Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

"The Harmony of Pen and Sword"

This samurai motto used to be a way of life

Now it's forgotten

Can art and action still be united?

This quotation forms perhaps the central theme of Paul Schrader's presentation of the life of Yukio Mishima in his 1985 film titled Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. The film is a dramatic and stylistic portrayal of Mishima's life, told through flashbacks, scenes from the last day of his life, and dramatic adaptations of excepts from three of his novels. I found the film absorbing, tense, thought-provoking, and imaginative.

Throughout the film we see how Mishima develops from a sickly young boy, forced to live with his grandmother for the first few years of his life, into a young writer of poetry, and finally into one of Japan's best 20th century writers. Throughout his life he seems to have been deeply troubled by the duality of words and world, language and action, or, as he puts it, pen and sword. This central theme of the film is not only presented in the narration that appears throughout the film, but is dramatised through stylistic recreations of parts of Mishima's writings. For example, we see scenes from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion in which a Zen acolyte who suffers from a stutter, sets fire to the temple because he feels inferior to it's beauty.

The concept of beauty is another central theme of the film. Several characters from Mishima's novels, as well as Mishima himself, discuss beauty throughout the film. In one scene there is a dialogue in which an artist attacks a body-builder by telling him that his beauty, or rather his seeking after beauty through his own body, is doomed to failure because of the finitude of his own existence and because of the inevitable decay of his body. By contrast, he says that as an artist he can grasp the eternal form of beauty through perfecting his craft.

In another wonderful scene from the film, definitely one of my favourites, a young narcissistic man reflects on his own beauty, only to be mocked by his lover, who places a mirror on parts of his body which reflects corresponding parts of her own body. The effect is brilliant: the spectator sees, for example, the reflection of her breast in the mirror exactly where his breast is. Thus there is an effective doubling of his appearance: he appears beautiful reflected through his lover and her mirror. The question though is whose beauty is this and does it reside in any one person? She says that she will be his mirror, but then uses a real mirror to reflect herself. Only, she places the mirror on his body in a kind of transfigurative gesture. It is a wonderfully ambiguous scene that resists easy analysis.

In his striving for a principle which will connect art and action, Mishima seems frustrated for most of the film. However, near the end there is a beautiful scene in which we see him piloting an aircraft high above the clouds. It is in this scene that Mishima reveals the principle which will unite the two: death. The poetic way in which he explains this is through an analogy with the upper atmosphere of the planet: here, where there is no oxygen, man must wear a mask in order to survive. Hence, he is like an actor who must also wear a mask, adopt a persona. Mishima finds a stillness and a sense of unity beyond opposition high above the clouds: no more pen or sword, no more body or spirit, no more male or female, as he says. He has found a ring that resolves all contradiction.

However, juxtaposed with this scene we see the last moments of his life, in which he addresses a crowd of army officers unsuccessfully, and then finally takes his own life through the ritual of seppuku. This brings me to what is perhaps most troubling in Mishima's life: his militant traditionalism. Throughout the film we see Mishima more and more disturbed by modern life in Japan. He sees greed, corruption and a lack of national spirit, and he forms a private army in response. It is through this traditionalism that he seems to believe he can unite his writing with action. And it is here that I was reminded of Martin Heidegger's project which took him into National Socialism. The connection between poetry/language and being/action seems to be an important theme in both writers, as well as a politics of turning back to tradition in order to reinvigorate modern society. The film does a decent job of helping the viewer to appreciate how Mishima came to his ideas, but never acts in support of them.

I think the film is brilliantly made and well worth seeing. I found myself totally captivated by it's wonderful style (the use of colour is fantastic), provoked by many of its central themes, and towards the end I felt a very tangible sense of tension. The film is 2 hours long, though I never felt it was dragged out in any way. Philip Glass provides the music and it seems to fit the tone well, with it's building sense of tension through repetition. The narrative is split into four sections which give the film a good sense of coherence (each chapter focused on a particular theme such as beauty or action). Schrader himself considers it his best directed film, since he only wrote the screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. It's a beautiful film so go check it out!