Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) Spine #432

While Paul Schrader was a well-established screenwriter [The Yakuza (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Obsession (1976), Rolling Thunder (1977), Raging Bull (1980)]  and director [Blue Collar (1978), Hardcore (1979), American Gigolo (1980), Cat People (1982)], he had a hard time getting funding together to make and then distribute Mishima:  A Life in Four Chapters (1985).  Toho, who had put up about 2 million dollars, was pressured by not only right wing groups that were furious that a gaijin was making a movie about Mishima, but also his widow, Yoko, who did not want two scenes showing Mishima’s homosexuality in the film.  I don’t know if he approached Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas or if it was the other way around, but Coppola and Lucas gave him the money to finish the film (or at least had enough clout to get Warner Brothers to give him the money), expressing that they never expected to make the money back.  They just felt that the work itself merited being finished.  Toho, having put up half of the money for this film, disavowed any involvement.  The film has never been shown in Japan.

This is one of the best films ever made (if you haven’t read my entry yet for Patriotism, go do so now).  I lean towards it not only for its focus on a favored author of mine, but on just how ambitious a project it was.  In my Film and Literature class, the goal is to explore all aspects of adapting a work into a film.  However, our last unit has a dual purpose.  One is to look at biopics of authors’ lives to see how faithful a film portrays the author (this requires biographical research of the author).  The other is to look at how authors involve themselves in adaptations of their own works, from screenwriting (like Bret Easton Ellis writing the screenplay adaptation to The Informers) to directing (like Tom Stoppard directing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) to acting (Stan Lee’s multiple cameos in his superhero graphic novel adaptations) to producing (JK Rowling producing the last two installments of Harry Potter).  How does the authors’ involvement in the adaptations affect the adaptation (and to what degree)?  I feel I hold the ace in both cases.  When it came to adapting Patriotism, Mishima wrote the screenplay, was lead actor, chose the actress, storyboarded the shots, designed the set, chose the music (his own record copy of Tristan und Isolde), chose costumes, and directed.  The only thing he didn’t do was act the female lead, cinematography and post-production.  Who is more controlling than that?  No, really – if you can think of someone else, PLEASE POST A COMMENT.  I want to know.

But the most beautiful trump card to play for the unit is M:ALiFC.  Because it is not just a biopic.  It adapts FOUR OTHER WORKS FROM MISHIMA, along with the biographical information.  For an adaptation class, the work alone is mind-blowing, but then to be a biopic on top of that?  Now I will admit, since the film is only 120 minutes, we do not get a full-blown adaptation of any of the works, but Schrader pares down each work to its essence.  And we can relate that work back to Mishima’s life in a tangible way by the subheadings Schrader uses (“Beauty,” “Art,” “Action,” “Harmony of Pen and Sword”).

For “Beauty,” the adaptation is The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (my personal favorite).  Eiko Ishioka, the production designer, had a color scheme for each of the three adaptations.  This one is gold (an obvious choice) and green.  But what is so fascinating about the design is that, even though they did not have a lot of money to make this film, instead of trying to make elaborate sets, they enlisted stagecraft for sets.  Ishioka creates a small version of the Golden Pavilion, has a gold, wooden walkway, a bamboo forest off the path, constructs a sort of shouji box for the Superior’s room (him playing Go alone).  The adaptation focuses on a lot of the key points of the novel:  Mizoguchi being befriended by Kashiwagi, Kashiwagi setting Mizoguchi up for his first sexual experience (which fails as the temple looms large – the way they arrange this in the film is curious but I believe works well ultimately), Mizoguchi being chastised by the Superior for falling behind in his studies, Mizoguchi telling Kashiwagi that beauty is now his enemy and his wish to destroy the temple, Mizoguchi finding out that the war with America has ended, so the bombers won’t be coming, Mizoguchi’s visit to the whorehouse where he tells the prostitute, after finally performing, to remember him, as he will be famous, and the setting up and lighting the bundles of straw at the base of the pavilion.  This is all executed quite effectively, beautifully, in a rather short space.  Because Schrader intersperses parts about Mishima’s life inside the adaptations (or vice versa, if you prefer), “Beauty” also covers Mishima’s childhood (again, if you didn’t read my comments on Patriotism, go back and do so), adolescence, and being disqualified for military service.  That’s a lot of ground to cover on top of the adaptation.  And Schrader does so.  And it works.  And it’s gorgeous.

The second section, “Art,” goes into Mishima’s emergence as a writer.  It also has those two scenes of his homosexuality that Yoko would not allow.  The book that Schrader wanted to use for this section was Forbidden Colors, which was overtly homosexual.  That was the only book Yoko would not let Schrader use.  However, Schrader gets around this because he uses (throughout the film) parts of Mishima’s non-fiction work Sun and Steel, but more for its discussion of his travels and his awakening of the body.  The St. Sebastian stuff in “Beauty” is more from Confessions of a Mask (which is mostly autobiographical).  Schrader also uses information from the BBC documentary The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima to fill in the conversation Mishima had with Akihiro Maruyama (one of Mishima’s lovers) about his slight build.  What Schrader does use in place of Forbidden Colors is a curious work, Kyoko’s House, which was never translated into English (and I have therefore never read it).  It deals with four characters that are friends and meet occasionally.  One’s a boxer, one’s an artist, one’s an actor, one’s a businessman.  We get to see three of them (sans businessman) meet for noodles at a cart during an interestingly constructed scene where the cart (bright pink, one of the two colors in this adaptation, the other being gray), spins clockwise as the crowd encircles the cart counterclockwise, giving the impression of a busy street.  Again, this is so theatrical in its execution, but fresh and creative rather than looking cheap.  Who Schrader focuses on in this section of the film is the actor, Osamu.  Osamu is very much taken with himself and appears bored with the world.  His mother owns a dessert shop and is heavily in debt to Kiyomi Akita, a loan shark.  His mother is hassled by hoods, so Osamu goes to see Kiyomi on his mother’s bidding.  Kiyomi “buys” Osamu and cancels his mother’s loan.  Over a period of time, they have sex, and she beats him and cuts him.  Eventually, she kills him and drinks poison, committing suicide.  The noodle cart inclusion is interesting, as the friends discuss what art is.  They note the human body is high art, but the artist maintains that you have to capture it in some way (painting, sculpture, etc) in order to preserve its beauty, while the boxer feels it is all about building the body to its peak.  The actor takes up bodybuilding, but once Kiyomi starts to ruin his body with scars and bruises, he no longer goes to the gym, a combination of how ugly and scarified his body has become and that he sees no further use in self-preservation when his world seems to be headed towards destruction.  It is very reminiscent of Fight Club in that sense.  What is beauty?  What is art?  What does it mean to be a man?  All questions Mishima was interested in investigating.

Part 3 is “Action,” which follows Mishima into his last years where he forms his private army and advocates a very rightist agenda (he said at one time it was because the leftist movement was full).  This is paired quite effectively with Runaway Horses, which is the second book in his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, where he charts what he believed to be the descent of Japan as a nation from 1912 to 1975.  The day Mishima finished it and sent it off to his publisher was November 25, 1970, the day he and four members of the Tatenokai took a general hostage at a JSDF base, Mishima addressed the troops, then committed seppuku.  We see parts of this day throughout the film, and the film culminates, quite powerfully, in the resolution of all three of the adaptations:  the Golden Pavilion burns down as Mizoguchi escapes, Kiyomi and Osuma lie dead near each other, and Isao commits suicide in the light of the rising sun, which is the finishing image of the film.  Part 4, “Harmony of Pen and Sword,” finishes the story of the events leading up to Mishima and his group’s arrival at the JSDF base.  To go back to Runaway Horses, I feel that this is the most ambitious part of the movie visually for three specific scenes:  the meeting at the shrine where Isao tells everyone the plot is off, the secret meeting where the walls drop away and police pour in and the jail scene (I saw a production of the Washington Opera’s Fidelio with very similar staging that used television screens behind bars like the way the bars were set up in this film). Ishioka’s colors for this adaptation were black and orange (“shu, a particular hue of orange used in temples” notes Kevin Jackson in his article).  When the walls drop away, I always jump.

There are two things I do not like about this film, even though it’s damn near perfect.  One is Ogata’s acting when he addresses the assembled troops at the JSDF base.  He seems a raving thing, shaking, crying.  That was not the case when Mishima addressed the troops.  He looked calm and collected, not someone about ready to cause his own death.  It is unfaithful to portray Mishima like that, because it makes him look desperate and crazy.  The second thing is the music.  Ok, I get everyone loves Philip Glass, and the score he did for The Hours I felt was quite good (and that movie comes close to how ambitious this movie is with its different parts, emphasis on author and adaptation of literature).  But the score for this film beats you over the head relentlessly with the arpeggios and ding-dong bells.  I like the snares for the trip to the JSDF base, but the rest is too invasive.

Schrader himself says, “In many ways, I was out there directing a film that was financed by no one that was going to be seen by no one.”  He was drawn to Mishima because he was looking for another subject a la Travis Bickle who craved suicidal glory.  What results is one of the most gorgeous, sensitive, caring biopics and adaptations I’ve ever seen.  When Schrader and Ellis started their Kickstarter program for The Canyons and one of the levels was for a personal phone call from either one, I was torn about which one I would choose (and I don’t have the money for it anyways, so whatever), but it would be Schrader.  He’s already answered the question of why he chose to make this, but I still would like to hear it once more, because it seems so much like art for art’s sake.

Patriotism (Yûkoku) (1966) Spine #433

Of course this blog is biased to my preferences, and my commentary is rife with my opinions on the films.  However, the next two subjects will take subjectivity to a level that will be difficult to duplicate because of the focus of both films.  The love I bear Yukio Mishima is intensely strong.

It is a fairly recent development.  He wasn’t someone I studied while I was an English major.  I came across him, quite by accident, when I was in Japan in 2007.  I was in a multi-level gift shop that was the midpoint part of a package tour of Kyoto I was on.  I was in the book section, which had a small English-language area, and the cover of The Sound of the Waves caught my eye.  I hadn’t packed enough reading material (I was backpacking, so space was a prime commodity), and the novel was slim, so I bought it.  The story was a romance.  A boy, Shinji, who is taking care of his mother and brother because his father died as a result of American bombings in WWII, falls in love with a girl, Hatsue, who is the adopted daughter of a wealthy ship owner.  Their love runs into complications, as Hatsue’s suitor will also be adopted by her father and inherit his shipping business, so every bachelor on the island is after Hatsue.  Through proof of Shinji’s bravery and loyalty, he wins Hatsue.  The story was quite sweet and innocent.  In a word, it was nice.  I liked how Mishima’s diction created atmosphere and tone through detail, though I full well know the pitfalls associated with translations.  I had the book read before I left Japan.  When I got back, I began to seek out more.

I had no idea that the first book I chose to read by Mishima was the most uncharacteristic of his works, almost all of which deal with sex and love and betrayal and beauty and death.  The one I got next was because I had actually visited The Golden Pavilion when I was in Kyoto, so I was happy to see he had a book on it.  This was more like the actual Mishima that I would grow to know.  It was full of flawed characters and dubious situations.  I couldn’t figure out how someone could create two totally dissonant works.  More would follow:  Forbidden Colors, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Spring Snow, Thirst for Love.  I now have all of his translated works, including his plays like My Friend Hitler.

To try to engage how amazing and un-Japanese like Mishima was, yet marry that with his reverence of the traditions that the Japanese hold so dear, would take at least a book.  And indeed, Jonathan Nathan’s biography does an excellent job.  When trying to relate Mishima to my students, I made an on-the-fly comparison to Lego blocks.   They all have their own distinct features.  Yet each part, being separate, comes together to form Mishima.  I had that metaphor shot to hell when Kim noted, “but Legos can make a lot of different things.  They don’t have to assemble one thing.”  That’s very true, but I will continue, as Mishima did, futilely forward with my own concept.

One block must represent his childhood, which was twisted and lonely.  Snatched away from his mother when he was fifty days old, his grandmother dominated his young life until he was 12.  His mother was powerless to get him back, essentially a maid in a large house ruled by the matriarch, and a father that would never challenge his own mother.  His grandmother, Natsu, not allowing him to play outside, to only play inside with female cousins, not allowed to make a sound, feeble and weak, prone to illness, his growth stunted.  The only positive trait imbued in him was the love of literature and theater, Noh and Kabuki, which the aristocratic Natsu would take him to when her sciatic body would permit.

Another block, his father Azusa Hiraoka, for how he would not intervene in his own household, allowing his son to be dominated by his mother, until the age of 12 when they reclaimed him.  His assertion was what a man is, and how Mishima was far from that.  How literature was “for girls.”  Mishima needed to be tough, rugged.  Where would he get this guidance from, with 12 years of his grandmother’s tyranny?  His father would try to wipe all traces of love of the arts from him, barging into his room and tearing to shreds any writing Mishima created, the boy looking on, crying.

A block for his young student days, bullied, frail, sickly, yet in love with literature.  He started to write.  Teachers were impressed.  But he was terrified his father would find out.  So his teachers helped him by giving him the pen name Yukio Mishima, so he could hide his passion from his father.

I don’t know how many blocks you give to history, from the Jomon era to Taishō.  No one had ever bested Japan.  No one.  Mongols had been driven back by typhoons.  European traders were relegated to appointed islands.  Commodore Perry’s Black Ships “forced” trade open with the world in the late 1800s, but no one invaded.  Japan westernized at a rapid rate post-1860.  Then came the Sino-Japanese Wars, the Russo-Japanese War, WWI.  They were always on the winning side (they beat the Russians, for crying out loud).

There is no such thing as World War II in Japan.  They call it the Great Pacific War.  Before the Great Pacific War, they were colonizing, much the same way European powers were chopping up Africa.  Japan is a very mountainous country, and they wanted to expand like so many other countries in the west in order to get resources.  That seemed to work for the politics of WWI, but in WWII, Japan had overstepped its boundaries.  Germany could relate to the need for Lebensraum.  But Britain and other nations occupying Eastern countries were uncomfortable.

I will acknowledge insomuch as Japanese expansion and need for oil and raw materials and whatever politics is involved in how Japan became involved against the United States in WWII.  I will acknowledge it, but not go further here.

But this is when Mishima came into adolescence.  He was born in 1925.  He was 17 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but soldiers were already being drafted previously (the Great Pacific War started much earlier than 1941).  However, he faked being tubercular.  He was returned to the factory he worked at, and like everyone else in the country, heard his God, the Emperor Hirohito, the Emperor Shōwa, broadcast the surrender of Japan over the radio on August 15, 1945.  For those of us in the west, we cannot even begin to imagine what that was like.  If you want to read a GREAT book on this, please read Embracing Defeat by John Dower, which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and is a mind-blowing work.

It is this climate that produces Mishima.  An overbearing grandmother that fed him on the proud samurai history of her family and Noh and Kabuki theater, the hard father trying to make a boy he knew was being raised unnaturally into a man, the cloud of the Great Pacific War, and the demise of the role of emperor as a god and the influx of American occupation from 1945 to 1954.  He was a sort of perfect tsunami of history, and because of his amazing personality, he managed to supersede all of this and create his own incredibly unique identity in a land where groupthink is the norm.

And his identity is a host of other blocks.  Author, actor, screenwriter, director, bodybuilder, student advocate, militarist.  There is really no legitimate way to unpack this here.  What saddens me most about Mishima is that people today do not pay attention to his literature.  They are so engulfed in what is fantastical (and there is plenty) about Mishima that they miss what is truly great about him.  To try to elaborate:  there are over 10,000 kanji in the Japanese language.  There are three main methods of communication in Japan:  hiragana, katakana, and kanji.  In the first two, they are akin to our alphabet, meaning symbols / characters create sounds.  Sounds create words.  However, in kanji, symbols create words.  Know how you hear the Eskimo have so many words for snow?  Kanji’s like that.  In schools today, kids only have to learn 2,000 kanji.  But again, there are over 10,000.  Mishima was so well-educated that he knew these. So that when he wrote something, not only every day regular people but critics were forced to seek out the meanings of these antiquated kanji.  Because Mishima cared, above all (I believe), that the precision of language was vital.  Language is a horrible stand-in for being able to express what we really feel and think, but unfortunately, that is what we must rely on.  Mishima understood this more, I think, than ANY author in the modernist era.  And do NOT mistake me – I love William Faulkner.  But I love Mishima more.

Mishima’s literature was very conventional in the beginning.  His first novel, Confessions of a Mask, was in keeping with normal practice of Japanese literature in that most authors spoke from personal experience and not constructions.  His first novel was wildly popular.  It discussed his childhood but also got into his homosexuality, which for him was sort of bold.  His first sexual experience was happening upon a picture of St. Sebastian, impaled with arrows (search Google).  Confessions is not to be taken lightly.  There was so much in him in this piece, but that was true of most Japanese authors and their works (especially their first works).  He wasn’t really breaking with tradition.

What was different was his second work, Thirst for Love.  It centered on an older, female protagonist.  Her husband has died, and she is sent to live with her in-laws who live in the country.  This was very much outside of Mishima’s experience.  I’m not going to spoil it, but there’s a murder involved.  But it was so uncharacteristic of other Japanese authors that it really showed Mishima as something quite different.

Mishima maintains that Patriotism is any reader’s way in to Mishima.  Having read most of his works, I disagree.  I know that’s brazen of me, but permit me.  Mishima’s best work is The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which is the second work I had the honor of meeting him.  It’s monumental not only for displaying Mishima’s style (precision of language) but his value system as well.

However, we are not here to talk of that.  We are here to talk of Yūkoku.  The story is of a lieutenant that has been kept from a conspiracy by his fellows because he has fallen in love (very unmilitaristic).  He had made a pact with his fellow brothers in arms that he swore allegiance to none but the Emperor, which means forsaking all others (women in particular).  But, he broke that pact and got married.  His comrades act without him, and he is caught in the onerous position of either siding with the Emperor (and punishing his friends) or with his friends (and disobeying the Emperor).

This story starts with something called the 2-2-6 Incident.  It started February 26, 1936 (hence 2-2-6).  The 2-2-6 Incident has to do with a number of officers that banded together because they did not like what was happening with the corruption of politicians and senior officers (attributed to the influence of the west and the dreaded capitalism inherent).  They wanted to present to the Emperor their list of demands (who needed to be arrested, who needed to have power, etc.).  There was an overall distrust by this group that the country understood the role of the divine power of the Emperor and the responsibility of his subjects to his will.

No one, of course, would know and understand this better than a military man, who had given his life, every bone of his body, to the Emperor.  Mishima was not a military man.  But you don’t understand how this hounded him.  However, since an awakening of his martial self (look up Tatenokai), he came to think that the position of the intellectual in society had been wrong.  He harkened, of all things, to Greek and Roman ideals of men who had both been strong mentally and physically.  He did not understand why it was that those given up of mental activity were so meek of body and why those so athletic were often painted as mentally inferior.  The Greeks and Romans didn’t have this issue.  They were amazing, mind and body.  Perhaps he should do so of himself. In his later years, 30s on, he devoted himself to working out and bodybuilding.  Quite frankly, he did a pretty decent job.  So much so that he flaunted his body and had it photographed in the mid to late 1960s (sometimes nude).  He wanted to join this notion of physical and mental superiority, and (in my estimation) he did so.

I really don’t know what to do here.  I know all about the production of this movie, and if you look at the Criterion extras and Jonathan Nathan’s book, as well as the production notes included in the Criterion disk, you’ll know what I do.  But will you appreciate, understand?

Completely unrelated, there was a speaker at UMCP on Mishima and scripting death, lecturing the same night we were to start our third unit on authors’ involvement in adaptations and biopics (which I use Mishima for, as I cannot conceive of anyone who fits the unit better).  I offered for my whole class to go and listen.  Admittedly, I dangled a pretty carrot, but almost all of the class showed.  After we came back from Thanksgiving, we did Yūkoku.  What was unfortunate was the class’s introduction to Mishima was all death, death, death.  I was so worried about this that I posted somewhat of an apology on Canvas, explaining Mishima was not just about death.  There was much more to him.

I don’t know if either they are incredibly indulgent people or really cared, but they seemed to care.  Josh noted “we don’t have authors anymore like this.”  He’s so right.  This is only fifty years ago.  But he’s right. How often are popular authors regarded for their insights or comments?  And even if so, who hears them?

William, sitting outside of class, saw me walking up, with Nathan’s book in my hand, and incredulously asked “So you really like this Mishima, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I think he was crazy.”

And that’s not an uncommon statement from people when they look at Mishima.  Lots of contradiction, incongruity and pain.  But above all of that, I see beauty, not only in his work, but in his vision.  Ultimately, while I think his adaptation was ambitious, I do not feel it captured the same emotionality of the short story.  The film is gruesome, even more so since what he does in the film he does to himself roughly four years later.  The love and death scenes are treated so warmly, passionately with his words that I don’t feel it comes through with his various shots of body parts and the blade drawing across his belly.  My class mostly disagrees, saying the images made the concepts more vivid.  But as the movie is silent, with scrolls acting as title cards, the piety of the will of the soldier and his wife, solid and steadfast in their roles, makes the same impact.

I’ve been working on this post and the Mishima content for my class for over a month.  My fear is that I will not do him justice.  I have this fear every time I teach this class (and as the class is now being offered in the spring and fall starting next year, I guess I’ll be spending a lot of time fearful).  I need to shake hands with the fact that nothing I can post here can accomplish what I want it to and post, so I can get on to the second film, Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985).