Reading Mishima in Manhattan

National Review on Mishima's Death and Legacy

By the time the conservative magazine National Review noticed Yukio Mishima in its pages, he was already dead. But only narrowly. A “Letter from Tokyo” by the political scientist Gerhart Niemeyer called Mishima “one of Japan's foremost poets and novelists,” and also an “ardent nationalist, body cultist and possessor of a small private army, a figure reminiscent of Gabriele d'Annunzio or even of Otto Strasser in that respect.” By the time Niemeyer’s copy made it to print, Mishima was dead. The magazine’s editor, William F. Buckley, mentions passingly in his diaristic Cruising Speed, that they had to “at the last moment” switch references to Mishima to the past tense. Appended to the article is the note:

A fortnight ago, Mishima and a group of young followers first took a general hostage, then Mishima harangued a crowd for 45 minutes, and subsequently committed hara-kiri.

Quite the addendum.

In Cruising Speed, Buckley says the head of Time magazine’s news service, Richard Clurman, had sent him the news of Mishima’s death with a note to the effect that “here is a Conservative who knows how to make his points with style.” Buckley relayed the note to his readers, so he seems to have found it amusing enough to share. In general, though, when Mishima appears in the pages of National Review, which wasn’t terribly often, the American conservatives find themselves repelled by him and especially his death.

The first time Mishima comes up – Gerhart Niemeyer’s “Letter from Tokyo” – connects him, somewhat tangentially, to the New Left. The international New Left was a fascination of Niemeyer’s. He framed the Japanese New Left as more Marxist-Leninist, more political, and less existential, sexed and drugged than the American equivalent. Like the American New Left, though, the Japanese one was prone to splintering.

“In Japan, however,” Niemeyer wrote, “the New Left carries with it certain nationalistic overtones which explain the attraction, for many of them, of Yukio Mishima.” Working in a mode of clichés that rivals Life magazine, Niemeyer suggested Mishima’s popularity showed “that New Leftism in Japan is a quest for an authentically Japanese version of politics,” and their clashes with the police “seem to invoke the death-defiant samurai spirit,” while “their disdain for structured politics stems from a Japanese love for direct action.” Maybe so – I genuinely do not know. But Niemeyer misunderstood Mishima by associating him with the New Left, which Mishima abhorred.

In the following issue, National Review published an obituary for the Japanese writer. Its author was the magazine’s contributor most likely to make a sympathetic reading of Mishima: David Brudnoy, a young, quietly gay libertarian and scholar of Japanese literature. He’d already published on another Japanese literary suicide.

The manner of Mishima’s death infuriated Brudnoy. Part of his palpable frustration was literary. So egregious, so totalizing was Mishima’s death, that it would subsume his legacy. “They will forget the beauty of his Sound of Waves,” he lamented.

“They will recall the sado-masochistic parts of his fictionalized autobiography, Confessions of a Mask, but that book's beautiful prose will be ignored. And The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, about the crazed young priest who burns down one of Japan's finest buildings, will be talked about because of its protagonist's single-mindedness of purpose, not because of its author's skill at psychological writing.”

More of Brudnoy’s frustration, though, appears to be political. He correctly placed Mishima in Japan’s political history. “Mishima’s politics echoed the self-righteousness of the ultra-Right in the 1920s and 1930s, those who wished to usher in a regime of discipline, to ‘restore’ Japan's native virtues.” Yet, where the ultranationalists had succeeded in the mid-1930s, Brudnoy said, their heirs – Mishima et al – would fail, “despite the suicides and perhaps assassinations that will now be perpetrated by dissident elements, left and right, in Japan.”

Brudnoy’s specific complaint was against Mishima as a revolutionary rightist and the contradictory way he oriented himself toward modernity. “His mission, to restore Japan to some fanciful pristine purity, will fail,” Brudnoy remarked. “Mishima will have died for nothing.” Far from glorying in Mishima’s message, the National Review obit concluded that “Japan's most exciting young writer, perhaps her best, is dead at 45, victim of his own fanaticism.”

A year and a half later, Brudnoy had more space in NR to reflect on Mishima’s legacy in a review of an English translation of Spring Snow, the first book in the Sea of Fertility tetralogy. As a lover of Japanese literature, Brudnoy boosted Spring Snow as well as Mishima’s other novels, tentatively comparing him to Proust. He suggested Mishima’s death was born of aesthetic extremism: “he believed that he had attained the height of physical and literary development and was determined not to see his body decay into ugliness, or his imagination wither.”

He also zeroed in on Mishima’s contradictions. An “unlikely marriage” of tradition and modernity. Mishima’s political “movement” – Brudnoy used scare quotes to – “aimed nostalgically at a restoration of Japan's time-honored virtues.” But the way Mishima lived his life outside “that vaguely right-wing extremist corps of physically and spiritually ‘perfect’ young men” was shockingly modern. He was “comfortable in English; surrounded by Western (and modern) art: given on occasion, as the Japanologist Faubian Bowers frankly if indelicately revealed in the Village Voice soon after Mishima's death, to flying to New York for a one-night stand with some Caucasian young man; devoted to physical fitness; in love with beauty both corporeal and spiritual.” Once we recognize this, Brudnoy seemed to argue, Mishima’s revolutionary rightism seems to be artifice, affection – a “desperate whimsy.”

This contradiction is highlighted in the handful of other times Mishima comes up in National Review. Mishima’s letters “encapsulate his gaping dichotomies, kept in check by a mental effort akin to the physical one with which he built up his body from that of a wartime army reject to a fanatic body-builder's musculature as bulging as a Wagner opera” (from a pan of Paul Schrader’s Mishima).

Brudnoy’s analysis, though, comes close to arguments made by Andrew Rankin in his intellectual biography of Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist. Rankin deploys the concept of “aesthetic terrorism” in several useful ways, finding them in Mishima’s life and work.

Aesthetic terrorism “suggests the inevitable antisocial or amoral consequences of an extreme form of aestheticism that prioritizes beauty above all else. It denotes the aggressive shock tactics of modern art and the avant-garde.” It also describes an attack on aesthetics, though, through “aggressively sensual art that strives to erase the possibility of the disinterested pleasure of aesthetic appreciation.” It also “implies a general view of art as transgressive and oppositional.” Obviously, Rankin suggests, Mishima’s death is the apotheosis of aesthetic terrorism.

Like Brudnoy, Rankin says Mishima posed “as a radical conservative, a traditionalist struggling to preserve an ancient cultural essence that faces extinction in modernity.” He argues, though, “there is also a sense in which Mishima wants Japan to be in decline so that he can be its last defiant hero, a kamikaze of Japanese beauty.” Mishima’s cultural pessimism is in fact “typically modernist.”

To some extent, Brudnoy and National Review recognized this in Mishima, the modernist doth-protest-too-much of Mishima’s project and death, and found it unappealing or irrelevant.

In the same issue as the “Letter to Tokyo” in which Mishima first appears, Stephen Tonsor, a conservative and intellectual historian, reviewed three books on the revolutionary right. Tonsor was a true-believing conservative in a strict meaning of the term. For him, conservatism had little to do with the revolutionary right. “This conservative tradition is as antithetical to the revolutions of the Right as it is to the revolutions of the Left,” he wrote.

Tonsor found the books faulty in their fixation on assessing the revolutionary rightists for the origins of fascism. “The right revolutionary and the left revolutionary were blood brothers. Both saw the world in essentially pessimistic terms,” Tonsor wrote. The left opposed a decadence of class; the right a decadence of “usually biological or religious in origin.” For revolutionists, “Struggle lay at the heart of all things and was the key to all creative transformation. The struggle might be class, or national or racial: its sources were fundamentally irrational.” The revolutions of the twentieth century, he argued, were movements of “mass man.” Rather, they were led by “intellectuals manipulating significant minorities” who knocked over teetering societies by hitting “pressure points where minimum force could produce maximum disruption.”

Mishima repelled because his radicalism had little to do with the conservatives’ self-understanding. But also because Mishima’s stagey coup attempt failed so spectacularly as to reveal the absurd, aesthetic posturing of his politics.