SOURCE: McAdams, Dan P. “Fantasy and Reality in the Death of Yukio Mishima.” Biography 8, no. 4 (fall 1985): 292-317.

[In the following essay, McAdams examines the ways in which Mishima's fantasies are played out in his fiction.]

By the time the lieutenant had at last drawn the sword across to the right side of his stomach, the blade was already cutting shallow and had revealed its naked tip, slippery with blood and grease. But, suddenly stricken by a fit of vomiting, the lieutenant cried out hoarsely. The vomiting made the fierce pain fiercer still, and the stomach, which had thus far remained firm and compact, now abruptly heaved, opening wide its wound, and the entrails burst through, as if the wound too were vomiting. Seemingly ignorant of their master's suffering, the entrails gave an impression of robust health and almost disagreeable vitality as they slipped smoothly out and spilled over into the crotch. The lieutenant's head drooped, his shoulders heaved, his eyes opened to narrow slits, and a thin trickle of saliva dribbled from his mouth. The gold markings on his epaulettes caught the light and glinted …

Blood was scattered everywhere. The lieutenant was soaked in it to his knees, and he sat now in a crumpled and listless posture, one hand on the floor. A raw smell filled the room. The lieutenant, his head drooping, retched repeatedly, and the movement showed vividly in his shoulders. The blade of the sword, now pushed back by the entrails and exposed to its tip, was still in the lieutenant's right hand …

It would be difficult to imagine a more heroic sight than that of the lieutenant at this moment, as he mustered his strength and flung back his head.¹

In the autumn of 1960, Yukio Mishima penned this account of the Japanese samurai rite of seppuku. The short story “Patriotism” describes in detail the heroic double suicide of Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama and his lovely bride Reiko. Spurred by the knowledge that the lieutenant was to be implicated in an unsavory political plot, the newlyweds perform the quintessential act of patriotism, leaving as their only legacy the farewell note: “Long live the Imperial Forces.” Indeed the “last moments of this heroic and dedicated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep.”²

Ten years after Yukio Mishima finished “Patriotism,” he ceremoniously disemboweled himself in General Kanetoshi Mashita's office after addressing the Jieitai soldiers from the balcony at Eastern Army Headquarters in Tokyo. On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four compatriots in his private right-wing army overpowered General Mashita and a group of army personnel with their samurai swords in order to stage a public exhortation to Japanese patriotism and the defense of the Emperor. After making a short speech to a hooting crowd of infantrymen, Mishima with his group retired to a back office to enact the gruesome ritual which had been rehearsed by the five for several weeks. Mishima shouted a last salute to the Emperor and then plunged the dagger deep into his own stomach. His right-hand man, Morita, whom some have suspected was Mishima's homosexual lover, then joined his master in double suicide, as the three remaining students wept and chanted a Buddhist prayer.

Since the early 1950's, ritual suicide revealed itself again and again in Mishima's writing to be a central element in a macabre constellation of themes including beauty, blood, passion, night, hero worship, homosexuality, and glorious death. The same elements prevail in the childhood and adolescent fantasies the author reports in his autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask. Mishima, furthermore, acted out many of these themes in Japanese motion pictures, and he experienced their enactment vicariously as a director of modern drama. Tied to a tree trunk, arrows piercing his naked body, Mishima even posed for a leading Japanese photographer as the bleeding martyr Saint Sebastian. (A similar portrait of the dying saint had inspired his first ejaculation.)³ In other photographs, he wore but a tiny loincloth, his splendidly muscled body glimmering with sweat and the cold, steel samurai sword leaning loyally at his side, as if waiting for the inevitable command to sear open the taut but tender flesh of its bearer.

Such is a sample of Mishima's bizarre fantasy life. The weak and eroding dam separating the waters of fantasy from the waters of reality collapsed on November 25, 1970, and the opponent waters, separated so precariously for over four decades, rushed together with a cataclysmic explosion. Within seconds, the two waters became one, and when the momentary chaos of intercourse had passed, what remained was a solitary sea—cold, still, at peace.

Who can understand Yukio Mishima? Who can make sense of a life so rich and yet so tragic, of a psyche so complex and yet so single-minded? Mishima is considered by some to be the greatest Japanese novelist of all time. His triumphant tetrology, The Sea of Fertility, is a panoramic vision of Japan in the twentieth century. Spanning eighty years from the early Taisho period to the 1960's, the four books comprising this set are brilliant evocations of a fascinating culture only superficially understood in the West. Mishima wrote over one hundred full length books which have recently been combined into a thirty-six volume set.

But Mishima was much more than a novelist. He was a playwright, a sportsman, a film actor, the founder of a private army, a family man, and a world traveler. One biographer has characterized him as the “Leonardo da Vinci of modern Japan.”⁴ The first to take on the challenge of systematically imposing some kind of order upon his crowded life was Mishima himself. Shortly before he killed himself, Mishima organized an exhibition devoted to his life, displayed at the Tobu department store in Tokyo. In an introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition, he wrote that he saw his life as being divided into four rivers—Writing, Theater, Body, and Action, all finally flowing into the Sea of Fertility. But Writing and Theater were never able, in Mishima's eyes, to transform him into the tragic hero of his fantasies. Rather, as the psychological analysis offered in this paper will show, it was the inevitable confluence of the River of Body and the River of Action that united fantasy and reality as the blade cut.

THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD

Ruth Benedict has identified an essential dualism in Japanese culture in her delineation of the “chrysanthemum” and the “sword”—two antithetical themes that have been held in tension throughout much of the history of this island-state.⁵ The chrysanthemum theme refers to the traditional Japanese preoccupation with beauty, color, and aesthetics. Modern manifestations of this influence abound in the elegant Japanese flower gardens, the still polite and very delicate lines in Japanese architecture, and Japanese mores and customs which remain courtly and refined even today. The emphasis is upon style, grace, propriety, charm, and gentility. A kind of feminine principle reigns, the roots of which go back at least as far as the courtly life of Heian Japan (9th-12th centuries). The spirit of the Heian era is documented magnificently in Lady Murasaki's eleventh-century classic The Tale of Genji. Frivolous and vacuous, the courtly life is filled with secret trysts, court intrigue, and petty wars between the sexes.

The culture of the Heian period flourished within a political framework that was decentralized and non-militaristic. The eventual rise of the spirit of the sword ultimately generated a more centralized system in which political power was monopolized by the militaristic shoguns. Within the emerging feudal society, the aristocratic fighting man on horseback became an ideal; unequivocal loyalty to one lord above all else served as his oath. The samurai ethic—bushido or the way of the warrior—proclaimed the values of personal asceticism, the glory of death in righteous battle, and the honor of seppuku, commonly called harakiri, which is suicide by the painful method of cutting open one's abdomen.⁶ In contrast to the chrysanthemum, the orientation of the sword was decidedly masculine.

For Mishima, the chrysanthemum and the sword represented discordant elements in his own life. He identified his own writing (The River of Writing) as a daughter of the Feminine chrysanthemum. The struggle between the influence of the chrysanthemum and the influence of the sword is poignantly depicted in Mishima's 1956 novel Temple of the Golden Pavilion. For the protagonist of the story, a Buddhist acolyte named Mizoguchi, the Golden Temple embodies the essence of eternal beauty—an immutable and abstract beauty that protects man but smothers him, as well, by insulating him from life. Beauty's stultifying effect blocks Mizoguchi's attempts to experience life with any intensity or meaning. On two occasions the vision of the Golden Temple grinds to a halt a possible sexual encounter. The second time the beauty of the woman's naked breast becomes too powerful as it transfigures itself in Mizoguchi's eyes into the Golden Temple. Finally, Mizoguchi resolves to burn down the Temple and liberate himself from its emasculating grip. As the Temple blazes, the proud acolyte leans back to enjoy a cigarette. The novel closes with the suggestion of satisfaction and affirmation: “I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after finishing a job of work. I wanted to live.”⁷

Like the abstract beauty of the Temple, the words that waltzed on the pages of Yukio Mishima's novels and short stories threatened to separate their creator from “the instantaneous existence that life lets us glimpse.”⁸ Mishima ultimately rejected the chrysanthemum, arguing in one of his last pieces that words were by nature “corrosive.”⁹ Like a cancer, they ate away the flesh of human existence, leaving but an emaciated skeleton that could at best merely dream of glory. Salvation lay in the glorification of the body and the utilization of the sword in the act of destruction.

EARLY FAMILY LIFE

The most powerful agent shaping the early years of Yukio Mishima's life may have been his grandmother, Natsu. Natsu Nogai was a brilliant, cultured, selfish, and highly unstable woman whose grandfather was a daimyo (lord of a fief) related by marriage to the Tokugawa, the ruling family of Japan from about 1600 to 1868. Her husband, Jotaro Hiraoka, was a common man, a Walter Mitty character in a life of perennial failure, who was “absolutely unsuited for the management of a household—but an extraordinary gallant.”¹⁰ Mishima describes Natsu as “narrow-minded,” “indomitable,” and of a “wildly poetic spirit.”¹¹ She suffered from a chronic case of cranial neuralgia.

Natsu's only son, Azusa, married Shizue Hachi, and she gave birth to her first son, Kimitake Hiraoka (pen name: Yukio Mishima) on January 14, 1925. On Kimitake's fiftieth day of life, Natsu took the infant from his mother and proceeded to incarcerate him in her darkened sickroom for the next twelve years. In his infancy, Shizue was permitted to nurse the boy once every four hours according to Natsu's rigid schedule. When Kimitake had had enough milk, Natsu promptly snatched him up and carried him back to her sickroom. In the ensuing years of childhood, Kimitake sometimes met his mother on secret rendezvous escaping ephemerally the sickroom and Natsu's watchful eye.

It appears that the relationship between Natsu and her grandson was one of extreme ambivalence for Kimitake. Natsu believed that boys were dangerous playmates so the only friends she permitted Kimitake were three older girls she carefully selected from among his cousins. Because loud sound aggravated Natsu's neuralgia, it was imperative that the young Kimitake make as little noise as possible in his play. Despite the fact that his grandmother controlled virtually his every move with an iron hand, Kimitake seemed to develop a kind of affection for the woman, and one of his brothers remembers Mishima at eleven and twelve excitedly retelling her tales.¹² But there is one aspect of Kimitake's relationship with his grandmother that is surely traumatic. Natsu insisted that Kimitake give her her medicine and accompany her to the toilet when her neuralgia was complicated by stomach ulcers and a kidney disease. Sometimes her pain was so extreme that she would tear her hair and scream for Kimitake's comfort. One biographer reports that, on one of these occasions, she seized a knife and held it to her throat.¹³

There is little material available concerning the relationship that the young Kimitake may have formed with his father, Azusa. Perhaps, the tone of the relationship, however, is captured in a quote from the father concerning his philosophy of child rearing: “A parent has to apply pressure. You squeeze and you squeeze, and any child that collapses is better off dead.”¹⁴

Even less is known about Kimitake's early relations with his younger brother and sister. Nathan reports that he had little chance to interact with his siblings before his emancipation from his grandmother's rule at the age of twelve. Even in adolescence, Kimitake spent most of his waking hours in his room reading and writing. One sibling reports that he never knew his brother very well and that he and his sister had always considered Kimitake as a kind of guest in the house.¹⁵

Kimitake's early loneliness is probably most evident in accounts of his first six years in elementary school. A myriad of factors estranged the young boy from his peers, the most notable including his lower socioeconomic status, his recurrent illnesses, his frail physique, Natsu's restrictions upon his diet and the courses he could take, and his debilitating shyness. But Kimitake's major problem was that he had no notion of the appropriate way to behave with boys. The sedentary incarceration in Natsu's sickroom had hardly prepared him for the rough and tumble play of the pre-pubertal boy. Kimitake's placid play with his three cousins may have nurtured the growth of the gentle chrysanthemum within him, but the sword found no expression except in his fantasy.

From a cursory sketch of a few events in the early years of Kimitake Hiraoka's life, therefore, some themes that were to characterize the making of the personality of Yukio Mishima begin to emerge. From the fiftieth day of life on, Kimitake's behavior is to be controlled in virtually every detail by an omnipotent force from the outside. Spontaneity is squelched at every juncture; cycles of sleep, eating, and play are regulated with the utmost precision; and little time is parceled out for free exploration of any environment transcending the bleak walls of Natsu's sickroom. It is doubtful that anything resembling a secure bond with a mothering one is engendered. Except in feeding, the infant Kimitake receives little human contact of any kind. Natsu is not one to cuddle a child; her persistent neuralgia and hysterical disposition prevent her from filling in the vacuum of nurturance created by the dismissal of the natural mother.

At school, Kimitake the child learns quickly that he is different from everybody else. Peer rejection exacerbates the problem of loneliness. From the perspective of American psychiatrist H. S. Sullivan, Kimitake cannot propel himself out of the web of loneliness into intimacy with a chum.¹⁶ He does not know how to behave with boys and, therefore, never affirms, in the collaborative chumship of preadolescence, an essential similarity with another member of the same sex.

The real world affords little happiness for the young Kimitake. Offers of love are not reciprocated: His mother feeds him and then she is suddenly gone. The young child quickly learns that his love is not wanted so he no longer offers it. Indeed, little emotion is invested in any object or situation in the real world. A bulwark of defenses shields the child from the capricious and unfriendly forces of the outside. Azusa, in fact, relates one incident in which he sadistically picked up Kimitake as a young child and thrust him directly in front of a roaring locomotive, threatening to throw him into a ditch if he cried. But Kimitake amazingly evinced no reaction whatsoever. Azusa claims that the young boy's face remained a “No mask,” oblivious.¹⁷

In the words of the British psychologist W. R. D. Fairbairn, young Mishima is the budding schizoid personality who can remain virtually impervious to the happenings in the world around him.¹⁸ Libido is withdrawn from all external objects as Kimitake turns inward to fantasy.

CHILDHOOD FANTASY

Mishima's elaborate and macabre childhood fantasies are documented in the author's first autobiographical piece, Confessions of a Mask (1948). The book opens with a key statement: “For many years I could remember things seen at the time of my own birth.”¹⁹ The author later concedes the impossibility of ever really remembering one's own birth, but the fact that the young Mishima produced and perpetuated such a myth remains significant. Theory and research on infancy tell us that for the baby at birth there is essentially no differentiation made between the world and the self. In the first weeks of life, the infant is not aware that there exists anything but the “me.” Freud termed this feeling of oneness and omnipotence the “oceanic feeling,”²⁰ claiming that humans seek to recapture this infantile experience in the illusion of religion. According to Mishima's life myth, however, Kimitake is, from the minute of birth onward, a separate entity that perceives himself and the outside world, and perceives the two as two. The myth is one of immediate isolation from one's environment—a cool detachment from, and lack of communication with, the surrounding field. Furthermore, the myth hints at a painful self-consciousness that is to haunt the protagonist repeatedly in the ensuing pages. Add an intense preoccupation with self in contradistinction to reality and the first sentence begins to paint the portrait of a narcissistic and highly introspective figure existing in sharp contrast to a world with which he has no relation.

In Confessions, Mishima writes that four early memories stand out in his childhood years: the night-soil man, the Joan of Arc picture book, the odor of sweat, and the carrying of the shrine. Each was to be played out over and over again in subsequent fantasy, the images taking on meaning anew with each imaginary restaging, “tormenting and frightening me all my life.”²¹ The images were later to appear with great regularity in his writing, shaping an aesthetic of blood and death that finally motivated and justified Mishima's own self-destruction.

The first memory dates from about the age of four. On his way home for supper, Kimitake observes a young man busily carrying buckets of excrement, on his nightly rounds:

Looking up at the dirty youth, I was choked by desire, thinking, “I want to change into him,” thinking, “I want to be him.” I can remember clearly that my desire had two focal points. The first was his dark blue “thigh-pullers,” the other his occupation. The close-fitting jeans plainly outlined the lower half of his body, which moved lithely and seemed to be walking toward me. An inexpressible adoration for those trousers was born in me.

… toward his occupation I felt something like a yearning for a piercing sorrow, a body-wrenching sorrow. His occupation gave me the feeling of “tragedy” in the most sensuous meaning of the word. A certain feeling as it were of “self-renunciation,” a certain feeling of indifference, a certain feeling of intimacy with danger, a feeling like a remarkable mixture of nothingness and vital power—all these feelings swarmed forth from his calling, bore down on me, and took me captive, at the age of four.²²

Several dominant themes emerge for the first time in the vision of the night-soil man: hints of latent homosexuality, fascination with darkness and the night, a sensuous desire for tragedy and the “piercing sorrow” of tragic lives, and a preoccupation with dirt and the earth symbolically rooted in anality. Kimitake's inherent confusion in object relations is reflected in his sensuous feelings for a figure who he longs to be. For the solitary child who has never ventured successfully into the world of object relations before, there appears a deep and profoundly troubling confusion over the distinction between what Freud termed object cathexis (the desire to have the other) and identification (the desire to be the other).

The themes of latent homosexuality and fascination with the tragic are elaborated further in the Joan of Arc episode, also traced back to the age of four. Kimitake is enthralled with a certain page of a picture book upon which is majestically portrayed a mounted knight about to do battle with death. Kimitake longs to see the knight killed, and thus the theme of the tragic life first connected with excrement and hard labor of the earth is extended to more overtly heroic proportions in the personification of the fated knight about to die. In Mishima's symbology, excrement and the earth may signify decay and death. Kimitake's mounted knight is the same night-soil man in a different guise. In both instances the hero grapples intimately with the dark forces of Death. Mishima reports, however, that the image of his mounted hero is tarnished when he learns that “he” is Joan of Arc—a woman. The realization virtually devastates him (“I felt as though I had been knocked flat.”²³), and he refuses to look at the book again.

The Joan of Arc fantasy is especially interesting in that it speaks to Mishima's developing homosexuality. Throughout his life, Mishima refused to admit to the existence of heroism or honor in the female principle (the chrysanthemum), the fact of which is instrumental in his blocking virtually any libidinal investment in a woman. In fact, there is some evidence that Mishima was unable to feel real sexual excitement in the presence of a woman. In Confessions, he tells the story of his miserable attempt at a love relationship with the beautiful Sonoko. Although his marriage of thirteen years was not an unhappy one for either Mishima or his wife Yoko (the two even produced two children), the arrangement seems to have been more a result of the social demands of a literary gallant than any kind of real libidinal investment. In 1956, Mishima decided that his social life demanded he find a wife—and fast. With the spirit he always revealed in the undertaking of any kind of new project, he began to look for a suitable mate.

Mishima deplored effeminacy in both men and women. His love objects in fantasy were brutal, strapping men of the sword. The samurai code of the sword, in fact, traditionally allowed for homosexuality among warriors. There was no contradiction between the glorification of the warrior ethic and the practice of soldiers loving other soldiers sexually.²⁴ Even Reiko—the heroic wife in “Patriotism” who commits suicide along with her newlywed husband—establishes herself as a heroine by way of bushido—the masculine spirit of the sword dictating categorical devotion to one's master ultimately endorsed though self-annihilation. Moreover, the continual shame Mishima felt in the knowledge of his own rather effeminate body and manner plagued him for over thirty years until a rigorous exercise program transformed him into a muscle man. His extreme reaction against the Joan of Arc picture, regardless of whether the documented reaction of the four-year-old Kimitake is accurate or whether it is rather Mishima's later response superimposed upon a childhood vignette, may reflect a terrifying realization of his own underlying allegiance to the chrysanthemum and a desperate attempt to defend against its emasculating effects and ultimately to rid himself of it completely.

The third memory is one of the odor of soldiers' sweat that Kimitake oftentimes smelled as a child when the troops passed by the gate of his home. The smell “awakened my longings, overpowered me.”²⁵ Again it appears that the tragic calling of the soldier intoxicates Kimitake. The smell is the pungent aroma of death, like the excrement of the night-soil man, always beckoning the hero towards destruction, towards a tragic reunion with earth.

The fourth memory of Mishima's childhood shows a further development in the evolution of the hero image, early manifestations taking the form of the night-soil man, the mounted knight, and the sweaty soldiers. All four versions wrestle daily with death. All converge on an evolving internalized and ideal love-object/role-model. The fourth version is embodied in a group of strapping young men parading in celebration of the Summer Festival through the streets of Tokyo, bearing a black shrine called the omikoshi. At this time, Kimitake and his grandmother are watching from the front gate of the house. The practically naked young men in the frenzied procession swagger en masse towards the gate. The shrine they carry appears as a “perfect cube of empty night, ceaselessly swaying and leaping, to and fro, up and down” while “reigning over the cloudless noonday of early summer.”²⁶ Suddenly the swarm of men burst through the gate as Kimitake and Natsu scurry to safety. The intoxicated youths wantonly destroy the foliage of the beautiful garden while parading the shrine over every inch of the Hiraoka front yard. Kimitake perceives their faces and is both horrified and thrilled: “There was the expression on the faces of the young men carrying the shrine—an expression of the most undisguised drunkenness in the world.”²⁷

Again, if we accept Mishima's account as fact or even if we believe it to be a somewhat hyperbolic interpretation of a childhood episode, the frenzied youths who destroy the flower garden (chrysanthemums?) are the real-life forerunners of Mizoguchi, the fictional acolyte who incinerates the Golden Temple and with it its life-effacing beauty. The youth embody the spirit of the sword, and their shameless act of destruction is a prototype of the unself-conscious experience—the pure act—flowing from the River of Action. The black shrine is symbolic of death: The youths unabashedly parade it through the streets!

The memory of this childhood event so preoccupied the fantasy life of the young Mishima that he claimed it “represented childhood itself, past and irrevocable.”²⁸ On August 10, 1956, at the age of thirty-one, Mishima in fact translated this fantasy into real life when he donned a loincloth, cotton belly band, snug white trousers, festival jacket, and uniform headband to participate with the young men from the Jiyugaoka merchants' association in the parading of the portable shrine of the mikoshi. In an ecstatic essay written the next day, “On Intoxication,” Mishima proclaimed that he had beheld the same “divine blue sky” the others had beheld, and that he had become one both with the group and the mikoshi, all “drowned in life.” At that moment, he would later write, “I participated in the tragedy of all being.”²⁹

ADOLESCENCE

The morbid themes of Kimitake's fantasies, nurtured in the fetid atmosphere of Natsu's sickroom, found an almost equally generative climate in the socio-political environment of World War II Japan. Hence, when Kimitake finally emerged from his grandmother's cave in 1937, there awaited him a cultural milieu caught up in the horror, the conquest, and the blood of a Pacific war. The effect the war years may have had upon Mishima, however, is a complex one. Although the war provided food for his insatiable fantasy life, it did not transform Mishima into a self-avowed disciple of the sword. In fact, Mishima never became a soldier of the war. Drafted into the service in 1945, Mishima proceeded to mislead, intentionally, the army doctors into reading his relatively minor bronchitis as manifestations of advanced pneumonia. Consequently, he was not inducted.

During the war years, Mishima the adolescent tries desperately to develop some distance on fantasy and to live for the first time in-the-world. A tension exists between the budding realization that he is fundamentally different from all his peers and the desperate desire to be the same. The differences become apparent in many aspects of his life at school. Mishima began to establish himself as the premier writer at the Peer School, while his colleagues settled into mediocrity. He remained sickly and emotionally withdrawn while his male compatriots proved themselves outgoing and robust in both work and play. And he was not aroused by the opposite sex whereas his male peers could think of nothing else.

The similarities were not so easily discerned for the young Mishima. He was encouraged when he finally learned that all of the other boys regularly masturbated, too. Here was a point where he was completely identical with them. But, as he writes in Confessions, “in my state of autohypnosis I overlooked the fact that, in spite of the identical nature of the physical action, there was a profound difference so far as its mental objects were concerned.”³⁰ The other boys masturbated with images of naked women in mind. Mishima envisioned St. Sebastian!

In Chapter 3 of Confessions, Mishima tells the story of the contortions and convolutions he undergoes in an attempt to discover sameness. In the stage play that is adolescence, he continues to audition for and then abandon role after role in order to identify himself with the other characters in the drama. The adolescent in Confessions even goes so far as to read a host of books—both fiction and non-fiction—with the express purpose of finding appropriate roles to play, usual responses to make, the normal way to live as a teenager. Behind the wild sampling of alternative roles, the adolescent-as-actor searches for a unifying principle that gives meaning to the diverse roles he plays, that unites them to provide continuity of self from situation to situation and over time. This identity problem is epitomized in the futile attempts of the hero in Confessions to muster up sexual desire for the lovely Sonoko.

The interpersonal theory of H. S. Sullivan is critical to an understanding of the profundity of Mishima's loneliness as an adolescent. Sullivan's theory bespeaks three fundamental dialectics which in general fashion organize the interpersonal experiences of the individual throughout the life cycle.³¹ Each can be seen as a general dynamism, or recurrent pattern of energy transformation. The three can be illustrated as follows:

Anxiety	Loneliness	Lust Dissociation
↕	↕	↕
Security	Intimacy	Lust Integration

The first dynamism to arise in development is the anxiety-security polarity. Sullivan's theorem of reciprocal emotion maintains that anxiety is transmitted from the mother to the baby through the process of empathy. This interpersonal tension is experienced as unpleasant, eventually leading to the formation of the self-system which is an organization of experience for avoiding anxiety connected with the mothering one.³² In Mishima's case, we may hypothesize that in the very peculiar feeding situation he experiences as an infant, a profound and consistent anxiety is transmitted from Shizue to her kidnapped son. In a Sullivanian framework, therefore, Kimitake's elaborate fantasy life is the functional equivalent of the self-system in so far that it reduces the anxiety connected with the interaction with the mothering ones—both Shizue and Natsu. In a sense, the young Kimitake opts out of the anxiety-security dynamism through escape to reverie. Anxiety is avoided, but interpersonal security is sacrificed as well. The substitution of an absorbing fantasy life for the self-system precludes the development of any kind of “organization of experience,” and renders the child, without a personification of self, virtually helpless in interpersonal relations.

As emphasis is shifted to the second dynamism, the child eventually finds the phenomenological experience of loneliness so terrifying that he propels himself out of the self-system, at the risk of extreme anxiety, into a series of risk-taking ventures designed to attain intimacy. The fear of loneliness reaches its peak in the pre-adolescent period in which it becomes imperative that the child form a close chumship with a member of the same sex. It is essential that the chum be as much like the child as possible, and that the two share their every secret in an affirmation of their essential sameness. The intimacy attained in this kind of pregenital utopia is characterized as a collaborative relation with another in which the needs of the other become as important, or nearly as important, as one's own. Communication between the two chums approaches what Sullivan terms the syntactic: Through constant exchange, their symbol systems become commensurate.

In Mishima's case, a profound loneliness propels him out of his fantasy life into the arena of the adolescent on stage. He seeks to affirm a desperately desired sameness with others but seeks to achieve this goal not through intimacy but rather through mimicry and the sampling of roles. If Sullivan is right when he claims that identity can only evolve in a context of interpersonal relations and that a key factor in the fostering of such development is the collaborative relation of intimate chums, then Mishima's attempt to consolidate an identity in a social-emotional vacuum is doomed from the very beginning.

But the situation becomes a bit more complex. With the eruption of the third dynamism and the concomitant problems of lust, Mishima's heretofore latent homosexuality takes a more active form, ultimately revealing a narcissism so extreme as to render the attainment of intimacy, the affirmation of sameness, and the consolidation of identity goals eternally unattainable in his life. The complications arise with the entrance of the fourteen-year-old Mishima's first love object in the real world—a sixteen-year-old boy named Omi:

A raw carnal feeling blazed up within me, branding my cheeks. I felt myself staring at him with crystal-clear eyes …

For me this was the first love of my life. And if such a blunt way of speaking be forgiven, it was clearly a love closely connected with desires of the flesh.³³

Omi is hardly the Sullivanian chum arriving on the scene a couple of years too late. With reference to Omi, there is no chance in Mishima's eyes for any kind of collaborative intimacy to be formed such that his essential similarity with a member of the same sex can be confirmed. The relationship in fact works against the quest for sameness. Omi is everything Mishima is not in reality. Additionally, he is everything Mishima wishes he could be in his private fantasy. Omi is indeed the night-soil man, the mounted knight, the sweaty soldier, and the frenzied shrine-bearer. He is the tragic hero incarnate, and he exists in the real world. Like his precursors in fantasy, he is the paragon on un-self-conscious, pure action. Only a reading of the second chapter of Confessions can adequately convey to the reader the stark contrast between the sickly and cerebral youth that is the fourteen-year-old Mishima and his robust and primordial love object. The following is a simple breakdown of what he and his love object represent to Mishima at the tender age of fourteen:

Mishima	Omi
weakness	strength
thought	action
consciousness	instinct
naivete	experience
cultural	primordial
mind	body
sickness	health
artificial	natural
conformity	rebellion
domestic	wild
chrysanthemum	sword

To accentuate the distinction further, the fourteen-year-old Mishima idealizes Omi, refusing to acknowledge the dissonant cognitions and perceptions that do not fit exactly the “perfect, flawless illusion of him.” Mishima cannot bear the thought that Omi is a self-conscious, thinking person like himself:

How could anyone have expected such a person to have a secret, inner life? All one could hope to find in him was the pattern of that forgotten perfection which the rest of us have lost in some far distant past.³⁴

As Omi becomes a personification of an internal object created in the fantasy of a young boy imprisoned in his grandmother's sickroom, the same confusion between cathexis and identification that characterized Kimitake's feelings for his internal tragic heroes also begins to color Mishima's love for the sixteen-year-old boy who is so painfully external. The first sign of this conflict is revealed when Mishima is observing his lover exercising on the horizontal bar in gym class. All the boys observing are thrilled by the “extravagant abundance of life force,” the “ill-humored, unconcerned exuberance” Omi radiates as he performs his flawless routine.³⁵ For Mishima, it is as if Omi's flesh, infected with this violent power, “had been put on this earth for no other reason than to become an insane human-sacrifice,”³⁶ and, hence, that familiar intimacy with death that so characterizes the tragic hero is projected onto Omi. The protagonist responds to the scene with an erection. He blushes. But then, something goes wrong. Jealousy invades the emotional realm, and the protagonist finds that he can no longer love Omi. Omi is the sword, and that stark reality infuriates Mishima. He is compelled to abandon his cathexis for Omi, and, as we will soon see, to become his own lover.

After the break-up with Omi, Mishima writes of a most astounding daydream in which the protagonist of Confessions repeatedly indulges. In a most sensuous prose, Mishima describes a funeral feast in which a naked young boy is tied to a platter and eaten alive. Before he carves the breast, the protagonist plants a lingering kiss on the lips of his muscular classmate. As he then thrusts the fork into his beloved's heart, a fountain of blood strikes him full in the face.

The fantasy manifests a well-known theme in Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia,” revealing the regression of cathexis to identification in response to object loss.³⁷ In this case identification is symbolically represented in the phenomenon of incorporation—literally the “taking in” of the object in the classical totem meal. In Totem and Taboo, Freud writes of the slaying of the Primeval Father by the sons and their subsequent eating of his body representing an identification with the father, a resolution of the Oedipal Complex, the beginnings of the superego, and the establishment of a new order.³⁸ In Mishima, the synthesis of “Mourning and Melancholia” and Totem and Taboo takes the following form: The unidentified boy is Omi, the love object who is lost because of and whose loss furthermore results in internalization. The matching of an external object with the childhood fantasy of the tragic hero and the “reinternalization” of that flesh-and-blood object (not merely a fantasy product) results in an identification with Omi and a setting up of the internalized object as a kind of ego ideal. In Mishima's symbology “blood” equals “truth.” The blood of Omi strikes the protagonist full in the face. On some level, the truth is apprehended: “I must become like Omi,” and in the process integrate the earliest fantasies of the night-soil man with real action of the body.

BODY AND ACTION

In adulthood, Mishima's successes as a writer and actor do not erase his desire to become like Omi. The first step to fulfilling the identification is a transformation of body. In Sun and Steel, he writes,

Specifically, I cherished a romantic impulse toward death, yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle; a peculiar sense of destiny made me believe that the reason why my romantic impulse toward death remained unfulfilled in reality was the immensely simple fact that I lacked the necessary physical qualifications. A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensible in a romantically noble death. Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate. Longing at eighteen for any early demise, I felt myself unfitted for it. I lacked, in short, the muscles suitable for a dramatic death. And it deeply offended my romantic pride that it should be this unsuitability that had permitted me to survive the war.³⁹

In 1952, Mishima began a physical fitness program which eventually included swimming, boxing, and weight lifting. By 1955, his training regimen had advanced to three strenuous workouts a week, and until his death in 1970 Mishima was virtually obsessed with physical exercise. Over this period, he transformed himself from frail weakling to a muscular body-builder. For Mishima, physical exercise was an intoxicating activity that not only prepared his body for a glorious death but also provided an ephemeral epiphany of death:

Ceaseless motion, ceaseless violent deaths, ceaseless escape from cold objectivity—by now, I could no longer live without such mysteries. And—needless to say—within each mystery there lay a small imitation of death.⁴⁰

Physical exercise corresponds to Mishima's River of the Body, but it is only via the River of Action that the heroism of glorious death can be accomplished. Though exercise is violent action affording epiphanies of death, only seppuku can make glorious death a reality. Indeed, Mishima conceived of seppuku as pure, unself-conscious action. It is the confrontation with death that the tragic hero yearns for, the confrontation which indeed defines his life cycle as “tragic.” It is the instantaneous identification with Omi that is but approximated along the River of Body. The act is non-reflexive. It occurs once and only once, and it leaves no room for after-the-fact rumination, no room for reflection. Neither thought nor words can obfuscate the reality of an action that once and for all obliterates thinking and writing. Pure, unself-conscious action. The night-soil man bearing his excrement. The shrinebearers in the noonday sun. Omi on the horizontal bar.

In the 1960's, Mishima finds an appropriate context in which to perform the pure action which is to synthesize reality and fantasy. The context is a political one. But the “patriotism” he ostensibly adheres to during the last decade of his life represents a personal rather than a political phenomenon. The right-wing extremism so vociferously advocated during his last years is an ideological vehicle for a noble death. Mishima reveals little interest in politics before 1960. Likewise, his call for the revival of Japanese patriotism in the 60's is an exhortation and a eulogy for a lost ideal of heroism, and a preparation for his own fulfillment of that ideal, but it is not a political argument per se:

For every action there must be a reaction. And where does that reaction come from? It comes from your opponent. Without an opponent there is no point to action. Well, I was very much in need of an opponent and I settled on communism. It's not as if Communists had attacked my children or had set my house on fire. I have very little reason really. I simply chose communism as an opponent, because I needed an opponent to provoke me to action.⁴¹

In December of 1966, Mishima meets Bandai and Nakatsuji, both self-styled “neo-nationalists.” Although neither of these two men has an appetite for glorious death in battle, they eventually introduce Mishima to other young men who do. After enlisting in the Army Self-Defense Force (ASDF) and subjecting himself to forty-six days of basic training, Mishima proposes to a student group that it is time to take political action. He conceives and creates a civilian army—named the “Tatenokai” or Shield Society—to aid the ASDF should it be obliged to combat aggression from the political Left. The creation of the Tatenokai and Mishima's eventual use of the group as a vehicle for seppuku have their cultural antecendents in a long line of Japanese folk tales and historical vignettes, the most famous of which is probably the story of the “forty-seven ronin” (masterless samurai warriors). Set in the golden period of the Tokugawa regime, the story tells of the ceremonial disembowelment of one Asano—lord and master of the forty-seven—whose suicide is punishment for a petty crime and a means of redeeming honor after being publicly humiliated by a corrupt official of the court. The masterless forty-seven avenge the death of Asano by killing the venal official and many of his samurai. They are subsequently proclaimed heroes by the people, and after due consideration, the authorities permit the ronin to atone for their offense and preserve their honor by following the example of their master and committing seppuku.^42,43

Mishima's Tatenokai is comprised of students and office workers dedicated to the defense of the Emperor, at all costs. It is a standby army that is only to be mobilized in what Mishima likes to term “the final, desperate battle.”⁴⁴ The final battle, however, is in reality a psychological one; the Tatenokai a “therapeutic” tool. But why does Mishima need the tool? Is it only to give the illusion of waging a battle with a menacing opponent? In Sun and Steel, Mishima himself attempts an answer:

Only through the group, I realized—through sharing the suffering of the group—could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of the individual was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary—the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it on to ever-mounting shared suffering, and so to death—which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors …⁴⁵

It seems curious, however, that one who has perennially conceived of himself as separated from communion with the world should in his mid-forties suddenly find meaning in interpersonal interaction within a new-found community. Mishima writes that in partaking of the shared suffering of the group he becomes one with the group. Individuality melts away. The integrity of the ego is surrendered in light of a more transpersonal goal. On the last page of Sun and Steel, he almost convinces us:

The pounding of the heart communicated itself to the group; we shared the same swift pulse. Self-awareness by now was as remote as the distant rumor of the town. I belonged to them, they belonged to me; the two formed an unmistakable “us.” To belong—what more intense form of existence could there be? Our small circle of oneness was a means to a vision of that vast, dimly gleaming circle of oneness. And—all the while foreseeing that this imitation of tragedy was, in the same way as my own narrow happiness, condemned to vanish with the wind, to resolve itself into nothing more than muscles that simply existed—I had a vision where something that, if I were alone, would have resolved into muscles and words, was held fast by the power of the group and led me away to a far land, whence there would be no return. It was, perhaps, the beginning of my placing reliance on others, a reliance that was mutual; and each of us, by committing himself to this immeasurable power, belonged to the whole.⁴⁶

An implacable narcissism, however, runs throughout this paean to the god of community. For Mishima, the group is not comprised of separate and unique individuals interacting with one another in view of a common good. The group interacts as a whole with Mishima, and Mishima with the group. “I belonged to them, they belonged to me; the two formed an unmistakable ‘us.’” There exists the unique Mishima and the collective other; the two exist in a relation, for sure, but it is a relation of individual-to-group, instead of individual-to-individual within the context of a group. The distinction is crucial. It points to a false sense of community which Mishima holds up as a replacement for lifelong isolation and narcissism. But the isolation, the painful separateness which manifests itself even in the first sentence of Confessions, doggedly remains. The Tatenokai is the creation of one individual who seeks to use the group for the fulfillment of his own narcissism. Like Jahweh in the Old Testament, he does not live in the world he has created, but exists apart from it and above it. The orientation is “field-independent,” non-contextual. Mishima, in a sense, operates outside the context of the group—the field—while using the group, when appropriate, to expedite an individual quest. Mishima instructs the Tatenokai to disband once he is dead. With the fulfillment of the creator's personal ideal, the created group ceases to have a raison d'être.

AGENCY AND COMMUNION

Mishima's community of warriors—the Tatenokai—is thus a vehicle for his own narcissistic quest to complete a true identification with a tragic hero personified in Omi. In dealing with this group, Mishima operates, as always, in what David Bakan would describe as the agentic rather than the communal mode of human existence. Indeed, the striking parallels between Mishima's life and Bakan's conceptualization of unmitigated agency necessitate a further consideration of Bakan's theory as a way of concluding this psychological examination of the death of Yukio Mishima.

In The Duality of Human Existence, Bakan writes:

I have adopted the terms agency and communion to characterize two fundamental modalities in the existence of living forms, agency for the existence of an organism as an individual, and communion for the participation of the individual in some larger organism of which the individual is a part. Agency manifests itself in the formation of separations; communion in the lack of separations. Agency manifests itself in isolation, alienation, and aloneness; communion in contact, openness, and union. Agency manifests itself in the urge to master; communion in non-contractual cooperation.⁴⁷

Bakan's conceptualizations of agency and communion are necessarily general and interdisciplinary. Agency and communion are underlying principles, themes, if you will, which can be applied in the understanding of all living forms. In the context of a psychobiography, therefore, they can be applied as underlying modes of existence which organize the data of the human life cycle.

Mishima, then, personifies unmitigated agency. According to Bakan, the agentic mode is field-independent, non-contextual, and individualistic. It has decidedly masculine overtones. If its power is not mitigated by the communal principle of living forms, it proves self-destructive. Like the cancer cell which develops without regard to the intercellular context in which it is embedded, the agentic principle may wax so potent as to manifest itself without regard to the communal context, totally usurping the power of communion and ultimately destroying the organism—be that organism a sub-human form of life, a human individual, or a society.

Bakan delineates a number of major themes of unmitigated agency and illustrates them through an analysis of the mythical figure of Satan, who exists as a projection by Western men and women of the agentic principle upon an archetypal image. Three key themes are separation, mastery, and to behold that which has been denied. Each takes on a trenchant meaning in the life of Yukio Mishima. The notion of separation is central to the Satan myth. Satan is a fallen angel who is at one time in relation with God but whose individualism (pride) leads to a split in the deity and a casting out of the rebel. Although themes of separation abound in all human lives, they appear to be unusually salient and profound in the life of Mishima. As has been mentioned above, the first sentence of Confessions begins to paint the picture of a painfully self-conscious and isolated individual who perceives the world and himself as separate and irreconcilable. At the age of fifty days, Kimitake is separated from his biological mother and cast into the sickroom of Natsu. His father reports that in early childhood, Kimitake has already separated himself from reality and retreated to the world of fantasy and introspection. His brother and sister report that even after Natsu releases him in adolescence, Kimitake always seems different from the rest of the family. He separates himself from his siblings by locking himself in his room to write and study. His frail health and physique are instrumental in separating him from his peers in elementary school, as are his gloomy mood and bashfulness. In adolescence, he searches for sameness but rejects all roles and role models. His ability to separate himself from the “stage of adolescence” and observe the frantic enactment of scripts and roles of the various actors, while swearing “unconditional loyalty to the stage manager [himself] of the play called adolescence,” is uncanny, if not schizoid. Indeed, separation is the dominant theme in Fairbairn's schizoid personality whose ego is so wrought with splits as to be separated from itself. The schizoid's inability to offer his love to external objects separates him from the outside world and renders Bakan's communion an impossibility.

In Sun and Steel, Mishima writes that the most debilitating separation in his life is his early separation from his own body. By withdrawing into fantasy or engaging in writing, he isolates himself from the language of his body and fails to appreciate its potential for both life and glorious death. Although he eventually begins the body-building program, the separation seems to persist. The River of Writing and the River of Body do not seem to flow together at any point. Aspects of Mishima's life have a way of remaining autonomous and field-independent, separate agents in and of themselves. As he plans his death, he continues to write The Decay of the Angel, undaunted, undistracted. He sends the last chapter of this fourth book of his triumphant tetrology to the publisher on the morning that he makes the trip to General Mashita's office!

Mastery is the second theme of agency. In the New Testament, Satan is referred to as “the prince of the world” (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11) and “the god of the world” (II Corinthians 4:4), titles denoting a mastery of the secular world which has characteristically been attributed throughout history to the projected Satan. The ego function of mastery is subsumed under such overarching rubrics as “ego strength,” “coping,” and “competence.” Bakan also connects agentic mastery with D. C. McClelland's notion of achievement motivation which is conceived as a drive for attaining success or getting ahead within a competitive context with reference to a standard of excellence.⁴⁸ In the Faustian spirit, the person high in need for achievement may seek to master the secular world and, in a sense, make it his own. In The Achieving Society, McClelland looks to the mythical figure of Hermes as an embodiment of the spirit of achievement motivation. Hermes is an entrepreneur who devises ingenious skills to get ahead in the world, the craftsman and trickster who is born in the morning, constructs and performs the lyre at noon, and steals Apollo's cattle in the evening. McClelland relates the following corollary themes in the Hermes myth with high need for achievement: travel, upward mobility, athletic prowess, efficient use of time, and trickery and dishonesty.

Although a good deal of supportive data have been left out of this analysis, it is a fact that Mishima does exercise a tremendous amount of mastery over his environment. Mishima's need for achievement seems to reach dizzying heights, as manifested in an insatiable competitive spirit that runs throughout his life as a writer and as a man of the sword, rigorous self-imposed standards of excellence that he applies to both his writing and his body-building, and in an extraordinary efficiency in the use of his time which enables him to become Japan's most prolific novelist, a playwright, an actor, a sportsman, a soldier, and erudite scholar extensively versed in the writings of both East and West. Like McClelland's entrepreneur, Mishima is well-traveled (seven round-the-world trips), upwardly mobile, and an excellent athlete. His mastery is even evident in his ability to control other people. From scratch, he creates a civilian army dedicated to the defense of the Emperor and is able to use that army for his own psychological fulfillment. The Tatenokai is a frightening tribute to one man's uncanny ability to master and manipulate both the physical and the interpersonal environment.

Drawing upon the works of Freud, Fliess, Weber, Erikson, and N. O. Brown, Bakan makes the connection between agentic mastery of the Satan myth and anality. (It is interesting to note that anality is also a theme in the Hermes myth.) Characteristics such as thrift, methodicalness, punctuality, reliability, and orderliness have been noted in the psychoanalytic literature as associated with the anal personality, essentially the characteristics Weber identified when he documented the association between the capitalistic spirit and the Protestant work ethic.⁴⁹ In their treatments of the life of Martin Luther, both Erikson⁵⁰ and Norman Brown⁵¹ argue for an intrinsic connection between the Protestant illumination and anality. (Luther wrote, “This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.”)⁵² Finally, McClelland has connected the achievement motive with the entrepreneurial spirit of traditional capitalism, claiming that the achievement motive can be seen as an intervening variable arising out of the assertiveness training historically characteristic of the relationship between Protestant mothers and their male offspring and connecting Protestantism with the resultant rise of the entrepreneurial spirit and capitalism.

Given Mishima's exceedingly high need for achievement, his agentic mastery of the world, and the dreams of his childhood in which the tragic hero first manifests himself as the night-soil man, it appears that the issue of anality is another salient theme in Mishima's life. More specifically, feces represent the concrete part of the body which is closest to death. In “normal” development, claims Bakan, this apprehension of death is repressed so that the individual can face life and master it. Because he cannot repress death in his early years, however, Mishima is unable to affirm life and cannot at this time begin the business of mastering the real world. Feces are the first symbol of death in his fantasy, a symbol that becomes an inextricable part of the thematic constellation surrounding the tragic hero. Mishima's preoccupation with death causes him to immerse himself in his fantasy world. This withdrawal from reality is indeed exacerbated by the cold and morbid interpersonal milieu in which he finds himself captive for the first twelve years of his life.

I would suggest, however, that Omi jolts the fourteen-year-old Kimitake out of his shell of fantasy. Omi is the tragic hero in real life. He is the epitomization of the agentic. To become Omi and to have him (both to identify with and to cathect the object) represents for Mishima a mastery over death. This goal becomes his definition of fulfillment, and with the awakening of the idea that such a goal may indeed be attainable in reality, Mishima turns to the real world and begins to master it, agentically.

The third theme of agency is a paradoxical one because it denotes the renunciation of agency in the process of healing. To behold that which has been denied is to gaze upon those elements which agency has rendered separate (repressed) and by beholding them anew to undo the evil (pathological) action of unmitigated agency. In psychoanalysis, the unearthing of repressed psychic material serves as a prototype of this potentially salutary phase of the agentic, a phase in which agency is undone. In order to bring about the healing however, the surrender of mastery and control to free association in therapy is essential. Understanding replaces agentic knowledge, and the patient loses the control of his ego to regain it anew.

For Mishima, to behold that which has been denied is first to behold the body as it moves in violent exercise (the River of Body) and second to behold one's own death in seppuku (the River of Action). In the latter, one can see the glory of the tragic hero in action. Mishima describes his longing to see:

The apple certainly exists, but to the core this existence as yet seems inadequate; if words cannot endorse it, then the only way to endorse it is with the eyes. Indeed, for the core the only sure mode of existence is to exist and to see at the same time. There is only one method of solving this contradiction. It is for a knife to be plunged deep into the apple so that it is split open and the core is exposed to the light—to the same light, that is, as the surface skin. Yet then the existence of the cut apple falls into fragments; the core of the apple sacrifices existence for the sake of seeing.⁵³

At the moment the knife cuts, the core beholds that which has been denied. Healing and self-destruction are simultaneous.

At the moment of death, Mishima completes the identification with Omi. He becomes the tragic hero. But he also completes the cathexis of the tragic hero. In Sun and Steel, Mishima writes that the moment of identification with the tragic hero—seppuku—is supremely erotic as well:

… the moment of death, the moment when, even without being seen, the fiction of being seen and the beauty of the object are permitted. Of such is the beauty of the suicide squad, which is recognized as beauty not only in the spiritual sense but, by men in general, in an ultra erotic sense also.⁵⁴

The confusion between wanting to be and wanting to have the love object which is first manifested in Kimitake's feelings for the night-soil man and later revealed in his relationship with Omi surfaces again at the moment of death. Identification and object cathexis are never sorted out in the life of Yukio Mishima. And as he fashions himself into the physical image of Omi through fifteen years of rigorous body-building and seeks to capture the pure, noonday spirit of his lover in the life of the sword, Mishima's cathexis for an internalized object becomes self-cathexis. If he becomes Omi, he must have himself. In the thrusting of the sword into his own stomach he becomes simultaneously the lover and the beloved, the intrusive and the incorporative, the phallus and the vagina. Seppuku becomes the agentic act per excellence as the completely isolated individual finds that his mate in the act of sexual union must be himself.

Notes

1. Yukio Mishima, “Patriotism,” in Yukio Mishima, Death in Midsummer and other Stories. New York: New Directions, 1966, 114-115.

2. Ibid., p. 93.

3. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask. New York: New Directions, 1958, p. 41.

4. John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1975, p. 7.

5. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. New York: Meridian World, 1946.

6. Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan: The Story of a Nation. New York: Knopf, 1974, p. 44.

7. Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. New York: Berkeley Medallion Books, 1959, p. 285.

8. Ibid., p. 145.

9. Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel. New York: Grove Press, 1970.

10. John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography, p. 7.

11. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, p. 4-5.

12. John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography, p. 18.

13. Ibid., 18-19.

14. Ibid., p. 23.

15. Ibid., 24-25.

16. Harry Stack Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, New York: Norton, 1953.

17. John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography, p. 14.

18. W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, An Object Relations Theory of Personality. New York: Basic Books, 1952.

19. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, p. 1.

20. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents. In James Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 21. London: Hogarth, 1961. (Originally published in 1930).

21. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, p. 8.

22. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, 8-9.

23. Ibid., p. 12.

24. Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan: The Story of a Nation, p. 25.

25. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, p. 13.

26. Ibid., p. 31.

27. Ibid., p. 33.

28. Ibid., p. 28.

29. John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography, p. 128.

30. John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography, p. 25.

31. George W. Goethals, “The Evolution of Sexual and Genital Intimacy: A Comparison of the Views of Erik H. Erikson and Harry Stack Sullivan,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 4 (1976): 529-544.

32. Harry Stack Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, p. 166.

33. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, p. 61.

34. Ibid., p. 63.

35. Ibid., p. 78.

36. Ibid., p. 78.

37. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.” In James Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1957. (Originally published in 1917).

38. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo. In James Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 13: London: Hogarth, 1958. (Originally published in 1913).

39. Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel, 27-28.

40. Ibid., p. 76.

41. John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography, p. 241.

42. H. Paul Varley, Japanese Culture. London: Faber & Faber, 1973.

43. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1976.

44. Ibid., p. 231.

45. Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel, p. 87.

46. Ibid., p. 88.

47. David Bakan, The Duality of Human Existence: Isolation and Communion in Western Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966, 14-15.

48. David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1961.

49. Ibid., 301-346.

50. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther. New York: Norton, 1958.

51. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959.

52. David Bakan, The Duality of Human Existence: Isolation and Communion in Western Man, p. 84.

53. Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel, 65-66.

54. Ibid., p. 55.