SOURCE: Mengay, Donald H. “Body/Talk: Mishima, Masturbation, and Self-Performativity.” In Genealogy and Literature, edited by Lee Quinby, pp. 193-210. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Mengay examines Mishima's portrayal of the Japanese identity in a Westernized society.]

The social upheavals caused around the world by western imperialism were also felt in Japan, despite the fact that the west never established a formal colonial bureaucracy there. One of the early outcomes of the western “influence,” which began with an act of aggression, the American insistence in the 1860s that Japan open its borders, was the reconfiguration of the terms of a debate about the individual's relation to society. As H. D. Harootonian and Masao Miyoshi point out, this discussion, as well as a more general one related to modernity and modernization, began in Japan well before the invasion by the west.¹ An effect of the western presence, however, was the relabeling of indigenous individualism as “westernism,” a semiotic slippage that reveals western attempts to define the terms of the discourse, to take credit for the purported good (human rights, equality, the individual), and to assign the negative to the Japanese (fascism, mindless conformity, ultranationalism, nonrecognition, and even abuse of the individual).²

One of the tasks of modern Japanese writers has been to work against such simplistic portrayals. This effort constitutes much of the tension in the work of Yukio Mishima, which when taken as a whole struggles to reconfigure the relations between east/west and individual/society. These become for him and his characters a complex, wrenching, and inescapable conundrum, which he underscores the immediacy and intimate nature of by linking them metonymically to sex, and sexuality generally. More precisely, the mandate and desire to conform to sexual norms is offset by physical urges, desires, and demands that set the individual apart, that have no respect for the collective or for social norms. Sex and sexual acts, particularly masturbation and its attendant upheaval or shaking of the body, both individual and social, constitute the loci of desire and difference and ground a much broader discourse on identity. Drawn into this debate are issues about what it means to be Japanese in an increasingly westernized, or alien, culture; to be a “failed” man, sickly and weak and with (illicit) homosexual desires in a purportedly hetero/patriarchal culture; to write across the gap between east/west and to establish oneself as both international and “uniquely Japanese”; and to hail from a family with (weak) aristocratic links in a strongly class-conscious society.

The time when Mishima began writing, directly after the war, stands out as one of extreme cultural flux in Japan. In placing sexuality at the center of this debate, Mishima locates the quest for self against a historical backdrop that both mandates reproduction and questions the point and even usefulness of it, given the possibilities of mass destruction. This flux is metaphorized mostly in images of fluidity and bodily flow and gets at the impossibility of locating a “solid,” essential, definable identity. To employ western, Derridean jargon: the self is established as a process of differing—always, through desire, to be found in another place—and deferral, ungraspable and without closure in time.

This of course approximates what in the west has come to be called the postmodern condition. “The postmodern identity is frequently theorized as an atomic identity, fractured and disseminated into a field of dispersed energy,” writes Diana Fuss, the term “atomic” referring to “multiple identity particles bouncing off each other.”³ For Mishima, these “particles” or coordinates of identity (the entire litany of class, ethnicity, gender, race, sex, and so on) are portrayed as cultural flux occasioned largely by the domineering presence of the west in Japan.

In the works of Japanese writers the referent of this “atomic identity” is perhaps also the atomic bomb, and for them to employ it as metaphor is perhaps also to create a signifier far more immediate, and more vexed, than the use of it as mere figuration, as one finds in the west. It signifies the inversion of the relation of the self to the (epi)center, the negation of the signifier center-as-privileged-space.⁴

Writing as a westerner amid the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, I find Mishima disturbingly relevant, both because of the leveling effect, that is, of hierarchies of power (inside/outside, margin/center), caused by what gets perceived, even mythologized, as an irrational destructive force, and also more generally because of the placement of sex as the central metonym for exploring the effects of this destruction. Sex is portrayed by Mishima as central to an understanding of the self—not to mention that element that is most avoided, occluded, and reviled in social discourse. Positing the centrality of sexuality to modern notions of the (western) self, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that “many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured—indeed, fractured—by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/hetero definition.”⁵ It is precisely along these lines that Mishima configures a postwar Japanese self, thus effecting a bridge between eastern and western notions of identity.

Without labeling Mishima or his fictional self, Kochan, “gay” in any western sense of the word, the struggle of identity that occurs in his texts (and in Confessions of a Mask especially) focuses nevertheless precisely on the issue of (homo)sexuality and gender, expressed in the short-circuiting of relations between language and the body—issues faced uniquely by the contemporary western, queer reader. It is after all the sexed body, and particularly the “gay” diseased body, that constitutes the modern homosexual as inhabitant of both the margins and center, but the center as conceived by Andrew Holleran, as “ground zero.”⁶

For all intents and purposes, Confessions of a Mask (1949) is the narrative of Mishima's own youth. In this novel he details his experiences as a weak, sickly child forced to live with, and attend to, his equally sickly grandmother. Like André Gide's Michel in L'immoraliste, it is through aesthetic/erotic experiences with other men that a desire to live and be strong is planted in Kochan. He quickly discovers not only that his desire to live is intimately linked with homo desire (for example, for the night-soil man and for Omi) but that this desire is also socially unacceptable. He knows instinctually that to fit in is to manifest the “proper” desires, and so he endeavors to suppress his homo urges in order to cultivate hetero ones—specifically, for a young woman named Sonoko. Of course, this leads to disaster, to confusion and self-loathing. Kochan discovers he is capable of hetero desire, but he nevertheless is forced to admit to the persistence and irremediableness of his desire for young men.

Put another way, while Kochan tries to front a stable, culturally approved self, he is troubled by a concomitant, persistent marginalized self, one that threatens to obliterate the respectability that attains through conformity, expressed here in sexual attraction. Central to his struggle is the desire for agency, for the ability to dismantle the regulatory system of sexuality that limits the possibilities of desire.

The tenacity of these sexual norms is revealed in several ways, but most significantly in Kochan's experience of masturbation, with all of its decadent resonances. The latter is the subversive act for Kochan, precisely because of the specificity, for him, of its connection to same-sex desire. In this act of privacy he flaunts compulsory demands of heterosexuality in his infatuation with other men. On the one hand his position is rebellious, but on the other he is painfully aware of his investment and his own complicitous reinforcement of the very prescriptive modes he seeks to undermine.

Beauty encompasses the many binarisms marking these regulatory norms. Mishima's notion of beauty, an unusual hybrid of Japanese-samurai, classical Greek and Wildean aesthetics, incorporates both death and sex in such a way that sex appropriates, imitates, and metaphorizes death. Quoting Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in his epigraph, Mishima asserts an aesthetic in which “Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it never has and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Within beauty both shores meet and all contradictions exist side by side.” Not merely a zero-sum game in which binaristic forces cancel one another out, beauty becomes a site in which excess is engaged in for the purpose of baring the nature of binarisms themselves, inherent in societal norms. Beauty's iconography is a pastiche of signifiers in which, for example, “the ideal of Sodom” is metonymically linked with “the ideal of the Madonna”—a connection that both implicates the one in the other and retains its antinomies along the lines of the contestatory/subservient, denaturalized/naturalized, homo/hetero, illicit/licit, male/female, pagan/religious, and profane/sacred. Moreover, vitiation and innocence are contrasted in homo and hetero desire, even if directions for connecting the bilateral set of dots are unclear.

Kochan both reinforces and subverts notions of homosexual desire as degradation, asserting its primacy and innocence; hetero desire must be “learned,” as in the case of his relationship with Sonoko, but homo desire is decadently cast as “natural.” The beautiful, in other words, represents a means of escape from a sanctioned extreme—univocity, lopsidedness. For Mishima, it seems that it is a way out of “normal” (i.e., societal) formulations of the acceptable and the licit, even if the escape is ephemeral.

Mishima metaphorizes beauty in fluidic images that hint at unity and continuity (blood, river, sea, semen, urine), each of which is linked in some way to masturbation. This act molds Kochan's aesthetic, engaging elements of body/language, life/death, and stoppage/flowing, but it also is an expression of his mind-set both as determined subject and agent of resistance. As a performative act masturbation, like beauty, also does not represent a zero-sum game. Opposed to a synchronic perspective in which Kochan experiences only self-negating and warring forces is a diachronic one in which the iteration of the masturbatory act itself accrues, for all of its essentialist resonances, self-knowledge, even if the knowledge gained never seems to serve as a finality. Masturbatory “knowledge” of the self is significant not because the self is an existentialist entity defined merely by the aggregate of its acts, but because through masturbation Kochan discovers the nature of his desire.⁷ Through masturbation Kochan scrutinizes his own erotic phantasmatics in order to glean a sense of himself in the broader signifying economy of society; in it he takes stock of his same-sex desire as constitutive of a “real” self.

The groundwork for a problematized thematics of the self is laid at the point the reader learns that Kochan suffers, as a four-year-old child, from “autointoxication” (7).⁸ This disease, jika chudoku (self-poisoning), signals a somatic dissonance—literally, the body against itself—that foreshadows a cognate mental turning-against-itself, a self-poisoning or psychic nihilism. The illness, typified by a retention or blockage of the flow of bodily wastes (the body here reconstituted as the locus, the bursting receptacle, of conflicting social signifieds) is cured for Kochan through circulation and emission—that is, when he urinates. His uncle declares him alive upon seeing the escape of urine, commenting that “it showed his heart had resumed beating,” the pumping prefiguring the significance of blood in Kochan's aesthetic and constituting the resignifying process (7). This bout develops, though, into a chronic illness striking about once a month, an indication of a kind of somatic ambivalence. “I encountered many crises,” he comments; “I came to be able to sense whether an attack was likely to approach death or not” (7).

Kochan problematizes his body, an entity that assumes greater importance when he begins to see it in contradistinction to that of others. He speaks in comparative terms, indicating for example that he was an underweight baby (5) and that in adolescence he was an abnormally small and frail boy (79-80). His early years were spent in his grandmother's sickroom that was, tellingly, “closed and stifling with odors of sickness and of old age”—the insalubrious atmosphere of the room serving as a metaphor for his oxygen-deprived blood, an effect of the disease but also the body struggling to exist in an atmosphere hostile to it (6). Like Gide's “immoralist” Michel, he decides to fight against physical and mental weakness, remarking in frustration, “now I became obsessed with a single motto—‘Be Strong!’” (80). He fetishizes health and puts forth an aesthetic/transgressive model of the body, epitomized in his classmate, Omi:

Life-force—it was the sheer extravagant abundance of life-force that overpowered the boys [at school]. They were overwhelmed by the feeling [Omi] gave of having too much life, by the feeling of purposeless violence that can be explained only as life existing for its own sake. … [Omi's] flesh had been put on this earth for no other reason than to become an insane human-sacrifice, one without any fear of infection. Persons who live in terror of infection cannot but regard such flesh as a bitter reproach. …

(78-79; emphasis added)

Kochan becomes preoccupied with, eroticizes, the healthy body, which, as he says, “exists for its own sake” and which enjoys a certain agency inaccessible to him. The healthy body defines its own fate, serving as a law unto itself. Paradoxically, though, the healthy body is not only expendable but even developed for the sole purpose of its own destruction. In a world in which the body is subject to—is “infected” by—strict regulation, the uninfected body is nothing but an ephemeral anomaly, doomed to early destruction. It is characterized by circular coursings that must end in emission. The ability to spill (blood, shit, urine) is a sign of the body's flaunting of norms of containment, its relish in excess, but also of its moribundity.

Accordingly, Kochan's first physical attraction is to a ladler of excrement (funnyuo: manure/urine), an episode that comes close on the heels of his initial bout of autointoxication and reinforces his tendency to apotheosize health-as-reformulation/emission. The ladler collects and circulates waste, disseminates it. Waste is the symbol of a reconstitution process in which initial stages (i.e., eating) engage one set of norms regulating food consumption, and terminal stages engage another, centered around not just excretion but death as well. Among humans the entire process is regulated by taboos, all of which vary in kind and intensity specific to the particular stage in the process. For example, it appears ludicrous and revelatory to consider the differences in amount of time allotted to a “proper” experience of eating and shitting. Also, handlers of food occupy a very different status than handlers of excrement. A finely articulated hierarchy exists among food preparers that engages an elaborate industry of culinary schools, market guidelines, rules for presentation and arrangement, nutrition, order of consumption, manners, and so on. Kochan reconstitutes not just shit-handling but the shit-handler as an object of desire in a (at this point very unconscious) move to counteract norms of acceptability and rejection, a move psychodynamically related to what is occurring in his own body.

This ambiguous recognition manifests itself in the first glimmerings of desire. He comments:

The scrutiny I gave the youth was unusually close for a child of four. Although I did not clearly perceive it at the time, for me he represented my first revelation of a certain power, my first summons by a certain strange and secret voice. It is significant that this was first manifested to me in the form of a night-soil man: excrement is a symbol for the earth.

(8)

The “summons” and “certain power” to which he is drawn relate in one sense to his own practical need to defecate, which he cannot seem to do. To pass, expel, or disseminate become self-imposed health mandates and, again, emblematic for the need to redirect social limitations on the body. But the connection of excrement to the social role of the shit-ladler and the mapping of that role on a sociohierarchic grid—a role that Kochan valorizes and eroticizes—indicate the attraction is identificatory as well. In short, Kochan is as much captivated by the stigmatized status of the “manure man” as he is by the act of dissemination.

One effect of Kochan's pairing of recirculation/emission fantasies with the ladler of excrement manifests itself in a homoeroticized coprophilia, in which health and beauty are linked with the collection/dispersal of soil/feces. Compare, for instance, the “invitation” of Omi's footprints in the snow “the color of fresh black soil” (56)—scatological leavings of “coal black earth” that Kochan follows after spotting them from his window (57). These footprints relate to the “traces” Kochan leaves after masturbation and represent a text inscribed by the body, a signature, on the landscape. At the same time, Kochan's interest in them underscores the coprophiliac tendency to play with shit, in the same way Omi does, metaphorically. In a school competition, Kochan notices Omi “[stretch] his hands down leisurely to the ground and [smear] his palms with damp sand from just beneath the surface” (77). The erotic/scatological significance of soil here and in the episode of the excrement ladler is related to other themes, particularly those of beauty and death as they relate to masturbation.

Kochan fetishizes shit as a stigmatized bodily emission by linking it to others, including vomiting (6), sweating (13), bleeding (45), the growth of hair in the armpits (88), disembowelment (93), and ejaculation. These constitute what Mishima would later term, speaking in another context, “the body's loquacity,”⁹ its means of articulating (illicit) drives and desires outside of the realm of a sanctioned, verbal signifying order, which becomes an antagonistic force in the text. He contests the linguistic order, implicating it as the mode by which oppression and limitation take place. Agency is not achieved through words; the “free” self that Mishima constitutes is identified with bodily acts.¹⁰

Operating in Mishima's semiotics of the body, Kochan is obsessed in particular with the coursing of blood, which he images in an endless, fatalistic circularity. “Abundant blood coursing richly throughout [Omi's] body” represents “an untamed soul” (63) eager to escape its endless, goalless meandering like the peripatetic shade of a Noh protagonist. “Life … enslaved [Omi]” (87), Kochan indicates. Blood, the specter of the untamed and untameable, must escape the body in the same way other wastes must escape—which is in turn a metaphoric allusion to Kochan's desire to escape the “body politic.” Paradoxically, only in the spilling or passing of blood does “life” become possible. As a result, a central trope in Kochan's erotics is a puncturing of the imagined object's flesh in order to liberate blood/soul/self.¹¹ This mythology reformulates death as the site of freedom; it prefigures Georges Bataille's notion of death as “identified with continuity,” as that which “denotes passion” and is linked to eroticism.¹² Kochan recasts life, by which he means social life, as an entombing force. Death, that is, of the body, liberates.

This and similar passages elucidate that element in the episode of the night-soil man (and the general coprophilia of Mishima's text) in which Kochan comments that it was “Mother Earth that was calling to me” (8). Excrement/soil/earth beckon Kochan's body not only to divest and “void” itself, but quite literally to become earth, to die and decompose. The synecdochic connection between footprints/scat and Omi works both ways: the part (feces) represents the whole (the body) to the degree that it is generated by the body; but so is the whole ultimately nothing more than the part. That is, the body is no more than soil/shit, to the degree that it is nourished and unified with the earth. Unlike the mind, which is fractured and dichotomous, the body tends toward unity. Also, while the mind is socially determined, the body offers the potential for freedom.

The greatest possibility of this comes in the moment of orgasm. The experience, including the buildup to it, engages Kochan's aesthetic of death in which the self is asserted solely in somatic terms (semen), but also annihilated, lost in an emptiness without set boundaries or specificity (in this case, in “intoxication”). The semiotics of sameness and difference are played out in orgasm in the sense that the self is distinguished from its erotic object while it identifies with that object. Describing his first masturbatory experience, Kochan narrates:

That day, the instant I looked upon the picture [of Saint Sebastian], my entire being trembled with some pagan joy. My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited my use of it with unprecedented ardor, upbraiding me for my ignorance, panting indignantly. My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught. I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me. Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication. …

(40)

The image to which Kochan responds (Guido Reni's painting of Saint Sebastian) is important in that it both accords with Kochan's pattern of fetishizing bodily emission (blood escaping from Sebastian's arrow-wounds) and originates the highly articulated erotic themes that he later associates with Omi: integumental penetration, recircularity, the ebbing of life in the escape of blood, and a well-formed body. In referring to his joy as “pagan” he recognizes his tastes as atavistic, recalling ancient aesthetic formulations, as well as transgressive, in that his fantasy object is not only male but western. The unconscious aspect of his masturbatory movements foreshadows Kochan's realizations toward the end of the text, in which he recognizes his “selves” to have been less freely determined than he expected. Again, although this self may be unconsciously generated, it is also obliterated in a state of intoxication (meitei).

The Japanese term for intoxication refers literally to drunkenness, a word that reinforces the notion of circularity by metaphorizing semen as urine, an effect of drinking, but also invokes other more archaic meanings that evoke the decadence of a Shinto festival in which Kochan reads in the faces of the young men carrying a shrine “an expression of the most obscene and undisguised drunkenness in the world” (33). After this first experience he frames his erotic narratives in similar secular/religious terms, calling the act of masturbation a “pagan ceremony” and the masturbatory image—“victim”—a “ritual sacrifice” (175).

In the first ejaculatory episode, semen, like feces, is disseminated, and in this case dots the top of his worktable “leadenly” (40). “My blood soared up,” Kochan remarks, and then, significantly, “my loins swelled as though in wrath.” “The monstrous part” approaches the point of bursting if it doesn't soon, like Kochan's four-year-old, autointoxicated body, relieve itself (40). This “something” (mono) that the body releases is troublesome in its indeterminacy. As it is here contextualized, one way it signifies is as a kind of artillery of the body. “I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me,” the Japanese word for attack (seme) used primarily in the military sense. This “aggression” may imply several things, including the strength of Kochan's healthy resolve; a long-overdue—and therefore overcompensated—effort to assert a (homo) self; a violent attack against the restrictions that society places on the body; and even a carryover of Japanese-western hostilities, which had “ended” only three years before Mishima began writing. In the original text, Mishima employs the Latin term ejaclatio (37), which evokes the valence of not merely ejection/discharge but, literally, the hurling of a spear (or in the Sebastinian context, an arrow), the word ejaclatio meaning to throw away (a javelin, for example). Fixated on the image of Sebastian, whose body is riddled with arrows, Kochan objectifies him, even “attacks” him, but so does he identify with him as a symbol of salubrity. Evoking the samurai tradition of shinju or double suicide, Kochan's “little death” signifies a dying with Sebastian.¹³

Kochan's first ejaculation also serves as a complex interchange between body and text—or it reconfigures the body as a (censored) urtext. The body in effect rewrites itself:

I looked around the desk I was facing. A maple tree at the window was casting a bright reflection over everything—over the ink bottle, my schoolbooks and notes, the dictionary, the picture of St. Sebastian. There were cloudy white splashes about—on the gold-imprinted title of a textbook, on a shoulder of the ink bottle, on one corner of the dictionary. … Fortunately, a reflex motion of my hand to protect the picture had saved the book from being soiled.

(40-41)

The juxtaposition of the ink bottle—the covering of it—with semen foregrounds the nonverbal “loquacity” of the body to that of the verbal signifying order. Through his somatic “speech act” he attacks the social hegemony of this order, signified in the dictionary, schoolbooks, notes. Twenty years after the writing of Confessions of a Mask, in Sun and Steel, Mishima would refer to the way words corrode and destroy the body (82). The notion of ejaclatio as an “attack” (seme), therefore, also relates to the desire to go against the prevalent foregrounding of the written, verbal text, insofar as it is a culturally privileged medium, one that constitutes the body-text as inferior, governable, colonizable.

Kochan protects only the image of Sebastian from being “soiled,” the term signaling his own ability now to disseminate “shit.” This recalls Gide's protagonist Michel, who in the throes of tuberculosis coughs up blood and mucus, which marks a turning point in his fight against the disease. “J'en étais extraordinairement soulagé,” Michel remarks. “C'est le fin du rhume” (“I was extraordinarily relieved. … It was the end of the [disease]”).¹⁴ Similar to Kochan, illness for Michel is dispelled through the emission of blood/phlegm: “je crachais,” Michel says, the verb cracher meaning to spit/come out with/splash. His masturbatory expectorations work in harmony with the carriage in which he is riding, les cahots (the jerks) of which mimic the motions of his body.¹⁵ For Kochan, too, ejaculation represents a significant triumph, a telling moment in his struggle to “express” himself, achieve health, construct a self as agent.

This liberatory moment, however, lasts only for the duration of the orgasm itself. No sooner does he experience it than he undergoes an intensification of guilt. “This was my first ejaculation,” he explains at the end of the episode. “It was also the beginning, clumsy and completely unpremeditated, of my ‘bad habit’” (akushu) (40-41). This negative characterization (the Japanese aku: bad, evil) of the repetitive act that masturbation represents, both in a single masturbatory moment and in its temporal constitution as “habit” (shu) over time, indicates just how inescapable the norms are of which Kochan seeks to divest himself. Identifying generally with his schoolmates, for instance, he is nonetheless aware of a key difference:

Suffice it to say, then, that—always excepting the one shameful difference I am describing—in that most colorless phase of the bashful student I was exactly like the other boys, that I had sworn unconditional loyalty to the stage manager of the play called adolescence.

(122; emphasis added)

Awareness of difference between himself and his (putatively hetero) classmates in both desire and its complicated thematics affects him negatively and leads him to, in short, an epistemology of the closet. This locution, formulated by Sedgwick, posits silence as being “as pointed and performative as speech”¹⁶—a posture Kochan adopts while privately resorting to masturbation as the means of achieving “utterance.” He can do it, he learns, but at the price of guilt and remorse. He finds the regime of compulsory heterosexuality indomitable and indelibly “written” on him; all he can do is mask or outwardly silence the prohibited, (what he takes to be) “real,” self.

In her article “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Judith Butler, speaking of her own self-constitution as a “lesbian,” articulates a dynamic similar to that promulgated by Mishima:

How and where I play at being [a lesbian] is the way in which that “being” gets established, instituted, circulated, and confirmed. This is not a performance from which I can take radical distance, for this is deep-seated play, psychically entrenched play, and the “I” does not play its lesbianism as a role. Rather, it is through the repeated play of this sexuality that the “I” is insistently reconstituted as a lesbian “I”; paradoxically, it is precisely the repetition of that play that establishes as well the instability of the very category that it constitutes. For it the “I” is a site of repetition, that is, if the “I” only achieves the semblance of identity through a certain repetition of itself, then the I is always displaced by the very repetition that sustains it.¹⁷

This rather masturbatory iteration of an “I” at once engenders and destabilizes it; in Derridean terms, both repeats and alters it.¹⁸ Again, it is the diachronic experience of masturbation that works toward granting Kochan some sense of knowledge about the self. Reinforced patterns, even if contestatory or “illicit,” get taken for the “true” self while deviations from these repetitions appear to him artificial. Taking hetero desire as utterly foreign—and therefore immoral in Kochan's ethics—he comments, “I mastered the art of delusion until I could regard myself as a truly lewd-minded person” (115). Linking homo desire to physical passion and hetero to another form, he complains:

In order to delude myself that [heterosexual] desire was animal passion, I had to undertake an elaborate disguise of my true self. The unconscious feeling of guilt resulting from this false pretense stubbornly insisted that I play a conscious and false role.

(116)

The early, essentialist notion of the self mapped along an axis the termini of which constitute the true/counterfeit, normal/anomalous, licit/illicit informs Kochan's self-understanding and induces bouts of self-reproach (172, 173, 203, 206). This stems from his consciousness of what he considers to be cross-gendered sexual desire as a conscious “masquerade” (100-101), a “counterfeit” (106), “a machine of falsehood” (108), “the art of delusion” (115), a “camouflage” (120), “the machinery of deception” (201), and the “playing [of] a part” (229).

But this repetition—of albeit a “false” self—both reinforces its falseness and calls it into question, in the same way Butler's “I” is both constituted and called into question by its “deep-seated play.” “My ‘act’ has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature,” Kochan comments. What he has assumed to be a conscious performance has been “psychically entrenched play.”¹⁹ That is, no play at all. Kochan remarks:

My “act” has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature … It's no longer an act. My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever of normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretense at normality.

(153)

The degree to which “play” is meant in neither the ludic nor western-histrionic senses inheres in the Japanese word for play, engi. It carries the notion of a staged performance, but one in which the requirements for “acting” are different from those in the west. As Donald Keene points out, Japanese stage actors (here, of Noh) begin their training in infancy and continue until the “last tottering appearances on the stage.”²⁰ They live the subtle nuances and intonations they “perform” on stage until the movements—each of which are encoded with gender valences—become “unconscious.” The main kabuki actor, the onnagata, must repeatedly enact his “role” as well. As Mishima writes in his short story “Onnagata,” “unless the onnagata lives as a woman in his daily life, he is unlikely ever to be considered accomplished.”²¹ The “performed” self and the “real” self, then, become in a sense conflated, but they are also called seriously into question. The onnagata is an appropriate metaphor for Kochan in that he inhabits stereotypically male and female roles, and in so doing proliferates another possibility. The “counterfeit” and the “real” become in part moot categories, because the onnagata represents both.

Prefiguring the western notion of the postmodern condition, the “unified” or “normal” I becomes impossible for Kochan. He finds only tension, and a strong measure of guilt. After proclaiming his love for Sonoko, he comments (assuming his [male] reader shares his early essentialist demands for a continuity of self):

The reader who has followed me this far will probably refuse to believe anything I am saying. He will doubt me because there will seem to be no difference between my artificial and unrequited love of [Sonoko] and the throbbing of the breast of which I am now speaking, because there will seem to be no apparent reason why on this occasion alone I should not have subjected my emotions to that merciless analysis I had used in the former case. … He will think that I say a thing simply because I want to say it so, without any regard for truth, and anything I say will be all right so long as I make my story consistent.

(143; emphasis added)

This notion of truth-as-consistency foils Kochan in his early attempts at self-knowledge. He solicits the reader to accept the possibility of a self, other than the norm-flaunting one with which he has identified early on, a gesture that exposes as problematic the binarisms artificial/real and foreign/naturalized. “What appeared to be the inside was the outside,” Kochan comments, “and what appeared the outside was the inside” (177). This destabilization of the self as a single pattern of desire, so contrary to culturally bound (and I would add western as well as eastern) notions of the self, is difficult for Kochan to accept. “Even the strength of a Samson would not have been sufficient to make me adopt a manly and unequivocal attitude toward Sonoko,” he admits, assuming that a “manly” attitude is a rigidly consistent one. It is this socialized assumption, outside of the realm of his understanding, that, he says, “aroused my disgust” (203; emphasis added).

Worse, however, is the possibility that equivocal desire equals no desire. Deciding not to marry Sonoko, who is interested in marrying him, Kochan considers how to bow out:

Even though my heart was filled with uneasiness and unspeakable grief, I put a brazen, cynical smile upon my lips. I told myself that all I had to do was clear one small hurdle. All I had to do was to regard all the past few months as absurd; to decide that from the beginning I'd never been in love with a girl called Sonoko, not with such a chit of a girl; to believe that I'd been prompted by a trifling passion (liar!) and had deceived her.

(212)

He surprises himself to discover that the mask he has assumed is not a role now but another identification. Formerly having concretized the “true” as the homo “I” of his masturbatory fantasies, Kochan now realizes despite himself that this “I” is not the only one, that there is another axis along which his now-split self is mapped. The hetero, “masked,” identity becomes a habit paralleling the self of Kochan's “bad habit,” and in this way also becomes naturalized.

Both the complicitous hetero self and the transgressive homo self are all of a rather tattered piece: two possibilities engendered by a prohibitive, heterosexist economy. If he realizes the potential for either identification, he nevertheless comes to discern the limitations of agency as well. The homo-transgressive, if no longer constituted as the real or only self possible, nevertheless represents the more “immutable” and consistent for him. In a series of several meetings with Sonoko, who has now married another man, he repeats his early, now-formulaic, homonarrative fantasy. Standing next to Sonoko he is “drawn to … a youth of twenty-one or -two [who] … had taken his shirt off and stood there half-naked, rewinding a belly-band around his middle” (251). This belly-band recalls for him the samurai ritual of seppuku, again reiterating his antiregulatory, aesthetic thematics:

I was beset by sexual desire. My fervent gaze was fixed upon that rough and savage, but incomparably beautiful, body. … I had forgotten Sonoko's existence. I was thinking of but one thing: Of his going out onto the streets of high summer just as he was, half-naked, and getting into a fight with a rival gang. Of a sharp dagger cutting through the belly-band, piercing that torso. Of that soiled belly-band beautifully dyed with blood. Of his gory corpse being put on an improvised stretcher …

(252; emphasis added)

This fantasy is followed by an orgasmic moment marked again by martial rhetoric. “I felt as though I had witnessed the instant in which my existence had been turned into some sort of fearful non-being,” he remarks, referring to the state of intoxication and orgasm/melding of the self that we saw earlier (253). This orgasmic moment is also marked by “some sort of beverage [that] had been spilled on the table top and was throwing back glittering, threatening reflections” (254). As is his pattern, this moment is followed by yet another awareness of regulatory sex norms, which he refers to as his “icy-cold sense of duty” (253).

The experience of masturbation remains for Kochan a temporary escape from the force field of compulsory heterosexuality. His desire and unconscious pull toward subverting heterosexist injunctions engage him in the masturbatory act that is apotheosized in the moment of orgasm/death, arrived at through beauty and its attendant thematics. The moment of fusion that beauty/death represents, though, the stepping “outside,” is a fleeting one, followed by the reinforcement, the relaying of the prohibitive grid on the subject as it returns to “sobriety,” to its social prison.

This same circularity characterized the act of writing for Mishima, which, like masturbation for Kochan, became a self-revelatory act in which the text became “seminal,” both physical proof and a search for the self. “What I have written departs from me,” Mishima remarked a short time before his death by suicide, underscoring the importance for him of expelling that which was inside.²² But the text as ejaculation/iteration, Mishima realized, was not enough finally to constitute a stable self; the notion of a fixed self itself is problematic. Writing “never [nourished] my void,” he explains in his notes for the Tobu Exhibition. Self-solace (with all of the masturbatory connotations of the Japanese jii) achieves only in the (repetitive/masturbatory) act of writing itself: “I still have no way to survive but to keep on writing one line, one more line, one more line …”²³ This is the same principle at work in Mishima's presentation of body building as he discusses it in Sun and Steel, which is also effected through repetitive motions.²⁴ In accordance with his nihilistic aesthetic, the construction of a “pumped up” body served as a preparation for (his own) death through seppuku, a process in which emission is achieved in the form of a slitting of the abdomen in order for the viscera to escape, as well as in the form of beheading.²⁵

If Kochan is incapable of actually escaping the heterosexist signifying order in which he himself has been constituted, he nevertheless achieves a certain kind of agency through a fantasy of excess.²⁶ The formulation in particular of death as excess—whether in the temporary “death” of desire/passion/orgasm, the unifying death of decomposition/defecation, or the obliterating death in the physical act of seppuku—seems to have been one in currency among mid-twentieth-century Japanese writers. Several, including Ryuunosuke Akutagawa, Osamu Dazai, Yasunari Kawabata, and Mishima himself, committed suicide.

Confessions of a Mask represents for Mishima a deliberate writing against the social grain, against what Jakobson referred to as the “stagnating slime” that caused many Russian poets to take their own lives.²⁷ Mishima's case is complicated in that the forces he bucked were the same ones he would find provided him a privileged status. His death fantasies, and by extension those of Kochan, appear to be an admission of the immutability of these forces, as well as their limitation. His familiarity with “the deadly absence of fresh air” that Jakobson speaks of is metaphorized in the “closed and stifling” sickroom—that is, the broader cultural sphere—in which his protagonist is forced to stay (6).

As civil-rights-minded people in the United States have learned, windows of change open and shut quickly. The potential for appreciable change remains limited at any time, given entrenched social patterns. Tragic scenarios of mass destruction (the slave trade, the holocaust, the bomb, AIDS), which Mishima metaphorized in the “destroyed” or shaken orgasmic body, are often avoided, occluded, or even denied rather than occasioning soul-searching and self-knowledge. If in his later works Mishima would revert to a more traditional, atavistic, and even reactionary conceptualization of Japanese identity, one rejected by and large by the Japanese themselves, the subversive questioning—directive—of the early text remains.

Notes

1. H. D. Harootonian and Masao Miyoshi, Postmodernism and Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), x.

2. There is great irony and even hypocrisy in this when one considers that at the height of U.S. intervention in Japan, the postwar occupation during the forties and early fifties, the United States was enforcing Jim Crow laws, treating women as the legal property of their husbands, holding Japanese-Americans in internment camps, imprisoning and “treating” homosexuals, and denying legal land rights to Native Americans.

   For western views of the American relationship with Japan, see Meiron and Susie Harres, Sheathing the Sword: The Demilitarization of Postwar Japan (New York: MacMillan, 1987); Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Peter Tasker, The Japanese: A Major Exploration of Modern Japan (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987). Reischauer in particular stands out as one who avoids giving credit to the United States for what was indigenous to Japan, before the western intrusion.

3. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 103.

4. For a disturbing portrayal of the physical and cultural effects of the bomb, see Ibuse Masuji, Black Rain, trans. John Bester (New York: Kodansha, 1979).

5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1.

6. For Holleran's employment of the bomb as metaphor for AIDS destruction, see his Ground Zero (New York: New American Library, 1989).

7. For a discussion of the existentialist model of identity, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

8. Page references in this section are to Yukio Mishima Confessions of a Mask, trans. Meredith Weatherby (New York: New Directions, 1963).

9. Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel (New York: Kodansha, 1970), 18.

10. See Mishima, Sun and Steel, 50, 64-65, 66.

11. Among the many such fantasies are the following: the killing of Wilde's knight (11-12); the Rose Elf being stabbed to death (21); Kochan imagines Andersen's prince being torn apart by dragon's teeth, then dying: Kochan rewrites the story (23); the plaintive melody of a chant “piercing through” the confused tumult of the festival, mating humanity with eternity (30); dueling scenes/hard-ons (35); death by bullets (36); Sebastian (39-40); Sebastian pierced by countless arrows (42); Omi's fingers in game, like weapons about to run through Kochan (69); Kochan's ritual sacrifice of youth in his imagination during masturbation (175); penetration of the ephebe and delight in seeing blood flow trace ephebe's curves when running down (177); the twenty-one- or twenty-two-year old man on the street (252).

12. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 13, 20, 59.

13. The notion of shinju is an element of the samurai code of honor, bushido, which is limned in the eighteenth-century book Hagakure (A life hidden behind the leaves). As Tsuneo Watanabe points out, the text “teaches how one may be ‘beautiful’ in death.” This beauty is both ethical, militating a preparedness and even eagerness for one's own death, and aesthetic, suggesting that the samurai “should always carry rouge and powder” with him in order to preserve an appealing aspect at the moment of mortality. Sebastian, according to legend a martyr for the Christian cause, approximates many of the requirements of honor encoded in the term bushido. See Tsuneo Watanabe, The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality, trans. D. R. Roberts (London: GMP, 1989), 116.

14. André Gide, L'immoraliste (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902), 25.

15. Ibid.

16. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 4.

17. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), 18; emphasis in original.

18. See Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 53, 61-65, 70, 76, 92, 100, 102, 105, 119.

19. In her book Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), Judith Butler further explains the notion of performativity: “Performativity is thus not a singular ‘act,’ for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition. Moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical; indeed, its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated (and, conversely, its theatricality gains a certain inevitability given the impossibility of a full disclosure of its historicity” (12-13). The discovery of a personal-historic dimension to his “performance” indicates to Kochan his actions are not merely “acts,” but something “deeper.” This personal dimension is in turn related to the social norms of contestation and, in Foucauldian terms, reverse discourse, revealing the fractured nature of dominant discourse of (hetero)sexuality. Kochan's “performance” exposes the hidden flaws in purportedly rigid or univocal, social ideal.

20. Donald Keene, Noh and Bunraku: Two Forms of Japanese Theater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 57.

21. Yukio Mishima, “Onnagata,” in Death in Midsummer and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1966), 144.

22. Henry Scott-Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1990), 124.

23. Ibid.

24. Mishima, Sun and Steel, 25.

25. For Mishima's characterization of body building, see Sun and Steel, 25. For an elaborate and graphic portrayal of seppuku, see Mishima's short story “Patriotism,” in Death in Midsummer and Other Stories, 93-118.

26. This notion of excess as a means of subversion is based on one suggested by Judith Butler during a workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center, December 7, 1991.

27. Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, eds. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 227.