The poetics of self-destruction in Mishima Yukio’s work Confession of a Mask

Japanese Narratives and Human Rights (A.A. 2022/2023)

Licciardi Arianna,1789022 (LM2)

INTRODUCTION

In 1941 Japan’s interest in conquering the territories of New Britain raised new
hostilities towards the United States. In the same year, Japan signed the Non-
Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union violating the Anti-Comintern Pact with
Germany, directed, instead, against Soviet Union. Consequently, in an important
meeting between the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yōsuke Matsuoka (1880-1946),
and the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), it
was established that the United States were the true enemy to fight. Then, Japan
opted for an attack on Pearl Harbor on 7th December 1941, aimed at the American
fleets. It was an important victory for the Japanese country, but it marked the
beginning of the Pacific War.
In 1942 the United States decided to use the only chance left after the great defeat
at Pearl Harbor, to identify Japan’s next target: the crypto-analysts. American
mathematicians managed to decipher the Japanese naval code and found out that
some transports were heading the Midway Islands.
In the same year, they carried on the war in Guadalcanal 1 and many US victories
followed, while Japan found itself increasingly damaged. The war continued until
1943, the Japanese army lost control over New Guinea territories and was forced to
evacuate the troops.
During the first months of 1944, United States carried out the mission of conquering
the Marshal Islands and General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) launched a final
offensive in New Guinea. The chance for Japan to call for reinforcement vanished
after the invasion of the city of Rabaul2 by the American soldiers, which was an
important military base of the Japanese army. Overall, the Tōjō Government fell but
the Emperor did not make the decision to surrender and in 1945 the American
troops landed on Okinawa, starting other conflicts which saw Japan defeated again.
On 6th August 1945 the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, on 8th August
the Soviet Union violated the Non-Aggression Pact signed in 1941 and attacked the

1
Island placed in the Pacific Ocean. It belongs to the Archipelago of the Solomon Islands.
2
City in the current Papua New Guinea.
Japanese troops in Manchuria. Then, on 9th August 1945 the United States
dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
Eventually Emperor Hirohito proclaimed publicly the surrender of Japan, on August
the 15th, , and the American general Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) landed in
Japan two weeks later to direct the occupation that would take place until 1952.
In Japan, MacArthur decided to remove every idea linked to Nationalism, every
Anti-Democratic ideology and to bring down war industries that could have allowed
a possible rearming. (Bouissou, 2003).
In the next paragraph, I am going to elaborate a discussion over Mishima Yukio’s
complex personality, one of the greatest Japanese writer who lived his youth during
the hardest times of the conflict and decided to tell his own story in the post-Second
World War period in Kamen no Kokuhaku, 仮面の告白 (Confession of a Mask, 1949).
Moreover, I shall add another paragraph concerning Yukio Mishima’s poetics and
thoughts, which led the author to consider a premature death.

1. Mishima Yukio: building one’s own identity in times of war.

Mishima Yukio 三島由紀夫 (pseudonym of Hiraoka Kimitake 平岡公威, 1925-1970)

was born in Tōkyō and despite his incredible career as one of the greatest
Japanese literates (he left behind a prolific body of work, including forty novels,
eighteen plays, twenty collections of short stories and many essays) he
experienced painful episodes in his lifetime. First, his fragile constitution and
physical health, which made him avoid the calling to the Japanese army during the
Second World War, influenced heavily his psychological status, leading the author
to a sort of obsession or physical intoxication (Wagenaar-Iwamoto, 1975). This
uncontrollable feeling increased when he was a student due to his taste for
classical Greek art, which used to portray subjects with sculpted bodies and
muscles that in turn represented exactly the ideal of physical perfection so coveted
by Mishima. He even posed for a leading Japanese photographer recreating the
bleeding Saint Sebastian (256-288), a martyr tied to a tree and pierced by arrows.
A portrait of the Saint that he saw as a teenager aroused a strong excitement in him
and even caused his first ejaculation, according to his intimate reports written in his
autobiographical novel.
Nonetheless, he managed to avenge his physical unease twenty years later by
starting his own army and establishing a rigorous bodybuilding regimen as well as
expertise in martial arts. At the same time, a certain taste for literature aroused
during his youth and his father, who considered this voracious reading effeminate,
criticized him. Those kind of prejudices could come up in a decade where the World
War II Japanese society recognised masculine attitudes as a compulsory quality for
a man and for a good soldier.
Mishima confesses the truth of his homosexuality through the already mentioned
autobiographical novel where he brings together his memories in a continuous
stream of consciousness, involving the reader into the story of how his sexuality
developed. A sexuality that progressed stubbornly, even though almost kept in
secret, in the face of all conventions and norms of society. As the writer Paul
Binding (1943- ) points out in the introduction of the novel3:

The evolution of the narrator’s sexuality is traced against a marvellously if

economically realized background: familial ( a household dominated by a
grandmother where a somewhat despised father is ineffectual and a loved mother
force into a subsidiary role ), social ( the world of school for the upper classes
which, the times being what they are, perforce feeds the army ) and historical,
(Japan at war, at first sweeping all before it in its attempt at mastery of all East
Asia, later on beleaguered, doomed for all the ardour of its resistance, to eventual
defeat ).

Although Mishima was not properly what is identified as Hibakusha, 被爆者4 he felt
the need to empathise with this traumatic historical event.
Yukio Mishima was only sixteen when General Tōjō Hideki (1884-1948) became
Prime Minister and Japan started his conflict against the United States in 1941.
There are no doubts that much of his youth was influenced by external events
concerning Second World War.
Mishima’s obsession with this massive conflict has probably led the author towards
the definition of his poetics of decadence and deprivation.
In addition, exploring different themes mentioned in his novels, Mishima provided a
model for the reversion of the Kokutai 国体 (national body) wartime rhetoric into the
private obsession with the individual body that characterised much of Post-war
literature’s involvement. True beauty in his view can no longer be achieved by
means other than that of the death: the reason for this statement is that the deepest
conflict generated in his art are worked out with the mind-body individuality,
translated into the practice of letters and the practice of the martial arts (thought
and action). In summary, they could not be harmonized because they corrupt each
other. Overall, words falsify a pure experience of the body itself. Thus, there is no
other solution to end this “pollution” than to seek a glorious death.
In 1967 he enlisted in the Ground Self-Defence Force5 and later formed the
Tatenokai 楯の会 (Shield Society) through which he carried his coup d’état, and

3
Yukio Mishima, Confession of a Mask, translation by Meredith Weatherby, Peter Owen Ltd, 2007, foreword by Paul
Binding.
4
Term used to identify those people who were directly injured by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
from the balcony of the Army Headquarters in Tōkyō he performed his ritual suicide
on 25th November 1970.
Focusing the attention on his complex state of mind and connecting his personal
story with the events concerning the outer world, we can notice that the opening of
Confession of a Mask, with the protagonist’s claim to be able to remember the
scenery of his birth, may represent his loss of innocence prior to the discovery and
the use of the nuclear power (Milasi, 2019).
It also emerges that the young boy evoking his memories into the novel represents
the mind, the author’s inner and deepest part, who is giving life to a sort of Alter
Ego. It is not surprising to find Mishima's fictional worlds, too, replete with grating
conflicts, ideologies contested, emotions in clashing opposition, evoking the aura of
battle.
It turn out that Confession of a Mask is, first of all, a straightforward
autobiographical confession by the hero who is none other than the author himself.
Secondly, the hero is in search of a peculiarly personal ideal or moral vision, which
is at odds with the bourgeois standard of life. Thirdly, as a result the hero becomes
inevitably alienated from and eventually defeated by society. Fourthly, the hero
sometimes revenges himself on society with deliberate immorality, embodying the
paradox that the initial moral vision assumes satanic immorality.
The anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) has identified an essential dualism
in Japanese culture in her delineation of the "chrysanthemum" and the "sword”, two
antithetical themes that have been held in tension throughout much of the history of
this island-state, which could also add an important explanation to Mishima Yukio’s
poetics. The chrysanthemum theme refers to the traditional Japanese
preoccupation with beauty, colour, and aesthetics, while the eventual rise of the
spirit of the sword ultimately generated a more centralized system in which political
power was monopolized by the Shōgun. The samurai ethic Bushidō 武士道 , or
better known as the way of the warrior, proclaimed the values of personal
asceticism, the glory of death in righteous battle, and the honour of Seppuku,
commonly called Harakiri, which is the ritual suicide executed through the painful
method of cutting one's own abdomen. For Mishima, indeed, the chrysanthemum
and the sword represented discordant elements in his own (McAdams, 1985).
In the next paragraph, I shall discuss in a more detailed manner about the reason
why the author grew a strong attraction to the idea of dying young, focusing on his
poetics.

5
Branch of the Japanese Army.
 2. Self-destruction as the ultimate goal.

Death is a business of the factory where he is employed, death and early death is
what the conscript to the red forces (…) can and should expect, we should ask
ourselves are the horrible variants his brain invents any horrible that what so many
of his compatriots were inflicting on the other people in China and Indonesia?6

This theory, taken once more from the foreword of the autobiographical novel and
discussed by Paul Binding, suggests that there may be various explanations for
Mishima’s decision to end his life prematurely, although his great reputation as a
literate.
We could distinguish those motivations into external (historical or social) and
internal (personal) reasons, which we can find into the author’s deep psyche.
As one can notice from the last quotation, a crucial external factor is retraceable in
the shock he suffered during the Pacific War.
As already been discussed, Mishima was not directly involved in the atomic
bombing, nevertheless he grew a clearly obsession for the Second World War,
implying that what happened in Hiroshima had summoned the idea that the
surrender of Japan, in some way, caused the demise of the novel7, the latter
followed by a feeling of deprivation.
In 1967 Mishima wrote an essay entitled Watashi no naka no Hiroshima
私の中の広島 (Hiroshima inside me) where, for the first time, he makes a confession
touching the theme of the atomic bombing and implying a discussion over the moral
and psychic trauma that this event affected on him. A heavy declaration shows that
the entirety of his literary output derives from the bombing of Hiroshima and a
conceptual shift from the real Hiroshima to another imaginary Hiroshima, located
inside his mind, has given life to his poetic of decadence. In addition, if we are
familiar with his best-known works we could notice that death and premature death
is very much present. Indeed, another important example is Kiyoaki the young boy
of Haru no Yuki 春の雪 (Spring Snow, 1969) who dies prematurely in the desperate
search for Satoko, the young woman he loves, although his feelings never surface
except through his conscience. (In some way, that inability to love a woman could
be a reference to his own experience with the young Sonoko, cited in several
episodes of his autobiographical novel).
The author’s obsession with death matches perfectly with the historical setting he
lives in, and he keeps growing a constant feeling of his future to be a burden.
Accordingly, the prospect of death on the battlefield is the only available for the

6
Yukio Mishima, Confession of a Mask, translation by Meredith Weatherby, Peter Owen Ltd, 2007, foreword by Paul
Binding.
7
Milasi Luca, Ango, Mishima, war and nuclear power, in Disaster and Trauma in experience, understanding, and
imagination, Hasekura league intercultural studies edition n. 3, Milano, 2019, pg 69.
generation of young men of the 1940s, and even in an air raid is attractive to
Mishima:

(…) Moreover, I told myself, there’s no need for me to take such decisive action
myself, not when I’m surrounded by such a bountiful harvest of so many types of
death, death in the air raid, death at one’s post of duty, death in the military service,
death on the battlefield, death from being run over, death from disease. Surely, my
name has already been entered in the list for one of these: a criminal who has been
sentenced to death does not commit suicide. (…) I was waiting for something to do
me the favor of killing me.8

The sensitive hero of the novel is interested in soldiers, however his sexual
attraction is caused by the haunting idea of their eternal departure in the battlefield.
In this case, significantly enough, the charm of the soldiers derives from the fact
that they are destined to die early. In reading fairy tales, the hero does not like
princesses but only princes, especially those who are destined to die. He is
obsessed not only with the death of other people but clearly with his own too. He
exults in the idea of his imaginary death and once pretends to be killed in the battle.
The historical concern of the war, and the idea of dying prematurely, associates
deeply with the author’s internal psyche. Yukio Mishima, as well as his Alter-Ego in
Confession of a Mask, considers himself handicapped in many ways: his natural
habit of stammering, physical fragility and impoverished background, all of which
are both the fact and symbol of the barrier that intervenes between him and the
outer world (Yamanouchi, 1972):

I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks
carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own
stupidity … If such were the case, wasn’t the army ideal for my purpose? (…) Why
when sentenced to return home the same day I felt the pressure of a smile come
pushing so persistently at my lips that I had difficulty in concealing it? Why had I run
so when I was through the barracks gate? Hadn’t my hopes been blasted? (…) I
realized that my future life would never attain heights of glory sufficient to justify my
having escaped death in the army (…)9

In this passage just quoted above, the author's entire stream of consciousness
leads him to think that he is not destined to do anything he had fantasised in his
youthful years, even though he managed to “avenge” his condition twenty years
after the war, proving himself to be able to do something he could not do as a
young and ill boy. Despite his painful and constant desire to die early in the

8
Yukio Mishima, Confession of a Mask, translation by Meredith Weatherby, Peter Owen Ltd, 2007, Pg 208.
9
Yukio Mishima, Confession of a Mask, traduzione di Meredith Weatherby, Peter Owen Ltd, 2007 Pg 138-139.
battlefield, what is interesting in this short passage is that he claims, for the first
time, that he didn’t really want to die in the war, as it was just a fantasy created
once more by his Alter-Ego. He seemed even glad that he was not drafted into the
Japanese army.
Another point of discussion, which deserves attention, lies in his obsession for the
vitality of youth, which led him to be attracted to other boys. We can suppose that
another reason for ending his life so early is linked to the strong desire to preserve
the beauty and the strength of youth forever. Like Dorian Gray’s Portrait (1890), the
famous novel focused on the latter theme and written by the Irish decadent and
aesthete Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Mishima shared the same horror of ageing
which he regarded as a chronic disease (Rankin, 2013)
The complications arose with the entrance of the fourteen-year-old Mishima’s first
love: a sixteen-year-old boy named Omi:

A raw carnal feeling blazed up within me, branding my cheeks. I felt myself staring
at him with crystal clear eyes…For me this was the first love of my life. And if such
a blunt way of speaking be forgiven it was clearly a love closely connected with
desires of the flash.10

Fundamentally, Omi is what Mishima wanted to be and what he could never

achieve. Indeed, he desperately tried to strengthen his body with hard training in
the aftermath of the war but this obsession became just a single part of the whole
series of reasons that drove him to suicide.
Ultimately, Mishima's complex reflection reveals the author's own inability to decide
whether to choose the dialectic of the body or the mind.
The prolific writer's painful conclusion leads to an existential dilemma so great that
he sees no other solution but to transcend the choice through a noble death,
performing Seppuku.
Viewed in this way, according to Mishima, mind and body cannot be harmonized,
because while the body strips words and falsifies them, that same mind undoes
action. Thus, Mishima, conferring equal value on mind and body, started
considering life a slow and painful corruption of each other. The first required him to
turn himself into what animated his sexual fantasies, while the second would have
required him to turn himself into the very image that inspired his fear of old age. It
turns out that, in order to escape this choice, he decided to end his own life. Words,
he says to himself, corrupt people and show themselves as false. In his attempt to
achieve perfection of the body he comes to corrupt his mind in the final judgment.
Therefore, in his cultivation of the dualistic world he discovered that there was
nothing but a further pretext to act out a diseased craving for self-destruction.

10
Yukio Mishima, Confession of a Mask, traduzione di Meredith Weatherby, Peter Owen Ltd, 2007, Pg 61
In a note left on his desk the day he died, he described his ambition to merge the
transience of the body with the strength of the literature, and the transience of the
literature with the strength of the body, but without success, for the reasons
therefore explained.
From the Confession of a Mask’s hero point of view there emerges the following
features: his sexual perversion and inability to love women, disbelief in the existing
order of the world, aspiration to the vast or eternal as symbolized by the sea, wish
for the end of the world and inclination towards suicide. In a word, the hero is a
nihilist who cannot find any meaning in life.
As professor Yamanouchi (1934- ) points out in his essay, he slowly reached an
ecstatic embracing of nothingness, insisting in a rather apocalyptic vision.

To conclude the brief analysis I have just carried out by means of a historical
introduction, I have attempted to extrapolate some aspects of Mishima Yukio's
personality (in the first paragraph) and poetics (in the second paragraph), trying to
identify all those reasons that led him to renounce his life. I took essentially
fundamental outputs from the autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask, the
work that launched his career as a writer. In order to explore further aspects and
curiosities of Mishima, we might ask ourselves whether the characters in many of
his novels are not various manifestations of his own persona.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bouissou, Jean-Marie. Storia del Giappone Contemporaneo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003.

McAdams, Dan. P. «Fantasy and Reality in the death of Yukio MIshima», 1985.

Milasi, Luca. «Ango, Mishima, war and nuclear power». In Disaster and Trauma in experience,
understanding, and imagination, Hasekura league intercultural studies edition n. 3, 59–74. Milano:
Milano: Mimesis International, 2019.

Mishima, Yukio. Confession of a Mask. English translation by Meredith Weatherby, Peter Owen
Modern Classics. London: Peter Owen, 2007.

Wagenaar, Dick, e Yoshio Iwamoto. «Yukio Mishima: Dialectics of Mind and Body».
Contemporary Literature, 1975.

Rankin, Andrew. «A Wildean Theory of Yukio Mishima». The Wildean, 2013.

Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. «Mishima Yukio and His Suicide». Modern Asian Studies, 1972.