Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait

Rankin demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of Mishima's writing and quotes many works that will be completely unfamiliar to non-Japanese readers. He leans heavily on Mishima's essays, as well as various obscure short stories; for example, writing about Mishima's final days, he completely ignores "The Decay of the Angel" and instead focuses on a story called "Prince Ranryo," written around the same time. This material is fascinating, but almost none of it is available in English, and so the reader will not be able to follow up on any of Rankin's references. One can't blame Rankin for it (why is "Kyoko's House" still untranslated in 2019?), but the effect is odd.The main idea of the book is that Mishima's tragic, death-obsessed worldview was essentially fully formed by the age of six -- literally, Rankin quotes one of Mishima's childhood poems and observes that it reflects "an aesthetic governed by decadent principles. 'Summer is over, the world is against me, and I am alone, and this is beautiful.'" (8) Rankin argues that Mishima never really moved on from this aesthetic. In this interpretation, the primary motive of Mishima's life was to create the ultimate performance art, in agreement with the decadent idea that things attain peak beauty when they are destroyed.There are grounds for looking at Mishima in this way. No one would deny that Mishima was a narcissist, or that he was extremely calculating in the image he presented. His novels, especially the early ones, are indeed full of decadent, perverse cruelty, showing "gratuitous crimes, irrational crimes, inexplicable crimes, motiveless crimes." (62) It is likewise impossible to argue with Rankin's statement that, "there is also a sense in which Mishima _wants_ Japan to be in decline so that he can be its last defiant hero, a kamikaze of Japanese beauty." (11)However, while Mishima's insistence on Japan's decline undoubtedly served his narcissistic purposes, one need only look at the trajectory of Japanese culture after his death: in 50 years, there has not been a single Japanese cultural figure comparable to Soseki, Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima himself. Mishima writes, "Soon Japan will vanish altogether. In its place, all that will remain is an inorganic, empty, neutral, drab, wealthy, scheming economic giant in a corner of the Far East," (163) and it is hard to argue at a time when contemporary Japanese media have coined the term "celibacy syndrome" to describe widespread fear and rejection of human contact by young Japanese.Certainly, there were many masterpieces of postwar Japanese art, but they were all made by people who were raised in Imperial Japan, and whose worldview and values were formed by Imperial Japanese culture -- Mishima, or Kawabata, or the filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Ironically, if Imperial Japan had survived, these artists would never have been able to express themselves so freely, but nonetheless, they were carriers and witnesses of that culture, and much of their art now feels just as foreign to young Japanese as it does to us. Imperial Japan was a horrifically unpleasant political entity, but it created a great culture, and as soon as its carriers all died, it turned out that that was it.In short, Mishima may have dramatized his feeling that there was no place for him in the world, but that doesn't make it any less true. For that reason, it is quite unsatisfying to simply write off Mishima's last decade as a decadent art project. Rankin can only do this by ignoring all of Mishima's late novels except for "Runaway Horses." His justification is that this work is unimportant -- for example, that in "his later writings...Mishima was consciously playing to an international audience" (121). But much of this work is interesting precisely because it deviates from Rankin's template (or any template). For example, Rankin describes "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea" as, "a group of teenage boys murder a sailor...having judged that he lacks heroic potential." (62) But Mishima also makes them look ridiculous: the narrator keeps a written record of the sailor's "crimes," which include such things as calling the narrator "sonny." Surely Mishima understood that this was not going to make his characters look heroic to readers.Similarly, Rankin's interpretation of Isao in "Runaway Horses" is quite straightforward: "it is almost impossible to read 'Runaway Horses'...without superimposing our knowledge of the author onto the protagonist. This is just what Mishima intends." (158) Rankin paints Isao as a will-to-power type for whom "the one clear objective in his mind is aesthetic: he wants to kill and he wants to die _beautifully_." (159) What is not mentioned, however, is that Isao experiences the destruction of his illusions -- his group is infiltrated, reported to the authorities and arrested. Isao's grandiose plan fails before he can even attempts it; the assassination that he then carries out is driven by a kind of desperation, frustration at his powerlessness. Surely this is not how Mishima wanted himself to be seen.Rankin's tendency to dismiss certain dimensions of Mishima's work shows that there is a limit to how far his interpretation can go. For example, he writes, "Poetry and purity as synonyms for death. This is the hackneyed, degenerate aesthetic with which Mishima chooses to define his late style." (158) First, ironically, the phrase "degenerate aesthetic" itself has right-wing origins. Second, earlier Rankin approvingly quoted Julia Kristeva, who wrote, "Mishima...[carries] to the limit the slavish moment of male eroticism appended to a deathful veneration of the phallus." (90) There is literally nothing more "hackneyed" in literary criticism than shamanistic Freudian declarations, so Rankin's analysis has obvious blind spots.Despite these limitations, Rankin's book presents a great deal of material to think over. The scholarship here is of much higher quality than in any previous English-language critical study, and it offers a look into a very interesting side of Mishima's writing. One hopes that more of this material will become available.

We've been waiting a long time for this book and I'm glad to say it's the Best Book on Mishima I've ever read. Although Jerry Piven's The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima is still a great and sovereign work, and is the greatest psychological analysis of the man and his literature, Rankin has given us a true intellectual portrait, delving into Mishima's essays and other nonfiction works that have never been translated. Mishima's attitudes and marvelous insights in these essays (including those on Oscar Wilde and Bataille) are related by Rankin to the novels in magisterial ways. He translates more of Kyoko's House than we've ever seen, as well as from a couple of other books we are still without in English. Rankin's analysis and commentary are amazing and right on target, and he shows how poor most of the meager Mishima criticism in English really is compared with the plethora of works in Japanese. Anyone interested in any aspect of Mishima's life and writing needs to read this book. It has to be read to be believed. The only thing wrong with this book is that it's too short! We want more, more, more of these wonderful translations and miraculous insights. We can only hope Rankin isn't tired of writing about Mishima. Get it now!

As the previous reviewer notes, the book contains translations (Rankin's own) and information available nowhere else in English. Rankin's succinct yet unexpectedly entertaining prose is rich in ideas and connections that bring, for English readers, focus and clarity to Mishima and his times. I will be interested in anything else this author might offer - especially on the subject of Japan. I finished this book and immediately ordered his earlier history of seppuku.

This is an excellent book for readers who have a bit of familiarity with Mishima’s works - it’s very readable and helped me to understand his writing in a fresh way. There’s more focus on his output than on his life, except to the extent that it influences his writing. I learned about his literary influences both inside and outside Japan, and learned about his essays (which I knew nothing about). I enjoyed his take on some of Mishima’s fiction, especially The Temple of The Golden Pavilion. Highly recommended!

unlike american expats in nippon, mish was a crypto westerner. so there. DIXI IPSIT IMPM WAS A CRYPTO WESTERNER.

Super Biographie über den umstrittenen Schriftsteller.