Status Updates From Mishima, Aesthetic Terroris...

Regular targets of Mishima’s ire in his final decade were humanist thinkers (Mishima often derisively characterizes them as “pale-faced” or “anemic” thinkers) who reject the irrational side of nature. Prominent among them was the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom Mishima expressed intense loathing, though this was as much for Sartre’s physical ugliness as for his existentialism

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“The innocent eyes of the shrine bearers were directed toward a place I did not know. Those eyes, mixing sharpness with rapture, seemed to be looking at something that was beyond the imagination”

The affinity between novelists and criminals derives from the simple fact that both specialize in researching “probabilities” (gaizensei) that are beyond the reach of the law. “Society wears a mask of humanism,” writes Mishima, “but the novelist knows that behind that mask lurks a lurid curiosity, and indeed fondness, for evil. No one who ventures beyond that point is unconnected to the loneliness of the criminal”

Mishima writes, “I have no intention of swearing allegiance to the idol of truth. I shall let my lies roam free and feed wherever they please.'' Our truths are generally uninformative and invariably dull. It is in our artificiality—our posturing, our false confessions, our dramatic fabrications and exaggerations—that our real and interesting selves reside.

Constant at the center of Mishima’s work is the
belief, akin to a religious faith, that for a beautiful thing to be made perfectly and eternally beautiful, it must be destroyed. Mishima even dreams of a beauty so deadly that it would destroy itself, and he wants to throw himself into such beauty, to become beautiful with it, to merge with it at the moment when it burns itself out and vanishes from the world.

But there is also a sense in which Mishima wants Japan to be in decline so that he can be its last defiant hero, a kamikaze of Japanese beauty. Mishima’s work is suffused with a sense of ending—the end of art, the end of eroticism, the end of culture, the end of the world—and it conforms to a decadent aestheticism that holds that beautiful things radiate their most intense beauty on the cusp of their destruction.

"Aestheticism itself is intrinsically decadent, since the emphasis on beauty leaves little room for nature. To prioritize beauty and art is already to go against nature... 'Art for art’s sake' is no more than a temporary evasion."
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Mishima writes: "For the aesthete, beauty can be no more than a relative salvation. What comes in the end is the absolute salvation of God."

"[Proximity with crime] helps him [the novelist] to feel proud of his isolation from the judgment of society, brings him into close affinity with the pride of an unrepentant criminal... Society wears a mask of humanism, but the novelist knows that behind that mask lurks a lurid curiosity, and indeed fondness, for evil. No one who ventures beyond that point is uncon­nected to the loneliness of the criminal." Mishima

"In her celebrated essay 'Against Interpretation' Susan Sontag observed that we have lost 'the innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.' To interpret art, Sontag argues, is to impoverish it by reducing it to its content."

"Our modern tendency to adopt a critical stance toward artworks has become so strong that it renders us incapable of identifying with them. Instead we strive to represent the work to ourselves within a critical framework provided by aesthetic judgment [...] The Greeks saw the imagination as a fundamentally deceptive force, capable of permanently warping a person’s character and morals."

"The project of aestheticism was innately interdisci­plinary in its attempt to translate visual images, and also music, into words, as if painting with language... Mishima works along similar lines in his essays and articles on art, providing literary equivalents for the imaginative effects that paintings and sculptures have produced in him."

"Modern people are most uncomfortable when they are commanded to lay bare their true emotions. It is a cruel command that is impossible to obey. Modern people have all sorts of faces available to them. But “true emotion” has become just another one of those masks. Indeed, it is actually easier to believe that it is a mask. Hence laying bare one’s true emotions is really no more difficult than choosing a mask."

"Then the terroristic destruction of Mishima Yukio, beautiful, unique, glittering, iconic symbol of centuries of Japanese cultural tradition, will have the function of a spectacular religious ritual for wreaking vengeance on a world that ought to have died and yet did not die..."

"What [Takehiko] Noguchi wants us to understand is that the memory of this intoxication lingered, engendering confused and difficult feelings among many Japanese: nostalgia for that lost intoxication, a frustrated sense of destiny unfulfilled, a profound guilt at having survived the war, and even an unutterable resentment that the emperor too had not perished."

"Only after the war ended did I come to understand that the war had been an erotic time. It was a time when all the little pieces of vulgar eroticism that proliferate today were gathered together and purified in one giant Eros. Those who preach peace may not like to acknowl­edge it, but the fact is that war is more than just misery."
Mishima in August of 1965, on the 20th anniversary of Japan's defeat.

"Mishima’s contemporaries were inclined to interpret his work and his persona as the expression of a trauma that was not his alone, but which was embedded in the minds of young Japanese men of his generation who had experienced the intoxication of the community unto death and yet, randomly and unexpectedly, had outlived it."