By Kabir Babar

ON Nov 25, 1970, exactly 22 years to the day he began writing his first novel, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima ended his literary career via hara-kiri — ritual disembowelment in the samurai manner. Minutes earlier, his speech to soldiers of the Japanese army, to rouse them to overthrow the political establishment and restore the authority of the emperor, had been met with jeers, bewilderment, and abuse.

At the time of his death, Mishima was one of the most famous Japanese in the world, and his suicide shocked Japan. Thrice shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, his works had been adapted for stage and screen many times, from Australia to Mexico. Heavily influenced by Western traditions, ranging from Greek ideals of beauty to the German literature of Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche, he had travelled five continents, spoke several European languages, and had translated and adapted Western literature into Japanese. Thus, his final statement to the army denouncing Western influence on Japan confused many people at the time.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mishima was steeped in classical Japanese literature. As a boy his skill in poetry and unusual command over the Japanese language impressed his elders, prompting one of them to describe him as a “blessed child of ancient history”. His academic excellence led to him being personally rewarded with a gift by emperor Showa. Meredith Weatherby, the translator of Mishima’s autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask — penned when Mishima was just 24 years old — commented that translating his works was more difficult than translating classical Noh, and that due to the subtle expression of Mishima’s condensed sentences, it sometimes took three hours to translate a single sentence.

Mishima’s immense talent was matched by prolificacy: the 42 volumes of his collected works comprise dozens of novels, more than 50 plays, 20 volumes of short stories and hundreds of essays. But his artistic endeavours went beyond the written word: he acted in and directed films and theatrical productions, performed songs, modelled for photographs, and was a practitioner of the martial arts. Despite being eminent in the literary field, or perhaps because of it, Mishima was sceptical of literary activity. In his commentary on the famous 18th century samurai treatise Hagakure (translated into English as Yukio Mishima on Hagakure: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan), Mishima expressed his feeling that there was “inevitably something cowardly lurking beneath the surface of all literature”. This view was partly influenced by the Hagakure itself, which condemned artistic endeavours as unbefitting a samurai, and also by his growing awareness of the importance of the body as brought about by his physical training.

In his essay ‘Sun and Steel’ he wrote: “Never had I discovered in physical action anything resembling the chilling, terrifying satisfaction afforded by intellectual adventure. Nor had I experienced in intellectual adventure the selfless heat, the hot darkness of physical action”. Other samurai manuals and historical figures had endorsed Bunbu Ryodo, the dual way which combines literary skill with martial excellence. Famous exponents of this, such as the 15th-16th century Chinese philosopher Wang Yangming and the 19th century samurai Saigo Takamori, inspired Mishima to harmonise the pen with the sword, art with action. He once described performing intense combat exercises followed by listening to elegant flute music as an example of Bunbu Ryodo. But in the end, Mishima came to believe that the pen and the sword join only at the moment of death.

That Mishima was preoccupied with death is apparent from the frequency with which he wrote about it. His short story ‘Patriotism’ describes hara-kiri in great detail, and Mishima later wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a sensational and successful film adaptation of the story. These writings and rehearsals about a subject which few reputable writers touched upon were partially meant to revive the samurai spirit, which Mishima felt had been all but eradicated since WWII. The Japanese, he maintained, had skilfully applied makeup to appear more Western and peaceful, and broken all mirrors which might allow them to see themselves as they really were. It is therefore apt that Mishima’s posthumous Buddhist name, Shobuin Bunkan Koi Koji, translates as ‘Buddhist Lay Spirit of Literature and Martial Arts, Mirror of Culture’, because it was precisely his purpose to remind his countrymen of what they had once been.

These reminders were unwelcome: on his death high-ranking politicians and a compliant media dismissed him as mad, and his suicide as a homosexual love-pact between him and one of his disciples. To this day Mishima is almost a taboo subject in his native country. Most biographical material about him is written in English. The film he directed, Patriotism, along with Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, were prohibited from being shown in Japan for decades. All of this served to divert attention away from the political and aesthetic aspects of Mishima’s failed coup d’etat.

Mishima’s writings are notable for their aesthetic feeling, their questing for purity and beauty, and the psychological complexity of their characters. His novels are populated by figures plagued with questions of identity, who often demonstrate the co-existence or conflation of contradictory thoughts and emotions. “Beauty, beautiful things,” stutters the ugly Buddhist acolyte in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, “those are now my most deadly enemies”. These inconsistencies and nihilistic juxtapositions between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, between Eros and Death, were not alien to Mishima himself, or to Japan as a whole. Mishima’s friend and biographer Henry Scott Stokes thought of him as “part gentleman, part gangster”, which typifies the duality of this man of many masks, who once referred to himself as “beauty’s kamikaze”. But Yasunari Kawabata, Mishima’s Nobel Prize-winning mentor, described him as “[…] the kind of genius that comes along perhaps once every 300 years.” Mishima, however, expressed a desire to die as a military man, not a literary one.

Nonetheless, he was not a samurai warrior, and had never fought in battle; because of his physical unsuitability he was declared unfit for combat duty during WWII. Yamamoto Tsunetomo, the author of Hagakure, lived to old age in a time of peace. There is thus some irony in the positions of these two figures, who maintained that “the Way of the Samurai is death” but who were unable — and perhaps unwilling, in Mishima’s case — to engage in warfare.

Many have regarded Mishima’s suicide as a waste, but from his own perspective it seems as if there was little else to do. He was 45 years old at the time of his death, and considering his abhorrence of old age and the decrepitude that he thought would inevitably accompany it, coupled with his desire to make a poem of his life “[...] written with a splash of blood”, his actions seem inevitable. Mishima’s epic Sea of Fertility tetralogy which took him six years to write had recently been completed. Unfolding over the course of six decades, the four novels comprising this magnum opus contained everything that he had been trying to say; finishing it made him feel “as if it is the end of the world”.

What was left to him was a transcendent performance which irrevocably fused together his life and art so as to make it impossible to meaningfully separate the two. Whatever the merits and intentions of such an approach, it is difficult to recall any other person, past or present, who has fused the personal, the political, and the artistic with such finality.

The great filmmaker Akira Kurosawa attempted suicide in 1971 in despair at his declining success, but in later years went on to direct magnificent films such as Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985). One similarly wonders what Mishima might have produced had he decided not to die, and had he heeded these words of the Hagakure: “The climate of an age is unalterable. [...] Therefore, it is useless to try to make the present age like the good old days a hundred years ago. What is important is to make each era as good as it can be according to its nature. The error of people who are always nostalgic for the old ways lies in their failure to grasp this point.”

Kabir Babar is an antiquarian who writes.