Yukio Michima
"Human life is brief; but I want to live forever." Those were
Yukio Mishima's last words, which he wrote on a slip of paper in the
gray hours of dawn on November 25, 1970. Soon thereafter he and his
friend Morita died by the sword in a spectacular double suicide at the
defense ministry in Tokyo. One year earlier, Mishima had written, "When
I allow thoughts of the past 25 years to pass before my mind's eye,
their emptiness fills me with astonishment. I can scarcely say that
I have lived." Mishima lived a scintillating life full of an intensity
which was further increased by the fascination that death held for him.
Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925 and taken at an early age to
live in the rooms in which his domineering, aristocratic grandmother
dwelt. Together with her, he spent his childhood years in isolation
and luxury, sickness and dreams. He bore the crises of her nerves, learned
to care for her wounds, helped her onto the toilet. He wore girl's clothes,
attended performances of ritual Nô theater and melodramatic Kabuki
plays.
As a youth, he hid behind a wall of books and grew into a pale, slender,
extremely well-educated young man who had become aware of his homosexual
tendencies at an early age.
He studied law, withdrew completely into his literary world and published,
at age 24, his first autobiographical novel, "Confessions of a
Mask." The book was an overnight success. Mishima acted in films,
wrote screenplays and was active as a director.
He married (for his mother's sake), fathered two children and led a
bourgeois life.
Hagakure, the code of honor which arose during the 18th century as the
ethic of the samurais, fascinated him and gave him values that he could
cling to during the political and economic upheavals that swept through
Japan after World War Two. Dismayed by the Americanization of Japan
and as a reaction to the student revolts, Mishima founded his own army
of 100 soldiers who were sworn to protect the Japanese emperor.
"Money and materialism reign supreme; modern Japan is loathesome,"
Mishima declared three months prior to his death. Through his art, we
can experience Mishima's fascinating vision of an alternative world.
The Japanese
Noh Theater
One of the first
non-Japanese ever to witness a Noh play was the American general Ulysses
S. Grant. When Grant came to Tokyo in 1870, his hosts invited the
great Nô actor Hôshô Karô to give a performance.
Though it wouldn't have been surprising if the military man had fallen
asleep, legend has it that Grant was very enthusiastic about the show,
reportedly exclaiming, "You must care for and preserve this!"
Grant probably didn't know that the survival of the Nô theater
was actually in jeopardy at that time.
The original form of the Noh plays developed from rituals which were
enacted in temples and at holy sites to celebrate harvests and to
accompany other festivities. Kan'ami Kiyotsugu (1333-1384) and his
son Seami Motokiyo (1363-1443) reshaped these ritualistic performances
to create what is widely regarded as one of the world's most important
dramatic forms.
Noh plays recall Ancient Greek drama: in both genres, only a few people
appear on stage, accompanied by a chorus, dances and masks. But whereas
Greek drama gradually became progressively more realistic, Noh plays
evolved into an almost entirely symbolic art form in which both the
text of the pieces and the movements of their actors sought to manifest
unspoken and indefinable realities.
The first successful modern Noh plays were written by Yukio Mishima,
whose novels and plays draw upon Japanese material and Western sources.
For example, the fable recounted in his successful novel The Surf
is based on material contained in the Ancient Greek tale of Daphnis
and Chloe. Mishima was attracted to the themes and structure of the
Nô plays. Sometimes he uses only the basic theme; elsewhere,
he even preserves individual details from the original play. In The
Lady Aoi, the role originally played by the priest who invokes the
ghost of Rokujô is transferred to a nurse in a modern hospital
who talks about sexual repression rather than demons. Aoi's husband,
Prince Genji (who does not appear in the original Noh play), appears
in Mishima's piece under the name "Hikaru," which means
"the luminous one" - an epithet applied to the radiant personage
of Prince Genji. The chariot in which Rokujô and Aoi quarrel
about which of them will occupy the seat of honor at the Kamo festival
becomes a sailboat aboard which Rokujô and Hikaru revive the
romantic memories of their first meeting.
"A formerly
unheard narrative tone has established itself overnight in Japan.
It is audacious, rife with allusions, stylistically brilliant and
satirical; it has a tendency towards reflection and symbolist narrative
gesture."
"Life - that limitless, thousand-fold, flotsam-laden, moody,
mighty and always clear, transparent, azure-blue sea." (Yukio
Mishima)
"Early
in his career, Mishima's creative imagination and his urge towards
form led him to strive for a synthesis of Japanese and Western elements
which he ultimately fused into an unmistakable aesthetic all his own.
The unprecedented precision and fineness of his observations, his
virtuosity in designing gripping narratives, his celebration of life,
death and the night: all these are the elements of an aesthetic universe
whose originality -and whose shadow sides - rank among the 20th century's
greatest artistic legacies."
Meta Theater 9/2000
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