A nation must ravage itself before others can ravage it, a man must despise himself before others can despise him—Runaway Horses, p. 77.
Yukio Mishima as author is the reactionary Milan Kundera: poised, self-aware, and reflexively right-wing. Mishima graphically demonstrated the client-state status of Japan, as well as the inability of modern sovereigns to reclaim sovereignty; to make this point he gave his life. His magnum opus, the last word of which was penned on the morning he fatefully went to raise a coup, documents Old Japan’s retreat from living memory to an uncomfortable edge of social awareness.
Mishima’s final work is The Sea of Fertility, composed of four volumes: Spring Snow (set during the Taishō period); Runaway Horses (set during the lead-up to the Second World War); The Temple of Dawn (set from World War II until the late 1960s); and The Decay of the Angel (set from the 1960s to the early 1970s). Others have commented that The Sea of Fertility is the 20th-century Japanese saga, what C. P. Snow (Strangers and Brothers) or Marcel Proust (À la recherche du temps perdu) have done for their own countries and eras.
That is not to claim that the primary concern of The Sea of Fertility is political or even cultural. Far from so being, the political recedes into the background as the protagonists age. The Occidental Triumphant is taken for granted, youthful envy begets sterile voyeurism, and one grasps the cycle of Time in its turning although this is only a misapprehension. (Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, the last pages reframe the understanding one has come to have of the world one has read.) Mishima’s tetralogy augurs his later life: an obsession with never growing old, the transmigration of souls (in which he didn’t personally believe), above all the problem of living purely and authentically. Filtering for Japanese Buddhist and nationalist beliefs, the question of all romantic literature arises: what is the price of the æsthetic life?
Consequently, Mishima demands attention to several principles of a real Right: the sanctity and designation of authority; the nature of history; and the price of authenticity (and the cost of not paying that price). We as moderns feel that we do not have a clear notion of purity: we are compromised by our inheritance and the system we are embedded in. (This is a clearer notion than white guilt or white privilege, which imply complicity.) Mishima correctly identifies humanism as a river to be crossed (Runaway Horses, p. 292).
Although the second novel is the most political, it is the first, Spring Snow, that considers the violation of authority in the (disrespected) person of an Imperial Prince. What the reader can take away is the full-blooded reality of life with an Emperor held sacred. Whether for good or ill, all acts are considered in the light of the royal family, its claim on the nation and its destiny. Minor themes include the personal character of even international relations, and the social standing of various components of the élite. (Even Sartor Resartus makes a fleeting cameo.) Although the world Mishima conjures was already long past, he can still summon for your pleasure the foibles and glories of that imperial world. We find raised some vexing questions concerning the personal investiture of sovereignty. For instance, can an agent act against the Emperor’s will and yet justly in his behalf?* Can we truly hold that an Emperor is divine, and should we do so? Most importantly, can we countenance restoring the terrible crime of a lèse-majesté we can believe in?
In Runaway Horses, there is a notable story-within-a-story, The League of the Divine Wind, which sets forth a shogunist counterrestoration during the Meiji era of westernization. The Meiji “restoration” is a complicated time: the Emperor prior to this time had not held sovereign power for centuries, so a restoration of his power was not a traditional outcome. In light of the post-World War II secularization of the Japanese state and the concomitant humanization of the Emperor, Mishima’s motivations in its inclusion become more intriguing. Much of the book explores the motivations of a young reactionary as would-be warrior, samurai-in-waiting. Mishima here is a fantastically good author: apt description pairs with storytelling unpredictable before the reveal, inevitable afterwards. Runaway Horses grapples with questions that dominate a reactionary mind. A very different proto-Cathedral takes hold in the militarism of the Empire of Japan: still modern though, still recognizably the 20th-century matrix. (Glintingly, this raises for neoreaction the question of what makes a Cathedral into a Cathedral.) Ultimately, Mishima’s life and work demonstrates that even the class whose birthright it would have been to rule is unwilling to seize power away from the jaws of the administrative state.
The Temple of Dawn turns from obsession with restoration of an imperial state in which Japaneseness could be manifest to Mishima’s own preoccupation with the soul’s saṃsāra and with the inevitable effects of youth’s decline. Age foxes the temples and stoops the shoulders of the once-young. Potency recedes into voyeurism as a generation loses what strength it may once have had to move the world (exacerbated by Imperial Japan’s defeat and occupation). We find the core statement of the tetralogy:
Whether in success or in failure, sooner or later time must lead to disillusionment; and if foresight of this disillusionment remains only that, it is mere pessimism. The important thing is to act on this foresight even by dying…Only by action can one see through the glass walls erected at various points in time—glass walls insurmountable by human effort, but which can be seen through equally from both sides. In equal desire, in aspiration, in dreams, in ideals, the past and future become equal in value and in quality: they are coordinate – The Temple of Dawn, p. 88.
Finally, The Decay of the Angel. Mishima turns his full focus on decay, moral and societal and mental. “History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity” (p. 210). As with the Romantics, Mishima pursues a certain æsthetic of life, but beauty is evanescent. Time, society, and the manifold seductions of life corrode and undermine the æsthetic (just as in the challenging recent book Bronze Age Mindset, the author of which acknowledged a debt to Mishima). Even true knowledge comes in for its share of “blame”, thus in series: “It is not allowed to know and still be beautiful” (Decay, p. 76). “Pure beauty is the enemy of the human race” (Decay, p. 83). “There are persons endowed with a special nose for scenting out worth, They are the angel-killers” (Decay, p. 201).
At the end of the tetralogy, an observation by an outsider suggests to Honda that he has been chasing a phantom. All that he spent his life in understanding, in cultivating, was an illusion (in the Buddhist sense). But the story we are told is what Honda lived, or thought he lived. One could adduce a Borgesian theory of history or at least historiography from the last pages of The Decay of the Angel, in which the stories told are palimpsests on reality. “Borgesian” would be a mistake, however: too discursive, too rational even in its rejection of common sense. Better to take not the logical positivists at their word in an objectively realizable history, but the bromides of other magicians: what we seek is the illusion of our minds. But it is illusion, not delusion, if the physical evidence mustered by Honda stands. Roughly speaking, cyclical history is reactionary, linear history is Whiggish.
All, of course, is made more bitterly poignant by Mishima’s own death, which would have been brewing in his mind as the date of the coup approached. On the morning of November 25, 1970, Yukio Mishima penned the final words in The Decay of the Angel and consigned himself to history.
* Mishima seems to have believed that the Emperor, as symbol of Japan, was greater than the personal Emperor on Japan’s throne. Or does this become a purity spiral? Some unifying loyalty higher than the personal sovereign is necessary to organize the transition of any state, at the least.
— Mishima, Yukio. (1972). Spring Snow. Tr. Michael Gallagher. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
— Mishima, Yukio. (1973). Runaway Horses. Tr. Michael Gallagher. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
— Mishima, Yukio. (1973). The Temple of Dawn. Tr. E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
— Mishima, Yukio. (1974). The Decay of the Angle. Tr. Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.