You can easily find two contradictory characteristics in Japanese
cultures or Japanese characters. One is elegance and one is brutality.
The two characteristics are very tightly combined sometimes. Our
brutality, I think, comes from our emotion. It is never mechanised and
systematised like [the] Nazi’s brutality. I think our brutality might
come from our feminine aspect and elegance comes from our nervous side.
Sometimes we are too sensitive about defilement or elegance or sense of
beauty or aesthetic side. And sometimes we are tired of it and we need a
sudden explosion to make us free from it…I don’t like the Japanese
culture just represented only by the flower arrangement or such a sort
of peace/loving culture. I think we still have a very strong warrior’s
mind.
—Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima, pseudonym of Kimitake Hiraoka (1925-1970), was a
Japanese novelist and playwright, whose central theme is the dichotomy
between traditional Japanese values and the spiritual barrenness of
contemporary life.
On February 14, 1925 Yukio
Mishima, one of Japan’s most significant writers, was born into a samurai
family. Since youth he was brought up in
the spirit of the samurai tradition and values: nobility, truthfulness,
complete control over mind and body, and loyalty to the Emperor. Traditional
Japanese society was imbued with the samurai spirit. "What Japan was
she owed to the samurai,” observes the Japanese scholar Dr. Inazo Nitobe.
“They were not only the flower of the nation, but its root as well. All
the gracious gifts of Heaven flowed through them. Though they kept
themselves socially aloof from the populace, they set a moral standard for
them and guided them by their example."
The “way of the samurai” or Bushido, particularly as set out
in a 18th century text known as Hagakure, influenced all
of Yukio Mishima’s life and work. Drawing primarily on Zen Buddhism, the Hagakure
stresses dying a glorious death. It sets out a spiritual-warrior path
focusing on emotional and mental discipline, the martial arts, and
aesthetics. The author of the Hagakure defines the true spirit of the
samurai:
Lord Naoshige once said: “Bushido [way of the
samurai] comes down
to death. Even tens of people cannot kill such a person.” Great things
cannot be achieved by [merely] being earnest. A man must become a
fanatic to the extreme of being obsessed by death….The martial arts
require only an obsession with death. Both loyalty and filial piety [the
two other major samurai virtues] are included within this.
Indeed the first words of the Hagakure are: “One who is a
samurai must before all things keep constantly in mind…the fact that he
has to die.” Mishima said that the Hagakure is “the womb from
which my writing is born.”
A man of discipline and great energy, he usually wrote from midnight
until dawn and in his lifetime produced more than 100 works, including
novels, short stories, traditional Japanese No and Kabuki
plays, and screenplays.
Mishima's first novel, the partly autobiographical Confessions of a
Mask (1948), was widely acclaimed and successful enough to enable its
author to become a full-time writer. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
(1956) portrays a young man obsessed with both religion and beauty; The
Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963) is a tale of adolescent
jealousy. All Mishima’s novels contain paradoxes: beauty equated with
death; the yearning for love and its rejection when offered.
In Confessions of a Mask, Mishima recalls that he experienced his
first ejaculation upon observing a reproduction of Guido Reni’s
(1575-1642) painting of Saint Sebastian. “The arrows have eaten into the
tense, fragrant, youthful flesh” he writes, “and are about to consume
his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy.” A short
time before his own death, Mishima posed as St Sebastian, his handsome,
nearly naked, muscular body pierced with arrows. For Mishima, the ultimate
aesthetic experience, as well as the ultimate spiritual experience, was to
be found in the encounter of male beauty and death. As he wrote of Sebastian,
“was not such beauty as his a thing destined for death?…His was not a
fate to be pitied…[It was] a fate that might even be called radiant.”
A married man with children, Yukio Mishima’s homoeroticism is only
fully understood within the samurai tradition. Their custom required that
samurai marry and father children, thereby providing heirs and the
continuance of the family line. Hence virginity before marriage and
unsullied virtue thereafter were requisites for samurai women. But there was
another important aspect of samurai sexuality: homosexuality.
Sexual relationships between older samurai and young
adolescents, similar
to the mentor-pupil relationship of ancient Greece, were common in Japan’s
feudal Age of the Samurai. According to the authors of The Love of the
Samurai:
It is especially in the 16th, 17th, and 18th
centuries that it flourished greatly under the rule of the samurai, in a
period when the traditional civilisation of Japan reached its perfection….Far
from being condemned, it was considered more noble and more gracious
than heterosexuality. It was encouraged especially within the samurai
class; it was considered useful to boys in teaching them virtue, honesty
and the appreciation of beauty, while the love of women was often
devalued for its so-called “feminising” effect. A great part of the
historical and fictional literature was devoted to the praise of the
beauty and valour of boys faithful to shudo.
The devotion of male warrior-lovers, called shudo, together with
young masculine beauty were much esteemed in traditional samurai society.
Thus they are integral to Yukio Mishima’s life and writings.
Mishima’s literary masterpiece the four volume epic The Sea of
Fertility (1970), consisting of Spring Snow, Runaway Horses,
The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel, is
about the transformation of Japan into a modern but sterile society.
In the first
novel, Spring Snow, set in Tokyo in 1912, the closed
world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by
outsiders - rich provincial families without tradition, whose money and
vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power.
The second volume, Runaway Horses is the chronicle of a
conspiracy,
a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that
led to war - an era marked by depression, the upheaval of radical social
change, political violence, and assassination.
The third part, The Temple of Dawn is a story of the pursuit of
beauty and spiritual enlightenment. It powerfully dramatises the Japanese
experience from the eve of World War II through the degradation of the
postwar era.
The dramatic climax of the tetralogy, The Decay of the Angel
brings together the dominant themes of the three previous novels: the
meaning and decay of Japan’s courtly tradition and samurai ideal; the
essence and value of Zen Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics; and, underlying
all, Mishima’s apocalyptic vision of the modern era, which saw the
dissolution of the moral and cultural forces that throughout the ages
nourished a people and a world.
Mishima was deeply troubled by the changes wrought on traditional
Japanese ways by Western modernisation. The Decay of the Angel, his
last work, compares modern Japan to the barren landscape of the moon.
Mishima detested the sedentary life of most writers. For
him, words must
provoke deeds, thought cannot be separated from action. His reverence for
traditional Japanese martial arts led him to take up Kendo (a type of
fencing with wooden swords), karate and body-building. In an effort to
revive the ancient arts of the samurai he organised the Tatenokai (Shield
Society), a paramilitary brotherhood stressing physical fitness, the martial
arts such as karate and swordsmanship, as well as the upholding of the
ideals and virtues of Japanese imperial tradition. In the 1990s the ideals
of the Shield Society are carried on by Issui-kai, a Japanese
pacifist nationalist organisation.
True to the samurai spirit, Mishima attempted to rally his people to
combat the damage being done to Japanese society by such alien forces as
liberalism and capitalist consumerism. “Japan will disappear,” Mishima
prophetically warned, “it will become inorganic, empty, neutral-tinted; it
will grow wealthy and astute.”
At the peak of a brilliant literary career and at the age of forty five,
Yukio Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide) following an
unsuccessful attempt to re-enact successfully, in a carefully staged 'incident',
the Young Officers' rebellion of the 1930s.
On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four Shield Society members took
control of an office at Tokyo’s military headquarters. He gave a speech
attacking Japan's post-World War II constitution and called on the ranks of
the Japanese Self Defence Force to rebel in an effort to save Japan’s
ancient tradition. Faithful to the samurai code he then committed ritual
suicide (seppuku).
His death is regarded as his final protest against the decay of Japanese
society.
“Human life is limited. But I want to live forever,” Mishima wrote in
a suicide note to his wife. Loyal to the ready-for-death-at-any-instant
spirit of Bushido, Yukio Mishima found in a freely chosen death the
noblest and most beautiful action open to a human being.
