๐Ÿค– 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.

๐Ÿ“ Article Type: Book Review

The Biography of Yukio Mishima: For the voyeur, make yourself at home; for the researcher, proceed with caution.

"...my thesis, it would appear, still stands."

Upon first reading this book, one encounters the author's various reflections, years later in a preface, on this representative work of his. We find that his focus is less on Yukio Mishima as a human being than on modern Japanese society's struggle between foreign culture and native tradition. Having read the entire book, we become increasingly aware of a fact: neither the sardonic young author who wrote this book, nor the middle-aged author he became โ€” aged more than twice over โ€” ever truly cared about Yukio Mishima as the subject of his life's experience. The former took such pains to emphasize Mishima's pathology, while the latter was so indifferent as to turn Mishima into a hollow "representative of his era's maladies," so that his only mode of existence became a crossword puzzle of biographical anecdotes and Japanese chronicles. At one point: "During the Pacific War, the young Mishima felt a sense of excitement and fulfillment"; at another: "In the 1950s, Mishima's method of coping with existential crisis was to buy a wardrobe full of gaudy clothes." It might seem absurd to gauge the author's attitude toward Mishima throughout the work from the brief preface he later wrote to introduce the book to readers โ€” yet the fact is that we can see no difference between this dry, changeable, and all-but-incomprehensible Mishima displayed in fewer than two thousand characters of preface, and the Mishima attempted across more than two hundred and eighty pages of biography โ€” though pathological, volatile, and adept at disguise, ultimately rendered thin and pale by the author's creation of a single sexual/aesthetic impulse to explain a human life โ€” on the point of being "anything but human." The simple theory, gauged by whether it "still stands," was originally intended to help readers better understand the many contradictions in Mishima, yet โ€” like the fervent interpreter absorbed in the self-sufficiency of his own theory, as Susan Sontag described โ€” it ultimately destroys the precious cipher through the compulsion to decode.

Mishima is placed under continuous trial before a court of purportedly profound psychological analysis, and through the carefully orchestrated cross-examination of witnesses, he gradually becomes, in the eyes of the world, a pervert and a madman. Having already worn forever the mask of the perpetrator through his absurd act of violence, he simultaneously becomes the victim of this peculiar judicial system โ€” which is the narrative method of biography. Its violence lies in its failure to find the balance between the contouring and the substance of a portrait. In the particular case of this book, merely altering the order of presentation of select historical materials and the narrative method, with the aim of leaving sufficient gaps for the reader's own reflection, would have been enough to restore that balance.

The author has always sought to place Yukio Mishima in this repulsive position through his depictions of Mishima's various abnormalities and through the many barbs of his narrative irony. He simply could not accept that a man like Yukio Mishima โ€” a man of many unconventional traits and even psychological difficulties โ€” might possess a mind worthy of being regarded as an equal. He took such pains to emphasize Mishima's pathology that his existence as a human being was entirely eclipsed: yes, like many other quality biographies, this book contains detailed historical materials, but the center around which they are organized serves either merely narrative coherence or merely the role of material confirming the author's thesis. Within the book's architecture, there are few gaps in which we might examine Yukio Mishima himself. For many readers motivated solely by mere curiosity, these gaps signify only "tedious verbosity," but for those readers who genuinely understand the complexity of figures like Yukio Mishima โ€” figures who have exerted enormous influence โ€” and the deliberation with which they ought to be approached, such gaps constitute a spiritual summons. These suspended complexes of historical material, and the nearly invisible fragments even more easily overlooked, are precisely the windows through which we touch the actual existence of history via the actual existence of a person. Moreover, their very structure of existence is sufficient to illustrate many of the biographer's attitudes, rendering excessive narrative intervention superfluous.