Yukio Mishima

"Poetry Written With A Splash of Blood"

I've always loved the work of Yukio Mishima. He is the only writer whose work I've had to stop reading - putting down his book while on subway because the world he was creating, slowly and methodically, was too intense; too unbearable. When people read suspense novels and cant bear waiting to see what happens next, they can skip a few pages and sort of figure it out. Not with Mishima.

He builds and builds the suspense to a point of extreme anguish yet you never catch the tipping point - it just seems to rise queitly and irrevoacably - like smoke into the air - till the whole world around you is full of smoke.

Irrevocable. Mishima's stories are full of a deep sense of the irrevocable. While the typical Mishima character is INSANELY strong willed (and reserved), they all seem to propel themselves towards a (usually violent) destiny. Mishima is an expert at blurring the line between will and destiny. I suppose it is better to say, he is expert at showing just how smoky that line between the two is.

The best example of the irrevocable I can think of is his short story 'Patriotism'. The story is about a young liuetenant who commits hara-kiri along with his beautiful young wife in order to avoid betraying his fellow soldiers (they have rebelled against the reigning government and as an officer he was to be sent out to arrest them). Mishima makes it very clear from the very first paragraph that the lieutenant and his wife will kill themselves. Then he drags their last evening together over an excruciating 20 odd pages. They forgo eating supper and drink saki by the fire - in each other's arms. Then they go upstairs to the bedroom and make passionate love for last time (having decided to kill themselves first thing in the morning). To give you an extent of how deep into detail Mishima goes, he describes them going up to bed, the wife going to the washroom to shower while the lieutenant lies in bed, waiting for her - realizing 'that he had never felt so free as he did that night' waiting for his wife to come to bed (and havign resolved to die the next morning). He then describes the abandon with which they make love.

Realizing at that point that the couple will kill themselves the next morning was unbearable for me. All the while this is happening, Mishima goes to great lengths to show us how young and beautiful and fucking sexy this couple is. And then takes them and lets them kill themselves. In slow motion! The actual slitting of the stomach scene actually is almost two pages long! and unbearable.

I had to put this story down three times, taking a 15-20 minute break each time (the first when he was waiting for his wife) just so i could bear reading on.

I have to point out that Mishima wasnt only a literary masochist. At the same time as he is dragging you into an abyss of sorrow and shock, there is mesmerising profound poetry to his thoughts and feelings. Mishima really is a master at blending headspining thoughts with heart stopping moments and i can think of a number of lines that have frozen me dead in my tracks - amazed at what i have just read

One such set of lines is this:



One last thing, that I really love about Mishima's stories, are the fact that in almost all cases, (Spring Snow excepted), his stories are about someone trying to accomplish something. All his stories are about doing something and I have never read anyone who so perfectly captures the process of a idea (in his case, a wild idealism) turning into a reality

And while the the bright light of ideas often burns into ashes along the way to becoming real, all his characters ending up 'doing something' as a result of a thought, a feeling or an idea.