Spring
Snow
Yukio Mishima, 1966
We
live in an age without heroic death.
Nobody
in the world would be happier to know that his life was nearly inseparable from
his art than the bodybuilding Japanese power bottom Yukio Mishima, who spent his
entire artistic career trying to reconcile the two. Some folks will tell you that you
shouldn’t judge a work of art based upon the life of the artist but I’m not one
of them. For example, I think it’s really useful to know that Fitzgerald was a
hysterical alcoholic. I am of the opinion that context is important to enjoying
or understanding anything, and that knowing more about an artist will always make a
work of art deeper and richer. I can think of few artists whose lives loom more
monolithically over their work than Yukio Mishima. That might be one of the
reasons I like him so much, he was so dramatic and over-the-top compared to your average sweater-clad author. Mishima
painted on a different, larger canvas than the one upon which some MFA-toting writer
might work. His life was his bibliography. What you should know: Mishima was
Japan’s most famous writer, and a multiple Nobel nominee, before he and four
members of his private army (of a sort, I think of it as more of a boy’s club,
like the Boy Scouts mixed with a martial arts organization, where Mishima could watch
athletic young men march around in designer uniforms) stormed a Japanese
Defense Force base, kidnapped a general, and before the assembled soldiers delivered
a speech about power, glory, action, the Emperor, the shape of contemporary
Japan, and Westernization, a speech that no one listened to, and then, finally,
Mishima committed ritual suicide by disembowelment. Having read many of his
books, and read much about him, it’s hard not to think of this all as being
planned, manufactured, as some sort of fatal performance art. Harmony of pen
and sword. Other things you should know: Mishima was a bodybuilder, and a
homosexual, though he had a wife and children. He was a singular, contradictory, individual
human being. There’s probably never been a cat quite like Mishima, which is an
achievement in and of itself.
