Yukio Mishima, "The Sound of Waves"

(Vintage, 1994)

With respect to Mishima, so far I've blogged mostly about the more spectacular aspects of his life, particularly as these are staked out in or reflected by his various novels. I've argued that a work of fiction by Mishima cannot be adequately understood unless one takes into account the larger work of fiction, the larger spectacle, that is Mishima himself. 

The Sound of Waves appears on first blush an exception to this rule. The action takes place postwar on a small Japanese island populated by fishing families. The story concerns a poor but virtuous young fisherman who falls in love with the daughter of one of the island's more well-to-do patriarchs. The burgeoning romance fuels much gossip and ill-will among rivals, as well as many of the island's other inhabitants; the would-be couple seems doomed to unhappiness until certain decisive events and interventions change the course of the story. As in no other novel of his that I've read to date, Mishima's prose is here masterfully spare and controlled. Despite its ostensibly modern setting, the story reads like a timeless folktale and can be digested in a sitting of a few hours.

For all this, I don't think the novel can be chalked up to its regionalism, or to a mere genre exercise. My hunch is that it has a role to play relative to Mishima's larger vision. As I've argued elsewhere, manliness and purity are two of his abiding concerns, and here as elsewhere, the important thing seems less the tale itself as the man and woman he constructs in the telling. Shinji and Hatsue, the fisherman and his beloved, embody the kind of masculine and feminine ideal hinted at (and mourned) in Mishima's other novels. What is more, they embody this ideal unconsciously; through their unthinking strength, modesty, and determination, they stand as anathema to what he considered to be urban postwar Japan's self-devouring, neurotic, superfluous men and women (it is of course a fair question where Mishima himself would fit on this reading).

For this reason, I might be willing to rank The Sound of Waves among the great socialist-realist novels of the last century. But here I need to be more specific: I don't mean to suggest that Mishima's work is socialist in any meaningful sense of the term, and for this reason it should be considered quite apart from e.g. Gladkov's Cement. As I've stated ad nauseum, Mishima's politics were ultra-nationalist and rightist. What the novel has in common with socialist realism is, rather, its reactionary, nostalgic and mythical character (think here also of National Socialist art). Irrespective of the social form for which the fictional new man and new woman are constructed, they are offered with a view to criticising the urban/technocratic bourgeoisie of liberal democracy, and for standing as models to emulate. Mishima's future, in a word, is drawn from the past: the new imperial guard is the timeless stuff of Japanese soil and shore.

Whence the strange feeling the book produces: one gets the impression of being taken on a feel-good journey into a world that has largely disappeared, but where something sinister might be lurking in the corners. Mishima's trademark violence makes an odd but telling appearance early on in the book, when the narrator describes the death of Shinji's father in an American strafing raid. The effect is to suggest that there is no quaint village without its sea of blood and gasoline.

Yukio Mishima, "Confessions of a Mask"

Last winter I forayed into the works of arguably the greatest Japanese author of the 20th century, Yukio Mishima. I was not unscathed; you might say I'm still "working through it". In any case, I can't put this fascist bastard's books down.

I've already blogged about how Mishima's fiction, singularly crafted and aesthetically interesting on its own, makes much more sense - or in any case, gains considerably in depth - when one is familiar with his biography, psyche, political ventures, etc. In fact, there's good reason to suspect that Mishima cannot be divorced from his literary work, or vice versa; rather, since he lived his life as a work of art, to read his novels is only to scratch the surface. Whereas other authors I've recently blogged about, such as Cormac McCarthy, for the most part cultivate themselves as impersonal and remote with respect to their works, Mishima seems at all times to be engaged in creating the work of art that is Mishima; hence, each novel must be read in the context of the larger creation (less charitably, the larger spectacle).

For this reason, "Confessions of a Mask" is a particularly interesting Mishima novel. It's the closest he gives us to a straight-up, confessional autobiography, and although his surviving family would apparently still be (somehow) reticent with respect to this interpretation, it chronicles in a very literal way his own changing and largely painful relationship to his queerness. It's widely known that Mishima had affairs with men and trans-women throughout his adult life; "Confessions of a Mask" provides his own take on this, executed with incomparably violent and flowery prose.

It would be tempting, perhaps, to read the novel as in some way exemplary of postwar Japanese queerness. I suspect however that Mishima is too rare a bird for this to be true. His homosexual desire is to some extent polymorphous (armpits!), and is deeply tangled with a desire for images of violence, destruction and death; case in point, his description of erotic fantasies wherein his schoolmates are tortured to death, and his vivid description of masturbating to an image of St Sebastian bristling with arrows. Perhaps something about this sheds light on coming of age at the height of Japanese militarism and imperialism; Mishima did seem to regret faking his way out of military service, having missed his chance to die a "beautiful death" like so many other young Japanese men. I hesitate to make such sweeping generalizations, however. At best, I might agree that Mishima, as always seems the case, is something like the canary in the mineshaft: if something bizarre is going on in Japan, however buried, his prose and his gestures seem sure to reflect it in spectacular fashion.

Larger questions surrounding a "Queer Canon" can be posed in light of this novel. It strikes me that Mishima, like William S. Burroughs, presents something of an enigma, if not an outright problem, for constructions of queerness as somehow inherently liberal (if not radical). Let's not forget his cartoonish ultra-nationalism, his problematic celebrations of "manliness", and what is - arguably? - his gross misogyny. If Mishima belongs in a canon of any kind, I would suggest that it's as a liminal figure. The questions that can be spun from his confession are legion, and in my mind they suggest that the simplistic notion of a "queer author" is deeply troubled.

Yukio Mishima, "The Decay of the Angel"

(Vintage, 1990) 

The Decay of the Angel is the final book of Mishima's "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy. You'll recall that the series follows the life of Honda, a dry legal type born in Japan in the last decade of the 19th century. Throughout the cycle Honda encounters successive reincarnations of a school friend who dies at the end of the first novel. Here we find him pushing eighty, adopting a teenager named Toru whom he suspects is the latest reincarnation. His goal is to teach Toru, who embodies for him a rare nature incapable of lasting in this world, how to join the stream of the everyday, and thereby survive longer than his predecessors. It becomes clear as the novel progresses that Toru is either a fraud, or a corrupt shadow version of Honda's school friend. Where Kiyoaki, Isao and Ying Chan embodied ardour, purity and physical beauty, Toru is a vulgar, detached and narrow-minded spectator who becomes a vulgar, psychopathic self-maximizer under Honda's well-meaning tutelage.

The title of the novel refers to Buddhist and Hindu traditions enumerating the signs of an angel's decay (angels are superhuman, but still caught in the karmic cycle and thereby mortal). The closing episode concerning Toru offers a chilling tableau of these signs. More generally, the themes of old age and the latency of decay in even the most youthful, thriving beauty are driven home throughout the novel. If I had to zero in on one theme of prime interpretive importance (this being typical Mishima fare, and therefore bursting with half-finished ideas and blind alleys), I would draw attention to the role played by the perceiving mind/subject. You'll recall that I flagged this as an important theme in the novel's predecessor, The Temple of Dawn. Here Honda, having long since become a voyeur, will come to terms with the vanity of even his voyeuristic detachment. Toru, moreover, will embody this transition in a violent, disturbing manner.

Mishima sent the novel to his publisher in 1970, the day he committed ritual suicide following an abortive, bizarrely staged ultranationalist coup. For this reason it's tempting to read the book as his testament. I'm not convinced, however, that it provides a coherent key to its author's actions (the novel is strangely divorced from politics, for instance), though it does distill nicely some of his most important concerns. One imagines Mishima ending his life at the onset of much-feared decay, yet at the same time waxing strangely ironical about his gesture. To read The Decay of the Angel is to immerse oneself in supreme bitterness, on the strength of the remotest possibility of letting it go.

Yukio Mishima, "The Temple of Dawn"

(Vintage, 1990)

Back for round three of Mishima's "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy. The story takes place in the lead-up to the war with the US, and in the reconstruction years following. Action takes place in Japan, Thailand and India. Main character / observer Honda is now middle aged. Kiyoaki / Isao is reborn as a Thai princess who, as a child of six, seems to know all about her two past lives. As she gets older, however, these memories seem to fade altogether. Honda goes through a mid-life crisis, but in a very out of the ordinary form: if he can determine that Princess Ying Chan is indeed the reincarnation of Kiyoaki / Isao, then he will not fall in love with her; if he can determine that she is not his friend reincarnated, then he will love her madly. Honda spends most of the novel poised on this uncanny borderline, trying to devise ways to see the princess naked (so as to see if she has the tell-tale pattern of moles shared by Kiyoaki / Isao).

My interest in the tetralogy, flagging significantly during Runaway Horses, was in large part revived here. I'll explain why by isolating some important themes:

• Orientalism: The Temple of Dawn illustrates perfectly why orientalism is above all an othering rather than a strictly spatializing discourse. In a sense, the novel "de-naturalizes" orientalism by showing it at work in a Japanese character. Main character Honda, from "the far East", goes south to Thailand and India and there filters his experiences through familiar orientalist tropes. Thailand is listless, hot, sensual, poisonous, languid, etc; India is filthy, pestilential, gory, excremental, beatific, anarchical, and so on. While travelling in the oppressive, "irrational" south, Honda yearns for the cold, pure air of Japanese Buddhism and Japanese reason. If nothing else, this gives the reader a sense of Japanese self-understanding in the lead-up to the Second World War. Also notable on this count is Mishima's / Honda's rendering of princess Ying Chan, whose very body stands in for the unreason of the south (i.e. the Orient).

• Middle age: Mishima wrote the novel in his forties, well after determining to kill himself upon the tetralogy's completion; one gets a sense that his rendering of middle age in Honda and Honda's wife Rie is part howl of despair, part indictment of weakness and decline. Honda's rationality, profoundly disturbed by his experiences in India, gives way to a late-blooming sensualism rooted in idle perception, while his wife's obedience gives way to a seething hatred. Both of these changes are rooted in the body in profound ways. There's something here like a phenomenology of the middle-aged body that's well worth pondering.

• Eroticism: The usual Mishima tropes are present: armpits, urine, peeping through holes in the wall, public masturbation, sexual odours, and so on. And as usual, eroticism is tied firmly to death. However, if I'm not mistaken there's also a more explicit connection between eroticism, death and the senses (mostly the gaze) than usual. It's worth asking why, as soon as Kiyoaki / Isao is reborn as a woman, her perspective is virtually left out of the account, and Honda's is emphasized. Perhaps this is reflective of Honda's perceptually based eroticism; his lust is driven by what he can't perceive, and therefore Ying Chan is rendered as opaque to the reader as she is to Honda. (I will also allow that to some degree, Mishima was simply a sexist.)

• Art and politics: Largely through secondary characters, Mishima explores the relation of art to historical/political upheavals. Left-leaning artists are largely rendered as weak, declining dilettantes uninvolved with and unprepared for the revolution. To be fair, Mishima renders the communist-led, anti-American protests of the time without passing judgment. This is especially interesting given that at the time of writing, he was a laughing-stock among the Japanese ultra-Left.

Obviously there's much to explore in this novel. For prospective readers, I should add the usual proviso that Mishima's prose is plodding, baroque, and self-reflective almost, in places, to the point of meaninglessness. The reader should expect lengthy, narrative-killing discursions on the finer points of transmigration in the different traditions of Buddhism. Despite a seething eroticism throughout, Mishima also manages to render such episodes as a lesbian 69 between two beautiful characters boring and artificial. Finally, the reader will probably wonder why, with so many painstaking descriptions of vines, flowers, skies, temples, mountains and so on, the actual narrative seems to go off a cliff at the end. With these points in mind, patient readers should still find something of value in The Temple of Dawn.

Yukio Mishima: "Spring Snow"

(Vintage, 1990)

A few weeks ago I got ahead of myself and started reviewing Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy at the second book. You'll recall that I didn't care too much for the latter, which I characterized as a tale of whiney fascist manchildren obsessing about each others' purity (Jonas Brothers zing opportunity?). I should say at this point that part of my frustration with Runaway Horses was that it failed to live up to its precursor, Spring Snow.


If the second installment of the tetralogy is a tale of whiney manchildren doing squat thrusts together and fanasizing about how their abs and chests will look when they commit suicide, then the first distinguishes itself as a tale of whiney manchildren being rich, listless, ruining the lives of others through indecision, and generally pulling an affected Young Werther routine. I should specify: there is only one such ridiculous manchild in Spring Snow, the other young men being fairly reasonable and even likeable. The manchild in question is the one who, hypothesizes the character Honda, who lives through all four books, will be reborn as a fascist kendo enthusiast next time around (amd subsequently reborn in novels 3 and 4). The ill-fated character in question, Kiyoaki, symbolizes the last bloom or the sunset of the Meiji era (the novel starts in 1911, in the early years of the Taisho period). Certainly, he is not made for the 20th century; he invokes Eugene Onegin, but in a degenerate kind of way. He is the kind of character who is made to die; along the way, he compromises others and generally acts like a natural force.

So far this doesn't amount to much of an endorsement, but I'd like to flag Spring Snow as possibly rewarding to patient readers, especially those with a feel or affinity for elegance and decadence. Like most of Mishima's work, Spring Snow is baroque and plodding. It generally succeeds, however, where Runaway Horses fails. There were a few points in the novel which were absolutely beautiful, others quite singular (the protagonist drinking a glass of snapping turtle blood, dining alone in a big empty mansion). Generally, this is a more palatable introduction to Mishima than his other fare.

Yukio Mishima, "Runaway Horses"

(Vintage International, 1990)

Runaway Horses is the second book of Mishima's "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy, in which a single character, over the course of his life, is confronted with three incarnations of a dead school friend. Mishima is generally regarded as one of twentieth century Japan's greatest authors, but his legacy has been troubled. It's well known that he formed a cartoonish ultranationalist militia bent on protecting the emperor, and that he met his end committing seppuku after a failed attempt to rouse a military garrison into a rightist coup. It's also well known that he practiced kendo, lifted weights, frequented gay bars, and liked to have glamour shots of himself taken in which, among other things, he posed as St. Sebastien. When Runaway Horses was written in 1969, Mishima was increasingly viewed as an embarrassing anachronism, if not a dangerous figure of the extreme right.

Let's call a spade a spade: Mishima was a fascist author, or at least he would have liked to have been one. In this respect, Runaway Horses reads at times as Mishima's political manifesto. The context of the novel is Japan in 1931-32. The main character is a young kendoist who forms an ultrnationalist league with his schoolmates. They plot to assassinate the country's leading capitalists and then commit seppuku, in a bid to restore full legislative and executive powers to the emperor. The young men are very "pure". In fact the word "purity" appears so many times in the novel that it becomes annoying and almost meaningless (though it's interesting to note that at times it seems to mean something like Dostoevsky's Underground Man's notion of gratuitousness). In fact, purity in the hands of the league seems to pass over into pure vanity. I never realized how boring, mincing and petty fascism can be.

The novel is still somewhat interesting, however, because in the end the main character passes over from ultranationalism to nihilism. I won't ruin it for you, but anyone with an interest in Mishima's own bizarre biography can look to Runaway Horses for a clue. As I've already suggested, Mishima would have liked to have been a fascist. But one senses that when marching around in military garb he was not being honest with himself, that there's really something else going on. Though the novel is long and largely boring, it does speak to the possibility of believing in things, of purity even, in late modernity. And I think its assessment is profoundly negative.

Happy reading?

High-brow horror novels

When it comes to books and movies I'm something of a horror buff, but I'm rather finicky about what precisely, to me, constitutes good horror. Over the past year I've had the good fortune to stumble across some amazing horror fiction - the kind of stuff that is rightly considered world class literature first, horror fiction second. What follows is a brief summary of the top two highlights.

1. Yukio Mishima, "The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" (Vintage, 1994, 192 pages)

Mishima's stands out as one of the most beautifully crafted, as well as profundly frightening and disturbing tales I've ever read. The story centres on a 13 year old boy, Norobu, whose widowed mother begins a relationship with an idiosyncratic, sympathetic sailor. Influenced by "the chief", another boy his age who commands a group of like-minded boys with his eerie charisma, Norobu develops a nihilistic, creepily detached attitude which increasingly colours how he deals with his mother's new love. This leads to a shocking climax which is, in my opinion, among the best in fiction. What makes the novel so profoundly good is the convincing way in which Mishima crafts the boy and the sailor; those familiar with Mishima's other works, especially the more autobiographical "Confessions of a Mask", will recognize something of the author's own idiosyncrasies in both. Mishima's abiding obsessions with death and sex - one might say, with the real - turn an otherwise prosaic blend of coming of age story and mid-life crisis story into a vision of hell.

2. Cormac McCarthy, "Child of God" (Vintage, 1993, 208 pages)

Those who know McCarthy through the popular film "No Country for Old Men" will probably expect his fiction to be violent and terse. What they probably won't expect is the sheer extremity of the violence, and the fact that he delivers his tales in a lyrical, Faulknerian language that is practically unmatched. Moreover, the actual novel version of "No Country for Old Men" is arguably the least challenging of his works, and in this sense it is not representative. One should look elsewhere in his corpus to get a true measure of his aesthetic abilities; "Child of God", beautifully written and far less imposing than his masterpiece "Blood Meridian", is a good place to start. "Child of God" tells the story of Lester Ballard, a strange, dispossessed Tennessee man who slowly goes insane and resorts to murder and necrophelia. The tale is all the more chilling for the extent to which Ballard's descent is rendered plausible by his loneliness and material deprivation. McCarthy paints squallor and degradation with a loving attention to detail that makes his worlds as real as they are horrifying.