Mythologized post-war Japanese author Yukio Mishima has remained notable in the eyes of the contemporary literary world for his unique perspective on the relationship between beauty and death. How these two elements come together to produce a unique eroticism was in many ways the central theme of his life’s work and perhaps his life as a whole.
Yukio Mishima: The Death of a Man is a collection of photographs by Yukio Mishima and Kishin Shinoyama where the former modelled the various ways in which he felt the Japanese nation had experienced a certain death. This heavily reflected the authors right-wing nationalist viewpoint of upholding the country’s “national essence” (kokutai) and rejecting western ideals of materialism, globalism, communism and Japanese democracy. His own ideology culminated in a failed coup, where he unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Japan’s 1947 Constitution in a military base in Tokyo. After its failure he screamed “Long live the Emperor!” and proceeded to commit seppuku (ritual suicide committed by samurais in order to maintain honour). Shinoyama’s photographs depict Mishima dying in multiple ways again and again, fascinatingly all taken just a few months before his real death. Whether his fixation on death and eventual suicide was part of a political statement, or an erotic investment (as his former male lovers may recount) has long been debated. But as a theme, it appears again and again and again…
The first novel I read of Yukio Mishima’s was his semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask, chronicling the life of Kochan (based on Mishima himself), from his sickly childhood to the dichotomy of his adulthood during Imperial Japan and the Second World War. His pervasive sadomasochistic desires and hidden homosexuality haunt his life, forcing him to wear a metaphorical mask and conceal his true urges, an act he feels every individual is doing (‘reluctant masquerade’). As a child he is hidden away from normal society due to his ill-health and this isolation becomes key in his later fantasies of violence and death, similar to the author’s own adolescence. He becomes particularly enamoured with Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian, as something about the arrows piercing human flesh arouses him. Omi, his classmate and the object of his attraction, replaces the subject of Saint Sebastian in Kochan’s imagination of the painting.
“The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy. But there is no flowing blood, nor yet the host of arrows seen in other pictures of Sebastian’s martyrdom. Instead, two lone arrows cast their tranquil and graceful shadows upon the smoothness of his skin, like the shadows of a bough falling upon a marble stairway.”
As he grows older he meets a girl named Sonoko but is unable to love her because of his concealed homosexuality. As well as a semi-autobiographical piece of work, this novel is very much a Freudian self-examination. The protagonist’s lack of control in his early life translate into a desire for controlling beauty, something not immediately tangible and solely part of his mind’s construct. And what’s more powerful than controlling beauty? Destroying it. Kochan’s obsession with overt displays of masculinity closely tie into his sadistic imagination. His gaze comes upon a gangster, stripped naked to the waist, his body emblematic of traditional masculinity. Kochan imagines the young man getting into a knife fight, his torso eventually cut open, his body covered in sweat and blood. There’s an erotic perspective on human life, on fatality.
Confessions of a Mask laid down the foundations for Mishima’s later works. Whether it’s The Temple of the Golden Pavillion about a young acolyte who burns down the famous temple because he cannot reach its beauty, or the short story Patriotism following a right-wing Lieutenant and his wife’s ritualistic suicide after the February 26 Incident, echoes of the cogs in Mishima’s own mind lay bare for all to see. It’s easy to see why he remains such an enigmatic and mystified individual in the hearts and minds of readers.