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13 January 2025

Yukio Mishima’s lifelong death wish

The Japanese writer and nationalist, a darling of the US far right, was haunted by the aesthetics of self-destruction.

By Yo Zushi

In April 1951, General Douglas MacArthur went to the US Congress to deliver some good news. Japan, he said, had “undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history”. From the “ashes left in war’s wake” had risen a nation “dedicated to the primacy of individual liberty and personal dignity”, with “a truly representative government committed to the advance of political morality, freedom of economic enterprise and social justice”. But you can’t please everyone. Unlike the supreme commander of the Allied powers during Japan’s postwar occupation, the writer Yukio Mishima, who would quickly become the country’s most translated novelist in Europe and more recently an idol of the US far right, saw only “hypocritical ‘harmony’” in which emotions were “dulled, and sharp angles worn smooth”. Or so he put it in “Voices of the Fallen Heroes”, a spooky 1966 short story in which ghosts at a séance ventriloquise his preoccupations with national and cultural decline after Emperor Hirohito rejected his divinity.

The story is the centrepiece of a new collection of the same name, drawn from the last decade of Mishima’s brief but brilliant career. The author, poet, actor, film-maker and bodybuilder, born 100 years ago, was one of modern Japan’s most important cultural figures. But his life has too often been overshadowed by his death, at least in the West. His weirdly flaccid coup attempt in 1970 that culminated in his suicide by hara-kiri (and decapitation by members of his ultra-nationalist private militia) has been romanticised by reactionary freaks for years, who proselytise his ideas on neo-Nazi web forums such as Stormfront. His work once even made it onto a list of “Must-Read WN [White Nationalist] Books” – a wild achievement for a clearly Asian, sexually ambiguous beatnik sympathiser. His politics, however, was but one aspect of a writer of beguiling, sometimes confounding contradictions, as this latest Penguin Classics selection reminds us.

“Moon”, written in 1962, is a drugged-out, bugged-out tale of jazz-loving bohemians on a bender in an abandoned church; 1967’s “Companions” tells the story of a father and chain-smoking son falling in with a random dude while house-hunting in London. “Cars”, from 1963, derives moments of sweaty eroticism from an account of a middle-aged man’s driving test, while “Tickets”, first published the same year, is a haunting yokai (or supernatural folklore) narrative that begins with the granular details of a neighbourhood merchants’ meeting before taking a disorienting supernatural turn. Mishima’s stylistic and thematic range is masterly and his details always evocative – he describes a woman’s nipples as “ever so faintly red as if someone had playfully coated them in rouge”. But while the language is thrilling, there’s a cynicism here – a resentfulness, even – that spikes the beauty.

Even a day spent in San Francisco’s Union Square among children chasing pigeons and people-watchers enjoying the sun elicits in the narrator of 1962’s “The Flower Hat” a suspicion that “this ‘peaceful life’ might itself amount to nothing more than a picture”. The scene then becomes a vision of “utter death”, a boy in a baby walker suddenly as inert as an “immaculate shard of pottery”. “These days, anyone who didn’t see the world as doomed to destruction was simply blind,” he explains – a reasonable fear, perhaps, just 17 years after a world war and the dropping of the atom bombs, but so absolute that it renders ordinary joy almost impossible. If postwar abundance and stability were for phoneys and the self-deluded, what did Mishima want?

Intellectually, at least, he longed for the restrictions of an older, more rigid social morality that would give all those who accepted them a unifying purpose. He dreamed of a Japanese elite who, like members of the samurai class described in the 18th-century warriors’ handbook Hagakure, would be willing to expend their lives in the glorification of energy and passion, and perhaps find final fulfilment in a beautiful death. Japan had been a land of living gods until Hirohito stepped down from the heavens with the Humanity Declaration of 1 January 1946, humiliatingly drafted by the Allied powers. The emperor had been the embodiment of the country’s traditional culture, its sense of exceptionalism and its might, but he had ceded it all, dismissing it as “a false conception”. This, to Mishima, was a betrayal of the national spirit, the crushing of the chrysanthemum that followed the surrender of the sword.

For all his far-right provocations and calls for manly nationalism, though – for all his marching up and down the streets of Tokyo with his toy militia, cosplaying imperial soldiers – it was only in a kind of aesthetic hedonism that he seemed to locate any final meaning. “For me, beauty is always retreating from one’s grasp,” he wrote a couple of years before his death. “The only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed.” This pursuit of a paradise lost was what animated the author, regardless of its futility or even whether an authentic state of being had ever been anything but a myth.

In “Voices of the Fallen Heroes”, the spirits of kamikaze pilots who died for the then-divine emperor reproach Hirohito for defiling their sacrifice by conceding his humanity, ushering in a more skilled, reasonable, modernised and impassive modern era. “Even if the past ages were ‘a false conception’, and the present age is true,” they say, “why did not His Majesty… deign to guard that bitter, painful, false conception for the sake of those who had died?”

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False or not, that conception was something that Mishima was willing to die for. On 25 November 1970, he left a note in his office that read: “Human life is limited, but I would like to live for ever.” Then he marched with four hunky, hand-picked militiamen across the capital, entered the headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Japan Self-Defence Forces and failed miserably to inspire the soldiers there to launch a coup d’état to restore imperial divinity. And like Richey Edwards in 1991 carving “4 real” into his arm with a razor blade to prove how committed the Manic Street Preachers were, Mishima drew a Japanese sword and plunged it into his toned body, 1.6 inches below his navel. Then he tugged it 5.5 inches across, from left to right.

“A futile death that bears neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being,” Mishima wrote in a 1967 essay on the continued relevance of bushido, the samurai’s moral code. But his death wasn’t really futile. He had loathed what he perceived as the “estrangement of body and spirit in modern society”; what was his suicide but a grisly, ultimate refutation of that estrangement? In his 1968 book Sun and Steel, he confessed that he had long “cherished a romantic impulse towards death” and felt that an aesthetically pleasing act of self-destruction required first a beautiful body: “A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensable in a romantically noble death.” All of his training with his militia, his bodybuilding and his honing of muscles through martial arts were preparations for this final, extravagant, self-aware coup de théâtre. It was a seppuku both 4 real and in quotation marks, a carefully manufactured tragedy.

Mishima was 45 when he died, not much younger than the cuckolding Ryosuke in the 1965 story “True Love at Dawn”. That tragic hero finds eternal youth in death, slain by a young man tricked into having sex with Ryosuke’s wife. When the police ask the killer why he butchered them both, he responds, “Because they were beautiful and real… I didn’t have a single other reason to kill them.” I have a feeling that Mishima’s ghost would admit the same thing about his own self-murder. Sad, aren’t they – midlife crises? What lengths some people go to just to affirm their existence and maintain their lust for beauty as it fades.

Voices of the Fallen Heroes: And Other Stories
Yukio Mishima, edited by Stephen Dodd
Penguin Modern Classics, 272pp, £14.99

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[See also: Elsa Morante’s wild, compelling fiction]

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This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors