Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters

Schrader tackles this difficult material by taking three separate approaches and commingling them. The first is the events of the last day. The second are scenes from several of his novels -- Kyoko's House, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and Runaway Horses -- shot in glowing Technicolor and staged like modern theatrical productions. The third are events from the rest of Mishima's life, in stark black and white. All three "streams" are surrounded by a mesmerizing Philip Glass score.

In his youth, Mishima was a shy, cloistered child with a stammer and (if the film is to be believed) the nascent beginnings of his homosexual attractions. He was never allowed to serve in the army during WWII, but the film keeps any connections between that and his later patriotic fervor fairly subtle. He wrote voluminously, publishing a collected works before he was even forty, and knocking out over forty novels and twenty plays during his career, many of which were filmed, translated, or laden with awards. But despite his worldly success, something ate away at Mishima from the inside -- the gnawing feeling that both his life and the life of his country were somehow incomplete or tainted. He sought answers, and the answers he found are reflected in the books he wrote and the philosophies embodied in them.

In Kyoko's House (which, significantly, is probably Mishima's only major novel never to be translated into English), a young actor sells himself to a female gangster to keep his mother from being harassed. The actor grows obsessed with the idea of beauty, telling his then-girlfriend, "I'm concerned only with my face. If I could make my whole body beautiful, then my body could be my face." He and the gangster enter into a sadomasochistic relationship, in which she cuts and scars him, ending with their mutual suicide. (This is only one of four major plots in the novel, actually, but it's the one that makes the most sense in the overall approach of the film.)

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, based on a true story, examines a young religious acolyte (his stammering and Mishima's boyhood speech impediment are of course directly linked in the film) who is driven to burn down the aforementioned temple by the duplicity of his friend. The world he's offered can't compare to the beauty of the temple, but one or the other has to give, and soon he commits arson.

Runaway Horses has Isao, a young student in the Thirties, plotting the assassination of several key figures in the government that he and his cronies have deemed a threat to the Emperor by being sellouts to Westernism and capitalism. Isao and his friends are arrested when one of their army compatriots betrays them, but after he's released from jail, he assassinates one of the men on his list anyway, then commits seppuku while facing the rising sun. By dying for a principle larger than himself -- the defense of the emperor -- he makes himself true.

Interwoven with the books are key elements in Mishima's life that show his gradually consolidating sense of self. At first, he was an aesthete, coming uneasily to terms with his homosexuality. (The scene with him in a gay bar almost didn't make it into the film; Mishima's family and estate holders demanded that it be removed. The filmmakers refused, and as a result the family withdrew their support for the film. Some versions of the film do not have the scene.) Then, gradually, he turned from art to "action," pumping iron, fetishizing the Japanese youths who sacrificed themselves for their emperor, and performing a near-180 from his previous view of life (which consisted, in his own words, of a Hawaiian shirt and Levi's).

To that end, he founded the "Shield Society," a private army of one hundred men who he declared to be the final defenders of true Japanese culture. Most Japanese, including many of his friends on the right, were befuddled by what he expected to accomplish with the Shield Society. It ultimately became the vehicle through which he found a spectacular death, made all the more ironic by its almost total rejection by his countrymen. Another of the demands made by Mishima's estate was that his suicide would not be shown in detail, and we are spared this; Schrader finds exactly the right way to evoke it without actually showing it.

Ken Ogata, who plays Mishima, actually does not resemble the man all that much. The real Mishima was a delicate-featured man who made himself look absurdly hard with his body-building, and who had a slightly petulant smile on his face at all times. Ogata looks hard and frowning from the start. But this is a performance, not an impersonation, and Ogata does a good job of evoking the presence of a man who always has a lot more going on inside than anyone else is able to guess at. I've seen newsreel footage of the actual final speech he delivered, and Ogata's (and Schrader's) recreation of it is uncanny in its accuracy. A similar recreation, involving Mishima debating a gang of radical leftist students at Tokyo University, is equally eerie. And there's a moment involving him directing his own filmed version of one of his short stories, Patriotism, that is just as mesmerizing.

A great many details about Mishima's life probably could not be condensed into the film without becoming bewildering, and they have been omitted -- or, most likely, omitted because they would have caused legal problems. For one, there is absolutely no mention of his wife -- presumably at her request, since she went to some lengths to had a good deal of the offensive detrius of his life purged after he died, including having all copies of the Patriotism movie destroyed. There are no details about Mishima's relationship with Yasunari Kawabata, his literary mentor. It was widely believed he was awarded the Nobel Prize over Mishima, one of the things that may have in a small way fed his death wish. (Kawabata committed suicide two years after Mishima did, leaving no note, and no satisfactory explanation was ever given for his acts.) There are also no details about any of the other authors with whom he competed indirectly after his success began to wane in the late Sixties. The one element that's probably unfair to complain about is the relatively small amount of material about his homosexuality; most of Mishima's active pursuit of other men took place before his marriage, which was remarkably stable and successful given how difficult a person he could be to many.

But these things are only going to be of interest or significance to a purist. Their omission doesn't make the existing story any less mesmerizing or artistically successful. Mishima is a bold gamble of a film that pays off. We live in an era where intelligent and genuinely risky filmmaking is no longer taken very seriously by major studios. I'm grateful Criterion has seen fit to bring this idiosyncratic and powerful piece of work back into print.