Gil The Bright’s Reviews > Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait > Status Update

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.