Yukio Mishima, realist and myth-maker

The catalogue of twentieth-century writers who committed suicide is long and sad: Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and Sarah Kane, Stefan Zweig and Marina Tsvetaeva, to name only a few. Yet even amid this litany of literary misery, one name stands out for being perhaps more famous for their death than their work: Yukio Mishima (1925-70), who attempted a military coup before performing ritual suicide — hara-kiri — in the immediate aftermath of its failure. His long-planned, stage-managed, ostentatious and disturbing demise is not unconnected to his work, but it has dominated discussion of the writer ever since, significantly overshadowing his achievements — which were considerable, and led to his nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times in the 1960s. (His friend and rival Yasunari Kawabata would win in 1968, the first Japanese to do so.)

A self-conscious heir to the subtle, ambiguous beauty of Japanese language and literature, Mishima’s work is also a sophisticated fusion of national traditions with external innovations. The vocabulary can have a ferocious sumptuousness, a lavishness and sensuality which both seduces and repels; Mishima’s images, aphorisms and metaphors startle, agitate and excite, remaining for hours in the reader’s imagination.

His plots are frequently alarming, populated by peculiar and alienated outsiders — recluses such as the arsonist monk of 1956’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion or the eponymous mariner of 1963’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, whose narratives shatter modern taboos via a disconcerting synthesis of themes, challenging our complacency. Mishima is both a realist, portraying human life with honesty and candor, and a myth-maker, able to romanticize past and present with a beguiling eloquence and troubling emotional power.

Born a century ago this month, he was a complex, contradictory figure: a hypocrite, self-publicist, impostor, clown, contrarian — and literary genius. The quality of his work matched its quantity: more than thirty novels, fifty plays, poems, lyrics, dozens of books of essays, a libretto and a screenplay. The Japanese edition of his complete works runs to more than forty fat volumes. There was also a profusion of short stories, nearly 200 of them, of which this new collection from Penguin Classics takes fourteen from the last decade of Mishima’s life, wonderfully realized in English by nine different translators, including his biographer John Nathan.

Like Mishima’s other work in the 1960s — which included both the gratifyingly bizarre science fiction satire Beautiful Star (1962) and the vast, mythic-historical tetralogy The Sea of Fertility (1969-71) — they cover a huge array of genres, patterns, themes, characters, moods and situations. “Cars” (1963) takes the dreary, unpromising location of a driving-test center and twists it into an unnerving tale of voyeurism and manipulation, its hyper-realism constantly suggestive. “Companions” (1966), traveling into the supernatural, is a brief, unsettling, neo-Dickensian story with eerie echoes of Henry James, in which Mishima’s murky comic touch is menacing, monstrous and surreal. “From the Wilderness” (1966) presents a factual incident from the author’s own life (a break-in by an unhinged fan) in unusually sparse prose, the very frugality of the language inviting the reader to quiz and question the truth/reality of the occurrence and thence its multiple meanings.

Each one of the stories merits its inclusion in this collection, but two in particular stand out as masterpieces. “The Flower Hat” (1962) is a miracle of compressed tension and potent socio-political discourse: a figure sitting on a bench in a San Francisco park has a hallucination of nuclear apocalypse. All the scene’s details — the crystal-clear late-summer sunlight, a mother knitting, a man with a cane — are superbly, delicately captured in impeccable prose in order to be frozen forever by the cataclysm. It feels less like a work of fiction than a savagely beautiful diary entry, advancing Mishima’s meditation on living under the relentless promise of collective annihilation via the eternal folly of ephemeral politicians.

But it is perhaps the title story, 1966’s “Voices of the Fallen Heroes,” by far the longest of the collection, which presents Mishima’s art at its most mesmerizing, complex and formidable. A requiem for the war dead and a short story full of exquisite imagery, it is presented as a séance where the spirits of Japanese soldiers reproach the emperor. The narrative, like so much of Mishima’s work, is an encounter with time, myth and violence, an engagement with history: evading it, reworking it, rewriting it, displaying the freedom, potential and impertinence of fiction.

It is also a devastating statement about youthful sacrifice, about both national and personal loss, an exploration of the outrageous, misguided recklessness of war and Japan’s difficulty in coming to terms with its past. It was something Mishima himself never did, solving the problem only with his own self-eradication.