substance called soul in beings, there is, of course, none in inorganic matter. Indeed, quite like a jellyfish devoid of bone, there is no innate essence in all of creation.

    But then the troublesome question arises: if good acts produce a good subsequent existence and evil acts a bad one, and if, indeed, everything returns to nothingness following death, what then is the transmigrating substance? If we assume there is no self, what is the basis of the birth-and-death cycle to start with?

    The three hundred years of Theravada Buddhism constitute a period of dispute and conflict among many schools which resulted in no satisfactory logical conclusion for any given one. All were embarrassed by the contradictions and inconsistencies that existed between the atman, that Buddhism denied, and karma, which it inherited.

    For a credible philosophical answer to this question, mankind had to await the Mahayana school called Yuishiki, or “consciousness only.” But when the Theravada Sautrantika school evolved, the concept of “seed perfuming” was established, according to which the effect of a good or bad deed remains in one’s consciousness, permeating it as the fragrance of perfume permeates clothes, and thus forms character. This power of forming was the origin of the causal theory. The doctrine was the precursor of later Yuishiki ideas.

    And now Honda realized what was behind the constant smile and the melancholy eyes of the two Siamese princes. It was a feeling of heavy, golden listlessness, of lulling breezes beneath the trees—the constant evasion of any organized logical system; oppressed and languid in the sun, the people of this land of sumptuous temples and flowers and fruits faithfully worshipped the Buddha and believed implicitly in reincarnation.

    Prince Kridsada aside, the intelligent Prince Pattanadid had had, surprisingly, the sharp mind of a philosopher. Yet the violence of his emotions swept away any dispassionate intellectualism. Honda still remembered most vividly, more than any words the Prince had spoken, the sight of him fainting that end of summer on the lawn chair at Kiyoaki’s southern villa on hearing the news of Chantrapa’s death. His tanned arm dangled limply from the white armrest. Honda could not see if the Prince’s face, resting against his shoulder, had turned pale, but his brilliant white teeth were visible between slightly parted lips.

    His long, elegant brown fingers, meant for the subtle caresses of love, hung loosely, almost touching the green summer grass, as though all five had momentarily followed in death the deceased object of his desire.



    However, Honda feared that the princes’ recollection of Japan might not be very pleasant, though the passage of time could well have made them miss it even more. Their isolation, their language difficulties, the different customs, Prince Pattanadid’s loss of his emerald ring, and the death of Princess Chantrapa had made their stay in Japan something less than enjoyable. But what had ultimately turned away their understanding was the intimidating Swordsmen’s Team spirit at the Peers School. This had alienated not only the princes but also ordinary students like Honda and Kiyoaki and the liberal and humanistic young men of the White Birch literary society. Unfortunately, the real Japan was not easily found among the friends of the princes, but was much more present among their enemies; the princes themselves were probably vaguely aware of this. An uncompromising Japan, as proud as a young warrior in scarlet silk, and yet as sensitive as a young boy challenging to battle before he is taunted and charging to his death before accepting insult. Isao was different from Kiyoaki, for he lived in the center of this radical world and believed in the existence of the soul.

    Approaching fifty, Honda now possessed one advantage: he was probably free of prejudice. Of authority too, for he himself had once been authority; and even of reason, since he had once been the personification of cerebration.

    Even the spirit of the Swordsmen’s Team in the second decade of the century was one of youth in uniform; it pervaded the entire era. And Honda too, who had never been a part of it, now that he was older did not hesitate to identify in his memory those youthful days with an aggressive spirit.

    This temper, further distilled and purified, formed Isao’s world, one Honda had not shared with him in his younger days, one he had observed only as an outsider. Noting how Isao’s youthful Japanese mind, struggling in absolute isolation, had destroyed itself, Honda could not but realize that what had permitted him to live the way he had was the strength of Western thought, imported from the outside. Unfertilized thinking brings death.

    If one wished to live, one must not cling to purity, as Isao had done. One must not cut oneself off from all channels of retreat; one must not reject everything.

    Nothing had ever forced Honda to probe the question of an unadulterated Japan more deeply than had Isao’s death. Was there any way to live honestly with Japan other than by rejecting everything, than by rejecting present-day Japan and the Japanese people? Was there no other way of living than this most difficult one, in which ultimately one murdered and then committed suicide? Everyone was afraid to say, but had not Isao given proof by his acts?

    On reflection, in the purest of tribes there was the smell of blood and the taint of savagery. Unlike the Spaniards, who preserved their national sport of bullfighting despite the accusations of animal lovers throughout the world, the Japanese, when the nation had embraced a new culture and ethic at the end of the last century, turned their efforts to eliminating the barbaric customs of preceding generations. As a result, the genuine, unadulterated national spirit was subordinated, its energy erupting from time to time in explosions of violence which repelled and alienated the people even more.

    However, whatever frightening mask it might assume, the national spirit in its original state was of pristine whiteness. Traveling through a country like Thailand, Honda realized more clearly than ever the simplicity and purity of things Japanese, like transparent stream water through which one could glimpse pebbles below, or the probity of Shinto rites. Honda’s life was not imbued with such spirit. Like the majority of Japanese he ignored it, behaving as though it did not exist and surviving by escaping from it. All his life he had dodged things fundamental and artless: white silk, clear cold water, the zigzag white paper of the exorciser’s staff fluttering in the breeze, the sacred precinct marked by a torii, the gods’ dwelling in the sea, the mountains, the vast ocean, the Japanese sword with its glistening blade so pure and sharp. Not only Honda, but the vast majority of Westernized Japanese, could no longer stand such intensely native elements.



    - from The Times Literary Supplement (December 12, 2014); p. 26:

    I was around for [Tennesee William’s] many flops. When I first came to New York at the beginning of the 1960’s, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, starring Hermione Baddeley, was a huge commercial failure on Broadway (it opened during the newspaper strike). The following autumn it was revived with Talullah Bankhead, who lurched her way through it drunkenly for a day or two. I had always heard that Williams himself chose Bankhead, but Lahr taught me she had been forced on him. Over the years I faithfully attended the openings of the ill-fated Out Cry (Michael York played the brother trapped in a theatre with his sister), The Seven Descents of Myrtle and The Gnadiges Fraulein. In each case, the critics savaged him – [Tennessee] Williams told his friend, Yukio Mishima, he felt he’d been ravaged without Vaseline by a troop of elephants.



    - from Collected Essays: 1952-1972 by Gore Vidal (“The Death of Mishima”):

    A white silky beach just south of Madras. Blue sea full of sharks, blue sky full of clouds like egret plumes. Nearby, half in the water, half on the beach, the gray-violet pyramid of a Hindu temple gradually dissolving as the sea with each century rises. In the foreground, the body of a man, headless, armless, with only one leg whose flesh stops at the knee. Below the knee, a bright beautiful white bone around which a rope has been knotted. The angle of the bone indicates that the man’s legs and arms had been tied together behind him. Coolly, I become coroner. Speculate sagely on the length of time the man has been dead. Draw my companions’ attention to the fact that there is not a drop of blood left in the body: at first glance we thought it a scarecrow, a bundle of white and gray rags—then saw real muscles laid bare, ropy integuments, the shin bone, and knew someone had been murdered, thrown into the sea alive. But who? And why? Definitely not Chinese, I decide (not only am I at heart a coroner—redundancy—but I am also a geographer of Strabo’s school).

    I am interrupted by the arrival of a small Tamil girl resembling the late Fanny Brice. She glares at the corpse. “Not nice, not nice at all!” She shakes her head disapprovingly, hopes we won’t get a wrong impression of India. As we do our best to reassure her, we are joined by a friend with a newspaper: Yukio Mishima has committed seppuku (the proper word for harakiri) in the office of Japan’s commanding general; his head was then hacked from his body by an aide…. We read the bloody details with wonder. Such is the power of writing (to those addicted to reading) that the actual corpse at our feet became less real than the vivid idea of the bodyless head of Mishima, a man my exact contemporary whose career in so many ways resembled my own, though not to the degree that certain writers of book-chat in the Fifties thought.


    Tokyo. Unbeautiful but alive and monstrously, cancerously growing, just as New York City—quite as unbeautiful—is visibly dying, its rot a way of life. That will be Tokyo’s future, too, but for the moment the mood is one of boom. Official and mercantile circles are euphoric. Elsewhere, unease.

    I meet with a leader of the Left currently giving aid to those GIs who find immoral their country’s murder of Asiatics. He is not sanguine about Japan. “We don’t know who we are since the war. The break with the old culture has left us adrift. Yet we are still a family.”

    The first thing the traveler in Japan notices is that the people resemble each other, with obvious variations, much the way members of a family do, and this sense of a common identity was the source of their power in the past: all children of an emperor who was child of the sun. But the sun no longer rises for Japan—earth turns, in fact—and the head of the family putters about collecting marine specimens while his children are bored with their new prosperity, their ugly cities, their half-Western, half-Japanese culture, their small polluted islands.

    I ask the usual question: what do the Japanese think of the Americans? The answer is brisk: “Very little. Not like before. I was just reading an old Osaka newspaper. Fifty years ago a girl writes that her life ambition is to meet a Caucasian, an American, and become his mistress. All very respectable. But now there is a certain . . . disdain for the Americans. Of course Vietnam is part of it.” One is soon made aware in Tokyo of the Japanese contempt not only for the American imperium but for its cultural artifacts. Thoguh not a zealous defender of my country, I find goading its Tokyo detractors irresistible, at least in literary matters. After all, for some decades now, Japan’s most popular (and deeply admired) writer has been W. Somerset Maugham.

    We spoke of Mishima’s death and the possibility of a return to militarism. Two things which were regarded as one by the world press. But my informant saw no political motive in Mishima’s death. “It was a personal gesture. A dramatic gesture. The sort of thing he would do. You know he had a private army. Always marching around in uniform. Quite mad. Certainly he had no serious political connections with the right wing.”

    Mishima’s suicide had a shattering effect on the entire Japanese family. For one thing, he was a famous writer. This meant he was taken a good deal more seriously by the nation (family) than any American writer is ever taken by those warring ethnic clans whose mutual detestation is the essential fact of the American way of life. Imagine Paul Goodman’s suicide in General Westmoreland’s office as reported by The New York Times on page 22. “Paul Goodman, writer, aged 59, shot himself in General Westmoreland’s office as a protest to American foreign policy. At first, General Westmoreland could not be reached for comment. Later in the day, an aide said that the General, naturally, regretted Mr. Goodman’s action, which was based upon a ‘patent misunderstanding of America’s role in Asia.’ Mr. Goodman was the author of a number of books and articles. One of his books was called Growing Up Absurd. He is survived by . . .” An indifferent polity.

    But Mishima at forty-five was Japan’s apparent master of all letters, superb jack of none. Or in the prose of a Knopf blurb writer,


    He began his brilliantly successful career in 1944 by winning a citation from the Emperor as the highest-ranking honor student at graduation from the Peers’ School. In 1947 he was graduated from Tokyo Imperial University School of Jurisprudence. Since his first novel was published, in 1948, he has produced a baker’s dozen of novels, translations of which have by now appeared in fifteen countries; seventy-four short stories; a travel book; and many articles, including two in English (appearing in Life and Holiday).

    About ten films were made from his novels. The Sound of Waves (1956) was filmed twice, and one of Ishikawa’s masterpieces, Enjo, was based on The Temple of the Golden Pavillion (1959). . . .

    He has acted the title role in a gangster film, and American television audiences have seen him on “The Twentieth Century” and on Edward R. Murrow’s “Small World.” Despite a relentless work schedule, Mr. Mishima has managed to travel widely in the United States and Europe. His home is in Tokyo, with his wife and two children.



    The range, variety, and publicness of the career sound ominously familiar to me. Also each of us might be said by those innocent of literature to have been influenced (as a certain “news” magazine gaily wrote of Mishima) “by Proust and Gide.” The fact that Proust and Gide resembled one another not at all (or either of us) is irrelevant to the “news” magazine’s familiar purpose—the ever-popular sexual smear job which has so long made atrocious the American scene.

    The American press, by and large, played up two aspects of the suicide: Mishima’s homosexuality and his last confused harangue to the troops, demanding a return to militarism and ancient virtue. The Japanese reaction was more knowledgeable and various than the American. It was also occasionally dotty. Professor Yozo Horigome of Tokyo University found “a striking resemblance” between Mishima’s suicide and the death of Thomas à Beckett, as reported by T. S. Eliot! Apparently the good professor had been working up some notes on Eliot and so absorbed was he in his task that any self-willed death smacked of high jinks at Canterbury Cathedral. Taruho Inagaki thought that by extraverting his narcissism, Mishima could not continue as writer or man. Inagaki also observed, somewhat mysteriously, that since Mishima lacked “nostalgia,” his later work tended to be artificial and unsatisfactory.

    Professor Taku Yamada of Kanazawa University compared Mishima’s suicide to that of an early nineteenth-century rebel against the Shogunate—a virtuous youth who had been influenced (like Mishima) by the fifteenth-century Chinese scholar Wang Yang-ming, who believed that “to know and to act are one and the same.” The Japanese, the professor noted, in adapting this philosophy to their own needs, simplified it into a sort of death cult with the caveat “one is not afraid of the death of body, but fears the death of mind.” Yamada seems to be closest to the mark, if one is to regard as a last will and testament Mishima’s curious apologia Sun and Steel, published a few months before his death.

    The opening sentences set the tone:


    Of late, I have come to sense within myself an accumulation of all kinds of things that cannot find adequate expression via an objective artistic form such as the novel. A lyric poet of twenty might manage it, but I am twenty no longer.


    Right off, the obsession with age. In an odd way, writers often predict their own futures. I doubt if Mishima was entirely conscious when he wrote Forbidden Colors at the age of twenty-five that he was drawing a possible portrait of himself at sixty-five: the famous, arid man of letters Sunsuke (his first collected edition was published at forty-five) “who hated the naked truth. He held firmly to the belief that any part of one’s talent . . . which revealed itself spontaneously was a fraud.” The old writer amuses himself during his last days by deliberately corrupting a beautiful youth (unhappily, the aesthetic influence of Dorian Gray is stronger here than that of Les Liaisons Dangereuses) whose initials are—such is the division even at twenty-five in Yukio Mishima—Y. M. The author is both beautiful blank youth and ancient seducer of mind. At the end the youth is left in limbo, heir to Shunsuke who, discreetly, gratefully, kills himsef having used Y. M. to cause considerable mischief to others.

    Mishima’s novels are pervaded with death. In an early work, Thirst for Love (1950), a young widow reflects that “it was an occult thing, that sacrificial death she dreamed of, a suicide proffered not so much in mourning for her husband’s death as in envy of that death.” Later, in Forbidden Colors, “Suicide, whether a lofty thing or lowly, is rather a suicide of thought itself; in general, a suicide in which the subject does not think too much does not exist.” Not the most elegant of sentences. The translator A. H. Marks usually writes plain American English with only an occasional “trains shrilling” or women “feeling nauseous.” Yet from Mr. Mark’s prose it is hard to determine whether or not Mishima’s writing possesses much distinction in the original. I found Donald Keene’s rendering of the dialogue of Mishima’s Nō plays unusually eloquent and precise, the work of a different writer, one would say, or is it (heart sinking) simply the distinguished prose of a different translator who has got closer to the original. Unable to read Japanese, I shall never know. Luckily, United Statesmen have no great interest in language, preferring to wrestle with Moral Problems, and so one may entirely ignore the quality of the line (which is all that a writer has of his own) in order to deal with his Ideas, which are of course the property of all, and usually the least interesting thing about him.

    Mishima refers to Sun and Steel as “confidential criticism.” He tells us how he began his life as one besotted with words. And although he does not say so directly, one senses from his career (fame at nineteen, a facility for every kind of writing) that things were perhaps too easy for him. It must have seemed to him (and to his surprisingly unbitter contemporaries) that there was nothing he could not do in the novel, the essay, the drama. Yet only in his reworking of the Nō plays does he appear to transcend competence and make (to a foreign eye) literature. One gets the impression that he was the sort of writer who is reluctant to take the next hard step after the first bravura mastery of a form. But then he was, he tells us, aware from the beginning of “two contradictory tendencies within myself. One was the determination to press ahead loyally with the corrosive function of words, to make that my life’s work. The other was the desire to encounter reality in some field where words should play no part.”

    This is the romantic’s traditional and peculiar agony. There is no internal evidence that Mishima read D. H. Lawrence (his rather insistent cultural references consist of hymns in the Winckelmann manner to Greek statuary and the dropping of names like Pater, Beardsley, Poe, Baudelaire, de Sade), but one recognizes a similar tension in Mishima’s work. The fascination with the bodies of others (in Mishima’s case the young male with a “head like a young bull,” “rows of flashing teeth”—sometimes it seems that his ideal is equipped with more than the regulation set of choppers—“wearing sneakers”), and the vain hope of somehow losing oneself in another’s identity, fusing two bodies into something new and strange. But though homosexual encounters are in themselves quite as exciting as heterosexual encounters (more so, claim the great pederasts whose testimony echoes down the ages), it is not easy to build a universal philosophy on a kind of coupling that involves no procreative mystery—only momentary delight involving, if one is so minded, the enactment of ritual, the imposition of fantasy, the deliberate act of imagination without which there is no such thing as love or its philosophy, romanticism.


    To judge from Mishima’s writing, his love ritual was a complex one, and at the core of his madness. He quickly tired of the promiscuity which is so much easier for the homosexualist than for the heterosexualist. More to the point, Mishima could not trick himself into thinking, as Lawrence could, that a total surrender to the dark phallic god was a man’s highest goal. Mishima was too materialistic, too flesh-conscious for that. As for his own life, he married, had two children. But apparently sought pleasure elsewhere. A passage from one of the novels sounds as if taken from life. Mishima describes the bedding of a new husband and wife.


    Yuichi’s first night had been a model of the effort of desire, an ingenious impersonation that deceived an unexperienced buyer. . . . On the second night the successful impersonation became a faithful impersonation of an impersonation. . . . In the dark room the two of them slowly became four people. The intercourse of the real Yuichi with the boy he had made Yasuko into, and the intercourse of the makeshift Yuichi—imagining he could love a woman—with the real Yasuko had to go forward simultaneously.



    One looks forward to the widow Mishima’s memoirs.


    In Sun and Steel Mishima describes the flowering of his own narcissism (a noun always used in a pejorative sense by the physically ill-favored) and his gradual realization that flesh is all. What is the “steel” of the title? Nothing more portentous than weight lifting, though he euphemizes splendidly in the French manner. Working on pecs and lats, Mishima found peace and a new sense of identity. “If the body could achieve perfect, nonindividual harmony, then it would be possible to shut individuality up forever in close confinement.” It is easy to make fun of Mishima, particularly when his threnody to steel begins to sound like a brochure for Vic Tanney, but there is no doubt that in an age where there is little use for the male body’s thick musculature, the deliberate development of that body is as good a pastime as any, certainly quite as legitimate a religion as Lawrence’s blood consciousness, so much admired in certain literary quarters.


    To Mishima the body is what one is; and a weak sagging body cannot help but contain a spirit to match. In moments of clarity (if not charity) Mishima is less stern with the soft majority, knows better. Nevertheless, “bulging muscles, a taut stomach and a tough skin, I reasoned, would correspond respectively to an intrepid fighting spirit. . . .”


    Why did he want this warrior spirit? Why did he form a private army of dedicated ephebi? He is candid.


    Specifically, I cherished a romantic impulse toward death, yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle; a peculiar sense of destiny made me believe that the reason why my romantic impulse toward death remained unfulfilled in reality was the immensely simple fact that I lacked the necessary physical qualifications.


    There it is. For ten years he developed his body in order to kill it ritually in the most public way possible.

    This is grandstanding of a sort far beyond the capacity of our local product. Telling Bobby Kennedy to go fuck himself at the White House is trivial indeed when compared to the high drama of cutting oneself open with a dagger and then submitting to decapitation before the army’s chief of staff.

    It should be noted, however, that Japanese classicists were appalled. “So vulgar,” one of them told me, wincing at the memory. “Seppuku must be performed according to a precise and elegant ritual, in private, not” (a shudder) “in a general’s office with a dozen witnesses. But then Mishima was entirely Westernized.” I think this is true. Certainly he was devoted to French nineteenth-century writing, preferring Huysmans to Flaubert. In fact, his literary taste is profoundly corny, but then what one culture chooses to select from another is always a mysterious business. Gide once spoke to me with admiration of James M. Cain, adding, quite gratuitously, that he could not understand why anyone admired E. M. Forster.

    Yet Mishima’s passion for physical strength has no counterpart in Western letters. Few of the bourgeois inky men who created Western literature ever believed that the beauty of the sword was:


    . . . in its allying death not with pessimism and impotence but with abounding energy, the flower of physical perfection and the will to fight. Nothing could be farther removed from the principle of literature. In literature, death is held in check yet at the same time used as a driving force; strength is devoted to the construction of empty fictions; life is held in reserve, blended to just the right degree with death, treated with preservatives, and lavished on the production of works of art that possess a weird eternal life. Action—one might say—perishes with the blossom. Literature is an imperishable flower. And an imperishable flower, of course, is an artificial flower. Thus to combine action and art is to combine the flower that wilts and the flower that lasts forever . . .


    It is often wise (or perhaps compassionate is the better word) to allow an artist, if not the last, the crucial say on what he meant to make of himself and his life. Yet between what Mishima thought he was doing and what he did there is still confusion. When I arrived in Japan journalists kept asking me what I thought of his death. At first I thought they were simply being polite. I was vague, said I could not begin to understand an affair which seemed to me so entirely Japanese. I spoke solemnly of different cultures, different traditions. Told them that in the West we kill ourselves when we can’t go on the way we would like to: a casual matter, really—there is no seppuku for us, only the shotgun or the bottle. But now that I have read Sun and Steel and a dozen of Mishima’s early works, some for the first time, I see that what he did was entirely idiosyncratic. Here then, belatedly, the coroner’s report on the headless body in the general’s office.

    Forty-five is a poignant time for the male, particularly for one who has been acutely conscious of his own body as well as those of others. Worshiping the flesh’s health and beauty (American psychiatrists are particularly offended by this kind of obsession) is as valid an aesthetic—even a religion—as any other, though more tragic than most, for in the normal course half a life must be lived within the ruin of what one most esteemed. For Mishima the future of that body he had worked so hard to make worthy of a classic death (or life) was somber. Not all the sun and steel can save the aging athlete.


    Yet Mishima wanted a life of the flesh, of action, divorced from words. Some interpreted this to mean that he dreamed of becoming a sort of warlord, restoring to Japan its ancient military virtues. But I think Mishima was after something much simpler: the exhaustion of the flesh in physical exercise, in bouts of love, in such adventures as becoming a private soldier for a few weeks in his middle age or breaking the sound barrier with a military jet.

    Certainly Mishima did not have a political mind. He was a Romantic Artist in a very fin de siècle French way. But instead of deranging the senses through drugs, Mishima tried to lose his conscious mind (his art) through the use and worship of his own flesh and that of others. Finally, rather than face the slow bitter dissolution of the incarnate self, he chose to die. He could not settle for the common fate, could not echo the healthy dryness of the tenth-century poet (in the Kokinshu) who wrote: “If only when one heard/ that old age was coming/ one could bolt the door/ and refuse to meet him!” The Romantic showman chose to die as he had lived, in a blaze of publicity.

    Now for some moralizing in the American manner. Mishima’s death is explicable. Certainly he has prepared us, and himself, for it. In a most dramatic way the perishable flower is self-plucked. And there are no political overtones. But what of the artificial flowers he left behind? Mishima was a writer who mastered every literary form, up to a point. Reading one of his early novels, I was disturbed by an influence I recognized but could not place right off. The book was brief, precise, somewhat reliant on coup de théâtre, rather too easy in what it attempted but elegant and satisfying in a conventional way like . . . like Anatole France, whom I had not read since adolescence. Le Lys Rouge, I wrote in the margin. No sooner had I made this note than there appeared in the text the name Anatole France. I think this is the giveaway. Mishima was fatally drawn to what is easy in art.

    Technically, Mishima’s novels are unadventurous. This is by no means a fault. But it is a commentary on his art that he never made anything entirely his own. He was too quickly satisfied with familiar patterns and by no means the best. Only in his reworking of the Nō plays does Mishima, paradoxically, seem “original,” glittering and swift in his effects, like Ibsen at the highest. What one recalls from the novels are simply fleshly obsessions and sadistic reveries: invariably the beloved youth is made to bleed while that sailor who fell from grace with the sea (the nature of this grace is never entirely plain) gets cut to pieces by a group of pubescent males. The conversations about art are sometimes interesting but seldom brilliant (in the American novel there are no conversations about art, a negative virtue, but still a virtue).


    There is in Mishima’s work, as filtered through his translators, no humor, little wit; there is irony, but of the W. Somerset Maugham variety . . . things are not what they seem, the respectable are secretly vicious. Incidentally, for those who think that Japanese culture is heavy, portentous, bloody, and ritual-minded (in other words, like Japanese samurai films), one should point out that neither of the founders of Japanese prose literature (the Lady Murasaki and Sei-Shonagon) was too profound for wit. In Sei-Shonagon’s case quite the contrary.

    As Japan’s most famous and busy writer, Mishima left not a garden but an entire landscape full of artificial flowers. But, Mishima notwithstanding, the artificial flower is quite as perishable as the real. It just makes a bigger mess when you try to recycle it. I suspect that much of his boredom with words* had to do with a temperamental lack of interest in them. The novels show no particular development over the years and little variety. In the later books, the obsessions tend to take over, which is never enough (if it were, the Marquis de Sade would be as great as the enemies of art claim).

    *A number of professional Nipponophiles were upset by this passage. Didn’t I know that Mishima (in the phrase of one academic lint-head) was “a consummate word-smith,” fascinated by language? I did. Boredom with words referred to Mishima’s account of the two contradictory tendencies in himself: the life of words versus the life of action. At the end romantic action won out; words failed him—in every sense.


    Mishima was a minor artist in the sense that, as Auden tells us, once the minor artist “has reached maturity and found himself he ceases to have a history. The major artist, on the other hand, is always re-finding himself, so that the history of his works recapitulates or mirrors the history of art.” Unable or unwilling to change his art, Mishima changed his life through sun, steel, death, and so became a major art-figure in the only way—I fear—our contemporaries are apt to understand: not through the work, but through the life. Mishima can now be ranked with such “great” American novelists as Hemingway (who never wrote a good novel) and Fitzgerald (who wrote only one). So maybe their books weren’t so good but they sure had interesting lives, and desperate last days. Academics will enjoy writing about Mishima for a generation or two. And one looks forward to their speculations as to what he might have written had he lived. Another A la recherche du temps perdu? or Les caves du Vatican? Neither, I fear. My Ouija board has already spelled out what was next on the drawing board: Of Human Bondage.

    Does any of this matter? I suspect not. After all, literature is no longer of very great interest even to the makers. It may well be that that current phenomenon, the writer who makes his life his art, is the most useful of all. If so, then perhaps Mishima’s artificial flowers were never intended to survive the glare of sun and steel or compete with his own fleshly fact, made bloody with an ax. What, after all, has a mask to confess except that it covers a skull? All honor then to a man who lived and died the way he wanted to. I only regret we never met, for friends found him a good companion, a fine drinking partner, and fun to cruise with.


    The New York Review of Books, June 17, 1971




    http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/.../#.WYiUa_krJJk

    Life was but a stage for Japan’s troubled genius (by Donald Richie)

    Though he is most famous as a novelist, Yukio Mishima was also a prolific dramatist. From 1949, when his first play was published, to 1969, the year before his death, he wrote more than 60 such works, nearly all of them staged in his lifetime.

    Writing plays seems to have come to him with conspicuous ease. “I started writing drama just as water flows toward a lower place,” he noted in “The Temptation of Drama,” one of the three essays included along with the five plays translated in this book. “In me, the topography of drama seemed to be situated far below that of novels. It seems to be in a place which is more instinctive, closer to child’s play.”

    Indeed, Mishima used to express astonishment that Tennessee Williams found playwriting so difficult that he could sometimes manage only a line or two a day. For Mishima, a play was simply based upon structural logic, “and once a structure is built . . . you write it in one stretch.”

    Perhaps because of this, Mishima’s plays were once considered to have less permanent value than his novels and stories. More recently, however, there has been a critical move to reassess them in terms of theatrical language, and today some critics rank them higher than the novels.

    They are, in some ways, products more typical of the author. Mishima’s life was itself a drama, carefully molded in the shape he desired with a real coup-de-theatre as the finale. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the drama of his life should be reflected in his plays, particularly the later ones.

    It is from these later works that Hiroaki Sato has selected four of the five plays here translated: “The Decline and Fall of the Suzaku,” “My Friend ******,” “The Terrace of the Leper King” and the kabuki play “A Wonder Tale: The Moonbow.” (The one early play is the 1956 “Rokumeikan,” Mishima’s most well-known drama in Japan.) All were written in the last three years of Mishima’s life, and three of them saw production in 1969. Though he says he did not deliberately set out to translate later works, Sato notes that the four plays “may be viewed in relation to what some critics have called Mishima’s theology, an amalgamation of the ‘politics of death’ with the notion of what Mishima himself called ‘the Emperor as a cultural concept.’ ”

    Like all Mishima’s later work, the plays are also purposely sententious — both moralistic and didactic. There is certainly a place in the theater for such qualities (as attendance at any noh, kabuki or shimpa performance will attest), and to this extent Mishima joins — and intensifies — a major stream of Japanese drama.

    In “My Friend ******,” for example, he not only tells us about the plot’s machinations, but also how he felt about them. A result is that he interiorizes all of the emotions in his drama. We are not shown four real men and asked to understand their problems; we are shown segments of the author’s psyche and forced to choose sides. The play, as such, is psychodrama and all the lines are loaded.

    This is particularly evident on the level of metaphor and rhetoric. One of the principle metaphors is that of iron — one fittingly ******ian. We can examine its metamorphosis throughout the play in these three (nonconsecutive) speeches:

    Roehm: “The only thing that can hurt me is a bullet. Or rather, when the steel of my body happens to betray me and attract into it the small iron lump of my comrade’s — yes, when iron and iron, to be intimate, draw together and kiss, that’s the only time I’ll fall . . .”

    Strasser: “The pot that once swallowed a stray bullet put out blue flowers, but it puts out only insipid pansies now that the fertilizing bullet is gone . . .”

    Krupp: “For the guns . . . they’ve shot the real human flesh to their fill for the first time in a long while, and should be able to sleep, satisfied . . . like the soldiers who’ve been to brothels. . . . Iron . . . by going through the storm of 3,000-degree flames, iron ore turns into pig iron . . .”

    The rhetoric states not that iron must be put to a practical use (that ideals must give way to material considerations), but that this unavoidable process is bad, that the way of compromise (Krupp’s) is impure.

    Since Mishima indicates a very real unwillingness to consider the world as it happens to be, we must interest ourselves in his psyche. Otherwise, the characters in this play might seem lifeless and their conversations ploys, their personae appearing to spout rather than to speak. Since they are all one-dimensional and obviously constructed for a purpose, they would fail to gain our sympathy.

    But this is perhaps what Mishima intended. He did not want them to gain our sympathy; he wanted his great idea to gain our sympathy. Didactic, he is laying down the law — and so, on this level, the play offers no interpretation of the world as it is, but rather a condemnation of this world. We are not given the world; we are given Mishima’s opinion of the world.

    It is just this narrow and closed aspect, however, that can be admired. And here Mishima would enter the company of playwrights who thought likewise: Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and — yes — Bertold Brecht.

    This quality is seen most strongly in the ****** play and in the drama about the Suzaku family (based however loosely on Euripides), as well as in “Madame de Sade,” not here included but widely available in Donald Keene’s translation. The play about the leper king and the three-act “A Wonder Tale: The Moonbow” (staged for the first time in 33 years by the Kabuki-za last December) seem perhaps less didactic because of their more fantastic nature, but here too the concern is with ideas rather than character.

    One then understands that Mishima was speaking precisely when he said that writing drama was like water flowing toward a lower place. Indeed, the level of the drama is basic. It floats upon the forged character of the Mishima persona.

    The plays themselves have been most elegantly translated by Sato and I feel certain that Mishima, whose English was extraordinarily good, would have been delighted with the results. In addition, Sato has done both his subject and us a great favor by including the three essays, in which Mishima writes about his dramaturgy. This includes an important and lengthy piece about the kabuki, “Flower of Evil.”

    In these we can see the thoughtful, stubborn dramatist at work, creating the very impressions that blossom forth so impressively in these plays.


    http://www.academia.edu/35423022/Sun..._Yukio_Mishima

    - from Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima (translated by John Bester); p. 54-6:

    If the deepest sources of the morbid imagination that falls on one by night—of the voluptuous imagination, inducer of sensual abandon—lie, one and all, in death, how does that death differ from the glorious death? What distinguishes the heroic from the decadent death? The dual way’s cruel withholding of salvation proves that they are ultimately the same, and that the literary ethic and the ethic of action are no more than pathetic efforts of resistance against death and oblivion.

    What difference there might be resolves itself into the presence or absence of the idea of honor, which regards death as “something to be seen,” and the presence or absence of the formal aesthetic of death that goes with it—in other words, the tragic nature of the approach to death and the beauty of the body going to its doom.

    Thus, where a beautiful death is concerned, men are condemned to inequalities and degrees of fortune commensurate with the inequalities and degrees of fortune bestowed on them by fate at their birth—though this inequality is obscured nowadays by the fact that modern man is almost devoid of the desire of the ancient Greeks to live “beautifully” and die “beautifully.”

    Why should a man be associated with beauty only through a heroic, violent death ? In ordinary life, society maintains a careful surveillance to ensure that men shall have no part in beauty; physical beauty in the male,when considered as an “object” in itself without any intermediate agent, is despised, and the profession of the male actor—which involves constantly being “seen”—is far from being accorded true respect. A strict rule is imposed where men are concerned. It is this: a man must under normal circumstances never permit his own objectivization; he can only be objectified through the supreme action—which is, I suppose, the moment of death, the moment when, even without being seen, the fiction of being seen and the beauty of the object are permitted. Of such is the beauty of the suicide squad, which is recognized as beauty not only in the spiritual sense but, by men in general, in an ultra-erotic sense also.

    Moreover, serving as agent in this case is a heroic action of an intensity beyond the resources of the ordinary mortal, so that “objectivization” without an agent is not possible here. However close mere words may get to this moment of supreme action that acts as intermediary for beauty, they can no more overtake it than a flying body can attain the speed of light.

    But what I was trying to describe here was not beauty. To discuss beauty is to discuss the question “in depth.” This was not my intention: what I sought to do was to arrange a great variety of ideas like dice of hard ivory and to set limits to the function of each.

    I discovered, then, that the profoundest depths of the imagination lay in death. It is natural, perhaps, that quite apart from the necessity to prepare defenses against the encroachments of the imagination, I should have conceived the idea of turning the imagination that had so long tormented me back on itself, changing it into something that I could use as a weapon for counterattack. However, where art as such was concerned, my style had already built forts here, there, and everywhere, and was successfully holding the encroachments of the imagination in check. If I was to plan such a counterattack, it must take place in some field outside that of art. It was this, more than anything else, that first drew me towards the idea of the martial arts.

    At one time, I had been the type of boy who leaned at the window, forever watching out for unexpected events to come crowding in towards him. Though I might be unable to change the world myself, I could not but hope that the world would change of its own accord. As that kind of boy, with all the accompanying anxieties, the transformation of the world was an urgent necessity for me; it nourished me from day to day; it was something without which I could not have lived. The idea of the changing of the world was as much a necessity as sleep and three meals a day. It was the womb that nourished my imagination.


    - p. 38-42:

    It is common experience that no technique of action can become effective until repeated practice has drummed it into the unconscious areas of the mind. What I was interested in, however, was something slightly different. On the one hand, my desire to have pure experience of consciousness was staked on the body-strength-action series, while on the other hand my passion for pure experience was staked on the given moment when, thanks to the reflex action of the pre-trained subconscious, the body put forth its highest skill. And the only thing that truly attracted me was the point at which these two mutually opposed attempts coincided—the point of contact, in other words, at which the absolute value of consciousness and the absolute value of the body fitted exactly into each other.

    The befuddling of the wits by means of drugs or alcohol was not, of course, my aim. My only interest lay in following consciousness through to its extreme limits, so as to discover at what point it was converted into unconscious power. That being so, what surer witness to the persistence of consciousness to its outer limits could I have found than physical suffering? There is an undeniable interdependence between consciousness and physical suffering, and consciousness, conversely, affords the surest possible proof of the persistence of bodily distress.

    Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened. Even so, I would not have it believed that this development was a result of the workings of my imagination. My discovery was made directly, with my body, thanks to the sun and the steel.

    As many people must have experienced for themselves, the greater the accuracy of a blow from a boxing glove or a fencing sword, the more it is felt as a counterblow rather than as a direct assault on the opponent’s person. One’s own blow, one’s own strength, creates a kind of hollow. A blow is successful if, at that instant, the opponent’s body fits into that hollow in space and assumes a form precisely identical with it.

    How is it that a blow can be experienced in such a way; what makes a blow successful? Success comes when both the timing and placing of the blow are just right.But more than this, it happens when the choice of time and target—one’s judgement—manages to catch the foe momentarily off guard, when one has an intuitive apprehension of that off-guard moment a fraction of a second before it becomes perceptible to the senses. This apprehension is a quantity that is unknowable even to the self and is acquired through a process of long training. By the time the right moment is consciously perceptible, it is already too late. It is too late, in other words, when that which lurks in the space beyond the flashing fist and the tip of the sword has taken shape. By the moment it takes shape, it must already be snugly ensconced in that hollow in space that one has marked out and created. It is at this instant that victory in the fray is born.

    At the height of the fray, I found, the tardy process of creating muscle, whereby strength creates form and form creates strength, is repeated so swiftly that it becomes imperceptible to the eye. Strength, that like light emitted its own rays, was constantly renewed, destroying and creating form as it went. I saw for myself how the form that was beautiful and fitting overcame the form that was ugly and imprecise. Its distortion invariably implied an opening for the foe and a blurring of the rays of strength.

    The defeat of the foe occurs when he accommodates his form to the hollow in space that one has already marked out; at that moment, one’s own form must preserve a constant precision and beauty. And the form itself must have an extreme adaptability, a matchless flexibility, so that it resembles a series of sculptures created from moment to moment by a fluid body. The continuous radiation of strength must create its own shape, just as a continuous jet of water will maintain the shape of a fountain.

    Surely, I felt, the tempering by sun and steel to which I submitted over such a long period was none other than a process of creating this kind of fluid sculpture. And insofar as the body thus fashioned belonged strictly to life, its whole value, I came to feel, must lie in that moment-to-moment splendor. That, indeed, is the reason why human sculpture has striven so hard to commemorate the momentary glory of the flesh in imperishable marble.

    It followed that death lay only a short way beyond that particular moment. Here, I felt, I was gaining a clue to an inner understanding of the cult of the hero. The cynicism that regards all hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority. Invariably, it is the man who believes himself to be physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero; and when he does so, how dishonest it is that his phraseology, partaking ostensibly of a logic so universal and general, should not (or at least should be assumed bythe general public not to) give any clue to his physical characteristics. I have yet to hear hero worship mocked by a man endowed with what might justly be called heroic physical attributes. Facile cynicism, invariably, is related to feeble muscles or obesity, while the cult of the hero and a mighty nihilism are always related to a mighty body and well-tempered muscles. For the cult of the hero is, ultimately, the basic principle of the body, and in the long run is intimately involved with the contrast between the robustness of the body and the destruction that is death.

    The body carries quite sufficient persuasion to destroy the comic aura that surrounds an excessive self-awareness; for though a fine body may be tragic, there is in it no trace of the comic. The thing that ultimately saves the flesh from being ridiculous is the element of death that resides in the healthy, vigorous body; it is this, I realized, that sustains the dignity of the flesh.

    How comic would one find the gaiety and elegance of the bullfighter were his trade entirely divorced from associations of death!

    Nevertheless, whenever one sought after the ultimate sensation, the moment of victory was always an insipid sensation. Ultimately, the opponent—the “reality that stares back at one”—is death. Since death, it seems, will yield to no one, the glory of victory can be nothing more than a purely worldly glory in its highest form. And if it is only a worldly glory, I told myself, then one ought to be able to secure something very similar to it by resorting to the verbal arts.


    Criticism and politics:

    https://myanimelist.net/people/29917/Yukio_Mishima

    godhead: “like a tenth of Confessions of a Mask was dedicated towards talking about his cock getting hard to men and yet dopey anglo internet nazis will continue to claim him as their own SMDH”

    https://vpl.bibliocommons.com/item/s...609038_mishima

    dcb_0: ‘Good lessons in zealotry and megalomania. Try not to snicker and think, "That could never happen in MY country!".’

    https://www.popmatters.com/130651-fo...496142680.html

    https://forums.civfanatics.com/threa...ishima.505899/

    Wrymouth3: ‘In what might be possibly one of the most bizarre and offensive articles I have ever read, the American Conservative has urged so-called "traditionalists" to follow the ideals and philosophies of Yukio Mishima. I consider myself a moderate, and so happened to be linked to this from another party. Literature people may know Mishima as the author of such works as the Temple of the Golden Pavillion and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, and also attempted a coup of the Japanese government to proclaim himself emperor and reinstate a despotic theocracy.’


    "Every sane person would agree with him [Mishima]. Liberalism, capitalism etc. are clearly not working out. People who live under these kinds of rulerships are clearly unsatisfied with it, we really hate it, yet most people think that this is natural, this is how it should be."

    http://www.theamericanconservative.c...raditionalists

    What Yukio Mishima Teaches Traditionalists (by DANIEL MCCARTHY)

    Tim Stanley writes a lyrical reflection on the anti-modern ethos and suicide of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, a favorite of Justin Raimondo as well. Tim naturally finds much of Mishima’s life, especially how it ended, at odds with his own English Catholicism, but Mishima’s devotion to art inspires him:

    I’ve reached the conclusion that traditionalists should reject politics and focus on art. We should take back control of the cultural institutions—universities, academies, churches, periodicals—and use them to promote beauty. We should try to live charitably, fully and well—to be examples and trend setters. We mustn’t turn our backs on the people we disagree with, but embrace and cherish them (please, do not conflate traditionalism with snobbery—Yukio wrote, “The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can’t have.”) And we should not accept our fate as mere critics of civilisation (the figurative version of Mishima’s suicide) but instead become the architects of a new one. For we traditionalists don’t contribute nearly enough to our society. Helping to improve it could mean anything from blogging to writing a symphony. My favourite way to keep the flame burning is to attend the Old Rite Catholic Mass. There is the real synergy of art and action: an ancient ritual, unchanged, unchanging that represents a communion with the past. And, of course, to God.

    I’m reminded of the impeccably Bill Kauffman line in “Copperhead” (spoken by Esther), “Maybe poetry is more important than politics.”

    On the flipside, one of the problems with “anti-modernists” has been precisely their preference for romantic feelings over political realities. It’s not a problem as long as you know what genre you’re working in—whether you’re writing, say, political essays or literary ones. But it becomes a source of self-delusion when you habitually measure an actual society, with its necessarily sordid economy and politics, against a literary ideal. That delusion drove Yukio Mishima to his doom. It’s driven some American anti-modernists to futile action in politics and unwholesome resentments in social life. Tim’s counsel is wise, however, for calling on traditionalists to contribute something real and beautiful, even to a social order they find thoroughly ugly and false.












    Last edited by HERO; 01-11-2019 at 01:20 PM.

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