Yukio Mishima

[MTC]

I couldn't find a thread on Yukio Mishima's works so I decided to create one. The only book I've read of him so far is The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea which I absolutely loved for its bleakness, depravity and occasional beauty. Is the rest of his output similar to this I wonder? Any other recommendations?

[qcrisp]

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is probably the best and most representative of his work outside of his final tetralogy (The Sea of Fertility), which is undoubtedly his masterpiece.

TTofGP is somewhat like The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, but much better.

I've never read anything of his that was simply not interesting, but his work does vary somewhat in quality.

The other pieces I would particularly recommend are:

Patriotism (a short story about ritual disembowelment).
Sun and Steel (a long, autobiographical essay about literature, body-building, and ritual disembowelment).

[ramonoski]

I read Confessions of a Mask years ago. It's the only of his books I've read, I'm afraid. I liked it, and there's quite a bit of internal turmoil driving the narrative though it's not exactly bleak.

[xylokopos]

Like MTC, I have only read The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea. I loved it for the same reasons and also for the brilliant nautical descriptions and Mishima's obsession with the twin dichotomies of glory-death and love-death. I can see why he appeals to readers that like speculative and horror fiction - he has that morbid romanticism that one finds in the Gothic horror of the Romantics and the Victorians: that love's consummation is love's abandonment, that perdition is the shiniest hour.

I have found the Sea of Fertility books in a second hand bookstore in perfect condition for a total of less than 25 dollars and I think they will be my next purchase. Those Vintage International translations feel fantastic on the fingertips, there is something very appealing to the way the covers and the paper feel. Sadly, there were some very obvious proofreading failures in my copy, including the rendition of the protagonist's name.

I have known of Mishima since at least 1991, when I first heard Flotsam and Jetsam's No Place for Disgrace and developed an interest in Samurai culture and ritual disembowelment. Weird how it took me so long to read him.

[teguififthzeal]

Mishima was very much in concert with

Harry Crosby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Harry_Crosby

Crosby ended up killing himself and his "partner" at the end of his life in a suicide pact. He was a rich man who was slightly insane and had no idea what to with himself.

[qcrisp]

Quote Originally Posted by teguififthzeal

Mishima was very much in concert with Harry Crosby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Crosby ended up killing himself and his "partner" at the end of his life in a suicide pact. He was a rich man who was slightly insane and had no idea what to with himself.

This opens with an associational essay on the suicides of Harry Crosby and Hart Crane:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...ing-but-a-star

Changing the subject slightly...

I was thinking about Mishima just this morning, how the opening passage of The Decay of the Angel is one of my favourite opening passages in fiction. It's hard to find the equal of the restrained chill and melancholy that Mishima more than mastered here and in other places.

[ToALonelyPeace]

I'd recommend anyone new to Yukio Mishima to read his short story "Patriotism" (Patriotism by Yukio Mishima | Mutantfrog Travelogue ) It conveys Mishima's passionate interest with seppukku. There's also the contention whether Mishima's 'gay' or not, and how this affects his hyper-masculine focus. This post here from another forum (which I was linked to from somewhere else) explains why Mishima cannot easily be called 'gay'.

Spoiler

To understand Yukio Mishima, you need to understand the primary influences he was inspired by and in dialog with - primarily Thomas Mann, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Nietzsche - his body of work is very strongly grounded here, with the exception of the Sea of Fertility series; which is really a treatment of Japan's confused and syncretic religious tendencies. His most well-known works in the West, and the ones that defined him as a major author, are really philisophic novels in the European tradition. Why is this important? Its important because its essential to Mishima's view of sex, eroticism, and transcendental beauty. There's a tremendously misguided (and deliberately obfuscatory) effort in academia to portray Mishima as a ''closeted gay man'' - Roy Starrs is one of the only Western scholars who has made an effort to refute this narrative. His primary source, of course, is Mishima's thinly-veiled autobiography, Confessions of a Mask. Confessions describes a boy who was emotionally maimed by an overbearing grandmother who prevented him from associating with other boys, who was emotionally incestuous towards her charge, who preyed upon the boy's introversion and sensitivity, and who demanded he suppress his own willful impulses. His other parental figures were a callous, workaholic father who was cruel to the boy on grounds of his physical and emotional frailty and ill-health, and a mother who had abandoned him to the demented and selfish wiles of his grandmother. The legacy of this was that Mishima the boy became alienated from the world - to the point that his sense of self and his developing moral core fractured irreparably. The introversion he relied upon to sustain an ''inner-world'' which was essential to his psychic survival rendered him increasingly unable to relate to the world and its demands as a complete person. As he grew older, he was forced to don ''masks'' to deceive others with an appearance of superficiality and emotional normalcy. In reality, he was becoming less and less normal as his mind matured. He was literally becoming obsessed by macabre and erotic fantasies and fascinations, the expression(s) of which would, if brought into reality, make him a monstrous and criminal figure. Mishima came to view human intimacy as basically sentimental and fatuous - he came to disdain women on grounds that coveting female beauty was a source of spiritual and moral malaise - as when lust for a woman was consummated, it simply led to the imposition of boring, pointless, and dreary obligations and expectations that robbed a man of his youthful and vital ambitions. He came to view sex itself as a cheap and shallow way in which people utilize their physical body (and that of others) to achieve a temporary catharsis and escape from the self. His seminal erotic experience was (despite the opague language in describing it) masturbatory - he came upon (presumably on ground's of Mann's repeated reference to it) the iconography of Sebastian, and determined that this represented the ultimate expression of beauty - essence combined with form in the masculine body. Of course, Sebastian was a Saint - in Mann's (and Yukio's estimation) beauty is a masculine province, and the distilled, emblematic expression of beauty is a man exhibiting poise under torture in the flower of his youth - not encumbered by either the ravage of age and decrepitude, nor tainted by common sexuality and the impurity of lust. Sex, thus, to Mishima, was a corruption of beauty - in his own words, ''those of us who never had physical health in childhood don't lose ourselves in sex'' - the mission of the aesthete, the Saint, the artist, the philosopher is to capture beauty in an upright, virginal, and manly capacity - the only way to achieve this is to become the form of beauty itself, and to prepare oneself for sacrifice (physical and spiritual). The erotic ideal in Mishima's canon is expressed in Patriotism and Kyoko's House - the latter of course being the more significant. Mishima's alter-ego in the novel is a fractured personality who pursues narcissism to mitigate his emptiness. First as an actor, then as a bodybuilder. Aimless and unsatisfied, he is rescued by a female Yakuza who wishes to enslave him - on the condition that he never purport to love her in exchange for her patronage and he agree to mutual suicide on her terms. He agrees with the stipulation of, ''you mustn't kiss me until I am dead''. She obliges, and their pact is consummated - the underlying idea being that life can only be defined by death, and that erotic love can only host meaning if it constitutes sacrifice. Mere lust, be it animalistic and free or constrained by matrimony, is a ruse - people who believe love entails ''risk'' in and of itself are sentimental and deluded. The motifs here, obviously, are extremely homoerotic - that doesn't tell us anything. Homoeroticism is a basic component of high culture and passion. Its context is basically religious, anti-rational, anti-liberal, and highly traditional if not primordial and pagan. In contrast, the ''gay'' identity and ideology are the opposite - Larry Kramer actually gets into this quite extensively, as does Michael Foucault. Both are/were deranged in their own right, but they're absolutely correct in their assessment of the origin of ''gay'' identity. We can examine this further if you wish, but for now its best not to go that far outside the scope. Mishima didn't really want to be married - he married to satisfy his honor obligations to his parents. He agreed to an arranged marriage on the stipulation that his wife to be would have 1) never read his work; and 2) never take an interest in his work. This makes quite a bit of sense - his ''career'' couldn't really be reconciled with the demands of social respectability. Mishima's homoeroticism wasn't a ''secret'' - he was constantly airing these ideas in public, and his detractors and rivals (including the Japanese communist student movement) regularly portrayed him as a deranged, De Sade type of figure. Nobody believed Mishima was sexually normal - his wife, as were his parents, were profoundly discomforted by the trajectory of his life, and largely tried to avoid its implications. Paul Schrader noted that Mishima's estate objected really to the entire project of the biopic - singling out scenes that implied homosexuality as they thought it was emblematic of his ''problems''. Mishima was a great man, but he was also a pathologically disturbed individual - and this wasn't a ''secret''. He got increasingly savaged by critics overtime on grounds of this, and his parents and his wife suffered for it. Presenting the issue of Mishima being a ''gay man'' who had to hide a private life really misses the point by a mile; Mishima was actually a diabolical individual, and this became clear on November 25, 1970. Until then his friends, family and supporters had tried to convince the world he was a satirist or an eccentric - he wasn't: He meant everything he said. That's quite a bit more disconcerting than being a homosexual - if you think homosexual authors are rare or controversial, you're a rather sheltered person. No - its well known that modern Japan considered homosexuality to be a deviant behavior - and your source reflects that. They didn't conceptualize a ''gay'' identity. Nobody, other than Westerners, believes that sexual behavior or lust is an immutable trait that constitutes a cultural or social identity. Its a bizarre concept, rooted in ideology.

[paeng]

Yukio Mishimas enduring, unexpected influence | The Japan Times

[paeng]

Fiction: The Union of Death and Desire

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New in English: a 1961 novel by Yukio Mishima, plus sexy and surreal stories of obsession by two Japanese women.