Spurious

The River of Action

Ostentiously, perhaps, Mishima leaves the completed manuscript of the fourth part of his tetralogy on the desk in the hallway of his home as he sets out to commit ritual suicide. It is not by chance that the Sea of Fertility closes with a kind of denial that anything it recounted had actually taken place. Thereby Mishima underlines the errancy of fiction, its falsity; he is ready to leave the sham behind him, to follow the course of action he had adopted to its end. He will take his life; his body, trained, supple, ready, awaits the blade of the sword; his head will be struck off by his ‘second’. He dies, because to die already attests to a desire for truth which is the opposite of fiction. But it is only its correlate, and Mishima’s delusion is that action can overcome the inaction to which writing is linked. Writing escapes the measure of action; the life of action is only an attempt to escape writing.

It is Mishima’s greatness to know the limit of the books he wrote – to allow them, especially The Sea of Fertility, to unravel themselves (it is often awkward, ungainly). He is not content with the masterpiece, even though he is capable of them (this is why, indeed, he recognises himself in Bataille – remember Mishima’s remarks on My Mother). But he compensates for this discontent in his fervent nationalism, his militarism, his worship of the emperor. Each member of his army, the Shield Society, is supposed to be related through him to the Emperor. But the Emperor is the idol who must himself be shattered. It is unsurprising that Mishima admired de Gaulle – unsurprising, but disappointing, too, for it is in this temptation he avoids the demand of writing.

Martyrology

The final movement of Beethoven's 9th is the background to Domenico's self-immolation in the square in Rome in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. Remember it is as though scratched or stuck. No glorious celebration of freedom and joy ... the music stutters. What do I hear in this stuttering? A hesitancy within the artwork itself - within a beautiful artwork. A glitch in the beautiful which as it were divides it from its beauty. And it is thus with Domenico's suicide: it is not beautiful. He falls and crawls along the ground, crying out. He dies - it is a martyr's death. Martyrdom? But in the interval between the immolation and his death, he is just a man who has set himself alight.

Here is the mad attempt to negate the world, to draw the whole world into the fire of sacrifice and bring it shuddering back into birth. And this mad action is met with incomprehension that voids it of all beauty. We - the viewers - are not spared the hideousness of his agony. Far away, Gorchakov has heard of Domenico's death. He takes the stub of a candle and begins to walk across the drained pool. It is madness, all of this. But a madness which is bound to the world's plight.

We have seen people die violent deaths (swollen bodies, scattered limbs) and know death is not beautiful. But does the abjection of the martydoms which, in depriving death of its beauty, bear witness to the desparation and horror of suffering (think of the monks who set themselves on fire in protest at the Vietnam war)? Yes, witness is the word I would insist upon (isn't it linked etymologically to the word martyr?)

But then remember Mishima's ritual suicide: he would have cut open his own stomach - terrible pain - and his 'second' beheaded him. As I recall, the 'second' (was his name Morita?) did not slice Mishima's head from his body in a clean stroke. It took several attempts (and wasn't it someone else who delivered the final blow?) In Mishima's aesthetics, was death not also a moment of beauty (it is more complex than that)? - A beauty that, we know, was linked by Mishima to the glory of the old Japanese order, to the emperor? This is not a martyrdom, for it bears witness only to the limitations of a reactionary aesthetic which requires Mishima step from the world of the writer (he wrote at night) into the daylight of the world. Reactionary? Yes, because as Tarkovsky understands, the work of art already bears witness to the world's plight. There is no need to step into the light.

Bunburyodo

Yukio Mishima, the great writer, was a nationalist, an admirer of Charles de Gaulle and of Nietzsche and Bataille.

Stokes remembers encountered the Tatenokai, the Shield Society, which Mishima formed to uphold national pride in Autumn 1968.

What was the meaning of the Emperor to this second group of Tatenokai? It was as if Mishima read my thoughts. Siting close to me at the table, he said: 'In the Tatenokai A relates to B and B relates to me, and I to the Emperor'. It was precisely what he must have told the tatenokai members. And he added: 'The whole thing is built on personal relationships' I did not have the wit at that moment to ask Mishima how his 'personal relationship' with the Emperor had been established. (215)

Stokes explains the Society was a small one, numbering no more than 100, and comprising university students, who were able, unlike working men, to train with the army for a month at a time.

Early in 1970, Mishima formed a group within the Shield Society, who were to execute a 'coup d'état'. On 25th November 1970, the same day he delivered the final manuscript of his great tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, the Shield Society took a General of the Japanese army hostage, and Mishima addressed an audience of young soldiers. Then Mishima committed ritual hara-kiri and was beheaded by his 'second'.

In a letter to the translator of his magnificent tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, reprinted in Henry Scott Stoke's The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, Mishima writes:

The title Sea of Fertility is intended to suggest the arid sea of the moon that belies its name. or, I might go so far as to say that it superimposes the image of cosmic nihilism with that of the fertile sea.

I will copy a table from Stroke's book (169) which recalls Mishima's Bunburyodo, the dual way of Art and Action:

After completing volume 1 of the tetralogy, Stokes notes, Mishima applied for Jieitai training with the army.
After completing volume 2 of the tetralogy, he forms Tatenokai, the Shield Society.
After volume 3, he plans the 'coup d'état'.
After the fourth and final volume, Hari Kiri.