[In the following essay, Chan argues that Mishima concerned himself more with culture than with politics.]

Fifteen years ago the Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, died after an abortive coup attempt. This year, Paul Schrader's film of his life has been released. Already the subject of controversy, the film depicts Mishima's death not as a political one but as an indigenous expression of values—a statement of authentic culture in which the right-wing political label was incidental.

At first glance there appears some truth in this approach. Left-wing Japanese radicals have seemed as morbidly inclined and more violent than Mishima. The Japanese Red Army caused great bloodshed, and its members lived by a spartan discipline which almost mocked Mishima's. Critics of Mishima's work have invariably become commentators on his life. There are two schools of thought: one, to which Schrader belongs, stresses the primacy of cultural motivations; another which makes the plain statement that a man's political convictions, especially when sealed by his death, can be taken at face value.

Schrader's interest in things Japanese predates his cinematic career. One of his first film scripts, The Yakuza, caught brilliantly the values and code of Japanese society. Most of Schrader's films have had an other-worldly spirit. In Cat People, this was made explicit through horror. In American Gigolo he worked hard to create a mood of artificial behaviour, of short-term life-styles that either believed in nothing, or believed absolutely in an emerging, brooding and completely modern metaphysic. There is no decadence unless it has a social and cultural core.

In his film on Mishima, Schrader reveals a metaphysic which is ancient rather than modern, and one which is compulsive. Certainly Mishima's life appeared compulsive. His interest in bodybuilding and the martial arts seemed compulsive to the point of neurosis. Shortly before his death, he posed for a series of photographs, nude and with the body of a Greek god—induced through years of weight-training—depicting various forms of death. In the martial arts, he had achieved third-dan black belt levels in karate, kendo, and iaido (ceremonial swordsmanship). In all three arts, the essence of practice is to imagine an opponent whom one faces without fear of defeat or death. Eventually, this gives way to a facing of oneself and one's mortality, so that one pursues life without fear of death, expecting it rather as the culmination of training which has already overcome pain.

The concept of rehearsing for death becomes the theme of Schrader's film. The film opens with Mishima's last day—for which he had prepared the previous night in exemplary classical fashion: making passionate love to his wife and writing his final valedictory poems. From his last day the film proceeds by way of flashbacks to his earlier life, and to dramatised scenes from his last novels. Each segment concludes with prophetic allusions to his death. This is a perfectly valid way of proceeding—except, of course, an interpretation could be advanced that Mishima was intending to depict a certain degeneracy in Japanese life, and its death as a valued cultural well-spring. The reply has always been that Mishima afterwards sought to personify the death of culture.

His attempt at a coup was certainly symbolic. It is surprising how few people have made the obvious statements that his private ‘army’ was extremely small, noted for its fine tailoring more than its military capacity. His take-over of a defence force base was no more than the taking as hostage of the base commanders—who were certainly surprised, having expected Mishima and his tiny band as tea guests—and an impassioned and, often, inaudible harangue of the assembled soldiers. He urged them to reaffirm cultural values and to defeat the modern political institutions that had eroded them, particularly the post-World War II constitution imposed by the Americans. Then, without offering a programme for an uprising, he retired to the commander's office and, in front of the bound commander, committed seppuku (ritual self-disembowelling). It all seems a piece of theatre, deliberately put on for the sake of its polemic. Those who view Mishima as a political animal, however, indicate the pointed references in his last speech to the need to overthrow the constitution.

The argument against the constitution is not necessarily that its provisions are modern and guarantee liberties and equalities that are at odds with the mainstream of Japanese class traditions. Feudal distinctions had eroded and been replaced by an ersatz descendant well before World War II. The samurai ethic had been sanctified with time, but the samurai class had lost its right to wear swords decades earlier. The constitution was not vilified because it enshrined changes but because these changes were put into a constitution that had been imposed. The constitution was the immediate effect of military defeat, and symbolised a further defeat by way of cultural decline. An attack on the constitution could be political, but it could also be cultural, or merely sentimental and nostalgic.

What did Mishima want? To turn back the clock to the days of the samurai? He, himself, had benefited by Japan's modern institutions. He had been a brilliant student of jurisprudence at Tokyo University; he was hardly displeased at his fame abroad; his books were all translated into English and other languages; he was frequently interviewed by foreign literary journals and made a literary tour of the United States while still a young and promising author. He had ascetic habits but lived comfortably, surrounded by antiques—cultural artefacts. Through his books, he strove to represent the spirit of Japanese culture, not as an artefact, but as something that resided in the Japanese personality. Commentators, uncertain as to exactly how much Japanese personality could be located or defined at large, personified it in Mishima.

For Mishima, this was expressed in his writing in the form of a brutal and morbid minimalism. Beauty, good, and life were all counterposed with death—the ultimate white and black. Leading to these two colours was writing that spilled forth images in monochrome. His homosexual novel, Confessions of a Mask, ends with white and black fused: the beautiful body of a young man, the object of the protagonist's desire, bound and slashed by swords in his imagination. This is not merely the standard fare one finds in homosexual sadistic writing. It is an expression, in homosexual terms, of the opposites of beauty and violence cojoined in a form of love. ‘The Sea of Fertility’ is a title from his last works and expressed the contradiction without intervening factors. The Sea of Fertility is the name of a broad empty plain on the moon. In the imagination, there is a stark beauty there—but hardly fertility.

Contradictions are opposing forms. They are reconciled in death, in formlessness. From formlessness, new forms arise. A form of spiritual or metaphysical dialectic. But, apart from portraying this movement in his books, how far did Mishima wish to portray it in his life? There is no doubt that he had right-wing associates and sponsors. Much is made of the fact that the present Japanese prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, in his earlier days as an extreme right-wing politician, was known to Mishima. The question is whether right-wing politics was primary or incidental to his life.

There is a coincidence between Mishima's real death and his cinematic one in Schrader's film. Without any programme for a real coup d'etat, or any contingency plan in the event of the coup's (certain) failure, it was, in the literal sense, a coup de théâtre—a symbol, culminating in his death, for which he had assiduously rehearsed. One stage up from the nude photographs shortly before his death, he planned his death in powerful cinematic images. Was this a call for a political uprising, for which he had left no political guidelines, or a cultural statement of extreme intensity? If it were the former, one has no path to follow; if it were the latter, one is required to consider culture, its decline, and the concept of its rebirth, phoenix-like, through the death of one of culture's practitioners and advocates.

Altogether, by his life and literature, Mishima emerges as a man who believed in cultural values. Perhaps there is indeed no culture without politics? Insofar as Mishima was a political animal, he believed there could be no politics without culture.