Yukio Mishima
This June, the Criterion Collection, who have few rivals for the title best company ever (I’m also fond of Hyperion, the British classical music label, Squaresoft, the pre-merger Japanese video game studio, The Library of America, and its French equivalent, La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, even if I’ve only managed to finish one of either publisher’s daunting volumes), will be releasing two films related to Japanese author Yukio Mishima, and I thought I’d say a few things about him.
First, I’ve never read anything he’s written. That’s good, because otherwise I wouldn’t have the audacity to post about him. On that note, acknowledging that no matter how many posts I begin with dreams of measured, flawless reasoning and resounding, rewarding conclusions, I will only manage to finish those written in a feverish single sitting (preferably nearing dawn on a sleepless Monday morning), now seemed like the perfect time to settle a few matters.
If anyone of my age or creed has read a novel translated from Japanese, it was written by Haruki Murakami. If he or she has read another author, it was likely Murakami’s more erudite condemner and Nobel Prize winner, Kenzaburo Ōe. (If Murakami is the Garcia Marquez of modern Japanese literature, then Ōe is its Borges.) I know I’m baiting some ambitious reader to come forward, but no one has read anything else, have they? It’s still not clear if this is an effective way to judge my contemporaries, but I have the slightly arrogant habit of thinking, ‘Well, if I haven’t even heard of that, which of my contemporaries would have?’ even though the faultiness of such logic has been proven to me as recently as today, when I encountered three separate instances of the name Stefan Zweig, an apparently well-known Austrian author whose existence I had previously ignored. And don’t let me be confused with an authority here; the only non-graphic modern Japanese literature I’ve read is, who else, Haruki Murakami, and only his short fiction in The New Yorker.
But, of course, this isn’t entirely our fault. Eastern literature (not written by Anglophone Indians like Narayan and Rushdie) is rarely translated into English. And, having fraternized with a few translators (and recently completing my own first professional translation, an audio guide in a purse museum), I will say that just because something gets translated does not guarantee that it’s a considered effort, regardless of its quality in the original language. Yukio Mishima published over one hundred volumes in his lifetime (we would call him a ‘prolific writer’ if that term shouldn’t be reserved for Georges Simenon and Georges Simenon alone). Only a handful of those are readily available in English, and some of the translations are forty years old; others are merely of dubious provenance. (Half of the core works, however, are translated by Michael Gallagher and the late Edward Seidensticker, prize scholars both.) I doubt that Mishima’s complete works need to be translated. Much of what he published was for money, and, besides, the French seem to be the only culture subsidized passionate enough to, say, prepare collections of an author’s correspondence so comprehensive that you literally need to purchase the index separately. (I have a collection with Rimbaud’s telegrams to his mother.) But what can this dearth of Mishima translations mean? Or, more importantly, why doesn’t anyone give a damn?
My argument’s perspective here could be vastly improved were I able to read Japanese. I tried to compare how many of William Faulkner’s works were available in Japanese translation on Amazon.jp, but I was only able to find this cryptic cover, which I have been laughing out loud about for the past ten minutes (look at his nose!) and which is now my desktop background. Let us learn from it what we can. . . Instead, think of a few popular Western foreign-language writer of the last century: Mann, Camus, Lorca, Babel, Moravia. No literate society would stand for a mere one-twentieth of these authors’ works to go unpublished, even if a healthy portion of it were trash. Critics certainly aren’t unaware of Mishima; Paul Theroux called Mishima’s tetralogy (and most lasting literary achievement), The Sea of Fertility, ‘the most complete vision we have of Japan in the twentieth century.’ Others draw comparisons to Proust.
Let’s review what I’ve complained about so far: (1) No one has read any books by Yukio Mishima, a major Japanese novelist, the apparent equal of many popular Western authors. (2) Maybe this isn’t our fault, because few of his works are available in English, and even less (I assume) in proper translations. Who am I mad at? I’m not sure: it’s unfair to criticize the publishing industry for not publishing a Japanese novel the public will never read, and it’s unfair to criticize the public for ignoring Japanese novels that aren’t available.
It might not have been clear up to this point so I’ll say it again: I have never read a book by Yukio Mishima. I’d like to, though. (And novels Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata.) I became familiar with his name osmotically, really, spotting it in bookstores and book reviews until I finally thought, ‘But who is this Yukio Mishima?’ The rest of what I know about him has been cobbled together from the usual sources and supplementary googling. If you’d like an actual book on the subject, this biography, written by his friend and sometime translator, John Nathan, is probably the real deal. But if you live in a fast world and need it now, I’ll recite what I know from memory to avoid the grizzle (dates, names) and to isolate what aspects of his character seemed salient to me.
Like Nietzsche, Mishima was raised by women. This allegedly made Mishima rather feminine in manner and speech and subject to ridicule, which could have been especially erosive to his young spirit because he was most likely a homosexual and ashamed of it. He developed an intolerance for weakness, cultivating a masculine (strong) ideal. Whereas Nietzsche was content to show his contempt for the meek in his writing alone, Mishima, through bodybuilding and intense martial arts training, also honed his physique. He formed an elite, private militia that swore to defend the honor of the emperor. However, true to his omnipotent ideal, he disapproved of acts like the emperor’s concession of non-divinity after World War II and thought of himself as upholding an older Japanese morality; he even appeared as a retainer in Hitokiri, a film by Hideo Gosha (who directed other Samurai classics like Sword of the Beast and Goyokin). He began to see that the most heroic act (the least gay act, if you believe some of the hyper-Freudian commentary I found) was self-sacrifice, or seppuku. One day in 1970 he and his men stormed a Japanese army headquarters, took its commander hostage, and then read a list of demands from the balcony. When he was again ridiculed, Mishima went inside the building and committed ritual suicide in front of his comrades, who had some trouble beheading him, as is customary to minimize pain.
That’s a stingy biography made even lamer by the fact that (for the last time) I haven’t yet read a single one of his books, but you might I understand why I find him the idea of Mishima as icon-artist appealing. Such attractions are always questionable, like the teenager with the Joy Division poster and no Joy Division records. Actually, Mishima is kind of like the Ian Curtis of the post-war Japanese literary scene, the thinking man’s Ian Curtis, even: two tortured, examined lives that could only end in death, their art and ideals at odds with their society. Mishima’s story adds literary and homosexual intrigue (he frequented Tokyo’s gay clubs, ostensibly for research), kendo, a more extensive oeuvre, and an exceedingly violent and public death.
But I come two promote two new DVDs about Yukio Mishima, not to praise him. Those are Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) directed by Paul Schrader, film scholar and screenwiter of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and others. I don’t know what to make of Schrader’s career as a director. He’s credited with over a dozen films, but (with the exceptions of Hardcore which is a noted neo-noir and American Gigolo which. . . has Richard Gere’s penis?) they’re all exceptionally mediocre films. He’s a gifted storyteller and displays in articles and interviews a profound understanding of the medium. What’s the deal, Paul? Mishima looks promising, though. Philip Glass wrote the music, and Ken Ogata, star of Vengeance is Mine (1979), a bizarre and brutal film with out-of-this-world special effects (sarcasm), plays Mishima.
The other film is called Patriotism and was directed by Mishima himself. It’s a short film, 27 minutes, and was the multi-disciplined artist’s (he also wrote a libretto) sole cinematic effort. This film was thought lost forever, destroyed after Mishima’s death for its depiction of a Japanese soldier committing seppuku. (He idealized the act years before his own death.) A negative resurfaced decades later and now finds itself at the top of our Netflix queues in pristine Criterion sound and vision. It’s a shame they couldn’t pair it with a feature à la the recent Chris Marker release (which I often cite as my favorite film) but the included interviews and documentaries should be revealing.
I’m not sure what I accomplished here this morning besides postponing the moment of the day I have yet to master: the one where I get into bed and try to fall asleep on purpose. My chronic insomnia (it’s possible I haven’t gone to bed before 3:00 A.M. at the earliest, barring early drunks and jet-lag, in the past 5 years of my life) is the subject of another, longer post. Maybe someone will read this and then see a movie they like, or decide to read some Japanese literature, which must be a good thing, like charity or justice, overcoming cultural barriers and all. I just came back to Paris with half a suitcase of books, but if I could acquire one more right now, it’d be this. This has a solid cult reputation; a Japanese Céline, supposedly. Supposedly. ‘Lying, fucking, dying. A law had been passed prohibiting all other activity.’ Probably not.
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