Mishima: Spring Snow and Runaway Horses

Tateishi Harumi, Boston Museum

Two things facinate me about these books -- First -- the subject matter - the Modernization of Japan -- an incredible event in Japanese as well as world history -- as that small country caught up with Western Europe in the space of one generation -- while China, the predominant society of east Asia if not the world -- fell into a hundred-year-nightmare of colonialism/civil war/revolution/totalitarianism. So many issues are involved : economic, internal-political, geo-political,religious, moral, spiritual, aesthetic --- and Mishima tackles them all.

The second is the sincerity of the author himself -- and what could be a better proof than seppuku -- i.e. ritual self-disembowelment -- a suicide requiring too much determination to be anything but sincere.

And maybe there's a third cause for fascination as well: the traditional obsession with craft/aesthetic that informs all the Japanese arts. Mishima is a perfectionist -- and so many scenes sparkle like a well made tea cup.

And yet ---- so much is problematical.

The characters are so shallow/self-absorbed -- there are some wonderful soliloquies (exclusively of self disgust) -- but when characters interact with each other -- it doesn't seem real -- and the novelist usually turns the reader's attention to something visual that surrounds them.

And there are really only two characters: the self-destructive hero who repeatedly kills himself from one Buddhist incarnation to another --- and his childhood friend who repeatedly enables him to do it. It feels like the novelist wants us to buy the purity, tradtional nobility, and beauty of the one -- and the modern, European rationality of the other --- but I don't. Sincere --- alright -- they and the author are sincere -- but so is a psychotic -- and why should I care about psychotics (except perhaps to admire the therapy that heals them)

And maybe most troubling: the steady decline of narrative quality -- where the
first book, Spring Snow, is utterly absorbing -- with the joys of calculated drama, accumulated tensions, revelations - and perfect dream-like images -- like the island on the lake in Matsugae park - with it's tiny waterfall and snapping turtles.

"Runaway Horses" continues the parade of images -- with a spectacular Shinto ceremony and that uber-dramatic moment under a grander waterfall - -- when the enabler identifies the reincarnation of his self-destructive friend. But then the narrative flow is destroyed by a 48-page digression into the text of the "League of the Divine Wind" --- a tract said to have been written 30 years earlier to commemorate the abortive rebellion of some Shinto priests and their idealistic young followers against the (modernist) Meiji restoration -- but obviously written in the author's (Mishima's) own voice. And following that the characters stopped being exotic/strange -- and began to appear shallow/tiresome/unreal --- as they became more precisely drawn as elements of the author's ideology -- rather than as characters that could have actually drawn breath.

Biographical information about the author confirms his progress toward suicide/spectacle with the publication of each of the 4 books in the series. First, he studies martial arts -- then he joins a military self-defense unit --- then he starts his own para-military organization. And biographers also describe his procedure of writing: stories go from his head to the paper -- from first page to last -- without revision -- in perfect penmanship.

I.e. -- as I see it -- his life progressively fails --- as his novels do-- to find a way for a man to live in a modern Japan --- and the sheer insensitivity (to the victims) of his terrorist war-mongering is as chilling as the smug hatred exemplified by the Islamic terrorists of today.

Maybe a man CAN'T live in modern society as a man (in book three, the hero reincarnates as a princess) -- and maybe all men in Confucian society are repulsive in one way or another (a possible conclusion from the "Dream of Red Chamber" -- where the author, though male, is exclusively devoted to the company of women -- with the possible exception of one cross-dressing actor)

Stay tuned for the rest of book three and four -- (as well as for the next hundred years of world hisory)