This death in life: leprosy in Mishima Yukios Rai l no terasu and beyond

Abstract

This article focuses on Mishima Yukio's late play Rai l no terasu (The Terrace of the Leper King), concerning the construction of the Bayon temple at Angkor Wat by Jayavarman VII, rumoured to have been a leper. In Mishima's retelling, the king's leprosy grows with the raising of the temple, he becomes blind as it nears completion and dies just as the project is finally completed. The last scene of the play is a dialogue between the soul of the dying king and his youthful body in which the body says that the soul itself is leprosy, while it, the unsullied body, truly represents the timeless beauty of Bayon. In this article I argue that Rai l no terasu represents a more thorough working out of the theme of leprosy to be found in many other works by Mishima. Leprosy is particularly rich in signification. As a disfiguring disease, long thought incurable though not fatal, it can stand for corruption of both soul and body, for divine affliction and for divine election. As such, it is a particularly effective metaphorical vehicle for Mishima's work and for his constant interrogation of the themes of beauty and ugliness, desire and death.