Not much is written about Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) today. Few people talk about it, starting with the Japanese themselves. Whether it was a growing indifference towards the author who persistently stole the Nobel, or some sort of conspiracy of national silence to erase his last embarrassing memory is unknown. Mishima’s political views turned out to be so extreme that he was labeled fascist. The Japanese right wing not only rejected him, but also threatened him with death and never offered him the compliment they believed he deserved. Near the end of his life, at the age of 45, he founded his own private army, the Shield Society, or SS, as it is popularly known. In 1968, he wrote a play called My Friend Hitler, which, according to Marguerite Yourcenar, was meant to be ironic, and it could have been, but was therefore not more acceptable. He was an extreme mythomaniac, any evaluation of his life had to begin with a close examination of the myths to distinguish what was real in him and what was just a simulation. It’s an almost impossible task, as he probably takes at least some of the poses that characterize him seriously.
Mishima was the most famous and furiously prolific and contradictory Japanese writer of his generation: gay and family man, reactionary politician and apolitical stylist, fond of both self-disclosure and self-loathing, proud of Japan but Western for his own liking. He ended his busy life by disemboweling himself in the offices of the army led by him and his lieutenants. Matters came to a head in 1970 when the writer and three members of his militia, assigned to restore the Emperor of Japan, took the commander of a military base hostage and staged a failed coup. Mishima gave a poignant speech to the soldiers at the base itself and suggested that they join efforts to strengthen the Emperor. He saw her as an infallible being. However, the soldiers mocked him and he committed suicide a few minutes after the seppuku ritual.
La Casa de Kyoko, a novel hitherto unpublished in Spanish, first published in 1959, is dramatically summarized in the chapter entitled The Art of the 1985 Paul Schrader biopic, a four-part biography of the Japanese author. The novel is about four young men who represent the full character of the narrator: a painter, a boxer, an actor and a businessman. Obsessed with the power of the human body, as expressed in his 1967 article The Sun and Steel, Mishima explored each of these aspects—artistic, athletic, narcissistic, and nihilistic—in his literary life. Some of these experiences were incorporated into his novel The House of Kyoko, whose existence he traces almost mathematically. He later wrote: “The characters in the book progress in one way or another as their individual personalities, occupations, and sexual preferences require, but in the end, all paths, however convoluted, all lead back to nihilism.” Kyoko’s home was to Mishima in her thirties what Confessions of a Mask (1949) was to her twenties, the epitome of her development as an artist and as a man. The novel was a disastrous failure, although the author saw it as a deeply nihilistic work, a portrait of a generation that saw meaning only in destruction and death. In any case, death is present in all the works of the Japanese author.
Yukio Mishima was, so to speak, a joker of immense literary talent, the author of The Sea of Abundance, a beautiful quartet chronicling the evolution of Japan from the early 20th century to shortly before his death. and many other titles that any reader interested in literature should know. By writing nearly forty novels, eighteen plays, and twenty-volume short stories, he became the first modern Japanese writer to become almost as famous and respected internationally as he was in his home country. I mean before it happens. In the late 1960s, it seemed likely that he would win the Nobel Prize in Literature, although the award eventually went to his mentor, Yasunari Kawabata.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that Mishima represents more than himself when it comes to the extreme view of things. It’s best to focus on his books as works of art, not as support for grand revelations about his life and controversial death. Something of far greater value in these times when true artistic meaning is dangerously ideologized and distorted.