RITESOnly days before his death by ritualLASTseppuku after a failed coup, Yukio Mishimasat down for an interview with the literarycritic Takashi Furubayashi. This is anexcerpt from that interview.Translation: Semmelweis (@semmelweis7)MAN'S WORLD
Yukio Mishima...For some time I believed in my ability to exert self-control by force, immersing myselfin the world of classicism or, rather, neoclassicism, in the world of a work like TheSound of Waves. In those years, I cherished the illusion of being able to establish myselfas a new kind of writer, a man capable of totally dominating with reason an aestheticuniverse of classicist overtones and until then unusual in Japan. But it didn’t take longfor me to realize that I was wrong. I was forced to admit that there were things insideme that I could never control with reason. In other words, I could not prevent withinmyself the rebirth of that romanticism that I had once strongly repudiated. When Iunderstood 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 werePandora’s box. It is true that, to be honest, people could laugh at me or criticize me, butit seemed to me that I had no other way out than to be true to myself, faithful to the selfthat returned to its origins. I think that people who are ideologically distant from me orwho belong to another generation will find it difficult to understand the state of mindthat I am describing.THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEATH AND EROTICISMTakashi FurubayashiPerhaps because I am among those people who find it difficult to understand, I would like to insist on thesubject. I mean the aesthetics of feelings. In you as a writer, Mr. Mishima, there has always been a kind oftendency to aspire to purity. It is, how shall we say, a true Mishimian stereotype. For example, theprotagonist of The Sound of Waves, the work mentioned a moment ago, and also that of Sword are youngpeople who have not read a book; only their splendid bodies are molded as if they were Greek statues. Thelieutenant who plays the leading role in the story Patriotism. And even the figure of the beautiful wifedressed in immaculate white and ready to follow her husband in suicide, have the vision of the imperialfamily, the nation, the flag of the regiment. There is also the image of the emperor that is described inVoices of the Heroic Dead, mounted on a white steed from whose nostrils the mist of an equally whitebreath comes out and pierces the white snow on top of a hill … Likewise, the stories of your first period, youusually set them with an intense blue sea, with very white clouds, without missing the usual immaculatelywhite snow. By the way, you wrote a novel called Pure White Nights. In short, whether it is characters orlandscapes, they are all always shown wrapped in models of purity. It does not seem to me that thisparticularity 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 andviolence are also hidden, but you, Mr. Mishima, deliberately ignore this fact. My opinion is that you aredeceiving yourself and your readers when you say that such artificial exclusion represents that return toadolescence to which you have just alluded. Not only that: such an exclusion can even work as long as itremains within the limits of a personal aesthetic value arising from the inner world. But the matter getscomplicated when the writer’s point of view stops when it comes to assessing social facts and makinghistorical 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, morethan 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 ofyour literary landscapes at all, Mr. Mishima. Similarly, when you describe the insurgent officers, you onlyhighlight their individual feelings, which you mix with the beauty of white snow. It seems that you do notgive 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 lookat the victims as well?MAN'S WORLD32
Change language