Mishima

Mishima: A Vision of the Void by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Alberto Manguel,152 pages

Early in her short study of the life and works of Yukio Mishima, Marguerite Yourcenar notes how, in our progressively illiterate society, the lives of artists have come to overshadow their works.  In Mishima's case, however, it is impossible to dismiss the former in order to concentrate entirely on the latter, as his life and death were themselves self-consciously artistic.  Indeed, the artist-hero's enthusiasm for traditional Japanese culture has about it an atmosphere of play, not only due to the undeniably strong influence Western culture had on him but, more fundamentally, the patent impossibility of entering voluntarily into a tradition that can only be received, never chosen.  And yet, as Yourcenar maintains, his final gesture was intended as a consummation, an act which fulfilled his desire to enter fully into that tradition.  Throughout his life and work, Mishima treated identity as something transitory and ephemeral, an attitude only reinforced by Buddhist teachings on the illusory nature of the world.  For Yourcenar, Mishima's suicide is the final punctuation on his lifelong existential project of making his own meaning in the void of the absurd, although the interpretation suggests itself that his was a search for something solid on which to rest his faith amidst the great sea of liquid modernity.