Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima

First published:Taiyo to tetsu, 1968 (English translation, 1970)

Type of work: Essays

Principal Personage:

• Yukio Mishima, a brilliant Japanese author and playwright

Form and Content

On November 25, 1970, Yukio Mishima, a brilliant author of more than forty novels, short-story collections, plays, and essays, committed suicide after leading a group of his private army, the Tatenokai (shield society), into the office of a general in the Japanese Self-Defense forces in Tokyo and holding the officer hostage while he tried to rally the troops to cast off their role as a merely defensive force and honor the emperor by returning to the ancient Japanese traditions of the warrior. Mishima knew that the attempt to rouse the army was doomed and had already planned his death as a penance for having led a failed coup. He killed himself by seppuku, ritual disembowelment. (Hara-kiri, the term for this method of death which is more commonly used in the West, literally means “belly cut.”) In the final act of seppuku, Mishima was beheaded by his best friend in the Tatenokai, who was then killed in the same fashion. Not only the literary world but also the global community was stunned by what seemed an insane act that ended a prolific artistic career.

Although the manner of Mishima’s death was shocking, his suicide at the age of forty-five would not have surprised a careful reader of his works. Only two years before his death, Mishima had published Sun and Steel, in which he outlined his views on death as the ultimate tragic experience and the perfect fulfillment of the life of the warrior and the artist.

Sun and Steel consists of three parts: a long essay in which Mishima relates the story of his life from the standpoint of his intellectual, spiritual, and physical development; a shorter essay, “Epilogue—F104,” in which he describes a ride in a jet fighter; and a short poem, “Icarus.” In the long essay, Mishima describes how the growth of his mind and spirit was essentially backward; most people enter a world which they experience primarily in a physical way and then progress to the world of perception, thought, ideas, and words. Mishima, a bookish child who was overly protected by a domineering grandmother, began life by regarding words as primary and realizing only in late adolescence the importance of the body in the training of the total person. In his adulthood, he began a program of bodybuilding to which the title of the work refers—the sun on one’s skin when exercising in the open air and the steel of the weights and swordplay used in developing muscles.

As his body becomes more finely tuned, Mishima discovers that too much emphasis on words have caused him to cloud reality with ideas. He rediscovers a language of the body and learns that to be truly alive is to experience the pain and suffering which is the mark of tragedy. Moreover, Mishima believes that the ultimate experience of pain and suffering is death. Thus, Mishima’s physical and spiritual education leads him to the conclusion that a sound mind must be housed in a sound body, uniting the roles of intellectual and warrior, and that an early death in the full flower of both physical and mental vigor is desirable.

Critical Context

Mishima’s revolt and suicide mimicked one of the most famous events of Japanese history, the Ni Ni Roku incident of February 26, 1936, in which army officers tried to force the emperor into a militaristic position by occupying parts of Tokyo. Their revolt was crushed, but Mishima wrote a laudatory short story, “Yukoku” (“Patriotism”), about an officer who, although not actually part of the revolt, favored its objectives. He knows that he will be asked to lead an attack against his comrades and chooses seppuku as an honorable way out of his dilemma. His wife, a bride of only a few months, stabs herself. The couple make love before their suicides, so the story is an intense blend of eroticism and violence. Mishima also played the role of the officer in a film of the story that is so graphic that some members of the audience fainted.

The theme of tragic fulfillment through violent death which is the central idea of Sun and Steel appears frequently in Mishima’s fiction, often coupled with an act of revolt like the attempted coup which triggered his suicide. Another of Mishima’s works based, like “Patriotism,” on an actual incident is the novel Kinkakuji (1956; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1959), in which a Zen Buddhist student burns down a sacred temple. In Homba (1969; Runaway Horses, 1973), the protagonist commits seppuku. Yukio Mishima wrote works which scintillate with many ideas and emotions leading to a multiplicity of interpretations. It is therefore too much to say that Sun and Steel provides the answers to the meaning of his life’s work, but it certainly does supply the key to the meaning of his death.

Bibliography

Keene, Donald. “Yukio Mishima,” in Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, 1984.

Lebra, Joyce C. “Mishima’s Last Act,” in Literature East and West. XV, no. 2 (1971), pp. 279-298.

Nathan, John. Mishima: A Biography, 1974.

Scott-Stokes, Henry. The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, 1974.

Spurling, John. “Death in Hero’s Costume: The Meaning of Mishima,” in Encounter. XLIV (May, 1975), pp. 56-64.

Ueda, Makoto. “Yukio Mishima,” in Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, 1976.

Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. “Mishima Yukio and His Suicide,” in Modern Asian Studies. VI (January, 1972), pp. 1-16.

Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. “A Phantasy World: Mishima Yukio,” in The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature, 1978.