Man's World Issue 1

Yukio Mishima
...For some time I believed in my ability to exert self-control by force, immersing myself
in the world of classicism or, rather, neoclassicism, in the world of a work like The
Sound of Waves. In those years, I cherished the illusion of being able to establish myself
as a new kind of writer, a man capable of totally dominating with reason an aesthetic
universe of classicist overtones and until then unusual in Japan. But it didn’t take long
for me to realize that I was wrong. I was forced to admit that there were things inside
me that I could never control with reason. In other words, I could not prevent within
myself the rebirth of that romanticism that I had once strongly repudiated. When I
understood that my nature was romantic, I went back to the origins, to adolescence.
And when I returned to adolescence, all things suddenly came out, as if it were
Pandora’s box. It is true that, to be honest, people could laugh at me or criticize me, but
it seemed to me that I had no other way out than to be true to myself, faithful to the self
that returned to its origins. I think that people who are ideologically distant from me or
who belong to another generation will find it difficult to understand the state of mind
that I am describing.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEATH AND EROTICISM
Takashi Furubayashi
Perhaps because I am among those people who find it difficult to understand, I would like to insist on the
subject. I mean the aesthetics of feelings. In you as a writer, Mr. Mishima, there has always been a kind of
tendency to aspire to purity. It is, how shall we say, a true Mishimian stereotype. For example, the
protagonist of The Sound of Waves, the work mentioned a moment ago, and also that of Sword are young
people who have not read a book; only their splendid bodies are molded as if they were Greek statues. The
lieutenant who plays the leading role in the story Patriotism. And even the figure of the beautiful wife
dressed in immaculate white and ready to follow her husband in suicide, have the vision of the imperial
family, the nation, the flag of the regiment. There is also the image of the emperor that is described in
Voices of the Heroic Dead, mounted on a white steed from whose nostrils the mist of an equally white
breath comes out and pierces the white snow on top of a hill … Likewise, the stories of your first period, you
usually set them with an intense blue sea, with very white clouds, without missing the usual immaculately
white snow. By the way, you wrote a novel called Pure White Nights. In short, whether it is characters or
landscapes, they are all always shown wrapped in models of purity. It does not seem to me that this
particularity can be dismissed simply on the grounds that it is a matter of taste. But what I am going to do:
you know well that in the world that you describe with these images of white and purity, crudeness and
violence are also hidden, but you, Mr. Mishima, deliberately ignore this fact. My opinion is that you are
deceiving yourself and your readers when you say that such artificial exclusion represents that return to
adolescence to which you have just alluded. Not only that: such an exclusion can even work as long as it
remains within the limits of a personal aesthetic value arising from the inner world. But the matter gets
complicated when the writer’s point of view stops when it comes to assessing social facts and making
historical value judgments through the mouth of his characters. Let’s take an example. As you describe it,
the 'two-two-six' incident, [the coup attempt of February 26, 1936] which you like so much, becomes, more
than anything, an insurrection that takes place in the framework of a landscape with very white snow.
Over time, that snow naturally melts and becomes muddy, but this picture does not enter the visual field of
your literary landscapes at all, Mr. Mishima. Similarly, when you describe the insurgent officers, you only
highlight their individual feelings, which you mix with the beauty of white snow. It seems that you do not
give the slightest thought to the fallen people because of the incident. Why are your stories always like this?
Honestly, I can’t understand it. I admit that it is very good to evoke purity, but why not take at least a look
at the victims as well?
MAN'S WORLD
32