Words, and the internal fictions they represented, would never be enough to join Mishima’s corporeal self to the abstract notion of beauty except in a dreamlike capacity, which would not satisfy the harshly masculine realist in him. He later echoes this realization on the morning of his final day, as shown at the start of the film: “Words are insufficient. So I found another form of expression.” Scraping against the limitations of his artistry, Mishima sought to transcend it. To write for beauty was one thing; to die for beauty, exacting revenge on it in the process, something greater altogether.
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In his 1949 novel Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima wrote that “it is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.” In Mishima’s case, one of the demons he tried to exorcize was his nascent effeminacy, a condition that for the rest of his life lent itself to both an intense longing for beauty and a self-immolating desire for masculinity. Until the age of twelve, he was brought up by an abusive, aristocratic grandmother who secluded him from male companionship but immersed him in art; subsequently, he was placed under the care of his abusive, chauvinistic father, who filled him with militaristic zeal but forbade him from writing and other “feminine” pursuits. Captivated and rejected by both specters of his adolescence, Mishima’s resulting deficiency of self forced him into a tireless journey to find completeness, to try and thwart alienation by surrendering to something as fundamental as beauty, particularly a hypermasculine form of it.
It is easy to dismiss Mishima’s flamboyant attempts at reconciling masculinity and beauty as ridiculous; stunts like his photographic re-creation of Saint Sebastian’s sensual martyrdom seem to many like play-acting at fatalism. Mishima himself was aware of and resented this fact, complaining at one point, “I walk on stage determined to make the audience cry. Instead, they burst out laughing.” Paul Schrader, however, whose films plumb the depths of the iconoclastic male psyche, understood that Mishima’s obsession with beauty came from a place of intense sincerity, albeit one that was forged by equally intense insecurity. As such, he knew that the way the story of someone like Mishima should be told is how he himself would have perceived it: with a mythologized aesthetic and the utmost earnestness.
Schrader’s 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, as the title suggests, is divided into four sections, Beauty, Art, Action, and Harmony of Pen and Sword, each of which elucidates some aspect of Mishima’s all-consuming desire for beauty in its various forms: to become one with it, to conquer it, to transcend it. The chapters include three adaptations of Mishima’s novels, as well as an account of the events of November 25, 1970, the last day of his life, when he attempted a right-wing military coup and committed seppuku upon its failure. These sections are interspersed with flashbacks to his formative experiences – featuring imagined narrations by Mishima – which culminate in his final, fatal act. In presenting these particular facets of Mishima’s life, Schrader interprets the primary motivation behind his lifelong obsession and self-inflicted demise as a series of failed reconciliations, selecting and elevating the events both real and fictional that are most emblematic of the contradictions Mishima tried futilely to force together, through sheer strength of body and mind.
The film begins with Mishima’s final day but soon dissolves into a flashback to his childhood, shown in black and white to emphasize the desolation and solitude of his upbringing. “I see myself as a boy leaning at the window,” Mishima’s voice intones, “forever watching a world I was unable to change, forever hoping it would change by itself.” Here is the first great failed reconciliation that defined Mishima, between himself and the world in which he existed. Isolated as his childhood was, Mishima struggled to conceive of himself as belonging to the same existence as everyone else, the enormity of which was often overwhelming. Throughout this childhood sequence, young Mishima’s face is resolutely impassive, suffering from yet also perpetuating its own alienation, severing his boundless, delicate imagination from the stark outer world that, if allowed in, would inevitably devour it. This stolidness recalls a shot from earlier in the film where older Mishima looks into a mirror before setting off on his last day, only to see that his face has suddenly been covered by an unfathomable Noh mask, a prop that is used in traditional Japanese theater to tightly control emotional expression while also heavily stylizing it. The only time young Mishima’s mask slips is when, at a Kabuki play his grandmother takes him to, he exchanges a long glance with a male actor dressed as a woman and widens his eyes in awe. “The stage made everything more beautiful. It transformed men into women. It transformed the entire world,” Mishima says. He has discovered a path through the contradiction of his existence: by shaping the remote “real” world to his specifications, and in the process accessing its beauty, using the power of fiction.
This revelation is short-lived, however. When his grandmother falls ill, Mishima is sent to school, where he interacts with boys his age for the first time. After engaging in a seemingly dramatic brawl with a bully, the other boy calmly dusts himself off and drifts away when the school bell rings, leaving Mishima confused about the conflict’s sudden loss of perceived mythic significance. “In my earliest years I realized life consisted of two contradictory elements. One was words, which could change the world. The other was the world itself, which had nothing to do with words,” he narrates. Words, and the internal fictions they represented, would never be enough to join his corporeal self to the abstract notion of beauty except in a dreamlike capacity, which would not satisfy the harshly masculine realist in him. He later echoes this realization on the morning of his final day, as shown at the start of the film: “Words are insufficient. So I found another form of expression.” Scraping against the limitations of his artistry, Mishima sought to transcend it. To write for beauty was one thing; to die for beauty, exacting revenge on it in the process, something greater altogether.
And yet, for most of his life, he did write for beauty, flagrantly pouring himself into the sumptuous, self-sacrificial worlds that his novels encased. As Mishima states in the film after an inspiring visit to Greece, “creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself are identical.” In portraying these stories, Schrader exchanges the black-and-white simplicity of Mishima’s flashbacks for gorgeously stylized theatrical sets and script-like dialogue, where characters and backgrounds are simultaneously more and less than what they represent. The result is not unlike the effect of a Noh mask – distancing an actor from reality while weaving its most fundamental components into something greater – reflecting the desperate desire to embody beauty that motivated Mishima to write. These stories are never presented as anything more than Mishima’s fantasies cut off from the real world; nearly all of the incredibly designed sets, beautifully lit as they are, are surrounded on all sides by thick, empty darkness. Narratively, each story leads into the next, representing the progression and crystallization of Mishima’s plan to end his life.
In the first story, titled The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a Zen Buddhist acolyte with a stutter is entranced and disturbed by the temple he studies at. His handicap excludes him from partaking in life, sexually and spiritually, and he comes to blame the oppressive beauty of the temple for smothering his own pathetic existence. In one particularly striking sequence, the acolyte reaches out to touch the breast of a girl who is interested in him, if only out of pity for his infirmity, when a profound wind sweeps in on the wings of Philip Glass’s virtuosic score, pushing the resplendent temple to the foreground in a startling zoom shot. Overcome by the enormity of the temple’s beauty, the acolyte’s trembling hand is unable to touch the girl, who leaves him in disgust. “That’s the power of beauty’s eternity. It poisons us. It blocks out our lives,” the acolyte laments. It is at this moment that the acolyte’s desire to become one with beauty, by sleeping with a girl, is replaced by his desire to vanquish it, by burning down the temple and freeing himself of his crushing obsession.
This violent impulse also motivates the protagonist of Kyoko’s House, in which a handsome young actor sells himself into sexual slavery as payment for his mother’s mounting debts. In this story, however, the destructive desire is turned inward, at ensuring the eternal beauty of the self by preserving it through death. Osamu, the protagonist, is vain to a fault and obsesses over maintaining his physical attractiveness, claiming that “the human body is a work of art. It doesn’t need artists.” His mind is changed, however, when a friend reminds him that “even the most beautiful body is destroyed with age . . . you must devise an artist’s scheme to preserve it.” He suggests that Osamu commit suicide at the peak of his beauty in order to preserve it, which he eventually does, allowing the dominatrix to whom he sold himself to fatally mutilate him. By offering up himself so completely during a sexual act, he has attempted to ensure that his beauty will live on, enshrined by the intensity of the desire it necessitated.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and Kyoko’s House illustrate another of Mishima’s failed reconciliations: between physical and fundamental beauty. In the former story, desire for the female body is always overshadowed by the looming beauty of the temple, and in the latter, Osamu’s attractiveness only becomes truly beautiful when destroyed. Mishima, like Osamu, was incredibly vain; he was an flamboyant bodybuilder and took great pride in his physical appearance, as shown by a scene in which he runs away in shame from a male lover after the other man remarks on his flabby arms. (Ironically, the militant Mishima likely developed an interest in bodybuilding after being declared unfit for service in the Second World War due to physical frailty, a sequence that is also shown in the film.) Also like Osamu, he came to recognize that vanity was by nature a pursuit of shallow, ephemeral beauty, incongruous with his goal of achieving true sublimity. As a result, he concluded that the only way to circumvent this contradiction, to go beyond his stubborn inclination toward self-absorption and experience fundamental beauty, would be the sacred destruction of this superficial physical attractiveness, forever preserving it as Osamu did.
Mishima’s death drive acquires its final, jingoistic layer in the third novel adaptation, Runaway Horses. In this story, a kendo champion attempts a coup to assassinate key capitalist leaders and return the Japanese Empire to the honorable ways of the Samurai. Undeterred by the plot’s discovery, he stabs his primary target and commits seppuku. The story mirrors the political trajectory of Mishima’s life, including his formation of a far-right militia called the Tatenokai, which he personally trained and led in the coup of November 25, 1970. Similar as it is to the events that led up to his death, this story provides a glimpse into how Mishima’s nationalism also originated from his basic longing for beauty. Purity is possible, the protagonist says in an attempt to justify his desire to return to ancient order, “if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.” Once again, beauty, this time in the guise of ultranationalist “purity,” can only be found at the conjunction of reality and art, a state that can only occur via a physical sacrifice. This cruel logic of pen and sword is fatally reflected in Mishima’s coup and subsequent suicide.
The stuttering acolyte, the masochistic lover, and the fervent nationalist, in line with Mishima’s desire to transform himself through his writing, are all obvious stand-ins for his real-life persona, which shared each of these characters’ defining traits. His own relationship with beauty follows theirs: a yearning to experience it, a desire to seek vengeance on it due to its exclusion of him, the reorientation of this hatred toward the beauty he tried to cultivate within himself, and finally, the impulse to give himself up to it completely. Schrader emphasizes the confessional nature of Mishima’s writing with seamless visual and narrative transitions between flashback and novel sequences. For example, when an exhausted and aging Mishima enters a gym sauna after discussing his desire for physical beauty, the lithe, youthful protagonist of Kyoko’s House emerges on the other end, indicating a transformation into an idealized version of himself as reality submerges into fiction. Similarly, after the stone-faced coup members in Runaway Horses affirm their loyalty to the emperor, standing next to a futuristic model of a Shinto shrine that is both brutalist and symphonic, the film shifts to a related scene in Mishima’s life in which young men hunched around a table sign in blood the document founding the Tatenokai. This juxtaposition of real and fictional scenes demonstrates the mythologized perspective with which Mishima himself, in his self-aggrandizing vanity, probably viewed these events in his life. What many would dismiss as delusions of grandeur, Schrader depicts as poetic attempts to bridge the gap between self and beauty.
The prescient events of Runaway Horses lead into the film’s final chapter, Harmony of Pen and Sword, which reveals the final flourish on Mishima’s lifelong work of art, the theatrical culmination of all the prior stories and flashbacks. This sense of gradualism is present throughout the film, enhanced by Philip Glass’s score, which swells from slow, warlike percussion to soaring orchestral melodies alongside rising action. The musical and narrative buildup gives viewers the sense that Mishima, from the very start of his life, has been waiting and preparing for his death.
During the coup, Mishima and the Tatenokai walk easily into Japanese Armed Forces headquarters and take a general hostage, forcing the garrisoned soldiers to assemble under the general’s balcony. In the struggle, a globe is knocked from its stand, rolling along the floor until its face rests on North America, perhaps prefacing the ultimate dissolution of Mishima’s anti-Western dreams for Japan. Dressed in the clothing of his father’s masculine fantasies – red-white hachimaki wrapped around his bulging forehead, golden-black belt wrapped around his militant waist – he gives his captive audience an impassioned speech, demanding a return to the ways of the Japanese Empire. To his dismay, the soldiers are not receptive; they heckle him just as loudly as the leftist college students he often tried to debate.
Here, Mishima faces his final failure: the inability to reconcile the idealism of his art with his actions in real life. Throughout his life, he painstakingly sculpted a specific vision of beauty through his art: fierce, masculine, patriotic. He placed the full weight of this vision on the success of his coup, which he hoped would drag it out of the depths of fiction and into the real world. This is perhaps why he intended to die in the event of its failure; he was unwilling to live in a world where even the most drastic action did not equal the transformative power he could wield using a single written page, which, paradoxically, could never measure up to the acute sensation of reality. Before his death, Mishima narrates: “I saw the outcome of my final action. In this stillness was a beauty beyond words. No more body or spirit, pen or sword, male or female.” Facing mounting jeers from a group that he had seen as holding the possibility of his salvation, he welcomes his ascendance into the stillness of death, which he now sees as another paradigm of beauty altogether, one free from the contradictions that formed the impassable chasm between him and the sublimity he so strongly desired.
As a screaming Mishima plunges his blade into his chest, the film reaches a brilliant climax, cutting to the final moments of each of his fictional counterparts, the dress rehearsals for his actual death: the acolyte, standing in fearful anticipation as flames swell up around him and devour the temple; the beautiful body of Osamu lying bound, mutilated, and lifeless with a faint smile on his face; and the vengeful coup leader, positioned exactly like Mishima, bleeding out on a beach while facing the sunrise. It is implied through this sequence that Mishima is feeling all of these emotions at the moment of his death – fear, beatitude, triumph. The viewer is at last aware of the “accumulation of many things,” as Mishima refers to it at the start of the film, that led him to his death. The gaping shadow of his childhood, which thrust him back and forth between extreme notions of beauty while preventing him from truly understanding them; his fundamental alienation from the world outside himself, which try as he might, could not be surmounted through words; the divergence between his nature and his ideals – these factors pointed Mishima toward the only act that would place him outside the realm of any such contradictions. These philosophical afflictions are communicated by Schrader’s bold visual and narrative choices, such as fluid transitions between reality and fiction, carefully selected narrations from Mishima, and stylistic reliance on Japanese theater, all of which place the viewer within Mishima’s perspective and illustrate the sensual frustration and exhaustion brought on by his obsessions as if transposing his glittering turmoil directly onto the screen.
The film ends as Mishima narrates a passage from Runaway Horses, one he no doubt wrote in heavy anticipation of the day he would experience it, the day on which he could finally break through the confines of his existence and join together self, words, reality, and beauty: “The instant the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up behind his eyelids and exploded, lighting the sky for an instant.”
Works Cited
Eha, Brian Patrick. “Kamikaze of Beauty.” The Point Magazine, 25 Oct. 2021. thepointmag.com/criticism/kamikaze-of-beauty/
Gorman, Paul. “The Japanese Proust? Yukio Mishima.” Into the Gyre, 21 Nov. 2019. intothegyre.org/2019/11/25/the-japanese-proust-yukio-mishima/
“Masks.” Introducing the World of Noh: Masks. www.the-noh.com/en/world/mask.html
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Directed by Paul Schrader, Zoetrope Studios, 1985.
Mishima, Yukio, and Ivan Morris. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Vintage Books, 1994.
Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask. New Directions, 1958.
Reprobate Press. “Sebastian & Mishima.” The Reprobate, 26 July 2020, reprobatepress.com/2019/06/22/sebastian-mishima/
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Unless otherwise indicated, all images are screenshots from the film.
