Reputation
Mishima Yukio is often considered as the opposite of the liberal democrat Oe Kenzaburo. The last events of Mishima’s life seem to point to this conclusion. In 1970, Mishima committed ritual suicide after a failed attempt by his small militia group to take command of an army barracks in the name of his brand of patriotism and emperor worship.
However, he has some similarities to Oe and the other writers considered. Mishima was firmly in the urban, literary establishment and lived in a Western house according to Western mores. While he lusted after the beauty of old Japan and studied kendo and karate extensively, most of his work was not a return to the old form, as with the works of the Nobel Laureate Kawabata Yasunari, but had an eye to the Western reader with dense plots, allusions to European Literature, and commitment to psychological realism.
Like Soseki Natsume before World War II, he could function in both worlds, but felt unease living in both at once and disliked the empty Western materialism that plastered over traditional culture. Like Oe, his worldview was profoundly shaped by Japanese defeat in the war and a childhood without a consistent father figure. It is intriguing to consider Mishima as Takashi, the firebrand in Oe’s novel The Silent Cry (1967), who expressed his desire for self-punishment in an ill-conceived political program. However, that alone would be too simple.
Golden Pavilion
The novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956) is the best expression of Mishima’s sensibility. Ironically similar in form to Oe’s short story about a young terrorist who assassinated a socialist leader, Golden Pavilion purports to be a first-person account of a young acolyte to the Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji) about his life there and his reasoning behind burning the Temple to the ground. This was based on a true story and the acolyte’s public act was almost like performance art that expressed the beauty of the destruction of a polished exterior to reveal a devouring nothingness.
This “nothingness” is not the void of Basho and traditional Zen. Instead, it is self-devouring nihilism. For the Mishima, this opulent beauty existed and sought to maintain an exterior of order and harmony. However, as the acolyte discovered through his life in the corrupt temple institution, the interior was hollow. Burning the temple is a symbol and expression of the destruction of that exterior and capitulation to the nihilistic no at its core. Its beauty now contains the recognition of its appearance as appearance–how its own structure is its own undoing.
Self-immolation
It seems like Mishima’s death was this kind of performance art. His body, which he sought to perfect through discipline, was destroyed by the urge that made it so–the restless desire that he could not and would not mortify. Maybe Mishima didn’t so much die for a cause, or for the expiation of sin, but simply to put an end to this restlessness.
On the day of his death November 25, 1970, Mishima penned and submitted to the publisher the final volume of his uneven yet inventive tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. It is the journey through modern Japanese history through four incarnations of the same personality. While the tetralogy had been hinting at a progression of consciousness from one life to another and eventual enlightenment, it ends on a spectacularly depressive note when the secondary character, who follows these incarnations in his one lifetime, states that the only kind of release available to protagonist was the breakup of the particles in his body to be refashioned by natural processes.
In the last chapter, the main character’s lover in the first book denies ever knowing about her love and any linkage between these four personalities was chance or simply error. Like burning of the temple, Mishima destroyed his narrative in the final chapters.