Yukio Mishima: Dialectics of Mind and Body

Abstract

Despite its distinguished tradition in Japan as the shi-shosetsu, or I-novel, raw autobiography in the guise of fiction was a genre Yukio Mishima dismissed with a contemptuous smirk. Like Kafka, who once noted that writing an autobiography would be as easy as recording one's dreams, Mishima was convinced that confessional writing exercised neither the imagination nor the craft to shape it into art, merely one's propensities for self-indulgence. Yet, he submitted to the considerable attraction it must have held for him on several occasions. Apart from work not translated, his early Confessions of a Mask (1949) can be cited, as can Sun and Steel, written some twenty years later. Neither conforms strictly to all shi-shosetsu conventions, however, the former because its material shows evidence of tight artistic control, the latter because its character as abstract discourse excludes much of the quotidian in which the shi-shosetsu usually revels. But both works lay bare the essential forces at play, or at war, in Mishima's puzzling psychology. What emerges most clearly from this psychology is a conflict between two antithetical modes of being, both equally seductive for Mishima. To establish one's existence either within the confines of