The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima 9780313057526, 9780275979850

Citation preview

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

This page intentionally left blank

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima JERRYS. PIVEN

PRAEGER

Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Piven, Jerry S. The madness and perversion of Yukio Mishima / Jerry S. Piven. p. cm. Parts of translation from Japanese by the author. 1. Mishima, Yukio, 1925-1970—Psychology. I. Title. PL833.I7Z784 2004b 895.6'35—dc22 2004003663 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2004 by Jerry S. Piven All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004003663 ISBN: 0-275-97985-7 First published in 2004 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Miyoko

Her breasts were immediately before me wet with perspiration. .. . And it comforted me to think that, like the evening sun buried beneath myriad layers of clouds, the gelatinous flesh before my eyes would soon be lying deep in night's dark grave. —The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, pp. 244/228-229

Beauty was seizing a final opportunity to brandish its power over me and lash me with impotence. —The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, p. 272/256

Contents A Note on Translation

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

17

2

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

51

3

Steel and Wax: Icarus and the Decay of the Angel

79

4

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism: Psychological and Sociocultural Analysis of Mishima

99

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

135

Impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

187

5 6 7 8

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with

the Sea

207

Psychological Postscript

231

Conclusion

243

Chronology

247

References

251

Index

265

This page intentionally left blank

A Note on Translation Some of the passages quoted in this book are my translations, accomplished only with the gracious help of Dr. Yuko Katsuta and my wife Miyoko. My quotations from "A Forest in Full Flower" and Forbidden Colors are also borrowed from Daniel Sullivan's previously unpublished translations. Though the English translations of Mishima are excellent, there are occasions when I wish to convey a nuance not expressed in the other translations. This is hardly a criticism of the other translators, and I must express my deep respect for their skills. Newly translated passages are indicated by page numbers from the Japanese text, followed by the page numbers in English translation, for scholarly and reference purposes.

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments I would like to thank first of all Debora Carvalko of Greenwood Publishing for giving me the opportunity for my psychoanalytic explorations. I am extremely grateful to those who listened, encouraged, advised, and warned me during the writing of this book. Jacob Arlow graciously read the first two chapters before I submitted them to the Psychoanalytic Review. He wrote me a long, careful analysis, brimming with enthusiasm and encomium, and advised me to pursue this project. I must also thank Zvi Lothane for reading and publishing my manuscripts, and for being a fine teacher with an irreverent sense of humor. I have always sent my experiments and expositions to my former graduate adviser David L. Miller, who not only read my articles amidst the hundred dissertations with which he was inundated but also sent back ardent praise. Jacques Szaluta kindly read my manuscripts and tried to help me tell a story rather than a case history encumbered by stultifying jargon. He is a good friend. I would like to thank those with whom I have discussed Mishima over the years. Donald Keene was my professor at Columbia, and though he will no doubt disdain and object strenuously to this book, I certainly enjoyed learning from him. I had the good fortune to meet John Nathan in person and discuss Mishima over the phone with him, comparing the perversion in Mishima's texts with the fascinating bisexual fantasies in the latest Oe book he translated. Peter Brooks and Barnaby Barratt each gave me sagacious advice on how to write psychoanalytically without reducing everything to formulaic flotsam. I hope I have responded to their advice— certainly my idiosyncrasies cannot be blamed on them. I had many enjoyable conversations with my friend Yuko Katsuta, who was also helpful

XII

Acknowledgments

with the Japanese criticism of Mishima that takes me sheer eons to pore and puzzle over. I must also express deepest gratitude to Dr. Katsuta for spending many hours helping me translate the nuances of several fascinating passages from Mishima's novels. I owe special thanks to Daniel Sullivan of Stanford University for permission to quote his translation of "Hanazakari No Mori/' I expect great things from Mr. Sullivan in the nottoo-distant future! I will thank my wife last because nothing can ever follow her. Aside from the many hours spent assisting a rusty professor with his failing Japanese, her love, patience, endurance, humor, and intelligence buoyed me through some distressing times and brought me back to the pleasure of playing with ideas. She was always there with a brilliant insight or a cat to drop in my lap if ever I drifted a little too deeply into Mishima's eerie world.

Introduction

What is so ghastly about exposed intestines? Why must we cover our eyes in horror when we see a person's innards? Why does gushing blood arouse such astonishment? Why are intestines so hideous? . . . Isn't it utterly identical to the beauty of glistening youthful skin? If human beings could but invert their souls and bodies, gracefully roll them inside out like rose petals, and expose them to the sun and May breeze. —The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, pp. 62-63/58 You weren't afflicted with leprosy.... Youth never perishes, the Body is deathless. —The Terrace of the Leper King, p. 218 INTRODUCTION Why a psychoanalytic study of Yukio Mishima? K. R. Eissler suggested that great artists suffer from "the pathology of genius." Mishima (19251970) was undoubtedly one of the most prolific and creative writers of this century, author of some 40 novels, 33 plays, over 80 short stories, and voluminous essays. He is also one of Japan's most complex and "perverse" authors, one whose immensely violent homoerotic imagery and fascistic politics have aroused hostile criticism, idealizing fantasies, and militant devotion. Mishima is perhaps the most published and well-known Japanese author. Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata called him an extraordinary talent, the kind of genius that comes along perhaps once in three centuries. He has been compared to Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, Honore de

2

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and even James Joyce. He is said to practice the introspection of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Phillip Roth, venturing places few have glimpsed and forcing readers to face their own darkness. His beautiful prose and thematic intensity earned him the reputation of an outstanding novelist, though some critics see him as a self absorbed onanistic hack of minimal talent or importance. Mishima was also an eccentric exhibitionist who posed nude for bizarre and surreal photographs, appeared in gangster films, and played the part of a Hollywood celebrity. Amid his ludicrous flamboyance, Mishima espoused a philosophy of death and pure devotion. He sought to resurrect the diminished glory and noble beauty of Japan, adopted the pose of an intrepid samurai, and beseeched the nation for a return to emperor worship. He asked who would hurl himself against the constitution and die for his country and even sanctified assassination for this divine mission. In fiction and film, Mishima envisaged the tragically beautiful and erotic death of ritual suicide, the noble and sensual expulsion of blood and intestines. Thus, Mishima's sexual perversity and fascistic politics have been treated with apprehension by his readers and critics, especially after he begat his own revolution by seizing a self-defense force base with a small personal army and disemboweled himself as a final protest against the cancer of moral decadence consuming his nation. Not surprisingly, Japanese people are often uneasy and reticent about Mishima, as though he were an embarrassment, and his readers perverse fanatics. His devotees in Japan contribute to this unease. His portrayals of desperation and nihilism in postwar Japan still incite a modicum of Japanese youth to a frenzied call for the return to samurai ethics. Mishima is worshiped by a society of militant youths who march to the Imperial Palace on the anniversary of his death and demand the return of Japan to its noble martial glory. There has long been a "Mishima cult" in France, though his following outside Japan consists largely of gay populations who champion him, and innumerable Internet sites devoted to homosexual artists claim him as one of their own despite the fad that Mishima (1951-1953) expressed derision for homosexuals and depicted them as pitiable, manipulative, predatory, vain, and ultimately unhappy. What arouses such divergent adoration and discomfort? Whether this apprehension pertains to the autoeroticism and homosexuality of Mishima's Confessions of a Mask (Kamen No Kokuhaku, 1949), an ostensible identification with Nazism in My Friend Hitler (Waga Tomo Hittora, 1968a), or the political satire and martial emperor worship vividly delineated in The Sea of Fertility (Hojo No Umi, 1964-1970), his life and writing are a palimpsest of early trauma, severe conflict, narcissistic injury, the obsession with death, sadomasochism, vengeance, and the terror of disintegration. So why not a psychological study? After over 15 years of reading and

introduction

3

teaching Mishima's fiction, of poring over texts streaming with innumerable fantasies of raping and killing young beautiful boys, of scenes of masturbating to images of slain men, of ceaseless loathing for despicable women, of so many scenarios of vengeance, my question is why no one has yet penned a thorough exploration of Mishima's psyche. After all, just how many scenes, such as one confessing to his first ejaculatio while looking at a painting of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows, does one need before an inquiry into the fantasy is warranted? How many beautiful boys murdered, cats disemboweled, mocking women hallucinated before one is seduced by the fascinating complexity and strangeness of such writing? There have been some psychological analyses, both by amateurs and by professionals, but few sustained psychological inquiries. Of course, every reader tries to understand the motives of the characters of a novel or even of an author. Despite the fact that readers attempt to glean such motives, I have frequently been surprised that so few critics have believed that psychology could actually bring anything relevant to the discussion, as though Mishima's ideas and fantasies could be so easily explained (or often dismissed). Is it audacious to believe that perhaps psychological expertise might help explain elements of fantasy and emotion that might otherwise remain opaque? I am not sure how those without psychological training can endeavor to understand the complexities and motives of suicide, for example. Is it so obvious why Mishima might imagine scenes of homosexual rape, voyeurism, murder, or sexualization of violence? Is it not intriguing how an adolescent protagonist of a novel secretly watches his mother masturbate, spying on her through a peephole only when he is angry while disdaining her vagina? Is it not unexpected that a narrator might describe his wish to murder his lover and kiss his dying lips as he quivers spasmodically? Is the emotional life of men bent on revenging themselves against women by humiliation so transparent? How about the fact that as an infant, Mishima was taken from his parents by an exceptionally domineering and volatile grandmother and kept in the darkness of her fetid sickroom for the first 12 years of his life? Can one reasonably expect that this had no dramatic influence on Mishima? In fact, it is impossible for this early life not to have been uniquely traumatic, for it not to have imprinted itself on his psyche and saturated his emotions and fantasies. I believe that there is far more to Mishima's fantasies than meets the eye and, far from being an arrogant pretension, I believe that a psychological reading may shed some light on Mishima's fantasy life. For it is not clear why someone might represent such virulent hatred of women in his work, why he might be so preoccupied with death, or why he might disembowel himself. Even such tangible things as death and intestines are elusive metaphors, signifiers, and fantasies that are far more slippery than

4

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

one might suspect and need to be deconstructed or, perhaps more aptly, dissected. 1 In academia, the claim that one mode of discourse brings a unique perspective arouses hostile accusations of "imperialism" and pretensions of "privileged" knowledge (cf. Brooks, 1994, p. 23). My claim here is that psychoanalysis cannot bring the truth to the investigation of an author, but it can shed light on elements relatively obscure and misperceived without that lens. For instance, is it not of some use to know that research on suicide reveals certain common fantasies, such as punishing the bad internal object (hurting someone else in oneself), killing off one's bad qualities, being reborn purified, and reunited with loved ones who now forgive one for those evil qualities he had in life? Is it not useful to know that misogyny often contains elements of unconscious fear and envy, aside from rage (and that such rage is a displacement) or that voyeurism is a complex amalgam of fantasies, such as the wish to violate as well as possess the other, infiltrate and defend against abandonment, and be the other as well as the self? Psychoanalysis is no claim of omniscience, but I would make the claim that we have learned something from its efforts. METHOD AND MADNESS Of course, one might ask which theories or evidence one would be applying to the text. First of all, I am not applying anything. Psychoanalysis is used as a reference for comparison. Wittgenstein's question is relevant here: what can one thing show us about another thing (cf. Smith, 1982, p. 35)? Just because some suicides contain fantasies of immaculate resurrection does not mean this applies to Mishima. Comparativism alerts us to dynamics we might not otherwise suspect (Doniger, 1998; Smith, 1982, 1990). One may compare clinical research on voyeurism and suicide to the novel, to its language, to the metaphors and events, and see whether it resonates in some way with the tensions within the text. Application does violence to a text; comparativism sounds and amplifies the text (cf. Binion, 1981; Brooks, 1994, pp. 37-40). Second, psychoanalysis is more than theory or clinical evidence. It is an epistemic move—a challenge to the way we conceive the mind, a radical approach to questioning the way we think, imagine, and (mis)perceive reality, refusing to take conscious certainty, conviction, and claims to selfknowledge as final. In this sense, psychoanalysis is not about any particular theory or fact without which the endeavor must collapse. It is a deconstructive and postmodern mode of inquiry—meaning here not a contention that there is no truth but rather addressing the means of imagination and conception, questioning the conscious and manifest content of text, assaying the symbolic or alternative significations of meaning,

Introduction

5

exploring the elusive complexities to elucidate what may be unconscious in texts.2 I wish to linger on this for a moment, to make clear what a psychoanalytic reading of Mishima will entail. As exercised here, psychoanalysis is an epistemological instrument that calls systems of belief and meaning into question in a radical fashion. As practiced by Freud, psychoanalysis was (among other things) a "hermeneutics of suspicion," an insight and technique that arrayed him to peer into the dynamics and motives of the hidden, the unstated, the manifest fantasy projected into reality in order to sequester painful thoughts, memories, and impulses from consciousness and from others. Freud employed the psychoanalytic method to delve into those secret aspects of the self that were impelling the guise of conscious thoughts and feelings, to pursue the latent wishes, fears, and conflicts distorted, obfuscated, displaced, and denied by the fantasies and certainties of the patient. Freud sought to trace the images and beliefs of the subject through their distortions and disguises into the unconscious, to uncover the camouflage of representational language and reveal the complex motivational dynamics underneath. And though this procedure has been described as a "hermeneutics of suspicion" because Freud suspected that every statement, gesture, word, and image had unstated and symbolic content censored from consciousness defensively and fearfully, psychoanalysis is far more than mere hermeneutics. The supposition of the hermeneutic enterprise is that the hidden can be uncovered beneath the horizon of representation. Psychoanalysis renounces the concept of a pure moment of unconcealment (Barratt, 1993, p. 180). The psyche is far more complicated and labyrinthine—not just a matter of stated and hidden but a vastly deceptive and dynamic system of processes. The unstated was not as simple as merely having been veiled to consciousness, but was discovered as the conflation of meanings and images transposed, dismembered, disjointed. One often arrives at dead ends, avenues that lead into bizarre dream images and disconnected meanings. One expecting a simple motive hidden behind the arras would find Alice's wonderland. Disguise, fraud, distortion, and simulacra are not predictable and not static. The unconscious generates symbolic imagery, not just signs that are decoded. 3 One cannot assume, for example, that a staircase or shoe represents a vagina. The life history of the subject places unique feelings and associations on the imagery of the mind, which must be traced with the ingenuity of a detective who finds only mysterious clues and residues to be deciphered. When a cigar is just a proverbial cigar, it still probably has a host of unconscious symbolic affect behind its literal representation. This is not a hermeneutics of paranoia. It is not that things can never be as they seem but that they are always compromise formations (cf. Brenner, 1982; Thompson, 1994). Love may be love. It does not have to be a reaction

6

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

formation against hostility, or an oral dependence and attachment, or the pathological result of a transference. Nevertheless, to believe that the motives for our emotions, character, and thoughts are not composed of many unconscious fantasies is also unrealistic. We are all symbolic creatures, hidden as much from ourselves as from others. Thus, psychoanalysis can be an epistemological implement that unveils and traces the compromise formations and symbolic meaning of our beliefs, our ideas, and actions. (There can be many complex and contradictory meanings, not only one decisive meaning of an emotion. As shall be seen in this book, I try to clarify just how elusive and complex, even contradictory, Mishima's motives and imagery were.) Psychoanalysis calls into question the rationality of belief and finds that the manifest content of character itself is composed of far more irrationality and fantasy than we would like to believe. Components of psychoanalytic theory have been proven wrong, flawed, or insufficient in a number of ways, and researches both psychoanalytic and experimental have made revisions and contributions that are highly significant. This is hardly an orthodox Freudian reading of Mishima. However, in order to call into question the epistemological foundations, premises, justifications, and rationales of a given belief system or ideology, one must ask the right questions and have the implements to discern the unstated, the distorted, the disguised, and the fantastical masquerading as truth. I believe that a psychoanalytic approach, not just its means of classifying psychological phenomena, is precisely that stratagem that enables us to explore the symbolic and unpredictable (even chaotic and nonlinear) dynamics of consciousness and belief. Psychoanalysis explores the nature of knowing, calls into question the problem of knowledge itself. Psychoanalysis may be described as a science of depositioning and subverting the epistemological pretensions of knowing. Thought is far more complex and unconsciously motivated than ego consciousness would like to believe. And while we feel that we think and understand, we are driven by wishes and fears far more dreamlike and more deviant from what consciousness maintains. Psychoanalysis therefore endeavors to identify and delve into the dynamisms of fetishized belief, of libidinal investment in conceptions that provide certainty and knowledge against the fears of unknowing (Ogden, 1989). As Barnaby Barratt (1993) writes, "By setting normal discourse against itself, psychoanalysis pursues a changeful inquiry upon the inferiority of psychic reality. It is both scientific and emancipatory" (p. 173). Psychoanalysis therefore seeks to undermine the projection and solidification of its own certainties; it is perpetually engaged in an epistemological enterprise that disallows its own speculations from becoming the final measure of all phenomena and continually reflects on itself in order to avoid seduction into pretensions of redefining the world according to

Introduction

7

its own ineluctable truths. And psychoanalysis is misunderstood when conceived as "yet another system of interpretation, a set of constructions to be imposed, ideologically, on the subtleties and vicissitudes of life's events" (p. 15): . . . psychoanalytic method is a work of interrogation against propositional imperatives—that is, against the very structuring of our lives by conceptual or categorical systems—as if to expose, by a critical passage of free-associative thinking and speaking, the very ground and horizon of experiencing and understanding as the fundamental devices of our own imprisonments, (p. 20) What is unsealed are the psychodynamics of epistemic closure whereby consciousness believes its own falsifications, self-deceptions, and illusions projected on reality as truth and causality (p. 169). A psychoanalytic reading attempts to trace and expose such projections in their polysemous complexity, calling into question the nature of knowledge itself and, as stated, even its own capacity to know its subject matter. Thus, this book is an assay, an attempt at elucidation, and an invitation to dialogue and refutation. Finally, I believe that an author and a text can teach us psychology. Nietzsche said of Dostoyevsky that he was the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. Does not Dostoyevsky flesh out the excruciating madness of the psyche in so many intense forms? It was during years of reading Mishima that I began to think seriously about the motives for voyeurism, misogyny, sexual violence, and suicide. I sounded my inferences from Mishima against psychoanalytic researches to grasp further knowledge. If my readings on voyeurism, for example, focused on hostility and sexual arousal, Mishima's literary voyeuristic scenarios also exposed the pain of loss, abandonment, alienation, an anxiety ontologically amalgamated with his inquiry into the real, whether he existed, whether he could also be seen and have substance. In this sense, I hope that an investigation of the madness and perversion of Mishima can exemplify, embody, and teach us about the psyche (not only about himself). As Hulme states in his Speculations, "An artist makes you realize with intensity . . . something which you did not perceive before" (Hillman, 1986, p. 269n). But how does one know whether an author's writing is a fantasy? I don't want to fall into the naive and embarrassing trap of assuming that any word must confess the deepest and most authentic feelings of a writer. What can one glean of an author from his fiction? When trying to understand a text, it is always difficult to distinguish between the fantasies and observations of an author. One cannot conclude that John Lennon felt a sexual comfort in firearms just because he sang about it abstrusely in "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" (1968) or that a walrus (1967) was one personality of his dissociative identity disorder. One cannot conclude that

8

The Madness and Perveision of Yukio Mishima

Nabokov must have been a pedophile just because he ruminated on pedophilia so disturbingly in Tolita (1955). Art cannot be reduced to confession. The space of fantasy, as Ricoeur (1974, 1976) terms it, allows the observer to experience a modicum of the subject empathically, to imagine the experience of the dramatic subject without implicating the work as mere confession of immorality or perversion. The genius resides in conveying that imagination in ways the reader can experience, revolting though such experience may be. Nevertheless, there are times when a writer is convincingly confessing emotional involvement with his or her themes, when the writing expresses an intense struggle rather than an objective or dispassionate observation. (Observation and confession are always present, but each to what degree?) One cannot read the frenetic histrionics of Dostoyevsky without appreciating his incredible psychological insight amidst an intense confession of excruciating shame, humiliation, rage, and despair. Dostoyevsky cannot escape his torturous conflicts—he is plagued by his reminiscences and repeats his sufferings in a most exhibitionistic, even masochistic, fashion. One cannot evade these agonies in Dostoyevsky Yukio Mishima also repeats his fantasies and his conflicts throughout his literature. Mishima grants us the luxury of perceiving the sheer repetition of his obsessive rumination on misogyny, betrayal, and vengeance. His writings ever replay his fantasies without respite, always expressing a variant dimension of this compulsive confession, never escaping a consistent imaginary scenario, though the players vary. Thus, one of the phenomena I explore in this book is the reliving and repetition of critical conflicts and trauma through fictional fantasies that simultaneously rework archaic psychological material and unconsciously dissociate such feelings and conflicts from conscious awareness by placing them on a stage, reenacted with other fictive personalities. In attempting to understand Mishima, it is important to note those themes that recur in his work. Mishima consistently uses similar characters and conflicts in his fiction, often centering around an obsession with death, tragic love, erotic violence, and a solipsistic absorption in perverse and narcissistic fantasies. Mishima sought to evoke in life and art an image of the aesthetic lyricism and eroticism of beauty, ecstasy and death. 4 The protagonists of his novels are surrogates for himself, his ideas, and his aesthetics. These personae are split between his real inferior self and the self he wishes to become, possess, and merge with. Mishima also requires witnesses for the dramatic actions and proclamations of his heroes, as the acts of seeing, exhibiting, and being seen sustain the sensual dramatics of his novels (and life). It should be noted that a psychological reading of an author may be at a variance with the way the author sees himself and the way he views the artistic creation. As Nietzsche (1882) said of artists, they are like parents

Introduction

9

and least understand their own children (para. 369). Further, even when one seeks to communicate an intimate truth or to reveal oneself, what the reader is given is the personality construct the author wishes to express, and this may be very different from who that person really is. Even the most intimate confessions are self-concepts and self-representations, which are always constructs and fictions ineluctably hiding and distorting elements of one's true nature. As Erich Gould (1981) says in Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature, people wish to communicate, and they wish to disguise. Even their communications are unconscious distortions of their true selves and unconsciously communicate more than the confessor knows. As Lacan (1966) says, the idea of the subject is not identical with the presence that is speaking to you: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (pp. 90,166). One often confesses what one wants others to believe or even what one wants to believe about oneself, and this is invariably self-deceptive to some degree. Mishima (1968d) states in his philosophical treatise Sun and Steel (Taiyo To Tetsu) that his literary career has been an attempt to disguise himself (p. 71). Therefore, even when one examines his autobiographical work Confessions of a Mask, one must especially be on guard for self-fictionalization, or "auto-mythologizing," as Peter Homans (1979) phrases the invention of distorted self-narrative. Mishima wall therefore be read as a psychoanalyst reads a patient, understanding the language, narrative, memory, and imagery of the subject as a manifest tapestry of highly symbolic contents and fantasies. If there is a paucity of free associations and an inability to interrogate Mishima, there are thousands of pages of proclamations, images, and cadences that one can peruse infinitely that will not evaporate after their transient verbal utterance. The fiction "affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield" (Shelley, 1818, p. 5). Whether one listens with the third ear (Reich) or rather with a sense for nonsense, suspending the subject's certainties until their last mirages have been consumed (Lacan), whether one reads between the blinds (Derrida) or awaits revealing excesses (Nietzsche), the task here is to trace the complexities of Mishima's prodigious and deranged genius. The last thing I want to do is reduce Mishima to an Oedipus complex or some hackneyed formula that desiccates his writing and soul to desultory minutiae. If any jargon or psychoanalytic terminology is used, it is for the purpose of explaining and understanding rather than reducing Mishima or pegging him as this or that negative-sounding diagnosis. This work is essentially psychological catachresis: filling in some of the gaps in our understanding of our author and his fiction (cf. Brooks, 1994, p. 42). It seeks to shed light and make new connections rather than funneling everything into categories. Catachresis interrogates language, image, what

10

I he Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

is avoided, distorted, distended, to invoke and evoke what is not being said, to subvert meaning and denude the fantasy/1 It should be remembered that a psychoanalytic reading does subvert the author by claiming there is more than conscious intention involved (actually, in academia today, it is commonly stated that there are no more authors or intentions). However, it is not a way o{ derogating, insulting, demeaning, or criticizing someone to discuss his or her fantasies, conflicts, frailties, or even psychopathology. Too many of us believe that revealing human frailty demeans and diminishes, exposes weakness, victimizes, and humiliates. Psychology may be used this way by some, but one tenet many psychoanalysts share wholeheartedly is that we are all beset by illusions, self-deceptions, conflicts, and neuroses (if not worse). Most of us lie to ourselves, refuse to acknowledge some of our real feelings, distort reality, act out various problems and inflict them on others. But very few of us are geniuses and talented authors, and my exposition of Mishima's fantasy life, motives, or frailties only makes him as human as the rest of us, perhaps more conflicted and mad than some, but nevertheless still uniquely brilliant and fascinating in ways that no "diagnosis" would or could erase. For those who resist laying bare Mishima's soul, as though this were an obscene public dissection, I would encourage them to remember that this is no diminution of the author and to ask themselves further why perhaps Mishima needs to be an invulnerable hero without frailties. What does an author mean to us when we cannot allow him to be human? I would encourage readers resistant to a psychological reading to spare themselves the aggravation. One need not read further unless one is open to a psychological analysis of Mishima. To paraphrase Nietzsche, if one wishes to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then one will believe what is most comfortable. If one wishes to learn something new, then one must invariably encounter painful and frustrating ideas that are threatening or seem absurd. TERMINOLOGY At this point, I should define my terminology: what do the terms "perversion" and "madness" mean? 6 By perversion I do not mean something morally reprehensible or "abnormal." In classical psychoanalysis, perversion is described as investment in sexual excitations, motives, or practices that are not genital but are either required for orgasm or replace the sexual organs as the foci of sexual activity. In other words, an excitation in homosexuality, voyeurism, transvestitism, fetishism, sadism, or masochism, for example, that is required for orgasm or becomes the source of climax rather than (hetero)sexual intercourse (cf. F7reud, 1905; Laplanche & Pontalis, 1967, pp. 306-309). One cannot achieve orgasm without fondling the

Introduction

11

underwear or stiletto heels or using them for orgasm instead of attaining intimacy with a partner. (James Joyce eventually said that all he needed was Nora's underwear.) Freud (1927) wrote that fetishists desire the penis but are afraid to admit it, so they substitute other objects like noses or feet for penises and thus achieve gratification without the horror of confronting their shameful homosexuality. This sounds a bit archaic and has been revised significantly since Freud. (Though Freud stated that human beings had an intrinsic disposition to bisexuality, and thus homosexuality could not be considered inherently pathological, homosexuality retained its pervasive stigma as an illness, whereas it is no longer considered innately perverse by many analysts.) 7 But the principle is still sensible to some: if one needs an inanimate object, fears the genitalia and must find symbolic substitutes, and focuses on nongenital organs or paraphernalia in order to achieve orgasm, this tends to indicate some sort of deep unresolved conflict. This does not mean that excitation by any such organs or paraphernalia is perverse, that the wonderful variety of sexual games and diversity are evidence of conflict or psychopathology (Kernberg, 1992; Stoller, 1975, p. xviiiff.). Some authors believe that the term "perverse" nevertheless connotes a negative moral valuation, and thus writers such as Joyce McDougall (1982, 1995) prefer the term "neosexuality." But McDougall sees invented sexualities formerly called perverse as defenses against psychotic anxiety and fragmentation, and thus certain sexual tactics can be understood as strategies of attaining security and pleasure in the face of deep conflicts and terrors. Stoller (1975) sees perversions as ways of coping with threats to gender identity, to one's sense of masculinity or femininity (p. xii). He also defines perversion as the erotic form of hatred, a subtle means of inflicting anger and violence during erotic acts even though the lovers may have no conscious awareness of their need to hurt, violate, punish, or humiliate their partners (pp. xi, 4ff.). The elucidation of perverse sexualities thus entails tracing not only the obvious sadistic fantasies but also more elusive and unconscious rage and malice suffusing erotic desire. I believe that Mishima adopted and fantasized a number of perverse or neosexual strategies for coping with horrific terror and loss, including misogyny, the sexualization of violence, sadomasochistic fantasies, even his homosexual interactions, which in his case (not necessarily in other cases) implicate real emotional problems—as he often knew, Stoller (1975) also believes that perversions recapitulate the sexual and emotional development of the individual, that they represent the "remnants" and "ruins" of one's history (p. xiv).8 The sexual act is a symbolic and unconscious repetition of this traumatic or painful past (cf. Binion, 1981; Miller, 1982; Stern, 1988). One of the central arguments of this book is that Mishima's erotic imagery "takes the form in fantasy of revenge hidden in the actions that make up the perversion and serves to

12

I he Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

convert childhood trauma to adult triumph" (Stoller, 1975, p. 4). For Mishima, sexuality disguises and restages fear and suffering, erotic vengeance and triumph, simultaneous memorialization and eradication of traumatic sexual history, transforming humiliation and terror into orgasm, vengeance, and victory. Repetition is reenactment and escape, transcendence, erasing the past as it reenvisions it symbolically (Stoller, 1975, pp. 4-9). 9 One may argue that the term "perversion" is culturally relative, that the word inherently implies and imposes imperialistically a universal definition of normality. Here I would offer two counterarguments. First, the eroticism examined here is not considered abnormal and judged before the fact. Mishima's eroticism is analyzed according to significations of anger, conflict, repetition, fantasies of rage, hatred, vengeance, compulsivity, and fear. Second, the issue of whether something is "normal" or "deviant" is useful only inasmuch as the deviance may indicate problems in socialization. Of course, abnormal things can be signs of "health" or evolution. However, this analysis again does not impose categories on Mishima to label him. Hostile fantasies of rape can be considered to signify unresolved trauma, rage, and conflict regardless of how the culture interprets such imagery. A culture will least often interpret its normative behavior as deriving from psychological sources, especially if such behavior is socially accepted and pleasurable (detractors may disparage such behavior, but those participating tend to defend or ennoble it). This says very little about how conflicted, violent, or oppressive such behavior is. 1 need not assume that foreign behaviors similar to those in my native environment mean the same thing, but then again, I need not assume that someone else's native interpretation is valid either. If a Japanese colleague explains Mishima's suicide as a noble revival (hypothetically), 1 need not judge seppuku or assume anything about it. But I need not accept his interpretation either and may probe its imagery, language, and symbology for fantasies and motives that seem utterly alien to my colleague as well. 1 would certainly never argue, for example, that Americans are fully aware of their own culture and know it deeply I would maintain that any individual and culture is susceptible to fantasies that distort its nature, satisfy its need to modify its self-perceptions, displace conflicts and anxieties (one may even say that culture is such a network of fantasies). Unless one is prepared to accept such cultural flights of the imagination as American supremacy (or the German belief in Nazi supremacy or the Japanese conviction of their own superiority, both common in the early twentieth century), we must acknowledge that one's interpretation of oneself or one's culture is largely fantasy. Again, the task of a psychoanalysis is to explore and elucidate these fantasies. To conclude, then, my use of the term "perversion" is psychological but not imposed. It is an attempt to read the tensions within Mishima's life and texts. It is certainly not a moral judgment.

Introduction

13

And what of madness? I do not mean that Mishima was psychotic, that he was a raving lunatic or hallucinating schizophrenic. He was no Hitler, Manson, or bin Laden (there are those who debate the madness of even such men). Psychosis is usually defined by the presence of delusions and auditory or visual hallucinations. One can certainly argue that the figures mentioned above all suffer from delusions, including the fantasy that God (or other occult entity) sanctifies extermination of their enemies. They display massively powerful paranoid anxieties and delusions, along with a compulsive need to liquidate others. Megalomania, paranoia, and the genocidal impulse are fair indicators of deep psychopathology. I am not concurring with so many critics and others who, like Cabinet Member Sato (cf. Stokes, 1974), disdain Mishima and consider him mad or insane in the vernacular sense. But Mishima did experience tremendously injurious emotional experiences that are reflected in extremely violent fantasies. He did act out certain deep conflicts in his personal and fantasy life, and though it may seem unfair, I will make the case that his suicide reflects tortured internal conflicts. Madness here refers to the existence and enactment of serious emotional injuries resulting in psychological debilitations, pervasive conflicts, compulsions and avoidances, ceaseless and trenchant symptoms of serious problems. Mishima was not crazy. In some ways he was more perceptive and more anchored in reality than most of us. But disturbed he was, and suffering persecution from within. He experienced schizoidal withdrawal, paranoid fears of abandonment and death, furious but displaced hatred toward both sexes, masochistic self-destructiveness, toxic and crippling influences of an almost inconceivably painful early life. He had enduring trouble loving. Mishima's literature enacts his madness and suspends it in inaction, it is a means of expression and survival: it is artistic genius, without which he may not have been able to endure life as long as he did, but it is also compulsive and persecutory. ITINERARY The first two chapters of this book provide a psychological overview of Mishima, including a summary of his early life and the salient events that were recast in his fiction. These chapters are the most clinical and contain lengthy psychoanalytic analysis. I have endeavored to provide a mode of complexity and depth that I believe requires a psychological language, an inquiry into the symbolic and symptomatic aspects of his obsessive fantasies that may not be perceptible with a lens other than the psychological. Chapter 3 attempts to flesh out the deeply personal and psychological nature of his philosophy of death, focusing on two images that recur in Mishima's writing most prominently toward the end of his life: the beautiful immortal body and the decaying, decrepit angel.

14

1 he Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

Chapter 4 addresses postwar Japan, the impact of atomic trauma on sexuality, and some of the literary criticism that I believe misses the symbolic and psychodynamic elements of Mishima's ideology and aesthetics. This chapter also focuses on the fantasies infusing Mishima's politics and emperor worship. Chapters 5 through 7 analyze three novels by Mishima that I believe display the spectrum of his talents, madness, and perversion. Chapter 5 discusses Mishima's narcissistic and homosexual fantasies, vengeance against women and the vagina, the malicious wish to humiliate, and the

schizoid withdrawal from love in Forbidden Colors. Chapter 6 explores the

adoration and hatred of beauty in Mishima's novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, how rage and malice can be displaced into symbols of death and persecution, as well as the dynamics of vengeance against women and mortality. Chapter 7, regarding The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, investigates the intricacies of resentment, despair, abandonment, and grandiosity. The chapter focuses on the equation of women with decay and imprisonment and fantasies of glory and salvation by powerful men. Though these chapters sometimes repeat what was said earlier, I believe that dissecting Mishima thematically tends to dismember the author and narrative. Such dismembering is useful, but it may also render the narrative a dissociated or random body of segments that can leave readers without any cohesive image of the writing. 1 prefer to tell a story, and so in these chapters I discuss Mishima's themes as they cohere in each novel as a gestalt. Each novel contains numerous thematic repetitions, and thus I may discuss subjects such as vengeance and misogyny in each, but ideally each novel will expose a further dimension of such themes. In my psychological postscript and concluding chapter, [ reflect on the psychological analysis of Mishima and the intriguing but painful life of one of the world's most contentious artists. NOTES l.The term "signifier" is borrowed from the legacy of linguistics, semiotics, and deconstruction. It connotes not what something "is" but only the sound image or object of perception that harkens back to a concept, not a thing. For example, death may be a biological fact, but death is imagined very differently and may signify sleep, decay, bliss, or any number of complicated ideas that are not innately conveyed by biological death. It is a slippery displacement of signification from a signifier that is not apparent (it is absent or "ontologicaliy indistinct"). The connection between what is presently evoked and where it came from is elusive. In this sense, the sign resembles the psychoanalytic concept of symbol, which also means an elusive displacement of what is not apparent. (Thus, symbol in psychoanalysis resembles sign in semiotics.) Symbol is not allegory, where one thing implies or represents something transparent and specific. The symbol involves mystification, and the task is to trace its elusiveness because what is being sym-

introduction

15

bolized is not obvious and may connote many and contradictory things. And signifiers as well do not inherently refer to anything, so the task here is tracing their complexity, what they are expressing, distorting, repressing, seducing, and so forth. 2. Deconstructionism and postmodernism are often perceived as arguments against the idea that anything can be true or that any analysis can be objective. Though some may conceive deconstructionism and postmodernism this way, my usage of deconstruction (there are many interpretations of what these words mean) refers to the subversion of assumptions and the attempt to test the boundaries of a text. It attempts to expose the problematic nature of a text or discourse, analyzing the conceptual limits and foundations. It may sometimes undermine claims of truth and objectivity, indeed complicates epistemological inquiries, but does not argue either that all analyses or perceptions are equally random, relative, valid, or subjective. My usage of postmodernism also connotes questioning accepted discourses, boundaries, and hierarchies. Though postmodernism is sometimes thought to subvert "master narratives," in this work I use psychoanalysis as a postmodern inquiry into both Mishima's self-narrative and the interpretations of Mishima that tend to exclude psychological readings. 3. It must be stated here that I am using the modern psychoanalytic definition of a symbol. Freud (1900) sometimes saw symbols as representative of constant unconscious meanings (cf. Laplanche & Pontalis, 1967, p. 439) but elsewhere used symbols to denote highly complex unconscious significations (1900, pp. 196-197). Contemporary psychoanalysts tend to view symbols in the latter fashion as any elusive manifestation of dream work and imagination. However, in modern literary parlance, a sign means what a symbol does in psychoanalysis, and a symbol is the direct representative of a meaning. This should be kept in mind so as not to misconstrue my point. 4. Nathan (in Lifton, 1979) states the aesthetic equation as "Beauty, Ecstasy, and Death" (p. 268). I cannot be sure how Nathan construes ecstasy, but here I mean both intense erotic pleasure and the obliteration of self (ex stasis, outside the self) that arrives with bloodshed, an orgasmic dissolution of ego boundaries in which self and other are merged through violent death. 5. Catachresis literally means "misuse" or "excessive use." Here language is used against itself, as J. Hillis Miller explains, "naming by figures of speech what cannot be named literally because it cannot be faced directly" (Taylor, 1989, p. 227). To turn language around on itself and subvert intention or discourse is filling in the gaps, naming what will not or cannot be said by the author, what is repressed, denied, anathema to consciousness and self-identity. 6.1 borrow some of the following material from my introduction to Eroticisms: Love, Sex, and Perversion (2003c), which contains further elucidation of perversion as a psychological and cultural phenomenon. 7. See Stoller (1975, chap. 2) for an appropriate revision of Freud's problematic conception of gender and Young (2003) for an eloquent discussion of perversion since Freud. 8. In fact, Stoller believes that sexual pathology is ubiquitous among heterosexuals, which crumbles the definition of normality (p. xvii). The question is how much fear and pain inform psychosexual development, how much conflict and

16

The Madness 7\nd Perversion of Yukio Mishima

compromise are required or imposed, what strategy preserves gender identity and the possibility of sexual pleasure after having endured such tribulations. 9. Some may attempt to reject these arguments on the basis of genetics, hormones, neurology, or conditioning. But I agree with Stoller here that until someone can explain pedophilia or shoe fetishism in genetic or evolutionary terms, we will have to examine the emotional issues of the person (p. 36ff.).

CHAPTER 1

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

In this overview, I attempt to discern the complex and perverse fantasies pervading the life and fiction of Yukio Mishima, one of Japan's greatest and most disturbed artists. If Mishima provided readers with glimpses of the most scintillating and disturbing images of homoeroticism, sadism, and bloodshed, a psychological analysis asks what might inspire such repeated scenarios. Much has been made of Mishima's misogyny and phallocentrism (there are also apologists who wish to dispel such accusations). Here the task is not to convince readers that Mishima was sexist or that this diminishes him as a person or artist but rather to illuminate why he might have felt such misogynistic proclivities. Why does a person come to fear and despise women and seek revenge against them? This overview seeks to trace the origins and development of these repeated fantasies, for there is a vast swathe of Mishima's emotional life and fiction that remains a mystery. So many of his images are impenetrable to understanding unless one develops a psychological sense of wrhy someone comes to feel sexual arousal at images of violence, why one might crave and require images of a resplendent self, why one might enjoy the idea that one's country may be obliterated. An appreciation for the unconscious—for the consequences of childhood terror, deprivation, and protracted shame and exposure to disease, decay, and death—is required, for it is these cadences that resound so sonorously in Mishima's prodigious work. Both his life and his literary creations lead me to believe that repeated injury to his sense of self and severe conflicts impelled him toward misogyny, obsessive concerns with sadistic urges, the ugliness of his body the desire for and resentment of beauty, and the drive to murder his own

18

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

weakness and sexual vulnerability. Mishima denudes misogyny itself, exposes the intense rage over abandonment and impingement that engender disgust for femininity, the need to escape feminine messiness through homoerotic pursuits and the gestation of a beautiful invulnerable body. Mishima continually fantasized about murdering his weak and shameful self-image and commingled this sadistic impulse with fantasies of sexual merger with murdered loves. Finally, Mishima was the murderer erotically eradicating his sexual vulnerability as both perpetrator and victim. His suicide was a repetition of this erotic sadistic fantasy PROLOGUE: O R I G I N S If even as a child he suffers from anxiety or fears, the defect will be a scar he carries to his grave. —The Way of the Samurai, p. 63 Why does the business of growing up one's recollections of growth itself—have to be so tragic? ''Cigarette/' p. 109 . . . an imprisoned active child before long transforms into a timid child.. . . — "A Forest in Full Flower/' p. 26 To begin I would like to review some of the important biographical details of Mishima's early life, for it is these essential and salient events that I believe so orchestrated his character and pervaded his fiction as fantasies, obsessions, and reenactments. Mishima had an unbelievably traumatic childhood filled with abuse and deep emotional deprivation. Born Kimitake Hiraoka January 14, 1925, Mishima was taken from his mother Shizue when he was less than two months old and virtually imprisoned for the first 12 years of his life in the dark, reeking sickroom of his highly unstable grandmother, "jealously, fiercely, hysterically guarding him against his parents and the outside world" (Nathan, 1974, p. 8). Grandmother Natsu manifested "insane possessiveness" of young Mishima, demanding and receiving absolute control of her grandson's life (p. 8). She was pathologically jealous, and if ever the boy resisted her, she interpreted this as preference for his mother and retaliated against Shizue vengefully. Natsu would fly into a rage if ever Mishima relied on his mother for anything (pp. 11-12). His mother needed permission to take him outside, and this was granted only when the weather was acceptable—only on sunny and windless days (pp. 8-9). The boy had to wear his winter coat and muffler and even a face mask through April and most of May. Forced to sit in the sickroom silently, he was allowed to play only with dolls and other hushed activities, such as blocks and origami. Other games, toys, or objects, like a ruler or broomstick the boy liked to swing

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

19

over his head, were considered dangerous and were snatched from him (p. 9). Mishima was a sickly child who was forced to sit by his grandmother's bedside in the dark and could not make a sound, eat what he wanted, or play with other boys. He could only play quietly with three girls carefully chosen from among his cousins. Even by the age of 11, Mishima was still living and sleeping beside Natsu and had to care for his sick grandmother by taking her to the toilet and giving her sponge baths. Natsu was authoritarian and volatile, waking Mishima up at night screaming, crying, tearing her hair, at least once holding a knife to her throat threatening to kill herself (p. 19). At 16, Mishima looks back on life writh his grandmother: My grandmother suffered from neuralgia and interminable spasms. Her inevitable cramps would commence as though she were possessed. As her melancholic moans became audible, her convulsions would pour over the small furnishings in the sickroom—an ashtray, a medicine chest, a censer, and other such effects—like some invisible surge. Whereupon, in a single instant, everything in the room was brought to a standstill and plunged into grief by paralytic trepidation; and when it had quickly receded like a mountain fog, the room and all its trappings were saturated by her anguished moaning. Other than the room itself, it is the moaning and bellowing that would no doubt be difficult for other people to imagine. But when the paroxysms persisted all day long—and on some occasions even for several nights—more striking symptoms emerged. "Sickness" would run rampant throughout the house as if it were the sole inhabitant.,.. I arranged my knees in the proper manner and, slightly nervous about this important task of mine, opened the bottle of medicine.... That was when I distinctly saw a Disease in the bottle. He was dwarfishly small, and was sleeping with his chin resting on his knees as if oblivious to the sea of medicine washing his body. (1941, pp. 7-8) One wonders if the disease in the bottle is his own reflection and selfconception. Such exposure to disease left an indelible impression on Mishima. This passage conveys the sense in which disease haunted and owned the house, and young Mishima nervously traverses the hallways dreading an encounter: Trembling with fear, I dashed through the dark hallway.... And at each corner I met with a single Disease (invariably alone). Even the Diseases were in a hurried frenzy. The Diseases were all so much taller than me. There were some with faces, while others had none at all. One of the Diseases with a face—that one, I remember, laughed innocently. He was certainly the Disease not yet intimate with Death. He was no doubt on his way to bring tidings to the Disease more intimate with Death. One day, my left pinky graced ever so slightly a slippery invisible Disease. Whenever I had a spare moment that day, I would wash that pinky. WTien I had washed it so much that the tip of my finger swelled painfully, I could see quite clearly the fingerprint that I had until then never paid any attention. It reminded me of the

20

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

patterns of grain in the wooden ceiling of the room in which I could not sleep, and the hieroglyphs that "Disease" used on a daily basis. (1941, p. 9) Already Mishima shows signs of fearing contamination (if not persecution) by disease and obsessive ruminations with cleansing himself of the invisible illnesses that plague him. A similar passage occurs in "Martyrdom" (Junkyo, 1948a), where dreams lead the protagonist to lairs of various diseases suffered in childhood. The diseases greet him with intimacy, and when one approaches him, he noses a foul odor. When he tries to shove the disease away, it transfers itself "stickily to his hand like oil paint" (p. 134). Imprisonment, silence, immobility, darkness, stench, lurking disease, viscous and adhesive contamination—this is Mishima's youth. Mishima was unable to see his mother except when his grandmother permitted, and Mishima's misanthropic father Azusa was essentially absent and defeated by the grandmother, while he was cruel, invasive, and sadistic to young Mishima whenever he was present (cf. Nathan, 1974, pp. xix, 7, 10). Mishima's father subjected him to "Spartan training" and even held his four-year-old boy perilously close to the tracks as a passing locomotive roared past cacophonously, emitting clouds of black smoke (p. 13). Azusa then told Mishima that if he cried like a weakling, he'd throw him in a ditch (p. 14).1 Young Mishima was expressionless after the event, which deflated his father, so he repeated the experiment. The boy was still inexpressive, as he was on numerous occasions that might ordinarily upset or terrify a child. He obeyed without complaint, endured hostile vituperation, and surrendered toys, always reacting stoically (p. 11). Even by the age of three, the boy had already withdrawn emotionally and was evidencing the signs of severe trauma. Indeed, his "frighteningly internal" responses (p. 11) to grand-maternal and paternal brutality are evidence of severe disturbance. The healthy reaction is rage, terror, and hatred, the ability to feel and express anger and fear, while reactions of cheerfulness, affection, silent acquiescence, or stoicism in the face of immensely painful cruelty are symptoms of numbing, dissociation, and emotional facades that disguise one's feelings from oneself as well as others to avoid overwhelming terror and pain. Shizue believes that her three-year-old son deferred to his grandmother because he understood that the slightest rambunctiousness would cause her pain. We must recognize that children that age are (often) less sympathetic to the feelings of others than concerned about being punished, hated, abandoned, or destroyed by the furious adult. This acquiescence results from the dread of being persecuted and killed, along with the shame and terror of perceiving misery as a result of their actions. Such protracted exposure to displays of pained victimhood, unbearable anguish, and hostile paroxysms may engender the permanent fear that one's feelings are bad, selfish,

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

21

evil, shameful, and that one will murder those one needs (his wickedness made her scream in abject rage, his selfishness made her so miserable she held a knife to her throat) as well as convincing a child that he deserves to die, a pervasive aspect of suicidal emotion. These themes are encountered repeatedly in Mishima's fiction.2 The fact is that no child can escape such repeated and sustained trauma without deep psychological injury. As a youth, Mishima was frail, delicate, and sickly. During his childhood, he contracted innumerable diseases and was near death several times, vomiting and falling into states of coma (p. 14). He was always puny for his age, prone to illness, remote, alienated, a shameful outsider. Mishima had no idea how to interact with boys at school, was considered a girlish runt, and was called such names as "asparagus child" and "snake belly" (p. 16). Mishima finally rejoined his parents when he was 12. But Azusa was still sadistic, proclaiming that one must continually squeeze a child and that children who collapse are "better off dead" (p. 23). A teenage Mishima was discovering literature, but his father wrould tear books from his son's hand, rip them apart, and hurl them across the room, so corrupt and full of lies and girlish nonsense was literature (p. 24). From 1938 until 1942, Azusa was only in the house two nights a week, and according to Nathan (1974), this is when Mishima developed a passionate bond with his mother. The first summer Mishima was united with his mother, she took him to the beach for a month. Nathan writes, . . . his first encounter with the ocean disturbed him deeply. But he did fall in love with his mother. This was the first time in his life he had been free to depend on Shizue without interference or internal conflict; one month was all he needed to discover that she was the woman for him. From then on no other woman ever really mattered. Shizue, on her part, free at last to express the love pent up in her for twelve years, adored and continued to adore Kimitake in a manner almost too ardent to be called motherly, (p. 25)

Mishima soon discovered the pleasures of writing. Meanwhile, his father was determined to prevent this, and this is when Mishima adopted his pen name to keep his serialized publications secret from his father. (Mishima is the name of a town exhibiting an idyllic view of snowcapped Mount Fuji; Yukio means snow, its final syllable inspired by the name of the romantic poet Sachio Ito. [Stokes, 1974, pp. 66—67].) At 16, Mishima describes his father as "the embodiment of every imaginable handicap and obstacle . . . he is a bureaucrat frozen stiff with the bureaucratic spirit. He has never read anything of mine. But he is free with his criticism: 'the practice of literature/ he informs me, 'befits only the people of a degenerate n a t i o n . ' . . . He harps on one string only: Nazis, Nazis, Nazis" (Nathan, 1974, p. 43). Once back in the house on a regular basis, Azusa would

22

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

forcibly enter Mishima's room and destroy whatever manuscript he could find while his son looked on helplessly (p. 44). Though Mishima acquiesced in his father's demands to enter the civil service, fiction was a more urgent priority. Azusa finally gave Mishima his blessing, though he had been revolted by what he called the "preposterous nonsense" in Confessions of a Mask. Nevertheless, after Mishima became successful, Azusa became arrogant about his famed son, behaving as though he were the novelist. After they moved to their new home, he even began to act as Mishima's agent (p. 105). Instead of instilling his son with love and admiration, Azusa diminished Mishima's prodigious talents by disparaging literature, annihilating his son by showing contempt for his gifts while behaving as though the achievement were his own, as though his son were merely an irrelevant, infantile product of his father's grandiose emission. To summarize the early years: Mishima withstood sequestration from his parents, a virtually psychotic grandmother who held him prisoner in a dark silent room amidst her illnesses and hysteria for 12 years and an essentially absent father who abused him when present. Mishima suffered a suffocating infantilization, the excruciating absence of his mother, and humiliating derogation from a father obsessed with Nazism. Throughout adolescence and even in Mishima's adulthood, his father was a castrating, grandiose, insidious, annihilating influence. Though children may react differently to such experiences, it is inconceivable that a child could emerge unscathed from such trauma, exposure to such horrific and nauseating physical and emotional sickness, such negligence coupled with suffocating inundation by protracted hostility and incessant hysteria. While there is a spectrum of responses and infinite variables that cannot predict the intricate human personality that emerges from this genesis, it is not the case that there will be random and completely unpredictable consequences. There are experiences that may be inherently and irrevocably terrifying, traumatic, and injurious to the psyche of a child. And Mishima's exposure to such deprivation, sadism, immobility, darkness, stench, and disease would lead to a personality beset by immense terror, rage, unresolved conflict regarding women, trenchant feelings of betrayal, self-loathing, and unrequited needs. Viscous disease and wicked femininity became experiential and perceptual lenses, a tactile experience of body, self, and world that was an infuriating and ceaseless plague to be despised and transcended. Indeed, it is a testament to the young author that he was able to find a creative niche and did not fragment into psychosis as a result of his experiences. And it seems that Mishima's alchemy against death and psychic disintegration was gifted intelligence, language, and imagination, fantastic scenarios of vengeance and sublime triumph, wish fulfillment that replayed, sexualized, and vanquished terror, agony, yearning, and loss.

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

23

I do not want to diagnose Mishima here, just to establish how these events impressed themselves on Mishima's psychical life and would be reenacted in his fictions with obsessiveness, rage, vengeance, and sexual arousal. How did such a ghastly infancy and adolescence influence Mishima's fantasies? DISEASE A N D MISOGYNY Women are capable of producing nothing but children .. . even the atmosphere is beyond their comprehension. What they do understand is smell; a woman smells in the manner of a pig . . . .The sexual allure of a woman, her flirtatious aptitude, and all her talents for sexual attraction are evidence to the fact that she is worthless. Woman has no soul.

—Forbidden Colors, pp. 22-23/12-13

There is an intrinsic psychological relation between sickness, impurity, and misogyny in Mishima, saturating and seeping into so many of his fictions that it coalesces as a relentless leitmotif. Old, sinister Shunsuke of Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki, 1951-1953) despises the vagina and vows revenge on loathsome women. Women's genitalia are evil, reeking, putrid, carnal, undulating, vomiting things, regurgitating blood-soaked corpses in childbirth. Young, maleficent Noboru of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Gogo No Eiko, 1963a, 1963b) sees the vagina as a wound, a pitiable vacant hole, while woman is the sinister force that dominates men and enfeebles their glory. Mizoguchi of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji, 1956c, 1956e) digs his heel into the belly of a prostitute in sadistic pleasure, while his depraved friend humiliates women and rapes an elderly widow during a Buddhist ritual. Such misogynistic impulses are illustrated vividly in Mishima's autobiographical Confessions of a Mask (Kamen No Kokuhaku, 1949a, 1949b), a psychological dissection of the author, his erotic and violent fantasies, his struggle with roles and appearances, and his final realization of his sexual identity. Confessions is the story of a young man who narrates his life from the moment of birth, explores his precarious relationship with a young woman, his feelings of sexual inadequacy, his preference for beautiful males, and his final emergence as a homosexual who dreams of erotic bloodshed. Confessions reveals recurring associations of women with shame, weakness, decay, and death. Even in childhood, the narrator of Confessions is initially awed by the sensual tragedy of Joan of Arc but feels repugnance on learning that Joan of Arc is female (p. 12). There is a marked disgust for the feminine in this developmental current, as Mishima identifies with the authoritarian aggression of his grandmother while escaping her illness and femininity, which have undoubtedly been equated in the mind of the child. Mishima conceives of

24

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

women as both impure and castrating. His grandmother was the prototype of hostile and disgusting women who manipulated and belittled men. She showed contempt for both Mishima's father and his grandfather (p. 5). Mishima needed to escape her filthy and diseased nature, also resenting women for emasculating weak men. Mishima's father was impotent and unable to stand up to the grandmother, and Mishima despised both his father's weakness and his grandmother's emasculating authoritarianism. Exhibitionistic masculinity is a compensatory response to such suffering, humiliation, and rage. And indeed Mishima's infamous transition from ugly weakling to one obsessed with exercising and exhibiting his own body, with images, appearances, and masks, can be understood as an intense need to escape a world of immersion in sickness, secretions, excretions, and foul odors into one of physical beauty and strength, where one could perceive the beautiful self and receive adoration rather than shame and derogation. One escapes the imprisoning mire of obedience, illness, helplessness, annihilation of one's being and desire by exhibiting the self as a grandiose masculine incarnation invulnerable to defeat, disease, and decay. He is not a frail, effeminate child but a magnificent male naked in the pure snow, his flawless sinews astride his gleaming katana. Mishima created his body as a work of art. His literary images are poetic, vivid, and luxuriant, his physical images aesthetically striking. From helpless imprisonment in disease and shame to literary and physical elegance is an astounding triumph. Yet Mishima's need for visual exhibition, his drive to transform himself from that diseased world into a resplendent, pure one, is the psychological issue here. Could he have lived without images, exhibitionistic display of masculine beauty and prowess, ceaseless denial of that besmirched and hapless child? Mishima would seem to be the quintessential "phallic narcissist," one who must engage in grandiose masculine display in response to shame and inadequacy; flaunting and revering the male body and organ as responses to failure and derogation (cf. Bursten, 1973; Kohut, 1971; McDougall, 1995). Reich (1933) tells us that "phallic narcissism" results from "serious disappointments in the object of the other sex," while the father is weak or insignificant (pp. 152-153, 203). Reich writes of the powerful mother, but in Mishima's case the overwhelming grandmother serves the same function in defeating the father, if not even more so by defeating both parents while denying young Mishima maternal love, attention, and approval. In the absence of the mother who applauds the child's natural exhibitionistic needs for attention, the diseased and authoritarian grandmother exacerbates the phallic narcissistic injuries—demolishing the need for approval, joy in the child's play, displays, sense of self as a healthy, strong, intact, loved person—through her hostility and inculcation in Mishima that he was sickly and weak. Women are often conceived as manipulative, if not utterly contemptible

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

25

and wicked, in Mishima's fiction. After the Banquet (Utage No Ato, 1960a) is the story of an ineffectual old politician's bid for political office, maneuvered by his companion and thwarted by his feminine nemesis. In philosophical writings such as The Way of the Samurai (Hagakure Nyumon, 1967b), Mishima expressly speaks of women as treacherous, foolish, and shallow. Domineering mothers manipulate their children against their fathers, while men are losing their virility and becoming effeminate, which is equated with being "cowardly weaklings" (pp. 63-66, 118).3 Because women are perceived as so insidious and repugnant, prone to sexual betrayal and abject stupidity, the protagonist's malicious obsession in Forbidden Colors is revenge against women through seduction, rejection, and humiliation. 4 Women are imagined as devious, envious, infidelitous, voracious, and parasitic. They are equated with weakness and sickness, with corpses. The narrator of Confessions is anemic, and the doctor mentions that he might have chlorosis, "a woman's disease" (p. 77/92). He would rather die than be effeminate (p. 203). He is preoccupied by a phrase he reads in a book: "A woman possesses power only according to the magnitude of misery she can inflict on her lover" (p. 183/221). Similar deliria pervade Mishima's writing. The hero of Spring Snow (Haru No Yuki, 1967a) writes a letter to his "treacherous" feminine nemesis: "I learned to see a girl as nothing but a plump, lascivious little animal, a contemptible p l a y m a t e . . . . Geisha or princess, virgin or prostitute, factory girl or artist—there is no distinction whatever. Every woman without exception is a liar and 'nothing but a plump, lascivious little animal.' All the rest is makeup and costumes" (p. 50). He sees her as talented at torturing people, ever driven to inflict "humiliating mockery" and derive "sadistic pleasure" from deriding and discomfiting men with cruelty and laughter (pp. 42, 111, 142). The heroine of Thirst for Love (1950) is perceived thusly: "What caught his eye as he looked up now and again was not a woman, but some kind of spiritual monster, some undefinable spiritual embodiment—hating, suffering, bleeding" (p. 193). Can we be sure this is the author's voice? Mishima exposes readers to the self-contempt, weakness, and morbid fantasies that underlie misogyny. His novels may even be seen as meticulous deconstructions of the fear and hatred of women. One learns far more about the misogynist than women from Mishima. Some of Mishima's women are clearly hapless victims of sick, deluded men obsessed with their own delirious rage. Nevertheless, few women are portrayed sympathetically, and the vast majority are actually repulsive, manipulative, stupid, foolish, or evil, plotting against the protagonists, betraying them, possessed by reprehensible motives, in so many ways utterly contemptible. In Temple, Mizoguchi's mother is a repulsive woman who commits adultery. The beauty of his desire does laugh derisively at Mizoguchi. Virtually every specie of woman in Forbidden Colors displays some malice, vacuousness, betrayal, manipu-

26

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

lativeness, or vanity There is little indication that Mishima is doing anything other than repeating his own fantasies, conflicts, fear, rage, and nausea. The misogynistic voice is so often the same throughout his works, uttered by the aged, the young, cripples, arsonists, heroes, and the omniscient narrator, blurring into a sonorous, epistrophic loathing. Given his fear, disgust, and resentment, it seems likely that Mishima's sexuality was based on reaction formations against anything emasculating, sick, weak, feminine, or messy, and he tuned his erotism toward becoming and seducing masculine, clean, and powerful men. Reich (1933) notes that the phallic narcissist has contempt for the female sex and is disposed toward an active homosexuality (p. 202). The genesis of sexual preference and gender identity may have numerous influences: genetic, biochemical, social, and psychological. One cannot innately pathologize sexual preference. Nevertheless, what is at issue here is the influence of life circumstances on the sense of self, on one's ideas of masculinity and femininity, the auspicious or catastrophic relations with others that establish inclinations to love, hate, fear, escape, or avenge. Mishima's homosexual fantasies are engorged with rage and aversion and can explicitly be related to his narcissistic injuries, ideals, and compensations, which are also interrelated with his disturbed and hostile psychological relations

with women.5 Women's bodies arouse disgust, and Mishima protagonists

repeatedly imagine beautiful men after disdaining the female body. Mishima was in fact married, and not ail women portrayed in his work are representations of "castrating phallic women"—aggressive women imagined (usually unconsciously) to possess an invasive, castrating penis of their own. 6 Mishima also conceived innocent and pure virgins and starkly beautiful women. The narrator of Confessions watches the beauty and gleaming teeth of his cousin. He is mesmerized by an anemic woman whose "cold aloofness" captivates his heart (p. 95/113)7 And Sonoko is a naive, lovely youth whose purity from sexuality entices the narrator. The heroine of Spring Snow is the epitome of elegant Japanese feminine beauty, while the wife of the protagonist in "Patriotism" (Yukoku, 1960b) is the ideal obedient samurai wife who dies with her husband without complaint. Indeed, the descriptions of her body are deeply erotic, her "high, swelling breasts, surmounted by nipples like the buds of a wild cherry... . Where the shadows gathered more thickly, hair clustered, gentle and sensitive, and as the agitation mounted in the now no longer passive body there hung over this region a scent like the smoldering of fragrant blossoms" (pp. 105-106). Despite their appearance of elegance and seeming absence of insidious traits, however, these sensuous, beautiful women too represent a central component of Mishima's transference—they are both wish fulfilling fantasies and unconscious reenactments of archaic conflicts. For Mishima, women are virgins, harlots, or castrating monsters (though often they are

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

27

simply vacuous idiots). The feminine beauty who appears in his novels is an aesthetic trope, but it is almost certainly the split-off idealized image of the innocuous and benign feminine that Mishima must extract from the castrating and abominable feminine he actually experienced. The erotic pulchritude of Reiko in "Patriotism" is not a reflection of Mishima's adoration of women but rather his terror. "The lieutenant, not without a touch of egocentricity, rejoiced that he would never see this beauty crumble in death" (p. 105). Slitting her throat joyously thwarts the ravages of age, ugliness, and decomposition. 8 She is an immaculate fantasy that obliterates decay and death. Similarly, the narrator of Confessions feels "purified" by Sonoko's beauty, which transcends sexuality and the flesh, and seems "the visage of an immaculate soul" (pp. 117-119/142-145). This is more than romanticism or idealization. She appears as the incarnation of his love of "spiritual things," his love of "eternal" or immortal, undecay-

ing things (p. 200/241).9 Sonoko is thus shorn of engulfing and castrating,

diseased and excremental being, she is the denial of death and decay— she is the antithesis of Mishima's grandmother. Sonoko is even described as his "armor" against the chapped, cracked, scratched, squalid, and necrotic hands of his friend. She is thus the mother protecting him from decay and death (p. 130/157). But precisely because such purity is a projection, genuine relations can be only a schizoidal masquerade—a mask worn defensively to protect oneself against the excruciating pain of intimacy, which can be humiliating, suffocating, invasive, impinging, and annihilating. The moment the actual woman appears with her human sexuality and desire for relatedness, our protagonists panic, flee, rationalize the nature of the relationship and their motives, and immediately derogate the feminine. The narrator of Confessions is seized with anger after confronting his own cowardice with Sonoko, and he immediately belittles her intelligence. He then convinces himself that he does not desire women and masturbates only to perverse fantasies about men, finally narrating an elaborate sadistic scenario of bloodshed and orgasm to prove his point to himself (pp. 172176). His idealization is revealed as a fantasy, which is why Mishima's depictions of heterosexual love are aesthetic constructs (typically adolescent) and thus superficial and unconvincing portrayals of feminine beauty and character. The erotic love scene in "Patriotism" is as artificially, idyllically perfect as a Platonic simulacrum, sounding so much like a romance novel that it too much smacks of imaginary sexuality. This fantasy is more the dream of the sweetened vagina in response to terror and disgust than ardent arousal by the (truly) wonderful sensuality of a woman. In contrast, even where women and sexuality are idealized into artificial apotheosis, outside the momentary erotic idyll they too often reveal their demonism, once more evoke the dread of women and sexuality. Real women are

28

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

threatening, which is why so many Mishima protagonists are impotent before women, why the narrator of Confessions flees Sonoko and feels a sense of dread toward the "luridly crimson lips" of the maid Chako. She infantilizes and shames him: "curled up that way, you look just like a baby freshly weaned from his momma's breast" (p. 152/184). In other words, the dynamic of the narrator and a sexual woman repeats the infantile experience of discomfort toward a seductive, dangerous, and humiliating feminine presence. The narrator kisses Chako but then feels disgusted and impure, as though he has betrayed the purity of Sonoko (pp. 184-187). More than loyalty to a woman (a sentiment seldom portrayed in Mishima), actual merger with a real woman would be death and disintegration. The narrator feels that Sonoko is a seductive and intoxicating yet dangerous "abyss" (p. 161/194). Continual associations of Sonoko with decay and annihilation render this statement far more telling than it might suggest. It represents the anxiety of sexual disintegration on penetrating her vaginally and emotional disintegration on merging with her in love. He would even prefer to be bombed to death than to see her again (pp. 197-199). When he locks fingers with Sonoko, "a childhood terror was suddenly resurrected," recalling how children said their fingers would rot away if anyone broke a promise after locking fingers on it

(p. 165/200).10 He immediately thinks Sonoko wants a marriage proposal

and experiences the fear of a child passing through a dark passage at night. The sexual imagery of locking fingers, the castrating imagery of rotting fingers, and the vaginal imagery of traversing a dark passage thus equate sexual intercourse and commitment with castration, decay, and death. In Forbidden Colors, old, decrepit Shunsuke's adulterous third wife commits suicide with her lover, and their disintegrating bodies are washed up on the ocean crags. Their putrescence has merged them into one amorphous mass of necrotic disintegrating tissue. I would suggest that this is Mishima's fantasy of the dread of emotional and sexual merger. One might also read the image of decomposing lovers as the hostile fantasy of punishing those who merge sexually while excluding the observer, a recurring theme in Mishima's fiction. Mishima the voyeur definitely fantasizes about killing his parents, and this image could represent a murderous reaction to one of many "primal scenes" of witnessing (or imagining) sexual intercourse between the parents and feeling aroused, shocked, and envious. At the very least, this imagery implicates his narcissistic rage of being abandoned by both parents. The death of these lovers occurs after an illicit affair, and the fantasy thus represents the anger over betrayal. The parents who abandoned their child are murdered, while the fantasy that their deaths were suicidal eradicates the guilt of having murderous wishes toward them. During the funeral, Shunsuke places a No mask on the face of his dead

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

29

infidelitous wife and presses it on her with so much force that it crushes her flesh, which buckles like ripe fruit. Here the disgusting, putrefying, sinister image of woman is violently replaced by the pure, benign fantasy (a white mask). Splitting immaculate beauty from diseased evil femininity is not just a defense; it is an act of aggression and revenge against mordant women. Pure, beautiful women are fantasies intended to obliterate this anxiety. They are ghosts, mannequins, images without substance, since Mishima has never known them and can conceive them only as aesthetic facades.11 Idealization forcibly separates the toxic evil of the grandmother from the purified and benign feminine for whom Mishima yearns after being separated from his mother Shizue. The fantasy of the nurturing female is so powerful because Mishima experienced a unique situation where he was tortured by a diseased insane woman while the mother he needed was herself excluded and abused. When Mishima rejoined his parents after 12 years of sequestration and suffocation by his grandmother, "he fell in love with the poor beautiful woman who had been so cruelly treated by her mother-in-law" (Stokes, 1974, p. 53). Mishima's biographers and family friends describe the relation between mother and son as too ardent to be normal. 12 (Conventional normality is not the issue, as much as the devoutly amorous, almost sensual and incestuous aspects of their relationship.) Shizue later referred to her son as her "lover" and after his death proclaimed that "my lover has returned to me" (pp. 53-54). Stokes believes that Mishima may have never had a close relationship with any other person (p. 54). Until the end of his life, Mishima gave his mother his manuscripts for approval. The relationship between Mishima and his mother must be understood as the desperate need of a child for his mother and her desperate need for her child after forcible and abusive separation. They do not merely love one another; their desires have been traumatic and pathogenic, as each now engages the other in a process of idealization and self-completion. The other becomes a missing component one cannot relinquish, as it is now a "self-object" whose merger exceeds ordinary familial boundaries. There is no room for conscious acknowledgment of anger or conflict, and idealization purifies the relationship of poisonous imagery and emotion. These must be displaced. Mishima's imagination of women and intimacy is further perverted by his relationship with his sister Mitsuko, whom he loved with unremitting passion. One recalls the "fainthearted, susceptible, over-sensitive young man" of Mishima's play A Tropical Tree (Nettaiju, 1959), whose "erotic interest is completely split between his mother and his younger sister" (p. 210). In 1945, Mitsuko died of typhoid fever in a dark, squalid hospital, and the death of pure love amid further disease and filth can only have exacerbated Mishima's acute sense of loss. Beauty and love would abandon him and decompose wretchedly, inherently concealing decay that

30

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

might erupt spontaneously. This imbues even the purest woman with lurking disease, the inescapably persecuting (virtually paranoid) anxiety that she will succumb to grotesque disintegration and disappear. Love itself becomes something that dissipates and leaves the survivor abandoned to misery and an encompassing void. A person already betrayed, abandoned, and withdrawn from love to escape desolation and heartbreak must needs be devastated to an incomprehensible degree when the genuinely innocent, lovable, vulnerable sister succumbs to ravagement by illness and is contaminated by the grotesque decay so affiliated with the loathsome feminine evil that swallowed and ravaged his own youth. One despairs loving and feels rage toward the disease that abducts the love one desperately needs. Here again the engulfing disease of childhood that separated him from mother and nurturance also murders the pristine feminine he cherishes, only aggravating the emotional injury and rage toward feminine evil. (Indeed one learns from so many instances of mourning how the deceased is even abhorred for dying and abandoning the one who loves.) Evil femininity corrodes pure femininity, and hence misogyny is intensified by loss. If one dares yearn for or fantasize benign, loving, vulnerable women, they will be envisaged with leprosy beneath pallid skin and despised in vengeance against loss, abandonment, and the awakening desire that will be crushed. Thus, in so many of his fictions, from Confessions to "Love in the Morning" (1965) to Spring Snow (even in Forbidden Colors), Mishima continually imagines death lurking beneath youth, beauty, and layers of makeup. Orphic wishes remain but will be blackened by rage and despair. Hence, this nurturing image rarely occurs in Mishima's fiction. The silhouette of a beautiful and benign female graces his pages, but misogynistic heresies flood the text in revenge against parasitic and disgusting women. Always the beautiful feminine is maculated by the return of the repressed: rage over abandonment, revulsion, and terror against suffocation. Thus, their benign nature is often suffused with an uncanny and mysterious touch of evil or wickedness, the emerging suspicion and anxiety that they are unattainable, ultimately unloving, poisonous, and treacherous. Even the transcendent feminine beauty Satoko in Spring Snow is perceived as mendacious, alternately seductive and rejecting, filling her lover with intense humiliation and wrath (p. 142). Mishima has an unconscious fantasy of reuniting with the lost mother of infancy who is pure and devoid of malice, but his fantasies cannot fully separate the benign image from the invidious one. The cold, anemic woman on the bus in Confessions is attractive not just because she is lyrically beautiful but also because she recapitulates the fantasy of the cold and indifferent mother who abandoned him. In reality, Mishima's mother was anything but indifferent. She was ar-

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

31

dent to perhaps a sexual degree. However, for a young boy abandoned by parents who will not love him or rescue him from his insane grandmother, the face of the mother takes on the quality of one who is not responsive or loving. I would also add that children can internalize unconscious messages from their parents and that even outwardly and sincerely devoted parents can convey immense hostility, contempt, and shame in nonverbal ways: One must bear in mind that whatever the origin of the [infanticidal, sadistic] impulse, whether the mother is conscious of it or not, no matter how she copes with it, and whether or not it coexists with motherliness, it is communicated to the infant and evokes an appropriate response, the terror that is beyond our imagination. (Rheingold, 1967, p. 128) If Mishima's mother was the poor hapless victim truly devoted to her son, she was human and may have also experienced ambivalent feelings of love, aversion, and a desire to abandon him. From numerous accounts, Shizue could be extremely contemptuous toward others, especially Azusa (Mishima's father). In the somewhat autobiographical story "A Forest in Full Flower," Mishima observes, My mother was a stern woman . . . my mother saw only expressions of "vanity" . . . my mother saw an illusion of "vanity" in everything. This illusion, by a most reprehensible, hatefully cruel method, obliterated exceptionally noble things . . . to the very end, however, she viewed the exposure of vanity harshly Vanity itself has only sanguine eyes. And her impudence fully opposed the austerity of all nobility, (p. 10) Mother defeated father, (p. 11) My father was actually quite a weak and feeble man. (p. 11) Such derisiveness alone is enough to enrage a young boy toward the cowardly emasculated father and castrating mother (on which more later) who refused to rescue her son from abject misery. The fantasy of the cold and rejecting mother becomes a haunting revenant displaced into his transferences toward women in the external world. In Temple, the protagonist is haunted by his ghastly, wicked mother and repeatedly hallucinates onto women the face of a dead beauty who rejected and humiliated him. In Confessions, the narrator likewise sees beautiful and rejecting women in random places, but these are reflections of his own fantasies and yearnings. Sonoko represents not joy in the feminine but the need for a childish and nonthreatening, noncastrating feminine who can be injured in revenge against women, as blazon of the

32

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

narrator's desperate striving for sexual potency If the narrator can have sex with Sonoko, he would be reborn as "a different person, a real man, as if possessed by some malign entity" (p. 158/191). These placid women are fantasies of the feminine divorced from the grandmother's castrating domination and mother's rejection but also transferences that repeat the rejecting and malicious dynamics experienced in Mishima's infancy. Hence, they are actually terrifying or iniquitous and must be conquered, invaded, or disparaged. There is also a dissociative split between his attraction toward these women and his homosexual interests. While looking at the cold woman on the bus, the narrator of Confessions also feels attracted to the rough, young bus driver. Focus on women thus becomes a defensive means for him not to be aware of his burgeoning homosexuality, as Mishima may well have recognized in the course of his Active self dissection. This presages the conclusion of the novel, where the narrator is with Sonoko but now understands exactly what excites him (beautiful men). However, it is highly questionable whether Mishima is aware of his trainferential relationship to women—that he is repeating past perceptions and reenacting those relationships—and it is doubtful he recognizes his real need to seduce them to vanquish his rejection in childhood. If heterosexuality conquers the emasculating and rejecting feminine and awareness of this nascent homosexuality, then Mishima's homosexuality (not necessarily anyone else's) is, among other things, also a defense against the weakness of unrequited wishes, and the homoerotic fantasy of powerful masculinity is also a defense against the rejecting, humiliating, emasculating feminine. For Mishima, the feminine is incessantly controlling, hostile, abandoning, castrating, nauseating, excremental, engulfing. While his grandmother controlled his every movement and every morsel of food, inculcating his weakness and frailty, Mishima's mother existed as a person who abandoned him to this tyrant. (Again, whether mother actually abandoned him has no impact on the child's experience of abandonment, the feelings of rage that are continually reflected in Mishima's literary fantasies.) Thus, Mishima experienced excruciating separation individuation difficulties. Merger with mother was forbidden, while merger with grandmother was both abandonment by mother and suffocating engulfment and impingement by an unwelcome and diseased object. Merger with the feminine was asphyxiation, impotence, sickness, and death, as seen in the image of the decomposing lovers from Forbidden Colors, in so many Mishima scenes where boys are impotent with women until violence arouses them, and in so many scenes where the erotic is saturated and surrounded by visions

and omens of death, apocalypse, and decaying flesh.n Separation was therefore death as well since independence from grandmother was experienced as dangerous both from the perdition of the realm outside their house and from the punishment of separating from the grandmother, a

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

33

hostile and controlling presence in the outer world and a toxic psychological presence in his inner world. Mishima's childhood impingements and engulfments are again likely influences in the creation of schizoidal masks, desperate means of escaping the excruciating shame and annihilation of self that comes with intimacy and being known (Laing, 1959). Imagine a person so emotionally invaded, suffocated, and pulverized in early life that any future impingement becomes terrifying, claustrophobic, agonizing, humiliating, or enraging. Deep emotional contact threatens obliteration of the self, against which one may barricade the emotions with disguises and masks, personae invented to deceive oneself and others, a mythological self displaying beauteous invulnerability. Mishima's grandmother is what psychoanalysts would previously have called "schizogenic" in that she infused the child with an overwhelming sense of helplessness, rendering his psyche susceptible to fragmentation (cf. Wolman, 1973).14 Mishima was hardly schizophrenic. However, he did display marked evidence of immense grandiosity and rage, along with some proclivities rather in accord with the more severe personality disorders. Mishima's relationships seem to evidence a tendency toward splitting people into rigid categories of good and evil, all nurturing or lethal, an inability to perceive and accept people as all-too-human combinations of desirable and disappointing qualities. Mishima's way of experiencing people in stark black-or-white terms, of terminating relationships when he felt rejected, of discarding people abruptly (Nathan, 1974, pp. 66,194n, 206-209), suggests predilections toward acute sensitivity to neglect and disproportional reactions of rage (cf. also Stokes, 1974, p. 88ff.). At one moment Mishima can experience intense feelings of love and comradeship with his translator John Nathan and such disappointment and hostility the next moment that he experiences his friend as having betrayed him cruelly and never speaks with Nathan again. There are those who cannot tolerate ambiguity, who are so intensely needy of absolute love, so afraid of betrayal and persecution, so angry over being abandoned and betrayed, and so inundated with others' wickedness, that they cannot tolerate not knowing and must consign people to good or evil. They feel betrayal so intensely and globally, so disappointingly, that their rage is absolute. They may imagine betrayal where it is not, experience failure to conform to one's needs as absolute abandonment, even induce abandonment by demanding so much or forcing others to conform to one's suspicions that people are betrayers. They may unconsciously orchestrate abandonment, proving to themselves how abandoned, betrayed, and alone they are, how cruel, dishonest, and inconstant are others. This pattern thus suggests what analysts often term "projective identification," which indicates not merely the occasional attribution of one's feelings to others but also requiring or manipulating others to play roles

34

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

in the fulfillment of one's repetitive conflicts, distorting others severely to fulfill both idealizing and persecuting fantasies. It is like a child demanding that others play parts in one's make-believe, only the adult who engages in "projective identification" is desperate for make believe and doesn't want to acknowledge (sometimes cannot even perceive) that the game is not real. Mishima's perception of women (the profuse depictions of their wickedness or contemptibility), his compulsive reenactment of erotic trauma and conflict, his continual experiences of rage, persecution, the drive for vengeance, forcing others into the narrative whereby they become players in his erotic and vengeful scenario, indicate that such projective identifications are necessary and ceaseless fantasies he seems never to escape. Such intense need for others to participate in both fantastic and actual scenarios is an atavistic neediness, the angry demand of a neglected and suffocated child wishing to re-create scenarios of pain so that others may love, reject, or be punished in turn. This is a form of "malignant narcissism," a condition of intense egotistic grandiosity, voracious entitlement, an absence of empathy, in response to crucial emotional injury (Kernberg, 1992). Mishima is a maker of misogyny myths. A psychology of narrative recognizes myths and fairy tales as expressions of fantasy, of figures and scenarios symbolic of psychic states, of witches and ogres as displaced and distorted parents cannibalizing or murdering a child (Bloch, 1978; Ricoeur, 1967). Mishima's myths are retellings of his own psychic states, distortions of his own infancy, his symbolic life and death struggles. If human beings have ever told stories of wicked hags, demons, monsters, and sorceresses, Mishima's life gives impetus for vastly more horrific experiences of feminine evil. A case can be made that men have almost always feared women, the annihilation of their bodies through castration by toothed vaginas, sexual destruction by being lost in the vortex of feminine seductiveness and erotic voracity, the loss of semen, soul, and virility sucked out by woman's insatiable labia (Faure, 2003; Lederer, 1968; Neumann, 1959). Women may mythically represent death. Simone de Beauvoir (1949) writes of the blood, placental jellyfish, and uterine shreds that too much resemble carrion and terrify men. But men vary in the way they conceive women. Not all experience women as castration, decay, or death, and rather than a universal constant, misogyny must be understood as derivative of protracted invidious, painful, terrifying experiences with women. Mishima is the dread of woman metastasized by infantile annihilation, and his myths reflect a psyche plagued by witches who must be punished and humiliated with infinite malice. Mishima manifested what Rheingold (1967) would call the "catastrophic death complex," derived from such traumatic experiences with the primary maternal caregiver in which women and merger are equated with death and apocalyptic destruction of the self.15

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

35

As we have seen, in addition to her physical illnesses that cocooned Mishima within her sickroom, his grandmother suffered from a cranial neuralgia that gnawed at her nerves (Confessions, p. 5). Mishima had to be quiet lest any noise agitate her condition (p. 25). She evidenced a malignant narcissism that directed her immense sadism toward anyone who stood in her way, while she annexed Mishima as her own narcissistic selfobject—a person who exists to fulfill her needs, wrho is entitled to no desire or freedom of his own, whose life is absorbed into hers, who belongs to her and is effectively an extension of herself. Nathan (1974) suggests that she wanted someone to share the encumbrance of her physical pain, humiliation, and encompassing despair (p. 8). The use of a child as a receptacle for such misery amidst physical imprisonment, exposure to constant ravagement by disease, and the annihilation of his own desires and feelings are utterly and indescribably malignant. Her own pain and anguish are infinitely more excruciating and terrifying when thrust onto a helpless child. McPherson and Lester (1990) make note of a photograph showing Mishima at the age of five physically supporting his grandmother and himself leaning on her cane. They note that Mishima is "an intermediary between his primary object and her infirmity" (p. 274).16 Mishima becomes her transitional or narcissistic self-object, a container for her loneliness, sickness, and psychopathology, as well as a fantasied cure. The grandmother was at least borderline in nature and probably a full-blown psychotic, though some attribute her instability to gonorrhea or syphilis (Nathan, 1974, p. 6; Stokes, 1974, p. 39). Mishima understandably experienced an intense fear of annihilation, death, both merger and independence, disgust for the body and for the feminine, a need to evade and overcome feelings of weakness, engulfment, and impingement. Thus, Kohut (1977), writes, . . . behind the head of the Medusa lies the supposedly castrated genital of the woman. But behind the dreadful genital of the woman lies the cold, unresponding, nonmirroring face of a mother . . . who is unable to provide life-sustaining acceptance for her child because she is depressed or latently schizophrenic or afflicted with some other distortion of her personality, (p. 189) Kohut goes on to say that victims of such Medusan mothers develop a narcissistic rage, that "their sadism toward women is motivated by the need to force the mirroring self-object's response to them" (p. 194). In "The Room with the Locked Door" (Kagi No Kakaru Hey a, 1954), a man named Kodama dreams of visiting a bar where a symposium of he and several other men envisage drinking liquor made from girls' blood. A cloth dyer describes his wish to dissect women, extract the beautiful blue tendons from their bodies, and dye yukata robes from the blue pigment and blood. This would necessitate the dissection of more than 2,000 women. A banker

36

The Madness and Perveision of Yukio Mishima

pontificates the execution of a woman: first he would tattoo a fashionable outfit on her body. Then he would slice open her breast where the pocket appears on the tattooed outfit and insert a handkerchief, dyeing it with her beautiful blood. He would then slice open her hip where another pocket appears, inserting a compact makeup case into her body, thus tinting the powder a luscious red before she finally dies. In the dream, Kodama describes raping his lover's daughter and ripping her apart. Kodama compares adult women, whose bodies are made of separate genital components, to young girls, whose smallness makes them a whole body that can sit on one's lap. A sadistic, hateful, vengeful dream indeed, inspired by a woman who locked Kodama from her room and died after they made love. I have reviewed Mishima's early biography to elucidate its profound impact on his repetitious fantasies of malignant women. To phrase this another way, one does not repeat such hostile imagery unless one has been terrorized and filled with overwhelming rage, loathing, and disgust. Nor does one dedicate oneself to surmounting disease, ugliness, weakness, and the abhorrent feminine without trenchant enmeshment in such misery. ILLNESS, RAGE, A N D THE DRIVE FOR PURITY From Mishima's early immersion in sickness came his fascination with blood and death and his urgent fantasies of transcending weakness and disease through the pursuit of masculine beauty and purity The presence of a similar character in many of Mishima's works takes on a confessional quality, as his fantasies become the springboard for the portrayal of his sexuality and obsession with death. In his fiction Mishima depicts similar frail and alienated protagonists feebly wishing for love, esteem, power, and beauty, such as the weak and stuttering Mizoguchi in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mizoguchi is a stuttering virgin whose piteous sexual advances on women fulminate in laughter, derision, and impotence, leading him to fantasies of defilement and revenge. In "Sword" (Ken, 1963c), Mibu is a diminutive outsider who worships an exquisite masculine fencer, idealizing him, wishing to attain admiration and beauty.17 In "Cigarette" (Tabako, 1946), Nagasaki craves attention from the older schoolboy Imura, feeling erotic pleasure and guilt at the idea of holding the boy's cigarette between his fingers.18 In "Martyrdom" (Junkyo, 1948a), the effeminately beautiful Watari adores the cruel masculine Daphnis with the lovely eyes and enviable body. These dynamics are illustrated most clearly in Confessions of a Mask. The protagonist narrates the gestation of his pleasure in violent fairy tales, his arousal by murder, fantasies of killing beautiful boys. The book not only confesses to sexual perversion but verifies it (Nathan, 1974, p. 99). Indeed,

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

37

this is fiction, not necessarily "accurate" autobiography (this too is the fantasy of an event), and we should be wary of trusting what may itself be a deceptive mask (p. 81).19 Much of it does seem to accord factually with Mishima's life, but perhaps more important, the novel expresses Mishima's mythological self, the persona he wishes to imagine, reveal, distort, and deny.20 Confessions begins with many of the biographical elements precised earlier. The frail narrator recalls (imagines) the traumatic days of his youth, beginning as early as his forty-ninth day of life, when he was snatched from his mother's arms and sequestered from his parents to the sickroom of his authoritarian and tyrannical grandmother. The room reeked from the foul odors of sickness, and the narrator was consigned to this diseased and fetid dungeon as protection from the dangers that life presented to his frailty. The narrator describes himself repeatedly as an invert because of his childhood erotic attraction to a night soil collector, a man who roams the neighborhood carrying on his shoulders buckets of dripping feces scooped from outhouses (p. 10/8). The handsome young man with ruddy cheeks and shining eyes fascinated the narrator, and he was choked with desire on seeing his "groin tuggers" (tight pants that accentuate the male anatomy). Not only does this set a precedent for his future homosexual fantasies, but it also engenders his sense of tragic erotism, as he continually envisions dying a dramatic death. 21 He becomes sexually aroused by the voyeurism of imagining himself die. Peterson (1979) writes appositely, "Death: night: blood—the cluster of images appearing in all of Mishima's fiction in an odor of male sweat and accompanied by a ripple of muscles— is established before the narrator even enters school" (p. 222). How can we explain this? What is the connection between immersion in sickness, arousal by excrement, homosexual fantasy, and erotic pleasure in imagining his own death? Perhaps we might understand this eroticism a means of imbuing despair, disgust, and misery with pleasurable mastery. Mishima is simultaneously disgusted by the foul excrescences to which he is subjugated and aroused by them as well. There are two currents of erotic development that contrast one another: the drive to become the immaculate, purified, invulnerable self that disdains filth, weakness, and femininity, and another current of sexual arousal in the presence of excrement and filth. The invulnerable persona dedicated to escaping impurity and vulnerability is manifested in Mishima's drive to attain a samurai aesthetic in later life. He writes of desiring "pure physical existence—like a statue" (Stokes, 1974, p. 105), which captures both the fantasies of attaining statuesque pristine beauty as well as physical and emotional invulnerability. From a sickly, puny child, Mishima would later carve his body into an image of Apollinian male beauty.22 He became virtually obsessed with his own physical strength and aesthetics. This is both reaction formation and

38

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

narcissistic compensation: he escapes weakness and death through a defensive flight from excremental immersion into invulnerable purity, and he envisions and enacts a new self-representation that drastically inflates his self-image—he is beautiful, has transcended illness, imprisonment, and ugliness. The fecal disgust and sickliness of childhood are conquered by a masculine protest against anything dirty, sickly, or weak. Lifton (1979) believes that Mishima became numbed to feelings of weakness, death, and disintegration as means of dissociating his anxiety (pp. 264-265). His "mask" was a means of withdrawing from the excrement, disease, and impingements of his childhood, of deadening himself to ward off the threat of actual or psychic death. At the same time, these experiences immersed him in death related imagery that would pervade his psyche for life. Mishima's bodily intactness was threatened by his sickliness, weakness, manifested somatically in debilitating abdominal pains that held him writhing in agony Such terrors of disintegration seemed to culminate in the 1950s, when Mishima described feelings of derealization, that he didn't exist or know whether he was truly alive. In his diary Mishima writes of feeling "emotional numbness he fears may be schizophrenic" (Nathan, 1974, pp. 126-127). It was these experiences that actually preceded Mishima's decision to transform himself from a sickly intellectual into a lithe athlete. By contrast, he realized that physical exertion created beauty, the mirror itself transcendence of ugliness and proof of existence. If previously he was "filled with disgust" at his reflection (p. 106), exertion and exorcism of his sickly self absorbed his vulnerability and fears of fragmentation. "In the mirror now, unmistakably, he existed! The disappointed, abandoned youth of a few moments ago was nowhere to be seen" (Kyoko's House, in Nathan, 1974, p. 128). Mishima was not merely numbing himself to misery—he was also striving to obliterate the numbness and reenact the misery in extremely violent fantasies. Murder, vengeance, blood, and death saturate Mishima's fiction. The most explicit example of the sadistic escape from death in Mishima's fiction is the scene in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, the story of an adolescent whose mother becomes sexually involved with a beautiful, masculine seaman. The adolescent fraternizes with a number of sadistic boys who despise their fathers and fantasize insidious plots to undermine the social order. In one of their "scientific experiments," the young antagonists joyfully throw a kitten against a log, then dissect and uncoil its intestines. I believe this scene is one of innumerable Mishima fantasies enacting the need to punish and escape physical weakness and self-loathing. The messy, disgusting, and weak innards are destroyed in this fantasy, while Mishima himself came to pursue his physical and tactile beauty, cleanliness, and invulnerability obsessively Mishima explicitly identifies with excrement, his narcissistic injuries exacerbated by consignment to a fecal prison. The regimented diet imposed

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

39

on him engendered feelings that he had no control over his body content. His intactness was perpetually threatened by the potentially poisonous things he might eat and by the impingements of his grandmother. Finally, his inner self was poisoned by toxic introjects: the psychological ghosts of others whose influence was painful and injurious, along with feelings of shame, badness, inferiority, and helplessness thrust into him. I believe this is why Mishima had an inescapable lifelong fear of being poisoned (Stokes, 1974, p. 46). Persecuting emotional invasion, penetration, noxious impingements are embodied in oral, visceral, anal imagery and metaphor. A bodily language suffuses the self, eroticism, and the waters and soil of nature with images of voraciously devouring and being devoured, masticated, or engulfed, swallowed or sullied by decay. Mishima thus seeks to escape his excremental inferiority, terrors of disintegration, and annihilation through fantasies of cleanliness, invulnerability, inflated body (phallic) narcissism, and destruction of disgusting messiness. Psychoanalyst Annie Reich (1960) writes, "The need for narcissistic inflation arises from a striving to overcome threats to one's bodily intactness" (p. 294). Narcissistic inflation refers to colossal grandiosity, fantasies of greatness and invulnerability as means of overcoming feelings of inferiority and weakness. As a youth of 20, Mishima imagined himself "as a genius destined for an early death. As the final heir to the tradition of Japanese beauty. As a decadent among decadents, the last Emperor of an age of decadence. Even as Beauty's kamikaze squad!" (Nathan, 1974, p. 53). As we shall see, such grandiosity is exhibited by innumerable xMishima protagonists, all of whom conspicuously fantasize their greatness and superiority in direct response to humiliation and narcissistic injury. I am describing Mishima's erotic currents as anal sadism because his mode of punishment is obsessed with guts, excrement, and violation. I describe his narcissism as specifically phallic because he is fascinated by masculine display as a means of denying not only ugliness but also effeminacy, the perception of weakness, of being a shamefully castrated thing. His narcissistic fantasies are attempts to overcome the fear of "catastrophic annihilation," of "disintegration" (Kohut 1977,1979), of what Ogden (1989) calls the "autistic-contiguous dread" of collapse, fragmentation, and dissolution into urine and feces. The severe narcissist fears "falling apart at the seams," or feels like "a bagful of excrement" (cf. Reich, 1960, p. 301). Mishima's fantasy is escaping feminine messiness, a sense of self as mired in illness, not a self who can disintegrate into disease and excrement but a hero who transcends and is aroused by filth. A N A L S A D I S M A N D HOMOSEXUALITY Despite the excruciating and annihilating experience of imprisonment by his grandmother in the sickroom reeking of foul odors, this excremental

40

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

immersion was also stimulating, or else Mishima would not develop his erotic attraction for the night soil man with his "groin tuggers." How does one come to enjoy or romanticize excrement? One might argue that Mishima was arrested in the "anal stage," when the child enjoys the stimulation of his sphincter and bodily products, thereby solidifying a trenchant anal eroticism. Such an interpretation seems somehow unconvincing, if not archaically Freudian. Mishima's arrest was catastrophic and traumatic, not merely overly stimulating, nor mere fixation at a point of security he could not relinquish. The bowels and excrement came to signify stultifying immobility, helplessness, separation, and punishment. The victim of the bowels is a frail excremental creature, while the master of the bowels

uses anality as a weapon,23 himself remaining immaculate and immune

from their stench and weakness. I would argue additionally that the erotic element is narcissistic and identificatory His arousal by the tragic life of the night soil man is an identification with an adult on whom he can project his own fantasies of adulthood. The projection of fantasies on idealized others satisfies the desire for merger with those who can extricate him from his excretory imprisonment. Mishima imagines what he will be like as an adult immersed in excrement. I le sees himself as the man consigned for his whole life to trafficking in excrement and imagines a heroic yet victimized nature for this man. Since he identifies himself with excrement, he envisions a hero whose tragic fate is to carry excrement nobly. Yet young Mishima's tragic heroes are also invariably murdered in his fantasies. The Rose-Elf, Saint Sebastian, and the lovely boys he imagines are all slaughtered romantically. If Mishima identifies with these figures and imagines himself as such romantically and tragically murdered heroes, he seeks to punish that self, which he equates with excrement. He transcends the excremental imprisonment of childhood by murdering the victimized self, transforming helpless, hated, abandoned victimization into tragic beauty, and surviving as a more powerful, beautiful, erotic incarnation. Reading fairy tales, young Mishima in Confessions "was in love with all youths who were killed" and feels cheated when a prince eaten by a dragon springs back to life (pp. 21/20-22). From among Andersen's fairy tales, only the Rose-Elf casts "deep shadows" on his heart, as the beautiful youth is stabbed to death and decapitated just as he is kissing the rose his love gave him (p. 21/21). This image of beauty murdered amidst vulnerability is eroticized and becomes the obsession of the narrator's masturbation fantasies. When the narrator of Confessions reaches adolescence, he is captivated and sexually aroused by Cuido Reni's painting of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows and bleeding. "An exceptionally beautiful youth of tender years was bound naked to the trunk of a tree. . .. His white peerless nudity glistens before the background twilight. .. . The arrows have eaten into the taut, fragrant, youthful flesh and will incinerate

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

41

his body with emanating flames of supreme agony and ecstasy . . . my entire being was seized with a pagan r a p t u r e . . . . My organ was engorged with wrathful color. About to burst, my gargantuan member awaited its use with an arousal never felt before." And as he identifies with the tragedy, drama and sensual death of the beautiful masculine image, he begins to fondle and caress himself, masturbates to the image, and experiences his first radiant ejaculation (pp. 35-37/38-41). He is aroused by the naked bodies of young men at the seashore, and he becomes erect imagining death, pools of blood, and muscular flesh, scenes of samurai cutting open their bellies and soldiers struck by bullets (p. 35). Mishima also expresses sexual arousal in cutting open the bellies of his victims to prolong their pain and concludes Confessions with fantasies of cutting the belly of a man who arouses him (pp. 93, 253). If Mishima was aroused sexually by seppuku, it is likely that his own ritual suicide was a sexual fulfillment in which he played the victim and the voyeur. Death commingled with orgasm is central to Mishima's erotism and fiction. Death is sexually exciting, and sexuality requires death to achieve its orgasmic apex. For Mishima, sexuality both feeds on death and escapes it, as the intense vulnerability of sexuality is conquered revengefully by murdering it in the act of coition. Revenge is taken on vulnerability and erotic merger by killing the helplessly ejaculating subject, and, further, vulnerability, impotence, and weakness are destroyed by killing the ejaculating subject before the orgasm detumesces flaccidly and messily. The most vivid example of this dynamic is the fantasied Utopia of "The Land of the Pomegranate" in Mishima's The Temple of Dawn (Akatsuki No Tera, 1969c), where youthful couples making love are killed in the throes of orgasm (pp. 169-173). In this Utopia, no orgasm shall be left unmolested, none shall peak and render the ejaculator helpless amidst his flaccid penis and dripping semen. Murder will occur tragically, but before ignoble flaccidity. Ejaculating erection is vitality and must not be allowed to decay. And just as in the onanistic gratification of watching Saint Sebastian die from bleeding wounds in Confessions, imagining the death of the object brings the voyeur to orgasm. For Mishima, the self is simultaneously killing, dying, and ejaculating. He is the subject and object of eroticism as well as the victim and victimizer in the act of revenge on helplessness and vulnerability. Voyeurs frequently identify with the objects seen. They thus imagine themselves in the people they are watching and derive exhibitionistic gratification from their voyeurism (Eidelberg, 1954; Socarides, 1988). This is fully consistent with the voyeuristic and onanistic scenes in Mishima's fiction where he imagines the death of an erotic object and sees himself in that erotic murder. The envious voyeur may take many forms, young, old, all ugly, all achieving sexual gratification from murdering beauty, all escaping their own ugliness by imagining the self in the beauty they murder. The with-

42

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

ered old man who pontificates his fantasy of murdering beautiful youths in the Utopian "Land of the Pomegranate" is another repugnant entity Mishima wishes to destroy. He is the antithesis of Mishima's ideal self and represents the decrepit self-image he wishes to escape. As Mishima says in Sun and Steel, "The face of the intellectual whose youth was past horrified me. It was ugly and impolitic" (p. 71). In The Decay of the Angel, old age is an "ailment" or "disease" (p. 43/35). Mishima wrote, "Among my incurable convictions is the belief that the old are eternally ugly, the young eternally beautiful. The wisdom of the old is eternally murky, the actions of the young eternally transparent. The longer people live, the worse they become" (Keene, 1971, p. 208). In The Temple of Dawn, the senescent and decrepit Imanishi says, "Don't you think it's true brotherly love to terminate life while it's still young?" (p. 170). This same decrepitating carcass, who later imagines the Utopian slaughter of orgasming lovers, is described as a "long, limp sash" (p. 242)—impotence murders orgasm in envy and revenge.24 The fantasy of the decayed intellectual that Mishima despises is the author's own fantasy of punishing and fleeing himself while revenging his ugliness on beautiful youths. In this Utopia, beautiful people are assembled in the idyllic "Garden of Loved Ones" to be objects of sexual amusement for the ugly voyeurs outside. The beauty of ephemeral love murdered at the moment of climax is contrasted with the image of geriatric sex: "two heaps of withered flesh hardly bursting with vigor, swaying slowly like aquatic animals as they made contact" (p. 173). Mishima never let himself decline in these ways. He committed sej'puku before imminent decay, punishing weakness and decrepitude, terminating himself at the summit of physical beauty. Yet for Mishima, suicide was as erotic as the murder of orgasming beauty in his fiction. Mishima also wishes to kill off his helpless and orally needy self, abhorring the hungry vulnerability of selfish infants he equates with murderous parasites. In Confessions, the narrator witnesses the bloody aftermath of air raids of Tokyo, sees the dead eyes of victims wrapped in blankets, and muses that the baby murders his mother when she dies trying to save it (p. 161). His rage and shame over both his vulnerability and his neediness are manifest in his blaming the helpless infant for crying out in hunger. This is a schizoidal reaction that conceives its own desire as destructive (cf. Guntrip, 1969; Kohut, 1977). It recapitulates the shame and resentment of the child who was forced to sit in dark silence lest his grandmother fly into psychotic tantrum, instilling the terror that his own needs would elicit her fury and pain. And given the rage he undoubtedly experienced as a neglected infant longing for food and love, it is understandable that he attributes a kind of murderous impulse (or effect) to children. Thus, he can disavow that needy and vulnerable part of himself, but

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

43

this can be achieved only by a fascinating identification with the grandmother who abused him. This enables him to escape awareness of his own neediness through her strength, and it simultaneously preserves the fantasy that she is benign and lovable. He subsequently revels in the torture of others. When the narrator of Confessions sees the wartime suffering around him and decides that needy people are to blame and should be destroyed, he feels a sense of joy and puts his arms lovingly around Sonoko. He later thinks that he would rather die than be unmanly or emotionally needy, being "a person who wants only to be loved without knowing how to love" (p. 203). His neediness and his inability to attain a relationship are so humiliating that he would rather die than experience his own feelings. Such shame also participates in sadistic fantasies wrhere he would mistakenly kill persons he loves in the absence of knowing how to express love (p. 93). Mishima's narcissism is an identification with the aggression of his grandmother, the only powerful organism to whom he can cling amidst a sea of craven abandoning objects. It should be no surprise that Mishima adored his grandmother, certainly not because she was a kind, nurturing woman (absurd) but because she gave him attention when others neglected (or were isolated from) him. And if this attention may have been utterly persecutory and injurious, his own need for safety and nurturance, alongside the terror of being demolished and despised by this volatile witch, became cheerfulness and alignment with her violence, as survival Ironically, identification with his grandmother meant aligning himself with both her aggression and sickliness. Mishima's sense of himself as diseased and rotting derives not just from his having been frail as a child or from being convinced he was sickly or inferior. Identification with his grandmother's diseased nature meant conforming to disease to merge with his grandmother, and one might conclude that his childhood illnesses were psychosomatic identifications reflecting her need to keep him

helpless, obedient, and sick (Rheingold, 1967, pp. 144-145).25 Not only

does he internalize her punitive need for him to be dependent and sick, but he also imitates her behavior (like a couvade), a hysterical psycho-

somatic adoption of similitude.26 Resembling her in illness is an emotional

bond. Succumbing to her authority, Mishima thus aligns himself with her malice and imagines destroying the weak and shameful creature she has envisioned and thrust into his psyche as his coerced but dominating selfrepresentation. Those described as phallic narcissists often imagine that the maternal object has a penis, a fantasy that in Mishima's case is bolstered by the phallic castrating personality of the grandmother—again, her aggression takes on a symbolically phallic contour by virtue of this fantasy and her hostile invasiveness. Hence, Mishima's identification with her aggression will be both anally and phallically sadistic. Mishima's phallic narcissism

44

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

and anal sadism turn hostile punishment toward others so as to be the active perpetrator rather than the passive, feminine, annihilated victim of the aggression. Mishima experiences severely masochistic impulses derived from an immensely sadistic conscience, but his identification with the aggression of his grandmother places him in a position to simultaneously punish his own frail nature, to transcend that nature through the identification, and finally to derogate others the way she did (cf. Kernberg, 1992, pp. 24-25). Note also that Mishima's sadism and masochism also express the wish to punish the grandmother, not only act out her sadism. Mishima therefore becomes powerful and authoritarian, derogating weakness and impurity, and counteracting his own weakness through aggressive, exhibitionistic, and grandiose behavior. Annie Reich (1960) writes of the person whose "uncontrollable feelings of helplessness, anxiety, and rage" are narcissistic injuries that lead to the compensatory "overvaluation of the phallus, in contrast to the concept of the female organs as being destroyed, bleeding, dirty, etc." Reich stresses that castration threats, with ensuing overvaluation of the phallus, represent only the most conspicuous and the most tangible narcissistic trauma. However, any need for repair or restitution may be condensed into fantasies about phallic intactness and greatness. Castration thus is equated with object loss, emptiness, hunger, bowel loss and dirtiness, while phallic intactness also expresses the undoing of pregenital losses and injuries. Most important in this context is the equation of the whole body with a phallus, whose oral background was pointed out by Lewin (1933). (p. 299)27 In this way, Mishima can contain both erotic currents, maintaining the element of tragedy, while killing off the excremental self in striving for samurai purity. This anal eroticism therefore contains a deeply sadistic element that drives his need both to punish the excremental and to achieve an orgasmic conquest over that which is weak and disgusting. Recall again Mishima's fantasies of disemboweling the kitten in The Sailor WIio Fell from Grace with the Sea and the numerous rapes and executions in Confessions. The story "Martyrdom" also depicts the sadistic thrashing of a young and helpless boy, after which the sadist and victim lay together in a state of exhaustion, the boy's naked buttocks exposed, the lovers in almost postorgasmic slumber. The beautiful but helpless boy is finally murdered (hanged) at the denouement of the story. Mishima's homosexuality takes the form of being the masculine subjugator who invades and emasculates the weak and fecal male of his childhood, revenging himself on his own excremental and helpless nature, his orgasm as both instrument of conquest and negation. Reich (1933) says of the eroticism of the phallic narcissist that "the penis is not in the service of love but is an

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

45

instrument of aggression and vengeance" (p. 203). Kernberg (1992) writes of aggressive penetration as a crucial contributor to gratifying fusion (p. 28), that sadistic penetration can satisfy the fantasy of destroying the genitals of the other and filling them with poison or excrement (p. 254). The erotic pleasure of anal penetration and conquest is a defense against that helpless vulnerability and anguish. 28 Beneath this, of course, may be a desire to be penetrated. Reich (1933) argues that the phallic-exhibitionistic and sadistic attitude serves as a defense against anal and passive homosexual wishes (pp. 163, 204): Your hand trembles in mine Like a frightened pigeon. I fear Your pink beak will peck My youth. (1940, in Nathan, 1974, p. 32) Mishima has a wish for a powerful father, and he is aroused by the night soil man. He is sexually aroused by images of hapless victims of penetration whom he perceives as languishing erotically in pierced, sensual death. Saint Sebastian and the Rose-Elf are vulnerable and therefore deeply sensuous, seductive, erotic, as is the beautiful Watari of "Martyrdom" discussed a moment ago. Mishima also developed an early inclination to transvestitism in identification with narcissistic women. Mishima identified with the narcissistic exhibitionism of his grandmother, with the performer Tenkatsu, and with Cleopatra (Confessions, pp. 16-20). This is an erotic fascination with their erotic aplomb, as these women command erotic attention, exhibit their sexuality for all to desire, and remain in control as they seduce their audiences. It is a wish to be loved passively (receptively), be the object of love and lust, rather than having to actively pursue the unrequited love of abandoning objects. It is also simultaneously an identification with the grandmother and the wish to be loved by father as though he (Mishima) were a woman. Numerous psychoanalytic studies (Greenacre, 1968; Socarides, 1988; Stoller, 1975) explain transvestitism as an attempt to diminish the fear of emasculation, to triumph over humiliation by converting a sense of being injured, inferior, and defective into exhibitionistic success. Transvestitism is seen as defending against deeper anxieties of fusion with mother (or grandmother) as well as impingement and engulfment. It maintains the relationship with mother but keeps her at a distance while retaining the penis. This may explain Mishima's prolonged fascination with the eroticism of the onnagata, the elegant male kabuki performer in woman's kimono and makeup. The onnagata is an erotic contradiction, feminine yet

46

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

phallic, beautiful and seductive, concealing a penis almost illicitly. Transvestitism idealizes the feminine psychic attitude, maintains the belief in the phallic woman, and enacts the fetishistic substitution of the mother by her clothes and a substitution of her clothes for her penis. Transvestitism reveals the inability of the child to identify with father or disidentify with mother and abates fears of fragmentation through identification with her, especially in homes where the father is inadequate or belittled. Socarides claims that homosexual transvestites dress as women to be loved by men and that penetration by a male reinforces masculine identity through incorporating the partner's maleness and penis while simultaneously preserving the tie with the mother (cf. also Kernberg, 1992; McDougall, 1982, 1995). However, because of his imprisonment in the excremental dungeon of his incontinent grandmother, Mishima's masculine protest conceives of passivity and penetration as weakness, femininity, and castration. This is again an aspect of the self he wishes to kill off and again why Mishima is so aroused by the idea of killing someone at the height of orgasm—both the object's orgasm and his own in the act of killing. I would finally add that young Mishima's joy in running about the room shouting at the top of his voice that he was Tenkastu, feeling all eyes on him, was terminated by the embarrassment of his pallid mother. She met his eyes briefly and then lowered her head. "Tears blurred my eyes" (Confessions, p. 18). The boy's identification with erotic and powerful women and his plea for mirroring were met with shame and disappointment, exacerbating the humiliating and enraging conflicts we have just seen. Vengeance against disease, weakness, ugliness, the feminine, his own shameful need for love: these are only the beginning. Thus far I have explored Mishima's traumatic childhood and the experiences leading him toward misogyny, narcissistic grandiosity and exhibitionism, and the drive to murder his own weakness and sexual vulnerability. Mishima suffered the extraordinary trauma of being separated from his parents and sequestered to the sickroom of a psychotic grandmother until his adolescence. Intense rage over abandonment and impingement engendered a disgust for femininity and the need to escape feminine messiness through homoerotic pursuits. Mishima's entrenched feelings of shame and weakness gave rise to phallic narcissistic tendencies, as he idealized powerful men and eventually strove to become a powerful and beautiful male. In pursuing this erotic masculine image, Mishima continued to fantasize about murdering his weak and shameful self-image and commingled this sadistic impulse with fantasies of sexual merger with murdered love objects. Finally, Mishima was the murderer erotically eradicating his sexual vulnerability as both subject and object, one of many repetitive fantasies composing the matrix of his suicide. In the

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

47

next chapter, w e explore M i s h i m a ' s a d o r a t i o n of b e a u t y a n d his need to murder it. NOTES 1. Mishima's mother tells John Nathan "do you see what a sadist my husband is?" during interviews (1974, p. xix). She later tells Nathan that because of her son's painful childhood (and the callous indifference of Azusa), her son's bleak destiny was decided by the time he was twelve years old (p. 10). 2. Fear of persecution runs rampant in Mishima's writings. The fear that one's emotions and needs will kill another will be discussed in greater detail in the chapter on Forbidden Colors. For exposition on the fear of loving and contaminating, see Guntrip (1969). For the role of hostility by family members in suicidal ideation, see Federn (1929), Meerloo (1962), Rheingold (1964,1967), Richman and Rosenbaum (1970), and Straker (1958). 3. Here Mishima quotes and expounds the views of Jocho Yamamoto, author of the samurai treatise Hagakure. One cannot help but perceive the correspondences between Mishima's resonance with these passages and his past. Nathan's (1974) biography of Mishima seems to confirm the sense that Mishima's mother was manipulative and was constantly deriding the father. 4. The term "forbidden colors" (kinjiki) is a classical literary term that refers to homosexuality. In the context of the novel, the colors depict the spectrum of young male sexuality from its dawn through its apex and dusk. Apropos of the term "protagonist," one might rather describe these malicious characters as antagonists, but they often speak with the author's voice, while the loathed women are antagonists to them. Our distaste for them does not make them the author's antagonists. In Forbidden Colors, the protagonists are repulsive in many ways, even to the author, but they are also his fantasies, repeating his obsessions. 5. If one objects to this argument and claims that homosexuality is genetic or organic, this would hardly explain his misogynistic rage, disgust for the vagina, and need to humiliate women. No biologistic explanation makes sense of his fantasies of death and bloodshed, and in fact equating Mishima's homosexuality with anyone else's is a disservice to those who prefer men but obviously do not inherently experience such rage, contempt, or disgust for women or the need to murder and violate other men sexually. One must look to Mishima's life and fantasies, which revolve around hatred of women, disgust for their bodies, and preference for masculine, pristine beauty. 6. The "phallic" woman has two connotations: possessing a penis because men cannot endure the idea that she is castrated, which is frightening. Here the fear of the vagina is primary, and the phallus is a fetish that denies reality. The second connotation, the one emphasized here, is the fantasy that the woman is so penetratingly invasive and masculine (in the social imagination of the word) that she is unconsciously imagined to possess a phallus. In this sense the phallus is a social signifier of masculine power and violence. 7.1 have described the woman's coldness as captivating his heart because the word kanjun contains the character for heart, though it can be translated as "interest" or "fascination."

48

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

8. If Mishima's grandmother did in fact wake him at night screaming that she would slit her throat with a knife, it seems plausible that the literary fantasy of Reiko's death by slitting her throat is a pleasurably vengeful wish fulfillment. Age, disease, and ugliness are murdered before they can embody themselves as the despised medusan grandmother. Mishima joyously calls his grandmother's bluff and murders her and all her loathsome grotesquerie, in effect killing her before she can be born and torture him. This image may have its origins in Japanese history, but this does not explain why Mishima writes about it, and it is clear from the text that he prefers her obedience to love. The text explicilly slates that her death is preferable to old age, which is different from merely lamenting the transience of beauty These themes are consistent with Mishima's haired for the feminine, old age, decay, and death, and here these are all murdered in what may very well be a vindictive repetition of the terrifying and enraging suicidal threat inflicted on young Mishima. Suicide itself may be seen as a murder of the hostile introject, the psychologically internalized punitive grandmother. As shall be argued throughout this book, Mishima's suicide represents the fantasy of murdering the toxic introject and expelling it with his entrails, and thus "Patriotism" envisions the fantasy of murdering the feminine, excising her presence from his innards, and even capitulating to grandmother's malice by killing himself, satisfying her, and attaining unconscious fusion in death (cf. Asch, 1980; Maltzberger & Buie, 1980; Straker, 1958). 9.1 translated the words eien na as "eternal." They also mean perpetual, immortal, and permanent, things that are not transient, evanescent, ephemeral, do not die and decay. 10. This is an occurrence of the "uncanny" in a psychological sense, meaning it is the return of a repressed memory. Mishima describes the terrifying recollection as "yomigaeta," brought back to life, resurrected, revived, risen from the dead, apposite metaphors for unearthing buried (repressed) memories and feelings if there ever were. 11. To evoke Milton, the mask vengefully forced on her face is an "excremental whiteness": it besmirches, and its blank whiteness belies the malicious derogation implied in the purification of her evil (Bloom, 1982, p. 79). 12. Cf. Nathan (1974) and Stokes (1974). 13. Cf. Reich (I960), who writes of the disturbed narcissistic patient who equates femininity with complete annihilation (p. 295). See also Rheingold (1964), who describes not the reality of "effeminacy" but the fear of being a woman. 14. The idea of the schizogenic or schizophrenogenic mother has been rejected by many scholars over the past generation. However, I doubt few would debate the devastating impact of childhood trauma on the psyche of the child and his or her burgeoning sexuality and gender identity. 15. See Horney (1967), Lederer (1968), Mahler (1979), Neumann (1959), and Rheingold (1964) on the fear of women. When 1 write that men conceive women, this implies that men know women only by way of imagination (the irony being that women conceive men of course, but men imagine and construct their own versions of femininity). For Mishima (and most men), women are a fantasy. Whatever women may be, he knows only what he imagines, and women will always conform to this fantasy. 16. The photograph can be seen in Nathan's (1974) biography. McPherson and

Disease, Misogyny, Narcissism, and Vengeance

49

Lester may exaggerate how much Mishima's grandmother is physically supported by the young boy in the photograph, but I believe the interpretation is valid. 17. Bester (in Mishima, 1989) maintains that "the hero worship does not come from the author, who is remarkably clear-eyed about his main character's priggishness" (p. ix). As Jiro is beautiful, with absolute dedication to the purity of his sport, and opposed to intellectualism, he is the idealized male Mishima so often envisages. And Mibu adores him, yearns for his affection, admires and wishes to be like Jiro, as also happens in these repeated scenarios. If the psychological motivations for Jiro's behavior are intimated by the passages describing his family background, this is no proof that Mishima does not see him as a paragon of masculinity. Rather, his flaws make him tragic—he possesses a deep pain and finally commits seppuku and dies a tragic death. He wouldn't be tragic without inner scars, and if anything Jiro's motives to escape his family mire are reflections on Mishima's own wish to transcend the miasma of his own family through physical and emotional purification. 18. Mishima writes that "remorse began to gnaw at me: or rather, a guilty fear. I felt as though there was still a cigarette down there between my fingers" (p. 116). Here the cigarette possesses many symbolic valences: rebellion, the need for love, the gift of love, the illicit homoerotic, the penis of the other that he holds between his fingers, his own penis that he holds in secret. 19. For one example of the difference between Mishima's literary accounting of memory and what might have happened (according to his mother), see Stokes (1974, p. 40). Of course, not just the faultiness of memory but other motives distort the narration of events. This is why Freud said that all memories were screen memories, always invested with meaning to accord with one's fantasy of self and history. So while one may consciously distort events, unconscious distortion is inevitable to some degree even when trying to tell the truth (cf. Greenacre, 1957; Hillman, 1983; Kris, 1952). 20. Stokes (1974) believes the essential details accurate enough to use as biographical material for his book on Mishima. Peterson (1979) believes that the issue of whether Confessions is factually autobiographical is irrelevant. The novel itself confesses Mishima's obsessive thematics and symbolism with his imagery of sea, sweat, butchery, and romanticism (pp. 225-226, 283). 21. Some critics argue against Mishima's homosexuality, either by denying it outright or by interpreting it as metaphoric of general alienation (Starrs, 1994, p. 98). Considering the proliferation of homosexual fantasies in Mishima fiction, this seems extremely unlikely and probably reflects their resistance to an unwelcome idea. Alienated people do not simply obsess on penetrating and kissing dying kouretes, wishing to see their genitalia, and masturbating to dreams of coupling with them. They do not spend hundreds of pages describing the kind of beautiful boys they find adorable simply to convey alienation. Mishima not only described homoerotic imagery in lurid detail, was not only obsessed with images of beautiful males, but also seems to have engaged in a number of homosexual relationships (Nathan, 1974; Stokes, 1974; Keene, personal communication). For now, the emphasis is on the psychological complexity of Mishima's fantasies rather than how he may have acted them out. 22.1 use the term "Apollinian" rather than "Apollonian" to reflect Nietzsche's influence on Mishima. Nietzsche (1872) writes of the "Apollinische."

50

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

23. As did Martin Luther, who defeated Satan in the Wittenberg latrine by hurling insults, feces, and a mighty anal blast at his foe. See Brown (1959) for a lengthy excursus on anality. 24. Ironically, Imanishi is only about 40, but he is described as a decrepit body, which only reifies Mishima's exaggerated sense that people in their forties (if not thirties) are already suffering that aged sickness unto death. 25. Nathan (1974) mentions how Mishima's illnesses disappeared when he entered school (p. 14). This only confirms that when not in his grandmother's presence, there was no need to simulate illness to accord with her. However, even in years after Mishima transformed himself into a healthy muscular specimen in his escape from disease and messiness, he did retain his susceptibility to debilitating abdominal cramps. There is no absolute proof that this condition was psychosomatic, but it seems likely an atavistic remnant of an object tie to his grandmother. 26. The couvade is a simulated pregnancy enacted by men of disparate tribes throughout history. More than just imitating the pregnancy of his wife, the male experiences abdominal symptoms (labor pains) and suffers alongside his wife. It is not just an act but also a hysterical (psychosomatic) experience. It has also been interpreted as a scheme to escape retaliation by women angry from their excruciating pregnancy (Reik, 1946) and as parturition envy, one of many instances where men envy women and attempt to generate the ability to give birth (cf. Bettelheim, 1954). 27. This description accords with Mishima in every detail. 28. Kernberg also writes that such penetration can be revenge against the "teasingly unavailable breasts that can be incorporated only by cannibalistic destruction" (p. 254). The yearning for the mother and her nourishment underlying violent fantasy will be discussed throughout this book.

CHAPTER 2

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

In the previous chapter, I explored the traumatic childhood that led to Mishima's misogyny, homosexuality, and fantasies of murdering sexual vulnerability. In this chapter, I argue that his murderous fantasies also reflect intense rage over abandonment by beautiful love objects. Mishima's voyeurism will be explained as a fantasy of both retaining and injuring unattainable love objects, as well as retaining his own existence against disappearance and loss. Mishima's phallic narcissistic exhibitionism can also be understood as an attempt to substantiate an ineffable self through perception by others. I finally address the complex nature of his ritual suicide as fantasy of rebirth, sexual merger, the murder of toxic introjects, and escape from death, decay, and regression to helpless infancy. REVENGE ON BEAUTIFUL A N D A B A N D O N I N G LOVES Revenge on beauty is yet another aspect of Mishima's sadistic erotic current. Mishima has fantasies of killing his weak and decrepit self, of attaining masculine beauty, and of merging with (and therefore becoming) beautiful male sex partners. However, the wish to murder beautiful objects complicates the merging fantasy. While Mishima is aroused by powerful, masculine youths, his self-disgust and narcissistic injury are inflicted on others who represent the ideal beauty from which he is alienated. While Mishima protests his weakness through manic attempts to attain beauty and invulnerability, he repeatedly fantasizes about destroying

52

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

beauty, which eludes and mocks him. This echoes Melanie Klein's (1957) perspective in "Envy and Gratitude" that severe narcissists despise the people they envy and love. They idealize the envied object to diminish envy, splitting the good from the bad object to merge with the exalted love object, but often come to turn their rage on those they envy (p. 216). Such violent fantasies are consequences of the narcissistic persona derived from prolonged injury to Mishima's sense of self, his feelings of shame and self-loathing, and derive from the failure of the "self-object environment" to meet the child's need for empathic responses. As Kohut (1977) stresses, destructive rage is always motivated by an injury to the self (p. 116). Rage erupts when attempts to resolve the intolerable loss by new acts of merger and rapprochement with the idealized self-object fail, refilling Mishima with his primitive and excruciating feelings of badness, shame, and rejection. Destruction or murder of the idealized and now despised object is the result. Mishima's own tragic suicide becomes the sadistic murder of the alienating and abandoning love object. As Kernberg (1992) says, "The object is at bottom both needed and desired, and its destruction is equally needed and desired" (p. 23). Further, "self-mutilation typically reflects unconscious identification with the object" (p. 26). The narrator of Confessions becomes infatuated by the mature, masculine sexuality of a youth named Omi at his school. He realizes it is a desire of the flesh and waits for summer to see Omi's naked body and his huge penis (p. 61). He says, "What I did derive from him was a precise definition of the perfection of life and manhood" (p. 64). The narrator of Confessions idealizes his love and "fashioned a perfect, flawless image" of Omi (p. 63). The narrator notes how much Omi has affected his life: "because of him I cannot love an intellectual person. . . . I began to love strength, an impression of overflowing blood, ignorance, rough gestures, careless speech, and the savage melancholy inherent in flesh not tainted in any way with intellect" (p. 64). Mishima conceives the unintellectual relationship as a pure, sensual one devoid of artifice and unsusceptible to the disappointment inevitably resulting from knowing his lover. This is a recurring theme in Mishima's fiction and once again reflects his sense of alienation from love and engulfment and impingement by poisonous influences. Vulnerability and merger have been traumatic and excruciating, and Mishima imagines that the only means of attaining intimacy is explicitly physical, so that nothing penetrates him emotionally The narrator of Confessions notes, "The discovery of even the slightest intellectualism in a companion would force me to a rational judgment of values" (p. 64). Since this would necessarily result in disappointment, he endeavors to remain at a distance and fancies the ideal relationship unattainable. As Kernberg (1992) writes, "Hatred and the inability to tolerate communication with the object may protect the patient from what might otherwise emerge as a combination of cruel

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

53

attacks on the object, paranoid fears of that object, and self-directed aggression in identification with the object" (p. 26). Thus, for Mishima, an erotic relationship could be achieved only when communication was inhibited, else he would despise and fear the object and sink into self-punitive hostility through re-creating the merger relationship of his infancy, where his love objects abandoned and derogated him. Communication would be an impinging and engulfing transference reenactment of childhood excruciation. Silence allows the projection to operate effectively, as idealizing fantasies protect the erotic illusion from molestation by actual interaction with the object. He therefore becomes a voyeur, "forever watching" toughs, sailors, soldiers, and fishermen from afar, pretending not to be aroused (p. 65). He watches Omi with a "primeval glance," cannot take his eyes off Omi's profile, and continues to have a fierce desire to see Omi's naked body (p. 73).1 He becomes aroused watching Omi's hirsute armpits (pp. 78-79, 82-83). Phallic imagery abounds. The "Omi" figure recurs in Mishima's fiction. In "Sword," Jiro is a masculine, disciplined incarnation of purity and youth. His suicide at the end of the story was not the first rehearsal of seppuku that Mishima portrayed, and, like Mishima, Jiro is concerned supremely with his ideals and dies at the apex of youthful purity. In "Cigarette" (Tabako, 1946), Imura is described as being attractive and masculine, while the boy who seeks to ingratiate himself with Imura compares the muscular object of his love with women and thinks them "intensely unattractive" (p. 111). The lovely youth of The Sound of Waves (Shiosai, 1954) is compared to a piece of heroic sculpture, the mathematics instructor of Confessions to a statue of Hercules nude. The "amazingly beautiful" Yuichi of Forbidden Colors emerges from the waves like a bronze Greek god (pp. 20-21). Jayavarman of The Terrace of The Leper King (Raio No Terasu, 1969d) is a "resplendently shining" paragon of men whose "youthful peak is beautifully evident in his eyes, in his eyebrows" (p. 175). Loyal Lieutenant Takeyama of "Patriotism" is "masculine beauty at its most superb" as he contemplates death "with severe brows and firmly closed lips" (p. 111). Isao of Runaway Horses (Honba, 1968b) is the ideal beautiful Apollinian male youth who commits seppuku. As Peterson (1979) writes, "This classical male body is the dominant figure in all of Mishima's works, including his final tetralogy: plays, novels, short stories, films.... The body assumes a hundred masks" (p. 205). Mishima himself was conscious that his own physical weakness created the obsession for an "Omi" image and that his own fear impelled him to create a replica of an "Omi" out of himself. The protagonist of Confessions is therefore unaware at times of the difference between reality and illusion. His fantasies of merger are so powerful as to render his identity boundaries fluid with the object of his desire. Kernberg (1992) writes of the

54

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

"unconscious identification with the originally hated—and needed—object" (p. 25). Love, envy, and hatred are thus commingled in fantasies of merger and revenge. The narrator of Confessions identifies with Omi and wishes to be like him. He experiences immense loneliness and searches for some element of similarity between himself and his love object, thus becoming "a stand-in for Omi" and feeling the same emotions. Finally, the narrator falls into the pose of Saint Sebastian, espies his own armpits, becomes aroused, and masturbates to himself as fetish and sexual object (pp. 88-89). Mishima thus enacts a narcissistic sexual fantasy becoming aroused while looking at himself, as his armpits become the fetish that arouses him. "In the armpits . . . a sweet and melancholy odor emanated from the growth of hair, and in the sweetness of this odor was contained, somehow, the essence of young death" ("Patriotism," p. 106). The armpits are displacements of both the bodily organ and the person who originally excited him. Since the narrator of Confessions is aroused by the pose of Saint Sebastian and the armpits of Omi, the arousal is in attaining a masculinity he utterly lacks. But why an armpit? Of all masculine organs, orifices, and concavities, what does this symbolize? It is not just masculinity but also a soft, hidden, moist, aromatic cove for sexual penetration. To make what may seem an excessively psychoanalytic interpretation, even their armpits are likely displacements of his mother's vagina. While it is speculative, I would suggest that eroticizing the armpits enacts an unconscious fantasy of retaining mother's vagina, which also enables him to feel that he has a vagina in his own body while simultaneously hiding this vaginal fantasy from himself. This would be consistent with Mishima's fantasies of passive penetration and feminine identification, but it also represents his wish for a vagina, which symbolizes the absent body of his mother and her love as well as the ability to create from himself. I lowever, given Mishima's anal fixations, it would not be inconsistent to see the sexual interest in the armpits as an anal displacement during the period when certain aspects of his homosexuality were uncomfortable and disavowed. 2 Yet those delusional fantasies of merger are punctuated by the reality of his separation and alienation from his love, as he looks at his own reflection and thinks, "Never in this world can you resemble Omi" (p. 83).3 It should be noted that the narrator's realization that he could not be like Omi makes him believe he could not attract women. The implication is that he wants to be like Omi so that he can seduce women, but one can also argue that he tries to desire women to be like Omi, which accords with his fantasies of becoming Omi to escape his weakness. The realization that he bears no resemblance to Omi arouses in the narrator of Confessions a destructive envy and agitates his hostile and reactive narcissism by the understanding that he was devoid of beauty and therefore different. He sees the abundant growth of hair in Omi's armpits and notices his

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

55

bulging muscles and suddenly becomes aroused with violent fantasies of Omi as "an insane human-sacrifice." The narrator has an erection, is filled with jealously, and forswears his love for Omi (pp. 78-79). His life becomes the pursuit of the "Omi" image, whether in the simple case of the narrator being attracted only to unintellectual sailors and soldiers or in reality where Mishima eventually became that masculine image. The narrator of Confessions becomes obsessed with a single motto: "Become Strong!" (p. 68/80). He realizes that he is still infatuated with Omi and falls in love with the hair under his arms, which makes him resemble Omi. Once again, this repeats his fantasies of merger, which dissolve differences of identity between lover and love object. The "Omi" imago is the masturbatory narcissism the narrator inhabits in his fantasies of merger. These fantasies are uncannily similar to the merger fantasies of murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed in order to gain intimacy with his victims and escape alienation and fragmentation. Reich (1933) writes that most sex murderers have suffered from severe infantile disappointments in love and later realize their phallic-sadistic vengeance on the love object (p. 206). Alford (1997) believes that such murderers are escaping from what Ogden again calls "autistic-contiguous dread," the primitive terror of leaking, disintegrating, and falling into nothingness that underlies the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (childhood fears of being punished and abandoned). 4 And like Mishima, these (real) murderers are not only responding to their fears of disintegration but also expressing their immense rage and shame over having been abandoned. Both the homosexuality and the violence are expressions of wishes for merger and incorporation in oral, anal, and phallic imagery—through kissing and cannibalism, penetration and violation from the rear. And the homosexuality and violence are similarly expressions of the rage and shame of being rejected, invaded, and penetrated as well. Not only does Omi become the object of his fantasies, but beautiful male images also become the victims of a recurring tragic death fantasy where they are slaughtered by the protagonist and kissed while still quivering: The weapon of my imagination slaughtered many a Grecian soldier, many white slaves of Arabia, princes of savage tribes, hotel elevator-boys, waiters, young toughs, army officers, circus roustabouts. . . . I was one of those savage marauders who, not knowing how to express their love, mistakenly kill the person they love. I would kiss the lips of those who had fallen on the ground and were still moving spasmodically, (p. 93) The narrator specifies that murder is enacted in the absence of knowledge on how to express love. One can therefore read this element of his murderous impulses as a reaction to frustration during attempts at merger

56

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

and rapprochement with those from whom one is estranged. His separation from love objects fills him with rage, and his complete helplessness in figuring out some means of communicating his love, of getting through, arouses destructive hostility. He feels immense antagonism toward those who rejected him, and I suspect that love objects must be punished, immobilized, and helpless before he can feel they are no longer threatening. He is also injuring them as a defensive response to his own feelings of shame and helplessness for wanting love, hurting them in anger for needing them. Finally, he identifies with the slaughtered victim, as he feels castrated and dominated, repeating the fantasy that transforms castration into tragic and noble death. Again, arousal by sadistic and homoerotic fantasies occurs immediately after an experience of humiliation, a threat to his narcissism, and the experience of feeling feminine and castrated. The narrator of Confessions calls this his "murder theater" (the same words used in The Temple of Dawn when lovers are murdered during orgasm), and he has innumerable sexual fantasies revolving around bloodshed and orgasm. He envisions killing one of his classmates through strangulation from the rear, after which the unconscious boy is stripped naked and given a "lingering kiss" on his "slightly parted lips." Note the image of anal domination envisioned in this fantasy. The narrator subsequently serves the boy on a platter and thrusts his fork into the boy's heart, a "fountain of blood" striking the narrator in the face (pp. 94-97). Once again, the erotic fantasies are not just phallic but oral in nature since the narrator wishes to eat the body of his victim in a veritable totem feast where he can absorb the manna and beauty of his victim (cf. Freud, 1913). The narrator elsewhere has fantasies about an execution factory "where mechanical drills for piercing the human body were always running, where blood juice was sweetened, canned, and put on the market" (p. 94). This contains both phallic penetrating and oral sadistic, vampiric components, the drills representative of the inserted penis and the sharp cannibalizing teeth that extract the nourishment and life from the victim (originally the absent mother whose emotional and liquid nourishment were yearned for). I would also suspect that eating the victim's heart would in this case relate as well to consuming the organ of love in both revenge and incorporation for having been abandoned. This fantasy of drinking blood was also acted out when Mishima formed his private military squad and held a ceremony where each member bled into a communal cup, finally consuming the ritual extraction. This murder theater repeats the adolescent masturbation fantasies described earlier, but my emphasis here is on revenge against unreciprocating beautiful others in addition to the murder of sexual vulnerability. If Mishima murdered his weak and needy self, he also wishes for the death of those he desires, wishes to be, who do not requite his yearnings, who have rejected him. As implied, this includes vengeance toward those who originally rejected

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

57

him, now displaced into revenge against beautiful people and even inanimate objects. Another masturbation fantasy enacts the murders of Jesus and Saint Sebastian, piercing their sides and reveling in the bubbling blood that flows down the thighs of the victim. Strange as this may seem, I would suggest that the bleeding wound is another surrogate vagina, repeating the displaced wish for mother's body and absolving Mishima of his loneliness. His internal voice says to him, "You are not attacked by that sadness which follows intercourse with a woman," which echoes both an escape from castration and the attainment of merger with mother disguised as masculine relatedness (p. 176).5 The description of his postorgasmic bliss is certainly described in amniotic terms: "For a little while you are floating in the memory of a huge ancient river" (p. 176). The homoerotic and sadistic fantasies must be understood in relation to the despair of loneliness, abandonment, castration, and death, and these derive from excruciating and unsatisfied relations with both the alternately absent and sadistic father and the lethal feminine of Mishima's infancy. Such experiences are displaced into terrifying fantasies of persecution, cannibalism, and death, threatened even by lifeless things that surge with malevolent intentions, like the sky or the sea. Throughout his fiction, Mishima imagines nature as a monstrous, murderous, lacerating, seductive, and often explicitly feminine essence.6 This image of the sea as a violent cannibalistic force of evil echoes throughout Mishima's fiction. In Thieves (Tozoku, 1948b), the protagonist Akihide looks out over the sea and is confronted by "death as a glittering entity" (Nathan, 1974, p. 76). In "Death in Midsummer," the ocean swallows and murders children. In Sailor, a cat's blood is likened to a tropical sea. In Forbidden Colors, the sea regurgitates putrescing corpses. In The Decay of the Angel, our protagonist stares at the ocean: Toru thought that the crashing waves were an embodiment of death itself.. .. They were maws gaping at the moment of agonizing death.... Their mouths, open in agony, the jaws, beginning to gasp, dripped copious strands of white saliva from rows of white teeth. The earth, dyed purple by twilight, was dying lips.... Death jumped swiftly into the gaping mouth of the dying sea. Nakedly exposing death again and again, the sea then disposed of the corpses like police, hiding them from human eyes.... He became fleetingly aware of another world being wrenched from the gaping maw of the wave, its jaws opening painfully . . . In the stomach of the breaking waves seaweed was undulating in a joyful dance, and perhaps the world fleetingly envisioned was a minute replica of the viscous purple and pink creases and folds of the nauseating seabed, (pp. 109-110/87-88) I would suggest that this is a displacement of the admonishing witch from childhood, the hostile maw that derogated and terrified the young boy,

58

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

the same maw later described as a cannibalistic creature like the Hindu goddess Kali dripping blood from her mouth (p. 210). Given its feminine character and Mishima's disgust for the vagina throughout his fiction (much more on this anon), I would even speculate that the gastronomic folds of purple and pink are not merely alimentary but genital, an evocative displacement of the loathsome castrating vagina. It was earlier mentioned how the ocean both terrified young Mishima and was the site of a passionate bond between him and his mother. Given the repetition of imagery wherein the ocean signifies death and the feminine, one wonders whether the ocean was an ideal container for the evacuation and displacement of terror of Mishima's grandmother, while safety associated with his mother was located beyond the carnivorous and masticating maw of nature. 7 In Confessions, the narrator thinks, "I had an uncomfortable suspicion that Nature had come to reconquer the earth for herself. The yellow of the rape blossoms, the green of the young grass, the fresh-looking black trunks of the cherry trees, the canopy of heavy blossoms that bent the branches low—all these were reflected in my eyes as vivid colors tinged with malevolence" (pp. 178-179). The ocean reminds the narrator of death, its splashing waves appearing as "white hands pleading for rescue" (p. 73/86). The waves form a maleficent hood, thus evoking the image of cloaked death with skeletal hands. The insidious hooded guillotine then decapitates and stalks its severed head: Something awoke and arose within its green hood. The wave ascended, and exposed the vast panorama of the colossal oceanic hatchet's sharpened blade, waiting to strike the shore. The inky guillotine crashed, ejaculating a spray of white blood. Then the spine of the foaming, collapsing wave momentarily pursued its crushed head, reflecting the immaculate purity of the blue sky, that unearthly blue reflected in the eyes of a person in the throes of death, (p. 73/87)

The imagery of castration by a clitoris and vagina is startling, and the Japanese word for "hood" chosen here is described with a specifically feminine and maternally imaged character.8 This uncanny vision evokes a sense of despair and solitude, a sense of "emptiness before the cascading flood of the sea." He immediately thinks of Omi and Saint Sebastian, falls into the pose of the dying Saint, and masturbates into the foaming waves (pp. 73-75/87-89). The narrator later masturbates after being impotent with a prostitute. He goes to a brothel to overcome his feelings of inferiority, castration, and alienation from maternal bliss but repeats the experience of castration in his terror of merging with the feminine. He weeps in response to the humiliation and despair of impotence until comforted by "those visions reeking with blood" and sexually aroused by "deplorably brutal visions"

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

59

(p. 228). Once again, homoerotic violence is a sexualizing response to impotence, an inability to merge with surrogates for his mother, the terror of the feminine and death. It should also be noted that even as the ocean is malevolent, it also absolves Mishima. When the narrator of Confessions masturbates in response to his anxiety near the maleficent ocean, he also says that his "defilement had been washed away" when the waves receded (p. 75/89). 9 It is as though his "wicked habit" could be castrated and absolved by the feminine force (grandmother) that would make him feel forgiven and loved by punishment. 10 Dread impels his sexual arousal as defense, but punishment for sexuality and deviance relieves the sense of being corrupt. Castration and masochism make him feel purified, which, as I shall argue, is consistent with Mishima's suicide. One might also suggest that his sexual arousal in the face of the hostile and castrating waves is also a placation of the angry grandmother who was so invasive of his sexual boundaries. She recedes after he ejaculates, as though she demanded his love all for herself. Recall that the grandmother throws a hysterical fit when Mishima returns to his father's household at age 12. "My grandmother embraced my photograph day and night, weeping, and she would be instantaneously seized with hysterical spasms if ever I should violate my contractual obligation to come stay with her one night a week. At the age of twelve I had an ardent lover of sixty" (p. 34/37). 11 If the waves are a clitoral guillotine decapitating the phallus, it can be said that masturbation is a defense against anxiety. However, in associating the ocean with death, one might interpret the dissipation of malevolence after orgasm as her satisfaction after he has died. Mishima associated orgasm with helplessness, vulnerability, and death, and the implication is that he feels on some level that grandmother would be pacified by his death—his defeat and submission to her. And given her sexual possessiveness, perhaps the calm recession of the waves after orgasm represents her demand for erotic attention under threat of death (images of decapitation, cannibalism, engulfmen t, castration). It is a repetition and negation of infantile threat and trauma. Consider also Mishima's statement that "Man gives his seed to woman. Then commences his long, long, non-descript journey toward nihilism" (Stokes, 1974, p. 111). Semen (pleasure, masculinity) is extracted, and then deadness, nihilistic despair, and destructive rage ensue. The narrator longs for death throughout Confessions and amidst his anxiety of being castrated and swallowed by the sea feels drawn toward oceanic death. He later confesses that "from the very beginning, life had oppressed me" (p. 127). Nathan (1974) certainly believes that Mishima yearned for death since childhood, even as he was also terrified (p. ix). Here we may perceive some aspects of why Mishima desired death. Life

60

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

is an agonizing burden, and death thus becomes cessation of pain and separateness, symbolic of slipping into a quiescent state of symbiotic merger: peace after death, the brother of sleep. (Wallace Stevens, The Owl in the Sarcophagus) Mishima's fantasy represents a wish to die as return to infancy and amniotic bliss. Death can become seductive, a state of placid oblivion, dissolution of boundaries between self and other, even erotically soothing as a fantasy of sensual absorption by another. As intimated, death may also be a seductive longing to please another. One may observe conscious and unconscious aversion in a mother or grandmother, internalize their wishes for a child to suffer, die, disappear, or cease to exist. One may attempt to satisfy such wishes through masochistic, self-punitive, or self-annihilative behavior, desiring the death of the self, or ceasing the will to live, and yearning for death (Rheingold, 1967, pp. 120-123).12 Mishima seems to believe in the existence of a yearning for death, a "death impulse," a "drive" to die (Samurai, pp. 25-27). I le writes of the need to die for a worthwhile cause and that without such a goal people may lapse into boredom and fatigue. Mishima nevertheless assumes everyone must be possessed by this desire (he mentions all those in Europe and Asia during the Pax Romana who were ripe for Christianity because they yearned for a thanatological purpose). Even with the element of needing a cause to die for, the universality of this claim sounds very much like a literal reading of Freud's death drive, that the human organism inherently pursues death. What Mishima may not recognize is that people vary in terms of how much they wish to die for a cause (many do not) and that needing a cause to die for is symbolic of the unconscious wish to extinguish separateness, the alienated, lonely, individual ego, and merge with a powerful love object. It resuscitates the infantile need to be protected, nurtured, loved, and admired by a parent, to attain oblivion in that regression and dependence. As we shall see in the following chapters, Mishima's philosophy and fiction reflect an intense need to submit himself to a powerful other. (Mishima even says in his essay on the film Afraid to Die [Karrakaze Yaro, 1960] that acting is pleasurable because he is under another's command and control.) Indeed, the intensity of this yearning among certain cultures has been provocatively cited in explanation of the ease with which certain individuals could submit to despotic, psychotic, and genocidal leaders and commit acts of sadistic, merciless brutality (Becker, 1973; Bion, 1955; Freud, 1921; Gruen, 1987; Stein, 2002). Mishima doesn't realize that (though we all may have the fantasy of merger) the intensity of this yearning for death and merger is proportional to the degree to which life is excruciating and terrifying, proportional to the extremity of derogative parental influence, the extent to which the

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

61

parent terrorized the child, coerced him into obedience, and instilled the fear of life, separation, and independence. It is not the case that those without a cause to die for must necessarily languish, and this is why the yearning to die must be deconstructed. The death wish is a floating signifier: death itself means different things to different people and stimulates a spectrum of feelings, associations, and defenses. One may associate death (consciously or unconsciously) with sleep, closure, pain, cessation of pain, love, forgiveness, completion, liberation, purification, resurrection, reunification, separation, engulfment, suffocation, stasis, loss of self, disintegration, decay, murder, orgasm, or any number of elements that constitute death as a fantasy (Hillman, 1979; Lifton, 1979; Piven, 2004; Yalom, 1980). Consider the diversity of these meanings and the intricacy of psychological means of coping with death. Death may engender delusional beliefs in afterlives, resurrections, and reincarnations. The conceptual awareness of death may be repressed (despite what some psychoanalysts might say), as can feelings about death and its imagery. Death may be distorted, horror transformed into blissful fantasies, even erotically desirous scenarios (McDougall, 1995, p. 200ff.; McWilliams, 1994, pp. 140-141). It is often impetus to adhere to rigid, protective worldviews, create evil enemies, and justify their murder (Solomon et al., 2003). Thus, Mishima could believe (and project onto others) that we all yearn for death and that this yearning must be satisfied lest we suffer desperately. He could desire death, imagine that death could be beautifully tragic and sexually arousing. Indeed, Mishima seems to think that the repression of death is a destructive influence (Samurai, p. 29), a profound psychological insight. But Mishima does not distinguish between consciousness of death and obsessive rumination on death. He does not perceive that eroticization of death is a defense against the terror of death, decay, and separation. He does not seem to perceive that his desire for death conceals the craving for amniotic bliss, the same imprisoning mire from which he struggles to extricate himself through immaculate, invulnerable masculine prowess, or even that he has masochistic, even suicidal, wishes to please another through submission, illness, and violence to himself. The conscious fantasy only obscures to the conscious self why one is inhabited by such feelings. It is self-deceptive and allows one to maintain the pleasing fiction of vitality and control in the wake of mortal terror. If Mishima thus desired death, yearning was also fraught with terror and stultification. As we have seen, it is precisely the poisonous nature of maternal engulfment that renders submission an excruciating rather than blissful experience. Death is imagined to be soothing, and one wishes for the obliteration of self, but merger is also experienced as a horrific annihilation. Death is desired and feared, seductive, arousing, engulfing, and terrifying. Separation is also fraught with anxiety, and thus life is expe-

62

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

rienced as burden and death, which is why the narrator fears the future. But since regression is death, he thus remains frozen between wishes for separation and merger. Both the pursuit of masculine sexuality and feelings of persecution derive from an uncanny reemergence of castrating feminine imagery that needs to be displaced, repressed, and counteracted through homosexual identification, merger, sexual arousal, and even violence.13 Mishima's protagonists invariably have obsessions with death that traverse experiences of illness, femininity, the malevolence in nature, the experience of love. Jealousy, terror, and self-hatred impel them toward cathartic revenge. The murder of the beautiful or masculine ideal repeats the fantasy in which the object of destruction is a reincarnation of the painful trauma of the past. The need to relive the guilt, frustration, and pain becomes their reason for living, and only by experiencing it again can they feel like life has any meaning. Thus, Mishima protagonists become self-punitive to murder their evil and weak selves and to punish their internal objects (those psychologically present inside him) but become violent toward beauty in revenge against rejection and to conquer death, vulnerability, and narcissistic injury through trampling the guts of others. The distance the narrator feels from the night soil man in Confessions gives him the impression that the man is tragic. He notes that existences denied him formed the conceptions of his tragedy (p. 10). The denial of the protagonist's involvement, if not existence, leads him into voyeurism. He later describes his sexual curiosity as "the hopeless yearnings of a bedridden invalid for the outside world" (p. 115). The narrator believes that his desire was intellectual and not physical, asserting that the mask was his facade of carnal sexuality. I would suggest that the intellectualism was itself a defense against dependency needs and emotional vulnerability (cf. Corrigan & Gordon, 1995; Phillips, 1995). Desiring that which he is exempt from leads the protagonist to despair involvement and forebodes tragedy and destruction when that ideal cannot be realized. The character will become all the more aware of his ugliness in the face of beauty: The agony admonished: "You're not human. You're a social incompetent. You're an inhuman organism, somehow weirdly pathetic...." My need to prove to myself that 1 had some sort of potency deepened every day. (p. 191 /230)14 This encapsulates Mishima's essential shame, his narcissistic injury, and explicitly phallic narcissistic inflation into a grandiose and invulnerable masculine image devoid of weakness. As Annie Reich (1960) says, the "bottomless need for grandiosity is clearly a compensatory striving.. .. Compensatory narcissistic self-inflation is among the most conspicuous forms of self-esteem regulation" (p. 293).

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

63

However, the critical agency that conceives his self-representation as inferior, weak, and castrated is now projected on external objects (some of them inanimate). An act of projection enables Mishima to externalize the toxic voice of his grandmother such that he is perpetually plagued by derogative external objects. Here Mishima is experiencing quasi-paranoid fantasies of persecution where anything beautiful delusionally diminishes and mocks him. This process may be described as "projective identification" because the projection is not merely hostile and persecuting but serves the purpose of merger with the destroyed object and also enables Mishima to mobilize a very pleasurable destructive rage (cf. Ogden, 1982, 1989; Tausk, 1933; Waska, 2002). Despite Mishima's attempts to murder his shameful self-representation of weakness, he nevertheless retains a trenchant sense of inferiority and the need for punishment. Projection is also a convenient way for the shameful self to deny its exhibitionistic wishes, saying, "I am not the one who wants to exhibit himself aggressively, but other people aggressively observe and judge me" (cf. Reich, 1960, p. 310). Since Mishima's narcissism was severely injured, his exhibitionistic and persecutory fantasies became urgent if he was to attain any measure of self-regard.15 But the shameful core self still staged the transference reenactment of projecting hostile motives onto others. After the narrator of Confessions flees a vain attempt at a heterosexual relationship, he feels years later as though he should be insulted by her once more to assuage his guilt (p. 235). The narrator is more strongly attracted to a tattooed tough at a cafe than to Sonoko. His pursuit of a feminine lover is a compulsion to repeat the abandonment and revengeful feelings of childhood, but he abandons her because he cannot possibly attain intimacy with the feminine, which means death. Once again, the pursuit of the feminine is motivated by alienation from nascent homosexual feelings and by the need to seduce and injure women to counteract his own feelings of weakness, inferiority, impotence, and abandonment. The heterosexuality is a mask— not just a facade but a compulsion to prove himself potent and immune to defeat by women. Women are nevertheless terrifying and treacherous, and Mishima returns to homosexuality. In another sense, even his homosexuality is a mask that covers his wishes for merger with the feminine by pretending to be masculine, powerful, independent of women. Mishima knows that his weakness impelled him toward masculinity and samurai purity, but I suspect he was unable to admit that he really wished for sexual symbiosis with the feminine. His needs were humiliating, and this is one reason why Mishima depicts characters who wish to conquer women through sex—Mishima was a person who could celebrate having finally seduced a woman when he was in his thirties (Nathan, 1974). His sense of inadequacy before women contained tremendous rage, and hence the last thing he could do was admit he

64

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

needed women. These dynamics are symbolized in his erotic relation to the ocean in Confessions: his desire for death and his erotic conflicts near the feminized sea symbolize his urge to return to infantile symbiosis, but his experiences with the feminine were so excruciating that the feminine must be derogated and escaped. To bask in the pain of insult would let him feel the vitality of destruction once again. Thus, shame is the only emotion that feels genuine and is the only emotion he can endure. It converts feelings of abandonment and remorse into feelings of active hostility and violence rather than passive humiliation and vulnerability. Shame thus fulfills both his need for punishment and a moral masochism where the shameful and envious contrast between him and hostile objects motivates his urge to revenge. This is why Mishima's literary fantasies are more often explicitly sadistic than a masochistic because he does have a vicious internalized selfrepresentation that makes him feel shameful and inferior, but he most often externalizes that narcissistic injury into sadism and narcissistic grandiosity. He repeats and relives humiliation not for the sensual joy in pain and not only in the need for absolution but also to motivate his thriving sadism. The need to exact revenge, feel pain once again, and control a chaotic and rejecting environment figures prominently in Mishima's major works. In Thirst for Love (Ai No Kawaki, 1950), Etsuko is a bitter woman resenting even the laughter of children (p. 8). In the home of her father in-law, Etsuko falls for the farm boy Saburo. Yet Etsuko feels betrayed because of Saburo's affair with the maid, Miyo, forcing her to relive the disappointment of love. Etsuko then endeavors to make Miyo suffer, lose hope, and collapse (p. 141). This seems to be a repetition of a fundamentally Oedipal trauma when Mishima felt abandoned by parents while he was consigned to the excremental sickroom of his grandmother. Ostensibly Oedipal fantasies are repeated throughout Mishima's work, with variations on which family member is desired or killed. Mishima simultaneously wishes for the love and death of both parents. However, these wishes are most likely pre-Oedipal since Mishima's core conflicts have to do with abandonment and engulfment, not sexual rejection by the mother in favor of the father. In addition, Mishima's father is never a sexual rival. He is if anything the castrated and abandoning nonentity that impels Mishima to construct fantasies of idealized masculine figures with whom he can love and identify. Oedipal fantasy consists of murderous wishes toward sexual rivals, whereas Mishima's rage and despair came from not having a father he could identify with, wThom he could love, and who loved him. Fantasies about the mother also reflect abandonment issues rather than sexual conflict and accord with phallic narcissistic injuries as his exhibitionistic behavior is rejected and repudiated by mother and grandmother (cf. Edgcumbe & Burgner, 1975, pp. 162-163).

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

65

I would therefore suggest that fantasies of murdering the parents reflect rage over abandonment and that the interloper is not the father but the grandmother, who inhibits Mishima from contact with those he needs. In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, the adolescent protagonist poisons and dissects his mother's lover. Recall that the lover is not the father but a surrogate who steps into the father's role. The lover may therefore

be a representation of the interloping and phallic grandmother.16 In Spring Snow, the authoritarian abbess (identical to the grandmother) bars Kiyoaki entry to the chambers of his lover even as he is dying. 17 In Confessions, a grandmother stands in the doorway as sentry between the narrator and the lovely Sonoko.18 In Sotoba Komachi (1956d), the demonic old hag interrupts amorous lovers in a park.19 In Hanjo (1956b), a miserable spinster contrives to prevent the Yoshio from seeing his long-lost love. What appear to be Oedipal fantasies reflect homoerotic and misogynistic proclivities, as the reigning fantasy consists of rage toward castrated fathers and a feminine imago (unconscious image) divided between the idealized abandoning feminine and the insidious castrating feminine. The child protagonist of Sailor seems to have explicit Oedipal fantasies. He watches his mother through a peephole while she masturbates, and he has murderous wishes toward her lover.20 His friends assert that there is nothing in the world so evil as fathers. Yet despite the sexualization of his mother, which appears Oedipal, this evil comes not from sexual wishes toward the mother but from intense disappointment in weak fathers. The young protagonist seems perplexed and disgusted by the sexuality of his mother and more sexually aroused by the erection of her male lover. As we shall discuss in more detail in a later chapter, his disappointment in the sailor appears when his hero falls from grace by becoming a simpering domesticated weakling, a fool dressed up and ordered around by the child's mother, and no longer tragic or masculine. The boy murders the sailor in hostile revenge after his hero disappoints his fantasies of tragic masculine destiny. If anything, the sailor is murdered not in Oedipal rivalry but from rage that his hero could succumb to needing a woman to be happy. This is anti-Oedipal, not sexual desire for mother but disgust toward anything castrated by her erotism. Sexual vulnerability and domesticity disrupt the homoerotic projective identification of the fantasized invulnerable male. Murdering the castrated sailor is the only way to restore grace and return him to the divine tragic death Mishima envisions throughout his fiction. Once again the fantasies are narcissistic and reflect identification with the idealized homoerotic object he wishes to merge with and become rather than Oedipal wishes toward the mother. A similar design pervades Thirst for Love, wherein eliminating the lover of the recurring masculine "Omi" figure enacts the ostensibly Oedipal fantasy of ridding the family romance of the mother. This is another repetition of the wish to both attain and punish the abandoning parents. How-

66

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

ever, the apathy of Saburo (the male love object) is so enraging that Etsuko murders him with a scythe. This is a reenactment of murderous revenge on the abandoning person. It is a vain attempt at rapprochement—closeness with the love from whom one is separated or alienated—which once again meets with disaster and homicidal rage. In this case the murderous merger and revenge are situated within a dramatic gender reversal. Mishima identifies with the passive feminine object, as he wishes to be loved by a masculine figure. The narrator of Confessions devotes all his "elegant dreams to love between man and woman, and marriage, like a little girl who knew nothing of the world" (p. 68/81). His homosexual object choice involves being loved by a man as though he himself were a woman, which is really the child's wish for passive reception of father's love.71 Revenge against beauty, alienation, and abandonment can also be seen in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, in which the alienated protagonist desecrates a Buddhist temple covered in gold leaf by incinerating it. Mizoguchi is frail and weak like Mishima as a youth, the narrator of Confessions, and Etsuko from Thirst. He is further alienated from normality by a stutter, perhaps caused by seeing his mother make love to another man. Whether this is a plot device, a screen memory, or a primal scene fantasy is not clear. One suspects that Mishima might have had fantasies about his parents sleeping together when he was sequestered from them to his grandmother's sickroom. Mishima's literature certainly contains the recurring theme of traumatically witnessing mother's involvement with other men besides their husbands, the protagonist feeling abandoned, rejected, and consequently debilitated and murderous. Arlow (1978) suggests that the proliferation of primal scene imagery in Mishima's fiction might have resulted from the crowded conditions of Japanese life. While I cannot discount the possibility that actual exposure to intercourse between his parents might have had a traumatic effect on Mishima, crowded conditions were never the case in his family. Young Mishima lived first on a different floor and later in a different house from his parents. The vividly autobiographical story "A Forest in Full Flower," written when Mishima was 16, depicts how he would watch his mother sneak to his father's cottage for a secret rendezvous. This may or may not have been the actual situation. What we do know is that Mishima was sequestered from his parents by his grandmother for the first 12 years of his life, and it is the thesis of this book that more important than having witnessed intercourse is the separation from his parents as one of the central dynamic factors in his representations of murderous rage, ugliness, and revenge. Mizoguchi's ugliness and stuttering in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion parallel the alienation other Mishima protagonists feel toward the outer world. Mizoguchi is also obsessed with death and destruction and enjoys an inflated narcissism resulting from the contemptuousness he feels in his

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

67

strangeness and isolation. Mizoguchi covets the dream that Kyoto will be incinerated, a fantasy that parallels the narrator's joy in the bombing of Tokyo in Confessions and is also recorded throughout Mishima's fiction and appears in his personal correspondence (Nathan, 1974). Arlow (1978) connects such destructive rage to exposure to the primal scene. In Temple, Mizoguchi associates this incendiary fantasy with having witnessed the secret meeting of a pair of lovers at the Buddhist temple Nanzenji toward the end of the war. The connection between the lovers and Mizoguchi's mother is solidified by the woman offering her breast milk to her lover. Arlow notes that young boys who have witnessed the primal scene often respond with "deep narcissistic mortification, a wounding of self esteem, often leading to the conviction that they are unloved and unlovable." Arlow writes that "the little boy often ascribes the fact that he had to play the role of observer rather than participant in the primal scene to his phallic inferiority.... In reaction to this sense of phallic humiliation, the boy may entertain grandiose, phallic, narcissistic aspirations of an exhibitionistic nature" (p. 28). This description fits Mizoguchi and Mishima exactly. Whatever one thinks about the theory of primal scene affects, such images of exclusion from mother, betrayal, illicit sexuality, and emasculation are recurring themes in Mishima, connected to misogyny, feelings of intense rage, and the drive for vengeance. Thus, these primal scene fantasies participate in Mishima's narcissistic and sadistic complex, commingling with Mishima's sickly childhood and the repeated trauma inflicted on him by his insane grandmother. There is briefly the presence of an "Omi" figure in the character of a naval engineer visiting Mizoguchi's school whose beauty and stature cause such jealousy in Mizoguchi that he defaces the scabbard of the engineer's sword. The obvious castration imagery parallels the recurring imagery of Mizoguchi's own castration by having witnessed intercourse between his mother and uncle, by being derogated by a woman he desires, and by the grandiose Temple, which makes him feel inferior and actually renders him sexually impotent. Emasculation of others abreacts and revenges his own emasculation. The defacement of the scabbard presages the dramatic fulminations of the novel. Mizoguchi's father introduces him to the Golden Temple, having explained to him repeatedly that there was no greater beauty. The Temple becomes an idol for Mizoguchi, believing that it has opened up to him the world of beauty. Yet as Mizoguchi becomes aware of the difference between himself and the Temple, he also becomes estranged from it. The Temple stood there amid the corpses and wartime destruction around it and seemed to look down on Mizoguchi for its audacious capacity to survive the ugliness around it. Mizoguchi envisions the Temple when he attempts sexual intercourse and becomes impotent. He is flaccid, emasculated, and defeated. As Mizoguchi comes to believe that the Temple will be destroyed in air raids, he once again

68

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

falls in love with it. If the Temple were destroyed, then beauty would be fused with ugliness, he would not be alienated from the world around him, and life would hold validity for him: "The Golden Temple was sure to turn into ashes. Since this idea took root within me, the Golden Temple once again increased in tragic beauty" (p. 42). With this incendiary fantasy, Mizoguchi attains an erection and has satiating sexual intercourse. Finally, Mizoguchi burns the Temple to the ground in an act of malignant and narcissistically joyful revenge, murdering beauty, rejection, signifiers of eternity, evanescence, emasculation, and sexual betrayal. n Eroticism, death, envy, and vengeance are intriguingly interlaced in "Love in the Morning" (1965), the story of aging lovers dreading the transience of youth and beauty. The lovers live in the shadows, deflecting illumination of their aging. They engage in poetry, imagination, then drama, attempting to cheat nature and thwart senescence, but these prove too futile and ephemeral. They resist "this decay and process of decomposition with all their might," and only when such schemes are exhausted do they arrive at one final plan to cheat death and plunge themselves in the blissful experience of "a ripe kiss on a young girl's lips on a morning in May" (p. 33). The lovers separately seduce young partners, making love in the dark, watching one another make love, while the young lovers are intoxicated and oblivious to anyone but the lover they each embrace. When the youths wrake, they espy the aging lovers kissing on the veranda. The male is so angry and envious that he murders the kissing lovers. Mishima enucleates his most relentless fantasies of aging, decay, beauty, and death in this brief but brilliant story. The lovers enact apotropaic rituals designed to evade age, magically alter its appearance, deny consciousness of decay. They dim the lights, avoid sunlight, use makeup and hair dye, but they also seek momentary oblivion through ecstasy and imagination. This envisions Mishima's own approach to death: physical alteration combines with obliteration of consciousness of time, the visible and temporal both erased in the wish for a "subjective illusion of beauty" (p. 32). Of the most revealing aspects of the narrative is Mishima's construction of the young male lover, who is disgusted and aroused by the aging wife. She is 45, but the youth thinks she is an "old hag," an "old bag" past her prime who conceals something rotten and grotesque beneath her elegant beauty (p. 34). He feels contempt for this woman, who reminds him of a begging dog and barely obscures blotches of age through translucent layers of makeup. Yet he is sexually excited. The uncanny provokes him: the mask is beautiful but fake, at once a little girl without breasts and a sophisticated middle-aged woman, perfect yet blemished, mature yet childish, scared, and vulnerable. But herein lies the sexual attraction, the contempt suffused by the desire to humiliate and penetrate, vulnerability exciting rage, loathing, and sexual arousal. He is disgusted but thinks he

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

69

would like her even more with gray hair, without makeup. This is uncanny because it expresses ordinarily isolated images of the feminine, their mutual contamination confusing, enraging, and arousing. One is horrified that beneath beauty lurk age and death, Mishima's quintessential terror. Compulsion to punish disappointing and loathsome beauty for betrayal emerges here as well. Sexual arousal, however, is not only eroticizing agedness and death but also a violation of rejection by beauty that ceaselessly eludes and disappears. A beautiful woman is despised and penalized for contamination by age, her fraudulence, her ill-concealed evil, while the aged, awful feminine underneath can also be penetrated, copulated, and punished in revenge. The climactic murder encapsulates Mishima's recurring fantasy of vengeance. When asked (presumably by police) why he killed the couple, the youth says, It wasn't just anger.... When anger and admiration get all smashed in together, what do you call it? How can you say it when joy and envy are mixed in with anger? That dirty couple and their long, sick, inhuman kiss.... A sense of defeat overcame me, like water dripping up to my chest in a torture cell. ... We were just shadows. . . . They were too beautiful, (p. 36) Death compels the pursuit of beauty, and exclusion from love and beauty drowns one in contempt, disgust, defeat, and agony, an annihilating disintegration of self into shadow, and arouses envy, rage, malice, bliss, and murder. 23 VOYEURISM, DISAPPEARANCE, VENGEANCE, A N D DEATH A final theme needs to be explicated amid the discussion of abandonment and revenge. As can be understood from descriptions of fantasies of killing and being killed (of watching these executions as he performs them and visualizing his own passive tragic death), voyeuristic eroticism, and primal scene imagery, Mishima was preoccupied with sight as that which apprehends, incorporates, retains, and penetrates. 24 Mishima's voyeurism was a means of merging with objects, incorporating, cannibalizing, invading, conquering, and retaining them. Greenacre (1971) suggests that visual acuity may be a substitute for the experience of being touched and that voyeurism is a substitute for being fondled, kissed, or hugged. Freud (1905) claimed that scoptophiles (voyeurs) may simultaneously devour, destroy, and preserve their objects against destruction or abandonment, by retaining them in their gaze. Almansi (1979) writes that object loss may lead to a "hypercathexis of the visual function"—a complicated way of saying that seeing becomes a deeply emotional, vital act—in which objects

70

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

may be captured and retained. Almansi concludes that the hypercathexis of the visual function is later sexualized, which is also consistent with Mishima's ocular eroticism as simultaneously retaining, destroying, and merging with those on whom he gazes, as well as gratifying himself sexually to abate feelings of loss, despair, and disintegration. Fenichel (1935) notes that anger over abandonment also impels a sadistic voyeurism that injures the object, which in Mishima's case accords with his phallic and sadistic impulse for revenge (Socarides, 1988, pp. 417, 422-423). I would add that capturing and retaining the one perceived not only is a way to prevent its loss and disappearance but is even a component of the revenge whereby Mishima may imprison with the gaze who abandoned and imprisoned him in infancy by ignoring his needs for love and mirroring without ever having let him out of her sight. There is an immense visual gratification in sighting beautiful men and in being perceived as a sensual male.25 A photograph taken in 1963 depicts a nude Mishima encoiled by a long hose attached to his mouth. 26 Phallic narcissism, exhibitionism of the deified penis, oral incorporative and homosexual imagery, and fantasies of umbilical nourishment and placental immersion combine his polymorphous perversity into a hermetic autoerotic complex. The hose is his glorified penis, an extension of his narcissism that ensconces him. It is an act of fellatio representing his incorporation of another male and his own phallus, an act of uroboric selfcreation and self-insemination that denies dependence on foreign objects for his creation and existence.27 The hose is finally the tube through which he is nourished and reunited with his lost love object in a cocoonlike womb. Mishima's penis is his transitional object: a substitute for the nipple, for his father's penis, for lost love.28 Reich (1933) writes that the phallic narcissist identifies on the phallic level with the mother and provides her with a fantasied penis. His own phallus also attains the symbolic meaning of a breast, a substitute means to imbibe love and emotional security (much as thumb sucking is for children, as so many adult urges to suckle may signify), thereby generating a tendency toward fellatio as symbolic extraction of nurturance (p. 205). Thus, for Mishima, orality and fellatio return him to mother's love. This is especially apt since Mishima's grandmother so resembled a phallic castrator, that aggressive, domineering, denigrating, invasive authority who emasculates men, makes them feel impotent, appropriates (the socially constructed signifier of) male power, and instills the (most often unconscious) fantasy that she possesses a penis. The hose in the photograph is an oral-phallic connection to his mother's breast, a return of object love, and a repetition of the intensely unsatisfied need for positive mirroring in the stages of childhood when exhibitionism of the male body was a most urgent means of attaining love and approval. Once again such conspicuous narcissistic display of the body in adult-

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

71

hood represents the original failure of infantile merger with the "idealized omnipotent self-object" (the perfect parent that satisfies all needs) due to Mishima's abandonment by his parents and the immense narcissism of his invasive, unempathic, and unmirroring grandmother. An exhibitionistic pathology arises from the failure of the desired merger and mirroring, replete with "isolated sexualized voyeuristic preoccupations with isolated symbols of the adult's power (the penis, the breast)" (Kohut, 1977, p. 172). Mishima was alternately persecuted and obsessed with these symbols and organs of authoritarian power, exhibiting and gazing to perceive both the objects of his desire and himself, to preserve his love objects and his own body from loss. For Mishima, being seen and exhibiting the self is not only an act of phallic narcissism but also one designed to avoid his own disappearance as an object. Being seen is not being abandoned, not being nothing. 29 In Kyoto's House, the nervous question of the actor-athlete is "do I really exist or not?" (Lifton, 1979, p. 272).30 Mishima (1968d) writes in Sun and Steel that he wishes to be seen from the inside out, as the only verification of an existence that lives beyond superficial images (p. 65). His ritual evisceration turned his guts inside out for all to see, an act of proving that he existed. If exhibitionism verifies existence, voyeurism retains the thing perceived in terror against its disappearance. Yet the disappearance of the other negates mirroring and thus shatters the possibility of being seen. Hence, not only exhibition but also voyeurism is a defense against disintegration, proof of the other as well as the self that dissolves when nothing can reflect the gaze. And as we have seen, in looking the unseen self can fantastically embody the thing perceived, being the envied object now seen by himself. In Temple, Mizoguchi anxiously looks because this proves his own existence (p. 227). Perception of the other preserves the self against death, even if envy is compelled to murder the object to avenge and consume it. What if the transience of the fantasy can no longer be denied? What if the imaginary fails and succumbs to the sorrowing apprehension of solitude, age, and the inevitability of death? Immediately preceding his death, Mishima wrote a tetralogy titled The Sea of Fertility, in which an idealized character is reincarnated in each novel.31 This reincarnation is a denial of disappearance, a consolation against death and nonexistence. Amid these four incarnations, Shigekuni Honda is the sole witness to this transmigration of souls, the voyeur whose existence becomes dependent on sighting signifiers of metempsychosis. He becomes an addicted voyeur who derives erotic gratification from perceiving illicitly and perversely, wTho has no real existence of his own. In Runaway Horses (Honba, 1968b), Honda has some intimation that his belief in transmigration is his own delusion, a fantasy of the return of loved ones that erases the trauma of abandon-

72

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

ment and death, as he becomes aware that "what had been reborn was in all likelihood not Kiyoaki himself but merely his own sense of loss" (p. 219). In the final novel, Decay of the Angel (Tennin Gosui, 1970b), Honda looks out into the garden of the Buddhist abbey and wonders whether the transmigrations occurred at all, whether even he existed. This is a fantasy that repeats the alienation and annihilation of abandonment, in which one knows existence but is treated as nonexistent and envisages repetition of the object so as not to lose oneself in oblivion. Reincarnation is a fantasy that duplicates the self, completes the self by re-creating it in ideal incarnations. It is a reparation of self that undoes the loss of love objects, as each external incarnation is the projective embodiment of an absent internalization, an absent loving soul needed to fill the self, to feel it exists. For such divestment is disintegration and death. The aged voyeur's emptiness before the garden is a realization that incarnation is an illusion, a fantasy, embodied evanescence, a sea of futility. Those idealized incarnations are actually unheroic, adolescent, self-absorbed, sordid, and repugnant, unworthy of adoration or reception of divine ensoulment. And embodiment, no matter how divine or beautiful, leads to agedness, decrepitude, and death. Such is Mishima's irrevocable realization, already presaged in The Temple of Dawn, in a grotesque vision of the ubiquity of sickness and death, "of the cruelty of the gods and of the never-ending torture of all living beings on the wheel of samsara" (Starrs, 1994, p. 54): There was every manner of deformity. . . . Thousands of obese, glistening, greengold flies carried blood and pus like pollen. . . . Everything was afloat. That is, multitudes of the most ugly, most mournful realities of human flesh, the excrements, the stenches, the germs, the poisons of the corpses were exposed to the sun, and everything floated through the sky like steam evaporating from ordinary reality Benares. A carpet so hideous it was luminous. One thousand five hundred temples, temples of love with scarlet pillars on which all conceivable positions of sexual intercourse were carved in black ebony reliefs, the House of Widows whose inmates waited for death while ceaselessly and passionately chanting sutras in strident voices, inhabitants, visitors, the dying, the dead, children covered with syphilitic sores, dying children clutching their mother's breasts. (Dawn, p. 67/59-60) All "glamorous and heroic acts faded away against the hallucination of Bernares" (p. 101). We are all ultimately alive merely to be digested and transformed into excrement (Angel, p. 271/210). Incarnation can terminate only in decay or nothing. On completion of the tetralogy, Mishima committed seppuku in front of 800 incensed self-defense forces deaf to his pleas for return to emperor worship, finally collapsing "in his own blood and entrails" (Lifton, 1979, p. 263). Intimations of nihility and nonexistence span Mishima's writings, from

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

73

"A Forest in Full Flower" to this final emptiness in the garden of Gesshu Temple in Decay of the Angel. Amidst distant, resounding cockcrows at night, the final words of Thirst for Love are "nanigoto mo nai"—"there wasn't a thing" (p. 231/200)—just as the terminating cadence of Mishima's final narrative is stillness, absence of memory, nothing. The repetition of defiance against depletion and its illusions of grandiose fate could no longer be sustained as Mishima aged and observed the withering of his youth. It seems that in middle age, Mishima was nearing narcissistic collapse, the apprehension that he was never going to die a heroic death, and that his masks, mirrors, and pretenses were as ephemeral as the body that decayed. In "A New Year's Dilemma," penned but three years before his death, Mishima laments the transience of beauty, the recognition that his accruing age would render a beautiful death eternally impossible (Nathan, 1974, p. 219):32 I have lost the youthfulness that made me feel as if I was winging through the skies.... My mind watches for my flesh that crumbles away day by day .. . why did you give me this painful suffering in which flesh and blood rot away while alive? (The Terrace of the Leper King, p. 194)

It is difficult to truly imagine the immense enveloping despair that arrives when one's deepest fantasies of grandiose genius and beauty wither into resignation, impotence, and self-loathing. The ensuing agony and selfdisgust, and rage, may be exacted on the self, that paltry tattered self that betrays and reveals itself as ugly, diseased, repulsive, unable to retain its glistening beauty, destined for putrid agedness, the wretched dissolution into paraplegic immobility and sickness that so evoke Mishima's early life. In suicide Mishima was revenging himself on his decomposing body and the viscous innards defiled by feces. He was murdering those lodged inside him, whose coercion persecuted, subjugated, shamed, and emasculated him, equating him with effeminacy and abject weakness. Mishima was murdering his own abhorred vulnerability, that diseased, helpless, needy, and repulsive self. In stabbing himself to death, Mishima was exacting revenge on himself, murdering evil, and exposing his self-loathing along with his shameful innards that, despite his fantasies, plagued him as fermenting carrion. With murderous rage, as well, was that yearning for oblivion and amniotic merger, the wedding of vengeance and futility whose consummation was death and self-obliteration. Amid this despair, however, was the enduring fantasy that death was the only redemption from the fall from grace, that murder would yet redeem lost glory and manifest a moment of tragic beauty, thwarting the grotesque ugliness of decomposition. How does mutilation via death immortalize beauty? In the next chapter,

74

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

I linger on M i s h i m a ' s p h i l o s o p h y of d e a t h , dwelling on images of ejaculated intestines as preservation of beauty, the divine incarnation that soars a b o v e the earth a n d flesh, as well as t h e frail mortal p u n i s h e d for aspiration, consigned to d e a t h a n d soil. Finally, I return to M i s h i m a ' s d e a t h as depletion a n d rebellion.

NOTES 1. When Omi makes contact and is friendly, the narrator feels disappointed because this "hurt the image" he had been constructing of Omi (p. 60). In other words, Omi must be vulnerable and defective if he can be friendly with such an inferior and unlikable person as the narrator. Despite these disappointments, however, the narrator soon falls in love with Omi. 2. True, this is speculative and in some ways recalls the absurd interpretations that have earned psychoanalysis a negative reputation. Nevertheless, how does one come to eroticize the armpit, and what does it symbolize? 3. Cf. also p. 120. 4. See also Goldberg (1996, 2000). 5. Mishima is suggesting the infamous statement of Claudius Galen: "omne animal post coitum triste." 6. There are exceptions, such as his novel The Sound of Waves (Shiosai), which depicts the sun and sea as Apollinian elements. However, this is an aesthetic construct, while the ocean as dark and murderous is not only an aesthetic and dramatic trope but also a consistent and recurring fantasy accompanied by perversion and homoeroticism. See also Confessions, pp. 230 and 240, where the narrator masturbates five times a day in response to the threatening advent of summer. 7. One might object not only to my speculation that pink and purple folds are vaginal but that the ocean must always be evil. In The Sailor Wlw Tell from Grace with the Sea, for example, the ocean is glory One must consider, however, that glory is also death. In Sailor, however, land is also death, for it represents imprisonment away from glory and domestication by the feminine. 1 would reply that imprisonment by the feminine does not exclude glorious death or violent castration by the feminine. For Mishima the dangers of the feminine can be displaced into a variety of landscapes, and the tension between land and sea resides precisely in the ambivalence between the desire for separation and merger; between flight from the vicious grandmother and submission to her, allegiance to the pure feminine of his mother and his feelings of abandonment and rage. As I argue, divided images of the nurturing and poisonous feminine contaminate one another in painful ways. It is this tension that this book continually explores. Psyche and symbol are not constrained by the rules of exclusive signification or denotation. What is intriguing is how the psychological pervades and suffuses so many images and relationships and how Mishima reacts and attempts to resolve such conflict. 8. In the original, the word for "hood" is "horo," which contains the Chinese (and lapanese) character for "mother." The hooded guillotine is thus also engulfment by mother (or grandmother), a malevolent swaddling force equated with death (Kamen no Kokuhaku, p. 73). 9. The word Mishima uses is "odaku," which connotes pollution, contamination, impurity, dirtiness, stain. Obviously, the word is both literal and metaphoric.

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

75

10. The narrator frequently refers to masturbation as his "wicked" or "evil" or "perverse" habit, "akushu" in Japanese. 11. The Japanese text describes his age as 13, but it was customary for a child to be considered one year on birth. Since Japanese ages would be a year ahead of the Western calculation, I have translated his age as 12. 12. For research on fantasies of oblivion and fusion in death, see Asch (1980), Friedlander (1940), Hendrick (1940), Jensen and Petty (1958), and especially Maltzberger and Buie (1980). For the impact of aggression and derogation on suicidal ideation and the wish to die, see also Federn (1929), Ferenczi (1929), Richman and Rosenbaum (1970), and Straker (1958). 13. Perhaps it might sound archaic, but here the wish for death (Todestrieb) is displaced violently to protect the ego from annihilation (cf. Freud, 1924). Hence, in wanting to die, the narrator also reveals his deeper wish to enjoy the agonies of others sensually. Once again he escapes weakness, vulnerability, symbiosis, and death by punishing that inner self projected into fantasies of torturing others. 14. The word "potency" is interpretive but I believe appropriate. Mishima uses the word "kano," which literally means "possibility." In the context of his impotence and desperate need to prove himself with women, potency seems the best choice to capture the meaning. I must thank English-version translator Meredith Weatherby for her acumen in choosing this word. 15. In this regard the fantasies of persecution are eruptions of uncanny terrors, the residue of trauma that plague him, as well as the displacement of such persecution into fictive scenarios that enable him to despise and avenge victimization and ideas of reference that gratify the need for attention. This is a way of denying abandonment by imagining that they are actually watching, while the rage of actual abandonment is projected, so that their looking is actually malicious, or for the wrong reasons. It is the fantasy of both an object tie and revenge in the face of abandonment (Allen, 1967; Fleischl, 1958). 16. My former student Judd Grill suggests that the lover is murdered in order to kill off the adolescent protagonist's emerging homosexual feelings, which are activated by an absent father and the need for masculine love. This is certainly a viable interpretation, and I would suggest in addition that this also agrees with Mishima's recurring fantasy of murdering beautiful love objects. If the adolescent protagonist has homosexual wishes for the lover, then he might wish to merge with and then kill the man who rejects him by choosing the mother, 17. Kioyoaki's lover ultimately becomes the next abbess, thus symbolically becoming the inaccessible and unloving condensation of the mother and grandmother. When Satoko appears at the conclusion of the tetralogy as an aged abbess, she actually disclaims any memory of KiyoakL If she is a condensation of the mother and grandmother, she now represents the rejecting but needed object who refuses to acknowledge his existence, a representation of immense agony and annihilation. 18. Confessions (pp. 168-169). Thus far, the narrator of Confessions has expressed entirely homoerotic impulses, but Sonoko is the split-off idealized aspect of the feminine that Mishima never attained when separated from his mother, and hence he feels a sense of bliss in her pure and naive beauty. Sonoko represents other things as well, such as proof that the narrator is not a weak and castrated male who cannot seduce women and a naive girl he can injure in revenge against

76

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

women (his grandmother and mother). That the grandmother who bars entry to Sonoko recapitulates his own grandmother barring entry to mother is supported by his equation of Sonoko's grandmother with "some sort of inorganic matter," that is, not a living thing, and his feeling that "everything had suddenly become motionless" after he is denied entry He experiences a regressive sense of infantile imprisonment, immobility, numbing, and death. 19. This play is Mishima's modern adaptation of the No play Sotoba Komachi, but the theme of the demonic aged woman resonates with Mishima's childhood agonies. 20. Arlow (1978) connects Mishima's pervasive voyeuristic imagery to the primal scene. Certainly the impact of such experiences would contribute to the preoccupation with witnessing events from a distance without being able to participate, and Arlow's excellent essay also links such primal scenes to currents of murderous rage and revenge. 21. Recall that in The Preoedipal Origin and Psychoanalytic Therapy of Sexual Perversions, Socarides claims that all transvestites ultimately wish to be women. Whether or not this is true in all cases, in the case of Mishima, he wished to be loved the way mother was by the father and hence attained a homosexual fantasy and identified himself with the passive feminine love object. In this case, there is also the identification with the aggression of the interloping grandmother, as the protagonist disrupts the relationship from which she is excluded. 22. Arlow (1978) observes that Mizoguchi uses mosquito netting as kindling, which recalls the primal scene of having witnessed his infidelitous mother forni eating beneath mosquito netting. Thus, the destruction of the temple is revenge on the illicit sexuality of his mother. The Temple is also associated with breasts throughout the novel, further connecting the Temple and mother (p. 33). I will return to these issues in chapter 6. 23. Mishima repeatedly states that murder preserves beauty against decay and death, and in numerous fictions beauty is murdered to redeem it from incipient decomposition. There is nothing in "Love in the Morning" to indicate that the murderer aspires to preserve beauty. He states explicitly that he envies the beauty that relegates his existence to shadow, and the motive is vengeance. One must then ask whether preservation of beauty is truly a motive in these fictions or merely a rationalization of vengeful desires since this element is sometimes curiously absent. Does the murder of the Sailor or the Golden Temple really preserve beauty by preventing decay? Is hurling a kitten against a log, scarring a scabbard, or killing a rejecting farm boy preservation or malicious destruction? Does termination in perfection, before decay sets in truly preserve anything? It certainly appeases the anxiety that beauty will decompose, but this is a personal motive defending against the fear of decay and loss. Redeeming or preserving the beauty of a thing is not the same as destroying something vengefully when one is envious and terrified of decay. And as will be discussed in chapter 3, killing an organism, sending its blood gushing, or razing a structure does not in fact preserve anything but its memory. It is in fact mutilation, not preservation. How much of this envious destruction is for the apotheosis of the thing or person murdered rather than a rationalization of terror amidst the desire to make the thing dead, mutilated, or destroyed, rendering its existence shadow, just as one felt ugly, annihilated, and enshadowed by exclusion from beauty? Given the immense rage, malice, jealousy,

Narcissistic Revenge and Suicide

77

and excruciating annihilation experienced when appraising beauty, it seems unlikely that preservation is truly a motive. Hatred dominates, as well as fear, the terror, resentment, and despair that beauty will decay. Again, as can be seen in "Patriotism," murdering someone is preferable to seeing her decay into old age, and it seems an ignoble deception to claim that it is for her sake, or "true brotherly love" (Dawn), when one is truly defending against fear and despair. Murder rather punishes the thing for not being perfect and kills it before it decomposes. But this is not at all performed for the thing murdered, as though one were truly doing it a favor. 24. We might invoke Freud and Lacan to describe Mishima's voyeurism as a veritable oral, anal, and phallic gaze. 25. Again, Socarides (1988) asserts that scoptophiles identify with the objects seen. They thus imagine themselves in the people they are watching and derive exhibitionistic gratification from their voyeurism (p. 418). This is fully consistent with the voyeuristic and onanistic scenes in Mishima's fiction where he imagines the death of an erotic object and sees himself in that erotic murder (cf. Confessions). 26. The photograph appears in a book of photographs by Eiko Hosoe titled Barakei, which means "Ordeal by Roses" or "Punishment by Roses." 27. The uroboros is the mythical serpent that consumes its own tail, signifying endless gestation and rebirth from the same font of life and creation. 28. Eiko Hosoe, the photographer who shot this image, tells me that the pose was his idea and not Mishima's. I am not interpreting Hosoe's imagination and confusing it for Mishima's, however. The photograph is the opportunity to exhibit these fantasies while being passively encoiled in the phallic-fellatial object. 29. Cf. Mahler (1968) in her discussions of mirroring and being seen. The baby who is ignored searches for the glance of recognition from its mother. This is also reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's statement in Notes from Underground that he would rather be slapped than ignored. For the abandoned and ignored child and for the adult whose narcissism has been impaired by a lack of mirroring and empathy, being avoided is the experience of one's own disappearance and dissolution into nonexistence. Exhibitionism is the means of being seen and existing. Perhaps even for Mishima, plunging a sword into his body was an attempt to feel Dostoyevsky's slap, a confirmation that he even existed and had substance. 30. Shortly before his death, Mishima is quoted in a newspaper article as saying, "When I think of the past twenty-five years within myself I am astonished at their emptiness. I can scarcely say that I have lived" (Lifton, 1979, p. 275). 31.1 say "idealized" because Honda idealizes them, while they are in fact selfabsorbed, adolescent, even sociopathic characters. Mishima may as well envision them as ideal, but they reveal themselves as sordidly repulsive, a corruption and decay of idealizing fantasies on the psychological and sociohistorical (allegorical) level. 32. Even at 30, Mishima seems to have felt that he was in decline, too old to die beautifully, and that suicide would now be as unseemly as that of Osamu Dazai (Nathan, 1974, p. 122).

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 3

Steel and Wax: Icarus and the Decay of the Angel I would like to offer two contrasting images of Mishima that flesh out the deeply personal and psychological nature of his philosophy of death: the beautiful immortal body and the decaying, decrepit angel. At the end of his life, Mishima could not sustain his narcissistic fantasies and experienced himself shamefully as a fetid corpse, as one fated not for glory but for derision and contempt by others. EPHEMERA: BOTH W O R D A N D BODY Sun and Steel is both philosophy and confession. In this brief autobiography and meditation, Mishima describes the events and realizations that hurled him from the ineffectual ephemera of words toward an immersion in the body, action, blood, and death. Muscles were desirable because "their function was precisely opposite to that of words" (p. 29). For Mishima art could no longer function as a sufficient substantiation of existence or a satisfying mirror (Nathan, 1974, p. 164). Mishima seemed to arrive at this after experiencing peculiar episodes in the 1950s of numbing, derealization, terrifying thoughts that he did not exist. As mentioned earlier, the anxiety of such feelings seems to have catalyzed his desire to transform himself from a weakly insubstantial self into something that existed. He simultaneously wished to cure himself of his debilitating abdominal cramps, for which he needed injections to calm excruciating spasms. One cannot overestimate the psychological impact of incapacitating infirmity, especially a humiliating condition embedding the anxiety that one may spontaneously lose control of one's body and erupt with

80

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

feces. One feels utterly weak, helpless, disgusting, identifies the self with excrement. This is a hyperbolic instance of Nietzsche's (1885) sentiment: "The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take oneself for a god" (aphorism 141).l Transcendence of debilitating infirmity, of the equation of self with excrement, involves investment in obsessive cleanliness, invulnerability, and aesthetic repair of the physique, control over the body so it no longer erupts spontaneously and shamefully Toward the end of 1951, Mishima traveled to San Francisco by ship, writing in the journal he titled Apollo's Glass of his resolve to become a new man. As he exposed himself to the sun, he felt through his entire body the joy of liberation from the excessively sensitive obstinacy of his youth (Nathan, 1974, p. 111). Mishima toured Los Angeles, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, London, and finally the Mediterranean. His sojourn to Greece catapulted him toward a Nietzschean cure—he found an aesthetic and erotic template for his fantasies of transcendence and selfovercoming. Greece cured his self-loathing and loneliness and awoke in him a "will to health" (p. 115). In 1955 he began a regimen of exercise that he would continue with unremitting discipline until the end of his life. And this achieved remarkable results. Mishima struggled with the sense that he was helpless, powerless, and barely existed, while exercise proved

to him that he was alive and powerful (Steel, p. 32). However, as Nathan (1974) illustrates, even his transformed physique was eventually unable to prevent Mishima from succumbing once again to feelings of derealization and despair (pp. 164-165). The problem was that muscles "were too closely involved with the life process, which decreed that they should decline and perish with the decline of life itself" (Steel, p. 29). Along with this was gradually born within Mishima the acceptance of pain—consciousness of the flesh is consciousness of pain, but with the development of the body came a pleasure in resistance, the agony required for strength, the pleasure in enduring from that strength, pain as the proof of existence itself (pp. 38-39). This is captured elegantly and disturbingly in Kyoko's House, where the narcissistic actor Osamu also lifts weights to beautify himself and finds his existence reflected in mirrors. Osamu also finds eventually that muscle is unable to substantiate his existence, then discovers accidentally how blood and pain enliven him. His mistress has cut him with a razor blade, and the sight of trickling blood awakens him "to the certainty of existence for the first time in his life . .. blood and pain guaranteed his existence" (Nathan, 1974, p. 165). Through the "tardy process of creating muscle," Mishima saw how "the form that was beautiful and fitting overcame the form that was ugly and imprecise" (Steel, p. 40). The language of this philosophy is situated within the metaphor of combat: just as one defeats an opponent by molding one's attack to the crevice of their frailty, the opening in their guard which is their weakness, so too beautification is conquest over the ugliness of that

Steel and Wax

81

crevassal weakness. And Mishima again realizes how ephemeral such beauty is, for we create sculpture to give permanence to that which must regenerate itself every moment or atrophy: "death lay only a short way beyond that particular moment" (p. 41). The very cult of the hero itself is based on the "contrast between the robustness of the body and the destruction that is death" (pp. 41-42). To pause for a moment: consider Mishima's logic. Words are ephemeral, muscles provide proof of existence, though these too decay and must be commemorated by artists in marble to survive. Muscle, however, provides the pain that makes one conscious of living while also overcoming weakness and ugliness. I would suggest that words are not necessarily transient or futile—some may say that words may be written in stone, a permanent mark that encloses truth, engraves or stultifies it, excludes alternatives by making permanent. Consider Ovid (8): My work is complete: a work which neither Jove's anger, nor fire nor sword shall destroy, nor yet the gnawing tooth of time. That day which has power over nothing but my body may, when it pleases, put an end to my uncertain span of years. Yet with my better part I shall soar, undying, far above the stars, and my name will be imperishable.... I shall live to all eternity, (p. 357) Words can be monuments that outlive an author for eons, preserving his or her memory, as they have with Mishima. But words may feel ineffective or intangible when communication is thwarted, like Kafka's K calling the Castle only to hear gibberish and static. My speculation is that Mishima's dichotomy between words and action resulted from physical helplessness and the suppression of any ability to communicate his needs and wishes, which were forcibly rejected and suppressed in his home. He is dissociated from his wishes, unable to act, like so many of his characters, a passive, speechless, stuttering voyeur, withdrawn from palpable action. Literary words were ever a grandiose means of obsessively replaying trauma, recapitulating fantasies, and inflicting vengeance against victimization and abjection, an asylum giving voice to rage, thought, desire, unimpinged dream. 2 But words on paper never transformed him, never achieved vengeance or fully masked him as a beautiful or masculine alter ego. In response to dire helplessness and frailty, aggression and physical activity are emotional and psychological triumphs. Abolition of language can be destruction of substitutes and simulacra, obliteration of verbal obstructions to immediacy, life, and existence, vengeance on helpless utterances ignored by neglecting and derogatory others (cf. Woodruff, 1999, pp. 702703). While the cult of the body may indeed be a masculine protest and compensation, it is still remarkable that Mishima could overcome such enduring emotional impotence and transform himself. But the pain he describes may not simply be the gratification of physical

82

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

exertion, evidence of struggle. I would suggest that for Mishima pain was necessary because living and exercising were forbidden, taboo, trenchantly opprobrious things that used to get him punished or belittled. Some will no doubt disagree, but I suspect there is a current of masochism in his exertions, enjoying not merely the conquest of weakness (which is also self-punitive) but in satisfying the internal object, his grandmother, who punishes him. He thus retains her presence as he defies her, receiving her attention, punishment, and forgiveness through that pain. One may prefer a simpler explanation (e.g., no pain, no gain), but I am considering Mishima's statement in light of his repetitive fantasies of masochistic violence and the likely possibility that traumatically indurated childhood invective does not simply disappear but remains in a variety of disguises. For Mishima, the immanence of death sustains the dignity of the body (p. 42). A bullfighter would be comic without the threat of death, as would the pretensions of the bronze Delphic charioteer without the specter of death looming near. Here life is captured in its supreme moment (p. 43). For Mishima, courage is the willingness to embrace suffering, and physical suffering makes one aware of the immanence of death. I Ience, "intellectual courage" and philosophical ruminations can never approach the understanding of death as long as one remains divorced from physical courage (p. 44). Intellect is only an impediment to experiencing the moment of being alive, of the surging life in one's veins as one embraces danger and death. Hence, for Mishima the intellect inhibits clarity of consciousness, attained rather through the exertion of the body (p. 46). Indeed, Mishima claims that he sought a literary language as starkly free from embellishment, an ideal style verging on noncommunication, which would have the "grave beauty of polished wood in the entrance hall of a samurai mansion on a winter's day" (pp. 46-47). Mishima "learned from the sun and the steel the secret of how to pursue words with the body (and not merely pursue the body with words)" (p. 49). Mishima considers literary flabbiness akin to physical flabbiness, a sign of artistic and emotional sloth. In pursuing the balance of art and action, Mishima saw his writing as a muscular, beautiful athlete moving proudly through his environment. Consider the dreadful alternative: More than anything, I detested defeat. Can there be any worse defeat than when one is corroded and seared from within by the acid secretions of sensibility until finally one loses one's outline, dissolves, liquefies; or when the same thing happens to the society about one, and one alters one's own style to match it? (p. 48) For Mishima, sensibility is "the henchman of imagination," which we have learned impedes experience of the body and consciousness of death. Defeat thus means a flabby, slothful unawareness, an overintellectualiza-

Steel and Wax

83

tion living inauthentically in regard to death, a laziness attentive only to fashionable trends and cliches, so that one is an abysmal clone of the other pretentious fops of one's society. Beauty and delicacy suffusing a text without sloth, without stylistic flabbiness and airs, words that describe as purely as a silent kouros emerging from the waves—this seems to be Mishima's metaphor for writing. But is it not significant that Mishima uses a language of deliquescing, of melting into others and being inseparable from that amorphous jellied mass? It is also significant that the corrosion emanates from within, an inward toxin that liquefies one so that one becomes amorphously merged with others. I take this to mean several things: that Mishima feels there is a genuine danger he will liquefy and merge with the others he detests. In other words, he fears the dissolution of identity and ego boundaries in the presence of others who may corrupt and force him to lose his individuality and muscular hardness despite his will. But the acid is from within, implying that he also has his own inner tendency to merge with others, not only that they melt him from without. For Mishima specifies that he alters his style to match those he despises. I believe this is similar to a fantasy in Forbidden Colors, where Yuichi fears having an erotic relationship with an ugly man who revolts him. One need not fear this merger unless one is already somehow aroused and seduced by it. The muscular body in the above passage is thus metaphoric of emotional boundaries and invulnerability; liquidation metaphoric of emotional fusion with others, experienced as dissolution of the self; acid metaphoric of the need for love dissolving him painfully from within— the acid itself a by-product of the toxic excruciating intrusions Mishima was early subjected to, all the pain and humiliation he was forced to swallow, which is why fusion with others is so painfully corrosive but needed. This is entirely consistent with the continual admonishments to "become strong!" in relations with women, in his fantasies of being the powerful Omi type, a language of the desire for fusion and the fear that it will be as destructive and necrotic as the jellied lovers cast ashore in Forbidden Colors. Finally, of course, is Mishima's ascription of the corrosion and liquidation of society, an amorphous and dead mass of tissues. Mishima soon supplies another answer to the question of wrhy words are the opposite of muscles and action: "literature is an imperishable flower. And an imperishable flower, of course, is an artificial flower" (p. 50). What this means is that it is not quickened by death, which means there is no vitality, no living essence, and, most importantly, cannot die a tragic death murdered in its ecstatic climax. Endorsement and existence by words was ineffective, immaterial, whereas muscle provided sensual proof of existence in the face of death. Yet Mishima simultaneously knew that time was not permanently recoverable and that seeing his own body was not proof enough of his own existence (pp. 63-64, 66). Mishima

84

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

writes, "Seeing is the antithesis of existing" (p. 64). The "eye of selfawareness" addresses the muscles, saying, "I admit you do not seem to be an illusion," but still requires proof (p. 66). Therefore, one must expose the core of existence, that essence of the self "shut up within the flesh" like the core of the apple (p. 65). To exist and see at the same time requires plunging a knife and splitting one's core, exposing it to the light, sacrificing life and existence for the sake of seeing (p. 67). Words are therefore "the slow-moving germs of a 'sickness unto death,' " a cowardly flight from existence that preserves life by escaping it, while death was the abandonment of words for experiencing and seeing the blood and organs exposed to light, the only proof that one lived. Only by death could one prove that one was alive (p. 67). Old age would inevitably expose the body as something that lived, but this would be a craven, ugly, emasculating way of living and dying that sullied the body, contaminating it by allowing it to become disgusting rather than preserving its beauty by killing it at its most beautiful (pp. 6971, 84). INVULNERABILITY A N D DELIQUESCENCE Once more, only a person emotionally annihilated, soul murdered, requires seeing his own blood flow to feel truly alive. 1 If experience is so insufficient, if banal living is so incapable of quickening one without the fantasy of cutting one's body open to see the spurting and dying fluids, then one seems justified to conclude (if there is sincerity to Mishima's assertions) that he was a person violently numbed to his own feelings and sense of personhood, brutally detached and dissociated from his own sense of being a person in possession of his own body. Such a person has been invasively controlled by others, manipulated like a mannequin without regard for his desires or feelings. Derealization is accompanied by schizoidal withdrawal from one's own emotions, a self-protective means of escaping the agony of impingement and coercion. Such withdrawal further numbs one's sense of existence, connectedness with reality itself, blurring the demarcation of reality from fantasy, hence so many repeated images of being the distant voyeuristic outsider, a sense that one watches the real from a distance. Mishima's only connection to participation in life, in emotional intimacy, was through a telescope, a peephole, and this voyeurism was both the only erotic (or umbilical) aperture and the only avenue for control and vengeance. Noboru of Sailor spies on his mother only when he is angry with her, sequestered from her in a locked room. Ocular gratification and the fantasy of voyeuristic control have replaced physical and emotional freedom. If the eye itself consequently comes to be the only organ capable of proving existence, Mishima's derealization and distance from the real is so tren-

Steel and Wax

85

chant that he must see blood pumping, experience mutilation and death before knowing for sure whether he exists. Of course, this is again a fantasy, but Mishima conflates reality and fantasy—so much that his arch-voyeur Honda can believe magically that his world may collapse if he does not enact his ocular rituals with meticulous attention (Dawn, p. 317). The world is deceived with ornament, so dissociated was young Mishima from intimacy with it. And no wonder Mishima's writings continually speak of the preference of fantasy over actuality, "the superiority of dreams to waking" (Angel, p. 54/44): the real is an annihilating, imprisoning, suffocating, barren world of emotional neglect and derogation where one is dissociated from oneself and intimacy. With the blurring of reality and fantasy, anything would be possible, "death, murder, suicide, even universal destruction" (Dawn, p. 264). Though one cannot take Mishima at his word, he does repeatedly say he is not sure of his own existence, has not felt truly alive, that he ever did what he really wanted—remarkable for someone who had such freedom and diverse experience in life. In effect, he was so dispossessed throughout his childhood that he could not feel at home in his own skin and now requires pain and violent injury to simultaneously punish himself, destroy the emotional presence of the puppeteer's hand inside him (the invasive presence of his grandmother experienced psychologically as manipulating him from inside), and inflict mutilation and pain not just masochistically (though this is also the case) but to even penetrate that dissociation. Only through such violence to himself could he feel alive, in possession of his own body, in control of his lifeblood. Mishima's fantasies are uncannily similar to those who actually lacerate themselves. A fascinating finding about self-cutters is that they simultaneously punish themselves, define boundaries, and eradicate boundaries through that violence (Doctors, 1999; Fowler & Hilsenroth, 1999; Piers, 1999; Tillman, 1999; Woodruff, 1999). Cutting the skin marks the boundary between inside and outside, self and other, one's own skin and body from the not self, the self one possesses demarcated from the outer world, which may impinge on one physically and emotionally. Such cutting can at the same time eradicate the boundaries between self and others, between the inner body (and feelings) and the outer world for which one yearns. It exposes the inner life to the outer, separated by the barrier of the skin. These are contradictory fantasies to be sure, but they may certainly operate together unconsciously. Mishima is establishing physical barriers between himself and others, replaying a scenario of childhood and adult vulnerability, where he was impinged on and devastated emotionally, so as to conquer that vulnerability. At the same time Mishima fantasizes cutting himself and others to gain penetrating access to them, dissolving boundaries between himself and those he desires to merge with, invade, and become. For while he was emotionally invaded in his vulnerability,

86

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

he yearned for an intimacy he could not attain, and hence intimacy required the fantasy of violent incursion. If the merger and intimacy must be violent to traverse emotional barriers, penetration is also vengeance against emotional rejection (cf. Fowler & Hilsenroth, 1999, p. 725; Tillman, 1999, pp. 713, 718; Woodruff, 1999, pp. 702-703). Thus, Sun and Steel provides further clues to Mishima's fantasies of sadomasochistic violence. I have argued in previous chapters that Mishima sought to destroy his weak and effeminate self by transforming his body and envisioning evisceration. Such fantasies were both identifications with the aggression of his grandmother and father, inflicted masochistically, as well as attainment of dominance over his own weakness and the toxic introjects, the emotional presences of those who controlled him. Sun and Steel shows us in addition that the fantasy of mortal selfpenetration was required for feeling alive, which connotes both the necessity of pain for permission to feel alive as well as violent mutilation to penetrate a thickly numbed sense of dispossession. Despite his freedom, Mishima was so alienated from his own feelings and autonomy that the sight of exposed viscera was required as proof of life. The fantasy of violent penetration gratified the need to establish emotional boundaries between self and impinging others and also to abolish barriers impeding intimacy. I would add that the fantasy of preserving beauty by exposing the bleeding intestines seems to ignore the inherently ugly disfigurement of the body through that violence. Unless one sees the writhing spewing body as beautiful, the gutted body does not preserve its perfection. Nevertheless, in fiction and philosophy Mishima continually voices the idea that beauty is preserved through murder: Why must we cover our eyes in horror when we see a person's innards? Why does gushing blood arouse such astonishment? Why are intestines so hideous? . . . Isn't it utterly identical to the beauty of glistening youthful skin? If human beings could but invert their souls and bodies, gracefully roll them inside out like rose petals, and expose them to the sun and May breeze. (Temple, pp. 62 63/58) Mishima's logic must be deconstructed then, for it is indeed very unusual to ask the question in Temple "what is so ghastly about exposed intestines?" (p. 62/58) with sincerity. (We are not dealing with a dispassionate doctor or anatomist here but someone who is aroused by the gushing expulsion of the bowels.) This aesthetic is gratifying only when invigorated by the sexual arousal in murdering vulnerability and weakness in oneself while exploiting the helplessness of the vanquished and penetrated other. We have returned full circle to the eroticism of Confessions of a Mask, of orgasm at the thought of Saint Sebastian penetrated, of beautiful boys disemboweled and kissed.

Steel and Wax

87

If Mishima tells us throughout Sun and Steel that life is proven only through death—through violent, mutilating death—I would reply that such continual obsession with glorious death eroticizes the most horrific in order to endure it, to soothe the terrified psyche, and transform the most feared thing into a masquerade of strength. Revenge nowr revels in punishing ugliness, weakness, and death. Eroticizing death is not a philosophy. It is flight, vengeance, and confession, even if couched in intrepid language and bravado. Mishima was a person who felt revulsion for decay, for the vulnerable body, for the uncontrollable weak self that threatened to erupt with excrement during his frequent bouts of debilitating abdominal pain. Seppuku masters the accidental and humiliating eruption by mastery and willing expulsion. It purifies the self of the intestines and font of nauseating weakness. This antinomy is expressed in Mishima's language throughout his works as well as Sun and Steel: dissolving, deliquescing, leaking, melting, and vulnerability are opposed to cleanly strength, invulnerability and intactness. Mishima concludes Sun and Steel with a poem titled Icarus: Do I thus belong to the heavens? Why would the heavens Imprison me with their incessant azure stare, Enticing me further, and my heart, further above Into oblivion4 Luring me ceaselessly Toward heights far transcending the human? When equilibrium has been pondered with precision And flight gauged with lucidity That nothing flawed should remain, Why thus should the desire for ascension Seem itself to so resemble madness? I am satisfied with nothing Earthly newness wearies in an instant I am lured higher and higher, more precariously Closer to the sun's radiance Why does this blaze of reason scorch me Why does this blaze of reason annihilate me? Villages below and the winding of streams Grow bearable as the distance grows If thus only from afar Why did they implore, approve, seduce me That I could love human things? Could the aspiration ever have been love? Had it been, could I ever have reason To belong to the heavens? I have not once envied the freedom of a bird Nor once longed for the solace of nature

88

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

Inspired by the bewildering tightness in my breast For ascent and ingress alone To immerse my body within the azure of the sky Opposed to all organic delight Far from all the bliss of superiority But higher and higher Dazed, perhaps, by the dizziness and incandescence of waxen wings? Or do I then Belong at last to the earth? Why if not should the earth Urge my fall so swiftly? Granting no time for thought or emotion Why did the soft and weary earth thus Welcome me with the force of steel plate? Did the soft earth thus transform into steel Only to expose my own softness? That nature might reveal to me That plummeting is far more natural than flight Far more natural than that bewildering passion? Is the blue of the sky then a fantasy Was it conceived by the earth to which I belonged And did the heavens secretly abet the plan To rain punishment down upon me For the ephemeral molten ecstasy Attained for an instant by waxen wings? To punish me for the crime Of not believing in myself Or for believing in myself too much Too zealous to know where I belonged Or for the hubris of presuming that I already knew everything For wishing to fly off To the unknown Or the known Both of them a single, blue fragment of an idea? (pp. 115 120/105 107) The i m a g e of Icarus cast from the skies is repeated often in M i s h i m a ' s final novel, The Decay of the Angel I believe this p o e m is transitional, m o v i n g from active fantasies of g r a n d e u r a n d a magnificent d e a t h to resignation a n d self-punishment. It a c c o m p a n i e s the realization that Mishima m a y be n o h e r o destined for glory b u t an u n d i s t i n g u i s h e d shameful creature. Icarus begins with y e a r n i n g a n d exclusion, desire for transcendence, a n d the d a w n i n g resignation of o n e w h o feels rejected. C o n s i d e r h o w M i s h i m a describes the h e a v e n s as a n a z u r e stare (ao n o chushi): o n e m a y interpret this as m e r e rhetoric, or imaginative description. But given M i s h i m a ' s repetitive concern w i t h v o y e u r i s m a n d the alienation of perceiving subject from that w h i c h is seen, I suspect this replays the familiar scenario w h e r e

Steel and Wax

89

the desired intimacy is both seductive and rejecting. The sky stares at him, enticing him, but as he later writes, that blue stare also casts him down (chobatsu o kudasu). This imagery replays both the wish for intimacy through loving glances and the admonishing stare that inflicts shame and self-disgust, even impotence, a perennial theme in Mishima's writing. 5 Mishima referred to the eye that questions his existence and requires exposing the intestines mere pages earlier. Transcendence and the metaphor of flight are by no means obvious signifiers, and even as familiar poetic imagery, such metaphors still need elucidation. 6 Given the imagery and thematics of Sun and Steel, I would suggest Mishima envisages transcending human limitations through ascendance (shoten no yokubou), which means both narcissistic specialness, a fantasy of grandiose predestination, and also flight away from the aging body he wishes to shed. For the body is indeed a burden to Mishima, a disgusting, decaying, sickly thing. Even in his transformation from effeminate weakness to muscular beauty, Mishima was aware that the body decomposes: "The essence of the flesh was decay" (Angel, p. 270/210). Becker (1973) wrote that investment in the fortress of the body is doomed to failure. Mishima would sooner destroy it at the moment of ecstatic pulchritude than allow it to become ugly and embarrassing. As Mishima later limns in Icarus, he wishes to plunge into a place contrary to organic delight (yukiteki na yorokobi), that is, beyond the body. But for Mishima, transcendence approaches madness and instability, for there is a realization of hubris—not just in the Greek sense, as though Mishima were echoing ancient emotions for symmetry or effect, but because transcendence and freedom have always been so simultaneously alluring and terrifying to him. Reason burns Mishima in exposure to the falseness of his facade, that transcendence and narcissistic pretenses of superiority will be unmasked and he punished. Mishima grows anxious as he accentuates his masquerade. He knows it is an illusion and fears exposure will burn him, bring his lies to light, sear his naked, exposed skin with shame and humiliation. In essence this is also freedom to play, to be a mask, to leave the site of his imprisonment, which will result in being cast down. It is another repetition of his past. Mishima then writes that places below grow tolerable as distance grows, that one can love the human only from afar. Again intimacy is thwarted merger, rage, disappointment, and disgust for human beings and can be desired only in fantasy. He then adds that the goal never could have been love, for even had this been the case, he could never have belonged to the heavens. He does not envy the freedom of a bird. This is a curiously apophatic statement. In other words, by claiming he does not desire freedom, he simultaneously wishes for the heavens and liberation from earthly imprisonment. It is not merely contradictory but an attempt to deny what he explicitly wants, which connotes the same ambivalent

90

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

desire and fear of freedom. It recalls Mishima's adolescent hymn of the bird wishing to return to its mother: A baby pheasant missing its mother A baby pheasant missing the wind, His crying voice The crimson moon.

Hahakou kigisu Kazekou kigisu no, Naki koe ni, Tsuki no iro akaki.

(1938, in Okuno, 1993, p. 124, translation mine) Icarus claims he desires the heavens while disclaiming he envies the freedom of the bird. If this is the case, can we not say that Mishima desires freedom and liberation but refuses to acknowledge it, feeling the threat of punishment for wanting it, and the shame of admitting he needs love? As we have just seen, Icarus speaks of yearning to plunge himself into the sky, so contrary to organic delight (yukiteki na yorokobi), dazzled by the dizziness and incandescence of waxen wings (tsubasa no rou). This is curious phrasing, for Mishima does not just mean wings made of wax but emphasizes the wax of the wings, that incandescent element that will nevertheless liquefy and send him plummeting to earth. Icarus then considers resigning himself to the earth, for it so swiftly encompasses (or urges) his fall (kakou o unaga). The earth suffocates him and allows no space to think or feel. It is soft and indolent (or weary; yawaraka na monoui) but shocks him like a steel plate, showing him his own softness (yawarakasa). Mishima feels far more comfortable with the familiar suffocation by an enveloping force, a (grand) maternal image of fertility and death that nevertheless shocks him, resists him, is invulnerable to him, and reveals his softness, or weakness, only to himself. Connected and contrasted with the previous images of plunging into the heavens in resistance of the need for love, this earthen image of enveloping resistance is equated with rejection of a goal that is not love—in other words, the pursuit that is not love consigns him to its opposite, the pursuit of love, which is impenetrable even as it entombs him. It shows Mishima only his own weakness, the vulnerable body, that soft craving for mother and earth, those organic joys, though finally impenetrable. Both images, of plunging into the sky's blue and of being encompassed by indolent earth, connote oblivion, merger with an expanse, surrender, oceanic dissolution. Both are visions of void, unconsciousness, of sleep and death. The final stanza recapitulates these themes: resignation is complete, for flight is an illusion; falling is the natural order, the ineluctable modality of the visible; and punishment (chobatsu o kudasu) is the consequence of passion. Mishima wonders whether punishment results from believing not enough in himself or too much, from wanting to fly off. Psychologically, they are inseparable—one who cannot believe enough cannot sepa-

Steel and Wax

91

rate and must punish oneself for attempts at freedom; believing too much may not only have realistic consequences, for he is already punishing himself for perceiving his hubris. Passion itself, desire for freedom, is punishable and lands one in unyielding, smothering earth. The image of waxen wings, of things that melt, deliquesce, and disintegrate throughout the piece connote insubstantial pretenses, the hubris of the one who will be punished, but it is also metaphoric of ego defenses—the soft vulnerability of the emotions—as well as the body that will decay and die regardless of one's immense struggles to render the flesh hard, invulnerable, and imperishable. He will thaw into liquid despite his passion for transcendence. One is not an angel but waxen viscose absorbed by soil. This poem sings what I believe is Mishima's lament before his suicide. The Decay of the Angel narrates the transformation of a beautiful egotistic male to a fetid, sweaty, squalid creature. In the final pages the cruel female observer admonishes Toru: You thought that history has its exceptions. There are none.... There is no tragedy and there is no genius. Your confidence and your dreams are groundless. If there is on this earth something exceptional, special beauty or special evil, nature finds it out and uproots it. You thought, didn't you, that you were a genius beyond compensation. You thought of yourself, didn't you, as a beautiful cloud of evil floating over humanity Maybe from the outset you were a fraud. In fact I myself am rather sure that you are a fraud. There is nothing inevitable about you, not a thing a person would hate to lose. There is in you not a thing to make a person imagining your death feel that a shadow had come over the world. Your thoughts don't go a step beyond those of any mediocre boy There is nothing in the least special about you. I guarantee you a long life. You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightning with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself. All you have is a certain premature senility. Your life will be suited for coupon clipping. Nothing more. All puffed up by illusions born of abstract concepts, you strut about as the master of a destiny even though you have none of the qualifications. You think that you have seen to the ends of the earth. But you have not once had an invitation beyond the horizon. . . . you have no destiny. The beautiful death was not for you. (pp. 201-207) I cannot but believe that these were his own misgivings, his real opinion of himself, the Icarus whose wings must melt as he dares ascend foolishly and plummets into the earth. Consider also how this decayed angel is belittled and emasculated so sadistically by this ugly, aged woman. At the end of his life, Mishima was still possessed by self-loathing inculcated by the psychological presence of a decrepit medusa who had mirrored only

92

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

annihilating malicious deprecation. Mishima's decayed angel reacts to such disparagement with rage, fantasies of murder, visions of blood spraying over gold chairs and doors (p. 207). Like so many literary cadences of Mishima, the humiliating desolation of a grandiose fantasy engenders destructive malice, the wish to murder and besmirch glittering beauty. But Toru's rage remains sealed inside him without an exit (p. 267/ 207), and he swallows poison, confirming Keiko's predictions. 7 1 think this echoes Mishima's brutally entrenched pattern of internalizing violence, ingesting his rage and inflicting it on himself. One cannot elude the coercion of self-loathing in Mishima's suicide. 8 The hostile oracle debasing aspirations of glory symbolizes the hidden executioner, the voice whose malice has been inflicted and absorbed, compelling the need to extinguish oneself. I N S U R R E C T I O N A N D RESURRECTION Even as self-extinction was submission to a desultory and inglorious fate, Mishima protested the admonishment of this malicious spinsterly norn and her conviction that a beautiful death was not his destiny. And despite an ostensible fanaticism, Mishima invokes a lucid and tragicomic parable about his own existence and pretences in the Decay of the Angel: the mouse who commits suicide to establish himself. One day a mouse meets a cat and tells the feline that he cannot eat the mouse because he is in fact a cat. The cat rolls over laughing. The mouse jumps into the laundry tub and drowns. The cat tastes the suds and leaves the mouse to float without eating him. Hence, the mouse is not convincingly feline but never believed he would deceive the cat. Yet the mouse was brave and filled with self-respect, was not eaten, and has proven that he is something cats do not eat (pp. 123-124). Comic though this seems, it accords with Mishima's philosophy that a nihilistic act may be completely ineffective and yet serve a purpose ("Yang Ming," p. 85). Or, as his Counterrevolutionary Manifesto proclaims, efficacy is not a concern (Nathan, 1974, p. 242). Mishima's suicide may not have been heroic or revolutionary. It was likely an erotic and pathological recapitulation of trenchant fantasies and conflicts. It was in many ways sick and pitiable. Such was his misery. But if Mishima saw himself as vermin, he could seemingly laugh at himself and, in knowing he was no revolutionary who would change the world, at least escaped being a sycophantic clone in a society he considered repulsive and embarrassing. And he did evade the decay of old age, escape being the fodder to stuff the bowels of a monstrous devourer biting and crunching human flesh (p. 271/210). Mishima evaded being an "empty sign," a completely insignificant nothing by choosing his own death (cf. Barthes, 1982; A. Wolfe, 1989, pp. 222, 229).9 If Mishima was convinced that one life could make no

Steel and Wax

93

difference and thus envisioned the beautiful hero as the person who did not struggle humiliatingly with futility but died a beautiful death, Mishima the man refused to have death devour him through the ravages of age, which would render him a helpless corpse. "At the end of knowledge anyone immediately becomes a leper . . . flesh divested of all corporeal beauty that disgusts by its carnality, a hoarsened voice, a body denuded of hair, falling like leaves" (Angel, p. 95/76). Mishima did not want to die an ugly death, an accidental death, a stupid death (cf. Keene, 1984, p. 1216). "How arbitrary we are!" lamented Mishima (Nathan, 1974, p. 189). His was a protest against both the defeated society in which one was insignificant and the viciousness of time. His echoed the protest of Dostoyevsky's Hippolyte in The Idiot (1868): I haven't the strength to submit to the dark force which assumes the form of a tarantula. . . . Can't I simply be devoured without being expected to sing praises to what is devouring m e ? . . . If I could have never been born, / certainly would never have chosen existence on such ludicrous terms . . . suicide is perhaps the only thing that I still have time to begin and bring to a conclusion of my own free will. Well, why shouldn't I take advantage of the last possibility to act? A protest is sometimes no small matter, (pp. 428-434, initial emphasis added) This is why beauty can be sustained only in ignorance, not intellect, for awareness of death, decay, and futility lead one to despair, resentment, and even self-punishing rage. Beauty "is not allowed to know and yet be beautiful" (Angel, p. 95/76). Mishima claims that knowledge of death is required to exist, yet here this knowledge impedes the illusion of beauty since one is aware of decay. Blood, pain, and self-massacre prove that one is not the consummation of time into humiliating and putrid flesh. Spurting blood demonstrates one is not that repulsive, dead, inanimate thing— a terribly mad but poignant protest.10 Ultimately, Mishima's narcissism was a defense against his terror of disintegration, the exhibition of himself as proof of his existence, an erotic plea for seduction as rescue, and sadistic invasive revenge. His suicide was an attempt to retain and preserve his existence against regression to the infantile state of helplessness and toxic merger while simultaneously revenging himself on the body, which decayed, and the disgusting and messy innards composed of excrement and coercively internalized emotional poisons. In scything his bowels, he was stabbing evil to death and expelling it with his entrails. His suicide was a narcissistic rejection of decay and death. Aging was an ineluctable experience of the traumatic return of childhood illness, weakness, helplessness, impotence, castration, immobility, imprisonment, and abandonment. He would kill himself before returning to excremental engulfment and merger, which would be the most ignoble, repugnant,

94

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

helpless death. Rather, his death was an act of freedom and defiance of soul murder. Yet, in suicide "the revengeful destruction of this bad object is intended to magically restore the good one" (Kernberg, 1992, p. 27). Amidst immense hostility toward his inner decay and a malignant need to destroy himself and the internalized presences of those who abandoned and victimized him, Mishima's suicide was also a fantasy of both the rejuvenation of his ideal self and a resurrection of those he desired. Like the transmigration of souls in his fiction, suicide in reality enacted the fantasy that Mishima and those he yearned for would be reborn as they were idealized, split from their decrepitude, shorn and devoid of shameful malignance.11 Suicide may be a submission to the inner object who fills one with selfloathing, may be surrender to the malicious oracle, but execution also purifies her, enables blissful fusion in death, and thus reclaims the body and soul from fate. Finally, in suicide Mishima was enacting his erotic fantasies of killing the helpless and vulnerable self at the moment of orgasm. Recall that Mishima had recurring fantasies of murdering ejaculating lovers, masturbating while viewing images of wounded victims, and became erect when imagining samurai cutting their bellies open. In cutting his own abdomen, Mishima's seppuku was an erotic act that repeated his sexual arousal toward the murdered beautiful victim and his voyeuristic arousal in imagining the murder. This also implies that the subsequent decapitation enacted the fantasy of castrating the erection. While this may or may not reflect the eroticism of Japanese imagery concerning death and suicide, in Mishima's case sexual arousal follows violent fantasy, and castration fantasies and anxieties follow sexual arousal. Once again this is joy in murdering death, in being murdered, and punishing the sexually aroused penis and self. Punishing sexual arousal is a repetition and identification with punitive action toward the infantile self, which needed love and attempted loving contact. It is a repetition of the anguish experienced during moments of vulnerability and neediness. It is also a castigation of individual will and desire, which are forbidden forms of selfishness and arousal to those who need to stifle those feelings.12 Eroticizing such pain and rage are also ways of transforming anguish into pleasure both masochistically, as selfpunishment and absolution, and defensively, as soothing reactions to terror and despair. Mishima's suicide was an act of violence against his own loathsome body and self, against others he craved and despised, a fertile protest against futility and desolation, the murder of decay and death, a fantasy of rebirth.

Steel and Wax

95

Wearing nothing but a golden loincloth, his nude Body has a glittering beauty ... SOUL: My body has rotted away, faded away BODY: .. .Your Body has not once been ill, wounded, or shapeless. Your Body is just like this—brimming with youthful brilliance, powerful, and as eternal as a statue molded out of gold. The repugnant disease was nothing but the Soul's fantasy The victorious King, the youthful warrior—how can this Body of his be affected by disease? SOUL: But what could the Body do? Could it make anything eternal? BODY: What has crumbled, what is shapeless, what has become blind. . . .What

do you think that is? It's

the way the Soul is. You weren't afflicted with leprosy. Soul, you were born a leper.... One beautiful summer afternoon is eternal.... Have you ever been beautiful enough to be loved, even just once?... Youth never perishes, the Body is deathless.... I've won. —The Terrace of the Leper King, pp. 216-218

A thing's end is a beautiful moment in which the limits of passivity are reached; it is a beautiful moment of water-like tension; it is eternal—like the premonition that the sunset's glow is an invasion of the night, during that fleeting moment when, in the midst of fear and tension, it shines most conspicuously; it arrests itself, unwavering, and for just one second maintains ''perfection," and will not accept even the slightest grievance. "A Forest in Full Flower," p. 4 Though I have argued for a psychological reading of Mishima's life and death, one would be remiss not to explore his philosophical and political positions. For it is difficult not to see Mishima as a man reacting to his times, to westernization, war, defeat, and atomic aftermath. One must investigate the impact of such phenomena on the artist, especially since he devoted himself to emperor worship and finally sacrificed himself as a protest against the death of Japan. In the next chapter, I explore sociocultural interpretations of Mishima, debating the effects of history on madness and perversion, finally returning to the examination of the motives and fantasies pervading his suicide. NOTES 1. When this facet of Mishima's life was discussed in an earlier chapter, I also indicated that such feelings of sickliness and equation of self with excrement motivated the impulse toward cleanliness and invulnerability. The person equating the self with excrement psychosomatically (or hysterically) also converts the self

96

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

into that condition in identification with the aggression of those who make him feel that way; it symbolizes the psychological state. Of course, Mishima's physi ological condition may not be psychological, but considering his childhood tendency to re-create situations of infantile dependence through "autointoxication" (jikachudoku) and his trouble defying the will of his grandmother, I suspect he did identify with both her diminishing Mishima to excrement and her own sickly condition with all its noisome odors. 2. See Sun and Steel, p. 15. His dark room and literary asylum are an amniosis, from which he can give birth to himself in lieu of being a loathsome prisoner deprived of a safe nurturing womb. 3. Mishima spoke of sincerity as residing in the entrails, that in feudal times the Japanese would cut their bellies to demonstrate their visible sincerity (Stokes, 1974, p. 6). Aside from the fact that Mishima is not indigenous to that society, it only begs the question why this might have been so in those times. Why was spilling intestines the way of showing sincerity? Obviously it is a sign of absolute loyalty to expose such a vulnerable area in death, but one must still ask why this was required, why people resonated with the will to expose and kill the body to demonstrate loyalty, why loyalty could not be effectively trusted or shown in other ways. I am not judging the act, just arguing that the fantasy is other than it might seem, more than the obvious. One must still ask why Mishima is stimulated by the idea of showing his sincerity this way, why he feels sincerity is otherwise invisible, why he needs to show his sincerity so ardently, to whom he really wishes to demonstrate this sincerity, whose love he truly desires. I believe this is far more symbolic, far more of a reenactment than one might be tempted to believe. 1 would also ask why Mishima needs to prove the superiority of the samurai to foreigners who could not die in such an excruciating manner (p. 6). Finally, as can be seen in Sun and Steel, Mishima was convinced that evacuation of the intestines was required for proof of existence, which is very different from proving sincerity 4. The word here connotes both "sky" and "emptiness." the latter has nu merous connotations, including "unconsciousness" and "oblivion." 5. In Spring Snow, for example, Kiyoaki wishes to lay his arm on his weeping love, "but at the next moment, his arm seemed stricken with paralysis and hung useless at his side, for he had met her gaze in its full intensity" (p. 315). The paralysis of the arm evokes phallic impotence, and in Mishima's fiction one often encounters paralysis, immobility, helplessness, shame, and defeat before the gaze of others. The wish is for a loving gaze that mirrors desire and beauty, a very basic need denied Mishima in childhood, whereas a direct stare is often hostile, infantilizing, contemptuous, and emasculating, as we saw in Confessions when Chako derogates the hapless narrator and when Uiko diminishes Mizoguchi or when Kashiwagi describes the malicious stare of his mother in Temple. As argued earlier, phallic narcissism is the exhibitionism that seeks to defeat abandonment and not being seen as well as the contemptuous emasculating stare (negative mirroring) with powerful masculine display 6. Bloom (1982) might ask what these images transumed, what these familiar images invoked in reference not only to poetic tradition but also to the identity of the author in agony against time and death. 7. One wonders whether Mishima was familiar with the psychoanalytic interpretation of blindness as symbolic of castration or whether the symbolization, the

Steel and Wax

97

unconscious equivalence of blindness and castration, emerged spontaneously. Of course, Mishima was versed in Greek theater and might have wished to evoke the tragic—but this would imply the hero blinded himself in culpability for having harmed others or transgressed the eternal order. In Angel, then, blindness is selfinflicted punishment for the hubris aspiring to greatness, or the masochistic humiliation of realizing one's grandiosity was a pathetic illusion. For Mishima Themis was vicious. 8. As indicated earlier, one can interpret the realization of nothingness or insignificance in a positive light if connoting the liberation from one's attachments, narcissistic impulses, and fantasies to be something substantial. However, Mishima implies no liberation in Decay of the Angel. Tom is berated and derogated, not instructed or enlightened. He feels shame and anger, the narcissistic response that Miller (1993) describes as the pathological reaction itself, and Toru's response is vengeance against himself and finally death rather than peace. This mitigates against an interpretation of The Sea of Fertility cycle as Buddhist allegory, which might view Mishima finally demonstrating an enlightenment regarding the futility of vanity and struggle, a fertile garden of nothingness from which liberation from things and attachments is possible. One may critique the cycle from a Buddhist perspective, as Loy (2002) has done to Western aspirations, but Mishima has hardly represented the repose of such realizations. Futility is a sign of decay rather than freedom, and his suicide was the fantasy of freedom. 9. Miller (1993) illustrates how terms connoting nothingness can have a positive value in Japanese thought. If nothingness or insignificance implies the irreality of the ego or self, then these terms are positive realizations of the need to be something, the compensatory urge to inflate the self, which is a destructive fantasy. Hence, it should be made clear that the usage of the term "insignificance" in this article relates not to the positive realization that ego inflation is futile and psychologically problematic but rather to the subjective feeling of misery because one is not important, that one feels like a dehumanized commodity, and so on. This point is reiterated in my discussions of the conclusion of Decay of the Angel in the next chapter. 10.1 earlier interpreted Mishima's requirements of pain and blood as deriving from the need to penetrate his sense of numbness. The conclusion here is an extension, not a contradiction of that idea. It was numbing suffocation and impingement that dispossessed Mishima of the feeling of being alive, indeed making him feel so psychically and physically dead, creating an awareness of sickliness and decay more horrific and vivid than most of us are usually aware. Thus, paradoxically he required more violent penetration both to feel alive and to overcome the fear of death. (Psychologists might call this counterphobic.) A great many selfdestructive people rush into death because they cannot endure their fears, not just because they are brave, reckless, masochistic, or wish to die. Mishima, as I have been arguing, manifests all these motives with disturbing intensity, except perhaps for bravery. 11. My former student Judd Grill describes Mishima's suicide as his own "caesarian section" where he enacts the fantasy of giving birth to his purified self and expelling his toxic innards. 12. Cf. Hillman (1986) and Szasz (1970).

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 4

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism: Psychological and Sociocultural Analysis of Mishima

This chapter attempts to demonstrate why a sociocultural interpretation of Mishima is sometimes unable to deepen our understanding of critical elements of the man and his fiction. No one would argue that situating a person in the context of his or her culture is unnecessary. In fact, one must recognize the cultural and historical milieu—obviously, it is critical to know that suicide might be considered a noble or beautiful death, for example, rather than a coward's escape (or any number of uncontextual interpretations; even Durkheim's modes of suicide do not in the least capture the aesthetics of seppuku). Without some understanding of the culture and history, how would one know that trains figure heavily in twentieth-century literature and film as symbols of invasive Western technology and the disappearance of traditional Japan? Or that homosexuality has a long literary tradition of its own? Without the cultural context, how can one fully appreciate the explorations and ironies of Rinzai Buddhism in Temple of the Golden Pavilion? How would one ever perceive the innumerable significations, allusions, images, and moods, conveyed by the language? Without an appreciation for the culture, its history, language, art, and poetry, we are understanding a bare summary of the complexity of the text, events crudely conveyed and interpreted in thick ignorance. Reading Mishima without a knowledge of his society and language misses both the cultural significations and his diversions from expected significations (Peterson, 1979, p. 231). One must know not only that mirrors signified reflection into the soul in ancient Japan but also that Mishima required mirrors to reflect his lithe beauty, indeed evidence his very existence (Nathan, 1974, p. 128; cf. Miller,

100

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

1986). Thus, recognizing cultural significations is often necessary but may not be sufficient for understanding the individual. Can a person be reduced to a set of social or cultural circumstances? Can these circumstances explain the complexity and imagination of a writer? To some this might be absurd, especially if one reflects on writers like Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, or Joyce. However, there are those who interpret Mishima almost purely in terms of his social and historical context, virtually ignoring what may have been unique about his life. This chapter would hardly be necessary except that writers continually interpret Mishima in political, philosophical, or sociocultural terms and so rarely focus on his peculiar childhood and fantasies. SEXUAL PERVERSION A N D POSTWAR MISERY Susan Napier (1991) has written a fascinating book titled Fscapefrom the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo, in which she argues that the works of these writers are "explorations of the society" that spawned the events of history. She quotes Akira Fukushima, who claims that Mishima and Oe "are the two writers most sensitive to the contemporary world" (p. 2). As two of the most important and controversial writers of postwar Japan, Oe and Mishima mourn the wasteland Japan has become, a culture devoid of noble values, one that has abandoned its own tradition and ethos and destroyed and sacrificed itself. Mishima and Oe capture and revile the society emerging in postwar Japan, where the populace languishes amid the anomie and horror of their decimated country, the shameful humanization of the emperor, a land of ugliness and purgatorial meaninglessness. Napier argues for the pervasiveness of postwar anomie and malaise very persuasively and envisages the utter desolation of a culture whose eternal truths, values, and symbols have been eradicated and betrayed, a condition Joseph Campbell (1968) describes as a wasteland of spiritual bleakness (p. 368). Mishima (1970a) described modern Japan as a "spiritual vacuum" (p. 74). But Napier seems to interpret the literature of Mishima and Oe (not to mention a host of others) specifically as the product of these cultural circumstances while evading individual experience. Napier writes that "Mishima's own rather bizarre childhood may have played a part" in developing his "artificiality" (p. 3). Mishima's "lonely childhood may have contributed" to his notorious "outsider" characters (p. 4). Thus, Mishima's behavior, his flamboyance, his personal and literary concerns, his sexual fantasies of raping boys, his dreams of vengeance against women, are all attributed to cultural phenomena and only vaguely and hypothetically to his bizarre childhood. Napier says very little else about Mishima's unique infancy and adolescence and later identifies a number of common postwar literary perversions, claiming that

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

101

these all derive from the cultural wasteland malaise. The perversion, madness, and horror depicted in Japanese postwar literature are explicitly the result of the annihilation of Japanese culture and the trauma of anomie "death in life" (cf. Lifton, 1967). Napier writes of the absence or inadequacy of fathers in postwar fiction, interpreting the homosexuality and voyeurism depicted so pitiably in Forbidden Colors as paradigms of "degraded sexuality" in the wasteland of the modern world (pp. 13-14). While a "literally and spiritually impotent voyeur" is a compelling image of the "fallen postwar world," do homosexuality and voyeurism derive from the defeat of Japan? How does historical trauma engender the kinds of homosexuality, predatory pursuit of sexual conquest, desire for vengeance against women, and odious cursing of the vagina that figure so prominently in Forbidden Colors? As I argued in a previous chapter, for Mishima the helpless voyeur watching his wife receive cunnilingus from the milkman is explicitly grounded in betrayal and emasculation by women. The decrepit voyeur is hardly an emperor among men. Thus, the allegory of defeat of an idealized father by another nation does not map on to the text, which seems rather to convey Mishima's own erotic currents of humiliation and vengeance. Voyeurism is a repetitive element in Mishima. Is this a consequence of postwar impotence or, as I have argued, a consequence of childhood sequestration from mother, helplessness before grandmother and father, both continually imprisoning and humiliating young Kimitake? Is the adolescent locked in his room secretly watching his mother masturbate in Sailor a metaphor for postwar impotence? How does his disgust with the vagina work within this interpretive scheme? Is also the imagery of homosexuals copulating to humiliate the wife who espies them "accidentally" in Colors such an allegory? Napier later attempts to interpret disgust with women's bodies as "the oppressiveness of reality" (p. 95) and women who cause sexual impotence as the uncontrollable element of nature itself, "threats to romanticism in general, as repressors of masculine dreams of adventure and beauty" (pp. 106-107). How is ripping apart the frail body of a young girl liberating ("The Room with the Locked Door")? 1 The question is why women represent oppressiveness, arouse malice and disgust. They do not inherently connote reality or the death of romanticism (women can be symbolic of the prelapsarian, preverbal dream, as Napier earlier suggests, or by contrast they can be the kind of salvation Dante imagines or signify almost anything). Meanwhile, Mishima characters are obsessed with vengeance on women, disgusted by their menstruating bodies; ugly vaginas; mocking, derisive rejection; sexual betrayal; and stupidity. If women represent repression of masculine dreams, we still must ask why since the conflation of women as oppressors and the sexual wasteland is hardly a compelling analysis of misogyny or the impact of historical trauma.

102

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

Napier acknowledges that voyeurism and degraded sexuality are also common in prewar literature, but what makes Oe and Mishima unique is their visions of escaping the wasteland (p. 14). She thus interprets sexual perversion as a romantic attempt at transcendence rather than a symptom of derangement. Napier does see perversion as a symptom of degradation but describes it also as a means of artistic triumph over oppression and impotence. If Mishima imagines the hero of Temple as an artist, so Napier argues that infantile feelings of disappointment and longing are transformed into the "sophisticated vision of the artist" (p. 108). Napier assumes that those who reject reality may be allied to the positive figure of the artist, having a creative function. While artists and heroes may indeed reject reality, enact perverse fantasies, even attempt transcendence through unusual eroticisms, why assume perversion must be artistic? It is absurd to call an infantile misogynistic arsonist an artist. The hero of Temple triumphs in overcoming sexual impotence with a prostitute, enabling him to revenge himself on beauty and his parents. Why is this artistic? Is it creative to destroy a temple in displaced revenge against helpless fathers and pernicious mothers fornicating before one's eyes? Is the eradication of beauty as surrogate for defiling prostitutes (and his mother) artistic? Peterson (1979) also writes that the Temple is more an aesthetic than a psychological interference between Mizoguchi's imagination and his life (p. 264), as though someone who is sexually impotent at the idea of a temple that he associates with breasts, death, and betrayal, enraged with a landmark for surviving bombings and beset by humiliating paranoid thoughts that an inanimate structure is mocking the ugliness of the pathetic weakling below, is not psychologically deranged but merely blocked creatively. Napier describes Mishima protagonists as "romantic visionaries" (p. 108), a positive description of solipsistic, infantile, self absorbed sociopaths without compassion or conscience. Does one consider Raskolnikov an artist for having killed the moneylender and split her sister Lizaveta's head with an ax? Napier's use of the word "romantic" makes infantilism a positive thing. Later she refers to the adolescent protagonist of Sailor as a romantic as well (p. 119), as though a malicious voyeuristic boy disgusted with vaginas and contemptuous of fathers were a visionary or Nietzschean Ubermensch rejecting the imprisoning society. I am not claiming the rebellion against reality or society is antithetical to art. Rather, I am questioning the assumption that one who rejects reality must be an artist. There is nothing about Mizoguchi or Noboru to give us any indication that some realization or vision beyond their solipsistic compulsions for vengeance is operating here. (Apparently, Napier believes that Mizoguchi does focus inward, citing the scene where Mizoguchi thinks of the Temple to avoid awareness of his mother's adultery [pp. 113-114]. This cannot be equated with any mode of profound intro-

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

103

spection. It is rather a defense against horror and betrayal, an association that later enables him to displace his misery on an external object when he cannot cope with his conflicts and resentment directly.) Napier also describes Temple as a love story, equating the Buddhist saying "when you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him" with the destruction of the Pavilion. In this interpretation, the destruction of the Temple is symbolic of destroying one's attachments and tendency to adore and worship the teacher. Hence, immolating the Temple eradicates the disciple's adherence to objects, devotion, signifiers of reality, imposed teaching and values, oppression, and subservience. The Temple is an outer representation of a psychological dependence, and hence its destruction frees him from his own obedience. What in Zen would encourage someone to destroy a temple? If objects are destroyed in Zen, it is surely not in anger or vengeance. A Zen response would sooner see the Temple as a metaphor for internal attachment and encourage internal liberation than destruction of the external and physical. To destroy the real Temple would be akin to behaving violently toward an enemy to free oneself rather than interrogating the reasons why the person arouses such fury. A Zen allegory this is not, even if Mizoguchi did identify with the liberating destructiveness of Nansen (Keene, 1971, p. 215). Again Mizoguchi destroys the Temple as a substitute, a displacement and reenactment of his psychopathology, rather than as liberation from it. His is an anti-Zen response, and certainly Mizoguchi experiences no satori in his travels, much less an interest in Buddhism. Again, how Zen is it to despise and torture women, destroying the Temple in a rage? 2 According to Napier, Mizoguchi is an artist because of his wishes to destroy and possess, because he exhibits "a powerful and creative imagination which transforms the temple into an Other of almost divine proportions, perhaps comparable to Ahab's vision of Moby Dick" (p. 111). So Ahab is an artist? Melville describes Ahab as one who explodes all his humiliation and injury from his heart's hot shell on Moby Dick. Ahab is a vivid illustration of psychotic rage and vengeance, not artistry, nor is Mizoguchi artistically creative or anything other than a humiliated adolescent inflicting his shame, misogynistic rage, and paranoia on something he believes mocks him. (For those who consider words like "sociopath" or "psychotic" labels or judgments, consider also how the words "creative" and "artist" are also judgments. Only I would make the claim that "art" is a far more subjective term than "psychosis.") Finally, Napier claims that Mishima killed the Buddha when he committed suicide, rejecting "endurance, knowledge, and even art" (p. 118). This is a gross misinterpretation of what it means to kill the Buddha, and if Mishima had done so, he might possibly have acquiesced to the noble truths of Buddhism that life is indeed aging, sickness, and death and relinquished his narcissistic need to be a beautiful ageless Adonis. If Mish-

104

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

ima had killed the Buddha, he might have nurtured his Buddha nature instead of eviscerating that as well, so incapable was Mishima of loving himself. Napier's analysis ultimately confuses pathological reenactment and sexual perversion as artistic aspirations of transcendence of the wasteland. In fact, psychological symptoms can be attempts at a restoration of psychic equilibrium and control or the dissolution of chaos and feelings of degradation or helplessness, but this does not make them something to ennoble as inherently artistic. Wras Hitler's genocidal liquidation of Jews artistic? Romanticizing psychological fragmentation or violence brings us no closer to understanding the dynamics of trauma on sexual perversion. It might even validate calling similar acts in the real world, like the destruction of temples or murder of human beings, a form of artistic transcendence, a very Nietzschean-sounding leap beyond of good and evil but hardly worth lauding. Meanwhile, we are still left with the question of why degraded sexuality is such a common literary fantasy before and after the war, if the impotent voyeur is supposed to be the specific paradigm of postwar degradation. Napier writes that Oe and Mishima capture the fragmentation of the postwar world through images of "non-procreative and illicit behaviors—autoeroticism, homosexuality, voyeurism, adultery, rape, and sadism.. .. Inscribed in the erotic discourse of Oe, Mishima, and a number of other postwar writers' works is a microcosmos of humiliation, chaos, and loss, in which sexuality serves as a redemption, a compensation, an escape, or a means of control. Or it can be the most extreme expression of the lack of redemption, the absence of compensation, the closing off of escape, and the loss of control" (p. 44). Napier believes that the Buddhist acolyte who tramples on the belly of a prostitute at an American soldier's request in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion exemplifies this pattern. But Temple is pervaded by hostility toward women, as are so many Mishima novels. And Mizoguchi comes to enjoy crushing the prostitute. In fact, he is not helpless against the GI; indeed, he seems sexually attracted to his cruelty and lyrical eyes. Thus, if we are to interpret this as an allegory of Western oppression (p. 115), we must see this as impetus to violate one's own culture at the instigation of another instead of rebelling and suffering the consequences. Why assume that this behavior must be a consequence of the war? The GI is the most insignificant of characters, and Mizoguchi despises his mother, the beautiful and rejecting Uiko, as well as the Golden Temple without such influence. Napier finds much more compelling examples, such as Akiyuki Nosaka's "American Hijiki," where a man in a sex show becomes impotent at the sight of an American. Post-Tokugawa literature is deeply concerned with the death of Japan and intimidation and invasion by Western influence. Novels from Futabatei Shimei's The Drifting Cloud (Ukigumo, 1886-

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

105

1889) to Natsume Soseki's Kokoro (1914) to Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes (Suna No Onna, 1964) are poignant explorations of Japanese malaise, as are such disturbing films as Nagisa Oshima's Violence at Noon (Hukucho No Torima, 1966) and The Ceremony (Gishiki, 1971), just to name a few of the innumerable examples of such categorical anguish pervading Japanese culture since 1868. And Napier deftly explores the profound concern with the death of Japan and post-Tokugawa despair that pervades the cultural psyche. Impotence, sexual alienation, voyeuristic passivity, and sadistic aberration all seem like gripping existential metaphors and psychological consequences of post-Tokugawa social and emotional fragmentation, cultural attrition, martial defeat, and atomic devastation and aftermath. But why assume that voyeurism and perversion must always derive from such malaise? Contradicting her earlier statement, Napier claims that prewar literature celebrates sexuality far more positively (p. 45), and thus the decisive factor must be the war. Actually, prewar images of sadism and bondage flourished but were suppressed by the Meiji government as "injurious to public morals" (Rubin, 1984). (One must also consider how improving technology and postwar literary freedom enabled the dissemination of formerly suppressed sexual imagery.) Napier assumes that the voyeurism of novelists such as Mishima, Kawabata, and Tanizaki are all consequences of postwar antisocial alienation (p. 46). The "solipsistic pleasures" of masturbation represent the fragmentation of sexuality. Are we to believe that Mishima's adolescent (prewar) masturbation fantasies of raping and eviscerating boys derive from atomic trauma? How are such fantasies "a reflection and criticism" of society (p. 49)? What social malaise causes little boys to be aroused by night soil? Or images of murdered saints? Or transvestitism? And Tanizaki's memoirs are filled with bizarre sexual accidents that seem to resonate with his unusual fantasy life, such as the time a pervert supposedly hid underneath the toilet and fingered his mother—an image that not surprisingly had a profound psychosexual impact on Tanizaki, if we are to trust the memoirs at all (1966-1968, pp. 6970). Nevertheless, Napier seems to think that "in a world that can no longer be controlled, fantasies of escape or of power that promotes the butchery of young men (as in the mask's 'murder theater') may be inevitable" (p. 54). Are we to conclude that in times of helplessness and degradation, men must inevitably become sexually aroused by the idea of killing and kissing eviscerated male victims? This raises a fascinating question: can historical events (not child rearing, not patterns of raising children, not the influence of parents, but purely social circumstances) influence a culture in such a fashion as to engender a preponderance of sexual conflicts, perversions, or obsessions that pervade the fantasy life of that culture a n d / o r its literature? This is a complicated question, for one can possibly observe changes in the expression

106

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

of sexuality based on social circumstances, such as the sexual liberation following social and cultural rebellion in 1960s America. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the rebellion itself caused changes in sexuality per se as opposed merely to the motives and freedom to express and explore (or exhibit) sexuality. Sexual consequences emerged from September 11, 2001, including impotence as well as sexual compulsiveness, excessive masturbation, and other erotically soothing behaviors. 3 Could the impact of Commodore Perry's arrival in Japan, the subsequent civil conflict, industrialization, social upheaval, numerous armed conflicts leading to World War II, and finally the defeat of Japan have so traumatized Japan that sexual aberration (as depicted in postwar literature) resulted? How is sexuality affected by the cataclysm of "national death" (Oe, 1989, p. 197)? PSYCHOLOGICAL U N D E R C U R R E N T S OF HISTORY (OR, WHAT E N G E N D E R S PERVERSION) I would suggest that some psychological understanding of trauma, conflict, defeat, and perversion might be necessary to answer this question reasonably. For perversion is far more than a lifestyle choice, something one chooses to do rationally, and much more than the result of the anomalous consequences of historic shocks and upheavals. One must recognize what engenders our eroticisms and "neosexualities," to use McDougall's term once more. Otherwise, one might not appreciate the impact of trauma on the tendency to regress and fragment psychologically, on the impetus to inflict losses and humiliations on others, to enact such humiliation through violence based on specifically organized preexisting patterns of fantasy and emotional disposition that are ordinarily controlled and calmed by a stable social order and sense of meaning. In other words, to understand the perversion being acted out or fantasized, it is not enough to recognize the impact of society and history. For not every individual or culture will react the same way. The reactions will vary according to individual and cultural patterns based on child rearing, socialization, and acculturation, which themselves determine the nature of the fantasies, of the defenses, of patterns of reacting to fear, loss, trauma, humiliation, or rage. One person may fragment and regress to an extremely sadistic means of mastery, inflicting shame, powerlessness, and fear on others to master his or her own feelings. Another person or group may regress to a dependent and malleable state, desperately wishing for rapprochement with whoever provides guidance and leadership. Another may acquiesce to the violence, experience defeat and resignation, internalizing the emotions in exhaustion and weariness. Another might repress and dissociate the trauma, welcoming the aggressor and actually experiencing a consciously joyous loyalty and optimism while unconsciously

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

107

humiliated and seething with malice. Did Holocaust survivors react with the same fantasies and behaviors as the Japanese? 4 A sociologically sophisticated person might be able to identify cultural patterns that follow historical events, and an avid reader may certainly perceive patterns that appear in the fiction of the era. So the question for us is, Do Mishima's psychosexual fantasies resemble those of other authors enough to argue that the common denominator is social, culturally indigenous to its era, and specifically related to historical circumstances? I would argue that it would be inconceivable for the events following the Meiji restoration and culminating with the defeat of Japan not to have had a dramatic effect on its populace. However, what we are dealing with here is not only the impact of these events on the emotional life of a people but also the way they subsequently interacted with one another, how they enacted their trauma on their own neighbors and on their own children, how parents unconsciously transmitted their feelings of rage and humiliation to children who grew up experiencing the jarred emotions of their parents in ways the parents could not understand. For the generational transmission of trauma and chaotic emotions impacts severely on children, as can be seen vividly in studies on Holocaust survivors and the progeny of those surviving the Turkish genocide of the Armenians (Adelman, 1995; Barocas & Barocas, 1979; Breiner, 2001; Hesse & Main, 1999; Kalayjian & Weisberg, 2002; Lifton, 1967).5 Beyond the claim that history may so shock individuals into sexual perversion, as Napier seems to, we can state that history may so influence the parents, for example, to unconsciously inflict their anger, shame, helplessness, and sense of defeat on a child by demanding success and strength from the child, refusing to put up with his failures or emotional sensitivities, punishing the child to feel a sense of mastery and control, inculcating dependence from the child, smothering the child to counteract one's fears of loss following war, defeat, and death. Social modes of relating to children can be dramatically altered, and if we find an individual manifesting certain unusual behaviors or fantasies, we can expect the person to be molded as an adult not only from a burgeoning awareness of history but also from the new ways he or she was treated by others from infancy (cf. Arlow, 1987; Russell, 1993; Tatara, 1982). Mishima may have been 20 when the war ended, but he was born in tumultuous times, when his family had gone through severe social change and their own dramas, themselves born in a vastly different society. And they were also more than simply clones of their society. Not every father trains his child in a Spartan manner by rejecting him, neglecting him, and holding him before passing trains. Not every grandmother forces the child to live in the dark away from his parents, screaming at night amid her sicknesses. And though other writers may have some very erotic and per-

108

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

verse fantasies (some far weirder than Mishima's), one simply cannot say that the social or literary pattern was the rape and murder of boys, arousal by death and excrement, incessant, repetitive fantasies of revenge against women and beauty.6 Even their similarities can be distinguished. Dazai and Mishima both contemplated and committed suicide. Despite Mishima's wish to be different, they may have suffered some similar agonies or wished for similar things (possibly). But their suicides were in fact vastly different, as were their reactions to life, sex, and death. It is deeply significant that Dazai and Mishima may have shared masochistic wishes to punish and absolve the self through death, but it is also critical to recognize the difference between exhibitionistic squalor as a weapon for disgusting others and obsessive cleanliness whose pride would revile such wallowing crapulence. Kawabata also committed suicide, but it is entirely significant that he did so in old age, while agedness was utter anathema to Mishima. 7 Oe also wrote of perverse onanistic excess, but is it not significant that the subway ejaculator in "Homo Sexualis" (1963) differs so dramatically from the isolated boy on the beach in Mishima's Confessions who masturbates to thoughts of boys and murder? Obviously, bizarre and flagrant sexual excesses cannot be conflated, nor even fantasies regarding death. A pertinent example is Mishima's fear of death: an anxiety of apocalyptic devastation pervades the writings of many postwar authors, yet Mishima was beset by annihilation anxieties far before Japan entered the war. And his writings continually evidence the desire for apocalyptic destruction, as so many disparate characters wish for the obliteration of Tokyo and Kyoto. In his diary Mishima writes that catastrophe is what he adored above all else (March 16, 1959, in Nathan, 1974, p. 157). Mishima jocularly describes the horrendous fires that killed hundreds of thousands of Tokyo civilians "the most beautiful fireworks display I have ever seen" (Stokes, 1974, p. 4). Mishima said that the death of his sister Mitsuko from typhoid in October 1945 affected him far more than the surrender. He disclosed how Japan's defeat was not a matter of particular regret for him, whereas his sister Mitsuko's death a few months later was far more sorrowful. "I loved my sister. I loved her to an inexplicable degree" (Nathan, 1974, p. 78). The atomic aftermath must have had a traumatic influence on Mishima, but one must consider his unique anxieties and fantasies that preceded the war and recognize how these were exacerbated but not engendered by atomic destruction. Mishima may have had some things in common with writers of his time, yet his erotic images were not shared by his contemporaries. This book is trying to deconstruct the anomalous character of Mishima's eroticism. For, as I have been arguing, Mishima's fantasies are erotic repetitions of specific childhood conflict and trauma, and none of this can be equated with social and historical influences on his generation—else they

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

109

too would be dreaming incessantly of homoerotic murder theater and vengeance. It should be obvious that Mishima's writing and what genius he may have cannot be considered a social clone of the literary Zeitgeist. Neither can Mishima's homoeroticism be considered an elegant revival of tales past, as authors like Saikaku hardly wrote with such frenetic obsession about sexualized disembowelment and vengeance against beauty or rejecting lovers. (Saikaku had a sense of humor and did not eroticize the evisceration or vengeance. 8 ) Mishima certainly demonstrated a palpable talent for evoking imagery from classical Japanese texts, conjuring beautifully subtle allusions to beloved lyrics of ages past, delicately scripting a language fading from his culture, but his transumption of these images, as Bloom (1982) might describe their recollection, most often invents an entirely solipsistic and sexually obsessive identity, which is not revival.9 I would argue two further points: first, that such phenomena as sexual sadism and misogyny, even if prevalent, are not caused by trauma such as war and defeat. Such historical events may exacerbate such proclivities or compel their eruption, especially when those events are internalized in terms of annihilation, emasculation, and weakness. 10 But this already presumes a preexisting psychological structure involving unresolved anger and derision toward women, a sadistic undercurrent, a reactive pattern that adheres to such forms of control and mastery in times of crisis. Misogyny does not appear reactus ex nihilo (out of nothing) in times of stress. Even if one seeks to analyze the cultural proclivity, one must come to understand the psychodynamics and etiology of the hatred of women, its roots in infancy, the defenses and fantasies that engender women as symbols of weakness, impurity, toxicity, castration, betrayal, and so forth. Even if culturally inculcated through tradition, such ideas impress on children ideas of good and evil that retain sufficient cohesion only when serving as a suitable map for their own issues. Rather than simply tradition, we must look to patterns of development: how mothers treat their children; how much rage, love, trust, idealization, or devaluation follow patterns of nurturing or neglect; how fathers instill in children feelings of derision or admiration. These are not just things children learn and accept without question, facts about the universe, humdrum pieces of information that somehow make kids hate. Rather, education furrows deep impressions, often scarred into children through punishment, threat, and terror. The learning itself is fraught with anxiety, fear, the wish to please parents and avoid punishment and shame, the need to believe what they say so as to receive approval and feel protected by the faith that their parents are sources of benign guidance. The model of gentle education is a rarely realized ideal (anywhere, but certainly not even yet in Japan), whereas the pattern is punitive, invasive education that demands obedience in the face of humiliation and alienation. Not only is the education drilled in traumatically, orchestrating psychological

110

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

patterns of fear, avoidance, and defense, not to mention bottled anger. The consequences of refusing the education in question are not only social alienation, which is drastic enough, but the horrible conviction that one is rejecting one's parents. This means not only reprisal but the dreadful idea that the parents are not omniscient or benign. Beyond the threat of exile is the most terrifying idea that the truths that organize meaning in the universe and the protective, morally benevolent nature of the parents may be a sham. (If the parent is humiliating or derogating a child and telling him or her it is for their own good, the child is faced with identifying with that aggression and maintaining the fantasy that the parent is really trying the help the child or realizing the excruciating truth that the parent may be a malevolent person inflicting his or her own psychopathology on the child.) Most people, especially in a society where conformity and obedience are enforced, would be petrified by the thought of such taboo ideas (when people do reject ideology is another issue). Hence, belief is not only about blithe acceptance but also about the profoundly dreadful (social and emotional) consequences of independent thought and the psychological patterns established by such coercion that ready individuals to reenact the fantasies and conflicts internalized and generated by their experiences. Belief represents the psychological state, symbolizes the psyche, the wishes and conflicts that create the world. The reenactment is experienced consciously as moral and pleasurable, even when violent. Thus, when considering socially enduring ideation, such as misogynistic themes, the supreme virtue of unquestioning loyalty, or even something as unique as considering death a poetic occurrence akin to the falling of cherry blossoms, one must recognize how these images endure. The fantasies remain because they work for whoever maintains them, not just because they are taught. One should look for traditional patriarchal values and instances of misogyny to get a sense of the backdrop of an individual, but one must also look to the unique life and see how the specific events of life adapted, modified, or adhered to the cultural patterns or used them to gratify other needs. For instance, the idea of splitting women into ogresses and virgins is a pervasive pattern in Japanese culture, according to Ian Buruma (1984). But the psychological defense of splitting is a means of keeping violent and arousing or nurturing aspects of the feminine isolated from one another, and if this cultural pattern persists, it is because people relate to it, need it, rather than because they simply ingest everything they are told or exposed to. Some ideas and images fade or change. The intriguing question is why. Why, for instance, do images of many phallic-tentacled cephalopodal monsters raping adolescent helpless virginal girls appear so prominently in contemporary Japanese comics and animated films? Explaining this on the basis of tradition would be absurd, as though Hokusai's art print

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

111

"amorous octopus" ukiyoe (in Kinoe No Komatsu, 1814) could influence generations of boys to orgasm to images of cunnilingulating mollusks. How did tradition teach so many animators and their aroused viewers to identify with images of themselves as hideous, raping octopi? The question is why so many boys (and men) experience themselves as disgusting, ugly, inhuman, putrescent monsters who must violently rape young girls, defeating them by forcing orgasms on the hapless and terrified doe-eyed virginally pure children. One must ask what about the culture enables so many boys to resonate with these images, to be aroused by them, to identify with the image of the body as a horrific thing rather than as something beautiful; why sexuality is a revolting inhuman force of violence rather than tenderness, love, or mutuality; why femininity is a castrating witch or a helpless child; why the innocent girl is something to be defiled and violated; why orgasm is something forced on someone who resists and rejects it; why forced orgasm is experienced as conquest. But then, in recognizing a pattern of fantasy, one must not assume this is just what one has received from culture. One must ask why people resonate with this. What about the development of sexuality, intimacy, and body relatedness inculcates Kafkaesque feelings of self-revulsion or feelings of misogyny, fear of castrating witches, and the need to penetrate and defeat terrified girls? In each case the cultural is generated by individual experiences of maternal and paternal pressure, humiliation, and rage. These create the culture and are not merely the consequences of instruction. History does not make one orgasm at the thought of raping young girls—one must already be possessed by unresolved feelings of hatred, fear, and shame for this fantasy to generate any intensity and erotic allure. Nor does history teach one like Mishima to orgasm at the thought of raping and murdering boys. History could teach any number of lessons and revive any number of erotic or even spiritual values. One might attain symbolic immortality in the atomic aftermath by saying "the state may collapse but the mountains and rivers remain" (Lifton, 1979, p. 22). One might even view postwar literature (and film) as the confrontation with dehumanization and the will to recover the ability to love, as Nathan does (1974, p. 72). Japan responded to devastation not only with perversion but with a spectrum of responses, from psychotic fragmentation to the search for love and meaning. There is no doubt about the proliferation of violent and sexually perverse responses, but to assume these were the inevitable and sole outcome is both a misunderstanding of perversion and a disservice to the humanity of so many Japanese. Thus, rather than claiming that history provided an unavoidable impetus for the kind of perverse fantasies so prevalent in postwar Japanese literature, we might ask what psychological substratum already existed and erupted uniquely from the seismic trauma of historical events. For Japan was not necessarily a Utopian idyll before the Meiji and Taisho eras,

112

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

and one could ask not only what the impact of social upheaval and defeat was on Japan but also what psychological undercurrents impelled them toward 50 years of war and such unspeakably horrific atrocities as the rape of Nanking. One might see postwar perversion not only as a consequence but as a lurking stratum of psychopathology generated by other prewar influences. This does not mean that the Japanese were sadists but that there might have been enough familial and social instillation of obedience, humiliation, rage, and trauma to provoke a vigorous current of sadistic impulses and fantasies that might erupt under certain circumstances of threat, anomie, or opportunity. One must therefore ask what motivated Japan to war against China, Korea, and America, what compelled soldiers invading Nanking to stick spears in women's vaginas, kill babies, and force fathers to rape their daughters (Chang, 1997). One can argue that "inhumanity may be panhuman," as does Lionel Tiger (1996, p. 96), but one can also address both the developmental experiences that gave birth to the psychological strata of sadism or perversion as well as the events that impelled or enabled their eruption in specific groups and individuals (cf. Volkan, 1988). This leads to my second point: I would argue that Mishima was preoccupied with historical events not because they impacted on him, traumatized him, or in themselves evoked despair but because they were an ideal narrative that could enable him to enact his own unique conflicts and perversions in a culturally familiar way. He was obsessed with the emperor because he was so tortured by conflicts over paternal rage and neglect, because he so needed an omnipotent, omnibenign figure to worship and adore. He was obsessed with the failure of Japan because he felt so personally emasculated and betrayed. History could become a surrogate narrative that would draw attention away from his own weaknesses, shameful needs, derogating humiliations, and neurotic conflict and, by making it grandiose, historical, and martial, transform embarrassing psychopathology into the appearance of nobility. It was another mask, hiding the internal conflict from himself and making it appear far more virtuous. The political was symbolic for Mishima, just as it often is for so many individuals and nations (Robins & Post, 1997; Stein, 1994). If a culture required an emperor and mourned his humanization, we might even ask psychologically why they needed such a figure, for again not every culture requires the same kind of figure, to the same degree, with the same intensity. Another culture may relate to a feminine figure or elect an idiotic president. The specific character of the leader and his or her idealization/derogation do vary tremendously. These reflect the emotional needs of a people and are not always interchangeable (some may relate to a celibate leader, others to a dictator, an intellect, a sleaze, or an erotic figure, or no leader at all, of course). In Mishima's case, we find a person who ignored the emperor for most of his life and then be-

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

113

came a zealot idealizing Tenno and mourning his loss (the loss of a more Platonic, ideal emperor rather than Hirohito specifically) at a time when ordinary Japanese had trouble relating to such fervor.11 To say that Mishima was more sensitive or perceptive only begs the question of why he needed such a divine figure in the first place. Fervor and idealization tend to be proportional to the need to gratify a painful absence as well as protect the fantasized father from one's own negative feelings. In other words, Mishima divinized the emperor as a reflection of his desperate need for a powerful, godly, benign father. But he also divinized him in such an immortal, benign, omnipotent way so that he might be immune from his feelings of hatred toward the father who so shamed and injured him. He required a father divine enough not to be tarnished by his own rage, invulnerable enough not to be killed by his resentful malice, distant enough not to be infected and corrupted by the intense hostility that Mishima would feel toward a human father. Such a masculine deity was also needed to rescue him from femininity, from the agony of feeling weak and effeminized, sickly, and emasculated, and finally to strengthen him against the wish to merge with that same loathed feminine, having never resolved his need for a nurturing mother (cf. Greenson, 1968; Rheingold, 1964). This repeats the same dynamic and potential for disappointment exemplified in Sailor, where the cadre of enraged boys despise weak fathers, and to avoid that, the emperor must indeed be omnipotent, invulnerable, Platonic, and sequestered from reality. Mishima is not alone here. History is replete with the desperate need for protective fathers (and mothers), manifested in innumerable forms of worship, devotion, and submission. One of the enduring dynamics of history is the wish to submit to a divine, omnipotent symbol or leader to feel protected, loved, and guided (Becker, 1973; Bion, 1963; Fromm, 1973; Stein, 2002). Throughout history individuals have sacrificed their lives for their ideals, behaving not just according to the morals of their group but to satisfy the need for parental love, enacting the willingness to die and be reunited with the omnipotent absent parent, defeating the permanence and horror of death through transcendence and symbiosis. Paradoxically, one can wish for death to defeat the horror of death, as death can simultaneously be equated with a nurturing womb, cessation of pain, and reunion with parents, protecting one from the fear of decay, aloneness, and nonbeing (cf. Piven, 2004). These wishes are so fundamentally human, I would argue, that the difficult and essential task (so as not to reduce history to Oedipal phenomena or other formulae) is to discern the differences between disparate groups and societies who manifest these same wishes. For Americans, Japanese, and Germans alike may have found deep satisfaction in participating in a transcendent ideal, submitting to it, vanquishing enemies, and sacrific-

114

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

ing themselves in devotion to the symbolic parent who granted love and approval. But not all those who participated in World War II adhered to this fantasy, and not all would have identified with a genocidal dictator like Hitler or the kamikaze ethos (Nazis varied enormously in the degree of their devotion, and apparently many kamikaze were often well educated, philosophical, and less than enthusiastic about killing themselves, according to recent evidence; cf. Buruma, 2002; Gruen, 2002; OhnukiTierney, 2002; A. Wolfe, 1989). Someone as fanatic as Osama bin Laden manifests the intense need to die and be reunited with his father in Paradise (Stein, 2002), but Mishima is a far cry from a genocidal terrorist. So what value would there be in citing this dynamic at all if so many people fantasize about reuniting with parents through transcendence and submission but are as different as Nazis, terrorists, and unusual Japanese writers? My point is first of all to underscore worship and submission as psychological phenomena that may be deconstructed as a complex of wishes, reenactments, distortions, and displacements, not to take them as rational philosophies with no deeper meaning than their stated purpose. My argument is that their stated purpose is usually a fantasy that rationalizes the ethic and says very little about the genuine motivations. My second point is to situate Mishima in the context of a very human psychological wish as well as the influence of his culture, which does evidence the ethos of submission to authority, the nobility of sacrifice, and the historical trauma of experiencing the dissolution of one's culture by way of Western influence and humanization of the emperor. But the unique pattern of his needs derived from personal experience and cannot be sufficiently explained by the kind of analysis that sees him as yet another Japanese bemoaning the fate of his country and culture. Once one recognizes the erotic obsessions and unresolved conflicts of his life far before he became political, then one perceives the political and the perverse as unconscious recapitulation, reenactment, and fantasy. PHILOSOPHY AS FANTASY A N D U N C O N S C I O U S EROTIC REENACTMENT Amidst the assertion that one must interpret Mishima in the context of culture is the assumption that revival of a tradition means only restoring what has been lost. Peterson (1979) believes that "Mishima died according to Japanese tradition" (p. 207). Starrs (1994) notes how often westerners see Mishima as "a paragon of bushido, perhaps even as the last samurai.' His seppuku is naively accepted as 'in the best samurai tradition'" (p. 6). But Mishima's culture is not the world of the Hagakure, the eighteenthcentury philosophical treatise on samurai ethics, and this makes a critical difference.12 Reviving a tradition is different from being born into it. Imagine how strange it would be to revive a medieval knightly ethos of fealty

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

115

and combat, imploring citizens to once again rally their forces in loyalty and courtly honor. Imagine such a person practicing the joust every day or challenging someone to a duel. Perhaps a better example would be someone who deplores the decline and fall of the British Empire, demands we restore the king to power and become loyal vassals, and then hurls himself from the Tower of London. One would surely not interpret the person reviving one of these eras as though he were native to them. (I am not evaluating the merits of each ethos here.) The comparison is striking because it does seem absurd to revive such traditions seriously, but enough literary critics and readers seem to think that reviving samurai tradition is not absurd. As Starrs (1994) writes, "Although Mishima thus tried to flavour his political programme with Japanese tradition, to yoke to his cause the more aggressive aspects of Shinto, neo-Confucianism, ultranationalism, and the samurai tradition, this was equivalent to the Italian fascist's use of Roman mythology or the Nazi's use of Wagnerian legends" (p. 194). Several things must be noted about this revival: first of all, Mishima wished to resuscitate what accorded with his fantasy of samurai tradition and disregarded other tenets of the bushido ethic. It was not traditional for one who objected politically to use his own private cadre to commandeer a military installation and commit seppuku. The rite of seppuku was granted by a lord as an honorable death. Mishima was deeply influenced by the Hagakure and wrote his own introduction, titled Hagakure Nyumon, translated as The Way of the Samurai. Stokes (1974) asserts that "to read Hagakure is to 'read' Mishima's personality" (p. 265). But Mishima ignores, violates, or fails as much of the Hagakure as he admires. Although the Hagakure advises stepping straight into the foe and being slain as a way of confronting adversity or never flinching from combat (I: 55; 189; II: 27; IX: 55), Mishima hid inside a neighbor's house when a burglar invaded the premises (Nathan, 1974, p. 119). He may have wished to be a samurai, but he was a man terrified of strangers, afraid because he could not tell who was good or evil, childishly proud that he could finally take the subway in New York (Stokes, 1974, p. 119). If the Hagakure claims that "truth lies in no place but in this course of pursuit itself" (I: 59), Mishima would kill himself if he could not sustain his physical peak before the onset of old age. The Hagakure claims that it is better "to start coming into one's own gradually at the age of fifty" (I: 126).13 I doubt Mishima conformed much to the ethics of shudo (homosexual fidelity) in the Hagakure. The book advises samurai not to view the past with nostalgia or attempt to return the present to "the better one of a hundred years ago" (II: 18). Mishima may have enjoyed the fantasy of being a brave, loyal warrior, but his writings convey the opposite-—which is probably why the Hagakure was such a satisfying antidote. For instance, if the Hagakure advises retainers to slay the wife committing adultery (IX: 20), Mishima's novels

116

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

are filled with helpless voyeurs (in Forbidden Colors, Shunsuke flees when he watches his wife receive cunnilingus, even buying her lover a sport jacket). Mishima wishes for a bygone era, that he were the man in the Hagakure who never flinched at death. But Mishima's revival almost approximates Quixote's reviving Amadis of Gaul, as though dressing up in armor and dedicating oneself to the tradition made it so, whereas it could make one no more the idealized hero than dressing up as Cleopatra made one Queen of the Nile. Or, as Starrs (1994) declares, Mishima "was no more a 'true samurai' than he was a true traffic policeman or airforce pilot, in whose garb he also had himself photographed" (p. 7) It would seem like the play of Mishima's childhood, but he took the fantasy seriously enough to kill himself, and this is why I compared him to Quixote, a romantic and a pitiable man whose yearnings to be dramatically other than what he was led to disastrous consequences. 14 (If we believe his fantasies, then by analogy we are the naively misled Sancho Panzas, and my project is in a sense to mirror some of the madness a la Sampson Carasco.) I do not mean that Mishima was a buffoon, though writers like Buruma (1996) call him that, and if he was Quixotic, it was certainly a relevant commentary on his era. Cannot one argue that regardless of how inauthentic a samurai revival might be, its value lies precisely in its "postmodern debate on the place of culture in relation to technological modernization" (Tetsuo, 1989, pp. 16-17). The absurdity of the revival might just be a way of shocking people into recognizing how fragmented and alienated their culture had become. It might be a success as a "symbolic action" (Japan Interpreter 7(1], 1971, p. 73). Perhaps, but then one must first acknowledge how Mishima was not nobly resurrecting samurai ethics and that he was rather evoking a far more solipsistic (or Quixotic) vision, with sinister political implications. To say that Mishima revived the samurai spirit would be akin to claiming that Osama bin Laden represents Islam, whereas it would be more appropriate to say that he uses whichever elements conform to his own agenda, fantasies, and delusions. 15 Mishima's own erotic interpretation of Japan's martial past reflects this. Nothing in the Hagakure or other samurai or martial treatise speaks of sexualizing death or being consumed by vengeance against beauty. It is not within the samurai tradition to continually fantasize about raping and murdering boys. One must concur with Peterson (1979) that "Mishima's samurai-homosexual comparisons break down" amid his depictions of hedonic, mendacious perversion and predatory, putrescent sexuality (pp. 213-214). One can further ask, "Was the samurai's profoundly Buddhist and Confucian philosophy a fundamental aspect of Mishima's attitude toward seppuku?" (p. 256). Not in the least. Eroticization of entrails and gushing spasms is the focus of Mishima's literature, his many depictions of the glory of suicide. Aside from the Hagakure, Mishima rather makes use of a different ethic

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

117

and paradigm in his suicide. Mishima invokes his own parable of political protest in Runaway Horses, citing the 1876 rebellion of a group known as the League of Divine Wind, who planned political assassinations and later committed seppuku after a fierce struggle (cf. Morris, 1975). There were in fact numerous cases of violent protest, as in 1837, when former government bureaucrat Heihachiro Oshio immolated his house in Osaka to incite his followers to revolt, seize and destroy tax records, annex and redistribute the property of the wealthy merchants. As Jansen (2000) writes, "The evils of the Tokugawa rule were contrasted to the absolute purity of the sun goddess and her descendant, the emperor" (p. 223). The fires spread for two days, while the poor ransacked the homes and storehouses of the rich until bakufu (government) troops suppressed the rebellion. Oshio then stabbed himself to death. According to Jansen, this event "served as the climax to the Tokugawa tradition of protest" and became the paradigm followed by General Nogi, prewar military radicals, the student radicals of the 1960s, and of course Mishima (p. 223). The paradigm of absolute samurai obedience and contemplative philosophy is starkly contrasted with this second model of social protest and fanaticism, though the emperor is still paramount. One may debate the morality of committing destructive acts, such as setting fires, destroying records, stealing property, or assassinating politicians, but psychologically such behavior is very precarious. Under what conditions do people steal, destroy, and murder for a cause? Fanaticism may be morally defensible to some (here I will not attempt to judge Japanese history), but if Mishima sincerely identified with such a model, were are now dealing with sociopathic license for acts of terrorism.16 Mishima is quoted as saying, "W^hile one hates a tiny nihilist, one may accept a nihilist on the grand scale such as Hitler" (Stokes, 1974, p. 195). Yet Hitler was not heroic enough for Mishima, who was more sympathetic to Mussolini (Nathan, 1974, p. 252).17 Mishima can laud and sympathize with fascists who killed millions but never their victims, which only reflects how Mishima evidenced a conspicuous absence of sympathy or empathy for human life. He explicitly stated that killing is permissible as long as terrorists are selective in their choice of victims (Starrs, 1994, pp. 166-167). Assassination is also valid if its accomplishment is glorious. Mishima certainly approved of Yamaguchi, the young rightist who assassinated Inejiro Asanuma, chairman of the Socialist Party in 1960, then hanged himself (Nathan, 1974, pp. 183-184,188, 247). Mishima would even say that such murder would be committed out of love (Dawn, pp. 25-26), thus ennobling the act and placing it beyond judgment. "Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil" (Nietzsche, 1885, aphorism 153). And Mishima (1969b) writes, "There is a value higher than reverence for life" ("Tate No Kai," p. 77). Far from being a positive or noble quality, it says more psychologically

118

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

about a person that the rights and lives of others should be sacrificed for a "higher cause" whose sanction is not granted by anything other than the megalomaniac righteousness in the mind of the fanatic. The killing would be sanctioned in the name of the emperor (Starrs, 1994, p. 167) regardless of whether the living emperor might approve or not. As mentioned earlier, Mishima "did not hesitate to 'correct' the imperial will" when it suited him (p. 172). Though I earlier stated that Mishima was no Osama, he does betray an inkling of the kind of fanaticism manifested by antiabortionists and even political terrorists who use such sanctimonious and zealous language to justify murder in the name of their god (or emperor). 18 Despite historical precedent, this approaches psychosis, the megalomanaically grandiose delusion that one's acts of murder are divinely ordained. But of course Mishima killed only himself, and the fantasy of murdering politicians is not the reality of doing so. If he lacked the courage to murder, I suspect he also knew it would have been an immoral facade.19 Mishima's political philosophy has been described as virtually incoherent, a kind of nonsensical madness, if not ugly and dangerous (Nathan, 1974, p. 247). Consider his logic: the death of Japan has been caused by the West, and a revival of emperor worship shall return Japan to its glory. Mishima writes as though the West forced itself on Japan instead of acknowledging that Japan welcomed Western technology.20 He writes, for instance, of the "evils of the westernization which has permeated Japan" ("Yang Ming Thought as Revolutionary Philosophy," 1970d, p. 87). No one forced Japan to industrialize. No one forced Japan to imitate Western practices or fashions. This is mildly paranoid and is most certainly a displacement. In the novel / Am a Cat, Natsume Soseki (1905) parodies the Meiji obsession with Western-civilized pretenses when he shows us a ridiculous character who believes he is superior to others because he can blow his nose into his handkerchief with one hand. Japan may have committed cultural suicide by embracing Western values and technology, but why is Western culture considered an evil imposed from without? (One might more aptly claim that the warlike spirit lauded by Mishima, the decision to join Hitler in the pursuit of world domination, led to far worse destruction.) Mishima certainly enjoyed innumerable Western things: literature, philosophy, fashion, architecture. His house was an unusual amalgamation of flamboyant Western styles. He did not even try to attain Japanese aesthetics while utilizing certain technological necessities, as did Tanizaki when trying to construct a Japanese house with more efficient heating and a telephone, hidden in such a way so as not to interfere with the beauty and shadows. Mishima certainly enjoyed his aloha shirts and blue jeans, Grecian statues, steaks and omelets, the literature of Bataille and Wilde, espousing a very Nietzschean-sounding philosophy of nihilism, Apolli-

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

119

nian beauty, and Dionysian ecstasy (cf. Kyoko's House and The Temple of Dawn, pp. 103-107). As Peterson (1979) writes, "Mishima worshipped at the Greek temple while urging, right up to the moment of his seppuku, a revival of the Japanese spirit" (p. 255, see also pp. 205-207). So what did he find so abhorrent if he embraced so much of the Western influence he ostensibly despised? This is more disappointment in the sacrifice and suicide of his own culture than an argument against externally imposed destructiveness. Much of Mishima's vexation seems to derive from the humanization of the emperor and the defeat of Japan: "For in his divinity is the source of our imperishability.... Why did the emperor become a man!" ("The Voice of the Hero Spirits," Eirei No Koe, 1966; in Nathan, 1974, pp. 210-211). But what does it mean to wish the emperor were still in power? Mishima wishes for a symbol of Japanese strength and nobility, but can this be separated from politics? Mishima demonstrates the symbolic meaning of his politics most clearly in a passage from The Temple of Dawn: Japan was to be married, not to Hitler, but to the German forests; not to Mussolini, but to the Roman pantheon. It was a pact joining German, Roman, and Japanese mythology: a friendship among the beautiful, masculine, pagan gods of East and West. (p. 21) If we are to take this as Mishima's own voice, he is claiming allegiance to the romantic beauty of the German wilderness rather than the genocidal Nazi regime. One can certainly laud a poetic spirit without proclaiming political action. Here Mishima sounds like Nietzsche speaking of internal, psychological combat rather than actual violence, a martial warlike nature that can resonate with the hammer of the gods without even entertaining political action. "Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself" (Nietzsche, 1885, aphorism 76). Japan languished in an era where the life of the soul was ignored and annihilated. If Japan would attend to the life of the soul, forging people "unafraid of the death of the spirit, fearing only death of the body, then peace would reign and all would be well with the country" ("Yang Ming," p. 84).21 But the Japanese were not sitting around idly reading Nietzsche and Schiller. Japan allied itself with a real murderer who liquidated millions of actual people. Is Mishima claiming that Japan's alliance to Hitler was an incidental and superfluous thing that just happened to transpire while the Japanese were busy invigorating themselves with more sublime spiritual relations with the masculine pagan gods? Mishima's evasion of the historical reality of the Japanese alliance with Hitler is a preposterous rationalization. It is absurd to side with Hitler because one romanticizes German landscapes or to claim that Japan's participation in the war was a spiritual union with paganism rather than the vicious pursuit of conquest. Mishima avoids the fact that his martial philosophy and idealiza-

120

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

tion of the German spirit must collide with ethics and politics, and he somehow believes that alliance with Nazi Germany can be dissociated from the Holocaust and World War II. For by imploring Japan to return to emperor worship, Mishima is asking Japan to return to a state that warred against China, Russia, and the West since the 1890s, a regime that conquered Korea and murdered several hundred thousand civilians in Nanking (Chang, 1997) and sided with a psychotic genocidal maniac. If Mishima was speaking of "the Japan within" and an emotional transformation, if he was wedded to the beautiful pagan gods as he claimed, then Japan need not have warred against the world in alliance with Hitler. But it did. The center of Mishima's metaphysical world does not hold because there were physical consequences. Understood as the despair of a person watching his culture vanish, the symbol of national pride annihilated, his own need for a powerful leader decimated, Mishima's gestures are poignant protests. The "unadulterated national spirit was subordinated" (Dawn, p. 26). He earlier writes (1964) of being bereft of "an appropriate ideology or philosophy of life that enables us to live with a sense of spiritual satisfaction" ("An Ideology for an Age of Languid Peace," p. 79): We have seen postwar Japan stumble into a spiritual vacuum, preoccupied only with its economic prosperity, unmindful of its national foundations, losing its national spirit, seeking trivialities without looking to fundamentals, and falling into makeshift expediency and hypocrisy . . . We have had to stand idly by while the policies and the future of the nation were entrusted to foreign powers, while the humiliation of our defeat was merely evaded and not effaced, and while the traditions of Japan were being desecrated by the Japanese themselves. ("An Appeal," 1970, p. 74) Mishima bitterly complains of being sad, angry, furious, humiliated, castrated, plundered, defiled, and putrefied (p. 76)?2 These sentiments are echoed in My Friend Hitler: Postwar decadence had already shown its signs on the home front during the war. All those perversions of values after the war, cowards' pacifism, democracy far more putrid than an asshole. . . . Ah, what voluminous tears were shed by the corpses of the noble heroes of the battlefield, (p. 117) The voice here is the Fuhrer, but it is so thinly veiled, limning erotically the gentle violence of "young men whose cheeks still radiate, like the evening glow, the destruction they wreaked during the day," their "barbarous lyricism" (p. 121), contrasted resentfully with anemic "intellectuals too powerless to lift a gun," who "raise hysterical pacifist screams," castrated and teaching defeatism to our boys (pp. 121-122). Roehm replies

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

121

that after the revolution the country will revive, "rid of every shred of corruption and decrepit ugliness, resurrected and youthful, a country, a community of warriors" (p. 128).23 The pretense of avoiding the political implications of all these proclamations is speciously sophomoric and sociopathic, as though one could participate in world domination for spiritual reasons and ignore the incidental facts of genocide and massacre. And if we are to take Mishima seriously, we must believe that he preferred action to mere symbol, that an emperor standing as a powerless figurehead would not inspire the immense Yamato spirit and provide a sense of cultural integrity (since the emperor is still revered, he still exists; he is just politically impotent). Peterson (1979) writes that "to read Mishima's death as an example of fanatical nationalism is to distort an ethical and aesthetic statement into a political gesture" (p. 207). Tetsuo (1989) also emphasizes the "need to separate 'culture' from 'politics/ beginning with the Tenno symbol," since again Mishima saw the emperor as a "radical cultural symbol of creativity and the realization of potential in each individual" rather than a constitutional monarch engaged in law or bureaucratic regularity (p. 16). Mishima did describe the emperor as the source of miyabi (courtly elegance), from which all subsequent aesthetic values of refinement, beauty, and nobility emanated (Nathan, 1974, pp. 232-234). Yet Mishima (1970a) asserts that "the real Japan" exists nowhere else but in the self-defense forces ("An Appeal," p. 74). He writes (1969b) that the Japanese "must revive the warlike spirit of the samurai and take action" ("Tate No Kai," p. 78). He lauded not just "aesthetic" but actual terrorism and "selective killing" (Starrs, 1994, p. 167). Mishima aligned himself with Oshio and political action, not merely spiritual revolution. Mishima saw Oshio as "hurling himself bodily against hypocrisy" and cried to the self-defense forces before he committed seppuku. "Is there no one who will die by hurling his body against the constitution which mutilated her?" ("An Appeal," p. 77). Mishima makes it clear that he is not merely speaking of a proud warrior spirit as a psychological or emotional stance. He advocates "an essential demoniacal element which is very difficult for the possessor of Apollonian reason to understand . . . giving oneself over to all-consuming action by experiencing what Heidegger calls a kind of selfless, ecstatic and rapturous vision of God" in the enactment of revolution ("Yang-Ming," p. 81). According to Mishima, purity required death: Was there any way to live honestly with Japan other than by rejecting everything, than by rejecting present-day Japan and the Japanese people? Was there no other way of loving than this most difficult one, in which ultimately one murdered and then committed suicide? (Dawn, p. 26)

122

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

How can this not have political ramifications? To protest the Constitution is to evade culpability for having participated in a genocidal ambition for world domination, as though this parchment were a sign of victimization, as though it were imposed unfairly against noble people. This is not to say that the westernization of Japan was a wonderful thing. The disappearance of spiritual, philosophical, poetic, and artistic depths, the mutilation of the landscape, the replacement of beauty and repose by factories and tenements, is tragic. Mishima's depiction of nearsighted, bespectacled, vacuous salary-man clones is vivid and disturbing. The ugly arrogant men flash gold teeth, and all wear glasses, speak with false modesty, gossip, and demure sycophantically (Dawn, pp. 82-83). It is difficult not to sympathize with his loathing, though this is an unfortunate dehumanization of many conscientious and benevolent Japanese. But who is to blame? Western civilization? The rewriting of the Japanese Constitution? Mishima (1970a) argues with a sense of narcissistic entitlement, that Japan has a "fundamental right to found an army" as though denying this right was persecution ("An Appeal," p. 75). Again, these phenomena were the result of Japanese choices: to embrace Western technologies, to side with Hitler in a world war. And the consequences of defeat were tragic (nowhere in any of this is admission of culpability or sympathy for the millions of victims of Japanese and German aggression or even for Japanese victims of the conquistadorial ambitions of their own government), but the alternative was to wish that the emperor had subjugated the West in alliance with Hitler. How exactly were the Japanese supposed to reject the Constitution without being political? Nathan (1974) observes how in "Patriotism" and One Day Too Late, Mishima represented terrorism as a "blissful" or "glorious" alternative to peace (p. 188, cf. p. 224).24 Mishima's protest is against emasculation and humiliation—words and images he evokes repeatedly—and there is very little alternative that can revive emperor worship and a martial state without approaching fascism. Democracy is a loathsome Western imposition that has feminized Japan, though this emasculation began with the peaceful Tokugawa regime, which transformed men into dainties virtually indistinguishable from women (The Way of the Samurai, p. 18). A symbolic castration of the Japanese male occurred in 1876, when the Meiji government banned the wearing of swords, an emasculation repeated even more traumatically after the defeat of the Imperial Army and their ridiculous diminution to a "self-defense force." "With Japan once again a nation of swordsmen instead of Toyota salesmen, the Emperor and Imperial Army would naturally be restored to their rightful position" (Starrs, 1994, pp. 170-171). If Mishima's death had any value to others, it might be an impetus not to adopt so blindly the cultural command to conform like sheep to a mercantile society that educates people to be submissive drones who accept their robotic roles with nauseating obsequiousness, not to accept the ug-

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

123

liness around them without an aesthetic and spiritual appreciation for their past. Mishima reviled the West but immersed himself in it. His protest was against his own identification with Western superiority when comparing it to what Japan had become. He was angry at his own culture, having seen it through the imagined eyes of the ethnocentric foreigner. When Natsume Soseki was in England, he saw a diminutive, ugly, clownish figure walking toward him and then realized it was his own reflection (cf. Keene, 1984, p. 311). Soseki had so admired and identified with the West that he came to revile his own culture unconsciously, conceiving himself as a little brown clown. I believe this parable applies to Mishima as well, identifying with certain Western ideals and feeling embarrassed about the inferior drones of his own culture. It is not that any culture is superior or inferior but that one has adopted its values and now despises one's own culture by comparison, which is humiliating and feels like a betrayal. Mishima saw the intelligentsia as closeting their own culture amidst the idiotic fervor of westernization, seeing their own things as "unenlightened," "loathsome," "disgraceful," and "contemptible things we don't want foreigners to see" ("Yang-Ming," p. 81). In effect, Mishima was imploring the Japanese not to be such embarrassing drones, not to be so emasculated, not to be sycophantic, and not to like it so much. The political was a reenactment of his own need to escape being a rejected, humiliated weakling, emotionally impotent, in need of admiration and epiphany, with grandiose fantasies of vengeance. And was he not punishing himself for being that same weak and submissive Japanese, despising himself both by seeing the Japanese through the eyes of others and for having adopted the West and betraying his own culture? MYTHOLOGIES A N D PATHOLOGIES Mishima's seppuku was mad and erotically perverse—but cannot one see his death as mirroring not only his psychopathology but a society perceived to be ludicrous? Before one is misled into assuming that I am arguing for the validity of Mishima's political philosophy, as though he was stricken by the decline and fall of a noble people, let me be clear: his concern with society was largely solipsistic, judgmental, and not empathic to human suffering in any way that can be gleaned from what he said or wrote. Mishima despised emasculated salary-men, but would he really have felt in his element with brazen samurai? I want to pause for a moment to dissect certain components of Mishima's fantasy that might be passionately desired but insufferable should such wishes come true. Mishima seemed to thrive on military exercise and training and wrote nostalgically of the ecstasy of losing oneself in the group euphoria of the

124

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

festival. In Confessions, Mishima writes of the intoxication and frenzy of the festival as well as his exclusion from it. Years later Mishima actually participated in such a festival, beneath the portable shrine, and finally experienced rapturous joy. This also may have more complex psychological significance than is apparent. Obviously, a child forced to be an excluded outsider, whose desire for play and companionship was severely thwarted, might fervently desire liberation from those constraints. Such euphoria can be an intense experience of being alive and eradicating inhibitions and boundaries. Mishima even seemed to find this thriving, undulating, sweaty, masculine swarm erotically alluring (Thirst for Love), if not a primal experience of power and destruction (Confessions; Steel). But the group also enables individuals to regress psychologically to a state where individual thought and conscience are dissipated, where anonymity in the swarm can enable liberation from shame, guilt, and conscience. More than just momentarily forgetting oneself in the moment or joy, this has sinister implications. Groups are capable of incredible violence because the moral and psychological structures restraining illicit behavior are dissipated. Mishima certainly articulates this potential in his depiction of the festival as destructive, evoking the ecstatic murder of Pentheus in the form of a lion in Euripides' Bacchae. The threat of blame and culpability is diminished by this anonymity, but the same person who might genuinely feel repugnance or remorse for violence might actually thrive on it when the group regresses him or her to a state of virtual ambulatory psychosis—judgment really is impaired drastically. In eradicating emotional boundaries the group provides a feeling of intense merger and indeed is sought for this purpose. Conformity is a dilute euphemism for the tendency toward losing one's individuality and shame via psychological regression to a desired feeling of merger with others, where an infantile condition of symbiotic bliss is sought. Both separateness and its requirements for thinking and choosing under threat of shame and humiliation, as well as the compulsive sacrifice of autonomy and erotic freedom, can indeed be strenuous burdens one wishes to dismantle in the wish to be reunited with mother in infancy. This may seem bizarre, but group ecstasy can be the fantasy of losing oneself and one's rational, moral ego—the group can be a conduit for regression to infantile nonthought and symbiotic pleasure and security (Bion, 1963; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1975; Freud, 1921).2R In essence, then, I would argue that Mishima desired symbiotic bliss so fervently because there never had been any and desired regressive merger through the group, an experience of oblivion (even suffusing his wish to die, symbolic of the wish for regression, reunion, and cessation of suffering), whereas the ecstatic aggression supplied by the group was the conduit through which Mishima could destroy suffocating ego boundaries and not only participate joyfully in life with others but vent the copious

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

125

rage accrued from having been infantilized and stifled so coercively. Thus, the ecstasy and power of the group appeals to Mishima for these reasons and drives his valorization of being a samurai in an army of powerful obedient men who might die a beautiful death in the ecstatic passion of battle. But this does not mean the reality of such a fantasy would provide the kind of ecstatic merger or license he desired. I would even suggest that Mishima would be deeply intimidated by real samurai, that salary-men who became powerfully masculine would terrify Mishima and threaten his uniqueness (cf. Girard, 1978). I suspect he enjoyed his Nietzschean contempt and found an emasculated culture an ideal repository for hated feelings toward his own weak and emasculated self. Denouncing them was denouncing himself and fantasizing noble, devoted superiority, as though his posture could preserve the illusion that he was not as pitiful. Berating a populace devoid of (his measure of) loyalty for the emperor is a brilliant projective strategy to avoid consciously confronting one's own torrential hatred toward that emperor who could not satisfy the need for love and apotheosis. Then one can truly revile society, as though the burden of rescue were on them. This is why I argued that Mishima blamed others for his own betrayal of his culture. In essence Mishima could not have withstood an emperor demanding obedience, sending him off to war, requiring self-sacrifice— for Mishima despised his real father (all fathers) and refused to comply with the authoritarian who imposed himself so coercively. Does one believe that Mishima would so joyously give up his life of luxury, exotic banquets, clownish, flamboyant behavior, and ploys for attention if he could devote himself utterly to the emperor in such a manner delineated in the Hagakure? Would this somehow miraculously resolve his rage toward fathers or emotional injuries? Would not such devotion in and of itself signify the enactment of the psychological problem rather than its resolution? How would a person abused and derogated by fathers, who loathed them passionately, be cured by absolute subservience? One cannot believe that the fantasy would be gratifying in actuality or imagine it would be transcendence of the psychological problem rather than a pathological reenactment. Indeed it would be a conduit to disguise and enact other fantasies of deeper psychological significance. As Nathan (1974) says, there is nothing in Sun and Steel about politics or the emperor, not the minutest intimation of patriotism (pp. 237, 240). These were only the mask worn to disguise his erotic fantasies and complexes, his obsession with magically transcending death and decay through murdering the mortal body Mishima envisioned an erotic death before he was ever interested in the emperor, and he continually replayed his fantasies in his fiction. Mishima rather wanted a fantastic alternative to the real, imagining blissful obedience and

126

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

eternal devotion, and in wishing this could vilify society for not providing his fantasy. Paradoxically, one can simultaneously berate an emasculated people, rejoice in berating them, and yet be angered that they are too emasculated to support one's fantasy. Starrs (1994) makes the claim that Mishima's nihilism did not contradict his patriotism since both are essentially manifestations of his wish to eradicate his contemporary culture. Starrs asks whether a nihilism born of personal suffering must necessarily precede the emergence of philosophical nihilism (pp. 90-93). I would suggest that philosophical nihilism is a displacement of personal rage demanding annihilation but I also want to emphasize the psychological function of nihilism beyond simply obliterating what one abhors. 26 It not only displaces archaic rage but enables the hated target to contain negative qualities in oneself, all those despised, embarrassing, shameful qualities that were likely derogated and mirrored by others. One now achieves gratification in evacuation and the fantasy of mastery, which is why the nihilistic rage needs the despised target so badly and would have it no other way. If Mishima could not manifest Nietzsche's amor fati (love of fate) consciously in protesting such a despicable society, nothing satisfied him more than the despicable society on whom he could replay archaic conflicts in the fantasy of having a nobler destiny beyond such contemptible traitors (cf. Asch, 1980; Kernberg, 1992, p. 23). So how exactly could Mishima's society simultaneously satisfy his nihilistic rage as well as thwart his loyalistic fantasies? Despite how ludicrous Mishima's politics and suicide may seem to so many, there are legitimate psychological questions here: how could the Japanese embrace defeat so easily? One must ask with John Dower (1999) how people who suffered so much could not be stricken down by misery and despair, how they could embrace the West so easily and work tirelessly in the wake of defeat, cultural decay, the loss of their god and glory 1 low could they welcome servitude and occupation so happily? How could they transform from a nation of loyal and proud people into such obedient people willing to forgo independence for a robotic existence? (cf. Koesller, 1960). For Mishima it must have been unbelievable to watch what used to be a samurai culture so easily become a nation of sycophantic salary-men. Mad though Mishima was, I am also struck by how mad postwar normality is, how insane ordinary happiness can be under certain circumstances (cf. Becker, 1973; Gruen, 1987; Leifer, 1997). While this hardly describes the sum reality of Japan, it still has not been sufficiently answered how a culture could embrace the West so fervently after the war—for misery, humiliation, and rage do not simply disappear. Many Jews have not forgiven the Nazis and resent contemporary Germans as inherently anti-Semitic offspring. Many Chinese and Koreans still resent Japan. Armenians still wait for Turkish acknowledgment of geno-

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

127

cide. Resentment and hatred are expected—happy acceptance and even idealization of the conquering country are the peculiar symptoms. One does not expect a country defeated, mutilated by atomic devastation, its emperor vanquished, its laws imposed from the invading armies, to suddenly love its enemy. This is not only tatemae (appearance or posture). The Japanese idealization of America is no stereotype, even today. (I have found myself trying to convince Japanese friends and acquaintances for about two decades that despite their convictions, not all Americans are beautiful, not everything American is wonderful.) One must see idealization as a symptom and not imagine the love of America as the whole story. Rage and hatred must linger, even if some people are not conscious of them. These feelings do go underground, and thus one must also ask how these are manifested, how such feelings escape, how these are masked under ordinary conditions, and how they are displaced and reenacted in socially "normal" or "abnormal" means. What misery, humiliation, and rage are repressed, what are inflicted within the cultural system but are perceived as normative, and what escapes in behavior considered criminal or aberrant? One might suggest that the culture inflicts shame and coercion as normality itself, that aberrant behaviors are only the symptom of how excruciating Japanese society is for so many people, not that ordinary society is in any way healthy. The need for an emperor may not disappear with his defeat, in fact the opposite, and one might interpret the cultural suppression of individuality and moral urgency to devote oneself obediently to the company/ society as expressions of the need to restore both sovereignty and an absolute ideal to guide and ensconce the alienated person. It is, as Fromm (1941) might say, an escape from freedom when liberty means anomie, the absence of ideals and a protective ideology or deity to which one can devote oneself. If Doi (1971) is correct, that the imperial family was the "spiritual center of society" (p. 59), that the Japanese were "'His Majesty's Children'" (p. 60), it seems ever likely that the need for dependence on a transcendent ideal remains an intense psychological need especially in the wake of devastation, defeat, and upheaval and that this need is displaced into unremitting devotion to surrogate ideologies as well as social coercion toward submission and conformity to such doctrines. For Mishima the emperor was the solitary font and guarantor of Japanese culture, and he is eerily prescient when he asserts that without the emperor, the Japanese people could have no ultimate "identification" (Nathan, 1974, pp. 232-233n). The rebellion of Japan's youth today is not merely the inevitable rejection of parental values, as though this were par for the course in any society. Perhaps Japanese youth cannot identify with parents they perceive as so defeated and miserable, resigned to an unhappy fate of working

128

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

absurd hours without time for their families, in cramped conditions, unable to express their feelings, frustration, and resentment against society and the companies to whom they are required to feel absolute devotion. Individualism, hedonism, outlandish rebelliousness, the yamamba imagery (girls who wear such lurid makeup they look like mountain witches), even the recent fashion of wearing bloody bandages, are symptomatic of having internalized parental misery and unremitting, humiliating, annihilating, unempathic parental coercion to succeed and sacrifice themselves. Such rebellion is not just childish hedonism but a symptom of the need to survive emotionally in the utter absence of parental norms with which they can identify proudly and healthily. Though it might seem childish, selfish, or absurd, rebellion is avoiding suffocation, despair, and all the postwar misery and rage parents consciously and unconsciously inflict on their children, even with the best of conscious intentions or in the names of love and necessity (cf. Friedman, 1968; Roland, 1988; Tatara, 1974, 1982; White, 1993). One can also recognize not only juvenile delinquency and acting out as symptomatic of these problems but the resurgence of newage religions and cults as well. Even as extreme a terrorist cult as Aum Shinrikyo (now called Aleph), bent on apocalyptic devastation as salvation, is symptomatic of the society and cannot be considered only an aberration or anomaly (just as American crime, religions, and cults are also symptoms; cf. Lifton, 1999; Murakami, 1998; Rosenman, 2001).77 This book is not a study of postwar malaise, nor am I am arguing that Mishima was merely a symptom of his society. On the contrary, I have lingered on postwar phenomena to argue that the society Mishima experienced as emasculated and ludicrous could not provide the myth he needed to live. His culture—perceived as having willingly submitted to aesthetic, cultural, and psychological degradation—could not sustain an individual in such dire need of an antidote to shame and weakness coerced so trenchantly, so excruciatingly in childhood. The samurai (and Grecian) fantasy was a mythic antidote for Mishima's ineradicable feelings of ugliness and shame. Among the complex motives for his suicide was a profound anguish that his society failed his needs for an illusion that might snatch him from abjection. As a displacement of the archaic need for love, mirroring, and protection, Mishima's world view itself was a symbolic immortality project, emotional rescue from the terrors of death, decay, disintegration into nothing, from weakness, insignificance, humiliating derogation, all those insults heaped on his final protagonist, too conscious of being worthless and inadequate for glory Mishima needed a fantasy of immortality, strength, and beauty and found embarrassment. Would he have been healthier had he acclimated to such insane normality? He might have been functionally pathological and far less interesting as a writer.

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

129

In the following three chapters, I engage in a psychological exploration of three of Mishima's most fascinating novels, which I believe emblematize the spectrum of his imagination, madness, and perversion. What is intriguing about these works is the recurrence of Mishima's obsessive theater, his conflicts and fantasies, his erotic deliria, the recapitulation of his psychological history, and yet each of these novels illumines a further corner of Mishima's soul. Each is gestated from Mishima's infancy, compulsively impregnates his labor with primal injury, malice, desire, and vengeance, and begets unexpected depths amid the repetition. In a sense each is the return to the primal scene of an erotic crime, a traumatic reliving, and a fantasy of violent rebirth.

NOTES 1. The Japanese word used to describe the ripping is "hikisaku," which in the context of the story has sexual connotations. The protagonist Kodama compares sex with adult women, who are separate genital objects to be fondled, to the young girl, who is a whole body that can sit on his lap. Hence she would be ripped to shreds in a specifically sexual act as Kodama rapes her to death. 2. This is not to say that Zen does not have its share of perversion and violence. One thinks of Keizan's preposthumous sacralization of his own bones as relics to be worshiped after he died (Faure, 1996). This is certainly the kind of literalism and even narcissistic grandiosity that might be considered very un-Zen, though Zen seems to abound in literal, magical, worshipful, and even sexist ideas and practices antithetical to the wisdom revealed in its diverse teachings. In fact, devotees of Zen have supported violence, as an article by Jalon (2003) in the New York Times demonstrates. During World War II, numerous practitioners and teachers of Zen influenced the military and "lent a religious purpose to invasions, colonization, and the former empire's destruction of '20 million precious lives/" It is important to recognize how this contradicts the Buddhistic teaching of compassion and nonviolence, which is why the Myoshin-ji, the headquarters temple of one of Japan's main Zen sects, offered an elaborate apology for such atrocities. Again,

Mishima's hero in Temple of the Golden Pavilion perverts Zen, and as the Myoshin-

ji apologists lament, destructive Zen is as fanatically perverse as militant Islamic terrorism. 3.1 have these impressions after having counseled victims and survivors in the months following September 11 as well as discussing these observations (abstractly) among colleagues and friends. Colleagues who have been therapeutically active in the Middle East and Mexico have also concurred that such sexual symptoms proliferate in times of social stress and upheaval. 4. In other words, are there culturally specific patterns of reacting to trauma, even if immense variation occurs? Or is it all random? 5. An adequate list of works on the intergenerational transmission is not possible here owing to the sheer abundance of research. I have included a few of these sources in the book's reference section. 6. After examining the history of events such as the rape of Nanking, one might

130

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

suspect that enduring patterns of misogynistic rage and the furious need to violate and humiliate women were psychological substrata of civilized life for many Japanese. While this may be worth exploring, even if one argues this to be the case, one must still ask why Mishima was so unique among writers to explore his fantasies of misogynistic vengeance so explicitly, for he was not in the martial milieu, where such unconscious fantasies could erupt under social influence and sanction. 7. There is of course the possibility that Kawabata's suicide was unintentional. Far-fetched as it may seem, this is the opinion of Donald Keene, who told his class at Columbia University that Kawabata's suicide was an accident and that he stuck his head in the oven because he was an insomniac in search of desperate measures. 1 agree with Dr. Anderer that this is unlikely but acknowledge the remote possibility. 8. One shouldn't claim that Mishima had no sense of humor. In life he enjoyed being a clown. According to Nathan (1974), Mishima "seized every opportunity to place himself in the most ludicrous light" (p. 171). He could even be seen barking like a dog on all fours at a party. And certain writings like My Triend Hitler (1968a) are extremely funny, for instance, the musical duet between Hitler and Roehm, after which the Fuhrer is given credit: "It was a sentimental song. Music and lyrics by Adolf Hitler" (p. 126). However, Mishima does not seem to be joking when he describes so many fantasies of vengeance and humiliation that constitute his works. 9. If Mishima's imagery is a transumption of a previous age, alluding to the images and poetry of the past, it reflects both his own sexual obsessions and an overly conscious or "conceited" evocation (cf. Bloom, 1982, pp. 74 75). 10. Mishima explicitly relates defeat to emasculation and humiliation in his writings and, as I will demonstrate shortly, also perceives Japan as having suffered feminization. 11. As Tetsuo (1989) explains, for Mishima, Tenno is "a radical cultural principle of creativity and the realization of potential in each individual" rather than "law, bureaucratic regularity, or ritualized, circumstantial pomp" or a constitutional monarchy (p. 16). Actually, Mishima was very disappointed in the real emperor and "did not hesitate to try to 'correct' the imperial will" when it suited him (Starrs, 1994, p. 172). 12. I am reminded of Borges's (1962) story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote/ in which an author living an identical life as Cervantes but in the twentieth century actually writes certain chapters of Don Quixote verbatim, exactly as the original, line for line, without plagiarizing. The very same words are clumsy in the original and astoundingly profound in the second version, replete with the enriching new technique of reading by way of "the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution" (p. 44). Some might support this in a postmodern era, but Borges's irony was comic. Perhaps this can serve as a provocative parable here. 13. While it is also the case that the most poetic and legendary metaphor for the death of the samurai is to fall like a cherry blossom "at the height of his strength and beauty, rather than to become an old soldier gradually fading away" (Keene, cited in japan Interpreter 7[1], 1971, p. 71), death after a failed coup d'etat does not

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

131

necessarily evoke such an image. My point here is that there may not be symmetry between Mishima's fantasy of samurai death and the actuality of his actions. 14. Mishima apparently referred to himself as "a kind of Don Quixote" (Lifton, 1979, p. 272). By implication, Mishima was aware not only of the romantic attempt to revive nobility but the foolish, self-defeating deliria of Quixote as well—he is the buffoon who gets his teeth knocked out repeatedly, who mistakes windmills for giants, a barber's basin for Mambrino's helmet, a flock of sheep for an army, a poison for a curative tincture (forcing him to vomit on Sancho and fall prey to gushing diarrhea), and finally returns to his dark chambers in defeat, misery, and stupor. 15. The words "spirit" and "spiritual" are used several times in this and the previous chapter. Such words may be problematic since Mishima was trying to invigorate the body, whereas some might see the spiritual as an attempt to transcend the body or emphasize that which is not physical (cf. Piven, 2002). Mishima was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, and one might justifiably interpret part of his philosophy as antispirituality, a rebellion against Socratic metaphysical alternatives to the body. Mishima echoes this when he claims that spirituality is a "grotesque outgrowth of Christianity" (Stokes, 1974, p. 107). However, even Nietzsche uses the word "spirit" in a less derogatory sense, writing, for instance, that "every profound spirit needs a mask" (section 40). Hence, the terms "spirit" and "spiritual" are used in this book to connote not antiphysical aspirations but rather invigorating emotions of being alive, of returning words and soul to flesh, a physical and even erotic spirituality. That being said, however, Mishima also wished for transcendence of the decaying body, and his pursuit of physical beauty was a fantasy of evading the reality of decay Mishima realized this illusion to be futile. And thus, finally, Mishima evidences transcendent antiphysical aspirations in his novels and poetry. 16. In case one disapproves of the use of the word "fanatic" here, consider how Mishima in fact lauded the "fanatic" (his word) devoted to ideals that transcend rationality (Nathan, 1974, p. 179). 17. Of course, Mishima did play the part of Hitler in one production of My Friend Hitler (p. 114). Given the parody of the play, amid some very Mishimanian adoration of beautiful boys, warfare, and revilement of postwar decadence, one must wonder how serious he was in his identification. Hitler definitely speaks with Mishima's voice when he speaks of postwar humiliation, when he dwells on the erotic beauty of sweat, bloodshed, and long lashes, but Hitler is also a buffoon. One might see Hitler as an alter ego for Mishima's homoerotics or fascism, one may rather see Hitler as parody, or one may even see the character as Mishima's self-caricaturing, potentially self-loathing alter ego. 18. Both divine justification and violence in the name of love are features of recent Islamic terrorism. The 19 hijackers of September 11, 2001, also followed a doctrine emphasizing the love one feels for God when enacting His will and that one will be blissfully united with Him in Paradise following death. The fantasy allows one to simultaneously sacrifice oneself for the parent from whom one needs love and approval, sacrifice others on whom rage and humiliation are evacuated and displaced, punish one's own impure and loathsome aspects, displace one's rage toward the disappointing real parent, reunite with the purified parent after death, and rationalize the entire pathological massacre as divinely sanctioned obe-

132

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

dience (cf. Juergensmeyer, 2000; Kobrin, 2002; Piven, 2002; Stein, 2002). Mishima was certainly not a terrorist, but he manifested analogous fantasies and used eerily similar language. 19. As 1 will continue to argue, Mishima seems to have believed terrorism and murder were justifiable, but the likelihood that this was a mask, that he did not truly believe what he said, is what distinguishes him from the kind of psychotic fully immersed in his or her delusions of divine sanction for murder. 20.1 say "as though" because Mishima is well aware that Japan chose to become westernized, no matter how much he pretends it is an imposition and contamination from without. 21. For Mishima "tension" and "an undercurrent of revolutionary desire" per vade society because Japan has ignored the life of the spirit in its era of postwar democracy ("Yang Ming," p. 84). Thus, paradoxically, nourishing the warlike spirit would dissipate revolutionary fervor and discontent, creating a peaceful land of proud warriors of action. They would not be declawed and helpless and thus would not need to strike out in anguish and frustration. While this Nietzschean interpretation seems psychologically astute, that spiritual nourishment tends to diminish the urge to strike out violently, it does not seem to apply to Japanese history, which was not especially peaceful in the prelapsarian era Mishima admires. For stolid peace another mode of nourishment may be necessary. Mishima is certainly correct when he connects postwar humiliation and anomie to the potential eruption of violence but by attributing this to spiritual neglect implores the government can do something about this. So one must then ask how the government (specifically) would nurture the spirit instead of only protecting the body. What are the implications of such an expectation? 22. This language refers to Japan's humiliation and misery, but clearly Mishima feels these emotions, as 1 have been arguing, for personal reasons. ('onsider Mishima's "determination of killing himself as a samurai with a sword should he have been humiliated" during the Tokyo University debates (Miwa, 1972, p. 15). 23. Critics tend to minimize the importance of this play, which is understandable because the writing is so parodical. But parody does not mean only rejection of an idea by way of farce and ridicule. The voices of this text, as I mentioned earlier, are so identical to Mishima's other literary and political ejaculations on the beauty of boys, sweat, blood, and death, so consonant with his vituperations of postwar decadence and fantasies of rebirth, that one cannot dismiss this element as farce, unless the message is that Mishima believes his own passionate urges are ridic ulous. 24. It should be mentioned that Mishima believed Japan was "forced to go to war" (Stokes, 1974, p. 67). Despite the fact that many Japanese believe the attack on Pearl Harbor was a "defensive measure" (p. 67), the Japanese government is extremely disinclined to make any admission of culpability for alliance with Hitler or any other act of aggression against the United States, Korea, or China. During his surrender broadcast in 1945, the emperor said, "We declared war on America and Britain out of Our sincere desire to ensure Japan's self preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from Our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or embark upon territorial aggrandizement" (p. 85). Perhaps Hirohito did not personally wish for imperial conquest, but Japan began its acts of sadistic aggrandizement in the 1890s, and his claim may be a way

Culture, Perversion, and Patriotism

133

of saving face, but it is an utterly absurd distortion of history. If Japan killed millions to preserve itself, then this is only a severely paranoid rationalization of military aggression and entirely superfluous massacre and torture. How were the rape of Nanking or the invasions of Formosa, Sakhalin, China, Manchuria, and Korea, the torture and subjugation of its people, acts of "stabilization"? Politicians still deny the rape of Nanking or minimize the number of people slaughtered while disdaining the complaints of those who demand admission of responsibility. Though one can always attribute the lack of culpability to ignorance, since the Ministry of Education largely forbids the teaching of certain aspects of history, I suspect that there is willful ignorance, denial, and rationalization because admission of guilt is too shameful and humiliating. It would be a critical blow to national pride, to many citizens' needs to feel superior. It would reify the narcissistic injury of national defeat. I might even suggest that this excruciating shame over defeat masks and denies admission of culpability. Mishima's own protest over having been emasculated and victimized by the Constitution may betray the shame not only of defeat but of being exposed as having sided with Hitler in an unjustifiable genocidal atrocity. 25. One might suggest that the "superego" is abandoned. I want to suggest that ego boundaries are dissolved, and while the "superego" is also dissolved, the group now forms its own inchoate ethos in conformity and seeks instruction from a leader—whom they also obey not just because it is law but because they desire to re-create the parent-child relationship of protection, where truth as a form of safety against confusion and the fear of unknowing is granted. But one must stress how people choose, invent, and fantasize their leaders, even if it seems like leaders only control or influence them. This dynamic is certainly a feature of Mishima's wish to dissolve emotional boundaries and submit to a leader he fashions in his own image (the real one is a disappointment). 26. This does not mean that nihilism refers only to the will to destruction. On the contrary, if one reads Nietzsche, nihilism is rather the eradication of sickening, psychologically and physiologically injurious ideas, values, practices, and institutions in the attempt to create healthier ones. It is an attempt to rescue us from the oppressive morality that aims at destroying the instincts that promote life. However, for purposes of this book, the focus is on nihilism as rage and hatred displaced, rationalized, and reenacted as philosophy. Mishima loves destruction but only sometimes envisions having an ethical purpose of resuscitating something nobler. Recall how Mishima writes of nihilism as commencing from giving his seed to woman (Stokes, 1974, p. I l l ) , another uncanny resonance with Mishima's fantasies of misogynistic vengeance. 27. An adequate list of works on catastrophic trauma and intergenerational transmission is not possible here owing to the sheer abundance of research. I have included a few of these sources in the book's reference section.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 5

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

When the evening glow reaches its zenith and the clouds blaze in a myriad colors and the sky exhibits an expression of mad delight, it signifies the full bloom of youth, that time from twenty to twenty-three. —Forbidden Colors, p. 192/138 Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki) refers to the ecstatic stratifications of homoeroticism. The Japanese word for color, jiki or shiki, connotes sexuality, and the word kin denotes precisely forbidden sexuality in this work. The novel expresses Mishima's repetitive and compulsive fantasies, but in this work he amplifies dimensions of these fantasies with intense, graphic, and prolix detail. Edward Seidensticker (1968) was wrong when he wrote that there is nothing new in Forbidden Colors. Here the contempt for and humiliation of women is abrasive, attenuated, prolonged, never sated. If Confessions of a Mask exposes us to scenes of autoerotic death and homosexual rape, Forbidden Colors divulges the secret life of homosexuals, the dark places they roam in search of intimacy, the mating rituals, the subtle signals and language of seduction and betrayal. Mishima sets out to describe the Tokyo homosexual underworld in graphic detail and consequently exposes readers not to an erotic paradise but a miserable, predatory world where voracious men use one another, abandon lovers for more beautiful exploits, manipulate and violate one another in a futile and desperate search for love that must always conclude in old, pitiable queers begging for attention exhibitionistically, excruciatingly and shamefully defying their agedness and misery before others. As Peterson (1979) points out, the original meaning of "color" "is 'the phenomenal world/

136

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

and the famous line 'all colors are empty' provides a mocking allusion to the theme of this novel" (p. 209). Forbidden Colors is the story of the aged and misogynistic Shunsuke, a novelist who employs a beautiful young man named Yuichi to inflict debasing revenge on women. Along the way Yuichi enters the homosexual underworld, arousing innumerable men with his physical perfection, seducing men and women, humiliating them and even his decrepit employer Shunsuke. In fact, this is a story of both incessant humiliation of others and the power one has over them by refusing to love or desire. Vengeance is achieved most sadistically by seducing others and refusing to requite their yearning for love. MISOGYNY A N D HUMILIATION Colors introduces us to the decrepit antagonist Shunsuke with many pages of free-associative misogyny—how much he despises women, how his wives have betrayed him, how he yearns for revenge. The novel opens with a perverse though ostensibly innocuous scene: Much to his delight, Yasuko had grown accustomed to nonchalantly alighting herself on Shunsuke's lap when he was resting in the rattan chair near the garden. (p. 9/3) What is so perverse about this? The very first words initiate a scenario where a woman is treated like a little girl prostituted to an aged man (actually, he is only five years past 60, but as we shall see, his decrepitude is described in some detail, and this reflects Mishima's sense that age is disgusting). An inverted pieta, a fully grown woman sits on the lap of a man who despises her. His joy is not purely physical, nor is it only the intense longing of age for youth, as we might see so disturbingly in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Any man might enjoy the fantasy of a woman sitting on his lap. Here, treating Yasuko like a child is an act of derogation. How do we know this? I am not insisting before the fact that any old man who enjoys young women must be perverse. But Mishima lets us know almost immediately just how much Shunsuke despises women, and hence this innocuous act takes on a demeaning significance: Contrary to the resplendent resignation that lingered in his writings, Shunsuke's life abounded with incessant loathing and envy. In the wake of three failed marriages and the dissolution of more than ten illicit liaisons the fact that this old writer, who was tormented by his stubborn hatred for women, never once embellished his works with such loathing was of an act of supreme humility of supreme pride.

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

137

For his readers, men and women alike, the female characters in many of his works were nauseatingly chaste. One inquisitive scholar of comparative literature likened his heroines to those otherworldly female personas found in the writings of Edgar A. Poe, whose flesh seemed to be carved from marble—namely, Ligeia, Bernice, Morella, and the Marchesa Aphrodite, (p. 16/8) Consider the comparison Mishima provides for us: of all the ethereal or pure heroines one could find in literature, he chooses Poe's heroines. He could have chosen any of Murasaki Shikibu's courtly women: Genji's mother Kiritsubo, Yugao, Murasaki—all beautiful, delicate, unfortunate— or a virtually infinite number of Western heroines idealized and purified from any aesthetic or moral blemish. Yet Mishima chose women who are not innately pure, for in Poe, the uncanny taint of death mars every heroine. They are ghostly, moribund, sickly, even if ostensibly pure and ethereal. They do not even resemble the unnerving ghostly beauty of the lifeless doll who contrasts the vulgarity of flesh in Tanizaki's classic Some Prefer Nettles. Poe's heroines are inherently wedded to death and decay, and Mishima is not accidentally hinting to us that Shunsuke's ideal and pure heroines are also uncanny precisely because the author despises women and must purify them from his own loathing. Mishima's brilliant insight (or confession) is that purity is an act of fantasy, splitting one's real disgust, loathing, rage, envy, and fear from the purified idealized image one can love. For as is obvious, women are human and thus traverse the spectrum of human talents and foibles, from the most stunning beauty and intelligence to the most repulsive ugliness and idiocy. (I assume I will not offend anyone if I suggest that women can be both more intelligent and creative and empathic than men and also as cruel and stupid as men, depending on the individual.) When one needs to force women into images of immaculate perfection, this implies the fear and resentment that women are not what one needed them to be. One may create a fictional character who is heroic and noble, but Shunsuke's consistent depiction of women as pure in the midst of detesting them is in fact a common process of splitting women in the wake of intolerable feelings. If a man can endure female sexuality, he does not need to split her into such infamously dichotomous characters as, for example, the animalistic, sexually voracious Lucy and the dignified, intellectual, asexual Mina in Dracula. A man who can endure women in their complexity may depict a sexual and intelligent woman without forcing her to be "masculine," phallic, castrating, pretentious, and so on. Shunsuke cannot, and thus Mishima has revealed a psychological insight about how women have been fantasized and violated for literally thousands of years. Idealizing and "purifying" woman implies that what she needs to be purified of is innately despicable. (It is not.) The intriguing question is whether Mishima himself is aware that this

138

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

is his own confession or whether he consciously believes he is depicting a person of his imagination but not his own misogyny. After all, one can depict misogyny without necessarily confessing. One can observe misogyny in others, for example, and I remind the reader that I am never assuming that characters must inherently confess the feelings of their authors. However, as I have been saying, Mishima's characters are so consistently misogynistic that it is difficult to see such compulsive repetition as mere fiction. But what is the origin of misogyny in Colors? Shunsuke despises women, we are told, because of his hideous wives. The first had been a thief, stealing various clothes, a camera, and so forth, even though Shunsuke was rich. His second had been mad (obsessive, paranoid, hysterical), fearing he would kill her in her sleep and burning the kimono of her husband's mistress on the Persian rug. The third wife was possessed by immense sexual needs and inflicted on Shunsuke every genus of husbandly agony (p. 9). Early one morning Shunsuke comes down the stairs, finding his wife sitting in the kitchen. The milkman arrives, and he fondles, kisses, and finally performs cunnilingus on her while Shunsuke watches secretly. Shunsuke is stricken dumb, incapable of vengeance, and retreats to the second floor of the house. Several things need to be said about this scene. 1 have previously stated that this seems like a primal scene fantasy, a theme I will return to periodically. Given how pervasive such images are in Mishima's fiction, it would be surprising if this is not some sort of traumatic and enraging memory from his childhood or even a maddening fantasy when imagining his parents without him. However, the text itself contains some intriguing elements worth noting. Shunsuke has never seen anything so pale as the nude body immersed in the gray dawn. The white embodiment of her figure is not standing but floating (p. 11). This unreal (or surreal) quality provides a Poe-etic feel to the event, intentionally I would imagine. But this effect is not evoked for the reader. Rather we are exposed to Shunsuke's perspective, that he experiences an event like this in an uncanny way, like Poe's Ligeia or Berenice or Morella. The wife is further rendered in an uncanny, ghostlike way: Shunsuke wondered what his wife could be looking at now, with gleaming eyes now clouding, with wide open eyes now half-closed . . . . Surely the intimate silence of the kitchen, like that of dormant barracks before the day's drills, harbored nothing for his wife. Yet those eyes distinctly saw something. . . . If they were aware of it, they never once tried to meet Shunsuke's perceiving eyes. Shunsuke shuddered when he thought, "Those eyes have been instructed from youth never to look at one's husband/' (p. 21/11) One might conclude that those eyes have in fact been taught to look past her husband, but Shunsuke shudders because she is in the throes of sexual

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

139

ecstasy and he does not exist. Shunsuke is a nonentity while his wife experiences orgasm. A tongue is inside her labia, but Shunsuke is absolutely helpless to make his presence known, to participate, to intervene, to enter her body or thoughts, and this is an absolute annihilation, a humiliating castration and impotence that he must experience in dissociated, surreal images because he is the nonentity in another world separated from his wife as through a dimensional barrier. Not being seen is an annihilation, a violence that renders one nonexistent (Dostoyevsky's Underground Man would wish to be slapped rather than ignored, just so that others would acknowledge his existence). Thus, however she was trained is not the issue. Shunsuke experiences her eyes as uncanny and disturbing, terrifying to such a degree that he must flee. It is surely no coincidence that Mishima once more evokes the image of the woman in the throes of orgasm staring into space, not seeing the witness. We are also exposed to this image in the opening scenes of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, where the adolescent protagonist voyeur must also helplessly witness his mother ravaged by pleasure, at first alone and later with her lover. This incident in Colors also resembles the primal scene in Temple of the Golden Pavilion not only because the protagonist must witness helplessly but because both humiliations and trauma render the witness dumb. Shunsuke loses his power of speech when he sees his wife receive cunnilingus, and I doubt Mizoguchi's stutter in Temple is an entirely different phenomenon. Mishima tells us that the stutter derives from having witnessed his mother copulating writh a man other than her husband, and thus Mishima seems to associate sexual betrayal with muteness, helplessness, impotence, and annihilation. Suffusing virtually all his fiction in one form or another, such primal scenes are far more than memories or fantasies; they become vehicles that justify hatred for those who have betrayed the voyeur. In Colors, the focus is not on Shunsuke's conscious sense of helplessness or on his own immorality but on the validation of his hatred of women. They are all mad or despicable, though he likely instigated their disintegration. Shunsuke writes in his French diary of his hatred for women immediately after retreating from witnessing his wife's transgression. In fact his diary is filled with curses against women, as are the diaries of decades past piled on his shelf (p. 12). Mishima interpolates a fragment from one of these diaries: Women are capable of producing nothing but children. Men are capable of begetting all manners of things besides children. Creation, reproduction, and propagation are all male abilities. Pregnancy is simply a part of child rearing. This is a truth long told. (Incidentally, Shunsuke did not have any children, partly out of principle.) A woman's jealousy is a jealousy of generative ability A woman who bears and

140

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

rears a boy tastes the sweet joy of revenge against creative ability. A woman who can keep creation at bay enjoys what she takes to be her raison d'etre. The cravings for luxury and consumption are destructive desires. In every aspect, the female instinct emerged as the winner. Once, capitalism was a male theory, a theory of production. And then female principles undermined it. Capitalism changed into a principle of extravagant consumption, and ultimately, thanks to this Helen, war broke out. In the distant future, communism will be overthrown by woman, too. Woman exists everywhere, and reigns supreme like the night. The baseness of her nature is almost sublime. She drags all forms of value down into the quagmire of compassion. She does not comprehend doctrine in the least; " istic" she can grasp, but not "—ism." It is not just doctrine that she does not understand; because she lacks originality, even the atmosphere is beyond her comprehension. What she does understand is smell; a woman smells in the manner of a pig. Perfume is something man invented from a need to school woman's sense of smell. Owing to this, man avoids being sniffed out by woman. The sexual allure of a woman, her flirtatious aptitude, and all her talents for sexual attraction are evidence of the fact that she is worthless. Useful things have no need for coquetries. What a loss it is that man must be charmed by woman. What shame it brings to man's spirituality A woman lacks spirit; she has only sensitivity. That which is sublime sentiment is an absurd contradiction; it is a flourishing tapeworm. The sublimity of motherhood that has developed, on occasion, to surprising degrees in truth has absolutely no relation to the spirit. It is nothing more than a biological phenomenon, with no essential difference from the self-sacrificing motherly affection seen in animals. It is necessary to acknowledge the distinctiveness of the spirit, because there are no other essential differences that separate man from other mammals, (pp. 22 23/12 13) This d i a r y entry w a s m a d e w h e n S h u n s u k e was 25 years old. T h u s , Mishima intimates that S h u n s u k e ' s hatred for w o m e n precedes his marriages. I n d e e d , d r a w i n g s in the diary suggest a far more archaic origin, for there are c r u d e illustrations of the vagina, coarsely marred by a canceling X. H e w a s "cursing the v a g i n a " (p. 13). C u r s i n g the vagina is far different from d i s p a r a g i n g unfaithful or despicable p e o p l e w h o m a y h a v e betrayed him. S h u n s u k e seems to h a v e cursed w o m e n from a far earlier age, a n d their vaginas specifically, w h i c h indicates hatred for the b o d y itself. O n e m u s t ask, instead of w h a t o n e m a y hate a b o u t a p e r s o n ' s behavior, w h y a p e r s o n despises a g e n d e r because of the genitalia. There are t w o a n s w e r s here (at least): o n e that implicates the character as represented by the author, explaining clues left by the author, a n d a n o t h e r that m a y explain the fantasy of the author. M i s h i m a ' s narration p r o v i d e s intriguing clues: S h u n s u k e specifically chose to m a r r y w o m e n w h o w e r e not spiritual since such w o m e n are m o n s t e r s a n d not really w o m e n (p. 14). This recapitulates the earlier idea that "spiritual" or intellectual w o m e n terrify a n d threaten certain m e n . S h u n s u k e deliberately chose w o m e n w h o were not spiritual despite the fact that such w o m e n repeatedly betrayed him. But that is exactly w h y h e

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

141

seems to have chosen them. The only women who could be unfaithful to Shunsuke were those who refused to comprehend his only strong, redeeming, beautiful attribute: his "soul" (p. 14). Paradoxically, or masochistically, Shunsuke monstrizes spiritual women but chooses women who are despicable and will betray him. In other words, both kinds are despicable, and he would rather have a woman who betrays him than a woman who can understand him. Shunsuke does not choose women who he believes are pure and loyal. So why would he want a woman he knows will betray him? This is fundamentally a masochistic trait, as intimated. There are those who choose to be betrayed to validate their anger and sense of injustice, of having been wronged and violated. Such people most often believe and claim that they were the victims and that they did not orchestrate their own demise in any way. This is a strategy that validates oneself, one's ideas, feelings, and moral purity, while indicting the evil qualities of others (Moses-Hrushovski, 1994). It both purifies the self and proves the other is evil. This is not only theory. Mishima is describing this to us. Remember, Shunsuke chooses to enter such situations and actually describes his own soul as "beautiful" even though the narrator seems to use the word "ugly" repeatedly when describing Shunsuke. The dichotomies could not be clearer, and Mishima is providing the reader with a brilliant example of the self-deceptiveness of human subjectivity. S C H I Z O I D A L WITHDRAWAL A N D C O N F E S S I O N Self-deception, or "automythologizing" may be fundamental to the human condition, as we all distort reality and our knowledge of ourselves to varying degrees (Abadi & Rogers, 1995; Gediman & Lieberman, 1996; Hartmann, 1964; Homans, 1979; Segal, 1985). Certainly Mishima invented and fantasized a masculine, confident, intrepid persona, alternating with a comic, relaxed, playful character in aloha shirts and Levi jeans (cf. Stokes, 1974). It is difficult to know to what degree he convinced himself that he was brave, noble, or even comic when he spent so much of his life performing these characters for others rather than expressing his real feelings openly. He evidenced a schizoid character parading a "false self" before others to avoid being truly known. The term "schizoid" is used here not in a reductive diagnostic sense but to underscore the intensity of the need to withdraw emotionally from intimate relationships because they are terrifying or painful (Laing, 1959). We all wear masks to some degree and present a social self before others (cf. Goffman, 1969). Character itself may be a facade to attain approval from others and disguise one's true feelings even from oneself. Obviously most people are wary of being criticized, laughed at, hated, rejected, and alienated. In certain families, groups, or communities, conformity is re-

142

t h e Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

quired to such a degree that one must conform coercively and disguise any iota of genuine feeling or individuality. I believe Japan is on the more coercive side of the spectrum of shame and conformism, where until recently (and still now in so many cases) the social self radically expunges unacceptable feelings in order to attain acceptance and solidarity. (This is not just a stereotype. Expressing feelings different from the group brings on intense shame and alienation, and even rebellion conforms to the peer group. Very seldom can people expose their emotions relaxedly, perpetually under the anxiety of being seen as shameful and strange.) This must be especially true of homosexuality as well (especially in Japan during the 1950s) when one is terrified of being rejected and condemned and must wear masks. Sunday is "pitiful" for a homosexual because one must pretend to do "normal" things happily, like going to the zoo, coffeehouse, or an amusement park with one's family. In the shining sky above, the eye of God perceives the sham, pierces the facades (p. 172). Later Mishima writes that homosexuals aren't embarrassed about immorality. "We are afraid of being laughed at" (p. 313). But the schizoid "false self" is a far more calculated strategy of avoiding being known because this is felt to be too engulfing, suffocating, impinging; one is too humiliated, embarrassed, ashamed to expose one's real feelings to others even when those feelings will not estrange others. Being known renders one excruciatingly exposed and vulnerable to the invasive influence of others. Imagine a person so horrified of being shamed, suffocated, or violated that he purposefully acts contrary to what he always thinks or feels, even in cases where conformity is not required. The idea of exposing a real feeling is so horrific that one adopts an utterly different attitude, not to conform to others but to hide the vulnerability. And this derives not only from having feelings the group or society condemns but from the most traumatic and excruciating infancy, where emotional survival was achieved only by adopting a strategy of blocking out the toxic, invasive, suffocating influence of others, their outrageous rage, smothering, or seductiveness, where the developmental process involves perennial and intensely hostile shaming and humiliating derogation of the child's and adolescent's feelings. Even among those with social selves, not all of us are terrified about expressing certain feelings or ideas. Not everyone withdraws from genuine emotions or reactions. Most of us, even those afraid of rejection, can still enjoy a conversation and "be ourselves" (even if that self is somewhat defensive and wary of rejection, even if that self is somewhat socially constructed). Most of us are not abjectly terrified of being found out and invaded by the knowledge and emotions of others, and most do not invent a persona explicitly false to escape the hounds of others' perceptions. What Mishima has done in his novels, and perhaps in his life as well, is embody characters who are far more calculating and manipulative in their schemes to fool others and wear masks than the

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

143

"typical" conformist. It is as though Shunsuke writes fiction with the obsession of deceiving others about his identity, penning years of aesthetic philosophies to falsify himself so that others will not perceive him, and eradicating his identity in the eyes of those who have humiliated him. There are those who become social selves, others who are malingerers and confidence men, still others who are Munchhausens or Ivolgins or Quixotes. So I raise the question: To what degree are Mishima personae, and the author himself, schizoidal on the spectrum of falsity? And to what degree are such people cognizant of their deceptiveness? Mishima was deeply aware of the process of wearing masks to deceive not only others but oneself as well. The belief that one understands oneself is one of the most crucial fantasies, a defense against not being in control, against experiencing feelings one does not wish to have or know, against being overwhelmed by illicit or humiliating desires, against being a pitiable incompetent fool. Shunsuke cannot admit he needs others, yearns for their love and admiration, is envious of beauty and youth, is humiliated by his envy and self-disgust, and thus he parades nonchalance to the world and deceives himself about his own feelings. He closely resembles again Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, who invites himself to a soiree and expresses haughty contempt when he arrives—too humiliated to admit he feels rejected, resentful, despised, inferior, and desirous of their esteem, he exhibits an air of superiority and disdain. And Shunsuke has no awareness (or is unwilling to acknowledge) that he is sinning far more than he is sinned against. He really does believe that women are evil, mendacious, worthless creatures rather than targets for his own feelings of ugliness and sexual rejection. He really believes his detestable soul is beautiful, such is his egotistic self-deceptiveness. Shunsuke may be an intellectual who believes he understands himself, but he is a manipulative, sadistic man whose victimization by women is a self-fulfilling prophesy he reenacts over and over. His repetition compulsion is indeed a reenactment, an attempt at mastery, a repeated orchestration of the process or betrayal where he can continue to find evidence that women are evil and despicable, though he cannot allow himself to know that he really initiated such betrayal (Binion, 1981; Stern, 1988). Were Shunsuke a real person, we might suspect that such hatred for the vagina, as illustrated in scribbles of vaginas with aggressive scratches over them, might derive from deep emotional injuries early in life. Scratches through a vagina are very primitive, nonintellectual, nonverbal expressions. But as we know, Shunsuke is a fictional character, and unless Mishima provides us with details about Shunsuke's infancy, we could only say why a person might hypothetically hate the vagina thus, and such extrapolation does not deepen our understanding of the text. (It is naive and pointless to discuss the hypothetical infancy of a fictional character.) However, if we ask why Mishima creates this character, we may rec-

144

Ihe Madness x\)d Perversion of Yukio Mishima

ognize this narrative and imagery as reflection of his own fantasy, precarious though this seems. Mishima may consciously believe that drawing an X through the vagina can be sufficiently explained by betrayal, but we have already noted that Shunsuke creates his own betrayal. We do not know why he despises women. But we do know why Mishima hates women and repeats his misogynistic imagery and violation compulsively throughout his work. We might therefore explain Shunsuke as both the fictional creation of an author with some fascinating insight into a moral masochist endlessly needing to prove women are evil as well as the fantasy of an author who slips into such hostile misogyny every novel and can hardly escape it even in characters who seem to diverge so far from himself physically and spiritually. Were this a theme treated in this novel alone or even intermittently, one would have to concede that we could not know why Mishima focused on this topic. Keene (1984) claims that this work is no confession (p. 1193). However, Mishima explicitly claims to dichotomize "the discrepancies and conflicts within myself, as represented by two T s ' " (Stokes, 1974, p. 102). And as vindictive misogyny appears with compulsive intensity in novel after novel, one might suspect that Shunsuke's private ruminations on the wickedness and worthlessness of women are Mishima's own voice. There is very little of the dialogical novel (cf. Bakhtin, 1929) when it comes to misogyny in Mishima- the voices vary only in timbre but converge in a misogynistic cacophony with very little counterpoint. Mishima actually stated that characters should speak with the "knowledge" of their creator, and despite his disparagement o( the self focused "I-novel," Mishima seems to have trouble disentangling his characters from his own voice (cf. Peterson, 1979, pp. 226-227, 286 287, 295, 299). I would suggest that this resonates with Mishima's fusion or confusion of his identity with the desired or observed sexual object. Ihe narrator of Confessions looks at Saint Sebastian and masturbates while imagining himself as the object. He later imagines himself as Omi during his autoerotic ejaculation into the foaming sea. As we shall see in Forbidden Colors, Shunsuke wishes to be the gorgeous figure of Yuichi, extricate his youth, merge with him, be the young beautiful Narcissus, and at times they are doppelgangers. In recurringly fantasizing himself as other, I believe Mishima not only has characters who speak with his voice but also seems to merge spontaneously with the identities of those others. In other words, not only are his characters often his own fantasies, expressing his wishes and aversions and conflicts. Mishima himself seems to have enacted this slippage. More than simply playing at being someone else, more than clowning, posturing, or imitating, he so easily seemed to slide into guises and alter identities, roles, and dramatis personae because he needed to be those people. For Mishima perhaps identity itself was an unstable center that could not hold, as he was so desperately wishing to merge with another,

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

145

absorb the essence of the other, and transform himself. Imitation, mimesis, identification and the need for absorption, and the need to escape the loathsome self seem to render identity susceptible to slippage into others. For there may actually be a core self, with unique and stable elements or characteristics (such as toxic introjects, derogatory self-representations, misogyny, the love of poetry, or a genius gift for language), but that does not mean a person feels stable or substantive. The perennial hunger for love, which Mishima describes in cannibalistic terms, reflects this need to consume, absorb, and ingest others (cf. Schafer, 1968, p. 21). There are those who adopt alternate personae to fill in a sense of being insubstantial, who have experienced severely traumatic conflicts over identification and need to adopt alternate identities to feel like they have one. These identities may vacillate according to encounters with those who seem to provide models of strength and superiority, who are admired and desired by others. Or such an identity may alternate depending on what persona one wishes to enact before others. Children imitate others and play at being their heroes. Adolescents usually experiment with such alternatives, gradually finding themselves and adjusting to what feels comfortable and natural. Others never do feel situated or comfortable in their own skins, remain feeling insubstantial, and must wear their identities, the trappings and suits of personality, gleaned from what they believe will substantiate them and help them transform into what they desire. 1 For Mishima the boundaries are not always clear, and indeed I would even suggest that it is the fear of merging with others, not being able to control fusing with them, being penetrated, engulfed, and annihilated by them, that even motivates Mishima and his characters to combat slippage with withdrawal and a very guarded emotional protectedness (for one may desperately need merger but dread it, especially when one is not in control of this tendency and may be tempted to merge with those one finds despicable, as we shall see). This may be a central component of the schizoidal tendency in Mishima. Thus, I am suggesting, though it may seem improbable, that Mishima's confusion of tongues reflects his tendency toward immersion in others. Is this not confession? Even masks that intend to disguise also reveal (even with unconscious desire) what they purport to conceal (Gould, 1981; Lacan, 1966). When the narrator writes that Shunsuke loathed the naked truth and made his works "sculptures of the raw flesh of its naked body" (p. 12), is this not the same idea Mishima expresses so often? His characters invariably despise reality and favor fiction over truth. They invariably prefer to sculpt the ugly world into their fictions. This quote further intimates the disgust for the flesh that Shunsuke feels for his own body, the way he is seen by others. It implicates his disgust for the flesh of

146

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

w o m e n a n d finally M i s h i m a ' s o w n need to sculpt his o w n weak, sickly flesh into a statuesque beauty. I w o u l d t h u s suggest that S h u n s u k e is Mishima's image of w h a t he m i g h t be like as an a g e d , petty, decrepit novelist: misogynistic, physically a n d spiritually despicable, a n d completely misinterpreted by readers a n d critics w h o mistake a p p e a r a n c e s for emotional d e p t h s . This is yet a n o t h e r m a s k , a n intimation that the a u t h o r is m i s u n d e r s t o o d utterly. A n d it seems to be M i s h i m a ' s i m a g e of w h a t he m i g h t become, the alter ego he despises, the m o s t disgusting i m a g e of himself, the most repulsive conclusion to his life: Shunsuke looked like a standing corpse searching for something. A color like corroded lead spread across Shunsuke's cheeks. His eyes lost their luster, and the whiteness of his too perfect false teeth, which protruded from his black lips, were strangely vivid, like the remaining white walls of some ruins, (p. 107/77) . . . this dead man grotesque in his ripened old age . . . (p. 108/78) The old writer, who had long since lost his creative powers, was himself embarrassed about this false enthusiasm. Although the impulse to create washed over him like the tides so many times these ten years, ultimately when he took his pen in hand it would not progress a single line. So he cursed this inspiration of his, which to him seemed like a dishonored check. Mis artistic impulse, which haunted his every action like an illness in his youth, now was nothing more than a hunger for a stillborn curiosity, (p. 147/106) M i s h i m a detested p r e t e n t i o u s intellectuals too shameless to hide their ugliness, strutting a m o n g others as t h o u g h superior to them, w h e n they w e r e repulsive, salacious, a n d despicable. Mishima refused to be such a paltry thing, such a tattered a g e d h u s k (cf. 1968a, p p . 70-71, 84). As the m o s t reviled future, S h u n s u k e m a y still be the alter ego w h o expresses M i s h i m a ' s experience of his o w n ugliness, a self portrait, his o w n Dorian G r a y articulating the self-hatred a n d m i s o g y n y he could not easily express w i t h o u t a mask. But w e are not finished with S h u n s u k e ' s misogyny, which discloses even m o r e intimate confessions of the a u t h o r ' s fantasy. After noting that h e w o u l d w e d only those w o m e n w h o were unspiritual a n d w h o w o u l d betray him, S h u n s u k e recalls the beautiful visage of his third wife, w h o d i e d three years a g o (p. 14). M o r e than free association, she is a n o t h e r u n c a n n y reminiscence, a n o t h e r ghost floating the way she d i d in the throes of orgasm. At 50, she a n d her lover half her age committed suicide: The dead bodies of the two lovers were washed ashore on Inubo point; the surging waves deposited their corpses upon a high crag, and getting them down was

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

147

especially toilsome. Fishermen fastened ropes about their waists, and carried them from rock to rock, upon which the roaring foamy waves spewed their white mist. Still yet, it was no easy task to separate the corpses. Their flesh had melted together, and their skin, which was like damp handmade Japanese paper, seemed to be one sheet. His wife's remains, which had been forcibly pried loose from the other, were, according to Shunsuke's wishes, sent to Tokyo for cremation.... (pp. 24-25/14) The imagery of rebirth from the ocean is suffused with vomit, semen, and death. Mishima has painted an image of the love suicide, which contaminates the idealized romanticized image of lovers dying together. The lovers are deposited, decaying, and unlike the poetic or tragic image from the playwright Chikamatsu, we have the fantasy that intimacy equals betrayal and death. As I suggested in an earlier chapter, this recapitulates the image of lovers engaging in illicit sexuality while excluding the imprisoned, helpless, resentful voyeur. For Mishima intimacy is death, both because his alienation and separation from love is so emotionally annihilating and because his own rage murders those who have betrayed him. Vengeance against unrequited love is the focus of his major novels, from Confessions of a Mask to The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, to Thirst for Love, to The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Whether the protagonist fantasizes murdering his love in "murder theater/' revenging himself on women and even a temple symbolic of beauty and the primal scene, killing one's love with a scythe, or enacting vengeance through sadistic voyeurism and poison, reprisal for betrayal is the incessant thematic compulsion in Mishima. In Colors not only do the characters die and decay disgustingly (the author's fantasy of revenge). Shunsuke seethes with resentment and seeks to humiliate all lovely women. Revenge for betrayal is depicted most grotesquely when Shunsuke attends his wife's funeral: Along the semitransparent hairline of her dreadfully swollen dead face, which was buried in lilies and pinks, the roots of her hair seemed to peer out in glistening shades of blue. Shunsuke gazed fearlessly at this extremely hideous face, whereupon he became aware of the wickedness it harbored. It would no longer trouble her husband, and since it was not necessary for that face to be beautiful, was it not proper that it had become ugly? He fitted his treasured Kawachi No mask of a young woman over the face of his dead wife. He pressed down hard until the drowned woman's face crushed beneath the mask like a rotten piece of fruit—this deed of Shusuke's would be revealed to no one, for in roughly an hour's time all traces of it would be consumed in flame, (p. 25/14) Vengeance is stratified in this narrative: while Shunsuke avenges betrayal by damaging her corpse, he also forces a benign, pure (though lifeless)

148

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

image on her face. She has been given one face, and he forces another on her, destroying the relic that has survived, obliterating the insidious one in revenge against the evil aspect of the feminine. This is revenge not only against his wife but against the feminine for not being idealized and pure, like his fictitious heroines. Splitting the image into pure and impure is both defense and vengeance. But another stratum is Mishima's fantasy. Is not this scene yet another repetition of his need to punish women through his decrepit antagonist? Mishima the author kills the unfaithful woman and through his character punishes and mutilates the corpse. Finally, as suggested, Mishima expresses intimacy as decay and death not only in vengeance but because love itself would annihilate him. Decomposing flesh is a symbol of Mishima's fear of love and intimacy, and, as suggested, this derives from an early life where merger was invasive, suffocating, nauseating, infuriating, infused with actual disease and decay, emotionally the most revolting annihilation. Intimacy murders and dissolves boundaries, the safety and separateness of his body, when his grandmother controls his diet, his behavior, his movement, and has infiltrating access that denies him any physical and emotional freedom. Under such circumstances, intimacy must be repulsive, gelatinous merger and death. Yearning for intimacy, fearing it terribly, despising it, and imagining love as physical jellied decay are not contradictions. In fact, the experience of invasive, annihilating intimacy spawns both images of vengeance and separateness as well as fantasies of merger (hoewald, 1980; Mahler, 1968; Stoller, 1975, p. 26). One may have been murdered by betrayal, by alienation, and by violation, but then one yearns for the bliss of merger one never did have and is angry that one never achieved this, the emotional sustenance that is benign maternal love. Thus, vengeance is not only for how one was murdered but for having not received what one was entitled to, which once again returns us to revenge against those who refused Mishima and his heroes love and intimacy. And like so many Mishima characters, Shunsuke is humiliated by the beauty of others, is filled with rage and envy that others possess beauty he does not, can seduce women in ways he can only observe maddeningly. Shunsuke has more rivals than fingers, and he despises their young arrogance and beauty (p. 15). This may seem like the pitiable consequence of old age, the envy of youth, but this recurring theme in Mishima requires no decrepitude for such wrath and envy. F.tsuko in Thirst for Love is no elder. Mizoguchi in Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a mere youth, but he envies so much he will destroy the beauty that mocks him—not only by way of vengeance against women who reject him or even in acts of violence against beautiful male rivals—but through destroying the Golden Temple in a quasi-paranoid delusion. He seems to truly believe that the eternity and beauty of this inanimate structure ridicule him. Not only age but an innate sense of ugliness and self-disgust inhabit his envy and rage.

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

149

Shunsuke once actually beat one of his rivals with a stick (rather than fleeing), but his wife threatened to leave him, and he actually apologized to her and bought the boy a suit. This minuscule, comic, absurd detail is significant—Shunsuke despises women, but he submits to them trembling like a little boy. The idea that a man would not only apologize to his wife when she had an affair but make remunerations to the lover is the act of a man despising himself for his needs, vengeful toward not only women but also himself for submitting and apologizing like a castrated fool (Gruen, 1987). He wishes he could be the kind of man who murders his wife and lover, but in fact he is the most helpless impotent coward, and he hates himself for his cowardice as much as he despises his wife and her rivals. When his wife's lover is killed fighting in North China, Shunsuke rejoices as though drunk with happiness, writing a long passage in his diary and then walking down the street like a man possessed. (Entering a crowd of well-wishers sending soldiers to the front, Shunsuke is so ecstatic he waves a flag, and a cameraman puts his picture in the newspapers—yet another instance where others misinterpret him.) But what explains Shunsuke's cowardice? Why does he not thrash the boy and divorce his wrife? It is not because he loves her. W7e know from everything he has said that he is incapable of love, despises women, reviles the vagina itself, and intentionally chooses women who betray him. I suggested earlier that this is a reenactment, and I believe this whole process can be best understood in its gestalt as a recurring and intentional (albeit unconscious) strategy that recapitulates a specific history. As Stoller (1975) says, a perversion reenacts a sexual trauma in order to master it. Here Shunsuke (and Mishima) repeatedly engage in an unchanging sequence of events: choice of lover, betrayal, and vengeance. Mishima seems to locate this pattern within the innate flaws of the characters: Shunsuke is ugly and always has been, while women are innately reprehensible. But Mishima's own reenactment is abandonment by mother, traumatic childhood humiliation by grandmother, and identification with her aggression, which becomes the repetitive fictional (fantasy) scenario throughout his work and then abandonment and humiliation by evil castrating women, voyeurism and envy, incessant fantasies of vengeance justified by the "fact" that women have betrayed him, and sadomasochistic recapitulation. In other words, such characters need to be abandoned and betrayed, and they choose such situations. Otherwise, they would be confronted with their own ugliness and cowardice but not have anyone to blame. The "sadomasochistic recapitulation" punishes the self via identification with the aggression of those who injured him—which means a part of him is gratified to punish the self perceived as disgusting (Yuichi's "soul" tramples and vilifies his body, p. 248), while also proving the others evil— using them as containers for his own despised psychological content,

150

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

projecting it into them. He really believes he is the ugly disgusting one but needs to disprove his own belief and murder those who reject and humiliate him. Thus, paradoxically, he will punish himself in order to prove them wicked but also enjoys the aggression of killing off that self they find loathsome. This must be kept in mind when considering Mishima's erotic pleasure in murdering tragic youths like the Rose Elf in Confessions or Kiyoaki in his final tetralogy, his masturbatory gratification in the death of Saint Sebastian, his decision to transcend his sickliness and ugliness by sculpting himself into an invulnerable and beautiful martial Adonis, as well as his suicide, which are all repetitions of this fantasy. Shunsuke's strategy then recapitulates violence against women—all displacements and surrogates of course. The opening scene of the novel where Yasuko sits on his lap is the first instance, and the entire novel is repetition of the attempt to humiliate others with very little realization and self-awareness on the part of the characters. They are such puppets of desire, reacting unconsciously and reflexively. In Girard's (1961) language, desire is so mimetic that characters cannot help but react with intense reflexive envy, rivalry, and yearning. 7 Even their manipulations and sneakiness are reflexive and predictable, following identical patterns they cannot resist. This novel is an intricate study of how people can be immensely calculating without any understanding whatsoever of their own emotions, much less a concern with anyone else. It is the supreme study of narcissistic self-involvement and solipsism. This novel could be a short story, and we must wonder why Mishima forced readers to endure the repetition so exhaustingly, especially since there is very little moral or psychological transformation (the characters may mirror and become one another, but nobody realizes the despair and pain to such a degree that they choose not to manipulate and humiliate others). I suspect that Mishima wished to illustrate the misogynistic revenge in some detail while further exposing readers to the miseries of the homosexual underworld in great detail, but still he dwells on such miseries without any realization (epiphany, enlightenment) in his characters that it is tempting to see the novel as his own wallowing in humiliation, revenge, and exhibitionism. Thus, reflexively, Shunsuke rides a bus to see Yasuko, all the while reminiscing on betrayal and his hatred for women. Mis rage compels his venture to the beach: "it was anger that had brought him this far" (we may even say in life, not just on this day). Approaching Yasuko, he trembles in anticipation of being wounded or in fierce desire of being hurt, seeking a climactic reception of lucid, unambiguous injury (p. 20). H O M O S E X U A L FANTASY A N D M I S O G Y N I S T I C VENGEANCE On the beach, however, Shunsuke espies Adonis in Mishima's own evocation of Death in Venice:

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

151

. . . a single ripple appeared out in the middle of the blue seawater, and a delicate mist, like the white crest of a wave, welled forth . . . a swimmer stood up in the middle of a breaking wave. Suddenly his body was washed out by a spray, and then appeared again as if nothing had happened. Kicking the water with his sturdy legs, he emerged from the sea. It was a startlingly beautiful youth. His flesh overflowed with a singular, irritatingly gentle beauty, surpassing that of the sculptures of Greece's classical age, like the bronze statue of Apollo fashioned by the hands of an artist of the Peloponnesus school—he possessed such a noble-standing neck, gently sloping shoulders, soft broad chest, elegantly rounded arms, an abruptly tapered and unblemished solid torso, and virile legs firm like a sword.... Alert, narrow eyebrows; deep, lamenting eyes; somewhat rich and unaffected lips—of such traits was his unique profile composed . . . they bestowed upon him an impression of a certain uncorrupted primitiveness, which knew of nothing save nobleness and hunger. This, together with his dark, expressionless gaze, his strong white teeth, the languid movement of his unconsciously swaying arms, and his vigorous carriage, exposed the true nature of this young, beautiful wolf. . . . the soft curve of his shoulders, the all too exposed purity of that chest, the elegance of those lips . . . a strangely inexpressible sweetness... . (pp. 33-34/ 20-21) And so on. Yuichi is yet another idealized self, in opposition to Mishima's entrenched conviction of his own ugliness. 3 Mishima dwells at length, almost onanistically, on this Apollonian beauty. Shunsuke despises young beautiful men, but he is entranced with his gorgeous mirror opposite, stalking him until the kouros enters a grove, finally to find Yasuko under the trees. Thus, this beautiful young man leads Shunsuke to the woman the old man was originally coming to see, and here we have yet another primal scene where the observer finds himself witness to his love object(s) united without him. Shunsuke feels envy and jealousy, but by this time he is more interested in the youth of such rare beauty (p. 22). What is new about this? Haven't we seen this before? The scenario presented here is significant for understanding Mishima's "homosexuality." For whatever explanations there might be for innumerable sexualities and eroticisms, Mishima's text reveals very consistent fantasy material, but we have a few more clues here. Though intimated in Confessions of a Mask, Shunsuke's desire for his young Adonis provides far more depth to understanding his eroticism. Beyond desiring masculine beauty for sadomasochistic theater, what is revealed here is fundamentally Mishima's poignant fear of death. I mentioned a few pages ago that agedness is not required for protagonists to envy beauty, and this is indeed the case because Mishima was the envious, sickly boy wishing to become beautiful, invulnerable, and desired by others. An ugly child may envy beauty and masculinity. In Colors, age offers an additional component because de-

152

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

crepitude is a further decent into ugliness and is representative of the most repugnant death. Observing beauty fills Mishima with envy and rage. In the fantasies of Confessions, he murders youth in erotic jealousy, penetrating from behind, forcibly entering his victim and taking youth inside him by eating his lover's heart, absorbing him. A similar absorption is intended in Colors, as Shunsuke desires the beauty and youth of Yuichi: He now felt that his heart was surely in love with this beautiful youth, (p. 193/ 139) Since meeting Yuichi, the work of his dreams had to be pervaded with a perfection cured of the chronic disease of perfectionism; he had to make it brim with a vigor of death cured of the disease of life—it had to be a complete recovery in every way: from youth and old age, from art and life, from years lived, from worldly wisdom, from madness. Through decay, he would attain victory over decay; through artistic death, victory over death; through perfection, victory over perfection—through Yuichi the old writer dreamed all of this. (p. 244/177) He wishes to punish Yuichi as well, reviling him amidst his own torture (p. 177). But this time he needs to exert manipulative control over Yuichi rather than sexual penetration. Shunsuke looks at Yuichi as no more than his "spiritual puppet" (p. 76). For Shunsuke is feeble and could not deceive himself into believing that Yuichi would desire him sexually. Psychologically, I believe this represents a schizoid withdrawal—in other words, Mishima is in a state where he is so disgusted with himself that he imagines himself as a dilapidated impotent aged man and, rather than simply murdering the objects of his desire, can barely muster the strength to appear before them in the shame of his ugliness. It is no accident that Mishima chooses ineffective aged voyeurs in several of his novels, including the final character of his final work. They are the nauseating elements of himself, the detestable future he wishes to deny. Mishima foresees a future that is pitiful, of repellent sinister men preying on youth, plotting revenge on the women who have betrayed him. Though the central plot of Colors is revenge against women, we must be aware that revenge against youth is a far uglier undercurrent. Mishima writes that all the hidden dreams of the ugly writer's younger life are concentered in the perfect youth. Shunsuke even castigated himself for such dreams, for even as he watches, the springtime of the intellect is the venom that withers youth (pp. 22-23). At the time of this novel, Mishima was still in his twenties, but he had resorted to intellectualization long ago and hence identifies with decrepitude and the loss of youth. Pitiable indeed for a youth to identify with decay and mourn the loss of his own life. It is the identification with a person spent of youth, poisoned and

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

153

enfeebled, whose words are mere masks that may seduce others but cannot spare oneself from a toxic ugliness, which is the schizoid withdrawal from intimacy. And thus in Colors, Mishima can observe beauty, invent it, desire it, and even manipulate it, but he is his own observer and, even while fantasizing himself in his Adonis, must depict a man incapable of love who also presents a schizoidal falsity before others. Consider Mishima's meditation on youth: .

Our days of adolescence torment us with a range of hopes and despairs, but we do not consider such suffering to be merely an agony particular to youth. Nevertheless, in his youth Shunsuke persisted to think that this was so. In all his concepts, ideas, and the so-called "literary youth" he did not permit anything everlasting, universal, general, disagreeable, vague, and, as it were, romantically immortal. In a way such foolish thinking was nothing more than an eccentric unprompted experiment. At the time his one true wish was that he would be lucky enough to be bestowed with the ability to regard his pain as youthfully absolute, legitimate suffering—and the ability to think of his happiness as consummate joy. In sum, he saw in this a force indispensable to mankind, (p. 36/23)4 This narrative simultaneously depicts a person removed from youthful aspiration, in an unusual hyperawareness of impermanence, because his own pain (his realization of despair and futility) eliminated his ability to fantasize future happiness. Consequently, he withdraws his enthusiasm for happiness and ennobles pain. His joy resides in the perfection of pain, as though attaining the consummate pain of youth rendered him superior to others. Twisted! This recalls the childhood fantasy in Confessions to be the beautiful male tragically stricken by death. It is a narcissistic inflation to believe perfection renders one 'Indispensable to mankind," as though one must exhibit oneself to others, that they must pay attention to see how important one is. This fantasy of tragic fate, a unique destiny of perfection, pervades so many Mishima novels (as we shall see) and is again a reaction to this very specific and incisive experience of insignificance, helplessness, and victimization, demonstrated previously when Shunsuke watched his wife receive cunnilingus from another man. Only a man (and boy) who experienced himself as a helpless, alienated, unseen voyeur would imagine himself and his pain indispensable to mankind. Fantasies of perfection immediately follow rage, humiliation, and feelings of betrayal and insignificance. Here is the sequence of Shunsuke's thoughts: he desires Yuichi, envies his youth and beauty, reflects on his own fantasy of indispensable consummate power over mankind, and then instantaneously thinks that being defeated won't bother him one iota this time (p. 23). His grandiosity is a reaction to his inferiority and envy, proven by his need to rationalize yet another withdrawal in defeat. To put it another way, Shunsuke must

154

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

claim he will not be bothered by defeat because he does not wish to admit to himself how envious he is, how much he needs the Adonis. What he really desires is power, as he said, which means he wants others to need him—he must be indispensable rather than depending on them for love so humiliatingly. He wishes to destroy the youth who is beautiful and will gain that attention, but he cannot defeat Yuichi, so he pretends to join him willingly. Shunsuke muses how he has been spent so much of his life combating beauty, but believes that he should soon reconcile with beauty. He thus imagines that heaven has sent these beautiful people purely for him to see (p. 23). To admit his neediness and envy would be the worst humiliations. Shunsuke even "gives" Yasuko to Yuichi, as though this were a choice, asking if he could leave her with the youth, whether indeed Yuichi would like to marry her (p. 24). D E C O N S T R U C T I N G DESIRE A N D V E N G E A N C E Yuichi may be the idealized beauty Mishima wished he could attain, but he resembles his author in his confession to Shunsuke: I can't love a woman. Do you understand? My body is capable of loving them, but my feelings for them are purely intellectual. From the time 1 was born I have never desired a woman. I have never felt yearning for any women I encounter. . . . 1 love only boys. (p. 39/24) Can we be sure this is Mishima's confession (especially if i stated so emphatically that Yuichi was Mishima's fantasy, his opposite)? Throughout his fiction, from Confessions through his final tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, men desire women purely because they wish to defeat them and force rejecting, humiliating women to desire them instead. In Confessions, the narrator states explicitly that the purpose of seducing Sonoko was his desire to defeat her and prove his superiority. Even the most romantic heterosexual novel, Spring Snow, avers repeatedly that the protagonist's desire is a fantasy, a need to defeat the woman who humiliated and enraged him with her manipulativeness. And like every single Mishima hero, the beautiful male protagonist of Spring Snow is so entirely wrapped up in his own feelings that he cannot empathize at all with the feelings of others, thus engaging in a destructive, protracted love affair for utterly narcissistic purposes. Far from tragic love, Spring Snow is an exhibition of infantile grandiosity that destroys anyone humiliating or rejecting, the complete antithesis of sublime love for another human being, the dire opposite of tragic love and death mused so poignantly by the classic Japanese poets. Mishima may set out to depict the tragic beauty of youth who dies from love, but he creates instead an adolescent who cannot really love at all.

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

155

The insidious plan envisioned by Shunsuke with fiendish delight and followed by Yuichi with a more subtle yet equally intense schadenfreude, is to humiliate women by seduction and nonrequisition of love. I believe this is one more reenactment fantasized incessantly by Mishima: seduction and rejection of women for having abandoned him. He forces women to desire him so that they will suffer and be humiliated as he was. No wonder Shunsuke's reasons for hating the vagina are unconvincing rationalizations—his rage and malicious schemes make sense only in the context of an author whose need for revenge originates from unspeakable trauma. All the events that are given as support for this hatred involve his own malice and manipulation, and his hatred in fact precedes these events. The hatred reads him more than the women he chose to manipulate. Consider also how Yuichi goes along with Shunsuke's scheme. He too is an extension of the author and is aligned in his callous joy in the suffering of women. Colors is the story of two men separated by beauty and age, who are both inexplicably incapable of love, and who inexplicably desire vengeance. Remember, Shunsuke's reasons are excuses. We know what he thinks women have wronged him, but we also have enough clues from Mishima that his hatred is an archaic mystery. And just because Yuichi loves boys is no explanation why he agrees to humiliate so many women. By the way, Yuichi cannot love boys either, no matter what he says. Mishima challenges us not to believe the stated motives of his characters, and if we do, we have ignored the clues and depths wrought by the author. One cannot take the conscious intentions and explanations at face value. They are almost always rationalizations, fraught with contradictions and gaps. They are insufficient to explain why a person could be so full of hate, why a person cannot love, why a person goes along with evil schemes. It is not unlike taking a Nazi's explanation of why he hates lews at face value and agreeing that Jews have given him palpable reasons for offense. Similarly, no matter what they claim, misogynists have no idea why they truly hate women, and their explanations are massive distortions that cannot possibly be believed. In Colors, Mishima has either painted one-dimensional characters or invited us to observe the dynamics of self-deception and rage. While I believe much of the text is confession, Mishima is nevertheless providing a real psychological reading of misogyny and homosexuality. Yasuko is the first victim of their scheme. However, Yuichi is unable to perform sexually. This requires pause: Mishima describes the setting of the encounter and mentions the pale green mosquito netting (p. 26). I want to alert the reader because it is surely no coincidence that this material signifies illicit sexuality and betrayal in other Mishima novels, most prominently in Temple of the Golden Pavilion, where, as we shall see in a future chapter, the protagonist finally uses the netting as kindling for revenge in the holocaust of the Temple. In Colors, mosquito netting also

156

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

appears in erotic scenes as almost subliminal reminders of perfidy and parasitism, just as images of fire and sirens signal erotic discord (p. 52ff.).5 Yuichi lays beside Yasuko with the window thrown open, the starlit sky glittering beyond. Yet the scene is of sexual failure, beneath mosquito netting, amidst death. The scene is one more Mishima equation of intimacy with women as mortality: The motionless girl lying beside him—jet-black eyes wide open, hand on her breast, and faintly perspiring—was, to Yuichi, death itself, (p. 42/26) Yuichi consciously thinks that touching her would be death, contemplates death, and considers suicide for having been shamefully seduced by Yasuko (though this was the evil plan). Not only is intimacy death, but Yuichi wishes to kill himself for having submitted to a woman. Thus again, seduction, arousal, desire, and acquiescence are all experienced as such humiliating defeat that Yuichi wishes to destroy himself. \ le is no different from Shunsuke, who also despised himself for submission once again the dynamics are identical confessions from Mishima. And this is exactly the humiliation in compliance and weakness that moves from defeat and retreat to mounting rage and the need to punish women. I he process is endless and cyclical. Yuichi remembers how he had opposed himself to sexuality since puberty, keeping his body pure. He then reminisces on the seductive sweat of a classmate. But instead of consummating with the boy, Yuichi defied his own desire, imagining that intimacy with a man would transform his lover into some "unspeakably ugly, woman like creature" (pp. 26-27). The perennial dynamic may become clearer if we consider Mishima's narrative in light of schizoid phenomena: desire is humiliating because one is ashamed to want, to be in the needy, inferior position, opening one to rejection and injury. One forsakes desire, which is experienced as neediness, so that one may remain in control and avoid humiliation. In addition, intimacy itself would contaminate and mutilate the object of desire. Apparently, copulation means mutilating something into an ugly woman. This is remarkable because the more pervasive homoerotic fantasy is of being contaminated by anal intercourse rather than contaminating one's partner (cf. Pflugfelder, 1999; Schalow, 1992). If this is not ripe for psychological analysis, what is? For here we have several fantasies: (1) One's love contaminates an object, indicating the sense that one is a disgusting, poisonous, contagious creature whose love destroys. Yuichi later compares himself to a gynecologist's "abnormal, unnatural" examination table, a "cold obscenity," an "unfeeling, implacable iron contrivance" (p. 127). After impregnating Yasuko, he experiences fear like that of a husband who has given his wife a disease (p. 130). Still later Yuichi thinks that he cannot make any woman happy, and thus

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

157

the only spiritual gift he could present a woman would be making her unhappy through revenge against her (pp. 197-198). (2) Love also destroys because of how needy one is. One is a voracious, cannibalistic child, a common childhood idea that one kills the mother by consuming too much, not uncommonly reinforced by messages from the mother that the child is too greedy and will kill her. Having internalized the idea that one is a parasite, a child can develop both the idea that one's influence is toxic and also a hatred for needy children who become unconscious symbols of one's now despised needs. Consider how Yuichi later views his own child as a "half-dead lump of flesh" (p. 294). Recall Mishima's explicit comment that hungry children kill their mothers in Confessions, a revulsion for infants echoed by a minor character in Colors who says "who needs children?" (p. 329). To put it another way, those who hate children have been inundated that childish needs are parasitic and irritatingly selfish and themselves feel that their love must also wound the person desired. (3) Desire also kills because one is full of rage for having internalized the sense that one's desires are selfish and bad. Mother withholds love and infuriates the child. (Consider Yuichi's inexplicable and instantaneous rage toward women throughout the novel, which I am arguing is Mishima's unconscious reliving of his own trauma of being unloved. Yuichi even thinks that in the absence of desire, a child is born [p. 130]. I believe this encapsulates his self-experience and perception of his parents.) (4) Having internalized the idea that intimacy castrates and mutilates, the child now equates deformity with femininity. In Mishima's case, this is reinforced by having nursed a diseased grandmother for so long, inculcating the belief that women are castrated and mutilated creatures. Mishima's grandmother was actually extremely phallic (meaning she was "masculine," invasive, and domineering) and expressed immense hostility toward the young boy when she was feeling ill. Hence, her sickness, mutilation, and castration were also his fault. Consider also how Yuichi equates purity with chastity. Those of us who have inherited a ludeo-Christian tradition might take this for granted (naturally, sex is dirty), but we must understand that even in a tradition of Buddhist and Shinto conceptions of purity and impurity, such categories are metaphoric and signify far more than literal stain, which is in itself fairly insignificant. Even when sexual fluids (or other matter) literally stain a physical environment, it is the emotional, psychological anxiety of contamination that is at issue. Sex is not impure just because of the messiness of fluids, any more than Lady Macbeth agonizes to wash a literal stain from her hands. As Ricoeur (1967) writes, impurity was never literally a stain. The stain is symbolic, and not only because tradition deems sexuality impure. Remember, Yuichi is different from a typical student who can feel love and engage in physical and emotional intimacy. Other students do not

158

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

necessarily feel that sex is a terrible impurity (students of Japanese culture often comment on how remarkably guiltless Japanese sexuality is, how unencumbered by the kind of conflicts over sin and guilt we cannot escape). Yuichi's interest in purity is his own ascetic withdrawal and does not derive from a social condemnation of sexuality—he specifically says that sexuality, not homosexuality, is impure. The question, then, is why Yuichi experiences eroticism as contamination. Earlier, eroticism contaminated the other person. Here, in addition, eroticism contaminates the self, but not for the homoerotic fear of contamination by the anus, mentioned earlier. It is also a common homoerotic fantasy that copulating a man castrates and effeminizes the one who receives the penis (indeed this may be an angry motive in many cases). Yuichi experiences his needs as destructive, and thus the beautiful object will be mutilated by transforming him into something disgustingly feminine. In this sense he preserves the maleness of the love object by not having intercourse while preventing contamination by the repulsive feminine the castrated lover would become. 6 It is the feminine aspect of the lover he despises and denies because the femininity would contaminate Yuichi through intercourse. Since his reminiscence occurs while lying next to a woman and experiencing her as death, I believe this is once again that incessant fantasy of Mishima himself, who imagines the feminine as an annihilating merger with disease and decay. Messy fluids are not inherently impure, but if one was immersed in disease and decay for one's entire childhood, impurity now means contamination by the presence who exposes one to death, who forces one to endure it, who annihilates and suffocates one, who violates emotional boundaries. Not only is intimacy death, but desire itself is transgressing the boundary between self and other, the defense against emotional invasion. Desire contaminates because one has forced oneself not to want, not to experience emotions that bring one into contact with something so dangerous, not to yearn for something withheld so traumatically. Not only invasion from without but irruption of one's own feelings contaminate. Here sex is a metaphor, a symbol for annihilation of control of one's feelings and boundaries against contamination by others. And Yuichi is therefore Shunsuke's doppelganger, experiencing the same conflicts and reactions, which I am arguing are confessions of the author who can barely imagine anything different. So if Mishima provides us with no reason why Yuichi can so callously go along with Shunsuke's plan to humiliate women, we can either assume he is creating his own Claggart, a malicious one-dimensional character barely worthy of a short story, or pay attention to the clues, which indicate that Shunsuke and Yuichi both associate women and intimacy with death and are inflicting revenge for having themselves been deeply humiliated and injured.

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

159

Meanwhile Yuichi provides us with another clue regarding his hatred for women: his mother is suffering from atrophy of the kidney, her heart is getting weaker, and he is called home. We read that his mother repeats incessantly that she would be content to die after seeing his bride (p. 38). This may seem comical since many of us have probably had mothers who try to guilt us into things. But this is yet another archetypal case in Mishima where mothers exert toxic guilt on their sons. (Later in the novel his mother becomes seriously ill after Yasuko gives birth, forcing Yuichi to postpone his departure—surely no coincidence but a manipulative way of reeling in her son after experiencing feelings of abandonment; cf. p. 337.) Having grown u p in an environment where, in his words, diseases were encountered at every corner of the house ("A Forest in Full Flower"), Mishima was subject to the psychotic histrionics of a grandmother who made him feel directly responsible for her suffering and discomfort. His absolute obedience and suppression of every iota of desire was demanded under insane threat of punishment and her death. It may seem far-fetched, but I would maintain that Mishima includes such scenes in his novels precisely to indicate that rage and misogyny have something to do with being humiliated by uncontrollable women, that the mother who inflicts shame, guilt, and histrionically violent emotional coercion will not only be despised, but her influence will preclude the ability to experience intimacy with women. Her coercion will indurate his emotional life, make him so rigidly defensive, and force such a suppression of his emotions (rage and love) that he must engage a schizoidal withdrawal from emotional vulnerability to survive at all. When Mishima interpolates the scene where his mother becomes seriously ill after Yasuko gives birth, we are provided an image of the split between toxic and benign women and happiness immediately corrupted by another's suffering, a recapitulation of both grandmother's coercion through illness and the insane possessiveness of Mishima's mother as well. Such coercion has certainly engendered loathing in Mishima's characters. In fact, this hatred clinches Yuichi's desire to marry since by her own words she would die after the marriage (p. 38). Not love for a woman or concern for his mother but the cold, scheming desire to see his mother dead compels him to marry. Yuichi then equates sick people with children—meaning that they are needy and helpless. By implication they are therefore defective in some despicable way and should die like his mother. Note that Yuichi thinks this right before savoring the thought of his mother's death. Again and again love and desire are equated with vulnerability—something disgusting, weak, diseased, selfish, and worthy of death. This is repeated later when Yasuko becomes pregnant. Yuichi contemplates the love between men and women and feels jealousy. He then thinks of his mother, wishes for her death, and recalls the joy he felt when a friend of Yasuko's lost her child. And when

160

The Madness and Perveision of Yukio Mishima

Yasuko coos at a baby on a bus, Yuichi thinks derisively that there is nothing pretty about the dirty drooling infant (pp. 132 134). \ \e later arrives at the idea of an abortion when Yasuko intimates that he will not leave her should they have a baby. Imprisonment is anathema. The stream of associations travels from jealousy of love to haired of his mother to hatred of children to the desire to punish his wife and coerce her into abortion. Yuichi despises mothers for not having loved him and despises children as helpless, imprisoned, needy things whose weakness and abandonment are reminiscences of intolerable rage, symbols of having been unloved, ciphers of his humiliating scars. Mishima provides more clues. Shunsuke muses that he would have enjoyed the love of women in his youth had he Yuichi's beauty, again indicating his resentment over feeling ugly and sexually rejected. It would have been even better had he not loved women at all, and lived without them (p. 29). Here is the insidious process: he despises himself for his ugliness but is so resentful for having been rejected that all women are despised. Misogyny is self-hatred, really. Hence, every woman humiliated also provides masochistic gratification, punishment of the self despised for being ugly. Shunsuke thinks that motherly love is an extraordinary thing because his mother was incapable of loving him, 'ugly as he was" (p. 38). Confession indeed. Now we know that his loathing of women is a displacement, have proof that misogyny is disguised vengeance against his mother. (If Mishima was aware of this, he nevertheless remained deeply attached to his mother throughout life, and one wonders how conscious Mishima was that his endless misogyny in his novels reflected his own hatred.) Shunsuke advises Yuichi to pretend that women are logs, iceboxes, a bundle of sticks, a cushion, a side of beef hanging from a beam in a butcher's shop—all dehumanizing images—never forgetting that woman has no soul. She is "inanimate matter," which likely means excrement or other rotting offal (p. 29). Like Yuichi, Shunsuke equates women with death. In sentences that almost seem comical given how arbitrary and repetitive they are throughout Mishima's fiction, random images evoke death and decay. The caress of Yasuko's hand against her drying hair imbues her with a startling sense of death (p. 37). How are we to read this? We have seen how Shunsuke and Yuichi both associate intimacy with disease, decay, and death. Shunsuke is repelled by the thought of Yasuko at 70 and must avert his gaze (p. 37). But he thinks this after noticing how her coquetry was not intended for him, implicating sexual rejection in his disgust. Thus, the equation of women with death also signifies punishing her for sexual rejection—she is old and decayed in his imagination because she has rejected Shunsuke. She is rendered ugly as revenge, just as smushing the No mask punishes his wife for illicit sexuality, just as in so many Mishima novels where the women who humiliate our protagonists are

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

161

killed or raped or humiliated in some fashion. For Yasuko the punishment for rejection is transformation into the wretched and nauseating decay of old age—in other words, she becomes Mishima's grandmother. Even intellect is a defense against invasion by the feminine—Yuichi's study is the sole niche of the house unwedded to woman. Only in this sanctuary can the miserable youth breathe freely (p. 48). The geography of the house is a bodily metaphor. The study is bulwark against the feminine because intellect is a retreat from desire, from eroticism, neediness, and vulnerability. Actually, this is a perennial psychodynamic in history West and East, where Platonic and Cartesian dualisms are conspicuous attempts to locate superior faculties in the mind rather than the disgusting, sexual body (Brown, 1959; Faure, 2003; Phillips, 1995; Piven, 2004, 2003a). I believe that the terror of death and decay, alongside the fear of being overwhelmed by repellent sexual desire, tends to instigate ideologies that condemn the body, sexuality, and the feminine. And such ideologies do range from Platonic strivings for noncorporeal intellect to Cartesian logic and even Buddhist derogations of sexuality and women (these do exist in abundance despite popular views). 7 In Mishima's case, history only alerts us to such phenomena, it does not inherently mean the same dynamics operate in his case. However, Mishima's narrative does in fact indicate that freedom from sexuality and invasion by the feminine is attained by sequestering physical boundaries. Any room might attain such a boundary, but the specific intellectual retreat indicates that the physical is a metaphor for psychological safety, ironically a womb without the feminine—a further repetition of the intellectual escape from women is in Mishima's case a fantasy of escaping a coercive feminine intrusion. Donald Keene (1984) credits Mishima's grandmother for exposing him to the splendors of Japanese literature. I would add that splendor may be introduced with love or with violence, and Mishima's identification with intellect and literature was an identification with the only aggressive means of survival available. In other words, Mishima could escape the weakness of the feminine (which was truly his own weakness) by identifying with the intellect of his grandmother. In incorporating such intellectual mastery, Mishima could retreat from her invasiveness, from boundariless intrusive intimacy—he could attain her strength and remain protected emotionally (from her) by eliminating vulnerability to desire and neediness, to women. If this were the only isolated instance of such retreats, then my case might be an unlikely speculation. But I believe that the preponderance of cases of withdrawal, defense against the feminine, rage and derogation of women, innumerable instances where women are seductive but corrupt bodies to be punished, tend to implicate the fantasy of refuge from women as a fundamental survival technique (and fantasy)

162

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

in Mishima's writings and emotional life. For his protagonist Yuichi, it is a conspicuous indicator not only of misogyny but of his homosexuality. M A S K S , M I S P E R C E P T I O N S , MIRRORS Like Shunsuke, Yuichi is also misperceived by others. But Yuichi participates in the mystification, for he does not wish to be truly known. He takes dance lessons without desiring them, while his observers believe that the vitality submerged within his beauty is being incessantly crushed to death (p. 31). Mishima is giving us mixed messages here. On the one hand, Yuichi is misapprehended. He is the perfect beautiful object about whom everyone fantasizes while in reality he remains detached. On the other hand, Mishima himself wishes Yuichi to be the lonely tragic beautiful figure arousing him throughout his fiction. Mishima wants to be Yuichi, desired by all and desiring (needing) no one. But the truly tragic hero for Mishima is the lonely, emotionally stricken youth. He has both fantasies and cannot reconcile them in Yuichi without destroying Yuichi's invulnerability—the power gained when others desire you while you are immune from need and yearning. Mishima clarifies this fantasy in his description of Yuichi's nuptials. Sex with Yasuko is "an ingenious impersonation." These are "grotesque, passionate acts, over and over." Mishima writes that "he needed to act, to use his p o w e r . . . . Impersonation is a superlative act of creativity" (p. 50). Mishima is not just writing of those unfortunate people who cannot experience intimacy, who have trouble loving, or of those in Japanese society who are living the lives others expect them to. Remember, this is Yuichi's decision, and he has an intention to humiliate Yasuko. He is not a hapless victim of society; he needs to wield his power. It is triumph over powerlessness, but in vengeance against women, not society, authority, death, gods, or fate even in an existential sense. Mishima makes no attempt to disguise his equation of Yuichi with Narcissus. Yuichi is exceptionally vain. His face is often reflected in mirrors. His own face stares back at him. He becomes aware of his own reflection, now allowing himself to believe that he is beautiful for the first time. He sees a superlative beauty in the mirror, a lovely face never seen before, a row of white teeth exposed by masculine lips that inadvertently break into a smile (p. 36). He is perfect, but according to Mishima he radiates surpassing beauty only after he becomes aware of how gorgeous he is. His joy is in his own loveliness. He now derives pleasure from seduction. At a restaurant Yuichi becomes aware of a gaze fixed on his profile. He returns the gaze and sees a fair, slim waiter with lips like a doll's and legs with the streamlined purity of a boy's. Yuichi feels the stirrings of desire (p. 41). He is aroused by being desired. Yuichi's homosexuality is not merely the desire for boys or men, as

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

163

though the sexual preference were genetic or innate (who knows, they may be, but this is not Mishima's fantasy). His desire is explicitly narcissistic, for he resents the immoral fact that a woman is in his bed instead of another gorgeous male. Yuichi then wishes that he could place a mirror between him and his wife (p. 51). On the one hand, he wishes to see himself. On the other, the mirror obscures the feminine (equated with death) beside him, as though narcissistic doubling enhanced his immunity from mortality. In fact, he is attaining confirmation, proof, and certainty of his own existence, which is symbolically defense against nonexistence and death. Narcissism is a defense against the fear of death. 8 Perceiving his own reflection is a way of confirming that he is in fact alive, beautiful, and intact, emerging unscathed from proximity to women and death. (He even describes sex with Yasuko as suicide.)9 Narcissism is a defense against extinction by the feminine and here serves the critical purpose of mirroring the self where the self was neglected, ignored, and annihilated in infancy. This is in fact Mishima's fantasy, enacted endlessly in his pursuit of physical beauty, admiration, reflection in mirrors, photographs, and cinema. It is impossible to believe that the Japanese psychologist Ikuo Yonekura (2001) believes Mishima did receive appropriate mirroring (as opposed to Dazai, who he claims did not—Yonekura somehow believes Mishima would engage in compulsive phallic narcissistic display despite having received proper mirroring). Mishima fanatically pursued the proof of his own existence, of his own beauty, in escape from infantile weakness, ugliness, and helplessness, finally murdering himself in his prime and capturing images of his perfection before mirrors reflected that detestable, humiliating, miserable ugliness once again. Thus, Yuichi cannot have intercourse with just any kindred homosexual—he must be beautiful. When spotting two men he perceives to be "kindred spirits" on the trolley, his self-respect is wounded by their ugliness (p. 53). Yuichi's quest for homosexual intercourse leads him to the dark erotic underworld, signified by his descent from the trolley to a place where the heaps of fruit are as cold as cadavers (p. 54). Mishima has a propensity to associate so much innocuous or even beautiful scenery with death (almost comically so), regardless of actual appearance. One may recall the scene in After the Banquet where a wisp of cloud appears as a tombstone or the random interlude in Spring Snow where an idyllic image of a waterfall immediately reminds the protagonist of death, and soon the decaying corpse of an ominous black dog obstructs the flow of water.10 Images of flowers, snowy fields, the sky, are suddenly associated with death and decay. But Mishima also uses this association to signify the actual (as opposed to perceived or projected) decadence of the environment itself. Yuichi wonders whether it will be his fate to sleep with one of the ugly men and shudders at the thought but then also experiences an impure, putrescing

164

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

sweetness (p. 54). He inclines toward the public restroom, where lurks the intimation of unseen masses assembled in shadow. Yuichi compares it to a public banquet, but we are told it is actually a toilet sunken in a reeking cloud of evil vapors. All eyes alight on Yuichi and glisten, staring in envy. The multitude move "like a clump of seaweed untangling slowly in the water." The benches where lovers intertwine is described as "a banquet for ghosts" (p. 55). The entire scene is indelicately evoking some sort of hell or land of the dead, a place of putrescence, excrement, and evil. It also evokes great hunger, like the voracious ghosts who drink a blood libation in Homer's Odyssey. But these ghosts are hungry for sexual predation. Hungering for sex is an oral metaphor (a similar oral craving is evoked in consuming the heart and blood of the erotic victim in Confessions and in the title and vengeful desire of Thirst for Love), and this is no mere innocent yearning. The environment signifies something predatory and cannibalistic, something dead and vengeful, vampiric, envious, and insidious. Mishima is providing the reader with an assessment of a truly pitiable homosexual underworld. Not only are such minions predatory, they also resonate with the experience Mishima strikes so frequently of people psychically dead from lack of emotional nourishment, a graphic metaphor of those starved for love and ecstasy, seeking the erotic not only as love but as vengeance that must be extracted. This is, by the way, the fundamental schizoid craving that is predatory and so voracious because deprived so painfully in infancy (Guntrip, 1969). It is a painful reminiscence, a series of images that symbolize so well the experience of psychic deadness, of deprivation of physical and emotional nourishment, of such desperation that voracity and vampiric consumption is the only understood means of extracting love. At this point Yuichi is superstitiously afraid, not only of the ghastly multitude but that he might somehow end up sleeping with Ihe ugly gentleman from the trolley. This is also significant. Why would one fear having sexual intercourse with a stranger one found ugly, especially when that person is not in sight? I suspect this must be an uncomfortable yearning, an alien desire, repugnant to one element of the self but strangely and frighteningly exciting to another aspect of the self. But then why desire, even unconsciously, to have intercourse with someone so repugnant rather than only fear there must be a desire to have sex with someone ugly? It is certainly not the case that homosexual desire is forbidden, therefore making him ugly to the conscious ego. Yuichi loves beautiful boys. To desire the ugly means desiring what disgusts one, in Mishima's imagination, himself. The flip side of narcissistic desire is the awareness that the beautiful image in the mirror conceals the experience of feeling ugly. One is ashamed, experiences self-loathing—this is the origin of narcissistic behavior and illusion in the first place—and thus a component of

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

165

narcissistic desire can be the wish to love the ugly element of the self, to give love to that which is not lovable, even as one despises that element of the self. The fact that one despises the ugly self is also food for desire since one wishes to punish oneself and therefore masochistically desires pollution by ugliness. Yuichi's fear is therefore the uncanny desire both to love the ugly self (and submit to it) and to punish the self by contaminating it with ugliness. Of course, Yuichi fears ugliness—he is tempted to merge with that which will contaminate him and taint him with what he feels he really is but in self-loathing is morbidly drawn to ugliness. Of course, since ugliness is so repugnant, this desire will be an uncomfortable temptation. To put it a final way, eroticizing ugliness transforms it. Eroticizing that which one fears and loathes is an anxious wish to efface its emotional impact and beautify or even transcend what is so miserable. Nineteenthcentury poets would sometimes eroticize corpses to cope with the horror of beauty become putrid (cf. Binion, 1993; Piven, 2004), and I suspect this is Mishima's quintessential erotic fantasy when eroticizing death, decay, and ugliness. Intercourse with the ugly both punishes that which is despised and also (paradoxically) forces sensual pleasure on the horrid to transform it (almost in the way the narrator of Confessions eroticizes excrement, death, helplessness, and victimization and even transforms his ugliness through the masturbatory act of imagining himself as Omi). As mentioned earlier, Yuichi may be physically beautiful, but he is the Mishima alter ego who must also experience himself as ugly despite how he consciously perceives himself (again, or he would not crave mirrors, adulation, and seduction so much), and in a sense, the bizarre desire for ugliness in others is a fantasy of transforming the self through the other. To continue: a youth now approaches Yuichi, but when the face appears more distinctly, it reveals deep wrinkles, meticulously blackened eyebrows, false eyelashes, age concealed poorly beneath theatrical makeup (p. 57). Mishima invokes this image repeatedly. For him the cult of homosexuality is a pitiable facade whose masks do not achieve beauty but only reveal the longing for youth, location of desire in physical beauty amidst the reality of decay. Make no mistake: even Yuichi's beauty is not exempt from this. He knows he will age and decay. Old age is hell for homosexuals and women (p. 156). Yuichi momentarily spots the beautiful boy he espied earlier, and the two flee from the park hand in hand. They go to a hotel and experience new ecstasies: For Yuichi the three hours they spent together thereafter in a room in a hotel where the intentions of the customers were left unasked was like a hot waterfall. He extricated himself from every artificial constraint, and for three hours his naked soul experienced an intoxicated bliss. Is there a greater pleasure than flesh made

166

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

bare? The moment his soul cast aside its burdensome dress, Yuichi's sensual rapture was driven by such a distinct fierceness that there was almost no room left for his flesh, (pp. 82-83/58) This passage is beautiful in its confession of how liberating uninhibited sexuality can be, especially homosexuality in a homophobic society (cf. p. 54). However, when Yuichi returns home, he compares himself to a prostitute. He imagines his wife will somehow exert dominating influence over him. He compares his body lying next to the boy to his body beside Yasuko, and he feels cheap. His thoughts are "self depreciating," which somehow delights him (pp. 59-60). He enjoys the idea of being a prostitute because it means others will desire him, but it is self debasing at the same time. Comparing himself to the youth means knowing he is already older than some lovers and will inevitably be the unloved imbeautiful member of the dyad, desiring narcissistic youths like himself who hurt others by making them desire. For the moment, though, Yuichi emerges with a newfound confidence, "brimming with happiness," and can acknowledge his disgust for Shunsuke, "this pompous, ancient man" (p. 61). He enjoys having swindled the old man by receiving money (as a gift, but truly for the plan of revenge) while actually indulging his own desires. But he craves an omelet rather than the rare delicacies with which Shunsuke plies him. (Mishima provides a breakfast scene as metaphor for Yuichi's emotional appetite. Incidentally, Mishima himself preferred such meals to Japanese delicacies, a further similitude and confession.)11 Yuichi's elation is short lived, as he comes to dread exposing his happiness as though he were both revealing too much and expressing insincerity at the same time. Shunsuke asks Yuichi if he is familiar with anything in the Japanese Middle Ages that resembles the medieval European worship of the Virgin Mary. Shunsuke supplies his own answer: the worship of the catamite (a boy kept by a pederast), who was given the seat of honor at the Lord's banquet. Aside from the obvious attempt to ennoble pederasty and distort the wickedness of their machinations, the catamite is compared to a sublime female virgin (p. 65). Shunsuke wishes to address Yuichi by the name of the catamite. Having introduced Yuichi to a vain middle aged woman called Countess Kaburagi, Shunsuke then tells his young apprentice that her seduction will lead to Yuichi's salvation and her own. Hence, vengeance is couched in terms of enlightenment and sublime motivation. Meanwhile, Yuichi looks at the Countess and imagines they are "doubles" because, as we shall see anon, she too is manipulative, deceptive, and seductive (p. 67). Yuichi rendezvous with his lover once again in Rudon's tea shop, a homosexual hangout. Though Rudon's is described as a place where these

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

167

young men came to "bring warmth into their lonely lives" (p. 86), we are gradually exposed to a murkier scene. Guests are divided into those young and charming guests who could bring Rudy success and the wealthy ones who squander money like idiots. Rudy himself spends two hours every morning applying his makeup and wears "circus suits" that make not only homosexual admirers but children stare. He does not realize he looks ridiculous. Mishima describes the yearning and behavior of the patrons: Whenever a man opened the door and entered, all the guests would look toward the threshold in unison. The man coming in was then instantly bathed in the emanation of their gaze. Who could guarantee that one's long-cherished and sought-after ideal would not suddenly appear in corporeal form from that glass door opened to the night streets? In most cases, however, the radiance of those gazes would suddenly fade, terminated by their disappointment. Their appraisal ended in the first instant. When a young customer came in with no knowledge of the place, assuming that a record wasn't playing, he would probably be startled when he heard murmuring evaluations about himself coming from each table. The regulars would say something like: "Oh, he is nothing special," or, "You can find guys like that anywhere," or, "His nose is small, so his tool must be, too," or, "I don't like the way his lower lip sticks out," or, "He has nice taste in neckties," or "He has simply zero sex appeal." (pp. 120/86-87). Mishima summarizes Ellis's views on homosexual narcissism, the search for the perfect ideal self and object. Meanwhile, Yuichi arrives as such a narcissus, establishing "his supremacy" at Rudon's. Yuichi's entrance on the stage will be a source of future legend (p. 88). Mishima is situating Yuichi within an environment where he is the focus of all desire. Rudon's is a theater where Yuichi can finally gratify everyone's pious yearning for the perfect specimen, and thus Mishima gratifies his own fantasy of being the most beautiful, desirable male before an amorously aroused crowd (the description of Yuichi's "universal beauty" is nauseatingly verbose). However, we are also provided with a rather desultory image of homosexual vanity, misery, desperation, manipulativeness, pettiness, shallowness, and somewhat embarrassing ridiculousness. Homosexuals are flirtatious but stare with cold appraisal; they are coquettish yet predatory (pp. 87-102). The restaurant reminds Yuichi of the park where the multitude of hungry ghosts stared at him (p. 91). Mishima describes looking as extremely cruel (p. 93), a theme he repeats throughout his fiction. Staring involves evaluation, judgment, invasion, penetration, smothering, annihilation of independence. More than just desire, the stare can be violent, rejecting, and vengeful. Yuichi cannot imagine that the rapture of the previous night can be repeated, and he wonders whether he will have infinite first nights with

168

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

streams of lovers. Ecstasy will always become contempt, and Yuichi is gripped by loneliness. The youths in Rudon's seem to be aware of the evanescence of the bonds that hold them together. They rub shoulders and touch hands, barely enduring the lonely discomfort. The tie that binds them seems like the shared love of comrades in war who sense they will perish the next morning (pp. 92-93). Yuichi is already tired of his lover Eichan and feels like being cruel to the boy in resentment against his own wife (pp. 93-94). (Amidst all this prolix about homosexual predation, Mishima reveals to us how cruelty against Yuichi's lovers derives from resentment against Yasuko, which must be understood as a displacement and reenactment.) The atmosphere of the restaurant is filled with sadness (p. 94). Love is ephemeral, and lovers are interchangeable. Yuichi sleeps with a new boy the first evening he enters Rudon's, while crowds swell the establishment as gossip of his beauty circulates, hater he sleeps with an actor: artificial, coquettish, diurnally pretending to be a macho heterosexual, nocturnally homosexual benighted by feminine shadow (pp. 9697). Still later Yuichi couples sadomasochistically, bemoaning his own loneliness and resorting to cruelty, passing the night with a boy utterly devoid of allure (p. 144). While he punishes the boy maliciously, he also punishes himself through intercourse with someone unattractive, with whom he would ordinarily disdain. For Mishima, sex is loneliness coupled with cruelty and masochistic shame. Men pursue Yuichi with varying strategies of seduction. Those who lose their way in the "jungle of sentiment"—Mishima's description of the homosexual underworld—become unsightly monsters (p. 98). This is hardly glamorization of the homosexual world. Rather, it is a very depressing illustration of the impossibility of happiness, sincerity, or sustained intimacy. In desperate need of love, the people Mishima describes are incapable of loving for more than the span of sexual bliss. Some are very clearly tender, compassionate people (and why not?), while others have wonderful senses of humor and style. Yet so many also prey on one another, are devious manipulators, mendacious, unempathic, and ruthless. The misogynistic youth Jackie has a wealthy Indian lover afflicted with a chest ailment whom he treats heartlessly by engaging in orgies downstairs while the hapless Indian lies prone and weeping upstairs (p. 146). Jackie's macabre Christmas Bacchanalia (or Saturnalia) depicts the spectrum of such misery most poignantly. The soiree is a manic orgy of entwined bodies and mad, lewd frolicking; giggling; and smeared mascara and saliva. They dance and laugh an eerie "spirit destroying" laugh. In a typical dance hall, men and women dance blithely and exhibit their impulses freely, but when these homosexuals dance with their arms intertwined, there is a feeling that they are coerced into a "dark bondage" (p. 150). Beyond social isolation and the oppression of homophobia, Mishima is exposing us to the desperation of Dionysian ecstasy, hedonism that

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

169

seeks to obliterate consciousness of misery if only momentarily, numb the awareness of the evanescence of love (as intimated earlier at the scene in Rudon's). As Peterson (1979) notes, passages on "the metaphysics of homosexuality" sound odd amidst these images, and Mishima's "samurai-homosexual comparisons" collapse (p. 213). They decay before the desultory misery displayed here. Meanwhile, Yuichi meets Count Kaburagi at the soiree, under the mask and nom de guerre of Pope. Kaburagi-Pope emblematizes the desperate homosexual hiding his sexual identity under the gaze of society: That restless, craving gaze was possessed with a desire to forever seek out a familiar beautiful type. That certain disagreeable something that lingered about Nobutaka's features like a spotted stain on a garment that won't dissolve no matter how much one wipes; that confused mixture of inexpressible, distasteful effeminacy and audacity; that forcibly constricted, dreadful voice; that attempt at a perfectly contrived naturalness—all of these were the seal of their society and expressions of the endeavors of their masks, (p. 211/153) Kaburagi is a master of seduction, having copulated about a thousand boys (p. 154). Mishima informs us that fear, not beauty, held him captive and drove him to debauchery. Is this a commentary on Kaburagi's corrupt homosexuality, as opposed to a purer form dedicated to love and aesthetics? Though Kaburagi seems to be the repulsive caricature, his cravings and artifice include him in the "fellowship," as though this were the inevitable guise of the homosexual. And despite his character's repugnance, Mishima compares Kaburagi's eroticism to that of Saikaku, the nineteenth-century novelist (who wrote of both heterosexual and homosexual love): "Making love to boys is like the sleep of a wolf under a flower whose petals are falling" (p. 154). Predatory debauchery, seduction, artifice, disgusting, and stained unpleasant features are compared to a primal animal beneath delicate petals whose fleeting beauty is enhanced by falling gracefully and poignantly to death. There is some ambivalence here to be sure, as Mishima mixes poetic delicacy with prosaic disgust. Such desolation does not suffuse the lighthearted amours of Saikaku (cf. Peterson, 1979, p. 214). Kaburagi intends to prey on Yuichi and notices that the youth has been rendered feeble by his own beauty (p. 155). The implication here is twofold: that since beauty renders one desirable to others, he will be subject to predatory attempts at seduction, which will make him vulnerable to the wicked sexual machinations of others who worm their way into his body and emotions by flattering his beauty. Yuichi also resembles the beautiful hero stricken down in his vulnerability, like the Rose-Elf and others. Kaburagi does prey on Yuichi's vulnerability, transforming himself into a mirror that reflects the boy and conceals himself, his agedness, his

170

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

predatory desire, and his devious ingenuity (p. 160). Yuichi is enthralled because Kaburagi monologues on Yuichi alone, professing his ardor and comparing the boy's splendor to a Grecian helmet, the most beautiful youth on a battlefield, beauty itself personified, "an eternal thing," the profile that "brought eternal form into time, and by fixing one consummate beauty in time became itself an imperishable thing" (pp. 160-162). This so inflates Yuichi's narcissism that he fantasizes touching his forehead to another Yuichi before him, the dreaming youth's parted lips moistened by the beautiful lips of himself just dreamed (p. 162). Thus, Yuichi is seduced by Kaburagi, who we find had previously wagered Jackie that he could copulate the boy. But this is only an interlude. Though Yuichi slips into the narcissistic bliss of the hallucinating Mishima character who invents his own erotic world, Yuichi's dissipation and descent into wickedness must not be forgotten. We soon find the tables turned, as Kaburagi has fallen in love with the beautiful youth: After Yuichi left, this middle-aged nobleman was, on the contrary, seized with an ineluctable ardor. He paced about the narrow room, still in his nightgown, until he collapsed on the carpet floor and rolled about. In his shriveled voice he madly cried out Yuichi's name many hundreds of times, (p. 232/168) This reversal recapitulates Yuichi's vengeance against women. \ le not only receives narcissistic gratification by being admired but sadistically enjoys making others desire him, seducing them and inflicting unbearable and humiliating desire on them. One must ask why he feels the need to injure other men, why seduction becomes a violent, ruthless means of shaming and annihilating vulnerable, needy human beings. I believe the dynamics are related to his misogyny: the need to force others to desire one when one felt undesired and rejected; the wish to revenge oneself on others by wrecking them with desire when he himself was desperately needy for love and wrecked by rejection. It is possible that this is a displacement of hostility toward women, as it recapitulates similar patterns, but the eroticism is male, and I suspect that this is Mishima's fantasy of avenging the rejection and humiliation he received from his father Azusa, who was entirely abusive, derogating, humiliating, withholding, and sadistic on the few occasions he did interact with his son. As I will argue in a future chapter, Mishima seems to have had fantasies of punishing men for being too weak to be powerful fathers, and here vengeance against needy homosexuals punishes their weakness and vulnerability, thus repeating and reliving the trauma of being rejected in need, humiliating his own loathed needy self, and aggressing against those too effeminate to withstand needs for love. Certainly nothing in the novel suggests why Yuichi would feel the need to punish or humiliate needy men, the very people to whom he

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

171

is drawn erotically, and again we can supplement our reading with knowledge from the life of the author and with the awareness that so many of Mishima's novels contain images of men humiliating and violating one another. In many of these cases, the fantasy is vengeance against beauty, which has rejected the protagonist, and in Forbidden Colors we might surmise a fantasy that reverses the aesthetics so that the protagonist is the beautiful one everyone else admires, who can punish them when the author felt alienated, weak, ugly, and rejected his entire life (even after he transformed himself). VENGEANCE A N D TRANSCENDENCE After Yasuko, the next victims of the scheme of vengeance are Count Kaburagi and his wife. The Count is a revolting pompous boor with discomfiting weakness and audacity, a tightly constrained voice, a carefully planned naturalness composed in feigned elegance, a drooping mustache and tired bloodshot eyes. His face and mustache are groomed too meticulously and give the inadvertent impression of "man-made filth" (p. 70). The Countess, a manipulative egomaniac who has never read so much as one book (p. 64), has the reputation of having sex with any man within a week of meeting him (p. 71). She had previously extorted 300,000 yen from Shunsuke in blackmail and was thus the target of humiliating vengeance. The Kaburagis are wealthy entirely from "his laziness and her villainy" (p. 69). The Count extracts money from his wife's lovers. The love that couples them is the epitome of connubial affection. It is the ardor of partners in crime, while she holds her husband in sexual loathing (p. 69). The Kaburagis are introduced to Yuichi at his wedding to Yasuko, and the Countess is immediately aroused by the young man. She quips to Shunsuke that he should send Yuichi to her for a few months of erotic instruction. Shunsuke arranges for the two to meet after the honeymoon. (Meanwhile, Yuichi spots the young waiter with lips like a doll's and is filled with jealously when he sees the man with a male companion. Yuichi recoils at the thought of himself, meaning he is humiliated by his own weakness and jealously, thus withdrawing from the shameful self he wishes to erase and avoid—a "strange creature . . . without shape or semblance of anything human." He immediately tries to imagine his wife as a boy, then recoils from her as something grotesque and impossible to love [p. 47]. Here jealousy [feeling like one is losing to another in competition for love] leads to humiliation, rage, aggressive fantasies, disgust with women, and loathing of intimacy.) Despite his physical beauty, Yuichi has a black heart. He enjoys the idea of crushing a beautiful orchid pinned to Yasuko's bodice during a dance at another soiree and even comes to feel it is his obligation (p. 73). Of

172

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

course, Yuichi does crush the orchid, a rather obvious metaphor for destroying beautiful delicate vulnerable things, which is itself a psychological reenactment as well. Malicious revenge and the humiliation of others becomes a dark compulsion for him. And Mishima shows us why: Yuichi needs to seduce the Countess and is even desperate for her to love him (p. 75). It goes without saying that Yuichi does not love her or anyone else and, despite his intention of crushing her, needs her love anxiously. The need for love is exactly the nodal point of the fantasy, hove must be seduced and extracted, then punished because it was withheld in the past. Mishima provides no substantive reason why Yuichi is so desperate for the love of a contemptible woman he intends to humiliate. But Mishima confesses here through his narcissus that love was deprived in the past, and women are displaced targets of his hatred, which he must reenact by inflicting the same suffering on them. And again, this is why he goes along with Shunsuke's scheme. In this same scene, Shunsuke introduces Yuichi to his next victim, another woman who had once rejected the old man and must therefore be humiliated. Kyoko is a beautiful woman in a Chinese dress, lively, effervescent, cheerful, an "ostentatiously virtuous wife" (pp. 78~7(*). Shunsuke is ruthlessly calculating about her seduction, telling Yuichi not to offer erotic compliments, as she likes clean men. Her breasts are small, her lovely bosom a mere contrivance of fine sponge. "Deceiving men's eyes seems to be good form among beautiful things, isn't it?" (p. 79). This last comment of course applies to Yuichi as well (Shunsuke's conscious or unconscious allusion, or Mishima's god's-eye commentary, we cannot know). Thus, Countess Kaburagi and Yauko (sans orchid) sit unhappily at the table, mirroring one another with the same distraught look, while Yuichi seduces another woman with feigned passion and sincerity. We are later given a description of Kyoko's character: never under any circumstances does she fathom her own emotions. She is like a welltrained dog or an exquisite artificial plant, she lacks any abundance of cleverness or humor that might redeem her femininity, and she has not a thing on her mind. It is doubtful that Kyoko is capable of loving anything other than ballet slippers (pp. 110-111). Mishima invites the reader to despise Kyoko, an unfortunate literary mistake since we are provided only with contemptible women in this text. The voices coalesce as though indistinguishable from one another. Even Countess Kaburagi perceives women with a homophonous cadence: One day she went to the theater alone. At the intermission, the scene before the powder room mirror presented a terrible sight; the faces of many women thronged before the mirror. They scrambled to puff out their cheeks, pout their lips, thrust out their foreheads, and caress their eyebrows in order to apply their rouge and lipstick, to pencil their eyebrows, to put a stray hair in place, to ensure that the

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

173

curls they had struggled with that morning had not come dreadfully undone. One woman shamelessly removed her teeth. Another, choking on facial powder, was contorting her face.... If one were to put that scene before the mirror in a painting, the dying screams of the slaughtered women would no doubt be heard emanating from the canvas, (pp. 166-167/119) We can take this with a sense of humor, and we should not be so politically correct that we cannot laugh at our human foibles. Women may sometimes behave this way. But Mishima satirizes very selectively, and he provides no counterpoint to his derogatory depiction of women. They all become caricatures that blur any distinction between the author and his misogynists, indeed supporting Shunsuke's stated reasons why he hates women rather than exposing his beliefs as projections and fantasies. It is here that we discern an unfair bias from the author, who somehow cannot depict a woman who is not despicable or ridiculous. Yuichi experiences inexplicable contempt for Kyoko though he knows her only superficially: "He hated that woman" (p. 111). Later in the presence of Countess Kaburagi, we are told that Yuichi's cold loathing had begun to assert itself, as he was incapable of seeing any beautiful woman as more than a monkey (p. 120). He begins a series of insidious plans rivaling the machinations of Iago, inducing Kyoko, Countess Kaburagi, and Yasuko to suffer the greenest and most humiliating mutual envies: "Each woman perceived the hostility of the other at a glance," and "Yuichi came home late so frequently that Yasuko exhausted herself working up all kinds of suspicions about her husband" (pp. 117,122). His overnight absences torture her, anxiety exhausts her, and she becomes "inured to the habitude of pain" (pp. 164-165). Yuichi wears the clothes and scarves each woman gives him, arranging intimate rendezvous and inviting two women without informing them the other would be coming. Of course, they suffer humiliation, indignation, and jealousy. One must keep in mind that much of this desire for humiliation is not only Shunsuke's scheme but Yuichi's own misogynistic pathology. He fears Yasuko (p. 173) and specifically wishes to humiliate her when she appears too sure of herself. If Yuichi tells her of an illicit affair, she laughs at him, which wounds his self-esteem. This is yet one more repetition of scenes where women laugh at the masculine pretenses of our protagonists, who then feel castrated and resentful. Another person might be grateful that a wife trusts her husband so much, but Yuichi is injured and must engage in further debauchery to avenge this humiliation and convince her that he is not in love with her (again love means needy and degrading vulnerability) despite the fact that he really believes he loves Yasuko (p. 174). These passages reflect the fantasy that love renders one helpless and that one must reject and shame the person one needs while simultaneously covertly loving the person and needing that bliss that comes from

174

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

emotional merger. Woman is dangerous and capable of humiliation, so she must be rejected and diminished, but she is also maternal and loving, comforting in her beauty, her breath in sleep relaxing and cozening Yuichi. Mishima even punctuates the narrative with random and brief interludes giving some sense of his character's rage over rejection by women. When threading through the Sunday throng, men and women stroll together. None of the men is as gorgeous as Yuichi. The women steal looks at him, intrepid ladies turn their heads, and in their hearts they forget the existence of the men beside them. When Yuichi observes this, he revels joyously in his hatred for women (p. 179). Yuichi enjoys being more beautiful than other men and uses this superiority to diminish them. This is most certainly anger at other men, aggressive competition and a need to put them down. But he is nevertheless angry when women prefer him. True, it does confirm how unfaithful they might be, but isn't it a contradiction to want women to look and then despise them for looking? Once again Mishima provides a character who has not actually been rejected by women (because he is beautiful), and nevertheless Yuichi resents unfaithful women and needs to confirm how despicable they are. Only a person reliving traumatic rejection and a trenchant sense of ugliness disdains inferior men and experiences rage when navigating a crowd of admiring women, which suits the author far more than his character. Yuichi may wish for his mother's death, but this relationship is onedimensional and still begs the question why Mishima would paint such a simplistic yet intense portrait of despicable mothers whom their sons wish to murder. Again, Shunsuke's misogyny is mysteriously virulent. While we are told he despises Countess Kaburagi because she extorted money from him, Mishima brilliantly elucidates the true dynamic. Shunsuke looks at the countess and thinks that she is as clumsy as an old maid, and thus his vengeance is complete (p. 189). But when he shortly walks in on her nakedness, we see the same fear of women Yuichi manifested earlier: She rose abruptly from the soap bubbles in the bathtub and stood erect. She looked at Shunsuke without flinching and said, "Come in, if you like." That naked body, deterred by not a hint of timidity, acknowledged the old man standing before her with as much attention as one affords a roadside pebble. Her wet breasts glimmered, completely indifferent to the world. F:or a fleeting moment Shunsuke was enchanted by the beauty of how her flesh had grown richly abundant with the years, but then the situation reversed itself, and when he became aware of his dumb humiliation he thereafter lost all courage to look at her directly (p. 264/191) Here are the images: froth, female nakedness, erection, solidity, exposure, wetness, glowing, ripened beauty, versus agedness, diminution, inani-

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

175

macy, immobility, inconsequence, assault, dumbness, cowering, flight. This not only recapitulates the earlier scene where Shunsuke watched impotently while his wife received cunnilingus from the milkman but repeats numerous similar scenes where Mishima characters are disregarded and humiliated by haughty women, the most conspicuous in Temple of the Golden Pavilion, where the stuttering Mizoguchi appears before beautiful Uiko and is cast aside amidst her derision. Here the Countess emerges from the froth, breasts glowing like Botticelli's Venus, and Shunsuke is limp and terrified before the goddess who invites him in. Brazen sexuality is terrifying to Shunsuke, and now we have something far deeper than swindling to set him on revenge. Meanwhile, Yuichi is angry at Countess Kaburagi because she will not permit him to intoxicate himself with his own splendor (p. 204). This is another recapitulation: the mirroring self-object refuses mirroring and brings jealousy and yearning. In other words, this recapitulates the archaic need to be affirmed and admired by mother, and it is only in this absence that a person becomes obsessed with affirmation by others and with his own narcissistic needs in adulthood. Only a person arrested in childhood would later feel deep disappointment that a lover would not allow one narcissistic intoxication (the fantasy of kissing himself), as though this were her only purpose and she had no needs or intoxicating qualities of her own. Revenge against mothers, against women, against rejection and humiliation, are achieved most dramatically (and perhaps comically) when Countess Kaburagi arrives home early one day. She is hurrying to meet Yuichi and intends to surprise him as he waits in her sitting room. She wishes to gaze for just a fleeting moment at the beloved image of Yuichi, from a surfeit of love, to see his "eternal form" (pp. 208-209). She ascends the steps quietly and peers into the den, as the latch is not hooked on the door. We are then told that after peering into the den, the Countess disappeared for three days without returning. Yet another primal scene, the Countess has peered through an opening clearly left for her (it cannot be an accident that the door is left open an inch or two, unlatched) and has been exposed to her husband fornicating with Yuichi. When Kaburagi is genuinely concerned for her, Yuichi vows further cruelty. A note from the Countess indicates she is contemplating suicide, but she comes to intensify her need for Yuichi. After all, aside from his physical beauty, she loved him only because he did not love her (p. 203). Thus, she loves him in proportion to his monstrosity (p. 214), a "whorish confession" and competition in which her vanity would rival his and undo humiliation by equaling his sexual licentiousness. She tries to save face and evade humiliation by claiming she is as immoral as he, that this shared immorality connected them spiritually. And she further adopts a maternal attitude, as one who has descended into such erotic sin,

176

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

supplying him with confessions of her misconduct, her painfully acquired wisdom, to endear herself to him. Though Yuichi feels victorious, he is still susceptible to his own narcissism, and Countess Kaburagi flatters him so much in a love letter that he actually believes he is in love with her (p. 222). He believes she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen and then enjoys the cruel thought that he does not love Yasuko (pp. 222-223). In other words, the Countess once again mirrors to Yuichi his fantasy of his own superlative beauty, and he loves her only inasmuch as she enables him to adore himself. Yuichi is rapturous and elated at such narcissistic inflation, so why his cruelty to Yasuko? One might expect his happiness to dissipate his rage. Here we must recognize that his sadism is the by-product of experiencing emotions that are pleasurable yet humiliating. It is not permissible for Yuichi to be happy or to expose his joy—these render him too vulnerable to others and to rejection. Hence, he must inflict violence even as he enjoys the idea of being loved. Here woman is once again split in two. She is the adoring loving feminine and the one punished (in displacement) for archaic feelings of rejection. Yuichi vacillates throughout the novel, alternately being sure he loves or hates Yasuko, alternately adoring or despising the Countess. He later returns to adoring Yasuko (pp. 274-275) while revenging himself on the Countess and Kyoko but must love his wife only from a distance, else the idealizing fantasy of her purity will be contaminated. In reality the woman does not matter. His rage persists and, when elated and flattered, idealizes the flattering woman as the most benign beatific goddess (even adoring the naked Countess; p. 368) while choosing another woman as the repository for his malignant hatred. In his idealization Yuichi even believes that he has loved Countess Kaburagi from the beginning. Of course, we know Yuichi is fooling himself, but Mishima actually informs us that his character is rationalizing (p. 224). Only after Shunsuke disdains Yuichi's love for the woman, proclaiming the incontestablility of the fact that women have no brains (p. 225), does the boy begin to question his own feelings. Though still rationalizing in order not to believe himself narcissus, he realizes that his idealized self is a fantasy: "I am not in love with myself. That is why I feel in love with Yuchan." He now understands his "love" for the Countess: "You like me; I like me; let's be friends—this is the axiom of egoistic affection" (p. 231). He then exclaims that he does not love the woman. But Yuichi's depletion is complex. He has not resolved his narcissistic needs. I le has recognized that he fell in love with a fictional alter ego and thus is reminded of how much he truly loathes himself. Mishima's insight into narcissism in this passage is unusual. Those ensconced in narcissistic illusions rarely perceive their beliefs are fantasies, or else they would derive no satisfaction from them. But Mishima imparts

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

1 77

a poignant insight about how depressed one can be when unable to sustain the crucial belief that one is beautiful and lovable. These feelings engender despair and the need for fictions in the first place. To suffer from an inability to obscure such reality may be excruciating, a depressive realism inflicting feelings of utter helplessness and shame (cf. McPherson & Lester, 1990; see also Gibbons, 1986; Sackeim, 1983; Sackeim & Gur, 1979). One wonders how much Mishima himself believed his fictions or whether he truly understood that his personae were only facades. Mishima writes of masks throughout his life and constantly tries to conceal himself, transform himself, escape himself. Yet, to what extent could he perceive or acknowledge that his martial and political philosophy may also have been facades, or clowning, as Stokes (1974) believed? Did Mishima commit suicide knowing it was a fantasy or a game, or did he try to convince himself desperately that his samurai persona was authentic? My suspicion is that he could not escape the feeling that he was humiliatingly repellant and ugly, no matter how much he transformed himself physically, and that his literature expresses this despair (and rage) repeatedly. We will return to this theme intermittently as we delve into his other fictions. But this one passage in Colors is critical. At least in principle, Mishima was too aware that the alter self is not real. Yuichi is not the only character in the novel to have fictional personae. He is the only one to be aware that his desired self is a fantasy. Shunsuke, the Kaburagis, and others believe others misperceive them, but they are identified with their own egos and thus never perceive their selfdeception. They believe subjective experience of the self is the real self, but this is also a fiction. What one believes about oneself is not necessarily (I might say even rarely) what one really is, and one invents fictions to protect oneself, inflate one's self-esteem, attain admiration from others, or elude shameful recognition. This is why certain Buddhist texts call the self a fiction, why Ferenczi could call character traits "secret psychoses" (1925; cf. Becker, 1973; Leifer, 1997). The ego is its own trickster. If Yuichi can realize this, he may be stricken by despair, but on the other hand, it is also the only genuine possibility of escaping the network of mendacious vengeance in which all others in the novel participate in one way or another. Nevertheless, though Yuichi realizes "Yuchan" is a fake and that his love emerges from being flattered, he does not cease the cycle of inflicting vengeance and humiliation on others, engaging in further liaisons with men and women. He breaks up with Kaburagi, lets the vile man profess his eternal love in desperate humiliation and kiss his shoe before fleeing in terror of the man's carnal ardor (pp. 240-241). Shunsuke is now covetous of Yuichi, enraged, and jealous of the beautiful boy's affairs. Now that Yuichi is no longer his pawn, Shunsuke's desire renders him helpless and dependent. He feels that recently he is the puppet and Yuichi the puppet master (p. 244). Yuichi is the source of his abysmal sense of im-

178

The Madness and Perveision of Yukio Mishima

potence (p. 248). Shunsuke feels the anguish of being "ousted" (p. 250), which again recapitulates innumerable primal scenes where the desirous voyeur is excluded from the intercourse he craves. In a letter to Yuichi, this aged decrepit man "dripped oaths, gushed hatred" (p. 251). However, incapable of confessing his anger at his love object for fear of irrevocable abandonment, Shunsuke directs his rage toward the vagina. Yuichi's previous realization only encourages him to evade culpability for his actions, as they are independent of his real self. Indeed, he derives an almost voyeuristic satisfaction from perceiving the desires of others for that beautiful body: It was as if his flesh had gained independence from itself, which he, in a second body, admired. And as his soul violated and disgraced his primary flesh, it tried to preserve a feeble balance, clinging to that admired flesh all the while; he was in this moment discovering a rare worldly pleasure, (p. 344/248) This is a repetitive scenario in Mishima. If the narrator of Confessions fantasizes being Omi while masturbating, the quintessential Mishima protagonist treats his body as a separate object of erotic arousal (and punishment, as the real and despised body is split, sequestered, violated, disgraced, and trampled). Yuichi (one may even say Mishima himself) cannot relinquish the need for images reflecting his beauty. Yuichi is still entirely narcissistic and incapable of escaping this "prison" of mirrors that holds him captive (p. 279). As I will argue throughout this book, such voyeuristic fantasies attain the erotic gratification of loving himself, transcending the loathed self, eroticizing the transcendent fantasy of beauty shed of its ugliness, and murdering the ugly self. Further, I want to remind the reader that this is fundamentally Mishima's fantasy in suicide. Though Yuichi momentarily feels joy in his amorous intercourse with Kyoko, the conclusion to their night of "indisputable perfection" finds the woman waking to the touch of a cold hand protruding of bones, the skin dry like tree bark, the veins hollow bulges pulsing faintly, the carcass beside her coughing death (p. 268). While she was asleep and dreaming, Yuichi slipped off while Shunsuke entered her bed and fulfilled his plot for revenge. Even here, however, amid Kyoko's humiliation and anguish, the fragmentation of her fantasies, Shunsuke is unable to escape his feelings of ugliness and impotence. He is convinced no one could love him. Though he momentarily experiences the pleasure of taking on the guise of Yuichi's youth by replacing him and hearing Kyoko mistakenly call him Yuchan (p. 280), he cannot absorb the beauty or feeling of being desired. I le reigns now with a horrible power, yet it amounts to no more than the conniving of a person who is not loved (p. 271). For his part, Yuichi feels no pangs of conscience whatsoever (p. 280).

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

179

The tension in this novel, especially as it nears its denouement, is in the barely nascent awakenings Yuichi experiences. He is often on the verge of having a conscience, of genuinely caring, of perceiving a world outside himself and feeling empathy for the needs of others. The moment of his child's birth is especially germane. Yuichi initially succumbs to revulsion for the birth process, then reacts misogynistically to female flesh exposed: There was something grotesque about her pale, swollen, unpowdered face.... (p. 397/287) I will witness my own child born from an unquestionably disgusting object.... (p. 398/288) Yasuko's lower body moved like a retching orifice, (p. 404/292) But Yuichi sees himself in this ugliness and recognizes a kinship with a life of his flesh but not one whose existence merely mirrors his own needs for affirmation of beauty: Confronted by this mute crimson flesh, he looked at its moist surface, his unremitting self..,. But this bare, crimson flesh was not alone. It was coupled with the scarlet flesh that no doubt existed within Yuichi's own flesh, (p. 405/292) At this time, however, Yuichi's heart, which weighed the pinnacle of suffering in his wife's face against the part of her that blazed a scarlet red and was once the origin of Yuichi's hatred, underwent a transformation. Yuichi's beauty, which had been consigned to the admiration of both men and women, which had seemed to exist only to be seen, for the first time recovered this function for itself, and now, at this moment, existed solely to see. Narcissus forgot his own face. His eyes confronted something other than the mirror. And in this way, gazing at extreme ugliness became equated with looking at himself. Until now Yuichi had been conscious of his existence only when he ''was seen" exclusively. Ultimately, awareness of his own existence resulted from an awareness of his being seen. The youth was enchanted by this consciousness of a new existence, an irrefutable existence in which he was not seen. In short, it was he himself who was seeing, (pp. 405-406/293) And the child is named Keiko (hope). Nevertheless, Yuichi perceives the child as a half-dead thing (p. 294). His moment of ostensible transformation somehow dissipates. He returns to his unempathic narcissism, continues his liaisons. He is still childish and self-centered (p. 367). Why does Mishima take us through the vacillations and pretensions of transformation when Yuichi only inflicts more misery as the novel draws toward its conclusion? The transformations are not in any spiritual or moral development but

180

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

in the reversals that beget Yuichi's independence from his surrogate father, who descends into dependent misery. But like Shunsuke, Yuichi's independence is not freedom or mastery. There are indications he will wane like Shunsuke, finding himself miserable, aged, rejected someday. This subtle change is indicated in his relationship with a boy named Minoru, a younger doppelganger who replicates Mishima's dreaming adolescents fantasizing about their tragic heroes. Minoru continually imagines Yuichi as the perfect warrior who will die tragically on the battlefield, stricken down in aesthetic apotheosis: For Minoru, Yuichi was a vision of the hero in many action films and the daring youth of adventure stories. Minoru saw in Yuichi everything that he had long wanted to become. . . . In a dream one night, Minoru saw himself with Yuichi on a battlefield. Yuichi was a beautiful young officer, Minoru a beautiful boy sentinel. Together they took bullets to the chest and died in each other's arms, kissing all the while. And there was the time when Yuichi was a young seaman. . . . To some extent, Yuichi, too, had been infected by such tendencies of youth, (pp. 453 454/ 326-327) And like his elder doppelgangers, Minoru is virulently misogynistic, echoing Shunsuke and Yuichi (not to mention the adolescents in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, as we shall see): he disdains women, argues that all they have creased between their legs is a stinking, soiled pouch crammed with refuse (p. 328). On days when he is anguished by selfloathing, Minoru too prays that war will commence once more as he dreams of the vast metropolis bathed in a holocaust. He feels that he might meet his dead parents and sister again in the midst of that inferno (p. 321). Like the narrator of Confessions, Mizoguchi of Temple, and Noboru of Sailor, this youth despises himself, exacts punishment on others for his selfloathing, and wishes for holocaust. He is another Shunsuke or Yuichi, inflicting violence on others specifically in response to feelings of loss and self-hatred. (The fantasy of uniting with loved ones in death is also a crucial element of the fantasy and is implicated in Mishima's own suicide.) This symmetry is not only Mishima's ceaseless repetition of these sexual and hostile dynamics but a revolution, a metempsychosis that portends the inevitable conclusion to Yuichi's aspirations. There will be no happy ending for a person trapped by his own cruelty and narcissism, and he will not even die a tragic, beautiful death. The novel comes to a close. In Yuichi's moments of clarity, he realizes that a narcissistic existence leads only to corruption, and he decides to return the money given him by Shunsuke (p. 389). But Yuichi's power as one who sees is soon lost. He falls under the spell of being seen and realizes in terror that the Yuichi observed is a dream of beauty, a transient aesthetic he does not possess (p. 398). It will leave him. The other Yuichi,

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

181

the shell and mask of his beauty, will be loved in other youths. Yuichi's identity is baseless, as it depends on the ephemeral. They do not desire him but a beauty he wears temporarily, and no one really loves him. Transition is Mishima's desperate concern, too aware that he will melt and resolve into a decrepit sullied carcass like Shunsuke. This is why suicide is Shunsuke's escape from the humiliation of impotence and decay, the consequence of realizing that one's sadism and cruelty have only exhausted oneself and exposed one's misery. Shunsuke is a living ghost who perceives the world as a mausoleum, perceiving the surface of the blue horizon flowing with a vision of corpses lying in heaps (p. 312). Here is a passage that applies to Mishima as much as his antagonist: Suicide might be called death through action. A man cannot be born of his own will, but he can will to die . . . in death, the action known as suicide and the expression of all that is life can occur simultaneously. Expression of the supreme moment must wait for death, (p. 569/400) Shunsuke poisons himself before Yuichi can return the money and declare his independence. Revenge is attained by depriving the youth of his independence, forever ensconcing him in the wickedness of manipulation and prostitution. Yuichi feels bound to Shunsuke even in death, marred by his failure to extricate himself. Shunsuke even leaves his fortune to Yuichi. But he does not refuse it. His solution is not to love others or forgo sadism but to shine his shoes. None of this will change the fact that he will also be hurled with dreadful suddenness into the ugliness of old age (p. 304): How insignificant is the death of the flesh, Compared to the unbearable death of youth? (p. 486/350) One more decay of the angel. P O S T S C R I P T O N SETTING M I S H I M A ' S HOMOSEXUALITY S T R A I G H T There has been a certain amount of cantankerous debate as to whether Mishima was actually homosexual. Indeed there has been categorical denial by his family and friends, one of whom wrote a 500-page book trying to discredit the reputation of Mishima's homosexuality. This is fairly preposterous since Mishima continually evidenced explicitly homoerotic and obsessively sadomasochistic fantasies, not to mention poignant scenarios of evanescent and unfulfilling attempts at love. However, Nathan (1974), Stokes (1974), and Keene provide ample evidence that Mishima did pursue various homoerotic relationships or encounters. Stokes claims that

182

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

Mishima's private life during the writing of Forbidden Colors resembled Yuichi's. He patronized the Brunswick in Ginza (the gay bar inspiring Rudon's in the novel) (p. 103; see also Nathan, 1974, p. 105). According to a member of the gay community who knew Mishima, the author favored both the tender intellectual student as well as the "swarthy, hirsute men, gangster types" (Stokes, 1974, pp. 266-267). Nathan writes of Mishima's "unabashed homosexuality" during his stay in Rio, where he would regularly bring young boys of seventeen or so, the kind who would hang around in parks (p. 112). In Paris he asked a friend to take him to "a bar for pederasts" (p. 113). I remember Donald Keene telling me how he accompanied Mishima to the airport en route to a liaison with an American man despite Mishima's fear of flying (Keene mentioned how humiliated

Mishima's wife Yoko appeared at his send-off).12 Jiro Fukushima (1998)

recently published a book detailing his homosexual relationship with Mishima, describing how a young, frail Mishima would shiver nakedly in his arms. Of course, the Hiraokas sued to censure its publication (and won). And so on. Does it actually matter? One is still amazed that today anyone might care enough to express anger, disbelief, or disapproval. As Stokes said to reporters after the publication of Fukushima's memoir elucidating Mishima's homosexuality, "It's astonishing it's taken nearly 30 years for this louting] to happen. There's probably 100 elderly Japanese men here in Tokyo now who were his lovers" (Wockner, 1998). One would have assumed the dark ages of homophobia were essentially history except for certain atavistic niches of puritanism and ignorance (a psychologist has some things to say about those who are disturbed, offended, or frightened by homoeroticism as well). However, it does make a difference whether someone acts on impulses or fantasies or not. We all have erotic and aggressive fantasies we might not actually enact. Obviously there is a difference between fantasizing and committing adultery. I know a certain professor who gnashes his teeth and imagines slapping around a prominent verbally dyslexic politician bent on a crusade against the Middle East. But unlike this politician, this professor has no plans to actually harm anyone. Similarly, a person aroused by fantasies of sexual sadism is far different from the person who would actually rape and murder someone. This divide spans the boundary between ordinary and ubiquitous strata of perverse and violent fantasy and far more pathological, if not even psychotic, enactments. In Mishima's case, fantasizing about homosexuality is the imaginative reenactment of myriad conflicts over humiliation, abandonment, self-loathing, rejection, shameful mirroring, impingement, and the excruciatingly unsatisfied need for love, as delineated throughout this book. To pursue an actual physical relationship cannot but enact these fantasies, but we cannot conclude very much about the intensity or actuali-

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

183

zation of such fantasies. A person reenacting vengeance in fantasy may be a tender and inhibited person in practice. By contrast, it seems unlikely that Mishima ever enacted the kind of sadistic rapes and humiliations inflicted in his fiction (or by actual people during the rape of Nanking, for example, who behaved normally before the eyes of their society and acted like upstanding citizens. These far more normal and virtuous citizens stuck spears in women's vaginas and made fathers rape their daughters and so on, which Mishima never did despite his gruesome literary images). The available evidence no doubt supplies some clues, but we cannot be sure that those claiming to have had relations with Mishima are even telling the truth (one thinks of the many women who claim to have slept with Elvis after his death) or even remembering or interpreting accurately. Indeed we cannot say that evidence for his homosexual affairs confirms or defines his sexuality very much at all since not pursuing his fantasies manifests and captures his sexuality as well, his emotional withdrawal, his thwarted ability to feel intimacy, his intense alienation from himself, his immense difficulty in loving. To conclude, then, I will just say that there is an important difference between dreaming and acting—it makes an enormous difference that Mishima probably did not rape someone, just as it makes an enormous difference that he did actually commit seppuku—but the purpose of this study is to explore Mishima's psyche, his emotions and fantasies. His inner world expressed through his writing tells us far more about a profound soul than reports of his behavior alone, and it seems that ultimately Mishima enacted his most tortured and sensual fantasies on himself. NOTES l.Girard (1978) and his colleagues believe identity is always this unstable, being perpetually drawn to the mimetic (desired, admired) object and helplessly identifying with him. Though it is "normal" for people to identify with others throughout their lives, even adopting traits they find admirable, it is simply not the case that people identify with every source of power and charisma and are helpless to resist the mimetic urge to transform themselves and become that person. People this unstable are usually people with serious identity confusion or long-term drug addicts. In Mishima's case, I believe he was unsure who he was, being convinced of his trenchant ugliness and insubstantiality only and needing desperate substantiation by adopting alternate personalities. 2. Unlike Girard, I believe that the objects of desire are arbitrary but that the emotional gratification is not. While anything may be desired because others desire it, and this may set a rivalrous competition in motion, I believe the goal of the mimetic rivalry is of critical importance. Girard implies this but in stressing the arbitrariness of rivalry negates its function: individuals seek love, esteem, significance, and rebel against narcissistic injury, humiliation, and insignificance. Superiority over others may be achieved by possessing what they want, and this can

184

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

be anything from expensive china to a graduate degree. But the need to be better than others, attract their attention, admiration, and envy, rather than being an anonymous or hated nothing, is hardly insignificant. 3. Keene (1984) writes that "Yuichi is not an alter ego for Mishima" (p. 1193). He is certainly not a disguised representation of Mishima, but he is very likely the same sexual ideal and fantasy we find throughout Mishima's fiction. Keene also claims that the four principal characters of Kyokors House are not alter egos (p. 1201). One need not confuse an actual self with ideal, fragmented or stratified selves. The protagonists of Kyoko's House are indeed projected alter egos and need not be realistic, wholly ideal, or at all likable or desired selves to reflect the fantasies and confessions of an author. An author need not at all identify with a character for him to be an alter ego. 4. One may interpret the last sentence of this passage as meaning such suffering is indispensable for people to live, in Shunsuke's opinion. It is more consistent with Shunsuke's character to have no concern for how others live, except for his indispensability to them. Like so many Mishima protagonists, he despises others, holds them in low regard, and has a grandiose fantasy of being destined for greatness. It seems hardly likely that he would equate himself with those inferior mundane fools who do not understand him, nor would they be capable of that consummate poetic suffering reserved only for such grandiose people as himself. Narcissists have a romantic penchant for believing that no one can fathom the depths of their suffering, which separates them from the crude masses and makes the conceited suffering poet special. Indeed, should others also experience such consummate suffering, this would make Shunsuke indistinguishable from them, a debasement that would threaten his uniqueness and impel what Girard (1961) might call a mimetic rivalry in which similar others are despised competitors. Thus, Shunsuke is the poet whose romantic agony destines him for greatness, as his suffering leads to such beauty and profundity, without which art human beings live in unenlightened dejection. 5. These images abound in Mishima's fiction. In Colors, one may see such imagery on pages 98-101, 131, 205, 249, 286-287, 291, 329, 369, and 391 393. Such imagery intimates sexual desire, arousal, orgasm, alarm, chaos, nihilism, and destruction as well as the glowing embers and strata of homosexuality alluded in the title of the book and the passage on the colors of the sunset. 6. Clearly Mishima overcame the inhibition against effeminizing lovers through intercourse, and again, castrating anal domination is a theme that recurs in Mishima's fiction (in more and less explicit guises), from Confessions to "Martyrdom" and beyond. As suggested, anal intercourse may enact the fantasy of castrating and effeminizing one's partner, and in this section of Colors this is the anxiety. It may also be a desire as well. If one fears contamination by the feminine, this is the very feminine that denied love and affection, so the fetishistic aspect of homoeroticism is sex with a man to avoid the feminine one despises while unconsciously merging with that very feminine. The manifest appearance of the maleness of the object enables one to avoid knowing the desire for the feminine one loathes. The need for her would be repulsive, engulfing, and humiliating as well. One can then take revenge on the feminine to escape any shameful awareness or hypocrisy in needing her and having intercourse with her through the feminized man. Sadism toward men and women is an attempt to cancel passive emasculation

Homoeroticism, Schizoid Vengeance, and Misogyny in Forbidden Colors

185

and injury. This struggle is difficult to resolve, and though Mishima may have experienced a sense of power and less vulnerability to effeminization after he improved his body, the conflict between need, shame, and effeminization may be one of the painful obstructions that makes the homosexual love in Colors so ephemeral and frustrating. Futility and withdrawal are often the sad consequences, as Colors poignantly illustrates. 7.1 have treated of this topic in more detail in the chapter "Death, Repression, Narcissism, Misogyny," which appears in my book Death and Delusion: A Freudian Analysis of Mortal Terror (2003a). For discussion of the fear of death and misogyny in Buddhism, see my paper "Buddhism, Death, and the Feminine," appearing in the edited anthology The Psychology of Death in Fantasy, and History (Piven, 2004). 8. Recent studies in "terror management" have shown remarkable correlations between narcissism and the fear of death. Not only are those low in self-esteem more susceptible to the fear of death, but enhancing self-esteem diminishes the fear of death. I have treated of this subject more thoroughly in Death and Delusion (2003a). 9. Using the word "suicide" to describe orgasm has two connotations: first, that submitting to Yasuko sexually is death, and, second, that he experiences ejaculation amidst his fantasy of rapturously throwing himself on the ground before the boy he desires ("a dreamlike delight spurted") as oblivion and destruction of ego boundaries and therefore death and annihilation (p. 51). 10. Peterson (1979) notes that images of waterfalls occur repeatedly in The Sea of Fertility cycle, representing Buddhist images of awakening, time, death, and reincarnation (p. 307). Though the image of the dead dog in the waterfall must undoubtedly be interpreted in this way, Mishima also associates scenes of nature with death throughout his fiction, and thus the dog is, among other things, yet another spontaneous and inevitable mental eruption of death and decay in the presence of nature. 11. Donald Keene so informed his students at Columbia in his survey course of Japanese literature. 12. One wonders whether this was in some way the kind of humiliation inflicted so sadistically on women in Forbidden Colors.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 6

Impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Their white faces, powdered even more meticulously than usual for the occasion, were dappled in violet, as though some exquisite shadow of death had fallen across their cheeks. —Spring Snow, p. 6 This chapter further discusses the connections between rage, misogyny, impotence, and death in Mishima's fiction. In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Mishima explicitly associates the grand edifice with illicit sexuality, betrayal, and decay. The protagonist is disgusted by the feminine and obsessed with the insidious specters of benign and demonic women. He experiences rage and the will to debase the female body. He experiences impotence toward the women who remind him of his ugliness, while associating this impotence and maligned sexuality explicitly with the Temple. The Temple also represents his rage toward his weak and castrated father, the mother who betrayed him, and time itself, which ravages mortal flesh but leaves the gilded edifice intact. The Temple is also a transitional object, symbolizing death and salvation for the protagonist. Finally, the analysis examines immolation of the Temple in terms of misogyny and conquest of death. T R A N S F E R E N C E , IMPOTENCE, A N D R A G E The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is the story of a young stuttering acolyte who becomes increasingly estranged from his temple, at first imagining its transcendent beauty, then experiencing disappointment, as the Temple

188

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

is in reality merely pathetic withered remains of its former glory. But the acolyte finds himself mocked by the eternity of the Temple, which reminds him that he will soon decay and die. He succumbs to sadistic impulses, sexual deviance, and fantasies of revenge against the temple and beautiful women, whose seductiveness and rejection diminish and humiliate him. Finally, he incinerates the Golden Temple in cathartic criminal vengeance. Several key events inaugurate the narration and establish an intimate connection between illicit sexuality and impotence: an Oedipal allusion whereby the father and Golden Temple are connected in the narrator's memory and fantasy, the defacement of a sword's scabbard by the stuttering narrator, sexual rejection by a cruel beauty named Uiko, and the trauma of witnessing an aberrant primal scene. The novel opens with the immediate connection between the Temple and the narrator's father: Ever since my childhood, Father had often spoken to me about the Golden Temple. (p. 3) Must this be significant? Our narrator Mizoguchi never actually sees the Temple, but it is visible everywhere, and the image of the Golden Temple as his father envisioned it dominates his heart (p. 4). The narrator immediately connects this imagery with being a cripple alienated from the world, defeated by others, and struggling to free himself by revenge (p. 5). This is significant—dreams of beauty conjoin his experience of ugliness and malice. Mizoguchi entertains wishes for power and imagines wreaking punishment on his teachers and schoolmates who daily torment him (p. 6). From its inception the narration connects the son to the father to the Temple to rage at being a defeated stutterer. This immediately segues to the vignette where a beautiful male graduate from his school returns for a visit. Mizoguchi dons him the apotheosis of youthful heroic perfection (p. 6), standing above the admiring students like a blossoming magnolia above the tulips and daisies (p. 7). Mizoguchi's rage seethes alongside sentimental idealization and longing. When the boy teases him, Mizoguchi espies the sword hanging from his waist, his "beautiful ornament," and later engraves several ugly cuts on the scabbard when the boy denudes himself (pp. 8-9). Thus, Mizoguchi free-associates his father and the beautiful imagined Temple to his own ugliness and rage, immediately recalling a beautiful boy whose towering beauty also reminds him of his deformity. The Temple and the beautiful boy are thus coupled, and we have an intimation that beauty is both desired and profoundly despised to such a degree that it must be castrated like the scabbard hanging from the boy's waist— foreshadowing the very climax of the novel. The desired Temple is inherently connected to something (someone) despised. But why is the Temple so desired and perfectly imagined in the first

Impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

189

place? Is the need for beauty a response to his ugliness, or is his stuttering a response to something mysterious about the glorious Temple connected with his father? For the moment, we must skip a few scenes and return to them later, as the etiology of Mizoguchi's bizarre obsession with the Golden Temple, his need for revenge, and his stuttering are revealed only on the anniversary of his father's death, which reminds Mizoguchi of a scene so shocking that we can hardly believe it floats through his memory so casually. Mizoguchi reminisces on an event that transpired during the summer holidays when he went home from middle school. As there was a shortage of mosquito netting in their temple, Mizoguchi and his parents slept under the same net with a relative of his mother named Kurai. Mizoguchi remembers being awakened by the cries of a cicada and realizes the mosquito netting is shaking strangely, rubbing against the floor, causing the rough material to undulate spasmodically (p. 55). Mizoguchi comprehends what is happening and feels like a drill is boring into the core of his eyeballs. He realizes his father is awake, as his father suppresses a cough and places his hands over the boy's eyes so that he could no longer see his mother fornicate with Kurai, blotting out his vision of the hell he had seen. Mizoguchi is then returned to the memory of his father's funeral, where he recalls looking down on the dead face in the coffin and shedding not a single tear (emphasis Mishima, p. 56). This alters our understanding of Mizoguchi's relation to the Golden Temple dramatically. The narrative has led us to believe that the Temple represents the authority, oppression, and values of Mizoguchi's father, the feelings of anger and estrangement experienced by a boy forced to submit to the monastic tyranny of the Temple and a life decided for him. This symbolic connection permeates the text, and it is also consistent with Mishima's own traumatic relations with a father who abused and subjugated him (Nathan, 1974).1 However, this is not only a story of Oedipal defeat by father but rather the unfortunate trauma of Oedipal conquest. The novel expresses rage against invidious women and fathers too weak and castrated to put women in their place. This is a familiar scene in Mishima's fiction. As we shall explore in the chapter on The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, the adolescent protagonist is enraged that his mother domesticates her lover and reduces him to an emasculated buffoon. One is also reminded how the protagonist in Mishima's Forbidden Colors cannot act when he sees his wife enjoying cunnilingus from the milkman. The cuckolded impotent protagonist merely retreats into the womb of his house in emasculated defeat. Similarly, Mizoguchi's father in Temple can only suffer in castrated impotence while his wife copulates incestuously underneath the mosquito netting where father, wife, uncle, and child all sleep together. As Arlow (1978) notes, the image of green mosquito netting becomes

190

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

metonymous of the primal scene and appears intermittently to connote discord. I would add that this novel incorporates what appear to be several Dostoyevskyian themes and symbols. Like the yellow or green cracking paint signifying moral corruption, chaos, and incipient madness in so many Dostoyevsky novels, this mosquito netting connotes rage, jealously, disgust, imprisonment, impotence, decay, and death. In the climax of the novel, the same green mosquito netting is used to ignite the fire that consumes the Temple, signifying revenge against the trauma of witnessing the primal scene. In this sense the Temple must also be understood not only as the oppressive father he wishes to destroy but the castrated father he wishes to murder for being too weak to punish the mother for her fornication, too defeated to defend the boy against witnessing the primal scene and too helpless to maintain for the boy the cherished image of a masculine father.2 The Temple also represents the mother who castrated father and exposed Mizoguchi to corruption and terror. Mizoguchi despises his mother, and she is also connected to the Temple by her ardent wish that her son become the Temple abbot. Her wish becomes anathema because she is the corrupt, adulterous, treacherous, licentious castrator, and while her husband represents a castrated and impotent representation of the Temple, it is she who has violated and emasculated its sanctity. Hence, the Temple represents mother as well, and Mizoguchi's vengeance becomes parricide and matricide. Thus, when Mizoguchi imagines the Temple, he enacts a dynamic transference. He sees an authoritarian and castrated father, and he sees an adulterous and castrating mother. He sees the beauty that has abandoned him just as his family did, the betrayal that has crippled him, and the beauty that mocks him because he is an ugly stutterer. But he does not recognize that the splendors and evils of the Temple emanate from these feelings rather believing the Temple is innately endowed with these qualities. 3 THE GOLDEN TEMPLE, DEATH, A N D BEAUTY Consequently, Mizoguchi is plagued by death and futility. When finally embarking on his journey to see the Golden Temple for the first time, he feels that the train he boards is advancing toward the station of death and that the smoke filling the carriage has the odor of a crematorium (p. 23). Even as Mizoguchi fantasizes the eternal beauty of the Temple, about which he had dreamed so often, he experiences intense disappointment when it finally reveals its entire form to him (p. 24). Mizoguchi remembers that when he first actually saw the Temple, the shadow was more beautiful than the actual edifice (p. 24): No feelings emerged. It was no more than an old, tarnished, puny, three storied building. ... It impressed me not as a beautiful place, but rather with a sense of

Impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

191

discord and agitation. I thought, was beauty such an unbeautiful thing as this? (p. 28/24-25) Mizoguchi then compares the Golden Temple to a model resting in a glass case, pleased that the simulacrum is closer to the Golden Temple of his dreams. He muses that the model was infinitely superior to the actual temple, so fantastic that it almost "enveloped the world" (p. 25). The actual structure was a decaying edifice, the "pathetic remains of the gold leaf" describing images of a rotting corpse (p. 26, emphasis mine). The real Temple reenacts Mizoguchi's experience of the real world—as a putrescing structure that fails to conform to his idealizing fantasy. Mizoguchi can find nothing beautiful in any of this (p. 26). Consequently, Mizoguchi imagines the Temple in relation to death, as a beautiful alternative to his ugliness (p. 36), as a timeless immutable transcendent beauty beyond the loathsome ugliness of our protagonist and the imminence of decay. He imagines the corpses and blood that enhance the splendor of the Golden Temple (pp. 36-39). Mishima here paints a dramatic picture of the symbolic significance of monuments as expressions of the human striving to transcend death, decay, and impotence (cf. Becker, 1973; Brown, 1959; Rank, 1939). The pyramids, grand edifices, the Golden Temple, are conduits to immortality, the erection of eternal structures that will withstand time, allowing those who merge with its transcendence also to transcend time, death, and putrescence (Schiffer, 1978; Searles, 1961). However, Mizoguchi cannot merge with this transcendence, vacillating between his love and loathing for the eternal edifice. A central theme in this novel is the disgust and rage experienced in the awareness of human evanescence. Mizoguchi perceives the Temple and is infused with the awareness of its permanence in comparison with his transience. The eternity of the Temple reminds him ceaselessly that he will evanesce, decay, die, and putresce. Fundamental to Japanese aesthetics is the repose gleaned from ancient objects amidst the sad evanescence of transient beauty. The splendor of Japanese temples such as The Golden Temple before its immolation or the rock garden of Ryoanji in Kyoto require the weathering of time to enable viewers to experience a sense of numinous connection to the vastness of time beyond the fleeting moment. A shining new temple can feel like a facade, a vulgar imitation, which is why the rebuilt Golden Temple today shines brilliantly but is rarely a poignant aesthetic in the hearts of indigenous Japanese. With aged patina one can experience millennia in a still moment, experience together the passionate sadness of death and transcendence through intense beauty attained from time.4 But Mishima the author is enraged at the eternity that ridicules him and the transient body that decays. Not only does he revile agedness in his

192

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

fiction, but in life he becomes obsessed with maintaining a beautiful physique and finally commits suicide by ripping out his own guts before age can humiliate him with the ravages of decay. In Temple, Mizoguchi's salvation through beauty becomes alienation from such transcendent beauty because of his ugliness and all the symbolic meanings of the eternal structure. In his transference, the Temple signifies his parents, their crimes, and the primal scene, so the immortality of the Temple cannot be joined. Mizoguchi seeks love and solace from the Golden Temple, but its psychic significance returns to repeat his betrayal and humiliation. Though Mizoguchi attains momentary symbolic immortality through mythic identification (Campbell, 1962; Lifton, 1979), the Temple finally expresses his insignificance, puny impotence, mortality, and decay. This vacillation needs some elucidation. Fleeting psychological rapprochement by way of fantasy allows Mizoguchi to simultaneously murder and retain the beauty of the Temple rather than suffering the ignoble victimization of abandonment by eternity. At first Mizoguchi idealizes the Temple and fabricates a perfect mental image of its beauty. Its immaculacy is a denial of the maculacy of his own experience. Its beauty denies the ugliness of the world, of its betrayal and corruption, of everything disgusting, putrescent, impotent, and transient. The Temple becomes a "transitional object" in Winnicott's (1953) sense—meaning that it is a thing identified with the parents that magically becomes a source of security and love in the absence of the parents. It is a powerful, soothing structure mollifying Mizoguchi's anxiety over separation and abandonment. But more than that, the Temple is an image coveted passionately so that the psyche may be purified of its awareness of terror and disgust. The Golden Temple is invested with powers to protect, save, and rescue the self from agony and despair, awareness of evil, corruption, and death. 5 The eternity and purity of the Temple ensconce Mizoguchi in its womblike perimeter, nullifying the impurity of the outer world. And this is why the Temple must be pure. Mizoguchi avows that whatever happens, it is crucial that the Golden Temple be beautiful. He therefore ventures everything not as much on the objective beauty of the actual temple as on his own power to imagine its beauty (p. 19). Hence, Mizoguchi envisions the Temple like a beautiful vessel traversing the sea of time (p. 21). Thus, beauty transcends aesthetics. Beauty might be described as a source of pleasure, but it is fundamentally an antidote to suffering and ugliness. Something can be beautiful and uplifting, but beauty can also be a truly necessary means of transforming decay and death into meaningful experiences. Beauty can even be compulsive, as a symptom of an inability to tolerate the terror and despair of ugliness and putrescence. Mizoguchi must conceive the Temple as a reality split from the horror of the primal scene, the immorality and pathology of his parents, the repul-

Impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

193

siveness of his body, the inevitability of death—the ineluctable modality of the visible.6 Inescapable awareness of ugliness necessitates beauty as its antidote: I could not but feel dissatisfaction and irritation at the thought that such a thing as beauty could come into existence unbeknownst to me. If beauty did truly exist there, my existence was a thing estranged from beauty. The Golden Temple was however never a concept for me. The mountains obscured it from view, but should I think of seeing it, it was something I could also go and see. Beauty was thus a thing that one could touch with one's fingers, and could also be clearly reflected in one's eyes. I knew and believed that despite all flux and transformation, an eternal Golden Temple existed unshakably. (pp. 2425/21) For Mizoguchi (and Mishima), transience is the problem, but evanescence itself is a complex revolving around alienation, parental betrayal, separation, and death. The Temple is an alternative haven, a source of security, amniotic bliss, paternal strength, and incorruptibility. The Temple was the surrogate haven to the realm of death ruled by his father (p. 22). Every real encounter with the Temple threatens his fantasy. Idealization is an attempt to isolate and purify a corrupt and dystonic image, and only by splitting the image can he sequester the Temple from the nauseating and corrupt influence of his parents, the primal scene, and their depravity. However, just as so many of Mishima's fantasies decay with the eruption of the repressed, the real Temple becomes oppressive, and his fantasy cannot sustain the immaculacy of the structure. Rage against the corruption of his parents and the Temple itself for having betrayed his idealization continually accrue toward the impulse to destroy the Golden Pavilion. This disappointment and rage are catalyzed by reminders of his alienation from the Temple. Mizoguchi has forged an imaginary similitude between himself and the Temple, a rapprochement and identification via the imminent destruction of Kyoto. Mizoguchi enjoys the fantasy that the Temple will be ruined (p. 42). Mizoguchi perceives the threat of destruction and now feels a sense of companionship with the Temple that might also be annihilated by war. The Temple is no longer immortal and no longer mocks him. However, the Temple survives the war, imploding his fantasy of similitude and reawakening the despair and rage of feeling puny and insignificant next to the immortal structure. His split-off idealized fantasy of the Temple gives way to the original rage against an eternal monument reminding him of evanescence, ugliness, and alienation from love. The Temple once more becomes the repository for Mizoguchi's displaced rage and trauma (cf. Bion, 1963, 1970).

194

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

THE G O L D E N TEMPLE, TRANSFERENCE, A N D FEMININE SEXUALITY Understood in relation to betrayal and the whorish mendacity of women, we can explain why the Golden Temple is explicitly connected with impotence and the feminine. Mizoguchi suffers the agony of his stuttering ugliness and impotence from the trauma of a perverse primal scene and moral corruption, and thus his impotence is reenacted and reevoked in his relation to feminine sexuality. We now understand why Mizoguchi is haunted by the image of Uiko, an impetuous beauty from his village who rejects and laughs at him. In her brief appearance in the novel, Uiko derogates and mocks Mizoguchi, and she is finally killed by authorities after harboring a criminal. Despite her fleeting appearance, Uiko haunts Mizoguchi throughout the novel far after her death, as he hallucinates her face in every woman he encounters and experiences immense anxiety, confusion, even impotence and rage. Uiko is thus a tangible symbol and displacement of sexual rejection and castration. Uiko is yet another Mishima beauty who repeats the experience and fantasy of insidious feminine sexuality and cruelty (Piven, 2002, 2003a, 2004). As I have sought to demonstrate, Mishima's own childhood generated the equation of the feminine with death. Mishima spent his childhood and youth under the tyrannical auspices of this diseased, mad, hostile, histrionic woman who controlled his every movement and every orifice. She is the poisonous object he was forced to swallow, trenchantly inculcating self-loathing, rage, and the need for revenge, an internalization so insidious one might actually conceive physically ripping it from the body in the desperate fantasy of solace. Mishima meanwhile pined for his beautiful, innocent, victimized mother (Nathan, 1974). Thus, so many Mishima novels are permeated by hostility toward insidious, emasculating women, while the image of the idealized, purified feminine becomes the fantasized antidote split and protected from the toxic introject (cf. Eigen, 1999; Kohut, 1977; Lederer, 1968; Rheingold, 1967). In Temple, the lovely Uiko is the sexual ideal sought to efface the hostile visage of Mishima's psychotic grandmother by splitting her evil from the benign beauty of Mishima's mother. However, she too is infused with emerging repressed evil. When Mizoguchi steps in front of her bicycle to waylay Uiko and get her attention, she simply laughs at his inept sexual audacity and leaves him in the dirt: "'Good Heavens!' she said. 'What an extraordinary thing to do. And you only a stutterer!'" (p. 12). Mizoguchi is humiliated even before she says anything, anticipating sexual rejection and disgust: . . . she only looked at my mouth. She was probably, in the darkness of the dawn, looking at that wiggling, worthless, dark, small hole, a dirty, ugly small hole like

Impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

195

the nest of a small wild animal; that is to say, she was looking only at my mouth. And, convinced that no power was emerging from my mouth to link me with the outer world, she felt reassured, (pp. 12-14/12) Mizoguchi's mouth is both fetid and powerless—soiled and impotent, a symbol of sexual trauma whereby speaking means expressing the most detestable, disgusting, unwanted feelings that contaminate the organ wishing uttering them and also render it shamefully impotent to act or copulate, like his own castrated father. Or, to put it another way, his mouth became a container for all the excrement forced into him, an experience so traumatic he became impotent and speechless (cf. Bion, 1963). The anality of Mishima's language is striking here, and one wonders whether the mouth not only is the container for the (metaphorical) excrement of others but represents Mishima's profound disgust with the human body. Via such imagery of being soiled, ugly, and repulsive, the mouth becomes the displaced rectal opening violating and humiliating narcissistic fantasies of bodily beauty and integrity. Before the beautiful Uiko, his writhing mouth can only contort and humiliate its owner. The name "Mizoguchi" literally means "ditch-opening" or "ditchmouth," the entrance to a trench. Mizoguchi is represented by his mouth, and his name describes its significance as a locus for dirt, refuse, a physiogeographical scar. The name also sounds like the Japanese word "mitsukuchi," which means "harelip." It is not likely an accident that Mishima chose a name that evoked the labial deformity of his hero. Not only does Mizoguchi evoke a sense of misshapenness and ugliness, his name connotes the psychological aberration resulting from his trauma, in which the mouth becomes a mutilated container and speech an impotent, guttural, futility. The alternative fantasy for Mishima is a beautiful mouth with red, moist lips, a description used repeatedly for the sensual boys to wTiom he is drawn sexually. In Forbidden Colors, the manipulative, physically perfect homosexual hero Yuichi ever exposes these beautiful moist lips to the men who crave him. In Confessions of a Mask, the narrator dreams of murdering young boys and kissing the moist warmth of their lips as their penetrated bodies writhe spasmodically. In Spring Snow, the frail protagonist Kiyoaki has such lovely effeminate lips that his father is unnerved and has a premonition of tragic death. In Temple, sensitive and naive Tsurukawa possesses such moist beautiful lips, and it is surely no coincidence that Mishima has his delicate fantasy killed tragically. Just as the feminine and the Temple itself are split into insidious and ideal aspects, the mouth itself becomes a split part object signifying either soiled shameful injury or pure sensual beauty. 7 Thus, in contrast to the sensual lips of youthful erotic objects in Mishima's fiction are instances of aged, disgusting mouths displayed by char-

196

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

acters such as Shunsuke in Forbidden Colors and Imanishi in The Temple of Dawn. Both of these senescent, decrepit figures possess cavernous dirty orifices, and it is also no accident that Shunsuke witnesses his wife receiving cunnilingus from her lover—a labial intercourse and pleasure that he surely could (or would) not provide and from which he flees in impotence. 8 Facing insidious women, the mouth is a disgusting, shameful aberration. Mizoguchi's reaction to Uiko is significant. He feels petrified, turned to stone (p. 11). Mizoguchi is paralyzed and impotent, but one wonders whether such lithic rigidity also symbolizes erection. As Freud (1922) says of the Medusa, paralysis represents castration as well as erection, and certainly Mizoguchi's exhibition is the attempt to recover and expose his own erection. His paralysis may well imply not merely the sexual attempt but an erotic pleasure in castration by Uiko, a masochistic need to repeat the trauma of impotence caused by his mother (cf. Cooper, 1988; Dorpat, 1982; Reik, 1941; Socarides, 1988). Paradoxically, this implies that being debased by a castrating woman can be arousing. 9 It is a psychological repetition working to transform the most painful agony into something soothing and erotic. Uiko suffers a gruesome death as she is shot in the back attempting to help her criminal lover. While Mizoguchi is once again Mishima's voyeur, the "onlooker," Uiko engages in "betrayal" (p. 15, emphasis mine). Uiko's transgression is a conduit for Mizoguchi's transference fantasies, and the crime and betrayal of the primal scene are evoked in Mizoguchi's perceptions. Consequently, Mizoguchi despises women, and as the object on whom transference fantasies are projected, Uiko must also be despised and murdered—but he is too impotent to carry this out himself, and her death is accomplished with a fictive deux ex machina—she is shot in the back by the authorities. For Mishima, her death is the culmination of transference reenacted within fiction. This death has important strategic significance for Mishima. It tinges Uiko with uncanniness, rendering her a traumatic and haunting memory. Her murder does not kill her; she inhabits Mizoguchi's memories and fantasies like a Shiryo possessing innocent female victims.10 As both literary strategy to evoke her presence in Mizoguchi's relation to women and the Temple and in Mishima's own fantasies, Uiko is a feminine presence evocative of death and evil. She is an erotic revenant and internalized object perpetually mirroring sexual inadequacy, impotence, and insidious feminine rejection derived from Mishima's infancy, just as Mishima repeats his own past and experiences the infusion of the evil feminine in all women no matter how benign, Uiko must be murdered so her ghost can haunt Mizoguichi's psyche. In fact, Uiko is a repetition of Mizoguchi's corrupt mother, just as such figures in Mishima's fiction recapitulate his own past. Mizoguchi believes

Impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

197

he sees Uiko everywhere, misperceiving other women in traumatic repetition and wish fantasy. Such hallucination enacts Mizoguchi's sexual wishes for Uiko, but this sexual arousal simultaneously derives from the need to abreact and punish the insidious feminine who adulterated his experience of motherhood and invoked masculine impotence. Desire for Uiko is not mere erotic desire but aggressive and debasing desire (Kernberg, 1992). Mizoguchi wishes to gain sexual potency where it was inhibited, to intercede between Uiko and sexual rejection to gain attention and mastery where alienation and impotence reigned previously. Further, the hallucination of Uiko on other women is a degradation of those women, not just wishful thinking. Mizoguchi cannot help but see all women as ghosts of the feminine who rendered him (and his father) impotent, but besmirching women with Uiko's image damages their reality and identity. It forces all women, no matter how kind, to be mere repetitions of insidious, unfaithful, castrating females. All women become recipients of his transference. SPLITTING THE FEMININE A N D THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED Mishima inserts the figure of an immaculate, beautiful, and maternal women into his narrative to express precisely this dynamic transformation of purity into impurity and death. Mizoguchi accidentally spots a mysterious and pitiable woman at the Nanzen temple who offers her white breast to her lover. She stands in stark contrast to Uiko and Mizoguchi's mother. She is described as a gorgeous young woman of perfect elegance who makes Mizoguchi and his companion Tsurukawa wonder whether she were truly alive (p. 51). The scene is disturbing to the unwitting voyeurs: .. . the woman abruptly loosened the nape of her kimono. I could almost hear the sound of the silk drawn from beneath her stiff sash. White breasts appeared. I held my breath. The woman cupped one of her white full breasts in her own hand. The officer held out the deeply, darkly colored teacup, and knelt before the woman. The woman fondled her breast with both hands. White warm milk spurted out, into the moss colored green tea foaming inside the dark teacup, leaving drops behind, to settle on the tranquil surface of the tea clouded and foamed by the milk, (p. 56-57/52) This is erotic but uncanny and insinuates a forbidden tinge to the scene. It expresses feminine beauty, sacrifice, vulnerability, and purity. But it also implies incest. Not only is the lover drinking the milk usually offered to her infant, but Mizoguchi watches the scene as an unseen but invasive participant—yet another pervasive image in Mishima's fiction. Arlow

198

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

(1978) believes this is a primal scene fantasy, and looking passively does repeat the trauma of having witnessed his mother copulate incestuously, after which reminiscence Mizoguchi stares at his dead father. I would add that the forbidden quality heightens the eroticism and its disturbing imagery. Amidst her purity and vulnerable absence of malice, Mizoguchi hallucinates the presence of his feminine revenant: "I thought that this woman was none other than Uiko, who had been brought back to life" (p. 52). I would also suggest that this is likely a fantasy and not an actual occurrence within the novel. Even when the shoji screens are open, it is not physically possible to distinguish human activity inside the Temple quarters from the Nanzen balcony with even a smidgen of perspicuity. Either Mishima is altering physics to create a scene or he is implying the hallucinatory predilections of his alter ego. After witnessing (or hallucinating) this scene, Mizoguchi is possessed by the fantasy for days afterward. Until he perceives this woman, Mizoguchi cannot imagine the feminine as anything other than the insidious sexual evil of his mother and Uiko, and thus even the most benign woman is distorted by his transference hallucinations. However, Mizoguchi is struck by her inhuman beauty and purity, and it is this cognitive dissonance, the conflict of the split images of the feminine forced into consciousness, that creates his confusion. His hostility and sexual desire, as abreaction of impotence, encounter the disturbing comfort of feminine purity and compassion. Mizoguchi meets this benign image of purity later in the text, finding that she has taught his clubfooted friend Kashiwagi flower arranging in a further repetition of her need for self-sacrifice. When Kashiwagi debases and rejects her, she flees in despair while Mizoguchi follows her through narrow alleyways, finally arriving at her apartment. Though Mizoguchi wishes to comfort her, he ultimately panics and flees from her. In the desire for feminine purity and solace, Mizoguchi pursues his ideal through a geographical umbilical passage and arrives at the womb. But it is this amniotic solace and purity that terrify Mizoguchi, for whom intimacy and the feminine are death, betrayal, and impotence. I le flees rather than contaminating the idealized purity of this feminine. However, his feelings of terror and sexual inadequacy fill him with rage toward the feminine, which must be expressed. Hence, he searches for a less benign, more contaminated feminine to besmirch and violate. Mizoguchi experiences the same transference hallucination when searching for a prostitute. The prostitute is the complete antithesis of the pure and elegant beauty offering her breast milk to her lover. Nevertheless, Mizoguchi still perceives her as Uiko. Once again the ghost of Uiko emerges as both haunting symbol of evil and impotence and derogating violence toward the woman whose face Uiko is forced on. This recapitulates a similar fantasy to the one seen in Forbidden Colors, where the de-

Impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

199

crepit, impotent Shunsuke mushes a No mask on the decayed face of the dead wife who betrayed him. The face of the feminine must be altered, violated, and revenged on. Mizoguchi forces no purity on the prostitute; his transference repeats the betrayal and rage of earlier experience, and thus his revenge is sullying every woman with Uiko's taint of death and evil. In both examples women are punished for being malignant and deceitful when they should have been immaculate. Pursuing a prostitute is actively attaining and despoiling the castrating evil woman who rendered him previously impotent. Hence, Mishima interpolates a scene where an American GI coerces Mizoguchi to step on the belly of a prostitute. A soldier brings a prostitute to the Temple and abuses her, delighting at the prospect of forcing the young acolyte to torture her. While the coercion illustrates Mizoguchi's impotent submission to power, his inability to defy authority, it also reveals his rage toward women. He begins to revel in debasing the prostitute, in revenging himself on women, in experiencing them as dirty whores who must be punished at the site of their fecundity. In crushing her belly, Mizoguchi punishes the womb and enacts vengeance on the feminine. This act is a conduit for his transference, his rage against the whorish mother. And it also punishes the womb for giving birth to him, for being the source of suffering, the locus of sin, from which all evil and illicit impulses emerge. The womb further evokes anal sadistic rage against sexual and feminine impurity, the soft viscosity of carrion and messy fluids that are such anathema to Mishima in his drive to escape the excrescences and boundariless enmeshment with the diseased and vile feminine of childhood. Woman is decay, death, and putrescence to Mishima (cf. Beauvoir, 1949; Lederer, 1968; Piven, 2002, 2003a, 2004; Theweleit, 1977-1978).11 A further component of this relation to sexuality and the feminine is Mizoguchi's fantasy that relations with a woman will inevitably sully the woman he joins. He further believes that any woman who loves him must be inferior. Thus, to avoid despoiling the split-off fantasy of the benign woman, Mizoguchi flees purity and commingles with prostitutes. Just as Mizoguchi flees benign purity and punishes the prostitute's womb, he also pursues sexual relations with a prostitute not just for sexual gratification but in debasing revenge. DEBASEMENT, DOPPELGANGERS, A N D DISSOCIATION This fantasy of debasing women is carried even further with the introduction of Mizoguchi's doppelganger as the expression of even more insidious and split-off hostility toward the feminine. Mizoguchi finds a sympathetic colleague in the clubfooted Kashiwagi, a cripple like himself

200

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

but with significant and sinister differences. This doppelganger is not afraid to debase benign women. The doppelganger becomes central to the narrative by mirroring Mizoguchi's ugliness while having rejected his shame through sexual violation. Kashiwagi is a veritable figment—for all we know he could be an imaginary friend—his significance is an alter ego whose sadistic exploits enable Mizoguchi to imagine himself aggressively potent rather than flaccidly and helplessly inactive. Though crippled, Kashiwagi defeats others by returning their gazes of disgust (p. 92). u As in so many of Mishima's novels, the gaze is an aggressive penetrating weapon that turns passive reception of violent invasion into reactive penetrative conquest. Voyeurism is phallic aggression, reactive vengeful rape, as well as an abreaction of abandonment and a forceful retention of objects (Freud, 1905; Socarides, 1988). Kashiwagi transforms his deformity into a weapon. Pity and disgust are evoked to get under the skin, to unnerve women, to take advantage of their shame and pride. His sadism defeats others before they have a chance to diminish him. I believe this is revenge against being seen and invaded by women, the fantasy deriving again from penetration by Mishima's grandmother, who would never let him escape her gaze or control. Kashiwagi explains that "to be a cripple is to have a mirror constantly under one's nose. Every hour of every day my entire body was reflected in that mirror" (p. 99). Grandmother's gaze was imprisoning and invasive, and she inculcated the deep conviction that Mishima was a sickly, weak, effeminate, easily destructible thing (Nathan, 1974). In Temple, Mizoguchi's mother laughs at the possibility that he might fight in the war, repeating the castrating diminution of his sense of masculinity, autonomy, adulthood, separation, and human value. Compare Kashiwagi's disgust over the inability to evade hostile derogating mirroring that reminds him of his ugly deformity to Mishima's own narcissistic beautification as compulsive panacea. In response to castrating mirroring, Mishima sculpts his body into an Adonis and even exhibits his masculine beauty in front of a mirror, as can be seen in numerous photographs (Hosoe, 1963; Nathan, 1974). Kashiwagi's supreme pleasure is transforming the pity of women into love and degradation. He comforts an old widow in mourning and then penetrates her sexually. He tells the widow that when he was born, Buddha appeared to his mother in a dream and announced that the woman who ardently worshipped his feet would be reborn in Paradise. Kashiwagi lies back naked and exposed, displaying himself and his deformity, and gets an erection. He sits up abruptly and pushes the woman over, raping her as she recites the sutras without resisting him. It is difficult not to read this as Mishima's fantasy of raping his own grandmother in revenge:

Impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

201

Before my eyes appeared a woman with closed eyes, in her sixties, a sunburned face without makeup.... My excitement did not subside at all... . There was nothing beautiful or holy about the aged widow's wrinkled face. However, the ugliness and agedness gave confirmation to my internal state that had no dreams. Without a bit of dream, who can ever say that however beautiful the face of any woman, she will not transform into this aged face? My clubfeet and this face, (pp. 108-109/101-102) Just as Mizoguchi sees Uiko in every woman, the face of an old ugly hag appears in every beautiful woman as the repetition and transference of Mishima's infantile trauma and catastrophic annihilation by his psychotic grandmother. Behind the face of Medusa, Kohut says, lies an unempathic cold (grand)mother who subjected her child to excruciating separation and abandonment (1977, p. 189). Kashiwagi is one more Mishima misogynist acting out the author's vengeful fantasies. But intimacy is dissolution: "I felt myself tumbling down endlessly into that apparition (of desire) and at the same time being ejaculated onto the surface of the reality at which I was looking" (p. 102). He is experiencing the anxiety of falling into the cavernous vaginal womb and being swallowed by desire. Desire threatens disintegration and fragmentation, the autistic-contiguous dread of dropping into an endless abyss (Ogden, 1989; see also Kohut, 1977). Ejaculation likewise is a loss of boundaries and a passive experience of helpless fragmentation. To make desire and pleasure manageable experiences that will not annihilate or shatter him emotionally, Kashiwagi must utilize his sexuality as an aggressive weapon that defies the ordinary yet traumatic loss of boundaries during love and sex (Kernberg, 1992; Reich, 1933). Once again, in accordance with so many Mishima characters, merger is annihilation and must be abreacted violently. The experience of sexuality as disintegration, coupled with his certainty of being scrutinized for ugliness, motivates tremendous narcissistic rage and the need for revenge. Kashiwagi's disdain for physical beauty and the hostility toward the absence of shame are illustrated in the following passage as he watches young students exhausting their energy practicing for their marathon: "Fools," said Kashiwagi. "That's what they are!... What on earth are they putting on that spectacle for? . . . What the public really should see are—executions! Why don't they put on public executions?" (p. 105) This fantasy of public execution appears elsewhere in Mishima's fiction. Aside from the sexual wishes of the narrator of Confessions, who dreams of slaughtering beautiful youths in public arenas, there is Imanishi's fantasy of the "Land of the Pomegranate" in The Temple of Dawn, where cou-

202

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

pies are executed publicly at the moment of orgasm. Such scenarios are intersections of Mishima's vengeful wishes to murder youth and healthy narcissism and his idealization of the body in reaction to immense feelings of being sickly, ugly, and shameful. Eroticization of murder expresses both rage toward beautiful people and arousal in the act of violence. Once again, sexuality becomes an act of violent domination and destruction over that which alienates and shames him. Murder at the moment of orgasm is a jarring invasion at the instant of purest vulnerability. Mishima's fantasies continually express the erotic joy in having his own orgasm while others are invaded and injured at the moment of deepest arousal and helplessness. Mishima thus murders vulnerability—his own helplessness—while engaging in that same masturbatory act of vulnerability as both observer and aggressor, thereby protecting himself and abreacting passive victimization and castration. Kashiwagi is the voice of that rage, and just as he rapes the old woman to inflict his shame on others and debase them, he wishes to execute everyone beautiful and happy. As abreaction of annihilation, death, and his own soul murder, Kashiwagi's daydream is one more Mishima fantasy that slaughters persecutory objects his grandmother and father—while displacing that rage away from his persecutors toward beautiful people (and things, such as the Temple) lacking shame and ugliness and further rationalizing those feelings consciously as philosophically superior utterances of an alienated and pitied cripple. Once again, this vengeance is directed primarily toward women. The protagonist and his double spot a beautiful girl walking toward them, and Mizoguchi once again succumbs to his transference, imagining the figure of Uiko (p. 109). The doppelganger pretends to fall in agony, berating the callous girl for abandoning him in decrepitude. She subsequently helps Kashiwagi (who now moves with "extraordinary ease") and takes him into her house for convalescence. Mizoguchi is horrified and flees in a dissociated fugue state, unconsciously moving in the direction of the Golden Temple, a "controlling force, a regulating force" (p. 111). The Temple "acted like a filter that transforms muddy into clear water." Mizoguchi calms down and thinks, "Beauty such as this could cut me off from life and protect me from life" (p. 111). This might be a repetition of the primal scene (Arlow, 1978) in that it evokes the passive and helpless observation of lovers abandoning the observer, but Mizoguchi's response is terror because his presence also contaminates the idealized purity of the girl. The Temple becomes the regressive surrogate womb and denial of postpartum reality rescuing Mizoguchi from phobic terror and allowing him to bask in its amniotic dissociative bliss. However, that same terror must also be the fear that one's repressed wishes will be fulfilled. Mizoguchi is enraged at his corrupt mother and wants to murder and contaminate her. His horror is the return of the

impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

203

repressed, and thus he is afraid not only of the benign feminine being sullied by the vicious medusal image but that his own rage and libido will contaminate his idealized and sequestered fantasy. He is afraid of himself, which is why the doppelganger is split between the ugly deformity who contaminates the girl and the other cripple who sides with the defenses and retreats to the amniotic and blissful fantasy of the uncorrupted womb by retreating to the Temple. Too much evidence exists to believe that Mizoguchi wishes only compassion for this girl—there is far too much rage at his mother, too much obsession with impotence, sexual conquest, and phallic violence and destruction. As of yet, he cannot acknowledge his feelings to himself and needs the idealized feminine, the safe womb of the Temple, because he is not brave enough to sever its umbilical connection. He is still too cowardly. Beyond fleeing from Kashiwagi's sadistic manipulation and maculation of the pure girl, Mizoguchi himself experiences the return of the repressed as he identifies the girl with the insidious Uiko—and it is this fear of the medusal castrating woman that sends him flying back to the Temple. He has imagined that similitude—it was not thrust on him. His own corruption of purity with rage and evil assaults him. However, the Golden Temple offers little solace, as he is rejected by its beauty and immortality. It reminds him of his ugliness and impotence, expelling him from its sanctuary and compelling the repetition of his vengeful, misogynistic fantasies, obsessive debasement of women through insemination. For Mizoguchi, erection is the denial of impotence through penetrating and violent revenge against women. It is women who rendered him flaccid and hostile, and only in sexual violation can Mizoguchi overcome his emotional impotence and feelings of having been betrayed. In the novel's denouement, the deranged acolyte finally burns the Temple to the ground in an act of ecstatically triumphant vengeance. To conclude, these dynamic relations to feminine sexuality are inextricably bound with Mizoguchi's experience of the Temple. Immolating the Golden Pavilion is the ultimate act of revenge against the feminine, of hostile vengeance against impotence and betrayal, the destruction of his internalized parental objects, the trauma of the primal scene, and his own psychological flaccidity. He annihilates his mother, his father, impotence, the coercive introject of his sexually inept father. Burning the Temple is destroying the womb itself, the symbol of the feminine, of the sexuality that has rejected and betrayed him. It is a symbolic repetition of crushing the prostitute's uterus. Mizoguchi enters the Temple from the rear and violates its sanctity. He ignites the green mosquito netting, symbolic of the primal scene, flees the fire, and emerges atop a mountain, where he smokes a cigarette in triumph. 13 He has immolated the eternal object whose gilded beauty reflected his evanescence, reminded him of his ugliness, deformity, erotic rejection, and the disgusting putrescence of his

204

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

own body. In raping and razing the Temple, he has revenged himself on betrayal, the feminine, impotence, and death. 14 These chapters have been psychoanalytic readings of Yukio Mishima through the novel as fantasy material. While each novel has been read according to the clues and tensions within the pages of the text itself, my reading accords with the deconstructionist notion that the author is also a text to be read (cf. Derrida, 1976). The life of the author informs the interpretation of the novel as the novel exposes the author. The question is what conclusions about the author one may safely derive from the novel since clearly every statement cannot be taken as confession. Thus, I have incorporated biographical materials from Mishima's life and thematic repetitions in Mishima's texts to emphasize those psychological issues that are salient in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Of course, there are vast complexities of Mishima's life and psyche that cannot be traced here. I hope only to have delineated the pervasive madness and perversion suffusing this narrative. What does one learn from this novel? I hope to have enriched our understanding of both Mishima and his work, but 1 believe Mishima has also exposed the reader to some disturbing psychodynamics of misogyny, humiliation, rage, and revenge. If we acknowledge the inherent complexity of these phenomena, perhaps we may still understand the kinds of annihilating and humiliating experiences that can result in impulses to violate and punish women. We may be alerted to the possible ways misogyny is displaced and reenacted through distorted perceptions of women, in the need to violate and humiliate them as a consequence of early traumatic experiences of shame and betrayal. We may also recognize how painful and infuriating it is to perceive one's father as defeated and impotent, how such agony may impel individuals to seek even inanimate objects as symbolic antidotes to helplessness, inferiority, and the fear of death. And Mishima has adumbrated the paradoxical consequences of seeking salvation through such fantasies, as feelings of humiliation and despair may arise in the presence of beautiful or eternal objects that mock our frailty and mortality rather than necessarily allowing us to attain symbolic immortality through them. In the next chapter, one of Mishima's later novels is discussed. It is his mature work, and yet it recapitulates the fantasies of an adolescent full of humiliation, rage, desire for vengeance, envisioning death and glory. But it also is a novel confessing a truly desperate need for love, wishing for love so madly but unable to acknowledge this to oneself. NOTES 1. Recall how during Mishima's childhood, his father would take him to the train tracks and thrust him near passing trains to terrify him. He forced him into

Impotence, the Feminine, and Death in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

205

submission, derogating young Mishima, during his son's adolescence breaking into his room and tearing up his manuscripts. 2. It is difficult not to see this excruciating repetitive theme as Mishima's own anger at having a father domesticated and emasculated by the family matriarch, the grandmother whose authoritarianism and madness sequestered young Mishima in her dark fetid sickroom until his own adolescence. For a complex analysis on disappointment in weak fathers, see Kohut (1971). 3. My use of transference here connotes the repetition of past relationships and perceptions such that these dynamics are displaced onto contemporary people and situations, even inanimate objects. The transference distortion enables these dynamics to reemerge so that unresolved conflicts can be acted out on substitutes without the subject having to confront his true feelings or the original people who hurt him. Mizoguchi reenacts his parental conflicts in relation to the Golden Temple and has no awareness that his feelings and perceptions are displacements. While he consciously associates the Temple to his parents, he is too immersed within the transference to perceive that his need for the Temple to be beautiful and his desire for acceptance cannot be reciprocated by the Temple, nor is he aware that his hatred for the Temple, which betrays him, and his feelings of sexual rejection cannot possibly emanate from an inanimate object. He has no idea that revenge on the Temple is vengeance against his parents, sexual violation, and humiliation. Rather, he sees the Temple as an obstacle to be destroyed for its own transgressions and evils. 4. Wabi expresses the deep satiety and aesthetic arrest of patina, the beauty of time, and mono no aware describes the profound sadness of fading splendor, the withering of a flower or the aging of exquisite feminine beauty. 5. The Temple becomes a soterial object, to use Laughlin's (1967) term. It is an external object invested with powers of salvation. 6. Compare the words used by James Joyce in Ulysses to describe the inevitable decay of all flesh. 7.1 might even speculate that the erotic attraction to an effeminate mouth represents displaced desire for the feminine, even a displaced desire for noncastrating vaginal labia. Mishima was terrified and disgusted with the feminine, and thus he needed a woman who would not castrate or violate him. Hence, beautiful boys were an erotic compromise. However, even this erotic beauty was the subject of violent fantasy, as Mishima continually imagined murdering young boys. The erotic act repeated his intense need to murder his sexual vulnerability as well. 8. This image combines the betrayal of the primal scene with labial sexuality— Shunsuke is disgusted by the vagina, but his own mouth is also an image of a disgusting orifice. 9. It should be noted here that this interpretation is of Mishima's fantasy about his protagonist and that I am not analyzing the stuttering or psyche of a character except as it reflects the fantasies of its author. In this sense it is important to distinguish between the motives of the character as intended by Mishima and the unconscious significance beyond what Mishima may have understood. Mizoguchi is a stutterer not because of the facts of hysterical conversion but because Mishima invented the connection between the primal scene and the trauma. Applying what we know about hysteria to Mizoguchi does not deepen the interpretation. However, reading Mizoguchi as Mishima's fantasy of sexual betrayal and trauma tells

206

The Madness and Perveision of Yukio Mishima

us about his conflicts and fantasies. Infidelity and helplessness are recurring issues for Mishima. Similarly, Mizoguchi's paralysis before Uiko is Mishima's repeated internovelistic theme of sexual impotence in the face of betrayal. Reading the repeated themes as fantasies deepens our awareness of this imagery, as Mishima returns to it and cannot seem to get beyond its trenchant impact. Mizoguchi is but one Mishima protagonist psychologically castrated by a dangerous, erotic, rejecting feminine presence, and consequently, she is intimately connected with rage and murder. 10. A // shiryo ,/ is the spirit of a Japanese woman who possesses others out of malignant jealousy and despair. 11. Mishima is not unique in his pattern of splitting women into angelic and demonic images. This characterizes Japanese culture in general whose imagery even today is replete with succubi, destructive whores, and rapist superheroes (cf. Buruma 1984)—not to mention most feminine imagery in the history of Western civilization. However, for purposes of this discussion, I am underscoring the specific fantasies and conflicts of Mishima, whose relationship with women, caregivers, and sexuality is vastly different from most Japanese. 12. The name "Kashiwagi" may be a satiric reference to the classic Tale of Genji (Shikibu 1008), where the hero of this name is extraordinarily beautiful. 13. He looks down on the smoldering Temple, deriving oral gratification from a surrogate nipple and phallus. 14. Far more could be said about Mizoguchi's motives and Mishima's fantasies about women and death. Space does not permit further elaboration of these themes here.

CHAPTER 7

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

A baby pheasant missing its mother A baby pheasant missing the wind, His crying voice, The crimson moon.

—Mishima, 1938

. .. the godlike boy rushed at him and buried his face in the arms outstretched to him and wept. A nightingale high in the tree wept too.. . . 'T had a child. A pretty little boy like you." —"Sorrel/' in Nathan, 1974, p. 29 The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea narrates the story of an adolescent who witnesses his mother consummate an erotic relationship with a heroic seaman. The boy admires the sailor but comes to despise him after he falls from grace by wedding the boy's mother and forsaking the sea. The boy finally rescues the sailor by killing him. In this chapter, I examine the novel as a fantasy derived from Mishima's immense rage over abandonment and betrayal, which have led to grandiose and vengeful fantasies. Voyeurism is a means of capturing and punishing abandoning others. Idealization of the father substitute enables the young child to identify with phallic dominance over the abandoning mother who made the child feel helpless, rejected, and inferior. Contemptuous grandiosity, the fantasy of being superior to others, derives from these feelings of insignificance and enables one to deny a desperate and shameful thirst for love. Disgust with vulnerability, the body, and death manifests itself in the vivisection of a kitten and finally the murder of the sailor. His execution redeems the

208

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

sailor from emasculation and the fall from grace, which have been catalyzed via domestication by woman. Death is redemption and perfection. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is a lucent window into the soul of a child furious over separation, exclusion, the disgust with women, and hostility over disappointing fathers. SEPARATION A N D I M M O L A T I O N The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is inaugurated by a bizarre opening scene: the adolescent Noboru is locked within his room, where he is terrified of dying. He is angry at his mother for shutting him inside, so he spies on her from a peephole while she masturbates. The novel opens with the young protagonist's anxious thought: what would his mother do if a fire ignited? (p. 3). Though he is thirteen years old, Noboru has been locked in his bedroom. This is apparently the pattern—Noboru is confined to his room at a bedtime decided by his mother, and he is helpless to do anything about it. He is infantilized, and though he is an adolescent and far from being a child so young as to panic if separated from his mother, he is terrified that he will die as the house goes up in flames. A significant beginning! Why would Mishima provide us with such a bizarre opening and such a distraught protagonist? As we have seen, anxiety over conflagration is a repetitive theme in Mishima's fiction. Fire represents both apocalypse and sexual discord. It is a signal of catastrophe and destruction, and Mishima's characters are often preoccupied with imagination of the fires following the bombing of Japan during World War II. Such ruminations on catastrophic annihilation not only recur in Mishima's fiction but generate ecstatic relief. Apocalypse is initially traumatic but becomes exciting and liberating for Mishima, representing the joy in vengeance and destruction most dramatically conveyed in the final holocaust just seen in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, where the protagonist revenges himself on beauty and eternity by burning the ancient temple to cinders. For young Noboru of Sailor, vengeful feelings occur immediately after Noboru experiences the humiliation and spite of being sequestered and locked in his room (p. 4). The narrative immediately connects anxiety over fire to the catastrophe of separation from mother and thus equates separation and death. For some unknown reason, Noboru experiences separation as the anxiety of cataclysm, of dying horribly as the result of rejection, which then generates feelings of humiliation and the desire for revenge. This opening scene repeats the dynamics of Mishima's alienation and fantasies of retribution recurring throughout his fiction. This is further reinforced by Noboru's connection of the anxiety of immolation to punishment for sneaking out of the house (p. 3). Separation is so dangerous and forbidden that one may be ostracized, locked up, and

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

209

consumed by flames as a result. More than the anxiety of mere separation from mother, this also represents the criminal consequences of freedom. We are given a protagonist who requires salvation from his mother, helplessness, and imprisonment. This is difficult not to see as a confession, a repetition of the perpetual threat and imprisonment Mishima himself experienced as a child coerced by his grandmother. As I have discussed already, as a child Mishima was confined within the sickroom of his histrionic grandmother, who forced him to remain quiet, in the dark, unable to play with dangerous male friends, forbidden to eat potentially dangerous foods (Nathan, 1974). Young Mishima was held within the room of the sick, decrepit, diseased woman who awoke screaming, holding a knife to her throat, threatening to kill herself, while the young boy was also literally sequestered from his mother for the first 12 years of his life and could see her only when grandmother allowed it. I have argued that it is impossible not to be immensely scarred by such engulfing, controlling, hostile, unempathic child rearing, commingled with the inundation of putrescent odors and the observance of ignoble decay, unable to escape from her disease. And thus it is no coincidence that Mishima explicitly connects separation from mother with anxiety, cataclysm, rage, and death in his fiction. SEPARATION A N D SEXUALITY Noboru's mother masturbates after locking him away. He then crams himself into a small chest and spies on her through a tiny opening between their rooms. Through his peephole, Noboru sees the passion burning in her eyes while separated from him, and this further anticipates an event of even greater sexual pleasure without him: mother's intercourse with a sailor. But this also requires us to pause and take notice. What pleasure does Noboru get out of watching his mother masturbate? There is nothing to indicate Noboru feels any sexual excitement. Rather, he is bewildered by her sexual pleasure. Whenever his mother masturbates, "eyes hollow as though ravaged by fever, scented fingers rooted between her thighs," Noboru mistakes her crimson nails for blood and trembles in fear rather than arousal (p. 7). Though she obviously pleasures herself, Noboru sees her vagina as a bleeding wound, not a font of pleasure. Sexuality is confusing and misperceived. This confusion may be interpreted as mere ignorance of the female body or even repression of his awakening sexuality, but nothing in the text suggests this. Rather, the significant (primal) context of Noboru's agitation is separation. This discord is repeated by the alarms and sirens resounding throughout the novel, as significations of psychological disorder. I would suggest that such agitating separation from mother, the com-

210

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

pulsive voyeurism, and the confusing advent of her sexuality are narrative repetitions of discordant experiences of alienation from Mishima's own parents. In line with Arlow (1978), this vividly evokes the symbolic discord of sexual exclusion. Clearly every fiction is a fantasy, though not every daydream, fantasy, or literary creation implicates the childhood trauma of the author. But Mishima repeats voyeuristic scenes of sexual exclusion with intense frequency, and this well accords with a childhood separated from his mother. Mishima intends—if I may use this maligned word—to draw attention to the adolescent's vastly atypical anxiety over separation—and his anger. The theme of separation and discord is illustrated by the simple statement that Noboru always came to his mother's room to whimper and sulk (p. 6). He returns to mother and the sheltering womb in times of agitation, and this is the security and love from which he is now excluded at night. This separation engenders voyeuristic motives, and Mishima writes that Noboru had begun spying on his mother at night, especially when she had pestered or scolded him. Not only ocular gratification in lieu of contact but visual invasiveness is Noboru's ocular rape and revenge after she has injured and humiliated him. On nights when she is tender, he never looks (p. 7). This accords uncannily with the psychoanalytic literature on voyeurism, which teaches us that obsessive looking signifies both the retention of the abandoning object and a vengeful invasion (Almansi, 1979; Freud, 1905, 1918; Lacan, 1966; Socarides, 1988). Voyeurism can also be a defense against castration anxiety, reenacting the traumatic visualization to achieve mastery. Noboru clearly exhibits anxiety, confusion, disgust, and anger at the sight of the female genitals, and Mishima has here expressed the intimate relation between disruptions of the relationship between mother and child and voyeurism, rage, the need to retain and punish objects, as well as the exhibitionistic desire to be seen, which manifests itself in obsessive looking. Thus again, rather than arousal, Noboru feels angry for being rejected and ultimately sees his mother's beautiful, erotic body as representative of pitiful emptiness, futility, and ugliness. On moonlit nights she dims the lights and stands nude before the mirror, after which Noboru lies awake for hours consumed by visions of emptiness and a grotesqueness that unfurls in the moonlight and suffuses the entire world (p. 11/8-9). 1 The sensuality of her body comes to symbolize his experience of chasmic woundedness, emptiness, and rejection. Misogyny and the disgust for the vagina are somatic metaphors for his anguish and rage. Here Mishima shows us that the hatred and disgust for the female body represent (among other things) self-loathing, anger, inferiority, the terror of death and catastrophic self implosion that emerge from the thwarted need for love.

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

211

RAGE A N D N A R C I S S I S T I C INFLATION Noboru is vengeful, but he is also humiliated and needs to fantasize his way out of hapless imprisonment. Amidst his voyeurism, separation from her body is associated immediately with fantasies of his genius and the despair that he could not defeat ugliness. Noboru immediately connects his genius with his hatred of fathers, the happiness he experienced when his father died, and then reminiscences of his mother's nakedness and masturbation. The body described by our author so sensually and beautifully rejects Noboru and creates ugliness and inferiority. Rejection diminishes him and motivates feelings of ugliness, fantasies of genius, disparaging evaluations, and vengeful impulses. However, despite his grandiose fantasies of genius, Noboru cannot escape awareness of his ugliness. This is also curious, and one is tempted to see this also as Mishima's confession. We often find that rejection entails the internalization of ugliness as displacement of rage away from the mother one needs to idealize. Instead of injuring the mother he despises for rejecting him, perhaps Noboru reflects a psyche that wishes to siphon hostility from the evil rejecting mother and place the evil on himself. By using himself as a container, one tries to salvage the ideal and pure image of his mother from contamination by his own rage. Though the fantasy often fails, resulting in spoilage of the idealized mother, he would rather blame and mutilate himself than lose his love object. It is difficult not to see this as a reflection of Mishima's own childhood, when the young boy internalized his own ugliness and inferiority while perpetually idealizing the mother who abandoned him. Despite her failure to rescue him, and despite the fact that she was truly capable of immense nastiness, Mishima yet considered his mother the paragon of loving motherhood. Until the end of his life he was devoted to her in a quasi-incestuous and adoring fashion. But the novel reveals the wrath beneath the idealization. His psychotic grandmother facilitated the mutilation of his self-image and the containment of his hostility by way of forcefully inflicting her anger and rage on him, and young Mishima internalized her demeaning, controlling diminution of his self-worth. Hence, Mishima novels are suffused with nasty, monstrous women who manipulate and belittle their sons alongside idealized, benign images. We have just seen in Temple of the Golden Pavilion how the femme fatale Uiko laughs at the stuttering protagonist who desires her and his adulterous mother fornicates right beside her son and husband. This ugly manipulative crone laughs at the prospect that her son might fight in the war. In Forbidden Colors, the aging novelist's wife receives cunnilingus from the milkman while her impotent husband watches helplessly. Even idealizations fail before the misogynistic rage that renders even the idealized mother a source of toxic nourishment and betrayal.

212

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

In Sailor, the beautiful woman of warm flesh and rosy nipples (p. 7) ultimately betrays her son not only by locking him in his room and pleasuring herself without him. Not only does she take a lover, but in the eyes of her son, she castrates her lover by domesticating him and making him an obedient weakling. This complicates Noboru's reaction to femininity. Noboru imagines his own genius immediately after being abandoned and diminished by his mother. Grandiose fantasies must be understood in terms of rejection, shame, and narcissistic injury, as the child inflates himself to counteract his helplessness, inferiority, and wish to merge with the omnipotent but rejecting other (Brown, 1959; Kohut, 1971). Rage and vengeance are also the consequences of this forced separation and rejection (Gilligan, 1996; Goldberg, 1996). This may sound Oedipal since Noboru contemplates her vagina, immediately despises fathers, glorifies his father's death, and then resumes his preoccupation with mother. But again her vagina is a disturbing mystery, a wound, a pitiable vacant house (p. 8) resonant with the emptiness and futility of the world. Noboru demands exclusive possession of his mother and the death of his father, but his anguish is over separation rather than sexual competition. There are wishes for the possession of mother that conceive fathers as hostile interlopers but not sexual rivals. Wishes for exclusivity are narcissistic exhibitionistic impulses demanding love and attention (F.dgcumbe & Burgner, 1975). And his experience of her sensuality is the fear and despair of inadequacy, disintegration, and ugliness. This is a further dimension of the wish to idealize his mother and render her a beautiful, sensual being purified by the reflective moonlight (p. 9). The vagina is cavernous and bleeding and threatens him with fears of inferiority and dissolution. While the anguish is pre Oedipal, the derogation of the female genitalia can also be considered a reaction formation against his own confusion and separation. The image of the bleeding, cavernous vagina may be a malicious derogation, but it may also represent rage against nascent sexual merger as well. This language is ambivalent, contradictory, desirous and contemptuous, terrified but mournful, and it is this blurring of emotions and fantasies that renders this such a telling confession. Mishima provides a boy furious over exclusion but terrified by immersion in globally suffusive vaginal ugliness. How do we get from a body naked in the moonlight to sexual repugnance so enveloping that it consumes the world and keeps an adolescent awake at night amid his dread? Under what conditions does a vagina consume ubiquity with terrifying ugliness? For a boy excluded from love, from the primal scene, and from the experience of a woman's body as a source of pleasure and comfort, the genitals will indeed become engulfing, representative of the placental suffocation experienced by a child tortured by a psychotic grandmother. Mishima was tortured by his grandmother, and imagery of merger with

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

213

woman as death pervades his fiction, as seen most graphically in Forbidden Colors when the cadavers of illicit lovers merge into a jellied mass of decaying flesh. The voyeuristic fantasy of Noboru instantiates the return of the repressed. His mother is an idealized feminine image, beautiful and sensual, not monstrous and insidious. Her cavernous, bleeding genitalia represent the emergence of unconscious images of woman's body as evil and engulfing. The idealized and benign feminine beauty cannot but be infected by some dangerous and sensual quality that transforms her into something lethal. Noboru's confusion and disgust with the feminine represent Mishima's own fantasy of idealizing his beautiful mother, but evil cannot but creep in and suffuse the feminine with vicious aspects. Thus, both childhood imagery of sinister women and rage over separation mar even the most comforting maternal fantasy with gashes, wounds, and engulfing orifices. Misogyny thus connotes rage over exclusion, the malicious response to being deprived of the mother needed to rescue him from death and annihilation as well as the livid response to the terror and disgust of immersion in engulfing, imprisoning disease. Sailor further intimates howhomosexual fantasies can reflect the anxiety, disgust, and rage inhabiting one's relation to the feminine. The love scene between Noboru's mother and the seaman epitomizes this eroticism. She lets sailor Tsukazaki into the house, hurries Noboru upstairs, and locks the door (p. 10). This repeats the separation and sexual exclusion. Noboru then angrily thrusts himself into the chest to spy on them, forcing his way into that cramped womblike structure in defiance of rejection (p. 10). When his mother disrobes, the sash unwinds with a sharp hiss, like the warning of a snake (p. 11). This is an image pervading Mishima novels, always presaging the immanent dangers of sexuality. A virtually identical image can be found in the novel Spring Snow. As Noboru's mother disrobes, her body exhales a musky fragrance the adolescent doesn't recognize. Noboru then compares himself with Tsukazaki, his rival, estimating his height. Noboru assures himself that the sailor is not such a big man, no more than five feet seven (p. 11). Finally, we read of the sailor's lovely body: Tsukazaki slowly unbuttoned his shirt, then slid out of his clothes. Tsukazaki seemed about the same age as Noboru's mother, but his body was far younger and harder than any landsman's, a body such as one cast in the forge of the sea. His wide shoulders were as imposing as a temple roof, his chest strained against its copious adornment of hair, knotted muscles like twists of sisal rope were revealed; he looked like a suit of muscular armor he could easily don or abandon as he wished, (pp. 14-15/11) Mishima was certainly attracted to sailors and lithe men of this kind, as is described in his autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask, virtually

214

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

all his other fiction, and his biographies (Nathan, 1974; Stokes, 1974). He is describing the male he wanted to be (and did become), instantiating the connection between his narcissism and homosexuality. In contrast to the bleeding, vacant house of his mother's genitalia, the erect penis of the sailor is far more arousing: Noboru gazed in wonder as, tearing up through the thick hair under the belly the lustrous tower arose proudly erect, (p. 15/11) More than simply homoeroticism, the transition from fear and loathing of the vagina to arousal in the presence of a beautiful organ intimates how the erect penis of the sailor is a denial of castration and vaginal engulfment, a symbolic expression of bodily intactness, power, and the ability to dominate women. The arousal experienced in viewing the towering erection of the sailor is identificatory in terms of the need both to combat castration anxiety, evoked by mother's bleeding vagina, and to express the phallic dominance of the noncastrated man who can copulate with a woman without being castrated by her. Noboru needs a hero who is not domesticated and castrated by woman, and it is difficult not to connect this imagery to the phallic narcissism in virtually all Mishima's novels and in his life as well. Exhibitionism is connected to that same anxiety and rage over separation, the need to see and retain objects, the need to be seen by the love objects that abandoned him.7 Thus, Noboru enjoys the grandiose fantasy of dominating his mother in defiance of rejection, castration, and abandonment, abreacting castration in a display of phallic dominance, displaying his huge intact erection in a way that seduces the woman who abandoned him and would not look at him. In his fantasy he becomes the object of his mother's desire and arousal, and instead of straining from a peephole to see her, she becomes the one who craves a look at him. Finally, Noboru's arousal by the penis is his wish for a powerful father who will not die either by woman or from his own weakness. Noboru wishes for mirroring and an object he can idealize so as to participate in the masculine strength of a father who will not be emasculated, vaginally absorbed, and killed. It should be noted that the description of the erection as luscious soaring temple tower accords with the imagery of Mishima's Temple of the Golden Pavilion. In this novel Mishima explicitly connects the Golden Temple to sexuality and erection, to phallic invulnerability, triumph over women, and an immortality immune to the effects of time, decay, and death. The phallus is here signifier not only of sexuality but of conquest over weakness and helplessness, over death and putrescence of flesh, which in Mishima's fantasies are all caused by the crippling influence of woman. The love scene concludes with the lingering cry of a ship's horn surging through the open window and flooding the room (p. 12). The sea screams, the horn thunders in, and Noboru experiences the miraculous instant

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

215

when everything crammed inside his chest since birth is unfettered and consummated. Disjointed elements merge into a perfect whole, as universal order is achieved in the harmonic merger of Noboru, mother, man, and sea. He is choked, wet, and ecstatic (p. 13). The scene is orgasmic and thalassal, as Noboru imagines enwombed bliss with his mother, his phallically intact and vaginally conquistadorial "father," and the world. (I might even suggest that Noboru masturbates as the couple makes love. Though the original Japanese provides only the words "choked, sweat, ecstasy," the inference of masturbation is consistent with Mishima's Active fantasies of arousal in the presence of heroic men.) 3 MYTHIC H E R O I S M A N D RAGE Having experienced the thrill of watching the sailor's towering erection, Noboru comes to admire Tsukazaki and imagines him a brave hero of solitude and masculine strength. Idealizing masculinity is a consequence of humiliation and impaired masculinity. It is not simply a celebration of maleness. Noboru requires the sailor to be a mythic hero and experiences intense rage and hatred when the sailor expresses such shameful qualities as happiness, amicability, and ordinariness. After wandering around the island and spritzing himself in a fountain, the sailor encounters Noboru and his friends. The boys had just held the usual congregation to confer on the superfluity of mankind and the irrelevance of life (p. 48). They are all puny, fragile boys (p. 49), and Mishima paints a vivid picture of alienated weaklings brimming with misanthropy, resentment, and cruelty. At first, Noboru loves Tsukazaki: "That sailor is terrific! He's like a fantastic beast that's just come out of the sea all dripping wet. Last night I watched him go to bed with my mother'" (p. 49). But the chief of the cadre responds snidely, "'And that's your hero?' the chief said when he had finished. His thin red upper lip had a tendency to curl when he spoke. 'Don't you realize there is no such thing as a hero in this world?'" (p. 50). Noboru defends the sailor in vain, as the chief derides the sailor and sexuality, ardently enlightening the boys about the insignificance and unworthiness of erotic pleasures (p. 54). The chief expounds the superior purpose of the group: The boss had an uncanny way of addressing the intellect. He claimed that they were endowed with genitals to copulate with the galaxy. Strands of pubic hair thickening powerfully, indigo roots beneath white skin, were born to tickle demure Stardust at the moment of rape.... They were entranced by this kind of holy babble, and they had contempt for their classmates; cretinous, filthy, pathetic boys full of sexual curiosity, (pp. 54-55/55) There is thus an explicit connection between the frail delicacy of the boys and their resentful repudiation of sexuality. They are not only intel-

216

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

lectually superior—an o b v i o u s e n v y for the physically superior boys they despise. They choose to c o n d e m n sexuality itself a n d s u b l i m a t e their sexuality for a m o r e cosmic p u r p o s e , w h i c h also involves rape. O n c e a g a i n w e h a v e r e t u r n e d to a familiar r e s e n t m e n t of physical inferiority, a fantasy of grandiosity a n d sexual violation, not unlike the vengeful v o y e u r i s m N o b o r u inflicts on his m o t h e r on nights w h e n she is cruel. The cadre itself is a g r o u p of d o p p e l g a n g e r s , a c h o r u s that speaks not only in accord with N o b o r u b u t w i t h a k i n d of metavoice continually echoing rage over alienation, humiliated bitterness over physical inferiority, and d i s d a i n for sexuality that m u s t b e c o n s u m m a t e d in sexual revenge. T h e chief m a y revile the sailor w h e n N o b o r u idealizes him, b u t this is a reflection of N o b o r u ' s ambivalence, a n d w e shall shortly find him despising the sailor as well: Because of this unhappy, unexpected encounter, tsukazaki had exposed himself as a pathetic figure in a drenched shirt and, as if that wasn't enough, offered an inanely ingratiating smile. That smile was utterly superfluous. It was not only infantilizing and humiliating to Noboru, but also transformed Ryuji into an embarrassing caricature of "the grownup who loves children/' His overly gleaming, exaggerated, child-appeasing smile, that utterly unnecessary, intolerable failure. Above that, Ryuji even said things he shouldn't have. "What a surprise! How was your swim?" And when Noboru criticized the soaked shirt, he should have replied directly: "Oh this thing? I've just rescued a woman who flung herself off a pier." (pp. 62-63/63) N o b o r u requires the sailor to conform to his fantasies of perfect maleness, w h i c h m u s t b e u n d e r s t o o d as reactions against friendliness, w h i c h is perceived as soft a n d weak. N o b o r u even resents the sailor for commiserating with h i m o n a secret. N o b o r u is s u p p o s e d to have been at the beach a n d has been discovered in the park, which would p r e s u m a b l y u p s e t his mother. But the sailor's c h u m m i n e s s actually irritates N o b o r u — w h a t h e w a n t s is not a b u d d y b u t s o m e o n e masculine e n o u g h to discipline a n d p u n i s h him. In other w o r d s , h e w a n t s s o m e o n e w h o w o n ' t be m a n i p ulated, w h o w o n ' t give in, b e soft. Ironically, adolescents s o m e t i m e s p u s h b o u n d a r i e s because they w a n t t h e m reinforced. Ultimately N o b o r u w a n t s a m a n powerful e n o u g h not to be defeated. N o b o r u later waits for his m o t h e r to return with Ryuji to the h o u s e so he can watch t h e m from his closet p e e p h o l e as they m a k e love. But Fusako s e n d s w o r d that she will not b e returning. Noboru is so furious, he d e spises all m a n k i n d a n d decides to o p e n his diary a n d list Ryuji's transgressions: Crimes of Ryuji Tsukazaki Item One: smiling toward me in a vile, ingratiating way when I met him this afternoon.

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

217

Item Two: wearing a drenched shirt and giving me the excuse that he had bathed in the park fountain like a hobo. Item Three: staying out with my mother without my permission, and putting me in a terribly ostracized position, (p. 81/81) Noboru erases the third count, but this is the humiliating wrish: what he really feels is abandoned and his hatred of all mankind emanates entirely from this. He is so furious he brushes his gums until they bleed, experiencing despondence and pure rage (p. 81). Noboru decides to slip into the dresser and look through the peephole—remember, he only does this when he is angry at his mother—and since no one is there he sees only darkness. The interior is as black as a large coffin (p. 82). Here Mishima's narration informs us that Noboru sees death in his mother's absence. This is evocatively sadomasochistic: Noboru is furious, despises mankind, injures himself, feels despondent, and crams himself into a coffin. He immerses himself in death, the womb, and the cavern from which he spies only when he feels malice. Finally, Ryuji sets sail. In a passage that can only express Mishima's fantasy of the Japanese male, Noboru knew that the specter of two nights ago was real, that he himself was standing at the inception and termination point of every dream. Then Ryuji appeared near the Japanese flag. (p. 89/90) The ship departs as a phantasm, and Ryuji is lost from sight (p. 92). This can easily be interpreted as a postwar commentary on the disappearance of the Japanese male. I would only add that this ideal was Mishima's sexual fantasy long before it became a focus for patriotism, politics, and the lamentation of the loss of Japanese nobility. The fascination with uniforms and proud masculinity derived from Mishima's childhood, and rather than interpreting his fiction as a philosophical treatise on Japanese history and postwar emasculation, I would read his fascination with the emperor and heroism in terms of his psychological fantasies, his need for a masculine ideal in defense against the kind of childlike rage Noboru feels separated from his mother, humiliated, weak and defenseless, loathing all of mankind in response to feelings of neglect and annihilation. Noboru has practiced voyeurism in anger and revenge, attains immense gratification from watching the sexual prowess of the sailor, and now sees him disappear or, to put it in (literal) perspective, watches him diminish into nothing as his figure recedes on the horizon, just as Ryuji diminished so disappointingly in Noboru's imagination. However, Noboru's rage against the sailor does not cease with the disappearance of the hero—because he returns to marry Fusako and diminish himself even further: the man so in unison with the existence of his vessel,

218

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

so inseparably a part of the dwindling gloss of a ship, has severed himself from that beautiful intactness, deliberately banishing the specters of ships and the sea from his dreams (p. 134). The domestication of Ryuji casts nauseating scents on him: Day by day, another repugnant odor of land routine clung to Ryuji. The odor of home, the odor of neighbors, the odor of peace, the odor of fish frying, the odor of courtesies, the odor of furniture that never moved, the odor of household ledgers, the odor of weekend excursions . . . the stench of death that these landspeople carried on their bodies, (p. 129/134) Once again confinement is death. He is emasculated by Fusako. He must read her silly novels and art books, study English conversation and store management, and wear the very clothes she dresses him in, as though he were a baby to be clothed (p. 135). Noboru experiences this as an infantilization of his hero. The chief offers Noboru the opportunity to make the sailor "a hero again" but postpones revealing how so that he may excite the cadre into a furious hatred of fathers: "they're enough to make you puke. Fathers are evil itself, laden with everything ugly in Man" (p. 136). Fathers stand in the way of their progress, burden their sons with "their inferiority complexes, and their unrealized aspirations, and their resentments, and their ideals, and the weaknesses they've never told anyone about, and their sins, and their sweeter-than-honey dreams, and the maxims they've never had the courage to live by" (pp. 136-137). One must wonder why Mishima is interpolating this scene. We cannot know exactly why these sons despise their fathers, and Mishima does not provide us with any details that would make this a character study. Nothing in the text gives any indication how fathers are actually despicable. Mishima provides no actual fathers, no actual cruelty to confirm the accusations or, rather, deliria, so all we know is how the adolescents feel. In a novel like The Brothers Karamazov we have a sickening portrait of the repulsive, wicked, stinking, dirty father, bathed in liquor, sweat, and excrescence, whose insidious influences so enrage and humiliate his sons. In Sailor fathers are repulsively amicable at worst, and the focus is on the adolescent resentment, of the fantasy of paternal iniquity. We do not know how fathers may burden their sons with such weaknesses and despicable qualities, and Mishima refuses to demonstrate the painful influence of these qualities. He only lists them, which is completely insufficient and would make this a lousy novel except that Mishima is focused instead on how irrational the adolescents are. One can certainly acknowledge that some fathers may inflict such problems on their children, but that would be an entirely different novel. If we side with the boys and agree with them, we are missing Mishima's focus—

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

219

which is on the inability of fathers to satisfy their sons' intense and often unrealistic needs. Not every son has such insatiable needs, but Mishima certainly depicts sons who cannot possibly find solace in parenting which might otherwise be reasonable. The chief asks his father if there is there any purpose in life. What he means is "can you give me one single reason why you go on living? Wouldn't it be better just to fade away as quickly as possible?" The chief is furious at his father's ridiculous look of surprise and the moronic, cliched reply: "Son, nobody is going to provide you with a purpose in life; you've got to make one for yourself" (p. 137). Some might consider this ridiculous, but others might appreciate the honesty, as opposed to some patronizing answer designed to soothe the anxieties of a son deemed too frail to hear this. But what does the chief want from such a question? When he means that he wants his father to answer why he goes on living, is the boy asking for guidance, how one finds purpose, happiness, and worthwhile goals, or is he implying that the father should die? When he thinks that it would be better to fade away as quickly as possible, is that an existential question desperately asked to a father who he hopes will provide wisdom, or is it maliciously wishing that father cease existing? One may say the chief hates fathers because they dispense such hackneyed advice, but it is more useful psychologically to see this as the malicious rage of a son fantasizing fathers as the worst evil. The language gives us an indication: fathers are "suspicious of anything creative, anxious to whittle the world down to something they can handle." They are "reality-concealing" machines who dish up lies while secretly believing they represent reality (p. 137). What reality are we speaking of here? These boys do not prefer reality to fantasy, and Mishima's characters are perpetually insisting on the pleasures of the imagination and the disappointments of reality. The narrator of Confessions of a Mask frequently mentions his preference for the imagination over reality. The protagonist of Temple of the Golden Pavilion is furious when he sees the real Temple, which violates the beauty of his fantasy. Noboru in Sailor is enraged when Ryuji disappoints his imagination of the heroic seaman. The imagery of the language is of diminution and confinement, "whittling away," stifling creativity. It is suffocating and castrating. If one believes this a stretch, the following rant is more indicative: Fathers are the flies of this world. They lurk silently, waiting to infest our decay. They are dirty flies that spread around the world how they fucked our mothers, (p. 132/138) This is a bizarre turn. Of the many complaints against fathers, how do we get from controlling and diminishing their sons to resentment over sex with their mothers? Again, the innumerable examples are all possi-

220

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

bilities but they are merely listed, not fleshed out in any narrative sense. The rage is the focus, and here we see that the chief feels belittled and humiliated that his father is a nuisance rutting in something rotten, like his mother. This may sound Oedipal, but his mother is not experienced as a beautiful or sexually desirable human being. She is equated with putrescence or excrement. Once again female sexuality is deplored the same way Noboru originally thought his mother's vagina a wound and a pitiable vacant house. This is echoed later when Noboru sees his mother from below—a revived screen memory from childhood if there ever was one—and perceives her not with arousal but fear and disgust: "The folds of her feathered indigo gown were spread open, and the swollen mound of her lower body looked grotesquely gargantuan and menacing" (p. 146/ 152): Noboru instantly caught this in a glance, and in the recesses of his icy brain a memory emerged, as if he had witnessed this same instance long ago. This was definitely the punishment scene he had seen in his dreams so many times, (p. 146/ 152) So whence the rage? Descriptions of fathers suspicious of creativity, hovering around and spoiling things lecherously, is a vivid recollection of the real father who was suspicious and disparaging of Mishima's burgeoning creativity, who stultified his son's wishes and imagination whenever possible, and barged into the adolescent's room to destroy his manuscripts. Mishima's own rage is confessed here, for the novel certainly provides no more than meager examples described by complaining kids on a mere few pages. The chief does not explain what creativity has been stifled by his own father. The abstractness and distance from any such events renders the accusations plausible but insipid and unsubstantial. But the abrupt intensity of the rage and its subjectivity make it a fascinating confession, and I believe what Mishima wants to do here is express his fantasy of how to redeem fathers from having failed their sons. That is exactly what the chief had suggested earlier. The sailor can be redeemed only by death. This is revenge, to be sure, but in the fantasies of children furious that fathers were not mythic heroes, redeeming them from kindness, helplessness, and emasculation is the only means of salvation. However, it is not only the sailor who needs salvation, for there was already one father who died. Redeeming the sailor is a fantasy of restoring the dead father to life. This needs some elaboration: we know that Noboru was happy that his father died, and Tsukazaki is the second mate. Noboru's need for a heroic masculine figure derives from having an absent father, but were Mishima merely narrating the story of a child in need of a dad, the kid would not be happy about his father's death. The absence

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

221

of the father represents the fantasy of having murdered and displaced the father. Familiarity with Mishima's biography and the prevalence of parricidal themes in his fiction makes it difficult not to see the death of Noboru's father as both recapitulation of Mishima's childhood as well as his murderous fantasies. Mishima's father was essentially absent during the boy's childhood, as the grandmother cloistered young Mishima and veritably castrated the boy's father with her histrionic and narcissistic dominance. Mother too dominated and emasculated father. The death of Noboru's father thus represents the recapitulation of a castrated father too weak to withstand domination by women. The dead father thus also represents the father Mishima wished to murder for having been so weak and castrated, for not being able to stand up to the authoritarian grandmother, for not being able to be a strong source of support with whom the boy could identify and drawT strength. Hence Noboru also wishes to kill his father, a man already dead, for having died. Noboru's need for the sailor reflects the crippling absence of a father—he needs a father who will not die, and he is angry at his father for both leaving him in death and being weak enough not to live, hence Noboru's immense rage toward the sailor when he also becomes domesticated by woman. As mentioned, Mishima wished to murder his father because he was cruel and demeaning on those rare occasions when he was present, subjecting the boy to tormenting trauma and disparagement of his son's wishes and interests (Nathan, 1974). Thus, in Sailor the collective of rebellious youths perennially disparage fathers as the worst thing in the world. They despise them for being weak, petty, and even caring. But this is apophatic—a denial of their genuine needs—their resentment confesses the need for strong fathers, the loathsome need for love that they experience as weakness. As discussed in the chapter on Forbidden Colors, Mishima was a man who both needed and despised men (even if he continues to be championed by gay readers). Despite his ostensive misogyny, Mishima was also exceptionally misandroistic. He enjoyed the soaring erect penis but despised fathers. While Mishima needed the love and sexual-narcissistic potency of a parental phallus, he also detested the sexuality he craved. Mishima's homosexual fantasies are exceptionally violent. We have seen how he wishes to disembowel, castrate, and murder men. He absorbs their love and phallic virility while murdering and debasing them in orally vampiric and anally penetrating as well as receptive manipulation. In Confessions Mishima fantasizes raping a youth from the rear and murdering him, kissing him as he dies quivering, and cannibalizing the youth's heart. In Temple of the Golden Pavilion the protagonist admires a beautiful youth but defaces his scabbard in symbolic castration. Yuichi of Forbidden Colors seduces men compulsively and allows them anal access, but he

222

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

destroys them emotionally by refusing to reciprocate their yearnings for his love and by abandoning them in a sadistic repetition of his own infantile abandonment. His pleasure is in their excruciating humiliation. The same boy who adores the towering erection of the sailor despises fathers, just as Mishima himself loathed his own father while imploring Japan to worship the idealized emperor. The same rage against fathers existed alongside an intense need for paternal love, and just as Yuichi of Forbidden Colors refuses to allow men access to his vulnerable emotions, the boys in Sailor need paternal love but refuse to admit their childlike needs. This ambivalence must be understood as a reflection of the rage of a young boy humiliated viciously by an unloving father, which engendered an intense misandry alongside a desperate and homosexualized need for father and parental mirroring, disgust toward castrated fathers, revulsion toward castrating (grand)mothers and their bodies, reparative idealizing deification of fathers, disavowal of the need for parental love, and the urge to merge with the omnipotent phallic paternal love object. The aggression of the adolescents in Sailor confesses the hatred of their own frailty and need for love, and counteracts their wishes to merge with both father and mother. Aggression and fantasies of grandiose superiority here nullify the shameful wish to be loved passively like children, who are therefore weak, needy, and vulnerable. While separation was previously equated with death, regression and merger are also experienced as weakness and death. As Mahler (1968) and Loewald (1978) both assert, separation and merger are both equivalent to death, a theme instantiated graphically by Mishima throughout his writings. The shocking scene where Noboru and his cadre attack and murder a kitten confirms this. The boys find a tiny stray kitten, blotched and mewing, with lusterless eyes (p. 56). The chief tells the boys they would achieve palpable dominance over existence by killing (p. 57). Noboru seizes the kitten by the neck and hurls it against a log. "What Noboru lifted between two fingers now was no longer a kitten. A resplendent power was surging through him . . . he felt like a giant of a man" (p. 58). Noboru examines the mutilated cat and watches as dull red blood oozes from the kitten's mouth and nostrils, the misshapen tongue crushed against the palate (p. 58). The chief then dons his rubber gloves and dissects the corpse with a pair of gleaming scissors. The boys watch enraptured as the tissues are peeled back. They watch the warm, soothing undulation of the colon (p. 59/59). 4 The chief unwinds the "immaculate bowels" and reels them onto the floor: Noboru endured the scene perfectly from start to finish, and his half delirious mind envisioned the warmth of the scattered viscera and pooled blood in the abdominal cavity housing consciousness in the ecstasy of the lost kitten's large

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

223

mournful soul, each thing become a perfect scene. Now the liver, dangling beside the body, became a soft peninsula, the squashed heart became a little sun, the uncoiled intestines became a white curvaceous coral reef, and the blood of the abdomen became the tepid waters of a tropical sea. The cat died so that it might become a perfect, autonomous world. "I killed it!" .. . "I can do anything, no matter how hideous." (pp. 60-61/60) This passage is not merely a repulsive exercise in adolescent brutality. Mishima is not simply commenting on how cruel kids can be, as though they were merely pulling wings off flies the way so many boys do. Immense and surging power is experienced through cruelty. Notice as well the sudden dispassion in the language following the murder, the denial of sympathy, the reduction of the cuddly animal to abstract, nonsentient biological processes somehow aspiring vainly to be something with form and identity. "The cat was a facade. This life had only pretended to be a cat" (p. 59/59). To transform a living, breathing, mewing animal into shiny dead entrails viewed scientifically entails a process of dissociation. This is not mere scientific investigation or autopsy but an intentional act of malicious cruelty, mutilation, and violation—it is a serious symptom indicative of a deep psychological need to isolate tender feelings and become immune from their impact, from one's shameful pain, fear, and fragility. Mishima loved his cats, doted on them, worked wThile they sat on his lap—he even wrote postcards to them when he traveled abroad (Stokes, 1974, pp. 104-105). Yet he claims to have actually vivisected a cat before writing this scene (Nathan, 1974, p. 103). For a person to murder coldly what one loves deeply is the attempt to replay and master an excruciating sense of victimization, helplessness, the fear of death and loss. When the gang throws the helpless kitten against a log, they are destroying vulnerability, displacing and externalizing their own rage at being weak and helpless, murdering their own wishes for love, and demonstrating the illusion of mastery over vulnerability and death. As Becker (1975) writes, trampling the guts of another generates the ecstatic relief of overcoming helplessness and mortality. Becker writes of the ecstasy of overcoming death through violence, so in addition to mastery, orgasmic catharsis can be attained in the act of sadistic dominance and the self-soothing pleasure attained in the grips of horror. These processes accord with Mishima's ubiquitous erotic fantasy of murdering sexual vulnerability. This can be found in Confessions, where the narrator masturbates to Guido Reni's image of Saint Sebastian penetrated by arrows, pleasures himself to fantasies of beautiful boys attacked from the rear and kissed while still quivering, and masturbates compulsively in response to an experience of terror when the hooded guillotine of nature threatens him with a castrating wave at the seashore. Such murder of vulnerability can be found in repeated images of murdering couples

224

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

at the height of orgasm, an image featured most disturbingly in The Temple of Dawn. Mishima's own suicide finally capitulates the complex fantasy of murdering vulnerability, helplessness, death, his disgusting and impure innards, along with the fantasy of giving birth to himself purified of his vulnerability and dirtiness, reunited with his purified love objects, finally thwarting the imminent decay of old age, experienced as horrific regression to helpless enmeshment with the noisome feminine of infancy. I believe it is this terror of regression and merger with the feminine and death that compels Mishima to remember himself in the character of the adolescent Noboru. Glory is the idealized male immune to being contaminated, castrated, or killed by the feminine. Such repulsive emasculating death is only redeemed by murder. Just as the kitten is killed in order to make it perfect, so sacrificial death creates tragic beauty, a ubiquitous theme in Mishima's life, fiction, and death.r> GLORY A N D DEATH Ryuji Tzukazaki and Noboru have one fantasy in common: they both imagine they are destined for greatness. 6 We have seen how Noboru envisioned his grandiosity after being humiliated by his mother. The sailor ponders dreams of heroism, and these are also explicitly intertwined with imprisonment: Ryuji despised the immobile character the land possessed, the eternally stagnant visages. On the other hand, a ship was another kind of prison. At twenty he had thought passionately: "Glory! Glory! Glory! That is the only thing for which I am destined." The more he thought about it, capsizing of the world would be necessary for him to attain glory. "There must be a special destiny for me. A scintillating, uniquely fashioned kind an ordinary man would never be permitted/' (pp. 18 19/16 17) Delusions of grandeur? These fantasies invariably involve not just specialness but capsizing the world order, and his grandiosity is unambiguously linked with death. Reminiscing his night with Noboru's mother, Ryuji laments, He couldn't express his ideas on glory and death to the woman. . . . He held the conviction that he had been chosen to be supreme. ... I have long thought that I alone am a man. (pp. 38-39/38) Other less manly men were the ones who had children, who looked at pictures their kids drew of houses and flowers. Ryuji no longer sees any hope for them (p. 38). For the sailor, death is equated with the immobility

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

225

of relationships, as though loving sentiment were a decline or emasculation. Indeed, Noboru and Ryuji both share the conviction that love is a sickening softness and decay, a loss of hope for glory: That's because, if I'm a man, someday a lonely clear horn will resound, penetrating the darkness of dawn, and a luminescent dense cloud will descend, and when the distant, piercing voice of glory beckons me, I must launch from my bed and venture out alone. That is why I never married, (p. 39/39) There is only one kind of relationship that satisfies Ryuji's concept of glory: . . . he doubted a woman would understand. Nor had he mentioned his sweet vision of ideal love: a man encounters the perfect woman only once in a lifetime and in every case death intervenes, and lures them into a predestined embrace... the cry of a tidal wave, the dark power of high tide, the soaring, soaring, soaring collapse of the breaking wave. (p. 39/39) Like so many consummations in Mishima's fiction, this one must end in death: "death bound them in wedlock" (p. 39/39). This fantasy should not be forgotten, for it anticipates the climax of the novel. For the author, death is necessary, and it may even accord with the fantasy of the sailor. Though, as we shall see, he seems oblivious of his fate, his own death is redemption from the loss of glory, and he achieves the death described in the above passage. For the moment, we must take note that there is contempt for the woman who would not likely understand, as contrasted writh the idealized woman who complements his own perfection in some sort of mythic syzygy (divine couple). Whenever this splitting of the feminine occurs, it is worth noting since the idealization inherently connotes loathing for the real, as though the actual were dangerous and disappointing. Noboru's mother fulfills the sailor's fantasy and is convinced that the beauty before him is the woman of his grand cherished dreams. He is a paragon of maleness and she the consummate woman (p. 39). In fact, the ultimate purpose of glory and idealizing of the feminine is demonstrated in the subsequent passages, where Ryuji wishes he could divulge the strange passion that seizes a man and transports him to a world beyond the fear of death (p. 40/40). Finally, in a conversation between the sailor and his lover, we are told what land actually means to Ryuji, why he perceives it as imprisonment. He limns how his only memories of life on land were of destitution, disease, death, and devastation. He had irrevocably severed himself from the shore by becoming a seaman (pp. 40-41). This being said, it is difficult not to see this as a message both from the author to the reader and from the

226

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

sailor to Fusako as well. In a conversation with a lover, how subtle is it to say that the sea is a source of "benevolence" freeing one from death? How can Fusako not hear this as a message about relationships that dock him? Recall the passage above where "a ship was another kind of prison." The sea too has a feminine quality, and Ryuji conceives the sea in sexual images: . . . the sea is just too much like a woman. Her calm, her storms, her caprice, the beauty of her breasts reflecting on the evening sun setting over the ocean, are obvious things. But I'm a ship that rides forward while being incessantly rejected, unlimited water useless to quench my thirst. While surrounded by the various elements we think are woman's nature, the real body of woman is always kept away from us. . . . That's the root of the problem. I know it. (p. 41 /41)7 Here is quintessential ambivalence: the sailor escapes from land (death) to the sea and glory and has a sexual experience of the ocean but feels ungratified. It is safe yet thwarts satisfaction. But the failure to consummate is again its safety since actual contact with the feminine would be death. Imprisonment can be both suffocating and self imposed. It is a "problem" Ryuji may not wish to solve, which is why the only acceptable relationship is idealized and linked with death. The fantasy of sexual merger is so desired but so threatening that one must murder it at a moment of perfection and bliss before it decays, disappoints, and drains glory from the immaculate sailor. If there was ever a passage in Mishima perfectly symbolizing the frustration and ambivalence of a childhood so near and yet so far from maternal love, this would be it. To describe proximity to a woman as dire but unquenchable thirst, like being as far as possible from a woman's warm body, recapitulates Mishima's own experience and further symbolizes the subsequent choice Mishima made about relationships, both in yearning and in emotionally withdrawn, protected self isolation. Again, the proof here is not just that this can be mapped onto childhood but that Ryuji (and Mishima) are not interested in merely consummating with any woman but in this fantasy an ideal and perfect one as antidote to the land, which is imprisonment and death. But like all Mishima heroines, even the idealized ones, perfection succumbs to disgust, rage, and disappointment. Ryuji sings Fusako a song but immediately thinks, "She can't fathom my feelings deep in the bottom of a song like this; the tears of agony I sometimes cry, the darkest depths of my male heart. Fine. As far as I can see she is just a piece of meat." . . . The scent of the sweaty perfume of flesh wafting toward him on the breeze seemed to say to him interminably, die! die! die! (p. 43/42)

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

227

Reduction to a body, rather than a human being or idealized feminine, is sexually exciting. Her perfection now resides in being beautiful, lewd, indifferent, and lecherous (p. 43), and her erotic perfection is described in great detail. To give an abridged sense of the imagery: "her lips exquisite . . . her eyes were quiet, and icy.... When I hold her breasts they'll nestle against my palms with a marvelous, sweaty heaviness" (p. 43). The language itself has shifted rapidly from alienation to stark eroticism. If she cannot understand the depths of his soul, then she will be merely an object to copulate. Fusako is "just a piece of meat," which teases him softly "like other things that I control" (p. 43/43), 8 The subtle shift of descriptors here reflects the transformation of Fusako into an owned erotic object rather than an ideal whole woman, as though coitus itself were satisfyingly demeaning. I am reminded of the words Polonius uses in Hamlet to describe how he will "loose" Ophelia on our hero, a language of animal husbandry Shakespeare employed specifically to connote insidious dehumanizing manipulation. Here Fusako becomes a body to be possessed, and her perfection resides in an inhuman, almost inanimate, quality. She is the erotic mannequin contrasting the living emotional woman in Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles, here descending from sublime to carnal perfection. Like the narrator of Confessions of a Mask and Etsuko in Thirst for Love, the protagonist is excited by sexuality divested of intellect, and the arousal is not merely pure carnal lust but perhaps in the act of derogating and insulting the sexual object who cannot understand and is just another body. To put it another way, eliminating the intellect and reducing the other to carnal sexuality eradicates the threat of emotional and intellectual impingement by the other. It is a defense against emotional invasion. The fantasy of the idealized couple gives way to disillusionment and then lust. But Ryuji does not know whether Fusako understands him—this is purely his fantasy. Rather than seeing disappointment as a consequence of her shallowness, we can understand his disappointment as part of the fantasy that needs alienation to protect the emotions and to enact the derogating reduction to a mere body that enables coitus to be safe. If Fusako could truly understand Ryuji, he would be genuinely disappointed and deeply threatened by emotional impingement, indeed susceptible to being discovered not to be a hero of destiny but an ordinary man of no consequence. A man truly desiring emotional closeness does not idealize or demean women, reduce them to sexual objects devoid of intellect, or even inflate himself narcissistically into a mythic hero destined for unique glory. Such is Mishima's ceaseless schizoidal fantasy—the helpless despised self must be masked, protected, and transmogrified into a heroic persona, while the other person must also be distorted to evade the threat of being perceived, recognized, and unmasked. A perspicacious soul will see

228

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

through the disguises, and being seen renders such a vulnerable person raped by their gaze. The fantasy of being heroic is not unusual, and to some degree all of us may narrate our heroism to a lover to make ourselves appealing to him or her. But in Sailor, as in Mishima's own life, identity became an extremely self-conscious theater perpetually striving to avoid being known, struggling to gestate an alternative identity to the helpless, frail, and humiliated one, inflating oneself like an unloved child in a masquerade one may not truly believe but hopes others may believe if one exhibits forcefully enough. If we all wear masks, even to deceive ourselves, the "ordinary" social presentation of self is vastly different from the erection of a massive barricade one knows to be false and misleading in desperate avoidance of the humiliation, impingement, and annihilation of being understood. Most of us do wish to have private selves and to impress others, but most of us also wish to be understood on some level, and the person fictionalizing himself in terror of being known is a pitiable person because the loving contact of intimacy really is shameful and emotionally annihilating. This is why Ryuji speaks with Mishima's voice in relating intimacy with imprisonment and death. After making love with Fusako, the sailor wanders around with blurry detachment. Everything is vague and unreal. It all lacks concreteness. Even his sexuality he perceives as "pure abstraction" (p. 46). In fact, the abstraction and blurriness of his perceptions are the avoidance of intimacy that enable him to experience sensuality—"Well go to bed together again tonight—this one's the last: we probably wont sleep at all. I sail tomorrow evening. 1 wouldn't be surprised if 1 evaporated faster than a damn memory, thanks to these two fantastic nights" (p. 47). This is not merely the blissful dreaminess of love. Such conspicuous usage of words indicating abstraction and irreality, alongside mention that the sailor will leave, is the author's way of informing us that the hero is in his reverie because he will leave, he will not be tied down, and thus the relationship might just as well be a dream. Yet Ryuji returns to wed Fusako. Pitiable ambivalence tortures this soul: the terror of imprisonment and the need for love; the shame and fear of confinement and contamination, the humiliation of admitting one needs love, against the love for which we all yearn. Wedlock is the stultifying death that denies glorious death (p. 180). Mishima was no sentimentalist, and his shame and rage demanded that his protagonist fall from grace. This is Mishima's admission that he could never overcome his need for love. But if he could not transcend himself, he would redeem himself through vengeance and die before he succumbed to a castrated admission of neediness. At novel's end Noboru and his cadre lure the sailor into limning stories of the sea and glory. Amidst his reverie, the youths slip on gloves for his

Voyeurism and Rage in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

229

dissection a n d serve h i m poisoned tea. I m m e r s e d in his d r e a m , h e y e a r n s for d e a t h . T h e m u r d e r of t h e sailor is M i s h i m a ' s o w n suicide. H e w o u l d kill himself rather t h a n s u c c u m b to merger with w o m e n — r e g r e s s i o n u n t o helplessness, disease, impurity, dissolution—the most excruciating a d mission that h e n e e d e d love. For M i s h i m a glory m u s t b e bitter stuff. NOTES 1. The word Mishima uses to describe the thing that envelops the world is "yarashii," which literally means something lewdly sexual, obscene, vulgar, or repugnant. Nathan translates the word as "ugliness," but this does not include the sexual connotations. Here Noboru feels that the sexual grotesquery of his mother's body envelops the world. 2. As Mitchell and Black (1995) write, "Penises are valuable because they allow escape from the enveloping threat of the pre-oedipal mother. The classical concept of castration anxiety is thus most deeply understood not as a dread of losing the organ itself, but of succumbing to engulfment" (p. 221). 3. The word for "temple" in Mishima's Japanese is specifically a Buddhist temple: not only a holy tower but also a stupa placed in graveyards. The erection also signifies death, whether by penetration of women or by the erotic experience itself. 4. The word "soothing" is used to connote the feeling implied by the Japanese word "kateiteki," which literally means "domestic," arousing the comforting feelings of home. 5. Nathan's (1965) translation emphasizes how death transforms the kitten. The passage in Japanese suggests that the kitten had to be killed in order to become something perfect. The difference in emphasis is slight but significant, for the death here is not the agent, as though the phenomenon of death itself made the kitten perfect. Rather, murder made the kitten beautiful and perfect. This is fully consistent with Mishima's philosophy that violent death is required to attain tragic beauty as opposed to the death that afflicts people through old age. And of course it would be murder that also made the sailor beautiful rather than an emasculated, living servant to Noboru's mother. 6. Note how the narration initially emanates from the eyes of Noboru but changes to the perspective of the sailor in chapter 2. Hence he is no longer referred to by his last name (Tsukazaki) but his first name (Ryuji). 7.1 have chosen to translate this passage in the first person, writing "I'm a ship," whereas there is no person mentioned. It is only implied. John Nathan translates it as "you're in a ship" (p. 41). There is no mention of being in a ship, and the sexual imagery connotes rather the phallic aspect of the vessel, so I have opted for the first person. 8. Mishima uses the words "kanri suru monohin," literally "things that he controls." Nathan translates this in terms of ownership, but the elements of manipulation and dominance are also clearly emphasized in the original.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 8

Psychological Postscript

This book has been an attempt to read Mishima according the tensions within his texts, suggesting symbolic evocations and analyses of the characters' motives as they accorded with cues within his novels, his biography, and his other fiction. This has not been an attempt to diagnose Mishima, map theory onto his writing, or reduce him to psychopathology, though a psychoanalytic reading does involve analysis of his fantasies and conflicts. Mishima's novels and philosophical writings provide readers with the luxury of identifying obsessively recurring themes, scenarios, symmetries, voices, and images that lend support to psychoanalytic elucidation. Given the repetitiveness of Mishima's thematics, revolving around death, murder, masochism, misogyny, and voyeurism, it is difficult to conclude that these are products merely of a literary imagination rather than urgent fantasies. The imagination is less conscious craft than we would like to believe, even when consciousness feels itself a master of thought. This too is an egotistic fantasy. As Hillman (1983) might evoke, it is the shadows that determine consciousness itself (p. 60). There is more dreaming with open eyes than we know (p. 38; Stein, 1994). I hope that an understanding of Mishima's genius and complexity is gained from exploring his perversions and fantasies. Despite the recurrence of fantasy, Mishima's fiction, persona, and suicide render his understanding intriguingly deceptive and elusive. In an almost Gnostic sense, the reader of fiction must inhabit the text and experience the swirl of emotions to get a sense of the author's psyche.1 Mishima's childhood is painful exposure to the impact of coercive parenting on the forming psyche, how immersion in terror, disease, emotional suffocation, emas-

232

The Madness and Perveision of Yukio Mishima

culation, and separation from love may engender immense malice, disgust for disease and decay, and loathing for the body and for women, which will be replayed in compulsive fantasies that achieve mastery and triumph in the wake of helpless victimization. The world itself will be gendered and animated by these residues of agony, hatred, and terror projected as reality, every corner, twig, and shadow of nature which seems evil, persecutory, malevolent, seductively erotic and dangerous, alive, decomposing, demonic. Words become a private world, a sacred enclosure, a space of fantasy that contrasts reality by endowing the author with the ability to think, imagine, create, give birth, lie, avenge, murder, and rupture. Here there is the fantasy of dire mastery, where an invalid may use a gifted intelligence and facility with language to inflict grotesque violence while composing fictions of graceful and fluid design, even as he is possessed by his demons and relives his history and death in every poem. Mishima's life is a tale of fictive reenactment and eventual flight from vulnerability and annihilation through beauty and musculature, life itself as art and fiction. We are also granted exposure to the feelings of despair, collapse, and incipient disintegration that may consume one who realizes that masks, playful identities, and narcissistic display are all futile, ephemeral, and insubstantial and lead to nothing. Mishima's death implicates intriguing polar psychological tendencies that McWilliams (1994) claims are mutually exclusive. She claims that the narcissist feels empty and "devoid of a substantial self," while the depressive feels full of "critical and angry internalizations" and that "the self is real but irreducibly bad" (p. 186). Mishima definitely felt shame and rage toward his internal objects (the psychological presences of others I keep mentioning, their anger, guilt, condemnation, and so forth), which he wished to punish and eliminate even through the psychotic act of stabbing them to death and ejecting them through his rent abdomen. As Kernberg (1992) writes of extreme hatred toward inner objects, "This form of hatred is sometimes expressed in suicide, where the self is identified with the hated object and self-elimination is the only way to destroy the object as well" (p. 23). (Is this not the metaphor depicted literally in so many stories where people destroy themselves to kill the demon possessing them? A vivid recent example is protagonist Ripley in the third Alien film sacrificing herself with arms spread on an invisible crucifix to kill the alien in her body.)2 Suicide is an exorcism. Mishima wished to retain his identity and excruciatingly wrought freedom. This is the paradoxical case of a phallic narcissist seeking love, exhibitionistic affirmation, freedom, and the death of shameful and polluting objects. This paradox can be resolved by recalling Mishima's questions whether he really existed (Kyoko's House), whether the transmigrations occurred (Runaway Horses), and recognizing that Mishima's phallic narcissism was an attempt to inflate or substantiate an artificial

Psychological Postscript

233

self. Mishima felt empty, could not experience his life as substantial. As Nathan (1974) writes, a few days prior to the suicide Mishima had been planning for an entire year, he confided to his mother that in his life he had never done anything he had wished to do (p. xiv). Mishima was a man of wealth who traveled widely and had rare control over his life circumstances, and I suspect his utterance can come only from a soul fundamentally alienated from himself, who desperately longs for authentic experience but cannot allow himself to be emotionally invested in the present. So divorced was he, so withdrawn, that life itself felt insubstantial and unreal. Mishima felt he had a bad core self but more fundamentally that the self he created, exhibited, and tried to believe was real, was a mask, a desperately forged identity he was terrified of losing, since it was the only thing to transform him from nothing into a virile invulnerable grandiose substantial self. But it failed since it was ultimately an evanescent facade. Ushijima (1985) has suggested that Mishima "suffered from a severe personality disorder with predominantly narcissistic traits" (in McPherson & Lester, 1990, p. 286). Ushijima believes that Mishima struggled against severe depression that was exacerbated as he aged and felt his body decaying. Mishima's narcissism was thus a desperate flight from melancholic feelings of despair, vileness, and inferiority. Ushijima quotes Mishima shortly before his death: "the melancholy within me became enlarged.... Am I rotten or in a state of exultation?" (p. 286). This is consistent with the argument in this assay that Mishima was filled with toxic introjects and a coerced self-representation of weakness and inadequacy. While Mishima struggled against his frailty and sickliness, he was ever feeling sick and rotten inside. The aged and decrepit antagonists of his novels, such as Imanishi of The Temple of Dawn and Shunsuke of Forbidden Colors, are self-representations, even as the beautiful Omi of Con-

fessions and Yuichi of Forbidden Colors are fantasies.

McPherson and Lester (1990) invoke Edith Jacobson's (1953) formulations on cyclothymic depression to describe Mishima's narcissistic breakdown, which lead to suicidal despair. They wrrite that Mishima finally realized "the inevitable hopelessness of his grandiose designs which had protected him from the underlying depression." 3 They further interpret Mishima's suicide as the killing of the introjected female and the male figures who "deceived, disappointed, and ignored him" (p. 287). They finally concur with Jacobson that in suicide the self "regains a feeling of power and achieves a final, though fatal, victory" (p. 288). Narcissistic inflation was certainly a strategy to escape severe depression and an entrenched sense of badness and inferiority. Mishima expressed recurrent fantasies of genius and superlative destiny. From his earliest fiction to the tetralogy completed the day of his death, Mishima fantasized his destiny of genius, beauty, and death. He sought to identify

234

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

his literary work with God. He acclaimed his Shield Society the ultimate representative of Japanese culture and history, the very embodiment of Japanese beauty, and he proclaimed his cause beyond mortal censure. His divine purpose could sanction violence, destruction, and murder. Such utterances were nearly delusional and megalomaniacal expressions of narcissistic grandiosity, even if they were repeatedly diminished by the return of the despair, self-loathing, and futility such deliria were trying to escape. I would add that the masqueradal invention of the beautiful and muscular self was flight from immense disintegration anxieties, the terrors of death, annihilation, violent penetration, and nonbeing as well. The narcissism therefore not only counteracted suicidal depression and inferiority but functioned as an immense armoring against impingement and obliteration. Mishima's narcissism was a defense against self knowledge and depression but also against piercing and invading injury from the outside world, against ontological vulnerability and terror. Against despair, seppuku reclaimed his body from fate. Mishima defied augury and hurled his everlasting protest against foresight of his own annihilation. If Mishima's suicide was symptomatic of his madness, all his deliria, and the despair finally engulfing him, seppuku was reclamation from descent into psychosis as well, a mad but focused defense against psychic disintegration. Lifton (1979) describes Mishima's feelings of unreality, his inability to experience life and vitality as characteristic of schizoidal despair. Lifton suggests that if a diagnosis must be made, Mishima might be described as a "borderline personality" (p. 276).4 As 1 have indicated, Mishima did exhibit primitive defenses such as splitting, denial, projective identification, and paranoid projection that seem to have operated on the borderline level. He suffered deeply disturbed and defective inner object relations that formed a very distorted experience of self and others (in a sense this is how he was perverted, meaning emotionally mutilated, not just sexually perverse). 5 Perhaps these terms do not really evoke the emotions, the agonies that tortured him. Mishima had trouble with excruciating contradictions, with so many feelings of betrayal, love marred by abandonment, cruelty, fear, and neglect. He may not have even been able to believe in love. His rage and engulfing despair emerged ceaselessly in his literary fantasies. He distorted, fantasized, and re-created women. Fie made beauty an ideal and a persecutor, dreamed his way past realities he could not accept, at times too aware of the futility of make-believe, often so miserable and delirious that he was on the borderline between "sanity" and dissolution in dreams, theater, delusions he visited on the world, on his own body. He seems to have experienced massive conflicts, primitive aggression, and severe separation-individuation trauma, ensconced in irresolvable wishes, desiring escape from emotional imprisonment, terrified to escape, experiencing both immobility and flight as self-annihilation. Mishima's primary fantasies and character traits were manifested in

Psychological Postscript

235

physiological, somatic, bodily metaphors. He was intensely and orally ambivalent—meaning that he needed affection and emotional nourishment, had a thirst for love, but was full of rage and experienced his needs as destructive. His thirst and hunger were voracious and vampiric, his own needs so ravenous that his language continually evokes oral rape, or rapacity, starvation for love, killing others to extract blood, while the world, nature itself, was a voracious maw that would consume him. This reflects violent starvation, the violence emerging from such starvation, thus the fear that his own needs and desire to love would be destructive, parasitic, a dirty contaminant, and fatal to the one he needs. This further engenders the fantasy that the world and the feminine will persecute and devour him and even mirrors the wish to be consumed, engulfed, absorbed by another despite how horrific this was. Mishima was also consumed by anal imagery. His self-representation was besmirched by the idea of himself as contaminant, a loathsome, dirty thing. He was disgusted with this sullied fecal self, sought cleansing by transforming himself into pristine purity invulnerable to stain and leakage. He was yet aroused by excrement, the impure, bodily odors, soil, and dirty fingernails, rectal caverns and offal in sex, dreams, and nature. Mishima's fantasies were anal sadistic—meaning that he wished to inflict his rage through emotional and physical penetration, humiliation, by attacking weakness and vulnerability, resonating with night soil images. And Mishima was phallically narcissistic—meaning that he needed to exhibit a sense of masculinity inhibited by vicious narcissistic injuries and deprivations, suffocating engulfment, and terrifying impingement that engendered massive fears of death and disintegration. His suicide sinuously enacted masochistic, sadistic, narcissistic, and rebirth fantasies, in flight from despair and deliquescence: . . . my little private joys, rationalizations, self-deceptions—all gone! . .. Growing old for nothing. I'm left with a terrible emptiness. What can life offer me but bitterness? . . . And if I cry out, who is there to hear me? . . . A hollow nobility— that's what's left for me. (Spring Snow, p. 356) Nevertheless, Mishima's anxiety over disintegration and nonexistence is deeply instructive. How much of character is fraudulent, illusory, a mask? Ferenczi (1925) said that character traits were "secret psychoses," and Becker (1973) called character the "vital lie" that protects us from the anxiety of death. Leifer (1997) calls personality and self illusions and attachments that we believe will substantiate us and enable us to escape the terror of death and nonbeing. Mishima's tetralogy concludes in a Buddhist garden, where the empty geographic expanse is a metaphor for our transience, illusoriness, and nonexistence. Was Mishima a borderline psychotic or genius psychologist? His perpetual experience of the void can

236

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

be read as narcissistic emptiness and the hollowness of fabricating a false identity. But it may also reflect the awareness of every human attempt to pretend we are more than immanent corpses, that every pretense of life, individuality, and significance is an illusion. I Ie is in good company when he suggests psychologically and Buddhistically that our tale may be one told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. 6 If he wished to die at least in beauty, we might then admire his awareness and despair rather than diagnosing him. Or perhaps the final scene in the garden in The Decay of the Angel is representative of fertility itself, emptiness as the ground from which life can spring, and uncluttering of the soul. Ultimately, whether as patient or artist, gnosis here represents amplifying the nature of fantasy and symptomology rather than reducing it to categories that then preclude further elucidation or inquiry.7 To be satisfied with being able to pinpoint the symptoms and syndromes would be useful only if we wished to derogate Mishima or medicate him. Donald Keene (1984) asserts that diagnosing Mishima might be satisfying to the amateur psychologist but cannot explain his genius (p. 1168). I agree and hope that psychoanalysis has illuminated a depth of human motivation and complexity that might otherwise be opaque. Analyses of Mishima have tended to be fairly simplistic, seeking to extol or persuade readers of the profundity of his subjectivity, nihilism, artistic vision, or erotic courage. This was Mishima's seduction. Writers like Margerite Yourcenar (1970) have little capacity for interpreting psychological complexity, especially of a man such as Mishima whose character and behavior are so utterly alien from most people we meet. Hxistential interpretations of Mishima have only supported the fantasies of the conscious ego rather than elucidating anything beyond the mask, such as the elusive intricacy of the disguise itself, the intense fantasies and conflicts emerging from the unconscious. They interpret the manifest content as philosophy and aesthetics to be defended and venerated (cf. Japan Interpreter 7[1], 1971, p. 71). Miwa (1972) writes, "The spirit of Mishima looms over all the people, rightist and leftist alike: He will remain a hero of activism even with his enormously oppressive demoniac majesty" (p. 16). Mishima's "activism" was not directed at resolving social issues, of diminishing anyone's suffering (cf. P. Wolfe, 1989, pp. 16-17). To make him a hero glosses his advocation of murder and ultranationalism and supports perversion and madness as something to be hailed as heroic. Lockwood also lauds Mishima as "a man who followed his passions, lived out his dreams right to their fatal conclusions when most of us don't have the courage to discover what we believe in" (in P. Wolfe, p. 185). Such interpretations reflect only seduction by Mishima's masks. Mishima might have been courageous, but then again he might have been acting out a melange of compulsive psychosexual conflicts and fantasies requiring an audience. I'm not sure what Mishima actually believed,

Psychological Postscript

237

whether he was genuinely ensconced within his radical devotion to an abandoned ethic, but does devotion to fanatical ideology inherently merit praise? September 11 hijacker Muhammad Atta also died for what he believed in—must we always believe that the language of passionate protest and conviction makes one an admirable person? This supports the fantasies but obscures the potential psychopathology driving such actions and potentially validates violence like the murder of politicians or justifies destruction the way Timothy McVeigh might protest injustice. Implicit in these assumptions about Mishima are fantasies that his suicide was poignant romantic self-sacrifice, dying nobly for a cause, staking one's life on crucial issues to awaken people to some terrible doom that awaits lest they pay heed, an almost Christian image of pietistic martyrdom. Even the excellent scholar Ivan Morris supports such glosses when he describes Mishima's suicide as the nobility of failure: "The Japanese hero as demigod who is defeated by the world's impurity reinforces the emotional and aesthetic appeal of mono no aware ('the pathos of things')" (P. Wolfe, 1989, p. 20). This describes a hapless victim of fate brought down by the gods, suffering for the evils of society, a forlorn hero whose poetic death so tragically epitomizes the evanescence of beauty like the morning glory that fades in evening, the cherry blossom whose tranquil splendor falls to ground in a brief span like human life. One might rather pity the passing of a man unable to cope with his suffering, who was so tortured inside that he loathed himself, feared and despised women, and could not love, escape dreams of vengeance and death, or feel he truly existed, finally devoting himself to a fantasy of nobility that might validate his existence, murdering himself in masochistic punishment and sexual arousal. This man I pity, but not as a hero failing nobly, not as a person defeated by the world's impurity, but as one consumed by intrapsychic poisons that plagued him all his life. Peterson (1979) is also seduced by this romanticizing distortion when she limns Mishima's death as "his ultimate statement of tragic theory, the only possible expression of a view of the beauty of life and art that is found in every aspect of his work" (p. 201). She later adds, "It is essential to remember that he regarded himself as performing a noble action designed to stimulate a return to Japan's heroic virtues" (p. 207). Peterson may appositely represent Mishima's own vision of his suicide, but must we as readers and observers concur that his seppuku was the only possible expression of an aesthetic and tragic theory? Was this aesthetics only? Does the word "aesthetics" really tell us anything about why disembowelment and spewing intestines are beautiful or erotic? (Beauty may be subjective, but we must ask why something violent is beautiful!) Was this really a noble action? Sacrifice for a higher cause? Martyrdom? This takes Mishima's mask for his genuine motives, as though his language of tragedy and beauty must inherently be his sincere purpose.

238

The Madness and Perveision of Yukio Mishima

I have offered another perspective: that Mishima ennobled his sadistic fantasies and terror of death by the use of such language. "Tragic theory" may be the valorization of less noble fantasies, a rhetorical masquerade that disguises the rage and fear of a traumatized child trying to appear powerful, intrepid, fearless, philosophical, and ethically loyal to a noble tradition for which he is sacrificing himself. Mishima's narcissism, grandiosity, self-absorption, and disinterest in politics for most of his life, coupled with his repetitive sadomasochistic fantasies of slicing open beautiful males, his repeated obsessions with power, strength, and overcoming weakness, his abject disgust with decay and old age, cannot but inform his motives. I would therefore claim that he mythologized himself into a grand and noble narrative as one more theatrical evasion of confronting himself that would be humiliating, especially if recognized and unmasked before others. Black (1991) epitomizes this vapid tendency to valorize the fantasy instead of reading beneath the mask when he calls Mishima's seppuku "performance art," "aesthetic suicide," and "controlled catharsis" (pp. 26,199). Black cannot define exactly what is being expelled cathartically, though he calls Mishima's suicide an expansion of consciousness, purity, transcendence of identity, primarily an aesthetic performance, and the enactment of a higher, sacred law (pp. 201-209). None of this explains how the wish to die can be "primarily aesthetic," as though saying one wanted to die beautifully were a sufficient explanation. Novelist Koichiro Uno makes the same vacuous leap when he surmises that "death developed very naturally out of this type of sensuality" (Miwa, 1972, p. 28), as though sexual arousal was the obvious result of contemplating death and disembowelment. It only begs the question and supplies an answer that needs deconstructing or, again, dissecting. None of such glosses truly explains why one wants to kill oneself, why exposing intestines can be considered beautiful, how death can be an expansion of consciousness (rather than its termination), or how death can be transcendence of identity. (One can fantasize being part of a more cosmic history, ideology, cause, and so on, but one may also say identity is epitomized or even symptomatized through an act—one is reminded of the parable how wherever Socrates went he met himself—that this is the opposite of transcending the self since in Mishima's case the pathological self is compulsively enacting his obsession with death and violence. One may see "transcendence" as inflation of the inadequate ego and narcissistic need to merge with people or events considered cosmically important. Is there an actual transcendence, or can we see this as a deceptive metaphor, one which is not self-explanatory?) Words like "purity" and "sacred law" are also reifications of cliches without doing anything more than regurgitating some shared vague sense of what they may signify traditionally—whereas they may be metaphoric

Psychological Postscript

239

of expelling psychological toxins, the despised object, the loathsome weak self, for example, purifying the self of "badness," "evil" feelings, punishing the hated body that decays, the sense that one feels somehow impure and dirty, and so on. Why does one feel "stained"? What does death purify? Cliches and fantasies don't help us understand the symbolic and unconscious aspects of such language or action. They only help the fantasy trick the audience. Taking the stated purpose as the genuine motivation is fundamentally misguided and is no longer tenable in a post-Freudian era. If Mishima referred to hara kiri as the "ultimate masturbation" (Black, p. 205), this may appeal to those with a derisive sense of humor, but it is not apparent despite what anyone says, why a person might feel sexually aroused by pain, expelling entrails, death, and a public performance of such an act. One can either try to support the author's point of view, which only elucidates the way the ego likes to see itself (and to be seen), or instead one can recognize the conscious perspective as a fantasy that needs deconstructing if one wishes to understand its intricacies and disguises. It is in a manner like reading a dream symbolically—not decoding it according to assumptions or preexisting schema but looking for indications of what might be masked, hidden, and camouflaged, effectively disguised not predictably as the direct opposite but obscurely enough so that the appearance does not give itself away but entices us to lose the trail rather sneakily, and playfully. (Here I invoke Poe's story "The Purloined Letter" as a parable for how easy it is to be fooled over and over again, especially when one is sure one has found the truth.) 8 Mishima loved fooling us. Why believe his disguises? This necessarily implicates the interpreter, of course, who may also be ensconced in his or her fantasies and projecting them on the text. Actually, this is inevitable to a degree, which makes the process of interpretation perpetually self-reflective, not just a matter of decoding the text. It is possible that any act of making propositions or truth claims may be a repressive imposition that both damages the thing described and abates the anxiety of not-knowing in the interpreter. Nevertheless, as D. L. Miller once told me, the trick is not to try to get out of the hermeneutic circle (which may never be possible) but to get into it interestingly. In this spirit I have sought to amplify some understanding of Mishima by dislocating him from the perspective of his conscious ego and illuminating the fantasy life of a brilliant but perverse and ailing human being: A worshipful attitude toward established explanatory systems—toward the polished accuracy of their definitions and the flawless consistency of their theories— becomes confining in the history of science—as do, indeed, man's analogous commitments in all of human history. Ideals are guides, not gods. If they become gods, they stifle man's playful creativeness; they impede the activities of the sector

240

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

of the human spirit that points most meaningfully into the future. (Kohut, 1977, p. 312) Or, to p u t it a n o t h e r way, For what is most damaging to psychoanalysis is the realization that the unconscious seduces: it seduces by its dreams and by its concept; it seduces as soon as the id speaks and even as the id wishes to speak. . . . The entire psychoanalytic edifice perishes of its own seduction. (Baudrillard, 1979, p. 55) T h u s , with Nietzsche, w e m i g h t perceive every p h i l o s o p h y as a "personal confession of its a u t h o r a n d a kind of i n v o l u n t a r y a n d unconscious m e m oir" (1885, section 6). That applies to Mishima but as m u c h to his readers. I suspect few artists besides M i s h i m a could seduce readers to reveal so m u c h of themselves in trying to interpret h i m — b u t Mishima is that ingenious. NOTES 1.1 mean this in terms of its etymological sense as "gnosis," as understanding deeply In this sense "diagnosis" is the opposite of the defensive and aggressive act of containing a psyche within the narrowest of categories. It should also be understood that entering "the swirl of emotions" is extremely precarious. One can attempt an empathic experience of the text, to try to resonate with the images, language, cadences, and situations of a text. This is never a guarantee that one will arrive at anything more than a transference reaction, a projection of self into such situations, a reader's response to the images, even a terrified and threatened violence to the text. In attempting to glean the emotions, indeed, the psyche of a text, one may therefore experience not only transference but countertransference, for the author does emit emotions and fantasies that arouse our reactions. One can be frightened, disappointed, or even sexually aroused in ways one refuses to acknowledge, and perception of the text can be hallucinated therefrom. However, there is the possibility of using the transference/countertransference to reach a deeper emotional state that may expand the horizons of possibility. A purely "intellectual" reading is a repressive one that denies desire, vulnerability, sexuality, and death itself through the imposition of rationality. It can be a defense. One will always have irrational reactions (even if one refuses to admit them), and thus examining the transference/countertransference is also a means of recognizing when one is reacting to the text and how one may be projecting oneself on it. This awareness may thus enhance one's experience of the text as well as the perception of what the text is not, if one can be aware of how one is reacting to it (cf. l.oewenberg, 1969, 1995). 2. Of course, some might interpret this as fear of the instincts, aggression, the unconscious, or even of babies as monsters. However the writer imagined the film, the image is used here to exemplify how a literal monster in the physical body can symbolize something actually psychological.

Psychological Postscript

241

3. Yet they attribute Mishima's "illness" to the destabilization of his instincts and his ability to sublimate, which ignores Mishima's confession of sorrow and rage coalescing after his feelings of being rotten, the purposeless feelings thai cry for eruption against submersion in paralytic oblivion (see also Stokes, 1974, p. 199). In this confession Mishima states he had felt this emerging rage for decades, which Ushijima omits. Rather than the sudden destabilization of instincts and the ability to sublimate (which sounds archaic), McPherson and Lester are more attuned when they focus on Mishima's hopeless despair accruing with signs of age, amidst the failure of grandiose designs and facades—not desublimation or deneutralization but accumulation of rage directed against the self and its malign objects, intensification of anger by betrayal of the body and fantasy, the denuding of illusion and realization of the inevitability of death, an irrevocable despair undone only by murdering the self in his own design. 4. Lifton and I are in exact agreement about this, though our conclusions wrere arrived at independently. 5. As McWilliams (1994) says, we all mobilize primitive defenses. What characterizes more severe psychopathology is the inability to utilize more mature defenses as well. If one reads Meissner's (1988) massive tome on borderlines, one will find an aspect or facsimile of Mishima on virtually every page, 6. The idiot here being the ego, which is full of childish attachments, illusions, and narrates a fictional self to itself. 7. As McWilliams (1994) aptly argues in Psychoanalytic Diagnosis. 8. For the deceptiveness of interpretation and deceptiveness of believing one has found the letter in question, see Muller and Richardson (1988).

This page intentionally left blank

Conclusion

Acquaintances and colleagues who read the chapters of this book in its formative stages wondered why a psychoanalytic reading of Mishima would be interesting. Is he a case history, no more than a person subject to the kind of desultory and invasive dissection that would expose his copious ailments (aliments) and demonstrate how pathetic he was? Despite my allusions to dissection (these were punning on understanding his death), I hope this book has not been reductionistic or dehumanizing, though some will inevitably react to psychological language as though it were a postmortem. I endeavored to do the opposite: to show some of Mishima's passionate and mad fantasies, to paint a very different portrait of a very troubled person hovering on the edge of despair, mania, grandiosity, and even paranoia. Rather than trying to preserve the fantasy of Mishima as a philosophical nihilist or samurai, I sought to provide a vivid image of a person suffering immense shame and humiliation, anger, seething resentment, a frenetic need to fabricate and mythologize himself through beautification and masks. It is anyone's prerogative not to preserve those masks but to glean the person underneath rather than defending the mask as the person, rather than endorsing the fantasy and illusion of heroism, all the tricks the ego uses to hide itself from oneself as well as others. It is the perversion and madness that I found fascinating. Cannot the critical reader justly assert that the entire book dismally reduces Mishima to his childhood? If Mishima is a misogynist, it is because of his childhood; if sadomasochistic, his childhood; if narcissistic or grandiose, again his childhood. The whole book can be summarized in a paragraph! I have indeed elucidated most of Mishima's fantasies as der-

244

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

ivations from his childhood, so traumatic it was that I do not believe anyone could have escaped such torture. I agree with Starrs (1994): "His entire work may be seen in terms of his struggle to overcome the passivity, effeminacy—and fear—which were the natural heritage of his childhood" (p. 102). This analysis has not ignored Mishima's adolescence or adulthood, however, not Erikson's eight stages of man or even Shakespeare's seven, as much as emphasized the critical genesis of Mishima's psyche and its unfolding. I here invoke Melville's Redburn: Talk not of the bitterness of middle-age and after life; a boy can feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mildew has fallen; and the fruit, which with others is only blasted after ripeness, with him is nipped in the first blossom and bud. And never again can such blights be made good; they strike in too deep, and leave such a scar that the air of Paradise might not erase it. (1849, p. 16) I would add that very few would emerge as exceptional authors, so the intrigue of this book is to trace how he replayed his childhood trauma, conflicts, and fantasies in his fiction, as expressions of both pain and the wish to overcome it, explore it, draw meaning from such degradation as he was subjected and exposed to. There has been some repetition here since Mishima tended to repeat (obsessively) so many scenarios and fantasies in his books. Repetition may frustrate a reader, but it may also remind one how epistrophic and repetitive Mishima's texts can be, and one returns to recurring themes both to engage the repetition itself and to illumine the intriguing nuances of each evocation. However, reductionistic this is not. For I have sought to provide a complex argument, readings that have multiple psychological elements to them. Rather than interpreting an idea or behavior as the result of one cause, one meaning, I have sought to explain phenomena as composed of an intricate register of psychological and symbolic overtones. The value of psychology here is not its diagnosis but the process by which a behavior such as suicide, for example, can be stratified into a spec!rum of fantasies and motives: that Mishima could simultaneously punish himself, his weakness, the flesh that would decay, the internal object (emotional presence of grandmother experienced as within, operating like a puppeteer or vicious conscience), while enacting the erotic fantasy of being the dominating beautiful figure who transcends cowardice, sickliness, ugliness, and death, purified of those noisome aspects, to be reunited in rebirth with idealized purified incarnations of those he needed. Death itself is deconstructed into component fantasies: decay, putrescence, weakness, vulnerability, ugliness, cannibalism, predation, ingestion and digestion, return to infantile helplessness and exposure to disease, merger with the horrific feminine, extinguishment of the ego, castigation, absolution, and finally cessation of humiliation, struggle, and suffering, attainment of love

Conclusion

245

and blissful dissolution, orgasm. As Bachelard says, "In the realm of the imagination there is no value without polyvalence" (Hillman, 1979, p. 126). One might object that an interpretation that provides so many meanings is only saying what is hypothetically possible and is doing nothing more than speculating. That is a gross misunderstanding. In fact, human beings have complex motives, and reducing intentions to singular and rational causes is facile and naive. This does not mean any possibility will do. Not only have I endeavored to find readings that resonate with Mishima's texts, but I have excluded those interpretations that are not based in careful readings but innumerable assumptions and fantasies about Mishima, Japanese culture, sexuality, gender, suicide, madness, and perversion. I would be in fine company if my interpretations were off the mark, so pervasive are silly or absurd readings of Mishima, of virtually any author. To quote Hamlet, "Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" (II.ii.512-513). So I offer mine as one analysis that seeks to dialogue on an intriguing mind, refuting some arguments and expecting mine to be roundly criticized as well. I am not claiming to say everything there is to say about Mishima, only what I think is being avoided and needs saying. As for Donald Keene's (1984) suggestion that a psychoanalysis of Mishima might make absorbing reading, "but it probably would not explain how he succeeded in becoming one of the important writers of the twentieth century" (p. 1168), my response is to ask whether anyone has clarified this question. Readers and critics are so diverse, enjoying and reviling his perversity, admiring and disdaining his language, that one must deeply analyze many disparate groups and individuals to understand why Mishima enthralled or disgusted so many. On the other hand, a psychoanalytic reading may at least disclose enough of Mishima's fantasies to help us understand what people are resonating with (or against). An author's popularity reads his readers. If one colleague of mine loved Bataille because he wrote so disturbingly about rape and urine, so another considered such writing trash with no value or profundity whatsoever. Both the erotic allure of golden-showered rape and revulsion to it reflect the specific reader. Since this book is about Mishima and not the world who reacts to him, I will only ask readers to ask themselves what they find arousing or repellent about Mishima, having been exposed to a few of the psychodynamics of perversion, madness, and the intricate deceptiveness of fantasy. I suspect that those who object to a psychoanalytic reading of Mishima or find it offensive are emotionally resistant to unmasking a person they need to be beautiful, invulnerable, noble, or sacred. One must ask, What do I need Mishima to be? How does one feel when he is not perfect, when he may be understood not as a hero but as an angry, sickly child posing as a brave man? To quote Nietzsche (1885) once

246

The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima

again, "One is most dishonest to one's god: he is not allowed to sin" (aphorism 65a). My own response has been deep fascination, curiosity, admiration, and pity. I am fascinated by such rage, sadomasochism, and misogyny; confused by how someone can be sexually aroused by death and violence, intrigued and curious to figure it out. I admire his skill, his incredible deftness and meticulous use of words. I am astounded that Mishima could have survived such misery to become a unique and brilliant author. And I pity his life, his suffering, his pain, his humiliation, his poses and compulsive needs to impress others, and his very human inability to transcend such agonies. Mishima would probably be enraged and offended by this book, though he might like the attention and would likely have laughed it off publicly. He might find my pity the most insulting. Can one not say with Nietzsche (1872) that there are "neuroses of health?" (p. 21). Pity not only implies that he was a hapless victim but that one wished things could have been otherwise. If one wished a soul not have endured the abject cruelty of Mishima's childhood, does that mean one wished such an individual with his unique life, and his unique contribution, have been undone for the avoidance of pain? Not having known Mishima, I am fairly sure he would embrace that pain, thank the pagan gods that it made him who he was, and laugh heartily that the pain was so feeble against him. If Mishima asked what was so ghastly about exposed intestines and finally sent them gushing out, I certainly find his physical disembowelment ghastly but will accept his invitation to look beneath the skin. Isn't that what he wanted?

Chronology

1925, January 14

Kimitake Hiraoka is born; named on day 49, taken on fiftieth day of life from parents by grandmother to live in her sickroom

1928

Birth of Kimitake's sister Mitsuko

1929

Onset of jikachudoku (autointoxication), vomiting, and falling into coma; nearly dies; is plagued by illness into adulthood

1930

Birth of brother Chiyuki

1931

Kimitake enrolls in the Gakushuin (the prestigious Peers School)

1937

Kimitake finally rejoins his mother after 12 years with grandmother

1938

Catches the attention of elder students of Peers School and its Bungeibu (literary society); becomes a regular columnist for the school magazine Hojinkai Zasshi

1939

Death of grandmother Natsuko

1940

Introduced to romantic poet Ryuko Kawaji; composes poetry under his tutelage

1941

Adopts the pen name Yukio Mishima and publishes "A Forest in Full Flower" under auspices of Peers teacher Fumio Shimizu

Included here are the dates of Mishima's major works. A comprehensive bibliography may be found in Stokes (1974).

248

Chronology

1944

Graduates from the Peers School and receives a silver watch from the emperor for being first in his class; enrolls in Tokyo Imperial University and studies German law; A Forest in Full Flower published as a book

1945

Mishima receives draft notice; is misdiagnosed with probable tuberculosis by army physician and is not conscripted to fight in World War II; death of sister Mitsuko from typhoid fever

1946

"Tabako" published with endorsement of Yasunari Kawabata

1947

Graduates from the Law Department of Imperial University (now renamed Tokyo University) and commences work in the national savings section of the Banking Bureau, Ministry of Finance

1948

Thieves; "Martyrdom"; abandons the Ministry of Finance to pursue his burgeoning literary career

1949

Confessions of a Mask

1950

Thirst for Love

1951

Forbidden Colors (part 1; Kinjiki); sets sail in December for the United States

1952

Sojourns in the United States, Brazil, France, Fngland, and Greece; writes his journal Apollo's Glass and awakens to the sun and a Nietzschean will to health

1953

"Death in Midsummer"; Torbidden Colors (part II, Higyo)

1954

The Sound of Waves

1955

Commences rigorous program in bodybuilding to exercise his body, become beautiful, and defeat disease

1956

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; Five Modern No Plays, Rokumeikan (play)

1957

Stays in the United States for six months waiting for production of his No plays

1958

Weds Yoko Sugiyama

1959

Kyokos House; moves into lavish European anti Zen/rococo home with Yoko; birth of daughter Noriko; studies Kendo (Japanese swordplay)

1960

"Patriotism"; After the Banquet; stars as yakuza gangster in Afraid to Die (film; title translated by Nathan as Tough Guy, by Stokes as A Dry Fellow)

1961

Birth of son Ichiro

1963

"Sword"; The Sailor Who Tell from Grace with the Sea; appears in surreal nude poses in Hosoe's Punishment by Roses (sometimes translated as Torture by Roses or Ordeal by Roses)

Chronology

249

1964

Silk and Insight

1965

Madame de Sade (play)

1966

"The Voice of the Hero Spirits"; poses as Saint Sebastian in photograph; Patriotism (film)

1967

Spring Snow (serialized 1965-1967); The Fall of the House of Suzaku (play); trains at Jietai (self-defense force) bases; christens his private army the Tate No Kai ("the Shield Society") in a blood oath ceremony

1968

Runaway Horses (serialized 1967-1968); Sun and Steel; My Friend Hitler (play); publicizes the birth of the Tate No Kai

1969

"The Voice of the Hero Spirits"; The Terrace of the Leper King (play); Black Lizard (play)

1970

The Temple of Dawn (serialized 1968-1970); poses for series of photographs called "Death of a Man" that display Mishima in gruesome scenarios; photographic self-retrospective at Tobu department store called "An Exhibit of Yukio Mishima"; inscribes final words of The Decay of the Angel, delivers manuscript to his publisher on November 25, and mounts assault on khigaya selfdefense force base with elite members of Shield Society, finally committing seppuku

This page intentionally left blank

References

Following many contemporary psychoanalytic authors, I have included the initial date of publication in parentheses following the name of the author, while the date of the edition cited in this document appears at the end, after the citation of publication. When citing articles, the date of publication is sometimes followed by two dates at the end. These indicate the original date the book containing the article was published, followed by the edition cited in the text. Where no date appears at the end, the original edition has been cited. Abadi, M., & Rogers, S. H. (1995). Reality andjor realities. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Abe, K. (1964). The woman in the dunes (E. D. Saunders, Trans.). New York: Vintage. Adelman, A. (1995). Traumatic memory, intergeneration transmission holocaust narrative. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 50, 343-367. Adler, G., & Buie, D. H. (1979). Aloneness and borderline psychopathology: The possible relevance of child development issues. In J. T. Maltsberger & M. J. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 356-378). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Alford, C. F. (1997). What evil means to us. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Allen, T. E. (1967). Suicidal impulse in depression and paranoia. In J. T. Maltsberger & M. J. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 173-184). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Almansi, R. J. (1958). A hypnogogic phenomenon. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 27, 539-546.

Almansi, R. J. (1979). Scoptophilia and object loss. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 48,601619. Arlow, J. (1978). Pyromania and the primal scene: A psychoanalytic comment on the work of Yukio Mishima. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 47(1), 24-51.

252

References

Asch, S. S. (1980). Suicide, and the hidden executioner. In J. J. Maltsberger & M. J. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 379 396). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Bakhtin, M. (1929). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (C. Emerson, Fd. and Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984/1989. Barocas, H., & Barocas, C. (1979). Wounds of the fathers: The next generation of Holocaust victims. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 6, 331 340. Barratt, B. B. (1984). Psychic reality and psychic knowing. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Barratt, B. B. (1993). Psychoanalysis and the postmodern impulse: Knowing and being since Freud's psychology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barthes, R. (1982). Empire of signs (R. Howard, Trans.). New York: Hill & Wang. Baudrillard, J. (1979). Seduction. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. Beauvoir, S. de (1949). The second sex (H. M. Parshley, Trans.). New York: Vintage, 1989. Beck, A. T., Kovacs, M., & Weissman, A. (1975). Hopelessness and suicidal behavior. In J. T. Maltsberger & M. J. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 331-341). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: Free Press. Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. New York: Free Press. Bettelheim, B. (1954). Symbolic wounds. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Bettelheim, B. (1975). The uses of enchantment: The meaning and importance of fairy tales. New York: Knopf, 1976. Binion, R. (1981). Soundings: Psychohistorical and psycholiterary. New York: Psychohistory Press. Binion, R. (1993). Love beyond death. New York: New York University Press. Bion, W. (1955). Group dynamics: A review. In M. Klein, P. I leimann, & R. E. Money-Kyrle (Eds.), New directions in psycho analysis (pp. 440 477). Tondon: Maresfield, 1977. Bion, W. (1963). Elements of psycho-analysis. London: Heinemann. Bion, W. (1970). Attention and interpretation. North vale, NJ: Aronson. Black, J. (1991). The aesthetics of murder: A study of romantic literature and contemporary culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bloch, D. (1978). "So the witch wont eat me': Fantasy and the child's fear of infanticide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bloom, H. (1982). The breaking of the vessels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Borges, J. L. (1962). Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote. In labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings (pp. 36-44). New York: New Directions, 1964. Breiner, S. J. (2001). Children of the Holocaust. In J. Piven & IT Tawton (Eds.), Psychological undercurrents of history (pp. 160-184). New York: iUniverse. Brenner, C. (1982). The mind in conflict. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1995. Brooks, P. (1994). Psychoanalysis and storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Brown, N. O. (1959). Life against death. Middletown, CT: Wesley an University Press, 1985. Bursten, B. (1973). Some narcissistic personality types. International journal of Psychoanalysis, 54: 287-300.

References

253

Buruma, I. (1984). Behind the mask: On sexual demons, sacred mothers., transvestites, gangsters, and other Japanese cultural heroes. New York: New American Library. Buruma, I. (1996). The missionary and the libertine: Love and war in east and west. New York: Vintage. Buruma, I. (2002, November 21). Suicide for the Empire. New York Review of Books, 49(18), 24-26.

Campbell, J. (1962). The masks of God: Oriental mythology. New York: Penguin. Campbell, J. (1968). The masks of God: Creative mythology. New York: Penguin.

Chang, I. (1997). The rape of Nanking: The forgotten holocaust of World War II. New York: Penguin. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1975). The ego ideal: A psychoanalytic essay on the malady of the ideal (P. Barrows, Trans.). New York: Norton, 1984/1985, Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1984). Creativity and perversion. New York: Norton, 1985. Cooper, A. M. (1988). The narcissistic-masochistic character. In Essential papers on object relations (pp. 288-309). New York: New York University Press, 1989. Corrigan, E. G., & Gordon, P. (Eds.). (1995). The mind object: Precocity and pathology of self-sufficiency. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Doctors, S. R. (1999). Further thoughts on self-cutting. Psychoanalytic Review, 86(5), 733-744. Doi, T. (1971). The anatomy of dependence (J. Bester, Trans.). Tokyo: Kodansha, 1981. Doniger, W. (1998). The Implied spider: Politics and theology in myth. New York: Columbia University Press. Dorpat, T L. (1982). An object-relations perspective on masochism. In Essential papers on object relations (pp. 267-287). New York: New York University Press, 1989. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. (1868). The idiot (H. and O. Carlisle, Trans.). New York: Signet, 1980. Dower, J. W. (1999). Embracing defeat: japan in the wake of World War II. New York: Norton. Edgcumbe, R., & Burgner, M. (1975). The phallic-narcissistic phase: A differentiation between preoedipal and oedipal aspects of phallic development. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 30,161-180. Eidelberg, L. (1954). A comparative pathology of neurosis. New York: International Universities Press. Eigen, M. (1999). Toxic nourishment. London: Karnac. Faure, B. (1996). Visions of power: Imagining medieval Japanese Buddhism (P. Brooks, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Faure, B. (2003). The power of denial: Buddhism, purity, and gender. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic studies of the personality. New York: Routledge, 1994. Federn, P. (1929). Selbstmordprophylaxe in der analyse. Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalytische Padagogik, 3, 379-389. Fenichel, O. (1935). The scoptophilic instinct and identification. In Collected papers, volume 1 (pp. 167-180). New York: Norton. Ferenczi, S. (1925). Psycho-analysis of sexual habits. In Further contributions to the

254

References

theory and technique of psycho analysis (J. I. Suttie, Trans.; pp. 259 296). New York: Brunner/Mazel. Ferenczi, S. (1929). The unwelcome child and his death instinct. In Final contributions to the problems and methods of psycho-analysis (E. Mosbacher et al., Trans.; pp. 102-107). New York: Brunner/Mazel. Fleischl, M. F. (1958). A note on the meaning of ideas of reference. American journal of Psychotherapy, 12(1), 24-29. Fowler, J. C , & Hilsenroth, M. J. (1999). Some reflections on self mutilation. Psychoanalytic Review, 86(5), 721-732. Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. SE 4-5. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on a theory of sexuality. SF 7 (pp. 125 248). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1913). Totem and taboo. SE 13 (pp. 1-164). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1918). From the history of an infantile neurosis. SE 17 (pp. 7 124). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SF 23 (pp. 67 144). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1922). The medusa's head. SE 23 (pp. 273 274). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1924). The economic problem of masochism. SF 19 (pp. 159 170). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1927). Fetishism. SE 21 (pp. 149-158). London: Hogarth Press. Friedlander, K. (1940). On the "longing to die." In J. T Maltsberger & M. ]. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 93 103). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Friedman, L. (1968). Japan and the psychopathology of history. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 37, 539-564. Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1960. Fromm, E. (1955). The sane society. New York: Rinehart & Company. Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York: Rinehart & Company. Fukushima, J. (1998). Mishima Yukio—Ken to kanben (Yukio Mishima Rapier and rouge). Tokyo: Bungei Shunju. Futabatei Shimei (1886-1889). japan's first modern novel: Drifting clouds (Ukigumo). [Note: Unlike other authors' names, this one cannot be reversed. Futabatei is the surname, but the pen name is based on a Japanese pun and would make no sense if listed under Shimei or if a comma were inserted between the names.] Gediman, H. K., & Lieberman, J. S. (1996). The many faces of deceit. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Gilligan, J. (1996). Violence. New York: Vintage. Gibbons, F. X. (1986). Social comparison and depression: Company's effect on misery, journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 140 149. Girard, R. (1961). Deceit, desire, and the novel (Y. Freccero, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965/1990. Girard, R. (1978). Things hidden since the foundation of the world. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987. Goffman, E. (1969). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday.

References

255

Goldberg, C. (1996). Speaking with the Devil: Exploring senseless acts of evil. New York: Penguin, 1997. Goldberg, C. (2000). The evil we do: The psychoanalysis of destructive people. New York: Prometheus. Gould, E. (1981). Mythical intentions in modern literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Greenacre, P. (1957). The childhood of the artist: Libidinal phase development and giftedness. In Emotional growth: Psychoanalytic studies of the gifted and a great variety of other individuals, volume 2 (pp. 479-504). New York: International Universities Press, 1971. Greenacre, P. (1968). Perversions: General considerations regarding their genetic and dynamic background. In Emotional growth: Psychoanalytic studies of the gifted and a great variety of other individuals, volume 1 (pp. 300-314). New York: International Universities Press, 1971. Greenacre, P. (1971). Notes on the influence and contribution of ego psychology to the practice of psychoanalysis. In B. McDevitt & C. F. Settlage (Eds.), Separation-individuation: Essays in honor of Margaret S. Mahler (pp. 71-79). New York: International Universities Press. Greenson, R. (1968). Disidentifying from mother: Its special importance for the boy. In Explorations in psychoanalysis (pp. 305-312). New York: International Universities Press, 1978. Gruen, A. (1987). The insanity of normality. Realism as sickness: Toward understanding human destructiveness. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992. Gruen, A. (2002). Surrendering the self: The reduction of identity to identification with the aggressor: The cases of Hermann Goring and Rudolph Hess. In J. Piven, C. Boyd, & H. Lawton (Eds.), Judaism and genocide: Psychological undercurrents of history, volume 4 (pp. 79-102). New York: iUniverse.

Guntrip, H. (1969). Schizoid phenomena, object relations and the self. New York: International Universities Press. Hartmann, H. (1964). Essays on ego psychology. New York: International Universities Press. Havens, L. L. (1965). The anatomy of a suicide. In J. T. Maltsberger & M. J. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 160-172). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Hendrick, I. (1940). Suicide as wish fulfillment. In J. T. Maltsberger & M. J. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 104-118). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Hesse, E., & Main, M. (1999). Second-generation effects of unresolved trauma in parents. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 19, 481-540. Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the undenvorld. New York: Harper & Row. Hillman, J. (1983). Healing fiction. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1994. Hillman, J. (1986). Egalitarian typologies versus the perception of the unique. Dallas: Spring Publications. Holland, N. (1973). Poems in persons: An introduction to the psychoanalysis of literature. New York: Norton, 1975. Holland, N. (1990). Holland's guide to psychoanalytic psychology and literature-andpsychology. New York: Oxford University Press. Homans, P. (1979). Jung in context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

256

References

Horney, K. (1967). Feminine psychology. New York: Norton. Hosoe, E. (1963). Ordeal by roses. New York: Aperture. Jacobson, E. (1953). Contributions to the metapsychology of cyclothymic depression. In Affective disorders (P. Greenacre, Ed.). New York: International Universities Press, pp. 49-83, 1961. Jacobson, E. (1971). Depression: Comparative studies of normal, neurotic, and psychotic individuals. New York: International Universities Press. Jalon, A. M. (2003, January 11). Meditating on war and guilt, Zen says it's sorry. New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01 / l 1 /arts/llZEN.html Jansen, M. B. (2000). The making of modern japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jensen, V. W., & Petty, T. A. (1958). The fantasy of being rescued in suicide. In J. T. Maltsberger & M. J. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 131 141). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Juergensmeyer, M. (2000). Terror in the mind of God: The global rise of religious violence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kalayjian, A., & Weisberg, M. (2002). Generational impact of mass trauma: The post-Ottoman Turkish genocide of the Armenians. In jihad and sacred vengeance: Psychological undercurrents of history, volume 3 (pp. 254 -280). New York: iUniverse. Kato, S. (1983). A history of Japanese literature, volume 3: The Modern years. New York: Kodansha. Keene, D. (1971). Appreciations of Japanese culture. Tokyo: Kodansha. Keene, D. (1984). Dawn to the West: Japanese literature in the modern era: Tiction. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Kernberg, O. (1992). Aggression in personality disorders and perversions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Klein, M. (1957). Envy and gratitude. In Envy and gratitude and other works (pp. 176235). New York: Free Press, 1975/1984. Kobrin, N. (2002). The death pilots of September 11th, 2001: Ihe ultimate schizoid dilemma. In jihad and sacred vengeance: Psychological undercurrents of history, volume 3 (pp. 76-98). New York: iUniverse. Koestler, A. (1960). The lotus and the robot. New York: Macmillan, 1961. Kohut, H. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York: International Universities Press. Kohut, H. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York: International Universities Press. Kohut, H. (1979). The two analyses of Mr. Z. International journal of Psychoanalysis, 63, 395-408. Kris, E. (1952). Psychoanalytic explorations in art. New York: Schocken. Kris, E. (1956). The recovery of childhood memories in psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2, 54-88. Lacan, J. (1966). Ecrits. New York: Norton, 1977. Laing, R. D. (1959). The divided self. New York: Penguin, 1990. Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.-B. (1967). The language of psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1973. Laughlin, H. (1967). The neuroses. Washington, DC: Butterworths. Lederer, W. (1968). The fear of women. New York: Harcourt. Leifer, R. (1997). The happiness project. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion.

References

257

Lennon, J., & McCartney, P. (1967). I am the walrus. On Magical mystery tour. Hollywood, CA: EMI /Capitol Records. Lennon, J., & McCartney, P. (1968). Happiness is a warm gun. On The Beatles (The white album). Hollywood, CA: EMI /Capitol Records. Lewin, B. (1933). The body as phallus. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2, 24-47. Lifton, R. J. (1967). Death in life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Basic. Lifton, R. J. (1979). The broken connection. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1996. Lifton, R. J. (1999). Destroying the world to save it: Aum Shinrikyo, apocalyptic violence, and the new global terrorism. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Litman, R. E., & Swearingen, C. (1972). Bondage and suicide. In J. T. Maltsberger & M. J. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 243-258). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Loewald, H. W. (1978). Instinct theory, object relations, and psychic structure formation. In Papers on psychoanalysis (pp. 207-218). xNew Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980. Loewald, H. W. (1980). Papers on psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Loewenberg, P. (1969). Decoding the past: The psychohistorical approach. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Loewenberg, P. (1995). Fantasy and reality in history. New York: Oxford University Press. Loy, D. (2002). On the nonduality of good and evil: Buddhist reflections on the new holy war. In Terror and apocalypse: Psychological undercurrents of history, volume 2 (pp. 244-267). New York: iUniverse. Mahler, M. (1968). On human symbiosis and the vicissitudes of individuation. In Separation-individuation (pp. 77-98). North vale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1979/ 1994. Mahler, M. (1979). Separation-individuation. North vale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994. Maltzberger, J. T., & Buie, D. H. (1980). The devices of suicide: revenge, riddance, and rebirth. In J. T. Maltsberger & M. J. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 397-416). New York: New York University Press, 1996. McDougall, J. (1982). Theatres of the mind: Illusion and truth on the psychoanalytic stage. London: Free Association Books, 1986. McDougall, J. (1995). The many faces of ems: A psychoanalytic exploration of human sexuality. New York: Norton. McPherson, D. E., & Lester, E. P. (1990). Homosexual conflict, sublimation, and suicide: A psychoanalytic study of the life and work of Yukio Mishima. In C. Socarides & V. Volkan (Eds.), The homosexualities: Reality, fantasy, and the arts (pp. 271-288). New York: International Universities Press. McWilliams, N. (1994). Psychoanalytic diagnosis. New York: Guilford. Meerloo, A. M. (1962). Suicide and mass suicide. New York: Grune & Stratton. Meissner, W. W. (1988). Treatment of patients in the borderline spectrum. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Melville, H. (1849). Redburn: His first voyage. In Redburn, white-jacket, Moby Dick (pp. 1-340). New York: Library of America, 1983. Miller D. L. (1986). Through a looking glass: The world as enigma. Eranos 55,349402. Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1988.

258

References

Miller, D. L. (1993). Nothing almost sees miracles! Self & no self in psychology and religion, journal of the Psychology of Religion, 4 5, 1 26, 1995 1996. Miller, J. H. (1982). Fiction and repetition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mishima, Y. (1941). A forest in full flower (D. Sullivan, Trans.). Unpublished manuscript, 2003. Mishima, Y. (1946). Cigarette. In Acts of worship (J. Bester, Trans.; pp. 107 124). New York: Kodansha, 1989. Mishima, Y. (1948a). Martyrdom. In Acts of worship (J. Bester, Trans.; pp. 125 142). New York: Kodansha, 1989. Mishima, Y. (1948b). Tozoku (Thieves). Tokyo: Shinkyosha. Mishima, Y. (1949a). Confessions of a mask (M. Weatherby, Trans.). New York: New Directions, 1958. Mishima, Y. (1949b). Kamen no kokuhaku (Confessions of a mask). Tokyo: Shinkyosha. Mishima, Y. (1950). Thirst for love (A. H. Marks, Trans.). New York: Perigee, 1969. Mishima, Y. (1951-1953). Forbidden colors (A. H. Marks, Trans.). New York: Perigee, 1968. Mishima, Y. (1951-1953). Kinjiki (Forbidden colors). Tokyo: Shinkyosha. Mishima, Y. (1953). Death in midsummer. In Death in midsummer and other stories (E. G. Seidensticker, Trans.; pp. 1-29). New York: New Directions, 1966. Mishima, Y. (1954). The sound of waves (M. Weatherby, Trans.). New York: Perigee, 1956. Mishima, Y. (1956a). Five modern No plays (D. Keene, Trans.). New York: Tuttle, 1957/1998. Mishima, Y. (1956b). Hanjo. In Five modern No plays (D. Keene, Trans.; pp. 175198). New York: Tuttle, 1957/1998. Mishima, Y. (1956c). Kinkakuji (The temple of the golden pavilion). Tokyo: Shinkyosha. Mishima, Y. (1956d). Sotoba Komachi. In Five modern No plays (D. Keene, Trans.; pp. 3-36). New York: Tuttle, 1957/1998. Mishima, Y. (1956e). The temple of the golden pavilion (I. Morris, Trans.). New York: Perigee, 1959. Mishima, Y. (1959). Kyoko no ie (Kyoko's house). Tokyo: Shinkyosha. Mishima, Y. (1960a). After the banquet (D. Keene, Trans.). New York: Perigee, 1963. Mishima, Y. (1960b). Patriotism. In Death in midsummer and other stories (G. W. Sargent, Trans.; pp. 93-118). New York: Perigee, 1961/1966. Mishima, Y. (1963a). Gogo no eiko (The sailor who fell from grace with the sea). Tokyo: Shinkyosha. Mishima, Y. (1963b). The sailor who fell from grace with the sea (J. Nathan, Trans.). New York: Perigee, 1965. Mishima, Y. (1963c). Sword. In Acts of worship (J. Bester, Trans.; pp. 35 92). New York: Kodansha, 1989. Mishima, Y. (1964). An ideology for an age of languid peace, japan Interpreter, 7(1), 79-80, Winter 1971. Mishima, Y. (1965). Love in the morning (L. Zolbrod, Trans.). The East, 2(2), 32 36. Mishima, Y. (1966). Death in midsummer and other stories. New York: New Directions.

References

259

Mishima, Y. (1967a). Spring snow: The sea of fertility, volume 1 (M. Gallagher, Trans.). New York: Vintage, 1973/1990. Mishima, Y. (1967b). The way of the samurai (K. Sparling, Trans.). New York: Perigee, 1983. Mishima, Y. (1968a). My friend Hitler. In My friend Hitler and other plays of Yukio Mishima (H. Sato, Trans., pp. 114-160). New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Mishima, Y. (1968b). Runaway horses: The sea of fertility, volume 2 (M. Gallagher, Trans.). New York: Vintage, 1973/1990. Mishima, Y. (1968c). Sun and steel (J. Bester, Trans.). New York: Kodansha, 1982. Mishima, Y. (1968d). Taiyo to tetsu (Sun and steel). Tokyo: Shinkyosha. Mishima, Y. (1969a). Akatsuki no tera (The temple of dawn). Tokyo: Shinkyosha. Mishima, Y. (1969b). "Tate no kai/ 7 Japan Interpreter, 7(1), 77-78, Winter 1971. Mishima, Y. (1969c). The temple of dawn: The sea of fertility, volume 3 (E. D. Saunders & C. S. Seigle, Trans.). New York: Vintage, 1973/1990. Mishima, Y. (1969d). The terrace of the leper king. In My friend Hitler and other plays of Yukio Mishima (H. Sato, Trans., pp. 161-218). New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Mishima, Y. (1970a). An appeal. Japan Interpreter, 7(1), 73-77, Winter 1971. Mishima, Y. (1970b). The decay of the angel: The sea of fertility, volume 4 (E. Seidensticker, Trans.). New York: Vintage, 1974/1990. Mishima, Y. (1970c). Tennin gosui (The decay of the angel). Tokyo: Shinkyosha. Mishima, Y. (1970d). "Yang-Ming thought as revolutionary philosophy/' Japan Interpreter, 7(1), 80-87, Winter 1971. Mishima, Y. (1989). Acts of worship (J. Bester, Trans.). New York: Kodansha. Mishima, Y. (2002). My friend Hitler and other plays of Yukio Mishima (H. Sato, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Mitchell, S. A., & Black, M. J. (1995). Freud and beyond: A history of modern psychoanalytic thought. New York: Basic. Miwa, K. (1972). "In the shadow of the leaves" and Mishima's death. Sophia University Institute for International Relations Research Papers, series B-2. Miyoshi, M., & Harootunian, H. D. (Eds.). (1989). Postmodernism in Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morris, I. (1975). The nobility of failure: Tragic heroes in the history of japan. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Moses-Hrushovski, R. (1994). Deployment. North vale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Muller, J., & Richardson, W. (Eds.). (1988). The purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and psychoanalytic reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Murakami, H. (1998). Underground: The Tokyo gas attack and the Japanese psyche. New York: Vintage. Nabokov, V. (1955). Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1989. Napier, S. J. (1991). Escape from the wasteland: Romanticism and realism in the fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nathan, J. (1974). Mishima: A biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Neumann, E. (1959). The fear of the feminine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

260

References

Nietzsche, F. (1872). The birth of tragedy. In Basic writings of Nietzsche (W. Kaufmann, Trans.; pp. 1-144). New York: Random House, 1967/1992. Nietzsche, F. (1882). The gay science (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Vintage, 1974. Nietzsche, F. (1885). Beyond good and evil. In Basic writings of Nietzsche (W. Kaufmann, Trans.; pp. 179-437). New York: Random House, 1966/1992. Oe, K. (1963). Homo sexualis. In Seventeen and ]: Two novels (I... van Haute, Trans.). New York: Foxrock, 1996. Oe, K. (1989). Japan's dual identity: A writer's dilemma. In M. Miyoshi & H. D. Harootunian (Eds.), Postmodernism in japan (pp. 189 214). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ogden, T. (1982). Projective identification and therapeutic technique. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Ogden, Thomas (1989). The primitive edge of experience. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko (2002). Kamikaze, cherry blossoms, and nationalists: The militarization of aesthetics in Japanese history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Okuno, Takeo (1993; Heisei 5). Mishima Yukio densetsu (The legend of Yukio Mishima). Tokyo: Shinchosha. Oshima, N. (1966). Hakucho notorima (Violence at noon). Kino International, 1988, 1999. Oshima, N. (1971). Gishiki (The ceremony). New Yorker Films. Ovid (c. 8). The metamorphoses. New York: Penguin. Peterson, G. B. (1979). The moon in the water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata,and Mishima. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Pflugfelder, G. M. (1999). Cartographies of desire: Male male sexuality in Japanese discourse, 1600-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press. Phillips, A. (1995). Terrors and experts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piers, C. (1999). Self-mutilation, masochism, and rigid character. Psychoanalytic Re view, 86(5), 691-700. Piven, J. S. (2002). On the psychosis (religion) of terrorists. In J. Piven, P. Ziolo, & H. Tawton (Eds.), Terror and apocalypse: Psychological undercurrents of history, volume 2 (pp. 153-204). New York: iUniverse. Piven, J. S. (2003a). Death, repression, narcissism, misogyny. Psychoanalytic Review, 90(2), 225-260. Piven, J. S. (2003b). Introduction: In defense of perversion. In J. Piven (Ed.), Eroticisms: Love, sex, and perversion: Psychological undercurrents of history, volume 5 (pp. 1-12). New York: iUniverse. Piven, J. S. (2004). Death and delusion: A Freudian analysis of mortal terror. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, in press. Rank, O. (1939). Beyond psychology. New York: Dover, 1941. Reich, A. (1960). Pathological forms of self-esteem regulation. In Psychoanalytic contributions (pp. 288-311). New York: International Universities Press, 1973. Reich, W. (1933) Character analysis. London: Vision. Reik, T. (1941). Masochism in modern man. New York: Farrar & Straus. Reik, T. (1946). Ritual: Four psychoanalytic studies. New York: Grove, 1962.

References

261

Rheingold, J. (1964). The fear of being a woman. New York: Grune & Stratton. Rheingold, J. (1967). The mother, anxiety, and death. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Richman, J., & Rosenbaum, M. (1970). A clinical study of the role of hostility and death wishes by the family and society in suicidal attempts. In J. T. Maltsberger & M. J. Goldblatt (Eds.), Essential papers on suicide (pp. 221-242). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Ricoeur, P. (1967). The symbolism of evil. Boston: Beacon, 1969. Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1974). Psychoanalysis and the work of art. In J. H. Smith (Ed.), Psychiatry and the humanities, volume 1 (pp. 3-34). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976. Ricoeur, P. (1976). Image and language in psychoanalysis. In J. H. Smith (Ed.), Psychiatry and the humanities, volume 3 (pp. 293-324). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978. Robins, R. S., & Post, J. M. (1997). Political paranoia: The psychopolitics of hatred. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Roland, A. (1988). In search of self in India and japan: Toward a cross-cultural psychology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosen, I. (1964). Exhibitionism, scoptophilia, and voyeurism. In The pathology and treatment of sexual deviation (pp. 293-350). London: Oxford University Press. Rosenman, S. (2001). Aum Shinrikyo and apocalyptic violence. In J. Piven, P. Ziolo, & H. Lawton (Eds.), Terror and apocalypse: Psychological undercurrents of history, volume 2 (pp. 328-360). New York: iUniverse. Rubin, J. (1984). Injurious to public morals: Writers and the Meiji state. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Russell, P. L. (Disc). (1993). On "resentment": Invisibility of trauma, need for repetition. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 3,515-522. Sackeim, H. A. (1983). Self-deception, self-esteem, and depression. In J. Masting (Ed.), Empirical studies of psychoanalytic theories (p. 183). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sackeim, H. A., & Gur, R. C. (1979). Self-deception, other-deception, and selfreported psychopathology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 47, 213-215. Schafer, R. (1968). Aspects of inter nalization. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1990. Schalow, P. G. (1992). Kukai and the tradition of male love in Japanese Buddhism. In J. I. Cabezon (Ed.), Buddhism, sexuality, and gender (pp. 215-230). Albany: State University of New York Press. Schiffer, I. (1978). The trauma of time. New York: International Universities Press. Searles, H. F. (1961). Collected papers on schizophrenia and related subjects. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Segal, J. (1985). Phantasy in everyday life. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995. Seidensticker, E. (1968, June 23). Yuichi was a doll. New York Times, h t t p : / / www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/25/specials/mishima-colors.html Shelley, P. B. (1818). Preface. In M. Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the modem Prometheus. New York: Norton, 1996. Shikibu, M. (1008). The tale of Genji (R. Tyler, Trans.). New York: Viking, 2001. Shneidman, E. S. (1970). The deaths of Herman xMelville. In E. S. Shneidman, N. L.

262

References

Farberow, & R. E. Litman (Eds.), The psychology of suicide (pp. 587-615). New York: Jason Aronson, 1976. Smith, J. Z. (1982). Imagining religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, J. Z. (1990). Drudgery divine: On the comparison of early Christianity and the religions of late antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Socarides, C. (1988). The preoedipal origin and psychoanalytic therapy of sexual perversions. New York: International Universities Press. Socarides, C. & Volkan, V. (Ed.). (1990). The Homosexualities: Reality, fantasy, and the arts. New York: International Universities Press. Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T, & Greenberg, J. (2003). Fear of death and human destructiveness. Psychoanalytic Review, 90(4), 457-474. Soseki, N. (1905). I am a cat (3 vols.; A. Ito & G., Wilson, Trans.). Rutland, VT: Tuttle. Soseki, N. (1914). Kokoro (E. McClellan, Trans.). Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1996. Starrs, R. (1994). Deadly dialectics: Sex, violence, and nihilism in the world of Yukio Mishima. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Stein, H. (1994). The dream of culture. New York: Psyche Press. Stein, R. (2002). Evil as love and as liberation: The mind of a suicidal religious terrorist. In J. Piven, P. Ziolo, & PI. Lawton (Eds.), Terror and apocalypse: Psychological undercurrents of history, volume 2 (pp. 90 121). New York: iUniverse. Stern, M. M. (1988). Repetition and trauma: Toward a teleonomic theory of psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Stokes, H. S. (1974). The life and death of Yukio Mishima. New York: Cooper Square Books, 1999. Stoller, R. J. (1975). Perversion: The erotic form of hatred. London: Karnac. Straker, M. (1958). Clinical observations of suicide. Canadian Medical Association journal, 79, 473-479. Szasz, T. (1970). The new product—masturbatory insanity. In The Manufacture of madness, 180-206). New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Tanizaki, J. (1966-1968). Childhood years: A memoir (P. McCarthy, Trans.). Tokyo: Kodansha, 1988. Tatara, M. (1974). Problems of separation: Dependency, personality, characterological and technological considerations of Japan. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 2, 231-242. Tatara, M. (1982). Psychoanalytic therapy in Japan: Dependency patterns and resolution of psychopathology. journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 20:225-240. Tausk, V. (1933). On the origins of the "influencing machine" in schizophrenia. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2, 519-530. Taylor, M. C. (1989). Tears. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Tetsuo, N. (1989). On culture and technology in postmodern Japan. In M. Miyoshi & H. D. Harootunian (Eds.), Postmodernism in Japan (pp. 3 20). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Theweleit, K. (1977-1978). Male fantasies, volumes 1 & 2 (E. Carter & C. Turner, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

References

263

Thompson, M. G. (1994). The truth about Freud's technique. New York: New York University Press. Tiger, L. (1996). Robert Jay Lifton and biology: The doctor is in—knock twice. In C. Strozier and M. Flynn (Eds.), Trauma and self (pp. 95-98). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Tillman, J. G. (1999). Eroticized transference and self-mutilation. Psychoanalytic Review, 86(5), 709-720. Ushijima, S. (1985). The narcissism and death of Yukio Mishima from the object relational point of view. Paper presented at International Psychoanalytical Congress. Volkan, V. (1988). The need to have enemies and allies. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Waska, R. T. (2002). Primitive experiences of loss: Working with the paranoid-schizoid patient. London: Karnac. White, M. (1993). The material child. Coming of age in japan and America. New York: Free Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. In Playing and reality (pp. 1-25). New York: Routledge, 1971/1994. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations. London: Macmillan. Wockner, R. (1998, April 10). Japanese book that outs Yukio Mishima recalled. Badpuppy Gay Today, http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/world/ 041098wo.htm Wolfe, A. (1989). Suicide and the Japanese postmodern: A postnarrative paradigm? In M. Miyoshi & H. D. Harootunian (Eds.), Postmodernism in japan (pp. 215234). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wolfe, P. (1989). Yukio Mishima. New York: Continuum. Wolman, B. (1973). Call no man normal. New York: International Universities Press. Woodruff, M. E. (1999). Flesh made word: Cutting back to the mother. Psychoanalytic Review, 86(5), 701-708. Yalom, I. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Yamamoto, T. (1716). The Hagakure: A code to the way of the samurai (T. Mukoh, Trans.). Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1980. Yonekura, I. (2001, September 10). Dazai Osamu to Mishima Yukio no jikoai no hikaku (Comparing the self-love of Osamu Dazai and Yukio Mishima). Psiko, 12,16-21. Young, R. M. (2003). Is "perversion" obsolete? In J. Piven (Ed.), Eroticisms: Love, sex, and perversion: Psychological undercurrents of history, volume 5 (pp. 3258). New York: iUniverse. Yourcenar, M. (1970). Mishima: The vision of the void. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

"A Forest in Full Flower" (Hanazakari No Mori), 18, 66, 73, 95, 159, 247, 248 "A New Year's Dilemma," 73 A Tropical Tree (Nettaiju), 29 abandonment, 4, 7,13-14,18, 30-33, 46, 51, 57, 63-66, 69-75, 84, 93, 96, 149, 159-60,178,182,192, 200-201, 207, 214, 222, 234 aesthetics, 8, 14, 37, 99, 118, 169-71, 191-92, 236-37 Afraid to Die (Karrakaze Yaro), 60 After the Banquet (Utage No Ato), 25, 163, 248 Alien, 232 "American Hijiki," 104 "amorous octopus," 111 "An Appeal," 120-22 "An Ideology for an Age of Languid Peace," 120 anal eroticism, 40, 44 anal penetration, 45 anal sadism, 43-44 anal stage, 40 anality, 39, 40, 44-45, 50, 54-56, 77, 156,184,195,199, 221, 235 annihilation, 24, 28, 33-39, 48, 61, 72,

75, 77,101, 108-9,126, 139, 148, 158, 167, 185, 201-2, 208, 213, 217, 228, 234 Apollo's Glass, 80, 248 Arlow, Jacob, 66-67, 76, 107, 189, 197, 202, 210 assassination, 2 Aum Shinrikyo, 128 autistic-contiguous dread, 39, 55, 201 auto-mythologizing, 9 Bacchae, 124 Bachelard, Gaston, 245 Barratt, Barnaby, 5-6 Bataille, Georges, 118, 245 Baudrillard, Jean, 240 beauty, 1, 18, 23-26, 32, 36-40, 45-46, 49-56, 62, 67-70, 76, 93-96, 101, 108, 118-22, 127, 131-32, 137, 141, 143, 148, 151,154, 160, 162, 167, 169, 170-205, 210, 213, 223, 226, 229, 233-34, 237-38, 245, 248; Appolinian, 37, 49, 53, 74; and death, 8, 13, 24, 27, 30-31, 35-36, 40-41, 44, 48, 68-81, 84, 86, 89-93, 99, 125, 130, 137, 153-54, 163, 165, 169, 174, 180, 191, 195, 205, 210,

266

224, 229, 236, 237; as defense against death, 26-29, 36-38, 46, 69, 80, 103, 128, 131,146, 150, 163, 165, 178, 191-95, 212-14, 232, 234, 244; feminine, 26-27, 30, 36, 68, 173-74, 197, 205, 210-13, 226-27; hatred of, 14, 17, 42, 51, 56-57, 62, 66-69, 92, 102, 108-9, 116, 143, 147-48, 152-54, 171-72, 188,190, 208 (see also envy; resentment); masculine, 18, 23-26, 32, 36-38, 41, 51-55, 58, 65, 67, 74, 83, 136, 144, 149, 151-84, 195, 214, 221-22, 233; persecution by, 63, 148, 190, 234 Beauvoir, Simone de, 34, 199 Becker, Ernest, 60, 89, 113, 126, 177, 191, 223, 235 betrayal, 8, 22, 25, 28, 33, 67-69, 101-3, 109, 123, 125, 135, 139, 143-50, 153, 155, 187, 190-211, 234, 241 Binion, Rudolph, 4, 11, 143, 165 bin Laden, Osama, 13, 114, 116 Bion, Wilfred, 60, 113, 124, 193, 195 bisexuality, 11 Black, Joel, 238 Bloch, Dorothy, 34 Bloom, Harold, 48, 96, 109, 130 Brooks, Peter, 4, 9 The Brothers Karamazov, 218 Brown, Norman O., 161, 191, 212 Buruma, Ian, 110, 114, 116, 206 bushido, 114-15 Campbell, Joseph, 100, 192 castration, 22, 24, 26-28, 31-35, 39, 43-47, 56-67, 74-75, 93-97, 109, 111, 120, 122, 137, 139, 149, 157-58, 173, 184, 187-206, 210, 214, 219, 221-29 catachresis, 9 catastrophic death complex, 34 The Ceremony (Gishiki), 105 Chang, Iris, 112, 120 Chikamatsu, Monzaemon, 147 childhood, 12, 17-18, 20, 21, 23, 28, 30, 32-33, 37-38, 40, 43-44, 46-48, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 63, 67, 70, 76, 82,

Index

85, 93, 96, 100 101, 108, 116, 128, 138, 149, 153, 157 58, 175, 188, 194, 199, 204, 210 13, 217, 220-21, 226, 231,243-44,246 "Cigarette" Oabako), 36, 53 Confessions of a Mask (Kamen No Kokuhaku), 2, 9, 22 77, 86, 96, 108, 124, 135, 144 57, 164 65, 178, 180, 184, 195, 201, 213, 219, 221, 223, 227, 233, 248 Counterrevolutionary Manifesto, 92 Dazai, Osamu, 77, 108, 163 death, 2, 3, 8, 13 17, 21, 32 50, 53-54, 56 66, 68 79, 81 99, 101-10, 113, 115-19, 121 25, 128 37, 147-69, 174, 178, 180-99, 202, 204, 206, 207 14, 217- 18, 220 41, 243-44, 246, 248; and beauty (see beauty, and death); conquest of, 22, 38, 62, 94, 107, 187, 214, 223; desire for, 28, 59 64, 73, 75, 88, 97, 128, 229, 238 (see also desire, for death; suicide); erotic, 2, 8; eroticization of, 37, 40-41, 54, 61, 69, 94, 116, 165, 178, 202; escape from, 51; fear of, 13, 60-61, 69, 128, 163, 185, 210, 223, 225, 234 35, 238 (see also (ear, of death); and the feminine, 23, 27 28, 32, 34, 48, 58 59, 226, 244; and glory, 225 26; and intimacy, 28, 32, 35, 63, 85, 147 48, 156, 158, 160, 198, 201, 226, 228 29, 244; of Japan, 95, 100 106; obsession with, 2, 8, 36, 62, 238; and orgasm, 61; repression of, 61; sensual, 41, 45; and separation, 32, 40, 61, 147, 192 93, 201, 208 10, 222 (see also fear, of freedom; separation, anxiety); sickness unto, 50, 84; and sleep, 61; tragic, 83; transcendence of, 125; of youth, 30, 181 "Death in Midsummer" (Manatsu No Shi), 57 Death in Venice (Mann), 136, 150 decay, 14, 17, 23 24, 27 30, 34, 39, 41-42, 48, 51, 61, 68, 72, 76-77, 8\, 87, 89, 91 94, 97, 113, 125-26, 128,

267

Index

131,137, 147-48,152, 158,160-61, 163,165,181,185, 187-88,190-92, 199, 205, 209, 214, 219, 224-25, 232, 238, 244 The Decay of the Angel (Tennin Gosui), 57, 73, 79, 85, 89, 91, 92, 93, 97, 236, 249 deconstructionism, 14-15 delusion, 13, 54, 61, 63,116,132, 234 depression, 233, 234 desire: for death, 43, 60-61, 73, 75, 83, 97, 113-14, 124-25,180-81, 228, 236, 238 (see also death; suicide); erotic, 2, 11-12, 18, 23, 27, 29-71, 86, 93, 101, 106, 109, 114,120, 125, 144, 150,164-65,169,178,196-97, 202, 215, 223, 227, 245 (see also erotic fantasy; eroticism); for love, 4, 30, 33, 36, 42-43, 45-46, 49, 56, 59-60, 64, 66, 70, 83, 90, 94,113, 125, 128,172,182, 204, 210, 221-22, 228 despair, 8,14, 30, 35, 37, 57-59, 62, 64, 70, 73, 77, 80, 93, 94, 105,112,120, 126,128,150,153,177,192-93,198, 204, 206, 211-12, 232-36, 241, 243 deviance, 12, 59,188 disease, 17,19-30, 35-50, 95,148,152, 156,158,160, 209, 213, 225, 229, 231-32, 244, 248 disgust, 18, 23, 26-27, 35-38, 46, 47, 51, 58, 65, 69, 89, 101, 137, 143,145, 148,160,166,169, 171,190-95, 200, 208, 210, 213, 220, 222, 226, 232, 238 disintegration, 2, 22, 28, 30, 38-39, 55, 61, 69, 70-72, 91, 93,128, 139, 201, 212, 232, 234-35; fear of (see fear, of disintegration) displacement, 4-5, 13-14, 29, 31, 34, 54, 57-58, 62, 74-75,102-3,118, 126-28,131,133,160,168,170,172, 176, 193, 194, 195, 204, 205, 211, 221 Doi, Takeo, 127 Don Quixote, 116,130-31 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 7-8, 77, 93,100, 139,143,190 Dower, John, 126

Dracula, 137 The Drifting Cloud (Ukigumo), 104 ecstasy, 8, 15, 41, 68, 88, 119, 123-25, 139, 164,168, 215, 222-23 emasculation, 24, 26, 31-32, 67, 73, 84, 91, 96,112-13, 123, 125-26, 128, 133, 189-90,194, 205, 214, 218, 221, 224, 229 emperor worship, 2, 14, 72, 95,113, 118, 120-22,130 engulfment, 32, 35, 45, 52, 59, 61, 64, 74, 93, 214, 229, 235 envy, 4, 42, 50, 52, 54, 68-69, 71, 89, 136-37, 143, 148-54,164, 184, 216 epistemology, 5-6, 15 erotic fantasy, 165, 223, 244. See also desire, erotic eroticism, 8, 12, 37, 39, 41, 44-45, 69-70, 86, 94,108,151,158, 161, 169-70, 198, 213, 227 Euripides, 124 evanescence, 68, 72,168-69, 191, 193, 203, 237 evil, 4, 21, 23, 25, 29-30, 33-34, 48, 57, 61-62, 65, 69, 73-75, 91, 93, 104, 109,115,117-18,141,143-44, 148-49, 155-56, 164,192, 194, 196, 198-99, 203, 211, 213, 218-19, 232, 239 excrement, 27, 32, 37-40, 44-46, 48, 64, 72, 80, 87, 93, 95-96, 108, 160, 164-65,195, 220, 235; eroticization of, 165 exhibitionism, 8, 24, 41, 44-46, 51, 63-64, 67, 70-71, 77, 93, 96, 108, 150, 154, 196, 210, 212, 232. See also phallic narcissism father. See Hiraoka, Azusa fear, 4, 12, 15,17, 19, 20, 25-26, 28, 35, 39, 45, 47-48, 49, 53, 61, 76-77, 83, 90, 95, 97, 106, 108, 109-11, 113, 133,137,145, 148, 151, 156, 158, 161,163, 164-65, 169, 174, 178, 182, 185, 202-4, 209, 212, 214, 220, 223, 225, 228, 234-35, 238, 240, 244; of abandonment, 13, 55,178; of aging,

268

68-69, 89, 103, 205; of annihilation, 28, 33-35, 39, 48, 61, 108, 158, 201, 228, 232, 234; of being poisoned, 39; of collapse, 39, 73, 85; of death, 13, 61, 69, 97, 108, 128, 151, 158, 163, 185, 204, 210, 223, 225, 234, 235, 238 (see also death, fear of); of decay, 23-29, 34, 39, 41-42, 51, 61, 68, 87, 113, 128, 158, 160-65, 181, 188, 191, 199, 224 (see also death; disgust; rage); of disappearance, 51, 70, 71; of disintegration, 2, 28, 38, 39, 55, 71, 93, 128, 201, 212, 234, 235; of dissolution, 39, 73, 83, 104, 201, 212, 229; of emasculation, 24, 26, 45, 84, 113, 214 (see also castration; emasculation; misogyny; rage; vagina, hatred of); of the erotic, 28, 32, 63, 147, 161, 209; of the feminine, 48; of flying, 182; of fragmentation, 11, 38, 39, 46, 55, 201; of freedom, 32, 35, 61, 87, 89, 90, 91, 124, 126, 127, 192, 208, 209 (see also death, and separation; separation, anxiety); of harming others, 157, 158, 235; of inadequacy, 212; of insanity, 38; of intimacy, 27, 33, 83, 84, 85, 148, 153, 158, 228; of love, 148, 228; of merger, 35, 83, 145; of nonbeing, 113, 234, 235; of one's own feelings, 20, 83, 161, 202, 235; of self-implosion, 210; of sexual intercourse, 28, 34, 45, 67, 164; of ugliness, 165, 212; of unknowing, 6, 133; of the vagina, 23, 27, 47, 58, 201, 212, 214, 220 (see also castration; death, and the feminine; emasculation; fear, of women; envy; misogyny; rage; terror; vagina, fear of; woman, and death); of vulnerability, 223, 244; of women, 17, 25, 26, 28, 34, 35, 48, 111, 137, 173, 174, 184, 203, 214, 220, 237 (see also envy; hatred; death, and the feminine; misogyny; woman, and death) Ferenczi, Sandor, 75, 177, 235 fetishism, 10, 16

Index

Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki), 14, 23-32, 47, 53, 57, 83, 101, 116, 135-89, 195 98, 211, 213, 221, 222, 233, 248 Freud, Sigmund, 5 6, 10 11, 15, 49, 56, 60, 69, 75, 77, 124, 196, 200, 210 Fukushima, Jiro, 100, 182 "Garden of 1 ,oved ()nes," 42 gender identity, 11, 16, 26, 48 Girard, Rene, 125, 150, 183, 184 glory, 2, 14, 23, 73 74, 79, 88, 92, 116, 118, 126, 128, 188, 204, 224-29 Gould, Erich, 9, 145 grandiosity, 14, 22, 24, 33, 34, 39, 44, 46, 62, 64, 67, 73, 81, 89, 92, 97, 112, 118, 123, 129, 153, 154, 184, 207, 211, 214, 216, 222, 224, 233, 234, 238,241,243 grandmother. See Hiraoka, Natsu Greenacre, Phyllis, 45, 49, 69 guilt, 28, 36, 62, 63, 124, 133, 158, 159, 232 Guntrip, Harry 42, 47, 164 Hagakure, 25, 47, 114, 115, 116, 125 Hamlet, 227, 245 Hanjo, 65 hara kiri, 239. See also seppuku hatred, 3, 11 13, 20, 25, 47, 48, 52, 54, 62, 77, 109 13, 125, 127, 133, 136, 139, 140, 143, 146, 150, 155-60, 172 80, 205, 210, 211, 215, 217, 218, 222, 232; of women, 17, 25, 26, 178. See also misogyny helplessness, 24, 33, 39, 40, 41, 44, 56, 59, 81, 86, 93, 96, 101, 104, 105, 107, 139, 153, 163, 165, 177, 202, 204, 206, 209, 212, 214, 220, 223, 224, 229, 244 hermeneutics, 5 heterosexuality, 32, 63 Hillman, James, 7, 49, 61, 97, 231, 245 Hiraoka, Azusa, 20, 21, 22, 31, 47, 170 Hiraoka, Mitsuko, 29, 108, 247, 248 Hiraoka, Natsu, 3, 18 50, 58 60, 63 67, 70, 71, 74 76, 82, 85, 86, 96, 101, 107, 148, 149, 157, 159, 161,

Index 194, 200-205, 209, 211, 212, 221, 244, 247 Hiraoka, Shizue, 18, 20, 21, 29, 31 Hitler, Adolf, 13,104,114-22,130-33 Hokusai, 110 Holocaust, 107, 120 Homans, Peter, 9, 141 "Homo Sexualis," 108 homosexuality, 2, 3,10,11, 14, 23, 26, 32, 37, 44-47, 49, 51, 54, 55, 62, 63, 66, 70, 75, 76, 99,101, 104, 115, 116, 135,136,142,150,151,155,158, 162-69,181-85, 195, 213, 214, 221 Hosoe, Eiko, 77, 200, 248 humiliation, 3, 8,12, 22-35, 39, 43, 45, 46, 56, 58, 63, 64, 67, 79, 83, 87, 89, 92, 93, 97, 101-12, 120-36,139,142, 143,149-56,160,163, 170-85, 192, 195, 204, 205, 208, 215-17, 222, 228, 235, 238, 243, 244, 246 / Am a Cat (Wagahi Wa Neko Dearu), 118 Icarus, 79, 87-91 idealization, 27, 29, 109,112, 113, 127, 176,188,193,202,211,225 identification, 41, 43, 46, 64, 77, 96, 103, 111, 123,127, 128, 152, 161, 183, 184, 221, 233; projective, 33, 34, 63, 65, 234; with the aggressor, 43, 44,53,110,207 The Idiot, 93 illusion, 7, 10, 31, 53, 68, 72, 73, 84, 89, 90, 91, 93, 97, 125, 128,131,164, 176, 223, 235, 236, 241, 243 impingement, 18, 32, 33, 35, 45, 46, 52, 84, 97,182, 227, 228, 234, 235 impotence, 32, 36, 41, 42, 58, 59, 63, 73, 75, 81, 89, 93, 96, 101, 102, 106, 139, 178, 181,187-98, 203, 204, 206 imprisonment, 14, 24, 35, 38, 39, 40, 46, 74, 76, 89, 93, 190, 209, 211, 224-28, 234 impurity, 23, 44, 74, 109, 157,158,192, 197,199, 229, 237. See also purity inferiority, 39, 58, 63, 67, 153, 204, 210-12,216,218,233,234 invulnerability, 10,18, 24, 33, 37, 38,

269 39, 51, 61, 62, 65, 80, 83, 87, 90, 91, 95, 113, 150,151,162, 214, 233, 235, 245 Jacobson, Edith, 233 Jansen, Marius, 117 jealousy. See envy kamikaze, 39,114 Kawabata, Yasunari, 1, 105, 108, 130, 248 Keene, Donald, 42, 49, 93, 103, 123, 130, 144,161,181, 182,184,185, 236, 245 Kernberg, Otto, 11, 34, 44, 45, 46, 50, 52, 53, 94,126,197, 201, 232 Klein, Melanie, 52 Kohut, Heinz, 24, 35, 39, 42, 52, 71, 194, 201, 205, 212, 240 Kokoro (The Heart), 105 Kyoko's House (Kyoko No le), 38, 71, 80,119,184,232,248 Lacan, Jacques, 9, 77, 145, 210 Laing, R. D., 33,141 "Land of the Pomegranate, The/' 41, 42, 201 League of Divine Wind, 117 Lederer, Wolfgang, 34, 48, 194, 199 Leifer, Ron, 126,177, 235 Lennon, John, 7 leprosy, 1, 30, 95 Lifton, Robert Jay, 15, 38, 61, 71, 72, 77, 101, 107, 111, 128, 131, 192, 234, 241 Loewald, Hans, 148, 222 love, 5, 8, 14, 21-36, 40-56, 59-77, 83, 87-90, 94, 96, 103, 109-17, 125-37, 143-85,191-93, 200, 201, 204, 207, 210-16, 221-37, 244 "Love in the Morning/' 30, 68, 76 madness, 7, 10,13, 14, 87, 89, 95, 101, 116, 118, 129, 152, 190, 204, 205, 234, 236, 243, 245 Mahler, Margaret, 48, 77, 148, 222 Mann, Thomas, 136 Manson, Charles, 13

270

"Martyrdom" (Junkyo), 20, 36, 44, 45, 184, 248 masculine protest, 38, 46, 81 masks, 24, 33, 53, 73, 133, 141, 142, 143, 145, 153, 165, 169, 177, 228, 232, 236, 243 masochism, 8, 10, 13, 44, 59, 60, 61, 64, 82, 97, 108, 141, 160, 168, 196, 231, 235, 237 masturbation, 3, 27, 40, 41, 49, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 65, 74, 75, 94, 105, 106, 108, 144, 178, 208, 209, 211, 215, 223, 239 McDougall, Joyce, 11, 24, 61, 106 McPherson, David, & Lester, Eva, 35, 48, 177, 233, 241 McWilliams, Nancy, 61, 232, 241 Melville, Herman, 103, 244 merger, 18, 28-35, 40, 41, 46, 51-63, 66, 71-74, 83, 86, 89, 90, 93, 124, 125, 145, 148, 158, 174, 201, 212, 215, 222-29, 244 Miller, David L., 97, 99, 239 Miller, J. Hillis, 11, 15 misogyny, 4, 7, 8, 11, 14, 17-19, 21, 23, 25-27, 29-51, 65, 67, 101-3, 109-11, 130-213, 221, 231, 243, 246 miyabi, 121 Moby Dick, 103 mollusks, cunnilingulating, 111 mono no aware, 205, 237 Morris, Ivan, 117,237 mother. See Hiraoka, Shizue murder, 3, 17, 21, 36, 41, 42, 46-52, 55, 56, 61-63, 69, 71, 73, 76, 77, 85, 86, 92, 94, 104, 105, 108, 109, 117, 118, 124, 132, 147, 150, 174, 182, 190, 192, 196, 202, 205-7, 221-37; theater, 56, 147 My Friend Hitler (Waga Tomo Hittora), 2, 120, 130, 249 Nabokov, Vladimir, 8 Nanking, rape of, 112, 120, 129, 133, 183 Nanzenji Temple, 67, 197, 198 Napier, Susan, 100-107 narcissism, 2, 8, 14, 26, 28, 35, 38, 39,

Index

40, 43-46, 48, 51 56, 62 67, 70, 71, 73, 77, 79, 80, 89, 93, 97, 103, 122, 129, 133, 150, 153, 154, 163 67, 170, 175, 176, 178 85, 195, 200 202, 212, 214, 221, 232 38, 243; as defense against death, 93, 224, 234; as defense against obliteration, 234; as defense against suicidal depression, 234; exhibitionistic, 45; malignant, 34, 35; phallic, 24, 39, 43, 44, 46, 51, 62, 64, 67, 70, 71, 96, 163, 214, 232, 235 (see also phallic narcissism) narcissistic: collapse, 73; compensation, 38; emptiness, 236; entitlement, 34, 122; grandiosity, 64, 66, 89, 153, 224, 233, 234, 238, 243; injury, 26, 38, 39, 44, 51, 62, 64, 67, 133, 183, 212, 235; rage, 35 (see also rage); self object, 29, 35, 71, 175 Nathan, John, 15, 18, 20, 21, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 57, 59, 63, 67, 73, 77, 79, 80, 92, 93, 99, 108, 111, 115, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 127, 130, 131, 181, 182, 189, 194, 200, 207, 209, 214, 221, 223, 229, 233, 248 Nazism, 2, 22

need for love. See desire, for love neosexuality, 106. See also perversion Neumann, Erich, 34, 48 Nietzsche, Fried rich, 7, 8, 9, 10, 49, 80, 117, 119, 126, 131, 133, 240, 245, 246 nihilism, 2, 59, 118, 126, 133, 184, 236 normality 12, 15, 29, 66, 126, 127, 128 oblivion, 60, 68, 72, 73, 75, 90, 96, 124, 185,241 Odyssey (Homer), 164 Oe, Kenzaburo, 1(H), 102, 104, 106, 108 Ogden, Thomas, 6, 39, 55, 63, 201 orality, 6, 39, 42, 44, 55, 56, 70, 77, 164, 206,221,235 orgasm, 10 12, 27, 41 46, 56, 59, 61, 86, 94, 111, 139, 146, 184, 185, 202, 224, 245 Oshio, Heihachiro, 117, 121

Index paranoia, 5, 13, 30, 53, 55, 63, 102, 103, 118, 133, 138, 148, 234, 243 / Tatriotism ,/ (Yukoku), 26, 27, 48, 53, 54, 77, 111, 248 Perry, Commodore, 106 perversion, 1, 2, 7-17, 27, 36, 70, 74, 75, 95,100-116,120,123,129,136, 149,182, 194, 204, 231, 234, 236, 239, 243, 245 Peterson, Gwenn Boardman, 37, 49, 53, 99, 102,114,116,119,121,135, 144, 169,185, 237 phallic narcissism, 24, 26, 44, 62, 64, 67, 70, 96, 214, 232, 235. See also narcissism, phallic phallic women, 26, 43, 46, 47, 65, 70, 137,157. See also Hiraoka, Natsu Poe, Edgar Allan, 137,138, 239 postmodernism, 15 primal scenes, 66-69, 76,129,138, 139, 147,151, 175, 188,190-205, 212 projection, 6, 27, 40, 53, 63, 234, 240 projective identification, 33, 34, 63, 65, 234 psychoanalysis, 4-15, 74, 236, 240, 245 psychopathology, 10-13, 35,103, 110, 112,123,231,237,241 purification, 4, 29, 37-39, 59, 61, 80, 95, 108, 137, 193, 239 purity, 2, 5, 24-30, 36-38, 44, 49, 52, 53, 58, 63, 74, 75, 111, 117, 121, 137, 141, 147, 148, 151, 156-58,162,176, 192, 195,197-99, 202, 203, 211, 217, 227, 228, 235, 238 "The Purloined Letter/' 239 rage, 4, 8,11-14,18, 20-26, 28, 30, 32-36, 42, 44, 46, 47, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 63-69, 73-76, 81, 89, 92-94, 103, 106-13,125-33,137, 142,147-61, 171, 174,176-78, 187-241, 246 Rank, Otto, 191 rape, 3,12, 58, 104,108, 111, 112, 129, 133,135,182,183, 200, 210, 215, 216,235,245 rebirth, fantasy of, 4, 51, 61, 77, 94, 129,132,147, 235, 244 Redburn, 244

271 reenactment, 12, 34, 53, 63, 66, 96, 103, 104, 110, 114, 123, 125, 143, 149, 155, 168, 172, 182, 232 regression, 51, 60, 62, 93, 124, 222, 224, 229 Reich, Annie, 39, 44, 62 Reich, Wilhelm, 24, 26, 44, 45, 55, 70 reincarnation. See rebirth, fantasy of resentment, 14, 17, 26, 42, 77, 93, 103, 128,137, 147,160, 168, 215, 216, 218, 219, 221, 243 resignation, 73, 88, 90, 106, 136 revenge, 11, 17, 23, 25, 29-31, 36, 41-44, 50-77, 87, 93, 102, 108, 136, 140,147-52,155-60, 166, 170, 172, 175, 176, 178, 181, 184, 188-90,194, 199-220. See also vengeance Rheingold, Joseph, 31, 34, 43, 47, 48, 60,113,194 Ricoeur, Paul, 8, 34, 157 romanticism, 21, 27, 49, 101-4, 116, 119,131,184,237,247 'The Room with the Locked Door" (Kagi No Kakaru Hey a), 35, 101 Runaway Horses (Honba), 53, 71,117, 232, 249 Ryoanji Temple, 191 sadism, 10,11, 17-27, 31, 35-39, 43-46, 51-57, 60, 64, 67, 70, 93, 104-6, 109, 112, 132, 143, 147, 170, 176, 181-83, 188,199-203, 222, 223, 235, 238; anal, 43, 44, 235; oral, 56; phallic, 43, 56 sadomasochism, 2, 246 Saikaku, Ihara, 109, 169 The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Gogo No Eiko), 14, 38, 44, 57, 65, 84,101,102, 113, 139,147,180, 189, 207-29, 248 Saint Sebastian, 3, 40, 41, 45, 54-58, 86,144, 150, 223, 249 schizoidal withdrawal, 13, 84, 159 The Sea of Fertility (Hojo No Umi), 2, 71, 97, 154 self-destructiveness, 13 self-disgust, 143, 148

272

self-hatred, 62, 146, 160, 180. See also self-loathing self-loathing, 22, 38, 52, 73, 80, 91, 92, 131, 164, 165, 180, 182, 194, 210, 234 self-mutilation, 52 separation: and rage, 56, 66, 147, 193, 208-14, 232; anxiety, 29, 32, 56, 61, 66, 147, 192, 208-14, 234. See also death, and separation; fear, of freedom seppuku, 12, 41, 42, 49, 53, 72, 87, 94, 99, 114-23, 183, 234, 237, 238, 249 shame, 8, 17, 20, 23, 24, 31, 33, 39, 42, 43, 46, 52, 55, 56, 62, 64, 89, 90, 96, 97, 103, 106-11, 124, 127, 128, 133, 140, 142, 152, 159, 168, 173, 177, 185, 200-204, 212, 228, 232, 243 Shield Society (Tate No Kai), 234, 249 shudo, 115 sickliness, 38, 43, 95, 97, 150, 233, 244 Solomon, Sheldon, 61 Some Prefer Nettles, 137, 227 Soseki, Natsume, 105, 118, 123 Sotoba Komachi, 65, 76 soul murder, 84, 94, 202; defiance of, 94, 232 The Sound of Waves (Shiosai), 53, 74, 248 splitting, 33, 52, 84, 110, 137, 193, 194, 206, 225, 234 Spring Snow (Haru No Yuki), 25, 26, 30, 65, 96, 154, 163, 187, 195, 213, 235, 249 Starrs, Roy, 49, 72, 114-18, 121, 122, 126, 130, 244 Stein, Howard, 112, 231 Stokes, Henry Scott, 13, 21, 29, 33, 35, 37, 39, 48, 49, 59, 96, 108, 115, 117, 131, 132, 133, 141, 144, 177, 181, 182, 214, 223, 241, 247, 248 Stoller, Robert, 11, 12, 15, 16, 45, 148, 149 suicide, 3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 18, 21, 28, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 51-53, 59, 61, 73, 75, 77, 85, 91-95, 97, 99, 103, 108, 116-21, 126, 128, 130, 146, 147, 150,

Index

156, 163, 175 78, 180, 181, 185, 192, 224, 229 38, 244, 245, 254, 257. See also seppuku Sun and Steel (Taiyo To Tetsu), 9, 42, 71, 79, 80, 86 89, 96, 124, 125, 249 "Sword" (Ken), 36, 53, 248 Tanizaki, Junichiro, 105, 118, 137, 227 "Tate No Kai," 121 The Temple of Dawn (Akatsuki No Tera), 41, 42, 56, 72, 85, 117-22, 196, 201,224,233,249 The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji), 1,14, 23, 25, 31, 36, 66 76, 86, 96 104, 129, 139, 147, 148, 155, 175, 180, 187 214,219, 221, 248 The Terrace of the Leper King (Raio No Terasu), 1,53,73,95,249 terror, 2, 11, 12, 17, 20, 22, 27, 28, 30, 31, 42, 43, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 69, 71, 76, 77, 93, 94, 109, 161, 177, 180, 185, 190, 192, 198, 202, 210, 213, 223, 224, 228, 231, 232, 234, 235, 238 Tetsuo, Najita, 116, 121, 130 Thieves (Tozoku), 57 Thirst for Love (Ai No Kawaki), 25, 64, 65, 66, 73, 124, 147, 148, 164, 227, 248 toxic introjects, 39, 51, 86, 145, 233 toxic nourishment, 21 1 tragedy, 8, 18, 23, 37, 40, 41, 44, 49, 52, 55, 56, 61, 62, 65, 68, 69, 73, 83, 91, 97, 147, 150, 153, 154, 162, 180, 195, 224, 229, 237

tragic death, 2, 37, 40, 41, 49, 55, 56, 61, 65, 69, 83, 122, 153, 154, 180, 195 transcendence, 12, 27, 36, 38, 39, 40, 80,87 91, 102, 104, 113, 114, 125, 131, 178, 191, 192,238,244 transference, 6, 26, 31, 32, 53, 63, 190, 192, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 205, 240 transitional objects, 70, 187, 192 transumption, 109, 130

index transvestitism, 10, 45, 46, 76,105 trauma, 2, 8, 12, 14, 20-22, 34, 44-48, 59, 62, 64, 67, 71, 75, 81, 101-14, 129, 133, 139, 149, 155,157, 170, 188-205, 210, 221, 234, 244 ugliness, 17, 24, 27, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 46, 48, 62, 66-68, 72, 73, 76, 80-93, 100-102, 111, 118-23,128,137, 141-56,160,163-65,171,174, 177-83,187-95, 200-203, 210-12, 218, 229, 244 vagina, 3, 5, 14, 23, 27, 54, 212; as wound, 209, 212, 214, 220; conquest of, 214, 215; dentata (toothed), 34; desire for, 54, 205; disgust for, 47, 58, 101, 205, 210, 220; fear of, 47, 58, 201, 209, 212, 214, 220 (see also castration; death, and the feminine; emasculation; envy; fear, of women; fear, of the vagina; misogyny; rage; terror; woman, and death); hatred of, 58, 101, 112, 140, 143,144,149, 155,178, 214; mystery of, 209, 212; surrogate, 57 vengeance, 2, 3, 8, 12, 14,17,19, 21-49, 55, 56, 67-69, 73, 76, 81, 84, 86, 87, 97, 100-103, 109, 116, 123, 129-90,199, 202-8, 212, 228, 237 violence, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 17, 32, 43, 47, 55, 59-64, 82, 85, 86, 92, 94,104, 106, 111, 119,120, 124,129-32, 139, 148, 150, 161, 176, 180, 198, 202, 203, 223, 232-40, 246; sexualization of, 3 Violence at Noon (Hukucho No Tori ma), 105

273 "The Voice of the Hero Spirits" (Eirei NoKoe), 119, 249 voyeurism, 3, 4, 7, 10, 28, 37, 41, 42, 51, 53, 62, 69, 70-72, 76, 77, 81, 84, 85, 88, 94, 101-5, 116, 139, 147, 149, 152,153,178, 196, 197, 200, 207-31 vulnerability, 18, 37-42, 45, 46, 51, 52, 56, 59, 62, 64, 65, 68, 73, 75, 85-87, 91, 94, 142, 159, 161, 169, 170, 173, 185, 197, 202, 205, 207, 223, 224, 232-35, 240, 244 wasteland, the, 100-104 The Way of the Samurai (Hagakure Nyumon), 18, 25, 115,122 weakness, 10,18, 23-26, 31, 32, 35-46, 51-56, 62-66, 73, 75, 80-82, 86-90, 93, 109, 128, 146, 156-63, 170, 171, 187-200, 205, 214-17, 221-23, 233, 235, 238, 239, 244 Winnicott, D. W., 192 Wolfe, Peter, 236 Woman, and death, 14, 22-36, 47, 48, 63, 75, 76, 101, 109, 112, 129, 137, 140, 141, 147, 156-63, 171-74, 180, 183, 187, 194-97, 200, 206, 211, 214, 221, 229, 232 The Woman in the Dunes (Suna No Onna), 105 World War II, 106, 114, 120, 208, 248 "Yang Ming," 92, 118-23, 132 Yourcenar, Margerite, 236 youth, 2, 20, 21, 26, 30, 37-42, 45, 52, 53, 66-69, 73, 80, 127, 135-38, 143-54, 160-81, 194, 202, 221 Zen, 103, 129, 248

This page intentionally left blank

About the Author JERRY S. PIVEN teaches at the New School for Social Research and New York University, where his courses focus on the psychology of death, evil, and religion.