[In the following essay, Talmor discusses Mishima's view of mortality.]

Yukio Mishima (the pseudonym of Kimitake Hiraoka) was born in Tokyo in 1925. He belonged to an old Samurai family and was brought up on its traditional values. When he graduated from the exclusive Peers' School in 1944, he received a citation from the Emperor as the highest honour student. He graduated from the Tokyo Imperial School of Jurisprudence, making good use later in his fiction of his knowledge of the law, the ways of life and thought of lawyers, judges, of judicial proceedings and technicalities, as well as of his knowledge of everything connected to the prison-world.

He published his first story at the age of thirteen and, encouraged by his teacher, continued writing. His vast literary work comprises all genres—short stories, novels, novellas, essays, plays, and travel books. In addition, he also wrote the script of, played in, and produced a number of films. Like Dickens, Balzac, and other famous writers before him, he also wrote for the popular press (in order to make a living), but, since these writings have not been translated, we do not know their worth.

Most of his other work has been translated into the major European languages, especially into English and French: The Sound of Waves (1956), Five Modern No Plays (1957), Confessions of a Mask (1958; 1967), The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959), After the Banquet (1963), The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1965), Forbidden Colours (1968), Thirst for Love (1950; 1969), and The Sea of Fertility, a cycle of four novels—Spring Snow (1972), Runaway Horses (1973), The Temple of Dawn (1975), and The Decay of the Angel (1974).¹ One of his films deserves special mention—Patriotism—since it prefigured his own death.

In 1970, on the morning when he wrote the last page of his novel, he committed ritual suicide—seppuku—in a spectacular way, in the sight of his group of followers, after a desperate political attempt to reinstate a traditional military regime. His life, his work, his death, have caught the imagination of millions in the whole world.

It is difficult to discuss a writer of Mishima's stature within the limits of a short article. I shall, nevertheless, try to give an overview of his major novels and attempt to outline his view of life and death.

I

Thirst for Love appeared in English only in 1969, but it was written in 1950, when Mishima was twenty-five years old. He seems to have already attained maturity both as writer and man. If there is one sign of youthfulness about it, it is the uncompromising passion of the heroine, Etsoku, whom nothing can deter from her passionate love of young Saburo, nothing, that is, except the loss of hope. Arriving on the farm of her father-in-law, old Yakishi after her husband's death, she is forced to become his mistress.

From the very beginning we feel the heavy, threatening atmosphere in which all the characters move—all except Saburo. It is a closed, claustrophobic place, recalling Sartre's No Exit. Yet an exit there is, a way out of the complexities of love and life—death. Mishima is from his very first stories and novels not only half in love with death but fully so. Belonging as he did to an old Samurai family, rooted and educated in their old traditions, beliefs, rites, ideals, and code of honour, he and his characters are seen to be aware, from their earliest years of the lurking shadow of death. And this violent death—for it is almost always violent, inflicted by some on others or on themselves by means of suicide, is accepted by all as part of life, as its meaning and final goal.

For young Seppuko death is a constant companion and she never tries to escape it. She longs for it, since, given her circumstances, she can now never attain the man she loves. In Saburo, young, handsome, strong, pure, and innocent, happy with his hard work on the farm, his poverty, the portion allotted to him in life, never questioning, accepting things as they come, we find a prototype for other characters who will appear in later novels. They serve as foils to the others, those who are strong of character, determined, ambitious, and ruthless. And many of them die or are killed or commit suicide in the full bloom of youth. They are the St Sebastians of Mishima's novels, symbols of truth, purity, innocence, courage and uncompromising loyalty to an ideal or belief. In later novels, especially in The Sea of Fertility, they return again in some other equally beautiful form, embodying the Buddhist belief in the transmigration of souls. And it is through his identification with them that Mishima foresees and represents his own death in all its terrible details.

By contrast to his other novels, there is little direct violence in After the Banquet, and it also doesn't have a violent end. Like in his earlier novel, Thirst for Love, here too the main figure is a woman of strong character—Kazu. But it is above all a political novel, about parties, politicians, capitalists and pressure-groups, and the manipulation of the media and the voters by all means at the disposal of those who have the power. And, although the novel is about Japan in the fifties, it is true of all countries both in the East and West. The great realism in the presentation of his characters and plot led to Mishima's being wrongly accused of having taken a living politician as model for the character of Nogushi. He was accused of libel, then blackmailed, and finally threatened with death. Although in the midst of a successful career as a young and acclaimed writer, he felt a growing disgust with the so-called successes of mundane life and at the same time a growing feeling of the Void—a feeling which we will find again and again in many of his later novels and, above all, in his masterpiece, The Sea of Fertility.

In Kazu we find a heroine of a type we'll encounter in some of his other works as well: she is not only beautiful and attractive but also a good business woman, knowing exactly what she wants and how to get it; she is strong and courageous, and not afraid of the reverses of fortune; after having lost the battle for the election of her husband as mayor on which she staked all her fortune, she will energetically start again from the bottom: and she will succeed. On a higher social level, we will find such a type again in Keiko in The Sea of Fertility and in the young widow in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea. But in this long novella we have already entered a new domain—that of the cold violence, the sterility and the horror of our times.

“Ever since my childhood, Father had often spoken to me about the Golden Temple”. This is the beginning of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Penguin Books), a novel which is rightly regarded as a masterpiece. This first sentence sets the tone for what is to follow. For, although Mizoguchi, the young acolyte of the Golden Temple is the protagonist, the Temple itself is the real hero of the novel. And the Golden Pavilion does not only obsess ever since his childhood all the young man's thoughts, feelings, and actions, but it also comes to obsess ours. For it is not only a beautiful temple, one of Japan's most famous and treasured national monuments, but also a symbol of something else, something much greater, some power of beauty and spirit which cannot be expressed in words: perhaps it is a vision of perfection, of something that passeth human understanding.

The story itself is based on an actual occurrence: in 1950, a young Zen acolyte set fire and burned to the ground the ancient Zen temple of Kinkakuji in Kyoto. Built in the fourteenth century by Yoshimitsu a powerful Shogun and patron of the Zen cult, it was a rare masterpiece of Buddhist garden architecture, loved and admired by all Japanese and many foreigners. Mishima made use of the reports of the trial and the confessions of the culprit (who was described as a psychopath), and created from it a powerful story of obsession: the obsession of a young man, who is ugly and afflicted with a difficult stammer and hence almost unable to communicate with others, with a beauty and perfection which is beyond his grasp and remains forever out of his reach. But the Golden Temple is also a religious symbol: a sacred Buddhist relic for many centuries, it expresses not only the Zen spirit but also the Zen way of life. In modern Japan, however, which is becoming ever more Westernised, or rather Americanised, with the postwar generation losing their traditional beliefs and values in a secularised society bent on material goods and money and pleasure, the power of the Buddhist religion with its temples, shrines, priests, festivals, and teachings is steadily losing ground—in the same way as is religion in the West. If seen in this context, the burning of the Golden Pavilion becomes not only the act of a sick, lonely, and unhappy individual, but a much more general, symbolic, act: it is a violent breaking with Japan's historic, religious and national past.

The novel gives us a realistic picture of the life of young acolytes in this temple and of all the others preparing to become priests of Zen or of other religious sects. In its poverty, strict discipline, endless prayers, daily lessons, menial duties, work for the temple and its Superior, poor, insufficient food, little sleep with no respite of games, pleasure, or freedom whatsoever, it inevitably reminds us of the life led by Catholic seminarists in Western Europe. Thus Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when describing the life of Stephen Dedalus in his Jesuit College of Clongowes Wood in Ireland, Graham Greene in his autobiography A Sort of Life (1971), Huysmans in Belgium and Bernanos in France have given a very similar description of the life and sufferings of their heroes in their youth: the dark and dusty dormitories, the fear and threats of physical punishment (which are, however, absent in the Japanese novel), are all the same and show one thing—that religion without the spirit and only the dry letter is finally of no real spiritual and human value to believers or to those training to become servants of the Lord.²

The figure of the Superior of the Temple is here of special interest: entrusted with the teaching and guidance of the young acolytes, he does not practise the holy virtues at all: on the contrary, he enjoys the good things of this world, the food, the saké, the American cigarettes, and even the geishas. Yet he is also seen in another light: once Mizoguchi finds him alone, crouched “with his head between his knees and his face covered with his long sleeves”. Nothing more is said of him and we are left to wonder: for he too is suddenly revealed to us as a lonely, suffering human being. And we are left to wonder about Mishima's real meaning, for he does not offer any further hint of making his real meaning clear.³

As befits the subject, the novel is full of Zen koans, those “riddles” or aphorisms through which the Zen students are supposed to reach wisdom or self-enlightenment. Most of these koans allow of many interpretations and misinterpretations, leaving the students of Zen and us, especially the Western readers, puzzled. One such koan is the classic Zen problem “Nansen Kills a Cat” or “Joshu Wears a Pair of Sandals on his Head”. Interpreted by the Superior on the day when the war was declared lost, it leaves his students puzzled and uneasy. And later again another more dangerous koan from the famous Zen master Rinzai is given: “When ye meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha! When ye meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor! When ye meet the disciple of Buddha, kill the disciple! When ye meet your father and mother, kill your father and mother! When ye meet your kin, kill your kin! Only thus will ye attain deliverance. Only thus will ye escape the trammels of material things and become free”. These dangerous words recall certain admonitions of Christ. As Marguerite Yourcenar in her book Mishima ou la vision du vide has said, perhaps this is meant to replace the kind of prudent wisdom of our life with a dangerous wisdom which revives us, of a freer fervour and an absolute which is mortally pure.⁴ As we'll see later, this kind of absolute purity is one of the highest values in Mishima's great tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, especially in volume 2, Runaway Horses in which Isao is the very embodiment of this absolute purity and loyalty to a self-imposed task.

In all the novels discussed so far, as well as in Mishima's work as a whole, Nature plays an important task. It is nature in all its varied aspects, and it forms not only the background for the life and actions of the characters, but more than that—an integral part of their mind and soul, a reflection and objective correlative of their very being. Such passages occur all through The Temple, but one at least is worth quoting. It occurs almost at the end of the novel, before the golden temple is going to be burnt down:

When the Golden Temple reflected the evening sun or shone in the moon, it was the light of the water (in the pond before it) that made the entire structure look as if it were mysteriously floating along and flapping its wings. The strong bonds of the temple's form were loosened by the reflection of the quivering water, and at such moments the Golden Temple seemed to be constructed of materials like wind and water and flame that are commonly in motion.

(pp. 214-215)

Mizoguchi did set fire to the Temple, but its beauty was not destroyed. “If one compared this beauty to a sound, the building was like a little golden bell that has gone on ringing for five and a half centuries, or else like a small harp. But what if that sound should stop?” (p. 214).

In real life the Japanese could not let the sound of the Golden Temple stop. And so they rebuilt it and it stands again in the ancient monastery grounds of Kyoto, reborn again like the golden phoenix on its rooftop. And so the little golden bell of the Temple goes on ringing. Yet in Japan's relentless surge forward into the New World that we're all building, its golden sound may well finally cease.

II

From 1965 to 1970 Mishima wrote and completed his cycle of four novels entitled, ironically, The Sea of Fertility. He explained that he chose the title to suggest the very opposite, the arid seas of the moon that belies its name: “it superimposes the image of cosmic nihilism on that of the fertile sea”. This nihilism is gradually revealed in the four volumes and it reaches its final expression in the last volume, The Decay of the Angel.⁵ Having given to this great work all he had, he felt that there was nothing left for him to do. And so, on the same morning before committing seppuku, he sent the manuscript to his publisher. “The rest is silence”.⁶

The work is a family history whose classic example is Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Here Mishima presents modern Japan from 1912 to 1970, through the lives of four generations. Like Mann's novel, here too the family forms the axis round which the main and secondary characters revolve. The family and its vicissitudes in business, love, careers and politics, in its relations with its sons and daughters, wives and mistresses, friends, relatives, and servants, they unfold before our eyes with the clarity and inevitability which Aristotle declared to be the very heart of the tragic plot. And so, when reading these novels one after the other, we have the feeling of watching, with bated breath the fates of the heroes unrolling towards their necessary end.

Spring Snow (1972), the first volume, is above all the story of a friendship between Honda and Kiyoaki Matsugae. It is 1912, at the end of the Russo-Japanese war. Both study at the Peers School, Honda working hard—as he will do all his life—Kiyoaki the romantic dreaming and writing his dream journal which he'll leave to his friend after his death at the age of twenty. But although Kiyoaki dies already at the end of the first volume of the book, his presence will never leave Honda or the novels: for he is to appear again in different forms as Isao, then as the Siamese princess Chan and finally in the last volume as Toku, a monster. This is related, of course, to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. Although for a westerner this may seem a difficulty in relating to the work, it is not really so: for within the context of Japanese society, its ways of life, its age-long beliefs, customs, rites, ways of doing, feeling, and expressing themselves, this belief forms an organic part of life. It is Mishima's greatness as a writer to make us accept his world as true to life.

Marquis Montsugae and his friend count Ayakura and Honda's family are already westernised. Their homes, books, clothes, food, are all Western, from their five o'clock English teas to their dinners with the menu written in French. They all belong to the new aristocracy and recall their Indian counterparts sending their sons to study in Oxford and Cambridge.

Against this social background there is the story of Kiyoaki's love for Satoko. But their families oppose their marriage and after forcing her to become engaged to prince Toin of the Imperial Family, Satoko is forced to have an abortion and escapes to a Buddhist convent. After trying in vain to see her again, Kiyoaki having climbed the hill in the midst of winter, falls ill and dies with Honda at his side. Honda will live to the age of eighty but will realise at the end of his life that in the final count he has not lived more than his dead friend. For Kiyoaki had lived to the fullest intensity, had experienced with Satoko the ecstasy of the senses whereas Honda was only a voyeur, watching others live and love and suffer. The one had spent himself, the other had frittered his life away.

Just before he dies, Kiyoaki whispers to his friend that they will meet again “under the waterfall”. In the second volume, Runaway Horses, it is young Isao that Honda will see under a waterfall. It is after Isao has won all the fights against the other kendo competitors. Having watched these matches, having seen young, handsome, self-assured Isao in action, Honda is struck by something he does not understand. But then, watching Isao standing naked under the waterfall, purifying himself before a sacred ceremony that is to follow, Honda sees, amazed, that under his left arm there are three small moles. Mystery seems to invade his life: for they're the same marks that Kiyoaki had had on his left side. This mystery, “Like a shimmering sphere of changing colors, it came plunging into the midst of the cold but well-ordered structure of his life” (Knopf, p. 43). From now on, everything changed.

Isao's figure dominates the novel from his first appearance. And into him Mishima has put everything he loves and admires. He endows him with all the manly virtues: beauty, strength, courage, loyalty to an ideal, unswerving pursuit of his chosen task, and above all, purity. And we're not surprised that Isao will, like Kiyoaki, die young.

There are some unforgettable scenes in this book. To give but some examples: the description of the kendo match where fifty young athletes participate and Isao is the winner. Mishima could give a realistic description of this duelling with bamboo staves as an insider since he himself was a kendo master of the fifth rank. We feel as if we were there ourselves, experiencing the heat, the dust, the thirst, the sun's unremitting rays at midday, the sweat and effort and strength of the young men engaged in this difficult ancient art. There is complete empathy between reader and characters and their actions. In another scene, this time on the drill ground of an army camp, Mishima again expresses his deep admiration for the martial arts of ancient Japan:

“Only on this drill ground was the hand of the sun working with a mathematical clarity and precision. Only here! The will of the Emperor penetrated the sweat, the blood, the very flesh of the young men, piercing their bodies like X-rays. From high above the entranceway of the regimental headquarters, the golden chrysanthemum of the imperial crest, brilliant in the sunshine, looked down upon this beautiful, sweaty, intricate choreography of death.”

(p. 159)

This last sentence describes succinctly the whole book which is indeed a beautiful, intricate choreography of death with Isao as both leading dancer and ballet master, and finally as the only one to die by his own hand. Another unforgettable scene describes the rite of the Ukei in which the Samurais, before going out to battle, consult the will of the gods. It is a divinatory rite and, in his loving attention to the smallest details of the rite, Mishima expresses his admiration for the traditions, beliefs, and teachings of the Samurai of the past.

No wonder that in his own life Mishima tried to bring back to his contemporaries the importance of their past; that he founded and became the leader of a group of young men ready to follow him wherever he would take them (just like Isao's small group of followers swore to commit seppuku if their plan of killing the most important members of the Zaibutsu—the great industrial trusts—should fail). Like Isao, Mishima too believed that what was happening to postwar Japan was destroying not only the power of the Emperor but also Japan's national character and identity. However, both Isao and his creator were engaged in a struggle doomed from the beginning—for the past cannot be brought back, neither for an individual nor for a people.

This is exactly the view of Judge Honda, whose highest values had always been reason, order, judgement and common sense. After reading the story of The League of the Divine Wind, the model for Isao's own group of followers, he writes to Isao that, although the story is a drama of tragic perfection, “one should by no means confuse this tale of dreamlike beauty of another time with the circumstances of present-day reality”. But Isao will not listen to this sound advice (just as Mishima would not listen in his own life).

But who were the men the new League had decided to kill, those honoured members of the Zaibatsu?

There were the bureaucrats of the Foreign Ministry, anxious to please England and America, oozing charm, only able to play the coquette. The financiers, giving off the stink of profit and greed, sniffing along the ground for their dinner like giant anteaters. The politicians self-transformed into lumps of corruption. The military cliques, so armored with the cult of careerism that they were like immobilized beetles. The scholars, bespectacled, sodden white grubs. The speculators eager to exploit Manchuria their beloved bastard child.

(p. 228)

No wonder that Mishima had many enemies of the right. Yet Honda, the man of reason will defend Isao's group against these men in power—and win the case. But Isao, for whom he had given up his career, had lost the respect of his colleagues and was ready to sacrifice all he had—for wasn't Isao a reincarnation of his dearest friend Kiyoaki?—Isao refused the gift of freedom. His freedom lay elsewhere: in killing Kurahara, the symbol of that power he wanted to destroy so as to save Japan and the Imperial Throne.

This is no doubt a difficult book for a Western reader unfamiliar with the ways of thought, the feelings, values, and actions of the Japanese. But then so is any other book or work of art issuing from and expressing a different civilization and culture from our own. Yet in our world, which is becoming smaller because of the media and swift ways of communication, we must become more familiar with what we are and what others are.

We cannot leave this harsh novel without striking a different note. We all understand directly Mishima when he writes: “The clear light of the rising sun cast a striped pattern as it shone down through the branches of the few old cedars that surrounded the shrine. Birds were singing. The air was fresh and clear. As for signs of last night's sanguinary combat, these were visible in the soiled and bloodstained garments, the haggard visages, and the eyes that burned like live embers” (p. 93). And a little later, we read:

The foothills around them were interlaced with small valleys dotted with villages, and there were terraced fields and paddies far up the steep slopes. Some sort of white-flowered bush grew here and there, along with the ripening crops of rice plants. The mountain forest spread out over the undulating terrain around the patchwork of villages scattered like so many cushions set out to dry, and the foliage of the trees, still a deep green in this early autumn, entrapped the subtle morning light to form delicate tracings of brightness and shadow.

(p. 94)

Rooted as it is in a definite land and way of life and time, such passages need no explanation or interpretation. They speak to all of us—they are universal.

In this novel there are many such delicate tracings of brightness and shadow, of hardness and tenderness. It is also this contrast between light and shadow and their subtle interweaving that make Runaway Horses so memorable.

In the third volume, The Temple of Dawn, we are in postwar Japan under American occupation. Honda has become a millionaire and is now legal adviser to one of the powerful industrial trusts of Zaibatsu that Isao has given his life to destroy. Honda has changed: from the detached observer of the human scene he has now become a simple voyeur whose only contact with others is in watching them having their sexual experiences.

Ting Chan, daughter of one of the Siamese princes who were Kiyoaki's guests in Spring Snow, is now a student in Tokyo where she leads a life of pleasure. Honda lives in a new modern villa where he has had a pool specially made to enable him, as he dreams, of watching Chan bathing naked. In the party he gives to his friends and neighbours on the occasion of opening the pool, Mishima offers us again one of those scenes of the dolce vita, of the boredom and emptiness of the life of the rich and powerful in which he excels. (He himself had tasted of this life for a while). We recall a similar scene in Runaway Horses, in the home of Baron Shinkawa, where Isao for the first time saw Kurahara and some others belonging to the establishment. But now, they too, the rich, the powerful, have like all the rest of society began to decay: they have been reduced to vain, silly, empty figures, inspiring only disgust.

But in the last volume, The Decay of the Angel,⁷ all these are gone. Honda has grown old and ill, and his only companion is Keiko, Chan's one-time lover. Together they travel abroad, like other old, rich tourists. And when they return home, they again set out, this time to visit ancient sacred sites of Japan. But here too decay has set in and the old beauty of the landscape and seascape are disappearing under the veneer of modernisation and factories and mechanised production.

When going to see an ancient sacred site near the sea (where the most famous of No plays is set), Hagomoro, they find that the last traces of the ancient site are disappearing under the new roads, souvenir-ships and stalls selling cheap ware. Not far from there, in an observation tower, they meet a young man who is in charge of the tower—Tóru. And when he sees him, Honda believes to find in Tóru's cold, intelligent face, the elusive smile of Chan. But he is wrong. This, his last choice, will be his doom.

Chan is the only exception, and, although her figure is not fully drawn, she is important: for Honda she is the reincarnation of Kiyoaki and Isao. And like them she will die young. We do not know whether Mishima shared in this Buddhist belief in reincarnation, but we feel that in these three figures he embodied the beauty, strength, and hope of youth or perhaps of life itself.

For Tóru is a monster. He is a product of modern society, a kind of robot, who'll use his intelligence to bring about Honda's downfall. Only after adopting him and making him his sole heir, Honda realizes his mistake, his failure of judgement. But perhaps he wanted to believe in Tóru as the last link of rare beings he had encountered in his long life, beings who accompanied him, who for him still lived and would never die. But regarding his last choice, it is too late to undo it now. And Tóru has him arrested in a public park on the charge of immoral behaviour and he is put away as senile.

But just as Kazu had saved Nogushi in After the Banquet, so Keiko now saves him. She tells Tóru about Honda's inner, hidden life and about Kiyoaki's Dream Journal. Tóru obtains it, reads and burns it. And then he tries to commit suicide by taking nitric acid, which does not kill him but leaves him blind. Honda knows that his end is fast approaching, for he is ill with cancer. He must for the last time ascend the hill as he had done, long ago. He wants once more to see Satoko again, Satoko whom Kiyoaki loved and for whom he died so young. And so slowly, painfully, he climbs the hill leading to the convent of Gensshu, where Satoko is now Abbess. She receives him graciously and he is surprised to see that she has not aged at all—she has only moved from the sun into the shadow. He dares to mention Kiyoaki's name and she replies:

“Don't you suppose, Mr Honda, that there never was such a person? You seem convinced that there was; but don't you suppose that there was no such person from the beginning, anywhere? …”

“Why then do we know each other? …”

“But did you really know such a person called Kiyoaki? And can you say definitely that the two of us have met before?”

“I came here sixty years ago”.

“Memory is like a phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too distant to be seen, and sometimes it shows them as if they were here”.

“But if there was no Kiyoaki from the beginning—” Honda was groping through a fog. His meeting here with the Abbess seemed half a dream … “If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no Isao. There was no Ying Chan, and who knows, perhaps there has been no I.” …

“That too is as it is in each heart”.

(p. 235)

Then, under a burning sun, she leads him into the south garden:

“It was a bright, quiet garden, without striking beauties. Like a rosary rubbed between hands, the shrilling of the cicadas held sway.

There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing.

The noontide sun flowed over the still garden”.

(p. 236)

This is the end of The Decay of the Angel, the last volume of the whole four-volume The Sea of Fertility. It is dated November 25, 1970, the day of Mishima's own end.

In his very short life, Mishima has produced a great oeuvre. It comprises 257 books, of which 15 novels in Japan and 77 translations into English and other European languages, countless short stories and plays. Ten of his books have been filmed, but I want to mention only one of them because it depicts his own death some years later.

Based on his novella Patriotism, Mishima wrote the script, acted in it and directed it. It possesses all the purity and simplicity of a great work, and portrays with reticence and economy, the double suicide of a young couple. (Such double suicides of a couple were not unusual in Japan). The central motive of this suicide is loyalty and, as a critic has rightly noted, this would have been a better title for the film. The story is simple: after an unsuccessful revolt by a group of right-wing officers, they are all to be executed—all, except their lieutenant who has been spared because he has recently married. But both husband and wife refuse this dishonour: he will die out of loyalty to his brother officers and the Emperor, she out of loyalty to her husband. (It is worth noting that the story is based on an actual political event, the abortive military coup of 1936).

III

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate the greatness of Mishima in a short space, and by trying to do so much will necessarily be left out. He has been compared to Proust, Gide and Sartre, to Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky, in one word, to some of the greatest writers of our time. But what is so unique about him is the fusion of Western and Japanese culture which pervades all his work. He could do it because he himself was a product of both these cultures, so much so that some of his novels appear to many to be more Western than Japanese.⁸ He had mastered not only English and French literature and art, but also Greek and Latin, in addition to his mastery of classical Japanese.

The fictional world he has created is peopled with innumerable characters, and all of them, from the major characters in the centre to the minor ones in the background, are all with a personality of their own, distinct from the others by their ways, words, thoughts, feelings and gestures—just like in life. Like in Thomas Mann, the centre is occupied by the family (Japan being, like Mann's nineteenth Germany a family-centred society), with their dependents, servants, near and distant relatives. A series of brilliant figures occupy the stage (e.g. Kiyoaki, Honda, Isao), all related by ties of blood or marriage; we follow them from early childhood, through youth, maturity, to old age and death. And in the description of their lives, experiences, friendships, loves, successes and failures, ambitions, hopes, played out against the background to which they belong and the social and political fabric of the whole country, we get a life-like picture of Japan in its new form. And all this panorama throbs with the energy of life and a sense of great intensity—the same that pervaded Mishima's own life. There is an incessant surging forward toward an end, a never-ceasing quest. In fact, the quest is one of the central, if not the central, theme of his work. It is of course also the central theme of the ancient Greek, English and French epics.⁹

The intensity of life is there from the beginning of his work, as well as the passion, the violence, the conflicts, and the quest. For all Mishima's characters are on the quest for something above and beyond the life of every day, for beauty, love, honour, for the spiritual or religious. This quest is symbolized by an ascent—be it of a hill, a tower, the stone-stairs of a temple or religious shrine. (We recall Kiyoaki's repeated ascents of the hill leading to the convent of Gensshi, an ascent repeated after his death for the last time by his aged friend Honda). That this quest always ends in failure is perhaps to be expected: for Mishima was a Buddhist and believed in Shinto Buddhism as do many Japanese. (It was, in fact, till 1945 Japan's official religion). And for such believers this world is all appearance, transitoriness, ephemera. If one is to seek something of value one can find it only in detachment, contemplation, and serenity. Perhaps one of the most memorable scenes in all of Mishima's work is that last scene of his last book when the Abbess reveals to Honda the great secret of the Buddhist faith—the Void.

But there is not only the world of men with their vain pursuit of pleasure and possessions, there is also the world of Nature. Its presence informs everyone of Mishima's works, and his love of nature in all its aspects is skillfully imparted to his readers. We see the country in its changing seasons and colours, with its trees, flowers, shrubs, its rivers, waterfalls, seashore and finally the wide, wide sea. The sun, moon and stars, the sky, clouds, rain, storms, and typhoons are described in all their changing phases and forms. The sun naturally occupies a central place since it represents the Emperor in all his power and glory. The land is seen in all its changing features, colours and sounds, but is, for the most part stark and bare, giving a feeling of great space. When his heroes are about to take their life they are seen in a lonely, beautiful spot where they can, for the last time, look at the land, at a tree, a flower, the sea. Since it is with Isao that Mishima most identifies himself and has endowed him with those qualities which, following his family traditions, he valued most, it is appropriate to end with a passage describing Isao's death:

The orchard gate opened easily. At the bottom of the steps, he saw the white spray leaping high as the waves worried the rocks. For the first time he became conscious of the echo of the sea …

Finally he came to a place where the cliff was gouged out to form something like a cavern. A greenish, twisted mass of rock had been partly eroded away, and from its top the branches of a great evergreen tree hung low over this ledge. A slender stream of water, sheltered by ferns, meandered over the rock surface, flowed through the grass, and apparently fell into the sea below.

Here Isao hid himself. He quieted his throbbing pulse. There was nothing to be heard but the sea and the wind … Though there was no moon, the sea reflected the faint glow of the sky, and the waters gleamed back.

“The sun will not rise for some time”, Isao said to himself, “and I can't afford to wait. There is no shining disk climbing upward. There is no noble pine to shelter me. Nor is there a sparkling sea”.

And then the final moment has come and he commits what he had sworn to do from the very beginning: “Then, with a powerful thrust of his arm, he plunged the knife into his stomach. The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids”

(pp. 419-421, Runaway Horses, the end)

On his last day, beside the completed manuscript of his last novel, there was found on Mishima's desk a slip of paper with a single sentence: “Human life is short, but I would like to live for ever”.

His passion for life had been intense—and so had his passion for death.¹⁰

Notes

1. All these books have been published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and Secker & Warburg, London. Penguin Books has also published Forbidden Colours, Thirst for Love, Death in Midsummer and Other Stories, and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1987. All page references are given in brackets.

2. In this connection, see also the very moving novel of a young Irish writer, John McGahern, The Leavetaking, Faber & Faber, London, 1974 and 1984.

3. The whole important passage with the Superior takes up almost two pages and is therefore too long to be quoted in full. But even a part of it may shed some light on Mishima's way of presenting him. At first, Mizoguchi thinks the Superior had fallen ill. But,

   Now that I observed the Superior carefully, he did not appear to be ill. Whatever may have happened to him his figure as he crouched there in the little teahouse was utterly devoid of pride and dignity. There was something ignoble about it, like the figure of a sleeping animal. I noticed that his sleeves were quivering slightly and it was as if some invisible weight was pressing against his back.

   What could it be—this invisible weight? Was it suffering? Or again, was it the Superior's unbearable knowledge of his own powerlessness?

   As I became accustomed to the quiet, I realized that the Superior was murmuring something in a very subdued voice. It sounded like a sutra, but I could not recognize it. Suddenly I was struck by a thought which shattered my pride—the thought that our Superior possessed a dark spiritual life of which we knew nothing and that, compared with his life, the little evils and negligences that I had so assiduously attempted were trivial beyond words.

   (pp. 197-198)

   We have here a whole gamut of feelings, thoughts, suppositions, retractions, just like in real life. And finally, we are left with the question, “But what is the truth about the Superior?” and the answer, as so much in Mishima, remains ambiguous, undecided.

4. Gallimard, Paris, 1980, p. 38.

5. As Yourcenar rightly remarks, from now on the great Buddhist ideas of detachment, impermanence, and especially the Void become predominant in Mishima's work, but what is missing is the feeling of compassion. Mishima wanted to be hard, both in body and in spirit (Ibid, p. 50).

6. It is clear that Western readers find it difficult to understand and accept the whole idea and action of seppuku, the ritual suicide which is part of the traditional Samurai code of honour. Although, of course, suicide is found in the Western world too and simply accepted as one of the many distressing facts of life. Moreover, it is to be found in the most advanced societies just as in the most primitive. Thus Sweden with a very high standard of living, prosperity, social security, etc., has the highest suicide rate in Europe. On the other hand, as we heard recently on a B.B.C. program, it seems that the Australian aborigines commit suicide as soon as they are put behind bars and deprived of their freedom. (According to the above-mentioned report, well over a hundred prisoners have committed suicide during the last few years, a large number if we recall the small number of aborigines in Australia today).

7. The Decay of the Angel (Secker & Warburg, 1974), was published in Japan in 1971 under the title Tennin Gosui. The Tennin are angels or genii or personified divine essences. They are not immortal or eternal but limited to a thousand years of existence after which time they decay and die. In the novel Tóru is the human form of such a decayed angel. But Yourcenar believes that the decayed angel is probably modern Japan itself and by extension, symbolizes the universal catastrophe of our time. (Mishima, p. 72).

8. Marguerite Yourcenar (who died at the end of 1987), was a great admirer of Mishima. In her talks with Mathieu Galey, he asked her how she'd like to die. She wanted to die when she was fully conscious, she replied, and after mentioning the various places she'd like to see again, she added: “Ou rien de tout cela, peut-être, mais seulement le grand vide bleu-blanc que contemple sur sa fin, dans le dernier roman de Mishima, terminé quelques heures avant sa mort, l'octogénaire Honda … Vide flamboyant comme le ciel d'été, qui dévore les choses, et au prix de quoi le reste n'est plus qu'un défilé d'ombres”. (Les Yeux ouverts, Paris, Le Centurion, 1980, p. 333).

9. Thus, for example, in Runaway Horses, we find the following striking simile when describing Kurahara's way of speaking: “His words, ever controlled, ever preserving the same inflection, flowed from his lips like the white pennants issuing from the mouths of saints and sinners in medieval prints” (p. 167).

   In another passage Mishima uses the Christian term Epiphany which has become familiar to us in an aesthetic sense through Joyce. Mishima writes: “Now divinity seemed so embodied in the bright-flecked clouds upon the mountain peaks that the watching men felt that they were viewing an epiphany of the Floating Bridge” (p. 95). And this, it should be noted, occurs in the chapter describing The League of the Divine Wind, whose members were Samurai who, in 1873, rebelled against the order prohibiting the wearing of swords; the rebellion was put down and all the rebels committed seppuku. What is noteworthy here is the fusion of Western and Japanese elements. One could also say that a moment of insight and illumination—an epiphany—is the same for whoever experiences it and wherever it is experienced.

10. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Atheneum, New York, 1967, passim.

    At the beginning we noted that Mishima has been compared to Proust: the breadth, depth, scope and rich gallery of individualized characters of his novels, and especially The Sea of Fertility, do stand comparison with Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. But there is one scene especially which recalls Proust's famous scene of the madeleine, (tea-cake), which calls up his memories of childhood and youth and starts him on his search for lost time. In Mishima we find a very similar, but much more poignant scene of the same kind. It occurs in The Decay of the Angel, the harshest of his novels. It is recalled by Honda: a memory of his mother setting out hotcakes for him when returning home from school on a cold winter day. The whole scene is beautiful, simple, direct, and (for Honda) unusually tender. The end at least is worth quoting:

    Sixty years had gone by, as an instant. Something came over him to drive away his consciousness of old age, a sort of pleasing, as if he had buried his face in her warm bosom.

    Something, running through sixty years in a taste of hotcakes on a snowy day, something that brought knowledge to him, dependent not on an awareness of life but rather on a distant, momentary happiness, destroying the darkness of life, at least for that moment, as a light far out on a dark moor destroys an infinity of darkness.

    (p. 43)

    In general, dreams and memories play an important role in all of Mishima's work, and the dreams especially are of great visual power, and their images often frightening. They have the power of myth and seem to rise not from the individual but the racial unconscious. An analysis of these dreams, memories and half-memories deserves, of course, a study of its own. They are, at all events, gripping: see especially, Isao's dreams during the year he spent in prison.