Samurai stock: Japanese writer and nationalist Yukio Mishima, author of The Sea of Fertility
Oddly, the spiritual heart of Yukio Mishima’s grandiose four-part literary edifice The Sea of Fertility is not his native Japan, but the sacred city of Benares (Varanasi) on the River Ganges in India.
Thunderstruck by the filth, disease, white-swathed corpses, ceaseless din, sacrificial blood and reeking fires on the riverside terraces, Shigekuni Honda drifts down dark waters roiled by human dung and the ashes of the cremated.
The city’s “nauseous abomination” is new to him and alien to the mirroring ponds and raked karesansui gardens of Japanese Zen Buddhism, inspired by “the beauty of emptiness”.
He sees a stately old man stretch his hand heavenwards with adoration, eyes rapturously transfixed — despite limbs of sickly pallor horribly exfoliated by leprosy.
Later, Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, will reflect that before passing through the hell and heaven of Benares, he himself was “a spiritual leper”.
The fascinations and destructive wages of extremism are central to Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy, widely viewed as the pinnacle of a prodigious literary output that included 34 novels, 50 plays and 25 short story collections.
The Los Angeles Times remarked that the tetralogy, comprising the novels Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel, “remains one of the outstanding works of 20th-century literature”.
His work, and that of other post-war novelists such as Jun’ichiro Tanizaki and Nobel prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe, underpins the resurgence of Japanese fiction, recently highlighted by The Guardian and other media.
Mishima was nominated for the Nobel prize four times but never won it. One suspects that his right-wing philosophical excesses, which became more pronounced as he got older, shocked the sensible social democrats of the committee.
Of samurai stock and immensely proud of it, his ritual self-inflicted death at the age of 45 earned him global notoriety. In 1970, driven by ultra-nationalism, he urged soldiers at an army base to overthrow the elected government and reinstate the absolute powers of the emperor, abolished in the American-imposed post-war constitution.
When they jeered him, he disembowelled himself and was decapitated — on the third attempt — by members of his private militia, samurai-style.
The operatic character of the spectacle, to which the media was invited and which he had predicted after completing The Decay of the Angel, and the bloody botch of the decapitation, were typical of Mishima.
Violent death and beauty were strangely entangled in his mind. Indeed, he argued that cruelty was intrinsic to Japanese tradition, emphasising that before committing hara-kiri the samurai had carefully made up their faces.
Runaway Horses revolves around a group of nationalistic teenagers obsessed with the late 19th-century Satsuma Rebellion, when the samurai rose against their dissolution as a warrior caste loyal to the crown and a ban on the bearing of swords.
Samurai stock: Japanese writer and nationalist Yukio Mishima, author of The Sea of Fertility, at the head of the militia he founded. In 1970, at the age of 45, he committed ritual suicide, aided by members of the militia.
The youthful right-wingers plan to assassinate business leaders, whom they see as having sidelined the emperor during the modernising 1920s, and then commit suicide.
Only one of them goes through with it. After stabbing a wealthy banker to death, he dies by his own hand on a mountainside as the sun breaks the horizon.
Mishima’s attitude towards his young protagonist is ambiguous. In the novel’s title the boys are “runaways”. But the rising sun, a deity in the native Japanese faith of Shinto, can be seen as symbolising both the tenno (“heavenly sovereign”) and a resurgent Japan.
Sex and death are also intertwined for Mishima. In the semi-autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask, the central character describes his sexual arousal on seeing an Italian Renaissance painting of San Sebastian as a shapely young male nude tied to a tree and pierced with arrows.
His “ephebophilia”, an adult male’s appetite for men in their late teens, takes a sadistic form in repeated daydreams of himself sacrificing a muscular, bare-chested classmate.
Sexual cruelty, anti-communism, the cult of the Big Man — small wonder that the international weird-right latched on to Mishima and that anyone daring to call him homosexual or bisexual ran the gauntlet of hate mail and litigation.
So why is it then, in reading him, one is left with an inescapable sense of his outstanding literary gifts? Can — should — one approve of a novelist with such retrograde opinions?
The first point is that he is not a propagandist — the novels of the tetralogy rarely betray his feelings towards his characters or theories about society.
Instead, despite the pitfalls of translation, he conjures up the unfamiliar natural and human worlds of the East in prose of often vivid and poetic power and the complex emotions of his dramatis personae with subtlety and pathos.
Their struggles largely take place against the historical backdrop of 20th-century Japan — a tumultuous tapestry of modernisation, Western imperial meddling, ideological upheaval and war.
Linking all is Honda, a rational man increasingly driven to irrationalism, especially the notion of samsara, the Buddhist wheel of perpetual death and rebirth.
In Spring Snow, he mediates in a tragic love affair between his friend Kiyoaki Matsugae and the beautiful aristocrat Satoko, who has been pledged to a prince.
The rest of the novel cycle traces his attempts to raise the friendship through what he believes are Kiyoaki’s subsequent incarnations.
The Buddhist infrastructure of the tetralogy might sound tenuous but Mishima uses it as a narrative device with power and often satirical effect.
Convinced that his friend has been reborn as a voluptuous Thai princess, Honda spies on her, purportedly to verify whether her naked body bears the same birthmark. Throughout The Temple of Dawn, we are left in a state of delicate suspense over whether his interest in Ying Chan is metaphysical or voyeuristic.
His reaction when she arrives at a garden party suggests she has ignited a new pulse in the dry old stick, now a retired judge: “Honda’s heart pounded as though he had stumbled … sugar cubes melted at the instant of this palpitation; the buildings all became unsteady; all the bridges bent as if they were candy; and life became synonymous with lightning or the wavering poppy, or with the swinging of a curtain …”
Wat Arun, the real Temple of Dawn, is a magnificent pagoda-like structure in Bangkok that receives cursory treatment in the novel’s opening chapter. By its close, when Honda’s house burns down as the sun rises, one glimpses the symbolic allusion.
Two guests, prisoners of false lives — a shallow, pill-popping sexual fantasist and a woman who cannot let go of her dead son — are burnt to charcoal in the blaze. Fire is the Buddha’s metaphor for a deluded attachment to the suffering and pleasure-seeking self and the senses.
In the final volume, Honda becomes the decaying angel of Buddhist mythology. Believing he has found yet another avatar of Kiyoaki and Isao, he adopts a clever 17-year-old marine signalman. Over time the youthful deceiver comes to dominate, abase, exploit and terrify him.
One dark night Honda drives to Tokyo’s Meiji Garden to console himself by spying on the loving couples, only to witness a stabbing. Arrested, he finds himself at the centre of a tabloid scandal. He imagines his once-proud career compressed into a single line: “Former judge, eighty-year-old voyeur.”
A final humiliation awaits him. Suspecting he has terminal cancer, he visits Satoko, who withdrew to a Buddhist convent 60 years earlier after her heart-rending romance with Kiyoaki and a forced abortion.
Now the abbess, old but still beautiful, she astonishes Honda by telling him she has never heard the name Kiyoaki Matsugae and asks how he knows such a person existed. Memory, she tells him, is a phantom mirror.
With his life’s quest set at nought, “groping through a fog”, he exclaims: “If there was no Kiyoaki, there was no Isao. There was no Ying Chan, and who knows? Perhaps there has been no I …”
A hint of strength appearing in her eyes, the abbess counters with a Zen conundrum: “That, too, is as it is in each heart.”