[In the following essay, Hirata explores the meaning of death in Mishima's texts and the meaning of Mishima's own textual death.]

“[I]t is always something like an opening which will frustrate the structuralist project. What I can never understand, in a structure, is that by means of which it is not closed” (160).

—Jacques Derrida

Mishima Yukio¹: how could we seize this bloody origin—the origin of so many luxurious texts that tightly surround it? Mishima Yukio is a textual product par excellence. It seems that his whole mode of being was to produce his own “self-text.” He kept exhibiting himself. Scattered around us are his words, his books, his images, his photos, his death. It seems that we are forced to read him ceaselessly. His texts are always outward, visible, and clear. Take for example the precision of his language and the superficial transparency of his poses in his photos. Mishima Yukio is a surface. The surface is the repeatable. His text, like a photograph, guarantees the very existence and repeatability (survival) of the surface. And we read that this surface, this text that Mishima so intensely fabricated, is nothing but his “self.” Yet, it has an opening, an unrepeatable opening: death.

This paper is an attempt to read Mishima's production of self (-text) in relation to this “opening” towards which Mishima's entire text seems to be directed. This reading, however, is doomed from the start precisely because this “opening” is non-readable. It can merely trace how the drive towards death was formulated, structured, and perhaps more importantly, how our reading itself is manipulated, structured, and seduced by the Mishima-text. As the seducer, the Mishima-text thus becomes an origin—an origin of our responses, of his writing “self,” of our reading “self.” How does the Original Text enact the inclusion and the appropriation of our discourse, of our “self”?

First of all, we must admit that it is peculiarly difficult to produce another secondary (i.e. critical) text on the Mishima-text. Here we are in agreement with Saeki Shōichi who, in his Hyōden: Mishima Yukio [Critical Biography of Mishima Yukio], writes that he fears that Mishima had known already and all too clearly what critics would say about him and his work:

Why is it difficult to write a critical discourse on Mishima? It is because we cannot help feeling that Mishima always precedes us, that is, he knows beforehand everything that we may say or discuss [concerning him and his work].

(11)

The notion that the Mishima-text (the Original Text) always already exceeds and anticipates any secondary text is a paralyzing one for secondary-text-producers called literary critics.

Coupled with the anxiety of being in the position of the secondary-text-producer, of being a mere marionette of the Mishima-text, another difficulty in writing about Mishima must be addressed. That is the fact that his text is dangerous. We may even call his text, with utmost caution, evil. With his extreme and ostensible aestheticization of politics and erotic violence, in a way Mishima appears to incite knowingly our moral indignation and criticism. What troubles me here is again the thought that our oppositions and resistances against the fascist Mishima, if we may call him so, may have already been planned long before, secretly inscribed, by and within the Mishima-text itself. The moment an oppositional reading appears, the Original Text (the Mishima-text) will have always already (re)-appropriated it within the structure and the limits of the Original Text itself.

I would like to address this entrapment formulated by the Mishima-text in terms of textual seduction. The Mishima-text seduces us to speak about it, for it, or against it. In this way, the Mishima-text survives, multiplies itself, reappropriating our seemingly endless secondary discourses. Furthermore, what is so insidious about the power of Mishima's textual seduction is that it can incite not only discourses but also silence—a silence caused by being stunned. Mishima's seppuku effectively stunned and silenced us at the time of incidence. Our secondary texts certainly needed time to recuperate from the initial shock to assume their appearance of intelligibility again.

So we are already caught in the web of the Mishima-text whether we produce another discourse on it or not. But then what should we do? How should we deal with the Mishima-text and our texts caught within it? Georges Bataille in his preface to Literature and Evil proclaims: “Literature is not innocent. It is guilty and should admit itself so” (iii). My strategies to move out of the hesitations of beginning are first to acknowledge the fact that I am seduced, that I must be implicated in the guilt of Literature, in the guilt of the Mishima-text and secondly to attempt to discern the process and structure of the very seduction which incites me to speak, or to be stunned, or to be silent.

The subject of this discourse, an incessant (and self-propagating) textual movement that I have been calling the Mishima-text, is constituted not only of Mishima's literary work but also of his biography in which his actual life and death are textualized. It is true that Mishima's death stunned the world. But it was not his death proper that stunned us; it was the way he died. From various reports, we read and imagine the ritualistic process of seppuku that culminated in his death. This means that his death is not a text; his seppuku is. We do not read death, we read the ritual of death. What separates the two domains of life and death, of text and non-text? Is it possible to imagine a most tenuous membrane, the very surface of surface, an epidermis separating the realm of text from that of non-text, that is, of death? This outermost epidermis of text is infinitesimally close to death. And it is beautiful, the Mishima-text teaches us. It is dizzyingly beautiful. This ultimate surface seduces us, invites us to caress it and finally to slit it open.

What is this seduction for the final self-laceration? What is Mishima's muscle-bound abdomen? What is his body/text? And the pain? We have the necessary textual ingredients before us: Mishima's own imaginative descriptions of seppuku as well as Mishima's actual seppuku reported as biography. His seppuku was wonderfully crafted, well-staged and exposed just as his sumptuously crafted language constructed his literary texts. Thus we have Mishima's luxuriously ornamented language, his muscular body constructed by his rigorous weight-training, his ecstasies of language, of pain, of blood, of the steel blade. We learn from his biographer John Nathan that there was even a writing brush and special paper ready beside his decapitated body, with which Mishima intended to write the character “katana” (sword) in his own blood (280). We could trace Mishima's textual movement up to this point. And a death occurred. How can we directly talk about this opening, this abysmal crack in the otherwise well crafted sphere of the Mishima-text? Again, my strategy here is to focus my attention to Mishima's will to exteriority, and to let my reading surrender to the authority and seduction of the Mishima-text, and finally to arrive at the opening with “him.” Can I stare into the opening with “him”? Is there no more language? I must first begin to examine the location of exteriority in Mishima's discourse of desire and confession.

Mishima's quasi-autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask brilliantly presents various aspects and functions of surface (exteriority) in relation to such notions as truth, self, and mask. The book may well have been written as a critical parody of the shi-shōsetsu (I-novel)² as some critics assumed when the book was published in 1949.³ The literary scene in Japan at that time was dominated by the anti-I-novel rhetorics. Mishima was absolutely clever in making the status (truthfulness) of the novel ambiguous. He writes:

Although this is a confession, I have allowed “lies” to pasture freely in my novel, and when it seemed appropriate, I gave them fodder to eat. Filling the stomachs of the lies in this way kept them from molesting the vegetable patches of “truth.”

In the same sense, only a mask which has eaten into the flesh, a mask which has put on flesh, can make a confession. The basic nature of a confession is that “confessions are impossible.” … I thought I would create a complete fiction of a confession. That meaning is also implied in the title Confessions of a Mask.

(qtd. in Keene 1185)

Of course, there is the confessor, the dominant “I,” the protagonist-narrator. But at the same time the book presents a structure of self that is irreconcilably double: the supposedly “true” self and the mask. In the crudest terms, in the novel the “true” self can be defined as the origin of his “uncontrollable” and “abnormal” desires. The mask is the consequence of his mimetic desire for normality. The narrator-protagonist performs relentless self-analyses, literally lacerating the mesh of his confused sexuality in the hope of reaching the very bottom of his ontological being. The narrator is essentially a gazer, and his discourse assumes a mask of confession. But where do the confessions originate from? Who is gazing at whom? In this way, “I” is never in the position to possess truly the center of Mishima's confessional discourse. Paradoxically, one finds no center in it. We see that the promised center of the self, the unifying point that is capable of producing one's identity is always contaminated and invaded by some elements of exteriority. The structure of the confessor, “I,” the subject, is therefore maintained solely by various surfaces, exteriors, mirrors, and trajectories of desires.

Karatani Kōjin in his Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen [Origins of Modern Japanese Literature] contends that it was not that a certain interiority preceded and thus necessitated the confessional discourse called shi-shōsetsu but rather that a system of confession instituted by the imported Christianity created the interiority (naimen) which in turn had to be confessed. At first glance, Mishima's novel Confessions does seem to expose such a secret interior, the true self. At stake here is the ontological status of the “confessed” self. Does the self thus exposed precede every mask, every falsehood? Was there, at the very origin, in the depths of an interiority, the true self that precedes every textual modulation (masks)? Or as Karatani suggests, is the true self also merely a creation of a certain discourse called “confession”? In Confessions we can discern at least this much: that this interior, an immanence of the true self, is presented only as certain manifestations of desire. And the direction of this desire is firmly set toward exteriority, surfaces, and thus, toward visibility—the site of exposed truth. Let us now trace the trajectories of “I's” desire in the novel so as to see how “I's” subjectivity is formulated.

When the protagonist was four years old, the narrator-protagonist recounts, he had his first awakening to the intense desire for the other. The other in this case was a “night-soil man, a ladler of excrement” (Confessions 8). Mishima writes: “I had a presentiment then that there is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain. Looking up at that dirty youth, I was choked by desire, thinking, ‘I want to change into him,’ thinking, ‘I want to be him’” (Confessions 9). Here the subject longs for a complete transformation into its object of love. The object of his desire is made to be an exemplary other, for the night-soil man is associated with an environment absolutely foreign to the protective, hygienic one the protagonist has been raised in.

Another childhood memory informs us in detail of his desire to become “Tenkatsu,” a theater actress. Mishima describes her in terms of her exteriority, surfaces:

She lounged indolently about the stage, her opulent body veiled in garments like those of the Great Harlot of the Apocalypse. On her arms were flashy bracelets, heaped with artificial stones; her make-up was as heavy as that of a female ballad-singer, with a coating of white powder extending even to the tips of her toenails; and she wore a trumpery costume that surrendered her person over to the kind of brazen luster given off only by shoddy merchandise.

(Confessions 16-17)

The child is enraptured by the actress's luxurious exteriors. And he desires to belong to the beautiful surfaces. So he sneaks into his mother's room, puts on the kimono with the gaudiest colors, puts on an elaborate make-up and rushes into grandmother's sick room in order to expose the successful exteriorization of his self:

“I'm Tenkatsu! Me, I'm Tenkatsu!” My grandmother was there sick abed, and also my mother and a visitor and the maid assigned to the sick-room. But not a single person was visible to my eyes. My frenzy was focused upon the consciousness that, through my impersonation, Tenkatsu was being revealed to many eyes. In short, I could see nothing but myself.

(Confessions 18)

He saw himself alone only when he put on the exteriors of an other and placed the spectacle under others' gazes. The interior never comes into being unless it is dragged out to the surface by a desire to become the other (exteriority) and is made visible to others' eyes. This is in no way a simple exhibition of an already fully existing interior-self to others. In a very complex and paradoxical way, the interior becomes visible only as an exterior, not even as the exterior of the self but as the borrowed exterior of the other to which the original self transfers itself through desire.

Let us examine another passage describing “I's” childhood memory:

The reluctant masquerade had begun. At about this time I was beginning to understand vaguely the mechanism of the fact that what people regarded as a pose [engi] on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my true nature [honshitsu ni kaerou to iu yokkyû no araware], and that it was precisely what people regarded as my true self which was a masquerade.

(Confessions 27)

The passage clearly indicates again that his “honshitsu” (essence) is located in the sphere of “engi” (play-acting), or in other words, in what he is not, in what he desires to be (for example Tenkatsu), or in the mask.

In one of the climactic scenes in the novel, the protagonist, who is in love with an older boy named Omi, masturbates before the ocean whose maddened waves reveal to him the visions of sacrifice: the severed head, the deathly blue sky reflected in the “eye of a person on the verge of death” (Confessions 87). Before the sea of crazed dialectics between repletion and emptiness, Mishima's language clinically traces the trajectory of an erotic desire, ultimately revealing again the double structure of the self; that is, the self desiring what it is not (in this case, Omi). Furthermore, in the process of desiring what it is not, the self desires to be what it is not and finally becomes what it is not by means of a metonymic transference. At the moment of complete transference the self must die. The self is no longer the entity of a perfect self-identity, no longer the origin of desire, but an empty receptacle. The self is usurped by what it is not, the object of its love. This is the moment of jouissance, of orgasm coupled with death.

The only possibility for survival in this double structure of love is to accomplish a rhetorical, or tropological displacement of the object of desire. In this scene, the protagonist's immediate object of desire is clearly stated: his own armptis. The image of his armpits is metonymically connected first to the picture of St. Sebastian's martyrdom (the object of his first ejaculation, to which I will come back later) and to the abundant black hair he spied once in Omi's armpits.

The shocking effect of the scene is undeniable—a naked boy staring at his own armpit and masturbating in front of the ocean. The shock comes mainly from the image of the armpits and its metonymical dimension, where the symbolic or metaphorical depth seems to be lacking. What catches us off guard is the sudden “exposedness” of the armpits, far more “exposed” than any genitals depicted in pornography, far more “visible” than a well crafted metaphor. This may be because in our discourse we have not yet coded our own armpits as masturbatory objects. Yet, more importantly, in its “exposedness” the image of his armpits succeeds in becoming the textual surface par excellence. Furthermore, at this point, we notice that this exteriority without depth is also the ultimate goal of the confessional text. Mishima's confessional discourse wants to expose everything in the bright sunlight. There, no depth, no interiority is allowed. Under his raised arm, the armpit is a surface whose incurvity is forced to open, to flatten itself, to be visible. No depth is allowed. Why? Because truth is visibility itself, exteriority itself (provided that we are still following the Platonic Idea). Truth is the non-hidden. Light brings forth truth.

The novel is filled with images of light. In fact, it begins and ends with descriptions of light. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator claims that he remembers the scene of his own birth:

It was a brand-new basin, its wooden surface planed to a fresh and silken smoothness; and when I looked from inside, a ray of light was striking one spot on its brim. The wood gleamed only in that one spot and seemed to be made of gold. … And, whether because of a reflection or because the ray of light streamed on into the basin as well, the water beneath that spot on the brim gleamed softly, and tiny shining waves seemed to be forever bumping their heads together there. …

(Confessions 3)

So his confessions begin with such lulling images of light. The dark, unknown interior, on the other hand, is placed at the center of jouissance, within the melee of a festival, in the omikoshi carried by the obscene, drunken, naked bodies of young men that forcefully invade his grandmother's garden:

Now the shrine itself came into view, and there was a venomous state of dead calm, like the air of the tropics, which clung solely about the shrine. It seemed a malevolent sluggishness, trembling hotly above the naked shoulders of the young men carrying the omikoshi. And within the thick scarlet-and-white ropes, within the guardrails of black lacquer and gold, behind those fast-shut doors of gold leaf, there was a four-foot cube of pitch-blackness.

This perfect cube of empty night, ceaselessly swaying and leaping, to and fro, up and down, was boldly reigning over the cloudless noonday of early summer.

(Confessions 31)

This perfectly vacuous darkness within the bright summer light is clearly linked to a similar oxymoronic description of his first ejaculation. As mentioned before, his masturbation is prompted by the sight of a reproduction of Guido Reni's “St. Sebastian.” Mishima again writes first and foremost of the exterior of the tormented martyr's body:

The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy. But there is no flowing blood, nor yet the host of arrows seen in other pictures of Sebastian's martyrdom. Instead, two lone arrows cast their tranquil and graceful shadows upon the smoothness of his skin, like the shadows of a bough falling upon a marble stairway.

(Confessions 39-40)

The boy begins to masturbate for the first time:

My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught. I felt a secret radiant something [kurai kagayakashii mono] rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me.

(Confessions 40)

The oxymoron is more conspicuous in the original: “a secret radiant something” is in the original “kurai kagayakashii mono,” more literally translated, “something dark, radiant.” It is important to see that the descriptions of jouissance are formulated in terms of an oxymoronic intertwining of light and dark. In jouissance, truth as exposedness, visibility, exteriority is irrevocably intermingled with its opposites—darkness, the unknown, interiority. But again we should not forget here that the ecstatic intercourse of light and dark is prompted by and directed toward a surface, toward a flat, smooth skin, which is far removed from the origin by the layers of reproductions (fact, legend, model, painting, copy, etc.). The seductive surface is thus essentially fictive, far removed from the origin.

Mishima's language of light continues. Now a radiance spreads and covers the entire city. Undoubtedly one of the most lyrical scenes in the novel, “I's” encounter with Omi in the snow-covered school yard awaits us. On the way to school, bathing in the peaceful radiance of the snow, the protagonist observes:

When I got off at the station in front of the school, the snow was already melting, and I could hear the water running off the roof of the forwarding company next door. I could not shake the illusion that it was the radiance which was splashing down. Bright and shining slivers of it were suicidally hurling themselves at the sham quagmire of the pavement, all smeared with the slush of passing shoes. As I walked under the eaves, one sliver hurled itself by mistake at the nape of my neck. …

(Confessions 54-55)

Light is committing suicide. And accidentally the light's suicide slashes “I's” neck. The exposed existence, the desire for the exterior in the light, at the very end reaches its own death, killed by light itself, by light's suicide.

Light not only exposes interiority (the site of a yet-to-be-exposed truth) in the confessional discourse but also the fictionality of the exterior, as well as the essential vacuity of the interior. Mishima continues:

For a moment I could not see a thing in the expanse of glare.

The snow scene was in a way like a fresh castle ruin [shinsen na haikyo]: this legerdemain [nise no moshitsu] was being bathed in that same boundless light and splendor which exists solely in the ruins of ancient castles. And there in one corner of the ruin, in the snow of the almost five-meter-wide track, enormous Roman letters had been drawn. Nearest to me was a large circle, an O. Next came an M. And beyond it a third letter was still in the process of being written, a tall and thick I.

(Confessions 58)⁴

This is another oxymoronic scene as we can see from the expression “shinsen na haikyo” (fresh castle ruin). What is exposed here is this “nise no moshitsu” (“legerdemain,” or more literally translated “a fake loss”) or the essentially oxymoronic duplicity of fictionality. So the truth-revealing light of fresh ruins visits the scene of a fake loss. And what do we see on this exemplary fictive site? The name of his desire “OMI,” whose last letter, the phallic, thick “I,” the ultimate letter of confession is just being written. It goes without saying that the letters “O, M, I” inscribed on the melting snow constitute themselves on the outermost layer of the identity named Omi, defined as the object of “I's” desire.

The tenuous exteriority of the letters in a way does enhance the protagonist's fixation with Omi's exteriority. Mishima describes Omi's face in the following way:

… it was a round face, with haughty cheekbones rising from swarthy cheeks, lips that seemed to have been sewn into a fine line, sturdy jaws, and a broad but well-shaped and not too prominent nose. These features were the clothing [ishō] for an untamed soul. How could anyone have expected such a person to have a secret, inner life [naimen]? All one could hope to find in him was the pattern [mokei] of that forgotten perfection which the rest of us have lost in some far distant past.

(Confessions 63)

Thus his face, his surface is the costume [ishō] of a forgotten, non-present, savage soul. Whether the interior [naimen], the immanent, human self of Omi exists or not is not the issue here. Omi is merely a model [mokei], a shell, of an impossible perfection. Omi is thus a signifier, a model, a visible surface, and letters in the snow.

How could one live solely within the system of desire that directs itself only to the surface? The protagonist's desperate attempt to love Sonoko is to reorient his gaze toward the interior. Sonoko offers an alternative to the dominant visibility of Omi in the form of sonority, more interior than the visible. She is introduced with the sound of the piano she plays. However, at the end of the novel, the visible overpowers the protagonist with threatening authority. The protagonist and Sonoko are in a dancing hall where he spies on a group of young thugs:

His naked chest showed bulging muscles, fully developed and tensely knit; a deep cleft ran down between the solid muscles of his chest toward his abdomen. The thick, fetter-like sinews of his flesh narrowed down from different directions to the sides of his chest, where they interlocked in tight coils. The hot mass of his smooth torso was being severely and tightly imprisoned by each succeeding turn of the soiled cotton belly-band. His bare, sun-tanned shoulders gleamed as though covered with oil. And black tufts stuck out from the cracks of his armpits, catching the sunlight, curling and glittering with glints of gold.

(Confessions 251-252)

The protagonist forgets Sonoko's presence and daydreams of this young man being killed in a fight. The novel ends with the following description of light:

It was time. As I got up, I stole one more glance toward those chairs in the sun. The group had apparently gone to dance, and the chairs stood empty in the blazing sunshine. Some sort of beverage had been spilled on the table top and was throwing back glittering, threatening reflections.

(Confessions 254)

We leave the book sensing that the protagonist is trapped in this threatening realm of light, of the depth-less visibility and exteriority. How can he escape this world of surfaces? Mishima's answer is, by now, obvious: by slitting it.

The object of desire, the most beautiful surface must be slit with a blade. This is quite reasonable when one considers that we destroy the object of desire through incorporation (eating), an assimilation of the other into the self. In fact, one of the victims in the protagonist's erotic daydreams is served naked on a large platter, surrounded with large salad leaves. The protagonist cuts into the boy's chest: “I began carving the flesh of the breast, gently, thinly at first …” (Confessions 97, italics mine). The narration of the daydream ends there. The protagonist does not eat the victim's flesh. The Sacrament is incomplete. There is only the slicing of the flesh, thinly. What is important here is, again, the “thin” surface and the slit.

Roland Barthes writing on the text of jouissance conceives it as the ultimate extension of the text of “pleasure,” where irrevocable disruptions in the order of signification occur (The Pleasure of the Text 52).⁵ The text of jouissance is thus “the untenable text, the impossible text” and is “absolutely intransitive.” The same intransitive text where no object (be it the reader or meaning) exists is categorized in Barthes's S/Z as the writerly text (le texte scriptible). The term signifies an incessant flow of writing wherein no “reading” (gleaning of meanings) is possible. In opposition to the writerly text, or the text of jouissance, there is the readerly text (le texte lisible), the text of pleasure. This is a text for consumption (reading), while the writerly text is a movement of pure production that defies consumption (of its meaning). The writerly text is thus absolutely excessive. And in its extreme excess, in the moment of jouissance, the text of jouissance must slit the very surface of textuality and plunge itself into the realm of non-text, of the primordial being, of non-knowledge (non-savoir), of non-meaning, of death.⁶

By taking the discursive mode of confession, Mishima's Confessions of a Mask posits the reader (auditor). In so doing, it claims itself quite ostensibly as a readerly text. At the same time, not only this particular text but Mishima's entire corpus posits a central question concerning jouissance: What if the primary condition of our being is not self-preservation but jouissance? This conflict between the readerly and writerly modes results in a tense textual surface supported by various intermingling dichotomies: abnormality/normality, imagination/reality, strong body/weak body, truth/mask, steel blade/resilient skin, and so on. If, however, these dichotomies functioned merely as novelistic structural devices, the text would simply remain readerly and ready to be consumed by the reader. But the Mishima-text drives itself out of such a structural confinement composed of mere dichotomies. It is the jouissance of imagination that must eventually triumph over the readerly, and over “the reality of everyday life.”

Here, one must note that in Confessions, jouissance, including death, is strictly relegated to the realm of imagination. The protagonist dreams of his own glorious death in a battlefield but could not suppress his joy when he was disqualified even to enlist. The reader is informed that his disqualification was due to his feigned ill health. Death must not occur in the realm of everyday life. Mishima writes: “Nothing gave me such a strange feeling of repugnance as the thought of a connection between everyday life and death” (Confessions 137). This again indicates that his system of desire functions only in fictionality. And what happens in his imaginary world is the detailed (thus, essentially ritualistic) reordering of reality according to the dictates of jouissance. In other words, it is a textualizing process exclusively directed towards jouissance. It is a production of more surfaces, more beautiful surfaces whose ultimate destiny is their own laceration.

Mishima's multiplying of textual surfaces is not an allegory of the proliferation of life. On the contrary, it happens at the tenuous border we call death. The lieutenant's seppuku scene in the short story “Patriotism” stretches out over five pages of sometimes evocative, sometimes clinical depictions. The hard surface of the dagger lacerates the skin and encounters the “soft resilience” of the entrails (“Patriotism” 114). Finally the interior is brought out to the surface:

Seemingly ignorant of their master's suffering, the entrails gave an impression of robust health and almost disagreeable vitality as they slipped smoothly out and spilled over into the crotch.

(“Patriotism” 115)

Even the interior (entrails) becomes another exterior surface. This movement of exteriorization parallels that of the confessional text where one confesses to expose the inner secrets. Beneath the field of sumptuous surfaces, we are led to glimpse death. A death made more glorious by the adornment of blood and pain is supposed to lie beneath the text.

Mishima came this close to death in literature. Even his actual death, as long as it is inscribed in his biography, must remain as a text. Yet no one writes death (though one may write about death). When there is no longer the possibility of a text, death may be actualized. But death cannot appear. Only ruins, tropological ruins appear. And we see nothing but the surface. Death by definition hides itself. Even Mishima's confessional desire cannot bring it to light. Death defies reading, defies the readerly text. But the text of jouissance may write itself unto death.

What if jouissance is at the center of our discourse? That is, what if the impossibility of a text is at the center of our discourse? Mishima answered it by slitting his sculptured abdomen. Finally the imaginary and the actual coincided. A writing brush lay beside his dead body. He intended to write the character “katana” (sword) with his own blood. His failure to do so certainly marks the end of his text production. Yet the unwritten word trembles with its insidious jouissance in its silence, in its death, in its failure. An absolute depth may open up in its non-being. Death is as tenuous as the failed word.

Notes

1. All Japanese authors' names are written in the customary order of the last name first.

2. The shi-shōsetsu is a peculiarly “Japanese” form of confessional, autobiographical writings that flourished especially in the Taishō era in Japan (1912-26). For a full discussion of this genre, see Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction, (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988).

3. See Keene 1183. Also see Saeki 375. Saeki questions the facile conclusion that the novel is merely an “anti-I-novel in the form of I-novel” by pointing out many verifiable autobiographical elements in the novel and thus reminding us of the suffering that the author of such a confessional text must have gone through in producing the text.

4. Note that in the original also the letters “O, M, I” are written in Roman letters and not in Japanese characters.

5. The word jouissance is translated by Richard Miller in The Pleasure of the Text as “bliss” with a note referring to the meaning of “orgasm” implicit in the French.

6. The moment of jouissance is also what Bataille calls “Sovereignty” by way of Hegel:

   … a point where laughter no longer laughs, and tears no longer cry, where the divine and the horrible, the poetic and the repugnant, the erotic and the funereal, coincide. It is not a point of the spirit. … Sovereingty is the reign of a miraculous non-savoir.

   Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, eds. Denis Hollier, et al., 9 vols. (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1970-1979) V. 251.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

———. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. New York: Urizen Books, 1973.

Derrida, Jacques. “Genesis and Structure.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 154-168.

Karatani Kōjin. Nihon kindaibungaku no kigen. Tokyo: Kōdansha bungei bunko, 1988.

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era, Fiction. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1984.

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———. “Patriotism.” “Death in Midsummer” and Other Stories. Trans. Geoffrey W. Sargent, et al. New York: New Directions, 1966. 93-118.

Nathan, John. Mishima: A Biography. Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1974.

Saeki Shōichi, Hyōden Mishima Yukio. Tokyo: Chûkō bunko, 1988.