Sun and Steel, Yukio Mishima: Review

This short memoir is a little door into the world of Japanese ultra-nationalism, the cult of the warrior and the inability of words to articulate the self and the world.

Yukio Mishima writes about how he finds the limits of language in describing life and of organising society. He finds a new way to express himself through bodybuilding and the sculpting of his body’s muscles.

Perhaps we do forget the profundity of one’s own body. It is a vessel and it is a tool that we choose to maintain or take for granted. It is through the perfecting of one’s body, Mishima believes, that a new, strong philosopher-warrior-king can be brought into being — and destroy the limp wordsmiths who narrow the world to mere language. In his words, he wants ‘to pursue words with the body and not the body with words.’

To an extent, he is right on the idea of language. We always struggle to find the words to describe love, hate and God. Sometimes words just won’t do. It reminds me of Stanley Kubrick’s work which famously stood for itself as a new visual medium, namely cinema, which promised in its own way to transcend spoonfed culture or art as propaganda and evolve everyone’s consciousness by making cinema a sort of psychoactive substance swallowed ritually.

I don’t know much about the history of Japan or how the concepts of samurais, warriors and Japanese nationalism that drove the country to disaster at the beginning of the 20th century intersect. Whatever those connections, Mishima laments their loss and wishes to bring them back as the first principles of society. To the European ear, this is the original form of fascism — a cult of war which demands the transformation of the individual through new design, bodies, clothes and architecture to create a better, stronger and more profound Nation that is akin to the societies of Ancient Rome and Greece.

The idea of Death is the most important concept. No longer taboo, death acquires transcendental, courageous, manly and utopian qualities. Mishima refers to danger as the only place where you can be happy and it is only through the perfection of one’s body that one is given a ‘precious passport’ to ‘dwell in danger.’

By now you may realise that Mishima is not a man who doesn’t follow through on what he thinks. As such, in 1970 he tried to launch a military coup in Japan and when it failed, Mishima, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature five times for his novels, poems and plays, killed himself by ‘seppuku’ a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment associated with the samurai.

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