[In the following essay, Washburn discusses the paradoxes of modernism evident in Mishima's works and life.]

Charles Jencks, in a famously acerbic account of recent developments in architectural style, has asserted that “Happily, we can date the death of modern architecture to a precise moment in time,” which he claims was “July 15, 1972 at 3:32 p.m. (or thereabouts).”¹ At that moment, several blocks of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri, which had been built from an award-winning design based on the ideals of the Congress of International Modern Architects, were dynamited. Hailed at the time of its construction as the model of a machine for living, the complex proved to be uninhabitable. Its failure was so complete that it not only called into question the viability of large-scale urban planning, but also, for some, discredited architectural modernism altogether. The demise of an aesthetic movement that had represented the hopes of so many for creating a humane and comfortable urban environment would normally elicit more sober reflection, and yet Jenck's undisguised glee is perhaps understandable when we consider the inhuman scale of so many modernist projects—not to mention the rarity of an event that allows the historian of aesthetics to periodize with exact precision.

Those engaged in the study of Japanese literary history can be grateful to have the same rare good fortune as their counterparts in architectural history, since the death of literary modernism in Japan may also be traced to a more or less precise moment in time: 25 November 1970 at around 12:15 p.m. It was then, in Tokyo, that the writer Mishima Yukio (1925-70) thrust a sword into his abdomen and ended his life in ritual suicide. Although the death of literary modernism in Japan was, in contrast to that of modern architecture in the United States, marked by the implosion of a single individual, it was still a spectacular event reported around the world. Mishima's suicide elicited widespread interest not only because of the lurid personal tragedy of an internationally famous writer, but also because of the various interpretations of the meaning of it all—often reflections on the conflict between modernity and tradition.² Looking back at this after twenty-five years, one thing seems clearer: Mishima's death brought to a momentary focus all the inherent contradictions of Japanese modernism, which has since collapsed in on itself. Beyond that, its legacy is that literary historians of Japan no longer have to deal with the problem of imprecise periodization. Even those who prefer that cultural history be left messy and open-ended can take comfort in the fact that the motives for the suicide have not been precisely determined, leaving some discursive space for interpretive maneuvering.

With the death of literary modernism in Japan, the imploding contradictions of Mishima's life remain compelling now only because the author was so audaciously aware of them, inviting us to read them as the contradictions of modernism itself. Like many other modernist writers, he eagerly cultivated a reputation as a serious artist; at the same time his commercial instincts, his thirst for international recognition, his exhibitionism, and his comic-opera emperor worship all waged a self-conscious war against that reputation. He was a prolific fabulist, but seemed to have sensed that all of his narratives, including the narrative of his life, were little more than empty structures. His skepticism made him a sharp critic of postwar Japanese culture, yet throughout his life Mishima's critique of the sterility of that culture coexisted uneasily with his crass exploitation of it. Mishima was an artist in revolt against the aesthetics of modern culture, but his struggle resulted in an aesthetics of the inauthentic in which he became, near the end of his life, a kitsch artist.

Even if we resist Mishima's strategies to persuade us to read him as the representative of modernism for Japan, the particular contradictions in his work remain an expression of a more widespread, fundamental paradox associated with modernism, and it is this serious aspect of his struggle that complicates judgments of his work. The modernist revolt against the modern is grounded in a preoccupation with origins and authenticity—with giving priority to the present over the past and future. The paradox of modernism arises from the presence of two opposing but equally compelling responses to that preoccupation: the effort to return to or regain origins, which necessitates a rejection of the present, and the attempt to obliterate origins, to make everything start with the present, which necessitates a rejection of the past. The impossibility of ever completely reconciling these responses results in a sense of loss for the modern artist, who must either deny the individual concept of self that gives personal meaning to the present or isolate the self from the inherited communal values that impose meaning and order from without. Zygmunt Bauman terms this sense of loss “the tragedy of culture” and describes the image of modernity as one of

twisted dialectics of inextricable contradictions: the absolute manifesting itself only in the particularity of individuals and their encounters; the permanent hiding behind fleeting episodes, the normal behind the unique. Above all, the drama of modernity derives from the “tragedy of culture,” the human inability to assimilate cultural products, over abundant because of the unbound creativity of the human spirit. Once set in motion, cultural processes acquire their own momentum, develop their own logic, and spawn new multiple realities confronting individuals as an outside, objective world, too powerful and distant to be “resubjectivized.” The richness of objective culture results therefore in the cultural poverty of individual human beings.³

In literature the modernist sense of loss is frequently expressed as a problem of time. The tragedy of culture is a recognition of the lack of duration in both human and narrative time, which forces a turning inward, a reliance on the subjective consciousness and autonomy of the individual to give significance to human experience. This turn inward is accompanied by skepticism toward the act of narration, by an embrace of relativism, and by gestures toward nihilism. Concurrently, there is a reaction against this loss of absolute values and a displacement outward, a decentering of the self reflected in antimodern obsessions with finding in the heroic, in nostalgic visions of the past, and in death itself substitutes, or simulacra, for absolute values, beliefs, or identity. A modernist, such as Mishima, can only express the significance of his moment through time and so is driven toward an end that makes him ever more aware of the futility of the effort to fix his “presentness” in an eternal form.

There is a close relationship between the aesthetics of loss and two important manifestations of modernism: nihilism and kitsch. Nihilism is an extreme reduction of the modernist paradox. George Steiner argues that the defining feature of modernity is what he calls a “break in the covenant between word and world.” He defines that covenant as the presumption that being is “sayable,” and that the “raw material of existentiality has its analogue in the structure of narrative.”⁴ Steiner notes:

The break with the postulate of the sacred is the break with any stable, potentially ascertainable meaning of meaning. Where the theologically and metaphysically posited principle of continuous individuality, of a cognitively coherent and ethically responsible ego is dissolved …, there can be neither Kant's “subjective universality,” nor that belief in shared truth-seeking which, from Plato to the present, from the Phaedrus to now, had underwritten the ideals of religion, of humanism and of communication. It is this very impossibility that defines modernism.

Thus the seductive force of the deconstructive semiotics of the “after-Word” is that of a rigorously consequent nihilism or nullity (le degré zéro).⁵

A preoccupation with the incommensurability of language and reality undermines the ability to do what is right based on a knowledge of what is true. The truth imperative is impossible to achieve in a world fragmented and made relative by the subjective self-consciousness of modernism. As Johan Goudsblom puts it, “the nihilistic problematic originates in the sense of a lack, in the realization that essential truth is missing. One has to know the truth in order to know how to act, but the truth is unknowable.”⁶ The nihilist/relativist problematic is thus an especially important manifestation of the paradox of modernist aesthetics. Once the modern artist recognizes the lack of absolutes, that aesthetic forms and values are relative constructs, then the emptiness of those constructs becomes apparent. The modernist, even in the guise of a nihilist, must either accept the task of creating arbitrary meaning out of a world of appearances, or despair at the loss of absolute values, meaning, and identity.

Kitsch is one possible aesthetic response to the nihilist problematic. It is a self-conscious stylization of the authentic that tries to be both a reaction against despair and an acceptance of the world of appearances. Kitsch art is inauthentic because it seeks to replicate art that is viewed as absolute, timeless, or sublime in order to mask or to compensate for the loss of what is felt to be authentic. As Matei Calinescu states, “the great psychological discovery on which kitsch is founded lies in the fact that nearly everything directly or indirectly associated with artistic culture can be turned into something fit for immediate ‘consumption,’ like any ordinary commodity.”⁷ The connection with nihilism, and thus with the modernist paradox, is apparent in the inauthentic aesthetic response of kitsch art:

Kitsch is the direct artistic result of an important ethical mutation for which the peculiar time awareness of the middle classes has been responsible. By and large, kitsch may be viewed as a reaction against the “terror” of change and the meaninglessness of chronological time flowing from an unreal past into an equally unreal future. Under such conditions, spare time—whose quantity is socially increasing—is felt as a strange burden, the burden of emptiness. Kitsch appears as an easy way of “killing time,” as a pleasurable escape from the banality of both work and leisure. The fun of kitsch is just the other side of terrible and incomprehensible boredom.⁸

What distinguishes kitsch aesthetics, as the term is used in this essay, is its self-conscious embrace of the inauthentic in an attempt to find a substitute for the real. This usage narrows the meaning of the term, bringing it closer to the notion of “campiness” in pop art. However, it is important not to mistake this usage for a definition of kitsch. It is not the intent of this essay to offer a standard by which to judge whether or not a work of art is kitsch (indeed, it is impossible to offer such a standard without willfully embracing the contradictions of modernism). Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, and so a painting of Elvis on black velvet or a plastic dashboard Jesus may be kitsch to some, but objects of veneration to others. The point is that kitsch is an operative concept only to those who self-consciously manipulate the difference between the authentic and the fake, between high culture and low culture.

This narrowing of the use of the term kitsch aesthetics is important in enabling us to discuss kitsch art in general and Mishima's art in particular. The self-conscious embrace of the inauthentic typical of kitsch aesthetics reveals, behind its campy attitude and surface, the need to overcome or avoid, if not actually to resolve, the modernist sense of loss. Kitsch art wears its counterfeit nature on its sleeve. The aesthetic lie at the heart of kitsch art is not so much its pretense of uniqueness or originality, as its pretense that, because of the self-consciousness of the artist, the forgery, or simulacrum, somehow reproduces the aesthetic value of the work or style being copied. The aesthetic lie of kitsch may result in the same kind of bad faith that Walter Benjamin argued comes with the mass production of art. For Benjamin “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.” However,

that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object produced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.⁹

Kitsch and nihilism replicate the contradictory responses to the preoccupation with origins at the heart of the modernist paradox. The covalence of kitsch and nihilism is always observed in trite images used to represent the loss of meaning. For example, widely recognized character types, such as the blasé sophisticate who commits suicide out of boredom, or the spurned lover who seeks death on the battlefield, or the tortured artistic genius whose blinding Nietzschean insights into the emptiness of existence leads to despair and self-destruction, are all popular, stylized, kitsch representations of the nihilist problematic. However, these trite representations create a strange incongruity by virtue of their connection with the authentic experience of death, and the images that perhaps best display this incongruity are objects with quasi-religious associations that convey an antirational, antimodern mysticism. An example of the effect of this type of image is the morbid sentimentality that has come to attach to death photographs, especially the photographs of children, popular in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. The incongruity in the photographs arises from the denial of death by the use of cute, innocent clothing and the pious poses of the dead children. This denial was both an expression of authentic grief and an effort to assuage that grief through the production of a stylized, contrived, religious “authenticity.” The popularity of the photographs, made possible by the mass-reproduction technology of the camera, is a testament to the emotional and psychological effectiveness of these images. The original owners, the bereaved families, certainly did not think of these photographs as kitsch, if for no other reason than that they lacked the self-consciousness to perceive them as such, that is, the meaning and associations called forth by the photographs were grounded in authentic emotions. However, now that the original owners are gone and with them their authentic grief, the photographs, which were mementos meant to comfort and serve the purpose of denial, have lost their “aura,” and the resulting incongruity—the subjects are, after all, little corpses—creates a distance from the viewer that makes the photographs eerily kitschy.

Saul Friedlander has remarked on the incongruity, or what he calls the “frisson,” between kitsch and death that arises from the fact that, on the level of individual experience, death creates “authentic” feelings of dread and loneliness. Moreover, he argues that the juxtaposition of kitsch and death is the bedrock of fascist aesthetics, a point that, as we shall see, has relevance to Mishima's work.¹⁰ Although the incongruity of kitsch treatments of death in American funeral customs may seem at first glance far removed from the kitsch of fascist aesthetics, the use of modern technologies in the service of antimodern impulses is emblematic of the twisted contradictions that characterize responses to the paradox of modernism. The religious sentimentality that informs the contrived photographs of dead children is no different from the fascist sentimentality that revolts against the loss of moral certitude and tradition. Insofar as these photographs serve as reminders of death, their sentimentality inevitably fails to convey spiritual authenticity when severed from their origins—the genuine feelings of grief that gave the photographs their “aura” in the first place. Similarly, the quasi-religious, mystical sentimentality that accompanies fascist revolt carries as a precondition an awareness of the nihilist problematic and so is doomed to fail in its effort to overcome the modern. Fascist aesthetics are obsessed with the moment of simultaneous creation and destruction, and the emblematic hero of fascism is the beautiful youth destined to die young. The very appeal of such a doomed hero derives from the subliminal realization that the myth-making of fascist aesthetics is an empty structure: a mask that represents only a single, contingent possibility in a relative universe. As Friedlander notes:

the young hero destined for death is surrounded by a nimbus of complex emotions; he is the carrier of either one of two banners, one proclaiming an implicit [Christian] religious tradition, the other that of a cult of primitive and archaic values. He confronts that which denies them: the abject world of modernity, the obscure weight of material powers, the revolting inanity of nonhuman factors. Unvanquished unto death, the hero takes on an almost supernatural incandescence.¹¹

Like other antimodern aesthetics—fascism, primitivism, heroic aestheticism, postmodernism—kitsch is a revolt against the paradox of modernism, and it is therefore no surprise to find elements of kitsch, especially the incongruity between the “authentic” experience of death and “inauthentic” kitsch representations of it, throughout the works of a modernist who was as conflicted as Mishima. Accordingly, an analysis of his aesthetics, his modernism, may properly begin with his suicide. This does not mean we should read his works solely through the prism of that act. Nevertheless, in order to be able to engage his aesthetics we must at least recognize the powerful impulse to exert a kind of absolute control over the texts of his art and his life. At first sight the connection between his aesthetics and his death may suggest a rather simplistic correlation between his life and art, a correlation it is tempting to resist on two grounds. First, there is the reasonable expectation that, whatever common elements run through his life and writings, all of his works have a formal autonomy untouched by his death. Second, there is the natural impulse to resist the pressure of an author, even one who commits suicide, to force the reader to read in a prescribed way. Even so, no matter how much we may want to reject the intrusiveness of the author, the suicide of Mishima compels us, out of consideration for the possible authenticity of his motives, to at least consider the terms on which he apparently wanted us to read both his life and his art.

The underlying contradictions of Mishima's modernism were apparent to his contemporaries. Isoda Kōichi saw Mishima as a man who was appalled at the weakness and collaboration of Japanese intellectuals with postwar politics, a situation arising from the inability of intellectuals to assume individual responsibility. Isoda felt that a paradox arose in postwar modernism, for while postwar modernists rejected the prewar ideology of the roman-ha (romanticists), for example, they nonetheless held to totalizing concepts of perfectibility that made them “legitimate offspring of the Japanese roman-ha.” According to Isoda, when Mishima is considered in light of this paradox:

his radical modernism is self-evident. The will that seeks for the sympathy and understanding of another person and that tries to place the masses under its control was nothing at all to Mishima. Even if we assume that all individuals possess autonomy, it turned out that absolute self-autonomy was achieved not by some left-wing intellectual but, ironically, by Mishima Yukio. There are perhaps various opinions about the content and political meaning of his thought. However, I think its actual meaning is supported by an extreme ultramodernity that utterly rejects the collusion of Japanese community. If Yasuda Yojūrō embodied the character of Japanese community, then what separates him from Mishima is in fact nothing more than this ultramodernity—the logic of achieving independent responsibility, which is a heterogeneous concept of modernism close to Western individualism.¹²

Isoda's characterization of the difference between Mishima and Yasuda as a difference in emphasis between the individual and the community is justified in terms of the appeal of their work. However, Mishima, like other postwar modernists, clearly owed a debt to the roman-ha, and that debt is apparent in his antimodernism. Antimodern impulses, such as the mythic confabulations and hero-worship of fascism or the nostalgic yearnings of primitivism, are but one side of the modernist paradox. In that respect Yasuda was as much a modernist as Mishima. Yasuda's communitarianism was forged from an idealized past and is thus an antimodern swerve. However, his later postwar denials of the power of his vision to lead young men to their death calls into question the authenticity of his vision, that is, it breaks the covenant created by his vision. Mishima was a radical modernist insofar as his nostalgia and his contempt for the sterility of postwar Japanese society was turned inward, and yet the expression of his critique of modern Japan was a fascist turn toward a martial code that, because self-consciously revived, was anachronistic and inauthentic.

In the end, what distinguishes Mishima's modernism from that of the roman-ha is the degree of self-consciousness he possessed toward the inauthentic, which he recognized but accepted as a way to make the present moment timeless through a return to Japan's martial past. In a late autobiographical piece, Taiyō to tetsu (Sun and Steel, 1968), Mishima states his understanding of the modernist paradox:

In this way, wielding both the sword and the pen is to hold at the same time a flower that falls and a flower that does not; it is to hold at the same time the two most contradictory desires of human nature, and the two dreams of the realization of those desires. …

The destruction of these ultimate dreams occurs upon learning the secret that the flower that dreams of the sword is nothing more than an artificial flower, while learning the other secret, that death supported by the lie that dreams of the pen is not death with any special grace. In short, all salvation is cut off by the dual way of the pen and the sword, and its dual secrets, whose fundamental essences must never be revealed to one another, mutually see through the other's mask. [The dual way] must be self-composed, possessing in a single form the final destruction of the principle of death and the final destruction of the principle of life.

Is it possible for humans to live this kind of ideal? Fortunately, it is extremely rare for the dual way of the pen and the sword to assume that absolute form. And even when it becomes a reality, it is an ideal that is over in an instant. Because even if there is always an awareness and premonition [of the end], which takes the form of a sense of unease, this final pair of secrets, which mutually assault one another, has no chance to prove itself until the moment of death.¹³

Mishima's idealized vision of the moment of death as the point when the modernist paradox is resolved in the fusion of the literary and the martial leads inevitably to the realization that outside such an ideal both the pen and the sword, words and world, are inauthentic, empty structures. Mishima understands that the realization of nihilism can never exist in real life except, perhaps, at that fleeting moment when the subjective consciousness slips, like an object falling into a black hole, beyond the horizon of the singularity of death:

To devote death to one's heart each day, and to converge moment by moment on death, which must come to us, is to place the power to imagine the worst possible outcome in the same location as the power to imagine glory. … In that case, [that devotion] is sufficient to be able to transfer things carried out in the world of the spirit to the world of the flesh. As I have stated before, in order to receive this kind of violent transformation, even in the world of the flesh, I thoroughly prepared myself and readied an attitude to be able to receive it any time. Thus the theory that everything had the potential to be reclaimed was born within me. Because it had been proven to me that even the flesh, which ought to be a prisoner by virtue of growing and decaying moment by moment with time, had the potential to be reclaimed. It is therefore not strange at all that the thought that even time itself could be reclaimed should have come to life within me.

For me, the fact that time could be reclaimed, at once meant that the beautiful death I had been unable to achieve previously had become a possibility.

([Mishima Yukio zenshū] MYZ 32:101-2)

Mishima is convinced that he can overcome the modernist problem of time, that he can break through his self-consciousness and achieve the modernist dream of reconciling the momentary with the eternal by returning to those traditions epitomized by the selfless life of the warrior, who accepted the inevitability of death.

Because Sun and Steel is a late autobiographical piece, the statement of his aesthetic purpose is based on a retrospective look at his life experiences. Mishima's aesthetics are inseparable from the context of his critical self-interpretation, and thus it would be a mistake to indiscriminately project this statement back onto his earlier works of fiction as a guide for reading. However, if we separate the self-destructive purpose for which he put his principles to work late in his career, we find a remarkably consistent presentation of his ideas about art and beauty as we move back through his earlier works. The presence of this common element in his work is significant in that it suggests that the modernist paradox is a developing theme, not a retrospective interpretation imposed on the reader by the author.

In Kinkakuji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1956), for example, Mishima finds a metaphor in the burning of the famous Zen temple in 1950 for the creative/destructive duality that marks nihilist aesthetics. The young acolyte, Mizoguchi, the narrating “I” who commits the infamous act of arson, is a stutterer who is utterly incapable of connecting his words with the world. The weariness and impotence that come over him as he contemplates the beauty of Kinkakuji, which has been an object of veneration for him since his childhood, are the result of his unceasing struggle to reconcile reality with his perceptions of it. He had hoped that the war would provide a way out of his predicament either through his death or through the destruction of Kinkakuji by American bombs. Because neither happened, he resolves to break through that weariness by the nihilistic acts of arson and suicide. By planning to destroy the barrier between his vision of beauty and the reality of the temple, Mizoguchi hopes to resolve the modernist paradox.

In the buildup to the climax of the novel, Mizoguchi ponders the beauty of the temple one last time. This beauty has so enthralled him that it is now as much a product of his memory as it is the product of his direct experience of it. Therein lies the discovery of the true nature of the temple's beauty. Unable to make out the details of the building in the darkness of the night on which he sets the fire, he closes his eyes and relies on his own vision to determine what it is that has such a hold on him:

However, as my memory of its beauty grew ever stronger, the darkness became the ground onto which I could self-indulgently draw my visions. Within this dark, crouching shape, every aspect of what I thought of as beauty lay concealed. Through the power of memory, the details of beauty came sparkling one by one out of the darkness, and, as the sparkling diffused, at last Kinkakuji gradually became visible beneath the light of a mysterious time that was neither day nor night. Never before had Kinkakuji appeared to me in such a completely detailed form, glittering in every corner. It was as though I had gained the powers of vision of a blind man.

(MYZ 10:265)

The beauty of the temple is the creation of the young acolyte's vision, or memory, of it. It is no longer connected to the real presence of the temple but arises out of a synthesis between the form of the temple and the individual mind contemplating it. The world of art and the world of experience are completely sundered for Mizoguchi, who is forced to create an architecture of the mind. And in that architecture he finds that it was

beauty that not only unified the struggles, the contradictions, all the discordances of the various parts, but actually controlled them! Like a scripture that has been copied painstakingly, letter by letter, with gold dust on dark-blue parchment, the temple was a structure built out of gold dust in the long, dark night. However, I did not know if beauty was Kinkakuji itself or something identical to the empty night that surrounded it. Perhaps beauty was both. It was the particulars, it was the whole structure, it was the temple, it was the night that enveloped the temple. Thinking about it in that way, I felt that the enigma of the beauty of Kinkakuji, which had heretofore tormented me, was halfway solved. The reason was that when I examined the beauty of each detail … in no way did the beauty end in them nor was it completed by them. Instead, a foreshadowing of the beauty of the succeeding detail was contained in every part. The beauty of each detail was filled with an uneasiness in itself. While dreaming of perfection, it was drawn toward the next beauty, the unknown beauty, never knowing completion. Foreshadowing was linked to foreshadowing, and each foreshadowing of beauty, which did not exist here, became, as it were, the theme of Kinkakuji. Those foreshadowings were the signs of emptiness. Emptiness was the structure of this beauty. Thus, naturally the foreshadowings of emptiness were contained in the incompleteness of the details, and this delicate construction of fine timber, like a devotional necklace swaying in the breeze, was trembling in the foreshadowing of emptiness.

(MYZ 10:267)

This idea of the nature of beauty may be likened to the Buddhist notion of the emptiness of reality. The existence of beauty depends not on any absolute but on the relationship of individual details, images, or memories. The creation of beauty requires the totalizing power of the imagination, but the subjective ordering of those relationships in turn requires an acceptance of the relative nature of aesthetic values.

Mizoguchi's aesthetic discovery, then, is double-edged. The recognition of the beauty of Kinkakuji, which is nothing more than the recognition of his own concept of the temple, gives him the freedom to control the reading of the temple's beauty, but in his understanding of that beauty he also feels an uneasiness that foretells the emptiness of his own aesthetic concepts. Mizoguchi, of course, cannot resolve the nihilist/relativist problematic. He is limited to making a gesture toward nihilism by destroying himself along with the temple, an act that would at least conjure the sense of authenticity that comes with death. Mizoguchi's failure is an explicit critique of the inauthentic: he is a kitsch aesthete. Mizoguchi is at last capable of destroying the object he believes blocks the expression of himself, but his self-awareness causes him to lose nerve, and he is incapable of completing his vision of self-immolation. Having committed arson, he retreats to a nearby hill and watches the blaze, casually smoking a cigarette. By failing to extinguish the self, Mizoguchi fails to destroy the subjective inner vision of Kinkakuji that is the source of his dilemma.

Temple of the Golden Pavilion gives a vivid critique of counterfeit aesthetics, but it is neither the earliest nor the most original formal expression of that critique. That distinction belongs to Mishima's first major novel, Kamen no kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask, 1948). In this work Mishima achieves a technical innovation by reversing the formula of the naturalist confession that art is life. For the narrator life is art: its essence is observable only through a subjective, relative perspective, and thus, like beauty, it is an empty structure. The complexity of the narrative arises from the contradictory nature of the confessional form. As the title suggests, it is not clear if the narrative is a “true confession” or a “false confession” and the lack of clarity is important to the conception of the work. A number of critics, most notably Donald Keene, have expressed puzzlement over the failure of critics to fully understand this work as a “true confession,” and they seek to set the record straight by emphasizing that Confessions of a Mask is in fact a sincere, autobiographical account of Mishima's early life, not a parody of a confession.¹⁴ However, it does not follow that simply because some readers have assumed that Mishima was not really talking about himself that the author was not deliberately playing with the ambiguities of the confessional narrative. Moreover, Keene's entire account of Mishima in Dawn to the West is rendered suspect by a kind of critical boosterism, which implicates Keene in the least savory aspects of Mishima's commercialism.

The use of the term “false confession” here is meant to point to the playful aspects of the work, and the contradictory self-parody implied by the term is an accurate description not only of Mishima's technique in this novel, but also of the narrator's self-image. Even so, to speak of Confessions of a Mask as a “false confession” is perhaps a little redundant, since confession by its nature shows a dual tendency. On the one hand it seeks to idealize or exemplify an individual life, in the manner of the religious confession of Augustine, for example. At the same time confession points out the uniqueness of the individual, and thus calls into question accepted norms even as it seeks to establish the narrated, confessed self as the new norm. Thus, there is in any confession an ulterior motive that threatens to make the narrative false. The narrator actively plays on this duality at those points in Confessions of a Mask where he professes fear at his abnormality and uniqueness, while confirming his abnormality by pointing out that fear.

Confessions of a Mask is the account of a young man who, tormented by his growing awareness of his homosexuality, strives to mask that real self that makes him different and thus isolated. However, the narrator is so self-aware and so critical of his own stratagems to hide his real identity that he cannot tolerate those self-delusions. The endlessly regressive self-exposure of the narrative, which reduces self-identity to nothing more than a mask, is the insoluble problem that the narrator must confront. Rather than try to overcome this dilemma, the narrator identifies what he takes to be his true nature not only in his homosexual longings, but also in the unstable act of self-exposure, in which the real presence of identity always slips away. The narrator describes his method of self-analysis as a Möbius strip, with the internal and external elements of his narrative twisted together to make a one-sided perspective that gives the illusion of being multi-dimensional:

[M]y powers of introspection had a structure that defied one's imagination, just like those circles made by twisting a long narrow piece of paper once, and then pasting the ends together. What you think is the outer surface turns out to be the inner. And what you take to be the inner surface is really the outer. In later years I slowed down a little, but when I was twenty-one I did nothing but run blindly around the track of my youthful emotions, and the speed of my rotations became dizzyingly fast due to the frenzied apocalyptic feelings that arose with the final stages of the war. I was allowed no time to go one by one into causes, effects, contradictions, or confrontations. The contradictions continued, just as they were, to rub against each other at a speed so great that they were not discernible.

(MYZ 3:291-92)

The paradox confronting the narrator is given wider significance by his questioning of the way in which all people create their identities. The narrator gains credibility by his self-questioning, but at the same time he forces himself and the reader to see that credibility as just another pose or mask. The mere utterance of the dilemma of an individual who cannot speak of his true identity does not by itself resolve that dilemma if there is no certainty in the absolute meanings of words. And if the narrative act of confessing is nothing more than assuming a mask, then are not all efforts to define the self—or indeed all human experience and memory—empty and illusory? When self-awareness becomes an end unto itself, then all human activity, like the narrative structure of Confessions of a Mask, spirals forever inward, making genuine knowledge of the self impossible.

At one point the narrator claims to desire death as the means for hiding what he sees as his difference from others. The appeal of death is the promise of nothingness in the face of the inability to break down the divide between the narrator's perception of his “abnormal” self and the “normal” reality of the world. Yet when he has the chance to seek out death at the time he is drafted into the army, he receives a medical discharge on the basis of a misdiagnosis of a lung inflammation as tuberculosis. By accepting what he knows to be false, he rules out the possibility of death in war. In reflecting upon his actions, he writes:

Then suddenly my other voice spoke up, saying that not once had I ever really wanted to die. These words allowed me to loosen the knots of my shame. It was a difficult thing to say, but I understood that my wish to go into the army only to die had been a lie, and that instead I had been embracing some carnal expectations of army life. And I understood that the power that let me persist in this expectation was the primitive, mystical belief all humans hold, the belief that I, at least, would not die. …

… Nevertheless, this thought was extremely disagreeable to me. So I preferred to feel that I was a man who had been forsaken by death. I preferred to concentrate my delicate nerves, like a surgeon operating on an internal organ, to look dispassionately upon the strange agony of a person who desired death, but who had been repudiated. I felt that the degree of my pleasure in this thought was wicked.

(MYZ 3:263)

The narrator, who fails to take the step toward death, is a clear literary antecedent of Mizoguchi. The predicament in Confessions of a Mask is, however, more complicated in that the narrator is forced to confront his lie and his failure. He tries to make his experience universal by confessing his fear of death, but then stresses the uniqueness of his situation by adopting the rationalization that he alone has been refused by death. He admits the falsehood of his sense of uniqueness—his sense of immortality—but even the honesty with which he confesses his self-serving actions does not give them a sense of authenticity and so does not allow him to connect with the world.

Mishima pushes the autobiographical confession, with its narrow perspective, to a radically new use. There is of course no doubt that the story is based on the facts of Mishima's life, but the simple equation of art and life is of little help in resolving the predicament of the narrator. The early disbelief concerning Mishima's homosexuality, far from being a complete misreading of the text, points out the difficulty at the heart of Confessions of a Mask. The skepticism toward his credibility, which the narrator invites by constantly pointing out the underlying motives for his confession, extends in a peculiar way to include the question about whether or not Mishima is telling the truth about his real life. A crucial part of his confession is the revelation of his impulse to write or narrate himself, to play with the text of his life. This proclivity is illustrated early on when the narrator rewrites a Hungarian fairy tale that tells of a beautiful prince who, like all the other noble heroes who attract the narrator, is fated to die young. In this story the prince undergoes numerous horrible deaths only to revive each time and gain victory. The narrator is fascinated in particular by the gory killing of the prince by a dragon, but he is dissatisfied with the part of the story that tells of the prince coming back to life. As a result, he begins to cover up that part with his hand and to read the story according to his own preference. He writes:

Adults would have perhaps read as absurd the sentence that resulted from that method of cutting. However, this young, arrogant censor, who was so easily addicted to his own whims, while clearly discerning the contradiction in the two phrases “he was torn to pieces” and “he fell to the ground,” could not discard either.

(MYZ 3:180)

The urge to rewrite, to represent death in a consciously contrived form, reveals the incongruity between words and death and thus puts the narrator's edited tale in the realm of kitsch. This self-conscious, belated urge to rewrite and interpret is turned upon the narrator's own life when the problem of his sexuality becomes more pronounced. At the beginning of chapter 3, he tells us that the idea that life is a stage, a kind of dramatic performance, became an obsession with him, and that he came to believe that life was nothing more than assuming roles. Accordingly, when he begins to be troubled by what he sees as his different sexuality, he looks for models to define himself as a “normal” boy. At this point in his life his early tendency to define himself in terms of the literature he has read becomes even more pronounced:

The time was nearing when one way or another I would start out in life. The preliminary knowledge I had for this journey came first of all from my numerous novels, a one-volume dictionary of sex, the dirty books that had circulated among my friends, and the many innocent, lewd conversations I heard each night that we went on outdoor exercises. My burning curiosity was a more faithful traveling companion than all of these. For my attitude on my departure, I decided it was best to be a “machine of deceit.”

(MYZ 3:241)

The narrator's dissociation and his inability to connect with others is thus explicitly related to the literary quality of his life, and he relies on fiction to learn about normal behavior. He pretends to be the same as the other boys, but the desires that drive them, especially their sexual desire for women, is beyond the vocabulary of his self-created identity, since he suffers from what he calls a deficiency in the power of his mental associations.

When the narrator confesses that he is being untrue to his real self by donning a narrative mask to define his persona, he is also assuming the paradoxical pose that he is giving a true portrait of himself. This double-edged confession makes any interpretation of the story problematic from the standpoint of judging its truthfulness. Are we to doubt him when he exposes the self-deceptions he has used to justify his actions? Conversely, are we to believe him when he makes claims for the truthfulness of his story? Throughout the text these questions are complicated again and again by the narrator's awareness of them. The novel opens with a crucial example of this awareness when the narrator discusses the trustworthiness of his memory, the faculty that makes his memoir, his fictional life, possible. The problem of credibility with his memory arises because it is apparently too good to be true. He claims to be able to remember scenes from his birth, a claim which both amuses the adults around him and threatens them, since they see the claim as a childish trick to get them to talk about human sexuality. The narrator, however, assures us that there was no such ruse behind his memory, which is of a light striking the basin where he was first bathed. Whatever explanations there might have been for this false memory—that it was suggested to him later or that he made it up—the narrator insists that he clearly saw the light:

The refutation that had the most power against this memory was the fact that I was not born in the daytime. I was born at nine in the evening. There could have been no sunlight streaming in. Even when teased with suggestions that perhaps it was an electric light, I was still able to walk with no trouble at all into the absurdity of thinking confidently that, even though it was nighttime, a ray of sun shone down on that one spot on the basin. The brim of the basin on which the light flickered somehow lingered in my memory as being something I definitely saw at the time of my first bath.

(MYZ 3:164-65)

The significance of this memory is twofold. First, the image of the light, with its extraordinary implication of an almost preternatural self-awareness on the part of the narrator, recalls Friedlander's description, cited above, of the typical fascist hero aglow with his supernatural incandescence. This light imagery is a recurring motif, and the story ends with an image of reflected sunlight described as both alluring and menacing because it confirms, by arousing, the narrator's different sexuality and because it calls to mind the emptiness of his confession, which is a presentiment of his death. Second, it creates confusion over the good faith and credibility of the confession. The danger of this confusion is apparent to the narrator, for he is careful to completely assure the reader that the next earliest memory he talks about is true (MYZ 3:167). The importance of this memory, which is of a handsome young night-soil man, is that the appearance of the man excited in the narrator his first feelings of sexual desire. The dual scatological and eschatological associations of this memory, which also seems neatly contrived, create the confusion of sexuality and the sense of difference that force the narrator into a life of assuming one mask after another in order to connect himself with normal human experience.

The problem of his sexuality is the dominant question for the narrator, and his early propensities are established by the homoerotic images of his earliest memories and of the first storybooks he read as a child—images that eventually evolve into graphic, violent adolescent fantasies. As noted above, he is particularly drawn to stories of beautiful young princes who die bloody deaths. Moreover, he is a sickly child, and when he is finally allowed out to play with a cousin named Sugiko he finds that he must go against the image of himself he has created and act in a manner that conforms to the expectations of others. He tells us that in Sugiko's house

I was required, without anything being said and without being told, to be a boy. The masquerade so uncongenial to my heart had begun. From about this time I began to vaguely comprehend the mechanism by which the thing reflected in the eyes of others as my acting was a manifestation of the need for me to return to my true nature and that what was reflected as my natural self in the eyes of others was my acting.

(MYZ 3:182)

The narrator's homosexuality is demonstrated to us, and to the narrator himself, many times. His first orgasm is achieved while he stares at a picture of the martyring of St. Sebastian, an image that explicitly conveys for the narrator associations of sexual desire and death; his first pangs of love are felt for a male classmate; and, near the end of the novel, the narrator gains what he takes to be absolute proof when he fails to have an erection during an encounter with a prostitute. However, the narrator presents such proof not simply to convince the reader of his true nature, but also to convince himself. The need to convince himself arises from his uneasy conviction that his true nature and identity, the things that make him an individual, are what separates him from the rest of humanity. The predicament of the narrator is most clearly portrayed in his relationship with Sonoko. She is for him the ideal woman, but she is ideal in an abstract sense, as an image of beauty not of sexuality. She represents the ideal referred to in the quotation from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevski, which prefaces the novel:

Ah, Beauty! The thing I cannot stand at all is that even splendid people who possess a pure heart and surpassing reason often start out embracing the ideal of the Madonna and end up with the ideal of Sodom. There is something even worse. Namely, those people who embrace in their hearts the ideal of Sodom while at the same time not denying the ideal of the Madonna, and who keep aflame in their hearts the longing for a beautiful ideal from the depths of their soul, as in the pure days of their youth.

(MYZ 3:162)

The story of the narrator's relationship with Sonoko takes up much of the second half of Confessions of a Mask. He seeks her out in part to confirm the suspicions he has about himself, and in part as an ideal, asexual beauty that will provide him an image of permanence through which he can assuage the anguish caused by his predicament. Although there is always a distance between them—a distance created by the narrator observing the ways in which Sonoko assumes his normality and thus misreads him—she nonetheless represents a solution to his isolation in the same way as death. The problem is that the attainment either of the ideal or of death must remain beyond the experience of the narrative, a fact felt by the narrator almost from the moment he first sees Sonoko. He tells us that he felt purified by the sight of her beauty, but then stops to address the reader directly:

Having written this, those who have read to this point will probably not believe me. This is because it may seem there is nothing to distinguish between the artificial first pangs of love I felt toward Nukada's younger sister, and the throbbing of my heart on this occasion. Because there was no reason why the ruthless analysis of the earlier instance should have been disregarded this time only. If that is the case, then my act of writing has been meaningless from the beginning. For it will be thought that what I am writing is nothing more than the product of the desire to write in this manner. Because, for the sake of this desire, anything I write is OK so long as it is coherent and accords with reason. However, an accurate part of my memory recalls one point of difference with what I felt now and what I had felt earlier. That difference was a feeling of remorse.

(MYZ 3:265-66)

He claims his feeling of remorse is genuine and not part of his masquerade because her beauty strikes him as ideal and asexual. He also tells us that he was confused by his feeling of remorse and did not understand its origins and explicitly connects these feelings with the problem of the credibility of his feelings and of his memory. The connection between his confused emotions and the problem of confession is important to the design of the narrative as a whole, because he feels that his remorse may have been a presentiment of sin. His confession confirms his abnormality, his sin, over and over, but it never allows him to establish absolutely his identity, and it prevents him from ever connecting with his ideal of beauty, Sonoko. To the very end she presumes his heterosexuality, and he is thereby forced to continue to lie and to hide his predicament from her. Confirming the reality of his homosexuality cannot stop the masquerade, because his confession lacks the power to become real. He is in the same situation as when he first met Sonoko:

The usual “act” had been transformed into a part of my personality. It was no longer an act. The consciousness that I was masquerading as a normal person had corroded the original normality within me, and I was finally forced to persuade myself each time that this consciousness was nothing more than a feigned normality. Put another way, I became a person who believes only in the counterfeit. That being the case, this feeling in my mind that I wanted to regard the attraction of my heart for Sonoko as counterfeit perhaps in reality revealed a masked desire that wanted to think of that feeling as true love.

(MYZ 3:273)

The maddening circularity of the narrator's self-analysis is not a sign of indecision, but signifies an irreparable breach between reality and the means to express it. Once the narrator is conscious of the fact that the narrative of his life (the expression of his selfhood) is a pose, he can never express his true identity, nor can he connect with his ideal of beauty. Instead, his story is reduced to a series of paradoxes. There is the paradox of his identity. He wants to confess his difference and assert his uniqueness, and yet he fears the isolation that would result. To resolve this paradox he confesses his tendency to masquerade, but in the end the mask becomes the image of himself, suggesting once again that he cannot connect with the reality of his life. The confession of a mask is by nature an empty narrative, and the narrator's self-conscious acceptance of that makes him a kitsch aesthete.

The emptiness of narrative is related in Confessions of a Mask to the specific predicaments of identity and credibility, but it has wider implications concerning the validity of social and moral values. The narrator touches on those implications when he describes the ravages of war he witnessed with Sonoko upon their return to Tokyo following the great air raids of the spring of 1945. The fire bombings destroyed everything that served as evidence of human existence. Not only did property go up in flames, but so did the primary relationships that held civilization together. In a desperate effort to stay alive, women killed their lovers and children murdered their mothers (MYZ 3:278-79). Like the beauty of Kinkakuji, the very fabric of human relationships and social values are exposed as relative, contingent, and empty, and when those values are placed under the same intense scrutiny that the narrator turns on himself, they lose all substantiality. The aesthetics of emptiness that informs the narrative emerges from the struggle between the conception of an ideal and the impossibility of representing that ideal.

The obsession with surfaces and false appearances that dominates Confessions of a Mask became the single most important recurring element in Mishima's writing. That constant obsession raises the question of how seriously Mishima's work is to be taken. Is it possible to distinguish between inauthentic art and art that is about—that critiques—the inauthentic? In the case of Mishima the answer is a qualified yes, since he plays upon the modernist paradox to brilliant formal and psychological effect in both Confessions of a Mask and Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The sad irony of Mishima's career is that the very nature of his aesthetic breakthrough imprisoned him within his early achievement. Like Hemmingway, Mishima found himself trapped by the realization that what he had become as an artist and an individual was an identity of his own construction, and thus one that held no absolute meaning. This could not have been a satisfying situation for a self-absorbed artist driven by the modernist preoccupation with certainty; by the time he wrote Sun and Steel his critique of the inauthentic had played itself out and he was becoming a kitsch artist. Mishima recognized what was happening, and no matter how much he may have enjoyed the masquerade, his knowledge about himself was obviously a burden heavy enough to make him long for the authenticity of death.

The attempt by Mishima to impose a final, authoritative reading on his life grew out of a lifelong project of narrating and renarrating his literary self. Mark Freeman, arguing for a method of critical psychology that moves toward the reintegration of language/text with experience/world, writes:

[T]he narrative imagination, engaged in the project of rewriting the self, seeks to disclose, articulate, and reveal that very world which, literally, would not have existed had the act of writing not taken place. In this sense, life histories are indeed artifacts of writing; they are the upsurge of the narrative imagination. This, however, is hardly reason to fault them or to relegate them to the status of mere fictions. We too, as selves, are artifacts of the narrative imagination. We, again literally, would not exist, save as bodies, without imagining who and what we have been and are: kill the imagination and you kill the self. Who, after all is said and done, would want to die such a death?¹⁵

Who perhaps but Mishima? His suicide was both an intellectual and emotional response to the irreconcilable loss of values and meaning in his life. And unlike his fictional characters—the narrator of Confessions of a Mask or Mizoguchi in Temple of the Golden Pavilion, who were objects of his critique of the inauthentic—Mishima sought to resolve the problem of the inauthentic, to make whole again the breach between his words and his world, and to reclaim time itself by consciously opting to overcome his self-consciousness in the only way he thought possible.

In the end, the irony of his death is that it can be interpreted as just another expression of the inauthentic. There is a disturbingly contrived, self-consciously literary quality about his suicide, with its counterfeit political motives, that limits the horizon of expectations we bring to his fiction.¹⁶ Through his death he in effect rewrote all of his works by making his career seem developmental. He imposed his own interpretation of his life and art as inseparable, as leading inexorably toward that final moment when what Steiner calls the “compulsion to freedom,” the “agonistic attempt to repossess, to achieve mastery over the forms and meanings” of one's own being,¹⁷ coincided with an absurd, excruciating act of self-immolation. Even if we resist his efforts at control, Mishima's suicide makes a claim on us by highlighting the contradiction at the heart of his lifework. The horror of the event is grounded in Mishima's drive to give his life a formal closure, but the overt staging of his death seems out of proportion with the finality of the event. For all of its horrible reality, his suicide, his seppuku, was also just another piece of writing: a forgery, a simulacrum, a work of kitsch art.

Notes

1. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli International, 1984), 9.

2. For a representative response, see Henry Miller, Reflections on the Death of Mishima (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1972). Miller's work is especially interesting in that it provides an almost parodic catalogue of modernist attitudes prevalent at the time, attitudes which include an exotic view of the traditions of Japan that Mishima lamented.

3. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 114-15.

4. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 90, 93.

5. Ibid., 132-33.

6. Johan Goudsblom, Nihilism and Culture (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 87.

7. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 247.

8. Ibid., 248.

9. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 220-21.

10. Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 27.

11. Ibid., 33-34.

12. Isoda Kōichi, “Mishima no kindaisei,” in Romanjin Mishima Yukio: Sono risō to kōdō, ed. Hayashi Fusao et al., (Tokyo: Roman, 1973), 50-51.

13. Mishima Yukio, Mishima Yukio zenshū (hereafter MYZ) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1975), 32: 96-97. Mishima's use of the phrase “apprehension” (zoruge, written with the characters for fuan) suggestively echoes Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's (1892-1927) explanation of his reasons for choosing to die. In the two autobiographical pieces he wrote just before he committed suicide, Haguruma (Cogwheel) and Aru ahō no isshō (The Life of a Fool), the vague unease Akutagawa felt was explicitly linked to the paranoid delusions that had shattered his psyche, but it also points to a more general malaise: the modernist paranoia at the inability to trust or believe in the certainty of art and experience. See Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters, 114.

14. Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 1:1183-84.

15. Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (New York: Routledge, 1993), 223.

16. There is an important parallel here with the suicide of Akutagawa, whose death was also interpreted as evidence of the crisis of modern culture. In that interpretation his death became a literary act, a way to take control over his life and identity by imposing or willing a form onto himself and by constructing an ending that turns his life into a work of art. Such a reading of course trivializes his death on one level, but the shock felt by many of Akutagawa's contemporaries at his suicide was severe, perhaps because his death could in fact be read as a literary act. For a brief summary of the interpretations of Akutagawa's suicide as a literary act, see Nakamura Shin'ichirō, “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke nyūmon,” in Nihon gendai bungaku zenshū, vol. 56 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1960).

17. Steiner, Real Presences, 205.