William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

As for Mishima, when I think of him I remember Urashima’s box. Mishima might have married the Sea-God’s daughter, but, suspecting the treacherous limits of everything, even the immortality her profiled kiss would have offered him, he took that casket and immediately smashed it on the rocky beach.

Komachi in the Noh Plays of Mishima Yukio

Like most novelists, Mishima writes principally about himself. In each volume of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which shines ever more obviously as one of the great works of the last century, the protagonist appears to have been reincarnated into a different body. First he is Kiyoaki, a sensitively self-destructive young dreamer who falls in love with the one woman he has been expressly prohibited from loving, and from that love he catches his death at age twenty. Next we see him as a kendo athlete with “a face like new-fallen snow, unaware of what lies ahead,” who matures into a rightwing suicide terrorist. In the third novel he’s reborn as a Thai princess who also dies young, of a snakebite; in the last, as a handsome, cruel young lighthouse keeper. The reincarnated person can always be identified by a certain birthmark, and the identification gets accomplished by the other protagonist, Shigekuni Honda, who is a judge — perfect profession for a soul whose task it is in the tetralogy to decide what might or might not be true, and what existence means. In the first novel, he muses about Kiyoaki: “Up until now I thought it best as his friend to pretend not to notice even if he were in his death agonies, out of respect for that elegance of his.” Certainly Honda never suceeds in preventing anybody’s death agonies. Scrupulous, empathetic, intelligent, aching to understand, and ultimately impotent, Honda might as well be — a novelist.

In effect, then, there are two main characters in this long work, the observer and the observed. Is the observed really one soul who comes to life four times, or, as the final volume hints, has Honda deluded himself (as I perhaps would) out of yearning for supernatural coherence?

Mishima was both Honda and Kiyoaki, the one and the myriad. As an artist, he could create, but creation can never substitute for action. Action, on the other hand, may be powerful but cannot transcend ephemerality. Action dies as does Kiyoaki, and as did ultimately Mishima himself, whose carefully politicized, aestheticized suicide was not only rabidly absurd, but a failure on its own terms: The troops refused to rally to his call for Emperor worship. At least Isao, the kendo athlete of the second book, succeeds in assassinating somebody before he cuts his belly open. Mishima was ultimately more like Honda than like Isao, which is hardly a terrible thing: while he may be sterile in the sense that he will not bring about any “great event” (he will not murder any ministers), his empathy will endure. Honda’s seeking, his sincerity, his fidelity to that not necessarily well founded belief in Kiyoaki’s reincarnations, here are the strands of perception, conceptualization and devotion which sustain patterns of recurrence into something permanent and precious. Without Honda, the four young men and one young woman who share nothing but a certain birthmark and a predilection to secret self-absorptions would not have added up to any collective thing. Thanks to him, they embody a sacred mystery. That is why Honda can be likened to the immense display case in the Mishima Yukio Literary Museum, where our author’s books shine as colorfully frozen as any collection of immaculate butterflies.

So Honda is Mishima; and the butterflies, the various versions of Kiyoaki, are also Mishima, whose strangely plastic features — and this is a quality more often pertaining to women, because more of them know how to dress the part and put on makeup — seem capable of forming themselves into any number of vastly dissimilar faces. Sometimes in the photographs his very head appears elongated, as though he were Cambodian or Vietnamese; at other times it’s rounder, like the clay head of some Assyrian idol; that frequently very sensitive and delicate face, Kiyoaki-face, can on occasion appear bleached and bleak like an ageing prisoner’s, or harden into the stereotyped clay vulgarity which I have seen in the attitudes of tattooed Yakuza gangsters posing for my press camera (this, perhaps, was an attempt to embody himself as Isao the suicide-terrorist). We have Mishima the suit and tie man, Mishima the flashy dancer (caught from above and grainily, à la Weegee), Mishima the artful poser in the dark kimono polka-dotted with light, and they are all his expressions of self, his legitimate incarnations, but only the Mishima called Honda sits down to the desk on which the bronze or brass letter-opener surmounted with the medallion of a Caucasian’s head (a certain Emperor Napoleon, I believe) lies beside a miniature sword; two very Japanese looking metal fishes and a metal lizard bask eternally by a golden Parker pen; it is none other than Honda who, perhaps wishing that he could be Isao, writes at the end of Runaway Horses : “The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.”

This defines Mishima’s agony. As he writes in his eerie confession Sun and Steel ,

In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all; then… came the flesh. It was already… sadly wasted by words. First comes the pillar of white wood, then the white ants that feed on it. But for me, the white ants were there from the start, and the pillar of plain wood emerged tardily, already half eaten away.

Regarding Ono no Komachi one sees the white ants in retrospect. But in her heyday, no doubt, one saw only the white wood of her perfect flesh, the white arms, black teeth, black hair.

Kiyoaki has the body, of course, and Honda the words. And the words despise themselves, knowing that their own fulfillment necessarily spoils the body with sedentariness. But without the words to define and cohere, the body lapses into its own separate incarnations; and even its most dramatic self-expressions, its mutilations and orgasms, cannot win to the understanding which words make possible and which will keep the body’s consciousness whole. For all his athletic poses toward the end, the mere existence of the Mishima Yukio Literary Museum suffices to prove that the body was not enough for our novelist, that like Kiyoaki he became too restless to stay in one body, that he wanted to be the man of a thousand faces even if the close-cropped hair, the half-smoked cigarette failed to remove him as much as he thought it did from kinship with any small boy who dresses up as a sailor. Yes, incarnation is restless, and so in some photographs, Mishima, whom my Japanese translator thinks of as “definitely gifted, but somehow not really sure how to cope with the ‘gift,’ ” wears a radiant if at times hysterically radiant smile, the white teeth tight together; in other images he’s trying to look stern. In the body-builder portraits, Mishima appears rounded and drawn in on himself, transformed into clay, a stolid corporeality which expresses itself more loudly than the inner spirit; but I suspect that the spirit, which accentuated that corporeality because it loathes itself, feels tormented by that loudness and dares not confess it. Could that be one reason that Mishima chose death?

About that death, or at least about its supposed inevitability, a little more should be said. In Sun and Steel he bitterly complains about the fact that men cannot objectify themelves, and from the context it’s evident that he means objectify their bodies as women can . I ask his ghost: What about the spectacularly objectified feminine beauty of the male Noh actor? Not answering, Mishima hurries on: “He can only be objectified through the supreme action — which is, I suppose, the moment of death, the moment when, even without being seen, the fiction of being seen and the beauty of the object are permitted. Of such is the beauty of the suicide squad.” Mishima wrote those words in that languorously white house of his, which might be considered a little peculiar for the abode of a Japanese nationalist given those white urns, Greekish statues and European horoscope mosaic, that house which serenely bides and forebodes behind its high white wall; if anything, it makes me think of the residence of the minister Kurihara in Runaway Horses , whom Isao stabs to death in punishment for the crime of sacrilege. Kurihara is, among other things, another Honda. The body hates the words (so, at least, the self-hating words say). The body freely, guiltlessly kills and copulates, marches, overthrows, dances, allures, inspires, makes history. It can do everything. But what’s it made of? The white ants are already eating it. When Mishima, naked but for his loincloth, sits on the tatami mat for yet another photograph (if you knew him by only this image, you wouldn’t suspect that he lives amidst French engravings of nineteenth-century experimental balloons), when Mishima leans on the staff of his sheathed sword, his face, which to others, including himself, may evince resolution, to me betrays resignation, even vacancy, as if it cannot escape its own clay.