Mishima

In literature as in so much else, purposeful canonization often makes a classic, rather than intrinsic and authentic values. Yukio Mishima's "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," a novel based on the actual incendiary destruction of the temple in 1950, was first published in 1956, immediately followed by an avalanche of raves and accolades, and then in 1959 the much-acclaimed English translation by Ivan Morris appeared from a renowned American publishing house. The novel now basks in the glory of world classic, perhaps outshining more or less the glitters of the reconstructed Golden Temple - an exemplary structure of feudal Japan's gilded age that reflected the syncretic tastes of courtly elegance, warlordly audacity, and Zen Buddhist loony fantasy.

Mishima's "The Golden Temple" is an eloquent confessional narrative, recounted by an unattractive, stammering acolyte of the temple, whose obsession with the beauty of the temple, unfolding as an eros-terror dialectic, finds the final resolution in the burning of the temple itself - an act of self-liberation and self-revitalization through destructive violence - which is nonetheless a bildungsroman or a story of growing pain, written in well-crafted, beautiful prose, where toward the end the protagonist goes beyond, almost above, the boundaries of good and evil, to find a new life in his own physical and therefore sexual potential, freed from the old delusionary confines of aesthetical and ethical discordance. Reading into this story - a beautiful story of creative destruction par excellence - postwar Japanese readers and critics alike bought into adulation, three million copies sold, Mishima industry kicked off.

This phenomenon appears to be a clear reflection of the intellectual situation of postwar Japan in the 1950s, when the Japanese came out of double bind only to enter into double abandon without coming to terms with war memories and responsibilities, instead envisioning a new Japan as a rising economy, thanks to Korean War and the subsequent U.S. soft power deployment through a carrot-stick approach. It was then, as so much later, that once-disbanded war crime industries and institutions were not only rehabilitated but rejuvenated as tens of thousands of intellectuals with advanced degrees in war crime rhetoric came back to life after years of official expulsion or self-imposed exile, all the while the nation as a whole morphed from a warmongering imperium to a war-profiteering democracy. Worse yet, the Red Purge ousted revolutionary Commies, initiating on the other hand the wholesale reinstitution of traditional Kamis. Indeed, the first economic boom coming in the wake of the Korean War was referred to as "Jinmu (Divine Prowess) Boom" by invoking the name of the first legendary emperor from the once-discredited books of ancient history.

In this context, Mishima's "The Golden Temple" was written and published, becoming an instant bestseller, and later, an international classic of modern literature. It was not that the burning of the temple was such a shocking spectacle. Who cared? Most of the nation had, just a while back, experienced hellish conflagration under U.S. incendiary bombing, including the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was just that Mishima made it a spectacular act of creative destruction that captured the intellectual climate of the moment, now freed from the old imperial obsessions, while at the same time glimpsing a prosperous future as a Cold War beneficiary, with a more matured outlook on new international realities, looking away all the moral failings in the past.

Put differently, Mishima on the one hand wrote a story celebrating the regeneration of a degenerate state, while on the other hand hiding his ideological agendas, which resurfaced after the publication of "The Golden Temple" and became his defining obsessions - samurai patriotism and imperial oligarchy - when the nation began going back to the future, celebrating its old cultural identities and thereby seeking international recognition as a born-again peaceful nation - a genesis of a postwar fraud state shining like a plated Buddha in the dark of Cold War obscenities.

Meanwhile, Mishima himself was regenerated, or rather rejuvenated, as a literary god of Japan. He now started working out on a combination of bodybuilding and martial arts programs to transform his body, reputedly a smallish egg-headed "green gourd," into a steely samurai-spirited physique, and also started learning to speak English - all this for international recognition and promotion. He then became a finalist, two times in a row, for Nobel in literature, when in fact his writing, once known for its stylistic precision, became increasingly obtuse and obsessive, to the point of first needing translation into Japanese before English translation, let alone overall intensive editing.

However, the Mishima industry grew, making him a rock-star god of literature and a devoted rights activist - yes, a rights activist - who championed the restoration of antebellum imperial rights. The cult industry even published a photo collection of his nude pictures, titled "Ordeal by Roses" (1963), displaying his masochism, his narcissism, his triceps, his belly muscles, and his sharp steel eyes, with the help of such paraphernalia as a samurai sword, a sun-marked headband, and a fundoshi G-string. In his last years, he and his followers formed a paramilitary group, and marched in a fashionable, designer-made uniform provided by his patron, a Tokyo department store owner.

Then, the moment of truth came when his mentor Yasunari Kawabata was awarded a Nobel literature prize for his works that beautifully spiritualized modern Japan with layers of seeping lyricism. Mishima lost it, to his mentor. Alas, he may have felt that he had tripped over his own fundoshi string. In the end, he killed himself, performing a seppuku ritual, after a media-covered coup attempt with his fellow militia troops - an audacious, gruesome attempt to enshrine his own life on the altar of world literature, as a sacrifice to Samurai Japan and Banzai Emperor - two of the staple mythos of modern Japan.

Indeed, it was a sacrifice of a reactionary cause-driven extremist life up against the rising tides of the 1960s radicalism in an island country that went from warmongering to war-profiteering, from warholic to workaholic, all along on the same unsustainable logic of self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement which inevitably and invariably entails an occasional self-renewal by force, either internal or external, in the form of - yes - creative destruction. Mishima himself acted it out - a myth-making playact to immortalize his own life, by making it part of the continuing pattern in history, not in people's history, but in upscale, blue-blooded history, which is ever sitting on the sacrifice of those down below.

But to get back to "The Golden Temple," critics and connoisseurs, including Western cohorts, still continue to sing paeans to it, many resorting to the old idea of nothingness to characterize Mishima's bildungsroman, rather than criticizing it in the larger context of nothingness culture - a war crime culture akin to a national religion that should have been trashed in the light of history, but was instead recycled and repurposed to build a postwar country of economic miracle, which ever since cashed in Cold War situations, here and there, with much pacifist facelift and mantra chanting.

So far we have seen the critics say things like Mishima's "aesthetics of death," his "trilogy of beauty, evil and nothingness" and his life-negating philosophy of nothingness as opposed to Western life-affirming tradition of thingness - a hangover from the antebellum stereotypes of Eastern spiritualism and Western materialism and a reminder of the 1980s cheap theories of Japaneseness vis-a-vis Western modus operandi. Enough! "The Golden Temple" is a prime example of nothingness culture, whose cognate, oxymoronic counterpart in Western thinking is, of course, the idea of creative destruction - now a dogma of neoconservative thinkers and tinkers in economics as well as in grand strategy discourse.

Here, the nothingness culture - a zombie culture that drags on three toxic memes of Buddha, Samurai and Emperor, along with other elitist cultural trappings, like tea ceremony and calligraphy - indeed does a lot of harm, because the undead culture helps maintain a culture of duplicity and death-encouraging, suicidal mindsets. It never stares evil in the eyes; instead it shifts attention from truth and justice to an empty, unintelligible, ungodly mess - a Zen koan strategy - relying on rhetorical technique, technology and anything closer to nonsense. It plays on human condition at the boundary of impermanence. Its aesthetical strategy is beautification and immortalization even with self-destruction, thus endlessly piling mythos upon ethos to the point of creating an obsessive universe, where being part of something permanent helps spiritualize matter and give meaning to an otherwise estranged modern life, but it also leads to self-deception and religious maneuvering - two major symptoms of the disease of nothingness culture.

Consequently, our society has lost sight of a basic human truth: A culture that too tightly combines self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement is unable, in the long run, to sustain itself, and in the end, brings about a spectacular self-destruction. You may call this process, as Marx did in his study of capitalism, "creatively destructive" or "destructively creative." Our forefathers referred to it as "the finest product of spirituality," adding,"This is the soul of Japan. Bushido lies in dying, for the country, for the Supreme Majesty," and more recently, "for the company." I would identify all this as a Zen-induced existential disease of our modern times, one of the most incurable diseases on the planet, and the nurturing ground of suicidal thinking and fascistic fantasies, all of which, heaping up on the nothingness culture's obscenities, forms the modern layers of an ancient emperor-topped, samurai-driven, buddha-counseled land-stealing settler culture.

Back to "The Golden Temple," the problem is Mishima needed to be more honest about the burning of the temple. A critic said it was "foot-written," meaning the author did a lot of investigative footwork, including interviews and survey trips. In other words, Mishima wrote it in the boundary situation of fiction and nonfiction, taking advantage of the real incident to frame his fantasia, and his seemingly well-researched story suffers a deficit of real facts; the underlying, primary realities often go against the loony realities of Mishima's literary industry, in a way similar to the fascist process of appropriating and transmuting reality to undercut the very distinction of true and false, with the use of aesthetic sensibilities for political purposes.

In fact, the temple, or more precisely, the pavilion, was then far from beautiful; it was an old rickety structure, with its gilded facades discolored, even peeled off in different places, as if an unredeemable past had caught up with the present and affected its ill-gotten fortune; yet it was still standing by a miasma-emitting garden pond covered with overgrown duckweed. This was, it seems, an utterly unlikely place, even though a National Treasure since 1897 and a lucrative tourist attraction, where the fictional temple acolyte, not a Zen master of meditation, could have conjured up a highly sophisticated, fantastic sense of beauty. It was Mishima who did that, perhaps with much head scratching and pencil biting, after long standing in the ruins of the golden pavilion, now reduced to charcoal - perhaps quite a shock to a man who untypically identified himself as a great lover of gilded-age artifacts.

Mishima came up with a series of images of the golden pavilion, presenting them like a musical composition, rather than a picture of painted images - a tricky and sexy process in which an inanimate cold-blooded architectural object finally morphs into an elegant blue-blooded beautiful apparition. Near the conclusion, the temple, "a delicate structure, gloomy and full of dignity," came close to assuming an eternal beauty, when its details began to scintillate in the dark under the "strange light of time itself, which is neither day nor night." Here the temple is imaged like a woman of aristocratic extraction, and the concept of eternity is skillfully rendered as a temporal continuum of hallucinatory, mystic experience.

This is a superlative literary artistry purporting to immortalize an upscale beauty, conceivably of an imperial category. In contrast, earlier in the story, a woman of vulgar beauty, while visiting the temple as a tourist with her G.I. boyfriend, got a kick in the stomach. As a result, she miscarried. The temple acolyte did that on behest of the American soldier. In "The Golden Temple" the image of an elegant high-class beauty is elevated almost to the height of eternity and immortality, while a lowly rowdy proletarian beauty is given a fatal kick in the underbelly, and a U.S. occupation troop is unduly assigned to demand an unexperienced Japanese youth to do wrong. For all this Mishima is really accountable; true to his samurai nationalist colors, he is criminal and even fascistic in his exercise of aesthetics and sexual politics.

Back to the beauty of the temple in question, Mishima then goes on to give the much-celebrated delineation on the aesthetic details:

[E]ach detail adumbrated the beauty of the succeeding detail ... always filled with uneasiness. It dreamed of perfection ... invariably lured on to the next beauty, the unknown beauty ... so it was that the various adumbrations of a beauty which did not exist had become the underlying motif of the Golden Temple. Such adumbrations were signs of nothingness. Nothingness was the very structure of this beauty ... and this delicate building ... was trembling in anticipation of nothingness, like a jeweled necklace trembling in the wind.

Wow. Quite a meditation. Music and philosophy. It sounds like Mishima playing a piano piece, in crescendo, puffing and sweating as if on a sexual exploration into a woman's interior through a prolonged series of foreplay in anticipation of head-blowing climax. Here Mishima's technique is in full display; he called it "Mori plus Mann" style - Mishima-esque namedropping - indeed Ogai Mori and Thomas Mann are known for their brilliance as superb craftsmen of style; Mann is also known for his literary ornamentation akin to "symphonic complications and syntheses." But here Mishima is more like a con artist on stage, performing a sex show with the ghost of a gorgeous aristocratic broad, who is identifiable as an imperial cognate. Mishima had such pomposity and vulgarity, and his "The Golden Temple" shines more as a penis-written work than as a well-researched "foot-written" oeuvre.

However, academic literary theoreticians, relying on the French-developed theories of narratology, may have this to say: This text must be examined, with a particular focus on "its discours / speech act, from a viewpoint of language as existing in the field of performative action, not from a viewpoint that presupposes the existence of contact between language and interieur." Then it becomes clear that "it is none other than a single discours attached to the histoire of the burning-down of the Golden Temple." In other words, you must "read its metaplot, not its minimum story, then it emerges as a narrative in which the liberation from a perceived world slips into the next world of perception, which is like the hell of an ant-trapping sand pit."

Hmmm? But no. Your head-heavy, theory-led approach doesn't seem to lead to a new discovery. It's meaningless if it could not bring to light something the conventional method could not discover. You're practicing methodology for the sake of methodology, and always end up saying something obvious in a more sophisticated, more sanitized way. Who's your boss? Your government-moneyed academic approach only contributes to endlessly piling up on the canonization of Mishima's literary industry, which is like a huge anthill growing and glowing in false adulation and sophistication. My no-free-lunch approach is at least revealing, revealing something new. Mishima's sex with the Golden Temple.

Oh yes. But the bigger problem is the philosophy part of Mishima's meditation on the beauty of the Golden Temple. As if deeply in Zen meditation, he peers into its ever-elusive aesthetic details, down below the level of awareness, but instead of coming up with a real thing, he conjures an abstraction that is marred with strange tangents and flawed reasoning. Down there Mishima found a pattern of aesthetical nothingness. Look. Each beauty, an imagined beauty, is imagining itself in an unbroken loop of chain reaction. This is an ethereal pipe dream or a sort of Zhuangzi-dreaming-butterfly / butterfly-dreaming-Zhuangzi thing. And Mishima's self-dreaming beauty, sensing its own precariousness, is quivering in between being and nonbeing, fearful of returning to complete nothingness, while craving it to come.

This is a decadent, druggy state of mind, but this gives the fictive acolyte the rationale to put the temple to flames. In fact he does, and then suddenly he hits an idea to kill himself in the same fire, becoming one with the beauty of the temple, forever. But blocked in his way, he escapes from the site to a hill top, from where he watches the temple flaring up in flames, when a will to live wells up from within. Now born again, he is a new man, a man of action, no more an impotent acolyte. Finally, he takes a puff on a cigarette, satisfied like a man who has done a job.

As it turns out, Mishima's philosophy of aesthetical nothingness is rife with fascism's core components, which in part overlap the toxic notion of creative destruction, such as resurrection and rebirth myth, the myth of decadence, redemptive violence, sublime perversity, and above all, the aestheticization of politics, often with erotic images, for the destruction of reality and then building on the ruins of reality a new ungodly order - a fascist nirvana where power is endowed with a godly freedom from responsibility and its actions are commonly justified by the use of rhetorical ornamentation and ideological obfuscation, even using teachings and symbols of a traditional religion to make its own ideology come across as a national religion.

Mishima attempted at all this in his "The Golden Temple," and ever since we have been living more or less in a Golden Temple novel, some even worshipping at a Mishima Shrine. Damn it! This nothingness culture is a war-crime culture synonymous with a gilded bubble floating high above against the gravity of ill-gotten, bloody gold, casting on the ground its shadow resembling ancient moss or patina, if you prefer. This culture never looks into reality on the ground; social and political forces combine to prop up this culture of nothingness - a fascistic bundle of institutional alliances, namely the diehard Buddha-Samurai-Emperor triad, that won a popular support by nurturing a false sense of cultural and racial identities and transforming it into a national religion that worships phony victories, alongside the developmental progress in industrialization, urbanization and militarization, and then all over again, postwar years of reconstruction and redevelopment toward remilitarization. This is a history bent on overkill, from human bullets to bullet train, from warholic to workaholic, from Hiroshima to Fukushima, slithering down all the way on the oxymoronic logic of self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement, always with a support network for political and cultural loyalists and royalists as well. But this culture is now "trembling in anticipation of nothingness" - really - as a result of awakening from its long daydreaming. You see old chicken back home to roost, to give it a bite in the ass. Hahahahaha.

Shortly after his death in 1970, Mishima was discussed in comparison with Earnest Hemingway, focusing on common areas that marked their lives, such as boxing, activism and suicide. Beneath the common surface, however, there are notable opposites derived from ideological differences. Both picked up boxing as a men's sport, but Mishima practiced it as martial arts, along with kendo swordsmanship, whereas Hemingway approached it from his down-to-earth plebeian orientation; for the matter, Mishima was aristocratic; he chose boxing as a gentleman's sport, perhaps in emulation of the Nobel literary laureate famed as Papa Hemingway.

When Hemingway went out on his fishing boat to attack German U-boats off Florida Keys, he was quixotic, thinking it was a civic duty to defend his country against German intruders, while Mishima's quasi-militia group was a media-supported demonstration, one closer to street agitation, calling up the myth of samurai patriots who sacrificed themselves to save an emperor's country from Western encroachment. Both went for patriotism, but one for his vision of democracy, the other for his fantasy about emperor-topped, samurai-supported theocracy, whose declared enemies were Christianity and democracy.

Hemingway killed himself out of despair, finding his country no longer livable, for it had lost what America stood for. In his last years, Hemingway grew increasingly deranged under FBI surveillance; he was a victim of McCarthyism. On the other hand, Mishima's suicide, after a kookie coup attempt, was also related to his disappointment at his own country where he saw the postwar inundation of American ideals - freedom and democracy - suffocating the legacies of a legacy country. He of course shouted, "Banzai the Emperor" before his head rolled in a much-choreographed harakiri ritual. Mishima's suicide was a fanatic performance to enshrine himself as a great sacrifice who stood up against the U.S. soft-power deployment, while Hemingway was sacrificed by the U.S. authorities as an un-American element when the country lost its mind from anti-communist paranoia that readily sacrificed its enshrined ideals.

Apart from Hemingway, let's see Mishima in comparison with another American Nobel laureate in literature, William Faulkner. Faulkner and Mishima, both as writers, experienced postbellum situation; the former as a son of a Southern elite family saw "a lost nation" in the still smoldering ruins of the American Civil War, while the latter as a son of a samurai-descended elite family also saw a lost nation, but Mishima saw it more in terms of national identities than in the abject plight of common people scratching along in war-devastated towns and cities of postwar Japan. It should be noted here that although Mishima went to Peers School in Tokyo, and his father was a high-ranking bureaucrat, his family had no relation with imperial aristocrat, nor with elite samurai family like the Matsudairas. But his grandfather was a low-ranking, Chinese-reading samurai scholar. The mendacious literary novelist was a draft dodger, too.

At any rate, Faulkner' postbellum experience is captured in his master work "The Sound and the Fury," an exquisite title taken from the biblical phrase "full of sound and fury" that tells in a nutshell the meaning of history - meaningless - whether it's about the South or somewhere else, say, imperial Japan. Here Faulkner goes or rather intends to go from particular to general, in an all-inclusive manner depicting the postbellum decay of an aristocratic Southern family, and the message is that human history, a series of clanging turmoil, driven by individual follies and glories, continues to unfold in an endless pattern of coming and going, in which redemption, if sought, visits the humble and the humbled, those close to Jesus, regardless of their social standing, descendants of slaves or slave masters.

His "Flags in the Dust," the immediate predecessor of "The Sound and the Fury," is another saga focusing on the collapse of a Southern elite family, in which Faulkner offers no redemption, rather suicide comes in the end. In the story, set in the years just after the First World War, Young Bayard, one of the twin brothers of the family, suffers intense survivor guilt over the death of his brother killed in action; both were superb athletes and fearless fighters and served in the war as fighter pilots. They went to war, not to do "A Piece of Cake" things, but to take on the burdens of noblesse oblige, with Southern ideal of chivalry and even with a family pride of begetting a Civil War hero. Now it's all gone when Young Bayard dies test-flying an experimental airplane, leaving behind his wife and his son, born on the day.

Here the moral is the vulnerability of an aristocratic breed who succumbs before the forces of historical turmoil, despite his noble creed and upbringing, or rather because of his adherence to noble ideals. His life is wasted under the double layers of postbellum history - a lost nation and a lost generation. And the story is about a lost family. War, lost or won, begets another war, with amounting casualties and more tragedies in the wake, and individuals as a nation bite the dust in the end, over there or back home, all the more so if equipped with more warlike fitness. So Faulkner remained as a humble man, against his aristocratic background, often identifying himself as a farmer, close to soil, nurturing living things, who only happened to be a writer. My favorite is his "Barn Burning," an ode to Southern redneck mentality - a life humble in spirit but honorable in standing up against authorities.

In comparison, Mishima's Temple Burning doesn't sound any good - far from a Nobel-class novel - in his treatment of a lost nation. The nation was in fact reduced to ashes, yet still responsible for millions of war dead, here and there, virtually all over Asia. All this overkill was done in the name of the emperor, under the muddleheaded military leadership, with the disinformation of Greater East Asia. Mishima's postwar bravura boils down to "Yankee Go Home" and "Banzai Imperial Japan" agitprop - a product of post-imperial bitterness under U.S. occupation and post-Korea economic recovery and concurrent rehabilitation of war-crime industries and intellectuals.

However, his anti-U.S. Banzai-Emperor propaganda received a worshipful treatment from readers and the media alike, because it gave out what many Japanese wanted to hear; it was a reassuring gospel for a vanquished nation, now on the track of economic recovery toward economic prosperity, regaining global recognition, this time as a rising economy, though in fact the economy depended on the U.S. market -a warring economy, from Korea to Vietnam. Simply, Mishima's agitprop served to divert attention from the areas of common-sense realities to the areas of re-indoctrination with recycled narratives of death-defying, mission-driven, samurai-spirited military mind - an incurable disease still troubling Japan's body politic and cultural policy; it was also a disease troubling Mishima's literature. He himself was a casualty of his times, binding his deep wounds with thick wrappings of words, ideas, and bits of story, which sound like a wrongheaded operatic kabuki actor singing the same old song, again and again, like a broken record. There was no illumination for the lost nation. As the old saying goes, Mishima used literature the way a drunk uses a lamppost - for support, not illumination. He was just a bit better disciplined than an average Japanese drunkard who uses the same lamppost for - what else - urination.

At a more serious level, Mishima's disease was of a philosophical kind, which is the toxic mix of Zen, Nietzsche and Heidegger - a prejudicial trilogy that still bugs Japanese intellectuality, along with the cultic Buddha-Samurai-Emperor hodgepodge. Mishima hated rationality and Christianity, attempting as a chosen one to transcend them all and go far beyond, like a Nietzschean Superiorman dreaming in the bubble of Dionysian orgies, hellbent on bringing about creative destruction with will-to-power cruelty and finally triumph over modernity - a philosophical response to the modern age rife with dog-eat-dog Darwinian strife. Nietzschean prescription was god-is-dead atheism and back-to-the-future paganism. Mishima's pills were a fascistic concoction of Buddha-killing Zen meditation and self-immolating Samurai bravado and Banzai-Emperor war cry.

It was Heidggerian existentialism that gave a redemptive quality to the Nietzschean hallucination of the godless, bottomless Superiorman. Yes, with his catchy Dasein or Great Anxiety about Being and Time, Heidegger provided the Superiorman with a philosophical fig leaf of a cosmic size, now seeing eternity in a supposedly unbroken legacy of a consanguineous nation - which, sorry to say, still muddles across time and space the minds of many Japanese thinkers and tinkers. Mishima, in defiance of common sense and the common good, looked to the redemptive power of patriotic sacrifice, in his case seeing it in the samurai life ready to sacrifice itself for an emperor's country - an empty entity considered eternal and therefore divine.

After all, Mishima wrote autobiographically like gang rappers, many of whom act out the murderous lives they rap about - a strategy of self-promotion by giving authenticity to their rhymes. Mishima killed himself to show the world that he was serious about Samurai Japan. Singing an anthem to an emperor's country, Mishima was a scoundrel through and through, far worse than a murderous gang rapper. As the old definition goes, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."