Man's World Issue 1

EROTICISM AS FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENT OF THE REVOLUTION
Changing the subject, today’s literary world is awash with novels about adultery and sex. For the conscience of
every writer, sex seems to be seen as a destructive element of the family order or, rather, as an antagonistic
element. You have also written some work in this direction. I am thinking, for example, of The Misstepping of
Virtue [Bitoku no Yoromeki], although it is rather an investigation of aesthetics and immortality and not of
sexual life. Also Thirst for Love, a novel simply about a passion that ends in murder. However, the topic of
crime is still marginal and I am sure that it is not your central interest as a novelist either. I cannot deny that I
do not agree with this current fashion of identifying sex and crime as expressions of opposition to the system,
although I do admit that, at least, they cannot be defined as a defense of it. It seems strange that you, who
denounce the degeneration of the current system and contemplate the establishment of a new social justice, have
not shown interest in this literary trend.
The beauty-eroticism-death diagram, to which I referred a little while ago, is a concept that
demands that the second element, eroticism, cannot exist except in the realm of the
absolute. As for Europe, eroticism is only found in the world of Catholicism. This religion has
severe commandments whose violation constitutes sin. And the sinner, whether he likes it
or not, must appear before God. Well, eroticism is the method of establishing contact with
divinity through sin. It is the subject of one of my plays, Madame de Sade. In the eighteenth
century, the Marquis de Sade put this method into practice and did not do it just to oppose
the system, that is, for a matter of banal dimensions such as the political one. If the French
Only
LAST RITES
(Continued)
days before his death by ritual
seppuku after a failed coup, Yukio Mishima
sat down for an interview with the literary
critic Takashi Furubayashi. This is an
excerpt from that interview.
Translation: Semmelweis (@semmelweis7)
Revolution had not been compensated by Sade’s thought, it would not have become a true
revolution. In other words, if there is no pessimism capable of completely denying the
optimism of a revolution, it does not work. Just as it does not work in the absence of a
mysticism that denies its own rationalism. In short, every revolution, if it wants to be
complete, must bring together both aspects. However, the postwar Japanese revolution
has ended up leaning on the side of rationalism, towards humanism, leaving eroticism
aside. In a sense, the writer Hiroshi Noma has walked on the right track, but halfway he
got lost. And from his straying he came to the stupid conclusion that eroticism is opposed to
the system. In the relativism of today’s world, however, eroticism is no more than a kind of
free sex. It’s not opposed to anything. It is sex without any relation to the absolute. In my
opinion, nothing could be further from true eroticism.
Not long ago I wrote a pretty harsh review of your short story Patriotism. But if we take into account that this
work is in line with the idea formulated by you just now, then my criticism does not agree at all with your logic.
Our positions are totally separate. In my opinion, one should only speak of eroticism when
the human being risks his life and seeks pleasure until death, which is as if he arrived at the
absolute from the reverse. If the gods did not exist, they would have to be reborn. And
without God there is no eroticism. And because of this way of thinking of mine, I have done
the impossible to make the absolute reborn. That is when eroticism arises. What does all
this have to do with everyday sex? Well, nothing. Let’s say it is a kind of 'paneroticism'.
That’s it. This search is the main objective of my literature.
MAN'S WORLD
94