MISHIMA AESTHETIC TERRORIST an Intellectual Portrait
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MISHIMA AESTHETIC TERRORIST 6810_Book_V3.indd 1 7/24/18 12:55 PM 6810_Book_V3.indd 2 7/24/18 12:55 PM MISHIMA AESTHETIC TERRORIST An Intellectual Portrait Andrew Rankin University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu 6810_Book_V3.indd 3 7/24/18 12:55 PM © 2018 Andrew Rankin All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rankin, Andrew, author. Title: Mishima, aesthetic terrorist : an intellectual portrait / Andrew Rankin. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018007919 | ISBN 9780824873745 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Mishima, Yukio, 1925–1970—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PL833.I7 Z79 2018 | DDC 895.63/5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007919 Cover art: “Ordeal by Roses,” photo by Eikoh Hosoe. Used with permission. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. 6810_Book_V3.indd 4 7/24/18 12:55 PM Dedicated to my parents David and Margaret Rankin 6810_Book_V3.indd 5 7/24/18 12:55 PM 6810_Book_V3.indd 6 7/24/18 12:55 PM CONTENTS Author’s Note ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1. A Zone of Unfeeling 12 Chapter 2. Problems of Beauty 21 Chapter 3. Originality in the Arrangement of Fate 41 Chapter 4. The Leap of Narcissus 73 Chapter 5. Intoxicating Illusions 86 Chapter 6. The Totality of Culture 120 Chapter 7. The Purest Essence of Japan 144 Notes 175 Bibliography 187 Index 195 vii 6810_Book_V3.indd 7 7/24/18 12:55 PM 6810_Book_V3.indd 8 7/24/18 12:55 PM AUTHOR’S NOTE All extracts from Mishima’s writings in this book are translated from Mishima Yukio ketteiban zenshū, the edition of his complete works published by Shinchōsha in forty-three volumes between 2000 and 2005. Each extract is identified with an in-text citation showing the volume number followed by the page number. References for quotations from all other authors are given in the endnotes. All the translations from Japanese are my own. ix 6810_Book_V3.indd 9 7/24/18 12:55 PM 6810_Book_V3.indd 10 7/24/18 12:55 PM Introduction On January 26, 1948, twelve people were killed in a bizarre robbery and mass poisoning incident at a branch of the Teikoku Bank in central Tokyo. A man pos ing as a government health worker tricked the bank’s staff into drinking cyanide; as they lay dying, he made off with some cash. After several months of investiga tion the police still had no leads. Under intense pressure to solve the case, they arrested an artist, a minor but popular painter in the Japanese style. On the basis of what appeared to be extremely flimsy evidence, the artist was charged with robbery and twelve counts of murder. People in the art and literary communities were appalled. Many issued statements demanding the artist’s immediate release. Newspaper pundits expressed skepticism that a man of high culture could be responsible for such a horrendous crime. There was, however, one brashly dis senting voice: It was obvious to me from the start that this extraordinary crime was part of a secret pact with the problem of beauty. This crime went so far beyond comprehensible norms that any talk of motive is surely redundant. The perpetrator’s profound insensitivity toward human suffering was matched by his exquisite sensitivity toward his own actions, a sensitivity that suf fused his unique powers of imagination. Clearly, an act that should have been carried out conceptually within the world of beauty had, for some reason, veered in the wrong direction and spilled outside. Considered in purely aesthetic terms, this crime was an ugly one. But this was not an ugliness of essence. It was the ugliness that is manifest when the good and the evil of mankind, all the creative possibilities that we call humanity, are condensed into a single event: a crime. Works of art are things of imperfect beauty. If ever a work of art is made perfect, it becomes a crime. (27:96) This perverse analysis was written by a virtually unknown twenty-three-year-old novelist named Mishima Yukio. Both in content and in style it is wholly charac teristic of his manner and simultaneously offers a manifesto and a self-portrait. Most of Mishima’s core attitudes are on display here: a willful contrariness, a 1 6810_Book_V3.indd 1 7/24/18 12:55 PM 2 Introduction refusal to empathize, a narcissistic concentration on the self, a substitution of ethi cal categories with aesthetic ones, an equation of beauty and evil, and a concep tion of artistic creation as an antisocial activity. Mishima is an aesthete with bad intentions, and he wants us to know it. His own lifelong pact with the problem of beauty will follow almost exactly the formula he outlines here, leading him, ulti mately, to condense all his creative possibilities, both good and evil, into a single, extraordinary, seemingly incomprehensible artistic-criminal event. A year after writing the article containing the above passage, Mishima pub lished Confessions of a Mask, the novel that launched his literary career. For the next two decades Mishima was a formidable presence in Japan’s cultural scene. Immensely productive, he published work in almost every genre: novels, both literary and popular, plays in modern Western and traditional Japanese forms, literary criticism, literary translations, journalism, travel writing, autobiography, poetry, opera libretti, and ballet scripts. His work as an actor and filmmaker also won him attention. Mishima was unashamedly a “celebrity” intellectual, an inde fatigable self-promoter, socialite, and public speaker, whose eccentric nonliter ary antics frequently brought him ridicule. While expressing contempt and con descension toward Japan’s increasingly consumerist culture industry, Mishima took every opportunity the industry offered him, participating enthusiastically in musicals, cabaret shows, photo shoots, boxing matches, samurai and gang ster movies, and much else. People called Mishima a sensationalist, a contrarian, an irrationalist, an egomaniac, a fake, a buffoon, a nihilist, a genius, a fascist, a madman. Provocatively, he articulated his antagonism toward postwar Japanese society in the language of the wartime militarists and formed a civilian militia of one hundred volunteers dedicated to defending the emperor, whom they revered as the supreme symbol of Japan’s enduring cultural unity. Yet Mishima’s tradition alism, his veneration of the imperial throne, and his worship of cultural purity, strength, and manliness were continually offset by his cosmopolitanism and by his irreverent and campy exhibitionism. The ranting nationalist rebel was also a sultry homoerotic pinup. Each aspect of his persona seemed to be contradicted by another, so that the result was an awkward hybrid that often appeared to lapse into parody. Mishima was therefore dangerous or irrelevant, reactionary or experimen tal, heroic or comical, depending on the point of view. His outrageous samurai- style suicide in the winter of 1970 set the seal on a frantic whirlwind of a career. Moreover, it was a seal that looked unbreakable. Throughout his career Mishima had pursued a fiercely eroticized vision of violent death, and after repeatedly writ ing his own death sentence (and acting it out) in art, he had finally carried it out in 6810_Book_V3.indd 2 7/24/18 12:55 PM Introduction 3 reality (or in an art that was real?), thereby accomplishing, so it seemed, a perfect unity of artist and work. Nietzsche says, “One does well to separate the artist from his work, which should be taken more seriously than he is.”1 The dazzling, exhilarating, bewil dering case of Mishima Yukio severely tests Nietzsche’s dictum, for here we are confronted with an artist who became his work and whose masterpiece is his own death. The scandal of Mishima’s suicide had a long-term silencing effect on his Japanese contemporaries. This was understandable. A militant nationalist shout ing banzai to the emperor and committing seppuku at an army base: this was not the image of itself that Japan wanted to present to the world. For nearly twenty years after his death Mishima’s name was virtually taboo in Japanese academic and literary circles. This left the field wide open for foreigners, who, equally understandably, were fascinated by Mishima. As a result, the most interesting statements about Mishima during those years came from abroad. In 1974 John Nathan, an American trans lator who had known Mishima personally, published an authoritative critical biography that no one has yet surpassed. This biography was followed in 1975 by a simpler biographical portrait by Henry Scott Stokes, a British journalist who had also met Mishima. The French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar published an admiring study of Mishima in 1983. Essays on Mishima by Henry Miller, Gore Vidal, Colin Wilson, and V. S. Naipaul were a lot less admiring. A film titled Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, directed by Paul Schrader and produced by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, was released in 1985. The film enjoyed international critical success, and the three books on Mishima mentioned above were translated into many languages. The reception of these works in Japan, however, was less than warm. Some influential Japanese critics disliked what they saw as Nathan’s vulgar Freudian reduction of Mishima to a pathological phenomenon, as if Mishima’s work had no significance other than as a sublimation of his neuroses.2 Mishima’s widow, Yōko, who was ruling his estate with a guardedness that no one seems to have anticipated, took exception to Nathan’s allegations about her late husband’s secret sex life, and she successfully pressured Japanese booksellers to remove the book from their shelves.