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Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) - Pseudonym for Hiraoka Kimitake |
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Prolific writer, who is considered by many critics as the most important Japanese novelist of the 20th century. Yukio Mishima's works include 40 novels, poetry, essays, and modern Kabuki and Noh dramas. He was three times nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. Among his masterpieces is The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956). The tetralogy The Sea of Fertility (1965-70) is regarded by many as Mishima's most lasting achievement. As a writer Mishima drew inspiration from pre-modern literature, both Japanese and Western. Mishima ended his brilliant literary career by suicide in 1970. "How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier." (from Runaway Horses, by Yukio Mishima, translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher, New York: Washington Square Press, 1975, p. 4; Japanese edition, Homba, 1969) Yukio Mishima was born Kimitaka Hiraoka in Tokyo, the son of a government official. Later he changed his name into Yukio Mishima so that his anti-literary father, Azusa, wouldn't know he wrote. The name Yukio can loosely be translated as "Man who chronicals reason." On his father's side Mishima's forebears were peasants, but his ambitious grandfather eventually climbed to the position of the governor of the Japanese colony on the island of Sakhalin. Mishima's mother, Shizue Hashi, came from a family of educators and scholars. Mishima was raised mainly by his paternal grandmother, Natsu
Nagai, a cultured but unstable woman from a samurai family, who hardly
allowed the boy out of her sight. During World War II Mishima was
excused military service, but he served in a factory. This plagued
Mishima throughout his life - he had
survived shamefully when so many others had been killed. "I believe one
should die young in his age," wrote Mishima's friend, the writer
Hasuda, who committed suicide after the war. In February 1944, Mishima received a silver watch from Emperor Hirohito's own hand at the graduation ceremony – "he was splendid, you know, the emperor was magnificent on that day", Mishima later said. Mishima entered in 1944 Tokyo University, where he studed law,
and
then worked as a civil servant in the finance ministry for eight months
before devoting himself entirely to writing. Mishima's first book, Hanazakari
(1944), a pastiche of decorative classical prose, appeared when he was
just 19-year-old. In 1946 Mishima met Kawabata Yasunari, who recommended Mishima's stories to important magazines. His first major work, Confessions of a Mask (1949), dealt with his discovery of his own homosexuality. The narrator concludes, that he would have to wear a mask of "normality" before other people to protect himself from social scorn. Mishima admired Oscar Wilde, of whom he published an essay in 1950. The largely autobiographical work reflected Mishima's
masochistic
fantasies. His preoccupation with the body, its beauty and
degeneration, marked several of his later novels. Mishima wished to
create for himself a perfect body that age could not make ugly. He
started body building in 1955 (Mishima had a gymnasium where he lifted weights) and he also became an expert in the
martial arts of karate and kendo. Ai no kawaki (1950, Thirst for Love), written under the influence of the French writer François Mauriac, was a story about a woman who has become the mistress of her late husband's father. Kinkakuji (1956, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) was based on an actual event of 1950. It depicted the burning of the celebrated temple of Kyoto by a young Buddhist monk, who is angered at his own physical ugliness, and prevents the famous temple from falling into foreign hands during the American occupation. "My solitude grew more and more obese, like a pig," he wrote in Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The Sound of Waves (1954) has been filmed several times. The story, set in a remote fishing village, tells of a young fisherman, Shinji, who meets on the beach a beautiful pearl diver, Hatsue, the daughter of Miyata, the most powerful man in the village. Hatsue is loved by another young man, Yasuo. Miyata forbids Hatsue to continue seeing Shinji, but when Shinji shows his courage during a storm, he finally gives him and his daughter his blessing. The first film version from 1954, directed by Senkichi Taniguchi, was shot on location in the Shima Peninsula in Mie Prefecture, home of Japan's famous women pearl divers. Perhaps preparing for his death,
Mishima liked to pose in photographs as a drowned shipwrecked sailor,
St. Sebastian shot death with arrows, or a samurai committing ritual
suicide. In 1960 he played a doomed yakuza, Takeo, in Yasuzo Masumura's
film Karakkaze Yaro (Afraid
to Die). At the end Takeo is
killed, dying in a stairway. Many of Mishima's later short stories and
novels delt with the theme of suicide and violent death. The most
famous is perhaps 'Patriotism' (1960), which described in detail the
double suicide Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama and his wife Reiko. ''The chances of misinterpretation are many. Let us go on, nevertheless, but let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work. However, while a film such as Patriotism, or a passage such as the description of Isao's suicide in Runaway Horses, sheds light on the writer's end and partly explains it, the author's death, at most, grants these works authenticity but does nothing to elucidate them.'' (Mishima: A Vision of the Void by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Alberto Manguel in a collaboration with the author. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986, p. 5) Although
Mishima enjoyed the status of celebrity throughout his career, his
popularity among general readers declined in the 1960s; outside Japan
his works were highly acclaimed. This
decade and the next have been characterized as something of a Golden
Age in the translation of Japanese fiction into English. Donald Keene,
who translated several of Mishima's plays and the novel Utage no ato (1960, After the
Banquet), developed a lifelong friendship with the author. Kinu to meisatsu (1964, Silk and
Insight), which John Nathan politely refused to translate (saying that
the "I don't think I could make it work in English"), dealt again lost
ideals, but this time the story was set in the world of silk textile
manufacturing and was based on a real strike that took place in 1954,
at the textile manufacturer Omi Kenshi. The central characters are an
old-fashioned factory owner, Komazawa, and a manipulating political
operator, Okano. Also After the Banquet, set behind the scene
of politics, drew from real-life occurrences and provoked a legal suit
for violating privacy. From early on, Mishima was deeply attracted to the patriotism of imperial
Japan, and samurai spirit of Japan's past. However, at the same time he
dressed in Western clothes and lived in a Western-style house. In 1968
he founded the Shield Society (Tate no Kai), a private army of some 100
youths in uniforms worked on de Gaulle's uniform, who were dedicated to
a revival of Bushido, the samurai knightly code of honour. In 1970 he
seized control in military headquarters in Tokyo, trying to rouse the
nation to pre-war nationalist heroic ideals. More like a performance art piece than a large-scale coup d'état, Mishima must have known beforehand how all would end. On November 25, after failure, Mishima
committed seppuku (ritual disembowelment) with his sword within the
compounds of the Ground Self-Defense Force. Mishima shouted,
''Long live the Emperor.'' As he fell on the carpet, he was beheaded by
one of his men, acting as a kaishaku, the one who delivers the
decapitating sword-blow. Mishima's widow Yoko had the
negative of Patriotism
(1966) burned, a film in which Mishima
played the leading role and committed suicide at the end. Moreover,
John Nathan's biography of the writer was removed from bookshops – she
"hated the idea of a book about her husband . . . For it is neither a happy nor a wholesome story, and from Yoko's
point of view her two children know too much of it already, that their
father abandoned them to disembowel himself." (Mishima: A Biography by John Nathan, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974, 2000, p. xviii) Mishima remained taboo in his own country for a long period. "What was Mishima Yukio to us, and what will he be in the future?" asked the literary critic Okuno Takeo in
1992. "In my mind I cannot comfortably link together
the man I knew as a friend, the writer whose work I hungrily devoured every time he
published something new, and that mind-boggling act of
self-destruction." (quoted in Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait by Andrew Rankin, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2018, p. 4) Also Western interest in Mishima was considered problematic; thus Paul Schrader's film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, produced by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, was dropped from the 1985 Tokyo Film Festival due to fears of violent protests by Japanese right-wing groups. The opening of The Mishima Yukio Literary Museum marked the comeback of Mishima as a popular writer, and his prose has been hailed as a model for the beauty of Japanese language. Moreover, Mishima's criticism of modern society has gained new momentum. As an essayist he had an opinion on nearly all conceivable subjects. On the day of his death Mishima delivered to his publishers
the final pages of Tennin Gosui (The Sea of Fertility),
the author's account of the Japanese experience in the 20th century.
Mishima based the theme on the Buddhist idea of the transmigration of
the soul. The first part of the four-volume novel, Spring Snow
(1968), is set in the closed circles of Tokyo's Imperial Court in 1912.
It was followed by Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn
(1970) and Five Signs of a God's Decay
(1971). Each of these novels depict a different reincarnation of the same being, Honda, who dies at the age of twenty: first as a young aristocrat, then as a political fanatic in the 1930s, as a Thai princess before and after World War II, and as an evil young orphan in the 1960s. The tennin in the tetralogy's Japanese title refers to a supernatural being Buddhist theology, who has similarities with the Christian angel but who is mortal. "Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision. However grave the matter at hand might be, if one neglected it for long enough, the act of neglect itself would begin to affect the situation, and someone else would emerge as an ally. Such was Count Ayakura's version of political theory." (from Spring Snow, translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher, New York: Pocket Books, 1973, pp. 316-317; Japanese edition, Haru no Yuki,1968) Mishima showed interest in the traditional Japanese theater and Western themes. His dramas, written for the Western style theatre, include Rokumeikan (1956), which deals with a ball given for the Emperor's birthday, Tenth Day Chrysanthemum (1961), Madame de Sade (1965), an effort to see Marquis de Sade through women's eyes (noteworthy, the real hero of the play never appears on the stage), The Fall of the House Suzaku (1967), and My Friend Hitler (1969). Mishima wrote several Kabuki pieces. Mishima's last work, The Moon Like a Drawn Bow, was performed in 1969 at the National Theatre. The play ended with scene of a seppuku. Mishima was considered to be in his time the only living author talented enough to write Kabuki plays in traditional style. For further reading: 'Existence through Annihilation: The Case of Yukio Mishima,' in The Paradox of Suicide and Creativity: Authentications of Human Existence by M.F. Alvarez; foreword by George Atwood (2021); Yukio Mishima: Death of Man by Kishin Shinoyama (2020); Mishima Aesthetic Terrorist: an Intellectual Portrait by Andrew Rankin (2018); Persona: a Biography of Yukio Mishima by Naoki Inose; with Hiroaki Sato (2012); The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima by Jerry S. Piven (2004); Mishima: A Biography by John Nathan (2000); The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott-Stokes (1995); Deadly Dialectics by Roy Starrs (1994); Escape from the Wasteland by Susan Napier (1991); Mishima by Marguerite Yourcenar (1985); Mishima: A Biography by John Nathan (1974); The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by H. Scott-Stokes (1974) - Film: Mishima (1985), directed by Paul Schrader, starring Ken Ogata, narration read by Roy Scheider. A violent kaleidoscope of the author's life. Scenes of Mishima's life shot in black & white, dramatizations of key fictional works in opulent color, photographed by John Bailey, score by Philip Glass. - Suom.: Mishiman näytelmistä on suomennettu mm. Sadannes yö. - See also: Yasunari Kawabata Selected works:
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