“À chacun son Tokyo.”1: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Reading of Yukio Mishima as a Revolutionary Exemplar for Western Literary Art

Abstract

Marguerite Yourcenar may well be best known for her prize-winning novels that accent the trope of homosexuality, but there is another, equally engaging aspect to her work that highlights her originality: her deeply syncretic cultural perspective. Regarding her strong interest in Japanese culture, she was intrigued by the polemical and ostentatious Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, and her 1980 text, Mishima ou la vision du vide, stands as an important milestone in the longstanding dialogue of East-West cultural relations. Mishima fascinated Yourcenar, above and beyond his interest in homosexual themes, and she identified in him a uniquely powerful exemplar of rebellion. After forming his own militia, barricading himself in the Tokyo headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, holding the commandant hostage, and committing suicide publicly on a balcony of the building through the ritual act of seppuku, Mishima became for Yourcenar a figure of almost hagiographic dimensions. Describing him dramatically as “le martyr […] du Japon héroïque,” Yourcenar presents Mishima as a figure whose art serves as inspiration both for Eastern and Western writers, while she explores his violent ideology, portraying his work as a compelling and paradoxical example of the potential of aesthetics to alter directly human culture.