NIHILISM in the NOVELS of MISHIMA YUKIO by ROY STARRS

THE MASK AND THE HAMMER: NIHILISM IN THE NOVELS OF MISHIMA YUKIO By ROY STARRS B.A., The University of British Columbia, 1971 M.A., The University of British Columbia, 1980 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of Asian Studies) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA August, 1986 '© Roy Starrs, 1986 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of Asian Studies The University of British Columbia 1956 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Y3 Date Oct.7, 1986 )E-6 (3/81) ABSTRACT This thesis offers an analysis of some of the major novels of Mishima Yukio in the light of their underlying nihilist world-view. There are primarily three different levels to the analysis: philosophical, psychological and moral/political, to each of which a chapter is devoted. In the treatment of each of these "levels" the focus is not merely on the nihilism per se but on the aesthetic consequen• ces of the nihilism in Mishima's art of fiction. An attempt is also made to place Mishima, as a "nihilist writer", with• in the international context of the nihilist literary/philo• sophical tradition, a tradition whose origins may be traced back to mid-nineteenth-century Europe. The analysis centres on what are, in the writer's view, Mishima's three major works—which also represent, coinciden- tally, the three separate decades of his literary career: Con• fessions of a Mask (Kamen no kokuhaku, 1949), The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji, 1956) and The Sea of Fertility (Ho jo no umi, 1965-70), a total of six novels, since the latter work is a tetralogy. The study aims not to provide an all-in• clusive survey of Mishima's career but to penetrate to the very core of his inspiration through an in-depth study of his most important works. Chapter One, "The Tragic Mask", begins with a general consideration of the relation between philosophy and the novel, iii or ideas and the novel, and offers a brief taxonomy of the "philosophical novel". Using this taxonomy, a description is then given of Mishima as a philosophic novelist whose central philosophy is nihilism. The main body of the chapter then offers an analysis of each of his three main works in terms of their nihilist philosophy, paying particular attention to its expression in "experiences of nothingness" which form the climaxes of the novels, and to the structural discipline which his use of this philosophy confers on the novels. Chapter Two, "The Void Behind the Mask", opens with a general discussion of the relation between nihilism and psycho• logy, and then proceeds to a consideration of Mishima's own "nihilist psychology" and the "nihilist psychology" of his novels. Each of his major novels, whether explicitly "auto• biographical" or more apparently "fictional", is found to be primarily an expression of the author's own "nihilist psycho• logy". The active/passive tensions which characterize this psychology are analysed in Freudian, Adlerian and peculiarly Japanese terms. Chapter Three, "Hammer to Mask", opens with a general consideration of nihilist morality and politics, especially in terms of the "active nihilist" tradition which may be traced from Nietzsche down to 20th century fascism and terrorism. Mishima's own right-wing extremism and his glorification of terrorist violence place him squarely in this "active nihilist" moral/political tradition. But his "active nihilist" side was also continually in danger of being undermined by his "passive nihilist" side, his sense of the futility of all action. The resultant tensions are found to form the basis of the moral/political dialectic of his major novels. V TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Tragic Mask 11 Notes to Chapter One 87 Chapter Two: The Void Behind the Mask 93 Notes to Chapter Two 159 Chapter Three: Hammer to Mask 165 Notes to Chapter Three 224 Conclusion 230 Bibliography 237 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my heart-felt thanks to my supervisor, Professor John Howes, for his warm encourage• ment and support, and for his sagacious direction of this thesis. I would also like to thank the members of my thesis committee, Drs. Leon Hurvitz, William Wray, Kenneth Bryant and Peter Petro, for their patient reading of this work during a particularly hot and dry August. Grateful thanks are also due to Professor Kinya Tsuruta for his advice and support over many years. Many thanks also to Professor Takahito Momokawa of the National Institute of Japanese Literature for sending me reference materials. Finally, a deep gassho to Kazuko, my wife, for her patience and loving support, and to Sean Kenji, my son, for lightening my days. NIHIL EX NIHILO. 1 INTRODUCTION Mishima Unmasked Mishima Yukio ( ^ , 1925-70) is probably the first modern Japanese novelist to have gained a genuinely international reputation. That is, he is the first to be widely known not only among readers with a special interest in Japan but also among readers in general—and, indeed, perhaps even, among many who never read novels. This fact was most obviously demonstrated, of course, by the 1985 film, Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters, directed by Paul Schrader—which, in turn, has led to yet another "Mishima boom" in the English-speaking coun• tries. In France, too, there has long been a "Mishima cult", and one of the most distinguished of contemporary French writers, Marguerite Yourcenar, has written a respectful critical study of his work, Mishima ou La vision du vide. That a popular American film was based on the life and work of a Japanese writer was certainly an unprecedented event in the history, of Japanese/Western cultural relations, and one cannot imagine such a thing happening with any other modern Japanese writer. Long before the film, in fact, there were already two excellent and highly readable biographies of Mishima in English, one by John Nathan, the other by Henry Scott Stokes—again, an unpre• cedented phenomenon for a Japanese writer. The curious fact is, though, that probably almost anyone who has read widely in modern Japanese literature regrets this "undue" popularity of Mishima. The general agreement seems to 2 be that it would be far preferable if this worldwide fame were bestowed on some of the Japanese novelists of obviously higher rank—say, Kawabata or Tanizaki, novelists who not only pos• sessed deeper wisdom and finer artistry but were also more "respectable" as men, and would thus "represent Japan to the world" in a much more satisfactory way. But a writer's fame, of course, is not always strictly commensurate with his liter• ary or moral worth, especially his fame beyond the borders of his own country. Many "extra-literary" factors may enter into it, especially, in this age of mass media, the "human interest" quality of his life and character—in other words, the extent to which the writer himself arouses the public's curiosity. Needless to say, Mishima was a past master at "arousing curiosity", at self-publicity stunts which, to put it bluntly, helped sell his books. As the media people say, he was "good copy": a writer with an international reputation as a "serious" novelist but who, nonetheless, did such bizarre things as play bit parts in gangster movies, pose nude for semi-pornographic pictures, found his own private army and, finally, commit sui• cide by ritual disembowelment and decapitation after a failed attempt at a coup d'ltat. And, indeed, many cynics have sug• gested that his suicide was merely the last and most spectacu• lar of his self-publicity stunts—a final desperate attempt to revive his flagging popularity. If that was, in fact, its pur• pose, it can only be judged an outstanding success. Though politically a "non-event", in "human interest" terms it commands our attention like no other incident in the lives of modern 3 Japanese novelists—which, it must be admitted, tend on the whole to be rather dull. More than a decade and a half after it occurred, Mishima's suicide—almost as if it were his last "theatrical performance"—continues to be the object of a some• what morbid fascination, as well as the subject of lively de• bate among "Mishima critics", most of which revolves around the tantalizing question: why did he do it? But this is not to say that there are no "legitimate" lit• erary reasons for the unprecedented popularity of this Japanese writer in the West. Firstly and perhaps most importantly, his novels are probably far more exciting to read for the average Western reader than many of those Japanese novels more highly valued by the Japanese themselves. For a reader not in tune with the subtleties of traditional Japanese aesthetics and social relations, the more "purely Japanese" novels by such writers as Soseki, Shiga, Tanizaki and Kawabata often seem rather "flat" and "uneventful"—or, to state the case extremely, a boring parade of trivial details headed in no particular di• rection, and apt to be cut short at any arbitrary moment. Mi• shima 's novels, by contrast, seem a veritable circus of colour and excitement, and a well-organized circus too.

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