Thursday, June 21, 2007

Yukio Mishima & love of death

I just finished The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes. Here's what I think about it:

Having read about Mishima previously, what piqued my interest was his supremely un-Japanese character. A romantic imperialist, extremely well-versed in the Western thought from the Greeks to Goethe, who dreamed of the perfect death and ultimately killed himself. All because of an obsession with death and outdated samurai ethics. As Stokes tells it, there's much more to the story.

Mishima was an intrepid writer, spilling volumes upon volumes over his short life. He had a magnetic personality. Stokes says that Mishima captured a room's attention with cocksure charisma and endless anecdotes. In private, he passed around cigars like a money-drenched tycoon.

Before his adult years as an inexhaustible novelist cum robust body builder, Mishima was a precocious student. A prodigious author as a teenager, Mishima in his twenties seemed to be on track to win the first Nobel prize for Japan. At around 40 years, in the mid-60s, he took a strange political turn to the right, devoting his efforts to training a private army and lobbying for the revision of Japan's pacifist constitution.

In 1970, he took over the army headquarters in Tokyo and attempted what turned out to be a horribly unsuccessful coup. What followed was his infamous suicide by hara-kiri–a samurai-style of suicide in which a small knife is thrust into the abdomen, twice. Sadly, this single event is for what he's most memorable.

As an influence for his radical change, he often alluded to the Shinpuren Incident of 1877. The event has been interpreted as a show of Japanese fanaticism and irrationality. Many Japanese see it as a shaming incident. As Mishisma wrote, "It was a revolt led by stubborn, conservative, and chauvinistic former samurai. They hated all things Western, and regarded the new Meiji Government with hostility as an example of the Westernization of Japan. They even held white fans over their heads when they had to pass beneath electric lines, saying that the magic of the West was soiling them."

Stokes' words on Mishima:
"He was an imperialist, of course, but he was also a great deal more than that–a cold, self-obsessed creature given to fist of passion, a novelist, a playwright, a sportsman. He was a man with many sides to his character, and his imperialism cannot be regarded as central; Emperor-worship was only one facet of Yukio Mashima."

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