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November 09, 2004Yukio Mishima and I have a complex relationship...
My love/hate relationship with Yukio Mishima continues.
How does one fall into such a relationship with a man who committed seppuku 34 years ago this month, you ask? Well...
I first became aware of Mishima as an author back in late 2000, during my first year teaching high school English. His short story, "Patriotism," was in the senior fiction/poetry/drama anthology--a story about a young newlywed soldier who commits suicide with his bride in anticipation of the order to go and fight his former comrades, who have staged a local rebellion on behalf of the lost glory of Imperial Japan. It's a great story, provided you don't lose your lunch during Mishima's excruciatingly graphic description of the husband's self-disembowelment, and I included it on the syllabus.
I read a biography of Mishima late last year, and it reaffirmed what I'd already come to suspect: He was a terribly interesting personality, but I don't think I'd actively enjoy spending any appreciable amount of time around him (a la Truman Capote, but less so than with Capote). He seemed to pump his writing full of himself--both with regards to characters and themes that were important to him--and it gets a bit trying.
I knocked out a Mishima novel this summer, "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea," and hated it. Much of the story revolves around a precocious, cynical little boy and his amoral, elitist, kiddie-fascist friends. Thinking that perhaps I should stick to Mishima's short stories, I went out and grabbed "Acts of Worship," a collection.
The first three stories--"Fountains in the Rain," about a young man who fosters an entire relationship with a young woman just so he can experience the thrill of breaking up with somebody; "Raisin Bread," about a bunch of young slackers; and "Sword," about a club of kendo enthusiasts on a training trip--didn't do anything for me. "Sea and Sunset" was interesting enough, revolving as it did around a European who participated in the ill-fated Children's Crusade and ended up in Japan, but it was a concept story rather than character-based, and woefully short. "Cigarette" bugged me at first, as I'd had more than enough of Mishima's fascist schoolboy microcosm, but it ended decently enough. I shouldn't have let up my guard, though; the next story, "Martyrdom," tossed me right back into that same hierarchy, this time with a little sadistic homoeroticism and just-for-kicks murder tossed in for good measure.
By this point last night, I had given up on Mishima. I'm not looking to write off authors, but with all that there is out there in the world to read, it's always valuable to know if you can focus your energies and time elsewhere. With only the substantially longer title piece left unread in "Acts of Worship," I was ready to make the break.
For most of its sixty pages, I held to my guns. The main character was a mousy woman who had dedicated her life to housekeeping for a bland, unfriendly professor of poetry. I wanted to smack him for being an ass, and her for acting so self-effacingly that she makes Katerina's speech at the end of "The Taming of the Shrew" sound like radical feminism by comparison.
And then, right in the last few pages of the story, Mishima made it all better. I won't go into specifics, as I wouldn't want to ruin the story for anybody, but I'll be damned if I didn't get a little choked up. After his boorish, pretentious characters, his "hey, everybody...let me beat the fact that I was a misunderstood youth to death" recurring theme, and his favorite love/sex/death trifecta, he managed to pluck at my heartstrings with only paragraphs to go.
I'd figured I wouldn't be bothering with his tetralogy, but now I guess I'll have to. He's a tricky one, Mishima. Watch me read his entire body of translated work and then get massively pissed off with the last novel I read, when it's too late for me to skip his other stuff on the basis of it. I wouldn't put it past him...
Posted by patrick at November 9, 2004 12:36 AM
CommentsAlthough at this point you might be a bit gun-shy when it comes to Mishima novels, you might give "Confessions of a Mask" a try.
Rub and Peas
Posted by: Mad Monarch Voards at November 9, 2004 03:46 PM
And, of course, you need to check out Paul Shrader's film Mishima, one of the better biopics out there. Starting with a narrative of Mishima's last day as he leads his loyal followers off to commit suicide, it tells the story of his life and also dramatizes some of his writings, many in a highly stylized manner.
Bonus points -- the film is entirely in Japanese. Shrader isn't one to pander. His biopic of Patty Hearst is also an amazing work.
Posted by: Jon Bastian at November 17, 2004 12:46 AM
I own Mishima, actually. I picked it up a few years back on DVD at Cinefile in Santa Monica.
I'll have to look up Shrader's other films. Thanks for bringing his Hearst film to my attention.
Posted by: Patrick Seitz at November 17, 2004 02:43 PM
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