On Yukio Mishima
The first Mishima I ever read was his novel The Sound of Waves. I was, I think, nineteen at the time.
There is a chapter in the novel where a boy named Yasuo attempts to rape a girl named Hatsu who is fetching water from a well. Yasuo's attempt is thwarted by a hornet who stings him on the ass as he struggles to pin Hatsu to the ground. Embarrassed by the foolishness he displayed in stopping a sexual assault to flail around and swat at a hornet, Yasuo loses confidence in the entire endeavor and—with his would-be victim now hiding in a tree and brandishing a rock—begins to fear that Hatsu will tell her father about the incident.
Yasuo calls out to Hatsu and pleads with her not to tell her father of what he has done. He says he will do anything for her if she agrees not to tell.
To this, Hatsu says that if Yasuo draws the water from the well for her and carries it all the way to her home, she will keep his behavior a secret.
What a bizarre scene, right? Mishima presents the moment after Hatsu gets away (but before she notices the hornet) by writing, "Hatsu did not know what god it was who had come to her rescue." But half a page later, has her offering to keep quiet about an attempted rape in exchange for Yasuo doing one single chore for her. This arrangement is her idea. Odd. It all sounds like Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal as reimagined by some surrealist.
When writing about art, there is always the temptation to say that some element of the piece stuck with you. This both lends an aura of gravity to the thing you're writing about and justifies you writing about the thing in the first place. I try to avoid this as much as I can. I try to center the elements I feel are innate and minimize anything that reads as nakedly subjective. But here, the message I feel I have to convey is that this scene REALLY did stick with me. I've randomly thought of it dozens of times, and it's much more vivid to me than the rest of the book. I actually don't remember how The Sound of Waves even ends.
So the question here is WHY did this chapter stick with me so much? There are two possible answers. 1) I'm fucked up and inexplicably fascinated by situations that combine deal-making and sexual assault, or 2) that this chapter is not just funny but also weirdly plausible and about many different things at once: male/female sexual dynamics, the burden of labor, the RNG of nature, fate, empathy, shame.
Yesterday was the 54th anniversary of Yukio Mishima's death by seppuku after his "failed" coup d'état against the government of Japan. His stated intention for taking control of an office on a military base in Tokyo, strapping the commandant of that base to a chair, and delivering a speech from a balcony to the soldiers outside was to restore the historical power of the emperor of Japan. His actual goal may simply have been to orchestrate a scenario in which he could die a glorious, honorable, and masculine death.
For some, Mishima is the ultimate romantic, a samurai artist who embodied his ideals. For others, he is Don Quixote, ignorant of the ways of the warrior and tilting at windmills in his middle age. But for me, this contradiction is entirely appropriate. That scene where the kid gets stung by a hornet while trying to execute a rape and then haggles with his would-be victim like she is a merchant in a bazaar is funny. But I long ago stopped laughing, and now I just think about what precisely it may have meant.
