🤖 AI Translation Notice: This article was originally written in Chinese and translated to English by AI. The original Chinese version is available here. Some nuances may differ from human translation.

📝 Article Type: Literary Analysis

An Overview of Yukio Mishima's Thought:

Position: Contrary to what many voices insufficiently acquainted with modern Japanese history maintain, Yukio Mishima was in no sense a fascist or a militarist, nor even, on a political level, can he simply be regarded as a member of the Japanese right wing. He held a negative view of the role played by the Emperor — representing the old order — in the preceding decades, contending that the imperial house, having regained power, should have continued to exist as a spiritual symbol approaching the divine, rather than becoming a manipulator of sordid political struggles, while at the same time actively guiding the national spirit. In sum, Mishima was a political and cultural conservative, and an aesthetic classicist.

Aesthetic Overview: Those who watched Mishima's Tokyo University debate will discover that Mishima had read the works of numerous Western thinkers — Sartre, Nietzsche, and others — and was by no means a reactionary fossil. His aesthetic, grounded in the body as the metaphysical foundation, was deeply influenced by ancient Greek philosophy (see Sun and Steel for detail): he believed that thought and knowledge (spirit) should not exist apart from practice (this being also one of his naive critiques of the 1960s Japanese student movement). The sound body serves as the foundation. This is a monistic aesthetic vision of body, spirit, and practice as a trinity, oriented toward a final, heroic martyrdom. At the same time, we can plainly perceive that his theory is not self-consistent, but rather a self-contradictory entity continually generating fissures — its root lying in the split between spirit and practice (or spirit and reality). The reason these two combine so marvellously lies not in fusion, but in extremely intense struggle, and in their shared object: eternity. To attain the state of eternity, Mishima chose martyrdom.

Martyrdom — The Explosive Death: In the 1960s, an era swept up in revolutionary passion, Mishima was most acutely aware of his own solitude. But as an absolute physical and spiritual strongman, he had no possibility of abandoning the ideal that would ultimately accomplish his aim in practice. Yet as an absolute weakman within the apparatus of the state, any resistance he could offer was, in the eyes of the big Other, nothing but violent crime. Only the elaborate complex of ideas (spirit) could endure; yet without thorough practice, it remained the base act of the weak. What he needed, then, was to push the vessels — body and spirit — to their limit, and finally, through martyrdom, to grant them eternity. On this point, he found common cause with the student movement leaders.

Revolutionary Collapse, the Vacuum of Order in the Late 1980s, and the Prophet László Krasznahorkai:

A Brief Account of the 1980s:

As the Lenin-Stalin system further decayed during the Brezhnev era, and as Andropov and Chernenko — two supreme leaders who, like the concurrent conservative faction within the Chinese Communist Party, might have simultaneously served to check and deepen reform — died in succession, the reformist Gorbachev, blindly trusting the West and deficient in governing capacity, ultimately pushed socialist order into the abyss — or rather, the system had, from the very moment of its birth, planted every seed that would eventually devour it from within. The force propelling its final, unavoidable destruction was the failure and inaction of successive leaders. The most ironic aspect is that the voice that truly proclaimed its complete dissolution emerged precisely from the tide of reform.

Beginning in 1985, the collapse of order spread from its still seemingly powerful heart, through countless networks of vessels, to every corner of its periphery.

László Krasznahorkai:

In 1985, two writers from socialist camps made their debuts; each exerted a revolutionary influence on their respective countries. One was Can Xue, the other was Krasznahorkai. The two are alike in many respects: both are representatives who resisted official literary narratives, both achieved unprecedented fame in the mid-1980s. The difference lies in Krasznahorkai's intellectualism — then as now, his writing possesses a philosophical depth, penetrating to the very pulse of human existence, that other serious literature finds difficult to match. His first two novels plus a collection of short stories convey, in my view, roughly the following idea: in a chaotic era in which all political orders, and even the anthropocentric narrative sustained for thousands of years, are moving toward dissolution, we must retreat into a personal resistance — a search and exploration of pure vital passion. At the same time, the present, surrounded by endless consciousness and reflection, seemingly frozen forever, is by no means the origin of individual spiritual regression. On the contrary, the momentary vacuum of order does not signify eternity; it will inevitably be reconstructed, inevitably enter the next life cycle fated to be oriented toward destruction.

The End of Craft: Text and Analysis

(1) The Story: Two short stories collected in The Relations of Grace — Hermann, the Gamekeeper and The End of Craft — narrate the same story from two perspectives and two timeframes.

The former's content: Hermann is an experienced hunter, a veritable master of traps. He takes pride in this, yet feels a bitter sorrow at the thought that this craft will ultimately be lost to the world. Hired to guard a hunting reserve, tasked with clearing away "noxious animals" such as wild cats and dogs, he soon completes the task with practised ease — only to be struck by a sudden realization: his killing was not, as he had previously believed, a necessary part of professional honour, but a disregard for life. At the same time, (like protagonists in Krasznahorkai's other novels) he perceives that the binary concepts of good and evil that had accompanied him through most of his life no longer function. There is no distinction between "noxious animals" and "useful animals"; human beings and livestock exist equally upon the earth from the beginning. The harm and judgment inflicted upon the Other, legitimized in the name of a god of nothingness, is itself injustice. What he must do, in this vacuum of order, is reconstruct his own inner primitive value system, using the dying craft of trapping as his intermediary to avenge these animals stripped of all dignity. In light of Mishima's practice-oriented ideas discussed above, it is not difficult to see that Hermann here plays precisely the role of the martyr in Mishima's imagination. But unlike Isao Hayashi in Runaway Horse, the right-wing youth who nobly organizes an assassination squad, Hermann's mode of resistance is utterly laughable, utterly senseless. First he roams the city in the middle of the night, piling animal corpses at every doorway, then he sets traps to injure innocent townsfolk. When he shortly thereafter recognizes the futility of this attempt to establish a new order, death has already arrived unnoticed: the citizens form armed squads, penetrating the forest to capture Hermann, only to reflexively shoot and kill, in a sudden fright, this old man who had never harmed a single soul. The ancient craft of trapping and the classical spirit of martyrdom thus come to their end — proven, in the final analysis, to be worthless.

A group of depraved outsiders, travelling together with the citizens, witness this absurd event and arrive at their own epiphany, which constitutes the content of the story The End of Craft:

These are a group of perverted young men, idle all day long, shuttling through the corners of the city, indulging in mad debauchery at night. What brings them to this forgotten little city where Hermann resides is the news that one member's mother is nearing her death. The original text's description — "she was feeling an extraordinary agitation at the prospect of seeing and touching that bed — that bed was the source and embodiment of the symbolic seductive power deep within her soul; she was born in this bed, and her mother would now die in it" — lays bare, with concise clarity, their mode of resistance: a self-moving force achieved through indulgence, depravity, and inaction, producing instantaneous destruction. Like Hermann, they too can be seen as a deconstruction and distortion (though by no means a mockery) of Mishima's thought. But what deserves more attention is the fundamental difference between these youths and Hermann in their modes of resistance, and the ways in which they complement each other. The reason Krasznahorkai, in my view, divides this single story into two short stories is to produce the following effect: he takes the latter two elements of Mishima's tripartite aesthetic — spirit and practice — and separates them, assigning them to two opposing yet interpenetrating sets of characters, so that the two modes of resistance explored throughout his work — refusing to flee from the absurdity of life, establishing a static and eternal new order through violence; defying reality and conjuring the distant, achieving hedonistic destruction through depravity and the desecration of the irretrievable old order — enter into mutual confrontation. This confrontation is one-sided, metaphysical, for it is those stagnant souls yearning for the restoration of the old order who pass sentence on Hermann — not the pleasure-seeking youths. It has no victor and yields no result.

(2) Conclusion: Analyzing the Three Dimensions of the "Anti-Mishima":

  1. On the level of prose: Mishima's classicalist shell is replaced by airless, unrelenting long sentences that constantly interrogate, constantly break through — like a scalpel, cutting straight into the interior of a pair of opposing figures.

  2. On the level of narrative: Hermann's fruitless demise and the youths' purposeless existence both point to the naivety and meaninglessness of Mishima's practice — is this not a dialogue between the 1980s and the 1960s, between the postmodern and the classical? Just as Masahiko Aneha, opposing Mishima's conception of history during the Tokyo University debate, proposed: history and art are spaces called possibility, are freedom, are spaces where subject and discourse contend with each other — this is the true value and meaning of what is called a liberated zone.

  3. On the metaphysical-theoretical level: Mishima's monistic aesthetic is torn into two halves that attack each other — this has already been elaborated above.