John's Updates

"Imagine: In 1970 Norman Mailer, fed up with hippies and the wimpification of America, leads his personal militia into a National Guard outpost in Washington DC, takes the commandant hostage and then exhorts the troops to rise up with him, overthrow the government and restore the Confederacy.

Crazy, right?

And yet that's pretty much what happened in Japan when Yukio Mishima, a renowned author who was seen as a sure bet for the Nobel Prize in Literature, attempted to incite a revolution within the JSDF. When he failed, he and his close companion, Masakatsu Morita, committed seppuku together.

As authors' lives go, you gotta give him 10/10 for style. Beats boring ol' Tennyson any day.

Nathan's biography does a good job with the facts, but is unfortunately light with interpretation and analysis, both of Mishima's life and his work. He glosses over many of Mishima's works -- major works -- spending only a couple sentences on The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and barely touching on Mishima's final set of works, The Sea of Fertility Tetralogy. When he does examine Mishima's writing, it's always because he feels it gives some insight into Mishima's final act. But the analysis is always the same prosaic observation, that some character is an author-insert, and whatever that person says should be viewed as reflective of Mishima's philosophy, even when Mishima wrote the work in question a decade before arriving at that philosophy.

Reading the book, one can't help but notice that Mishima evolved over time. When he received a draft notice in WWII, he escaped service due to illness -- almost certainly psychosomatic if he wasn't outright faking -- yet after the war he came to repudiate Japan's new pacifism and wanted a return to the nation of warriors. While this seems like a change of his character over the years, Nathan portrays it as though Mishima held the same views all along, and his reaction to the draft was a sign of hypocrisy.

To exacerbate this problem, Nathan can't take Mishima's politics seriously. He's very much a creature of '60s left-radicalism, and he treats Mishima's increasingly right-wing views as inherently silly. While they certainly were that (view spoiler) the biographer should strive to understand his subject's mind. How did Mishima get to this place? Nathan argues backward, taking Mishima's death as the starting point and taking for any minor utterance that prefigures it as evidence that he was on that path from the beginning. Only events in Mishima's earliest childhood are allowed to shape him -- once he hits ten, Nathan treats him as a fully-formed person with his end already predestined.

Nathan also fails to deal adequately with Mishima's bisexuality. Although acknowledging that Japanese attitudes towards man-love differ from the West, Nathan's tone is very much of his time, and despite his obvious liberal views, he can't help but refer to Mishima's sexuality as "deviant." Oddly, he spends much of the first half of the book dealing with Mishima's discovery of his bisexuality while researching Confessions of a Mask, but he never documents a liaison between Mishima and another guy -- the closest he comes is speculating on the relationship with Morita. There is no doubt that Mishima was into the ol' shonen ai, but if this biography was all you had to go on, you'd think it was a scurrilous rumor. In fact, the only sexual relationship in the book is between Mishima and his wife, with whom he fathered two children; nevertheless Nathan continually refers to Mishima as a homosexual instead of bi.

(Speaking of children, Nathan spends almost no time on Mishima as a father -- there are hardly any mentions of his daughter, mostly in terms of people Mishima met through her school, and fewer still of his son.)

For the longest time, Nathan's book has been the definitive Mishima bio in English, (Scott-Stokes' The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima being the only other contender), but I'm relieved to see that Stonebridge is bringing out Naoki Inose's Persona, which I hope will offer better analysis of his life, work and place in Japanese society."