Paul Schrader
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

“A natural disposition, even if withered, much like my entire life that is dwindling, remains well-rooted in me: it is the inclination, which was particularly vivid in my childhood and adolescence, not to fear spending the hours of the day daydreaming” from The Story of a Promontory, a youthful tale by Mishima Yukio, published in 1946, at barely twenty years old. And in these few words, which open one of his most beautiful stories, though not among the best known, much can already be understood about the personality of this man. The fundamental role of imagination since childhood, the very lyrical way of reflecting on one's youth, the awareness of death.

In 1970, at the age of 45, Mishima committed Seppuku, the ritual suicide of the Samurai, as the epilogue - prepared and studied in detail - of the last, symbolic and macabre performance of a tormented and complex life, emblematic of one of the most complex and controversial figures of the entire Twentieth century. Moreover, the love for theatrical art and theatrics was central throughout his journey.

Fifteen years later, in 1985, Schrader, a filmmaker who had already been well-established first as a writer and then as a director of great cult films of the era, created, he being American, this film entirely shot in Japanese. A film that, fully aware of how extreme and complex the human and artistic story of the most famous and debated Japanese writer ever was, certainly does not claim to be exhaustive on this matter, nor is this Schrader's goal, a screenwriter here alongside his brother.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is indeed not a biopic, but an attempt, by providing parts of the memoir left before his death, to restore, through a visionary and extraordinary cinematic experience that is unforgettable, and where Schrader's Western fascination always shines through, the essence of the poetics, the art, the vision and, yes, also the author's and the man's Mishima sensations. Here, throughout the film, that love of Mishima for theater and for the transformation of reality will always recur, also stylistically in the various representations.

A performance in four chapters, each through the conception and representation of a fundamental phase of Mishima's thought and art.

Youth, the torment for the lost soul of a nation, memories, traumas, the culture of the body - which also demonstrates a sign of continuity with American Gigolo by the same Schrader. The creative process of writing, seen as a voyeuristic act, homosexuality, are all fundamental themes, issues touched upon, never left aside; but above all, what is the core, the focal point of Mishima's search: beauty.

It’s the beauty that hurts you most.

Mishima, from an early age, grew accustomed to being considered fragile, small for his age (even as an adult he remained very small), in the hatred towards himself and his own image. His work is a continuous search for a beauty he lives as a myth and as a poison, as a prison, and this already returns in the representation of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, the first of three works that Schrader imagines as transposed into images and sounds (when, curiously, none of Mishima's novels have ever been cinematographically transposed) and that he realizes within this work. Thinking about it, it's the same thing that Abel Ferrara will later do in his recent, and underrated, Pasolini: uniting the last moments of the man and the artist with hypotheses of visual transpositions of the words of the two great writers.

In all these, the central points of Mishima's thought and poetics emerge, but more than anything else precisely this: beauty and death. Which finally become an indivisible subject but find the ultimate completion in the artistic act.

“From the moment you start to live, you gradually start to produce art. My case is reversed. I feel I began to live when I started to produce art” (“Spiritual Lessons for Young Samurai”, 1968)

If the human body at the peak of its beauty is already a work of art, art is the only possible means capable of preserving that beauty from the inevitable physical decay of time.

“Human life is brief, but I would like to live forever”. he used to say.

In art, everything can live and resonate eternally, something a person can never achieve.

But not only that: for Mishima, art, action, death, the pursuit of beauty (“Men wear masks to make themselves beautiful. But contrary to that of women, a man's determination to become beautiful is always a desire for death”) are connected by the same impulse. There comes a certain point when words are no longer enough to describe that own “multiform accumulation” no longer expressible in the objective form of the novel.

Mishima was always obsessed with the idea of death, the “pure death”, a death that cannot be such once the body decays as a result of the inevitable aging process of the flesh, once the decay of the angel occurs, to quote the final chapter of the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, as well as his last novel before his suicide. Mishima who also staged his own death, before the real tragic ending, even in fiction: in his only work as a director, the experimental medium-length Yukoku (Patriotism: The Rite of Love and Death), inspired by one of his own short stories, and which offers Schrader the opportunity to stage even a little moment of absolutely suggestive and significant metacinema, seen, with hindsight, how things ended in reality.

But art is also the shadow, always reflecting the unconscious and the dream of noble passions and heroic acts, the ever-present dark reflection that, however, at some point is no longer enough, and that is when thought and action must become one. That is when the harmony of pen and sword can manifest.

If only for a single moment. The harmony of pen and sword is what the artist Mishima, intellectual, man, paramilitary, symbol, patriot, pursued throughout his life, because if "words are a deception, action is never so". When physical beauty and the beauty of one's art become the same thing, at the same moment, that's when one can become a kamikaze of beauty, dying at the moment of splendor. The “pure death”, indeed, when, in that mix of extreme passions, idealism, and madness, the quest for the union of art and action materialized to the point of annihilation of self, art and action themselves, flesh and spirit, sexuality, and memory, the pen and the sword. As if being at altitude, above 25,000 feet. And like in that last performance where imagination, that same imagination that Mishima always sang about since young, as in the initial quote, is no longer needed, as for one last, dramatic and spectacular moment pen and sword can finally harmonize for the final act. Flesh and intellect are now no longer separate.

And finally, the circle closes, bringing to completion everything that had previously been left suspended:

"At the moment the blade slit his flesh, the shining disk of the sun rose from behind his eyelids and exploded, illuminating the sky for an instant"

Just an instant, a moment, before darkness. But it was in that instant that beauty reached its peak and then immediately went out.

The moral decay brought by capitalism and the progressive crumbling of Tradition, against which Mishima made a desperate appeal in his last proclamation, was not halted, despite the clamor of the act and the devotion of his followers, and Japan was not purified, but Mishima Yukio, born Hiraoka Kimitake, is a giant of culture whose legacy still endures today. His friend, mentor, and maestro Kawabata Yasunari was struck and shocked by the gesture and died by suicide two years later. Henry Miller, in his historic Reflections on the Death of Mishima, said:

“Somewhere, reading Mishima, I came across the phrase: “A pyrotechnic explosion: death”. Opposed to it we have another type of explosion: the satori. The difference between them is like night and day, between ignorance and enlightenment, between sleep and wakefulness. Despite everything Mishima said about death, despite the fact that from the age of eighteen he nurtured a romantic desire for self-annihilation, Mishima believed in the fullness of living, of being alive in every cell, every pore. Being fully aware, waking up from the deep sleep into which we have sunk”

Mishima was a man of passions and ideals, contradictions and torments. Clinging to life but desiring a heroic and pure death. A defender of values tied to a Tradition of a Japan that already no longer existed but who lived in a house in a purely Western style. Like all great personalities, his was authentic complexity that lived in nuances, but always tied to the utopia of unreachable purity in the modern world.

“There is a defeat equal to being corroded

That I did not choose but it is of the era in which I live

Death is unbearable for those who cannot live

Death is unbearable for those who must not live”

I think there is no better way to conclude than with the above words from Miller and those of Ferretti.

Curiosity: besides CCCP, even Massimo Volume paid tribute to Mishima, albeit indirectly, dedicating a song, Better than a Mirror, one of the group's most beautiful, precisely to this Schrader film.

Schrader who shoots with a beauty of style, where high pictorial references are not lacking, which perhaps has rarely been touched at these levels, as in the recent First Reformed.

On Mishima, I also point out 11/25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate by Wakamatsu Koji, among the last works of the great Japanese director before his passing. Not comparable to Schrader's film, but equally worth seeing.