O MINORITY, HOMOSEXUALS AS A

Still if one examines such indica- are a minority, in real life the two are tors as residential enclaves ("gay ghet- closely related. toes"), self-help groups, religious organi- In recent years the magnitude of zations, travelguides, anddistinctive taste the overall minority question has been preferences, homosexuals do indeed qual- recognized not only in the United States, dy-perhaps more than most groups. How but in such European countries as Britain, many American ethnic entities can count France, and Germany, where populations as many bookstores, for example, as gays are changing. World demographic shifts and lesbians? Another feature is the sense and new migration patterns are likely to of identity and shared fate with homo- make the minority concept even more sexuals in other countries, cultures, and complex, while the place of homosexuals political andsocialsystems-togetherwith within it will remain scarcely less prob- the emergence of gay subcultures modeled lematic. on the American bne throughout the non- communist world. With minimal social BIBLIOGRAPHY. Stephen 0.Murray, Social Theory, Homosexual Realities, skills a foreign homosexual can pick up New York: Gay Academic Union, 1984. partners in a bar, bath, or cruising area. Wayne R. Dynes This facility suggests another paradoxical concept: that of a transnational minority. The idea of homosexuals as a MISHIMAYUXIO minority has obvious appeal to would-be (1925-1970) political leaders as an organizing tool. But Japanese writer of fiction, drama, it also meets resistance from the rank and and essays. Born in Tokyo as Hiraoka file who reject the role of "professional Kimitake, the son of a government official gays." Moreover, the concept of homosex- and grandson of a former governor of ual identity is of recent origin, and it may Karafuto (now southern Sakhalin], he pre- not last. As yet unmeasured is the impact ferred to emphasize his descent from the of the social construction theory of his- family of his paternalgrandmother, which torical development, which denies the belonged to the upper samurai class. He stability of the homosexual orientation. attended the Peers' School, where non- To put it most sharply, if there are no aristocrats were often treated as outsiders, homosexuals, they cannot be organized- and where Spartan discipline prepared as a minority or anything else. Then again, youngmen to be soldiers ratherthan poets. to the middle class, "minority" usually A story entitled "The Boy Who Wrote connotes underprivileged, oppressed, per- Poetry" has strong autobiographical ele- secuted people, not members of a group ments stemming from this period of his who may on average be wealthier, more life, and describes the boy's fascination educated, and more intelligent than the with words. majority in the given country. The afflu- Mishima's mentors at the Peers' ent homosexual can retreat into a world of School not only encouraged him to study private clubs, social groups, and exclusive the Japanese classics but brought him into institutions invisible to the larger society. contact with theNipponese Romanticists, Thus the concept of homosexuals as a a group of intellectuals who stressed the minority may appeal rather to the two uniqueness of the Japanesepeople and their extremes--street people and gay leaders- history. His later devotion to Japanese while having little to offer to the mass of tradition, however, was tempered by fasci- homosexuals in between. While in prin- nation with the West. As a student he was ciple the matter of political practicality much taken with the essays of Oscar Wilde, should be separated from the epistemo- and even after war broke out with Great logical question of whether homosexuals Britain and the United States, Mishima MISHIMA YUKIO 4 continued to read-generally in Japanese an exceptionally sensitive account of a translation-authors who had been de- boy's gradual self-awakening, with the nounced as "decadent." But unlike most homosexual elements attributed to sexual postwar writers, who distanced them- immaturity or explained as symbolic of selves from the literature of the Tokugawa the sterility of the postwar world. In period and earlier, he read the classics for Confessions of a Mask Mishima boldly pleasure and inspiration. countered every convention of the novels A story entitled "The Forest in that had served him as models: the hero Full Flower" so impressed Mishima's fails to win the hand of the girl he loves adviser that he proposed publishing it in because he can no longer endure the mask Bungei bunka (Literary CultureJ, a slim of the "normal" young man that society magazine of limited circulation, but of and literature forced him to wear. The high quality and with a nationwide reader- intensity and truth of his revelatory in- ship. To protect the identity of the author, sights justlfy the novel's reputation, and still a middle-school boy, the editors gave the combination of truth and beauty made him a name of their own invention, the work a landmark in his development Mishima Yukio. The work was published as an artist. in book form even during the war, when With his literary reputation in the paper shortage was acute. Mishima hand, Mishima then began to compose himself took care not to be conscripted, works of popular fiction with largely fi- and was more concerned about his own nancial motives in mind. He continued writing than about his country's defeat in until the year of his death to devote about 1945. a third of his time each month to writing His first full-length novel, The popular fiction and essays in order to be 'Tlhieves (19481, was an implausible and free the remainder of the time for work on unsuccessful portrayal of two young serious fiction and plays.In anovel entitled members of the aristocracy who are irre- Kinjiki (ForbiddenColors; 19531, Mishima sistibly drawn toward suicide. In the same sought to show the discrepancies and year he was invited to join the group that conflicts within himself, "as represented published the magazine Kindai bungaku by two 'Its." The first "I" is Shunsuke, a (Modern Literature). He was an outsider writer of sixty-five, whose collected works here too, because he was essentially apo- are being published for the third time. litical in a left-leaning milieu, though his Despite the acclaim accorded to his liter- criticism of postwar Japan's business and ary work by the world, he experiences only political elite was that in their craze for a horror of his aging self. The second, profit they had forgotten Japan's tradi- contrasting "I" is Yuichi, a youth of exqui- tions. site beauty, first seen by the older man as In July 1949 Mishima published he emerged from the sea after the swim. the most self-revealing of all his works, Yuichi is a spiritually uncomplicated the novel Kamen no kokuhaku (Confes- sensualist who enjoys the act of love, but sions of a MaskJ, which made his reputa- for that reason far more a narcissist than a tion and continued to be ranked among his homosexual-true to Mishima's own finest work, even when his corpus had character in this respect. The novel is grown to some 50 books. Yet the homosex- strongly misogynist: ShunsukeusesYuichi ual tendencies of the hero, which keep to wreak his revenge on several women him from desiring the girl he loves, so whom he detests. The novel was also baffled the critics that some imagined the chauvinistic: the foreigners among the intent to be parody. Neither then nor later characters are deliberately absurd. was the novel read as a confession of guilt. Mishima's privatelife at this time Japanese readers interpreted the work as resembled Yuichi's. He patronized Aruns- 4 MISHIMA YUKIO wick, a gay bar in the Ginza, where he met fuse. In the 1970s many critics and histo- the seventeen-year old Akihiro Maruyama, rians concluded that modemism had, for who had just begun a golden career from all intents and purposes, come to an end, which he was to graduate to the theatre, having been overtaken by post-modem- where he became the most celebrated ism. Even though there was no consensus female impersonator of his day. Mishima as to the meaning of the new term, its had reservations about the gay bars, as (in introduction signals the possibility of keeping with the pederastic tradition) he assessing the meaning of modernism itself intensely disliked effeminate men and as a period which had attained closure. sought both male and female company- Although some would trace its in the Japanese phrase "a bearer of two roots to the later eighteenth century, most swordsu-while preferring the male. scholars concur that modernism was a After passing the peak of his liter- response to the complexities of urbaniza- ary career, he became more of a public tion and technology as they reached a new figure than ever. In 1967 he secretly spent peak in the later decades of the nineteenth a month training with the Self Defense century. The hallmarks of modemismvary Forces, and in 1968 he formed a private from one medium to another, but they army of 100 men sworn to defend the may be summed up as a new self-con- Emperor, the Tate no Kai (Shield Society). sciousness, irony, abstraction, and radical From the same period is an essay deploring disjunction of formal elements. Among the emphasis given by intellectuals to the the trends highlighting the first stage of mind and glorifying the body instead. On modernism are aestheticism, with such November 25,1970, he committed suicide figures as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, in samurai style to publicize his appeal for and decadence, with Paul Verlaine and revision of the postwar Japanese Arthur Rimbaud as central figures. Mod- constitution that would allow his country ernism entered a new phase in the second to rearm. However one may judge his decade of the twentieth century, with such political views, Mishima was the most movements as Cubism and non-objectiv- gifted Japanese author of his generation, ism in painting, imagism in poetry, and and he retains a secure place in the literz- twelve-tone music. This phase is some- ture of his country and the world. times known as high modernism, with late modernism ensuing about 1940. BIBLIOGRAPHY. JohnNathan, The bearers of high modernism, Mishima: A Biography, Boston: Little, Brown, 1974; Henry Scott-Stokes, The such as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, New Guillaume Apollinaire andF. T. Marinetti, York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974; Pablo Picasso and Marcel Ducharnp, were Marguerite Yourcenar, Mishima, ou la reacting against some features of incipient vision du vide, Paris: Gallimard, 1980. modernism as they perceived them: the Warren lohansson so-called "fin-de-sikcle," associated with over-refinement, decadence, and homo- MODERNISM sexuality. Consequently, we find in these The literary and artistic currents writers and artists a strong element of that came forcefully to public attention at masculism, leading them loudly to dis- the end of the nineteenth century and dain "pansies," and to treat women as favored stylistic and thematic experiment mere adjuncts in their creative endeavors. are known collectively as modernism. High The case of Pound shows a grad- modernism, the age of the pioneers, is ual hardening of attitudes. In the winter of generally accepted as lasting until about 1908 he was dismissed from Wabash Col- 1940.After that datemodernism expanded lege, ostensibly for a minor heterosexual beyond its early base, becoming more dif- escapade. Yet to a friend he remarked af-