Mishima's Apotheosis

...MISHIMA'S APOTHEOSIS BY PEARL K. BELL YUKIO MISHIMA'S Spring Snow (Knopf, 464 pp , $7 95) is the first volume of the tetralogy which the 45-year-old Japanese writer finished a few hours before he killed himself in November 1970 The overall title he gave to the four volumes is The Sea of Fertility, as Mishima explained to his friend Donald Keene, the American scholar of Japanese literature, the phrase "is intended to suggest the and sea of the moon that belies its name Or I might say that it superimposes the image of cosmic nihilism on that of the fertile sea " Mishima considered The Sea of Fertility the most ambitious work of his prolific career (20 novels, more than 80 short stories, 33 plays, countless essays), and in it he tried to bring together everything he had understood of Japan's catastrophic destiny m the 20th century-dramatized in the long-drawn-out struggle between the hereditary aristocracy and the increasingly powerful business elite Yet Mishima reserved the final episode of his saga not for the printed page but for himself In committing seppuku-the traditional samurai form of hara-kiri, permissible only to warriors, that prescribes both self-disembowelment and decapitation by a trusted comrade -Mishima brought to a shattering theatrical climax his doctrine of the necessary interdependency of words and deeds, of metaphor made flesh It was his way of attempting to revive "the old Japanese ideal of letters and the martial arts, of art and action" embodied m the ancient glory of the warrior-poet...

...Kiyoaki is pained by his father's crudity and his mother's vacuous subservience, and he is habitually insolent and distant toward his family and schoolmates Since his turmoil takes the form of incurable irresolution, he fails to do anything about his strong sexual attraction to Satoko, the beautiful daughter of the noble Ayakuras, until after she is betrothed to an Imperial prince Kiyoaki's affair with Satoko thus becomes a venial sin against the Emperor himself...

...Mishima's infatuation with death is the central thrust of Sun and Steel, where the word seems to recur on almost every page "The profoundest depths of the imagination lay m death," he wrote, and death is at the heart of every thought, the flame that lights and shapes each philosophical declaration In a powerful passage Mishima transforms death into salvation "Blood flows, existence is destroyed, and the shattered senses give existence as a whole its first endorsement The momentary, happy sense of existence could be finally absorbed only by death ' The resemblance to Hemingway, also a suicide, also an artist-warrior obsessed with death and manliness, is painfully clear...

...When Satoko becomes pregnant, Kiyoaki's father makes the expensive arrangements for an abortion so that she can go through with her marriage, but Satoko instead renounces the world to enter a Buddhist convent Kiyoaki follows her there, is not permitted to see her, becomes ill with pneumonia, and dies Strangely, this doomed affair, though it dominates the story of Spring Snow, seems less crucial to the book's texture than the extraordinary philosophical passages that from time to time halt and transcend the story with a mysterious energy of their own...

...Only toward the end of the 1950s did Mishima become passionately caught up m the extravagant romanticism that ended with his suicide He became an increasingly Right-wing militarist and nationalist, and was obsessed with the development of his body through rigorous exercise and sport-he made himself expert at wrestling, karate, and kendo, the ancient samurai form of sword-dueling All the while he pursued his immensely diverse and successful career as a writer and film actor Ever more passionately, he called for Japan to return to its self-obliterating devotion to the "sacred and inviolable" figure of the Emperor as "the symbolic moral source of loyalty and culture ". In tandem with his exigent pursuit of a perfect body, Mishima developed a literary style free of fat and clutter, a supple instrument for his searching accounts of such psychopathic personalities as the mad young monk who burns down an ancient Zen shrine in the superb Temple of the Golden Pavilion Although Mishima wrote of the deteriorating Japan of his time with unmistakably Western sophistication, his work came to suggest, more strongly with each book, that death alone is the coveted apotheosis of his characters' destiny Man was morally bound to achieve a body of perfect beauty and strength to make it worthy of receiving the sword...

...Mishima's motives for choosing this ceremonial form of self-destruction were as tauntingly complex as his work and his way of life On a practical level, he hoped to incite his countrymen to revolt against the American-imposed Japanese constitution, which "forever denounces war as a sovereign right" of the nation As A Alvarez points out in his recent book on suicide, The Savage God (Random House, 294 pp , $7 95), there is m an especially horrible form of suicide "a certain residue of primitive magic it is as though the suicide believes, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he will finally have his posthumous way, provided his death is sufficiently terrible ". However political Mishima's motives seem m this light, one has only to read his Sun and Steel (Grove, 107 pp , $1 95)-an oblique and not readily decipherable statement about his philosophy of art and the body -to realize that, beyond any practical results he hoped to bring about through his seppuku, it was m fact the consummation of his lifelong love affair with death Though he had organized a private army, the Shield Society, and hoped through his death to shock the Japanese into reconsidering their degenerative and humiliating course of history, Mishima's martial mysticism enflamed his imagination far more strongly than politics could ever do "I have never wanted to be a politician," he told a friend in 1970 "Politicians are concerned with the effect of an act My responsibility is to the act itself ". This austere, even hyperesthetic view was nurtured by Mishima's profound dedication, in the final third of his life, to the values of the Japanese imperial past Yet it is important to remember that Mishima was not always driven by the peculiar cult of anachronistic morality that he began to develop in the mid-1950s Though he was born into a samurai family and was brought up by its obsolete code of rigidly nationalistic courage and honor, he looked eagerly to the West for models when he began to write fiction toward the end of World War II He relied little upon such traditional contemporary Japanese novelists as Kawabata and Tanizaki...

...IN The Sea of Fertility "I wrote everything," Mishima declared "And I believe I expressed in it everything I felt and thought about through my life " But so far only the first volume, Spring Snow, is available m English, and it is not enough to let us see what Mishima achieved in this final work The novel is beautifully written, in a style that is less austere and more sensuously lyrical than Mishima ordinarily employed, yet most of the themes and characters are plainly meant to be developed more fully and comprehensibly in the three parts to come...

...Nonetheless, much of Spring Snow remains perplexingly obscure-at least to a Western reader It is simply not true, as the publisher claims, that this volume is "a complete and self-contained novel " Most of the characters are brilliantly alive, and the tragic love affair moves from beginning to end, yet at the close one is left hanging m air Though Mishima has skillfully delineated the contrast between the two principal families-the nouveau-riche Matsugaes and the aristocratic Ayakuras -the love affair is destroyed by Kiyoaki's feckless irresponsibility rather than by the social incompatibility of the lovers' families One's disappointed response to Spring Snow seems due not to any weakness of Mishima's but to the fact that The Sea of Fertility must have been written as an indivisible whole, and the first volume was no more meant to stand alone than was Proust's Du Cote de Chez Swann What we have here is only a small part of a huge panorama, moving from 1912 to 1970, and one's judgment must remain frustratingly suspended until we can read it all...

...Spring Snow follows its principal character, Kiyoaki Matsugae, from a schoolboy of 18 to his death of pneumonia at 20 Extraordinarily handsome, sensitive and melancholy, Kiyoaki is acutely troubled by the lack in himself of those decisive qualities that had m the past distinguished his "sturdy, upright" family By 1912, when the book opens, Kioyoaki is only too well aware that "the first traces of refinement were threatening to take hold of a family that, unlike the court nobility, had enjoyed centuries of immunity to the virus of elegance " (Elegance is here meant as a synonym for decadence ) No longer humble, the Matsugaes are immensely wealthy, shameless arrivistes who have become ostentatiously Western and fashionable Kiyoaki's father, a self-indulgent boor, is the time-honored parvenu trying to buy favor at the court with his vulgarly obvious largesse...