I mean he was a fascist. Never forget that.
Does anything about his art or his life even risk letting someone forget that?
Mishima in the Twenty First Century
31–36 of 36 posts
Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century
#32Philip Glass' soundtrack to the 80's film Mishima has become one of my favourite albums. The "Mishima VI, Closing" piece is some of his best work. The author's final observation, "Perhaps we need a Mishima to shock us out of our complacency." is something he should be careful about wishing for. (Though the idea of Ian McEwan storming a military base was very funny, I thought Stephen Fry would be even better equipped.…
> What makes Mishima so dangerous today is that he produced beautiful art and culture from which the downstream political conclusions were unavoidable.
This is strange to me. I can see a line between the kind of characters young Mishima constructed (extremely perceptive in limited ways, weird, [sometimes literally] impotent, and prone to mixing shame and violence and adoration) and the pretty basic understanding I have of the political ideas of the older Mishima. But the political ideas hardly seem "unavoidable". It's certainly plausible to me that somebody (apparently) traumatized by childhood weakness and confused identity would take up right-wing politics. It's also plausible to me that they would take up bodybuilding (check), realize that physical strength wasn't totally the problem (not check?), and, I dunno, go see a therapist or something.
I guess I see the eventual politics as one natural way all that could have played out. But to me the root themes of Mishima's work aren't intrinsically political. This may also be biased because I've only read Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which Wikipedia tells me pre-date his political writings, in the former case by quite a while.
Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century
#33Philip Glass' soundtrack to the 80's film Mishima has become one of my favourite albums. The "Mishima VI, Closing" piece is some of his best work. The author's final observation, "Perhaps we need a Mishima to shock us out of our complacency." is something he should be careful about wishing for. (Though the idea of Ian McEwan storming a military base was very funny, I thought Stephen Fry would be even better equipped.…
> What makes Mishima so dangerous today is that he produced beautiful art and culture from which the downstream political conclusions were unavoidable. This is strange to me. I can see a line between the kind of characters young Mishima constructed (extremely perceptive in limited ways, weird, [sometimes literally] impotent, and prone to mixing shame and violence and adoration) and the pretty basic understanding I ha…
> and, I dunno, go see a therapist or something.
Some people go to therapists, some people form paramilitary cults to a divine monarchy, stage coups, accept failure with ritual suicide, and become immortal legends. Different strokes for sure.
Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century
#34Philip Glass' soundtrack to the 80's film Mishima has become one of my favourite albums. The "Mishima VI, Closing" piece is some of his best work. The author's final observation, "Perhaps we need a Mishima to shock us out of our complacency." is something he should be careful about wishing for. (Though the idea of Ian McEwan storming a military base was very funny, I thought Stephen Fry would be even better equipped.…
Also you don't find a lot of far right artists now, Mishima's works and his political stand is a really interesting combination. Just watched the Mishima film a couple weeks ago, the Cinematography awed me the most, the director clearly studied a ton of Japanese cinema (I think he's going for that style), the theatre scenes are easily one of my top scenes of all time. The music on the other hand I think it's a little…
Mishima isn’t really that divergent from the prewar fascist aesthetic. More context on that in this book:
https://www.ubcpress.ca/glorify-the-empire
The only thing different about him was that he came to his fascism in a kitsch fashion after it had otherwise been broadly repudiated for its destructive consequences (largely for psycho-sexual reasons, he was decapitated in his “coup” attempt by his young lover).
But in prewar Japan, there were plenty of avant-garde artists who turned fascist as it subsumed the country. In the postwar period, they were rightfully turned on by their fellow citizens who had watched their country razed to the ground and families destroyed by proponents of an irrational nihilism. Their recuperation only began in earnest when US intelligence services began purging leftists from the cultural sector and funding proponents of “traditional” Japanese culture in literature and the arts in the 1950s-60s. I know that Kawabata Yasunari received CIA funding through cultural front organizations and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mishima did as well (they were close friends and shared work with each other). All of this was intended to combat the otherwise widely popular emergence of leftist culture in the post-occupation period.
Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century
#35Re: Mishima in the Twenty First Century
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just a lazy attempt at character assassination. A Japanese guy who killed himself in 1970 is a fascist? Only if you completely redefine what words mean. "Fascism" in its modern usage means "person whose right-leaning political views I don't like". Completely ahistorical and intellectually bankrupt form of argument.
On the contrary, your reaction is some kneejerk response influenced by a perception of overuse of the word in modern politics. Mishima is unapologetically a fascist; much of the Japanese right was, some still even is. > A Japanese guy who killed himself in 1970 is a fascist? A Japanese guy who took over a government building to agitate for a sublimation of individuality and a return to an imperial ethnostate? Only th…
I don't know if there is a formal term for the concept, but it seems like there is a quality of skilled authorship where an author's own prose impresses themselves to the degree they believe their own selectively edited metaphorically enriched version of their voice over than their actual, humble I-might-fart-my-tooth-is-sore base reality. They get gobsmacked by their own writer's voice and then their personality morphs to some monster. History has pivotal personalities that seem to fit this pattern of moderately intelligent authors being gobsmacked by the power of editorship, which causes them to elevate their personality into Uberman Insanity.