932 words
Spanish translation here
Yukio Mishima was one of the giants of 20th-century Japanese literature. He has exercised an enduring influence on the post-World War II European and North American New Right. In commemoration of his birth, I wish to draw your attention to the following works on this website:
By Mishima:
- “A Call to Arms”
- “The Anti-Revolutionary Manifesto”
- Mishima’s last words (Czech translation here)
- “Voices of the Heroic Spirits”
You can buy Kerry Bolton’s More Artists of the Right here.
About Mishima:
- Kerry Bolton, “Yukio Mishima,” which is included in More Artists of the Right (Portuguese translation here)
- Jonathan Bowden, “Yukio Mishima”
- Mark Dyal and Nick Fiorello, “Overcoming the Bourgeois Mind and Body” (Portuguese translation here)
- Alex Graham, “Beauty and Destruction in Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion”
- Alex Graham, “Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea”
- Alex Graham, “Mishima’s Life for Sale”
- Greg Johnson, “The Meaning of Mishima’s Death”
- Greg Johnson, Mishima’s English-Language Videos on YouTube
- Emi Mann Kawaguchi, “Yukio Mishima and Richard Wagner: Art and Politics, or Love and Death”
- Trevor Lynch, Review of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Spanish translation here)
- Trevor Lynch, Review of Mishima: The Last Debate
- Trevor Lynch reviews The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea
- Christopher Pankhurst, “The Immortal Death of Yukio Mishima”
- Quintilian, “Yukio Mishima’s My Friend Hitler”
- Riki Rei, “In Defense of Mishima”
- Riki Rei, “Naoki Inose’s Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima”
- Dominique Venner, “Zen, the Samurai Ethos, and Death”
- Romano Vulpitta, “Yukio Mishima, Yojuro Yasuda, and Fascism,” Part 1, Part 2 (Czech translation: Part 1, Part 2; Greek translation here)
Making substantial reference to Mishima:
I recommend an English-subtitled film called Mishima: The Last Debate, which Trevor Lynch has reviewed here. It is a documentary composed of archival footage, previously thought lost, of the famous debate between Mishima and members of the Left-wing student group Zenkyoto. I also recommend watching Paul Schrader’s beautiful and moving dramatic portrait Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which is available in a stunning edition from the Criterion Collection.
Many English translations of Mishima’s writings are available.
His novels can generally be divided into serious literary works and more popular ones. I recommend beginning with The Sound of Waves, a novel that transcends that distinction. It is one of his most naive, charming, and popular novels, yet it is also acclaimed as a literary masterpiece. Those drawn to his studies of nihilism should read The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (the latter is partly dramatized in Schrader’s Mishima). In recent years, two of Mishima’s popular works have been translated: Life for Sale and Star. They are highly entertaining and also beautifully written.
The best collection of Mishima’s stage works is My Friend Hitler and Other Plays. (My Friend Hitler is about the Röhm purge.)
Mishima’s most important quasi-autobiographical work is Confessions of a Mask. I say “quasi” because Confessions is a novel, thus it would be a mistake to treat it as a straightforward autobiography. Sun and Steel is an essay on Mishima’s relationship to his own body, as well as a meditation on the relationship of art to reality and thought to action. Mishima’s philosophy of life and death is found in his Way of the Samurai, a commentary on the Hagakure.
Starting in the late 1950s, Mishima also dabbled in acting and directing. In 1966, he directed and starred in a 30-minute film adaptation of his short story “Patriotism,” about the ritual suicide of a military officer after a failed coup. (Also a theme of Mishima’s 1969 novel Runaway Horses.) After Mishima’s death, the film of Patriotism was withdrawn by his widow, but after she died, it was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection.
Mishima’s charismatic performance as a swaggering tough guy in Masumura Yasuzo’s entertaining 1960 gangster movie Afraid to Die is available on DVD. He also appears as a human statue in Black Lizard, a movie so weird and wonderful that it is worth seeking out on VHS. (It highly deserves a DVD release.) Black Lizard is based on a play by Mishima, but I was unable to determine how faithfully it follows the original.
There is very little good secondary literature on Mishima in English. The best I have read are Andrew Rankin’s Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist and Naoki Inose’s massive Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima.
Rankin’s Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist is a superbly researched and written account of Mishima’s largely untranslated writings on aesthetics, literature, and politics. These are interesting in their own right and also cast light on his novels and his political actions, culminating with his suicide.
Inose’s Persona is an exhaustively researched volume that will probably stand for a long time as the definitive biographical work on Mishima. It contains too much information for the casual reader, but for Mishima fans like me, it is essential reading, filled with detailed and tantalizing accounts of Mishima’s many untranslated writings — fiction and non-fiction — including his many political statements. For the first time, it is possible for people who do not speak Japanese to gain a clear and detailed picture of Mishima’s politics.
I can also recommend Henry Scott Stokes’ biography The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mishima: A Vision of the Void, and Roy Starrs’ Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima. Yourcenar and Starrs deal with Mishima in relation to philosophy and religion, and although the theses and arguments of both authors strike me as confused, they still manage to ferret out a lot of interesting information.
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8 comments
If you remember Mishima, a non-white Japanese (I do not object that he deserves much respect!), but why you do not remember and pay a tribute to Nihal Atsiz, the great Türkish poet, writer and nationalist, his date of birth was just now in January; he was born on 12.1.1905 and died on 11.12.1975.
Never heard of him.
Dear Gregory Johnson,
I want to say thank you for introducing us to Yukio Mishima. I haven’t heard of him until I visited your webzine. Here are two recent books about him you should review for CCP.
Link#1-The title of the first book is “Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait.”
https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/mishima-aesthetic-terrorist-an-intellectual-portrait/
Link#2-The title of the second book is “Yukio Mishima: The Death of a Man.”
https://www.rizzolibookstore.com/yukio-mishima-death-man
You constantly praise Frank Herbert’s novel “Dune” as an example of archeofuturism. I am surprised his birthday isn’t celebrated here. You should add him to the list. Here are some others writers that could be included in remembrance: Anton Chekov, Fydor Dostoevsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Arthur C. Clarke, Edgar Rice Burroughs and William Olaf Stapledon.
Once again thank you for all the effort you put in to making a informative and well designed webzine.
The list of the “remembered” is sometimes restricted here. For example, of the Russian thinkers and artists of the Right some prominent writers and scholars were never mentioned. I think here about Ivan Ilyin, Ivan Solonevich, Lev Gumilyov, Igor Shafarevich. Of Ukrainians such right poets as Oleg Olzhich, Evhen Malanyuk, Ulas Samchuk should be remembered. And so many Romanians, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Poles… As of Türks I have mentioned above Nihal Atsiz, whose role as poet and nationalist author in the politics of Türkey was much more important, than the role of Mishima in Japan.
Well, I am surprised that Prof. Revilo Oliver was never mentioned here.
My full name is Darkplato Otalpkard.
Not Otalpkrad? You’re so close. You might as well go full palindrome.
Oliver wrote, that this was a long tradition in his family – to name the first son Revilo as palindrome.
Anyway his books about the Christianity are as actual and valid today, as they were for 40 years. He´s mostly remembered as the author of JEWISH STRATEGY, but I think it is not the best book of him. The Origins of Christianity, Reflections on the Christ Myth, The Origins of Christianity are more interesting and less polemical.
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