The Decay of the Angel

 The Decay of the Angel (1972)

Yukio Mishima

Perhaps, he sometimes thought, he was a hydrogen bomb equipped with consciousness. It was clear in any case that he was not a human being.

            On November 25^th, 1970, Yukio Mishima, after inking the final word of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, drove with a select few members of his private army/boy’s club to the Japan’s Eastern Army Headquarters. There they kidnapped a general, bound him to a chair, and standing on a balcony before the gathered crowd Mishima delivered a speech about duty and honor and purity. The crowd, not understanding what they were witness to, jeered him and he retreated inside. As he unbuttoned his coat Mishima turned to one of his acolytes and said: “I don’t think they even heard me.” And then, in the grand culmination of his life and his art, he committed suicide by ritual disembowelment.

The Temple of Dawn

The Temple of Dawn (1970)

Yukio Mishima

            Or: in which Shigekuni Honda, the bourgeois lawyer creep, masturbates to the memory of his dead childhood friend. I can tell already that this is going to be a difficult blog post for me to write. I’m running out of things to say about Yukio Mishima!

Runaway Horses

Runaway Horses (1969)

Yukio Mishima

We can only rely on our swords, and on bombs made from our flesh.

           

            For the second installment of the Sea of Fertility tetralogy Mishima moves the calendar forward almost two decades, to 1932. Shigekuni Honda, the earnest and intelligent school friend of Kiyoaki Matsugae, is now a respected judge in Kansai, which I gather is sort of out in the sticks, far from civilization. He is sagacious and sturdy and known for his legal wisdom. One day while attending a kendo tournament at a shrine he encounters a young man whom he believes is the reincarnation of Kiyoaki: they share a similar set of birthmarks, and the circumstances of their meeting mirror the final words spoken by Kiyoaki while he lay wracked by a feverish delirium. The young man, Isao Iinuma, is the son of Kiyoaki’s childhood tutor, who was expelled from the Matsugae household for impregnating a maid. In the intervening years the elder Iinuma has founded a school, the so-called “Academy of Patriotism”, a far-right enclave where his son is a star student and captain of the kendo team.

            Honda only shows up at the beginning and the end and for most of the book we follow Isao, who couldn’t possibly be less like Kiyoaki. Kiyoaki was all emotions and no will. Isao is the opposite; his is a ruthless, disciplined willpower. Isao embodies the concept of “purity” but it’s wholly alien to a Western conception. For Isao (and Mishima) purity involves making a statement to the Emperor and then committing an artistic suicide while facing the rising sun. In order to facilitate his grand gesture he has enlisted several of his school comrades in a plot to up end the social order by murdering several wealthy capitalists and then committing seppuku on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They try to involve an army Lieutenant and Prince Harunori, the same Prince who was betrothed to Satoko Ayakura. Someone rats them out and they are arrested and tried. The group is broken apart but after his trial Isao escapes his father’s house and murders the industrialist Kurahara and then disembowels himself.

            Isao and his group of fanatics draw their inspiration from a pamphlet concerning the Shinpuren Rebellion, a 19^th Century revolt of dissatisfied samurai and Shinto fundamentalists. They called themselves the League of the Divine Wind, which you might better recognize as the kamikaze. The rebellion failed and most of its members disemboweled themselves, which to Isao and his compatriots just about the best thing a human being could do. I guess it’s sort of admirable in a way, if you’re a pervert or an ultranationalist or someone impressed by ostentatious displays of obedience. Something like 4,000 kamikaze pilots gave their lives during the Second World War, which seems to me to be a gratuitous loss of life that stands out in even against a tapestry of senseless violence, genocide, grisly meat-grinders and black holes of human suffering. It’s not as if they were destroyed by bombs or famine or other things over which they had no control. They were convinced to sacrifice themselves meaninglessly for the sake of an Emperor who presided over some of the most horrific crimes in the history of mankind and was never once held accountable. Hirohito lived until 1989! Personally I could never imagine being suicidally devoted to a cause or an idea, and especially not a feudalistic anachronism like the Emperor of Japan.

            Of all the Mishima novels I’ve read this is the one that I have enjoyed the least. Mishima writes beautifully but there is one flaw that towers above everything: perfect characters are boring. Isao is perfect. Everyone he encounters is entranced by the intensity of his gaze, at his clarity, drive, and the purity of his obsession. He is intelligent, healthy, and untarnished. There is no conflict, no doubt. It’s an intriguing idea but it doesn’t come off the way I think Mishima wanted it to. I would think that a writer of Mishima’s caliber would know that. That was kind of disappointing. Otherwise it was more of the usual Mishima: very sensual, emotionally rich, and luxurious. Very surreal and internal and full of vivid beauty. And like other Mishima novels it is homoerotic as all heck! It made Spring Snow look like Big Tit Blondes #3. Isao is a champion in kendo, a form of fencing fought using very stiff, erect wooden staves that smash and crack together while hot sunlight reflects off sweaty, gleaming musculature. Young men, with their muscles coiled like vipers, pant in the hot darkness. And so on.

            One thing that I always appreciate about a Mishima book is that he is all about defeating hypocrisy and destroying the parent-world. As the product of two wildly hypocritical people that sentiment appeals to me.

In fact, it is Isao’s father who informs on him to the police, because his father is ultimately envious of the purity of youth. Much of the book concerns the contrast between purity and corruption. The old men, capitalists and landowners, are trapped in their weak, corrupt flesh while the pure, like Isao, die young and leave beautiful corpses. Mishima was somewhat obsessed with flesh, muscle, and skin. He was a bodybuilder, after all, which takes no small amount of hatred towards your material form.

I guess that’s all I have to say about that. I don’t want to run out things to write about before I finish The Sea of Fertility. Just started The Temple of Dawn. That book, and the next, are both shorter than Runaway Horses, so I should be done with this cycle pretty quickly. I’m not used to reading novels in a series one after the other and part of me wants to set it aside and move on to something else, but I’m going to power through them. I think Mishima’s dedication to beauty and his completely unique worldview make such a task very worthwhile. 

Also, I should note that the 80s biopic, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, is very, very good. Highly recommend that. Excellent Phillip Glass soundtrack, insane set design. A worthwhile viewing!

Spring Snow

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. 

The Rings of Saturn

The Rings of Saturn (1995)

W.G. Sebald

            It’s rare to read a novel that is unlike any other book one has read before. Few things are completely new, and most novels have the elements one would consider essential to fiction: story, plot, voice, characters, plot, plot, plot. Such an ugly word, ‘plot’. Onomatopoetic: a turd dropping into an empty toilet bowl. The Rings of Saturn has none of those things, especially not a plot. It’s part travelogue, part memoir, part (global) history, part fiction and while it is all of those things it is also none of them. Rather, it’s something new, but whether it’s a new form of fiction or a new form of history, I can’t decide. I do know, however, that it is one of the most stunningly beautiful books I’ve ever read. Completely unique and singular. Sebald is a masterful writer, and if history textbooks were this moving and this poetically beautiful maybe the masses would not be so ignorant of their past and fearful regarding their future. At the very least I don't think it would hurt.

The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974)

Heinrich Böll

            There are two kinds of news media on this planet: the kind that soberly reports the news, unbiased, with a nose for the truth, and the vicious, sensationalist kind, that cares only for ratings and money and will sacrifice and mutilate anyone just to stir up trouble. Here in America if the former ever existed then it is a dinosaur, on his way out, but the latter is alive and well, the most well known manifestation being FOX News. I think every one in America has had the misfortune of knowing someone writhing in the grip of FOX: a bigoted relative, a rabidly anti-union boss, someone who really hates “Socialism” or immigrants, a guy who wants to get a business degree, a cop, etc. This kind of “journalism” is like an agent provocateur in the service of the the new robber baron aristocracy, an agent who utilizes the sensationalist and confrontational language designed to appeal to a generally uneducated proletariat (a proletariat that has been hobbled from birth and views the world in simple us-versus-them terms), an agent who comes to the working class bar in the middle of the night and incites stupidity so the pigs can burst in, make some arrests and flex their muscle. Now, FOX did not invent this sort of reporting, it has been around as long as there have been people and their reptile brains, and, of course, a cowed and obedient media is one of the cornerstones of fascism.

Neuromancer

 

Neuromancer, 1984

William Gibson

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

           

            One of the most important aspects of science fiction as an art form is the genre’s interest in extrapolating our self-knowledge into the possible worlds of the future; that is, to hypothesize on our inevitable encounters with new technologies, social structures, and paradigms. We know how we act and we expand on it; and in the way that I, as an individual, might fret over an upcoming party and the potential embarrassments I might find when mingling, the science fiction writer frets over how we, as a species, might embarrass ourselves when we encounter new ideas and new things. While I stumble with a girl, we stumble with the atom bomb. Part of this extrapolation is prediction, and of all the genres of science fiction the one I believe most likely to come true is the cyberpunk genre. There’s an improbably remote chance that we’ll ever meet alien life, invent time travel, or build space stations around the gas giants, but I guarantee you that in the future the plutocrats that rule our planet will use newer and more efficient technologies to suppress and pacify the masses. Seems like so obviously a given that it hardly qualifies as a prediction; like prognosticating that the sun will rise.