The following is from yesterday's Sankei Shimbun.
'Reincarnation' Connecting Yukio Mishima and Civilization
Jason Morgan Associate Professor, Komazawa University
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death, the novelist, Yukio Mishima, is again in the spotlight.
The author, who was born in the United States, is also a fan of Mishima.
More than 20 years ago, when I was a university student, I picked up his works.
When I was a student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, I picked up a copy of Mishima's book from the library shelves and was immediately drawn to it.
It was the English translation of "The Snows of Spring," the first volume of "The Sea of Fertility.
I read "Confessions of a Mask," "The Golden Pavilion," and so on, one after another.
I was surprised at the brilliance of his works.
I can assure you that there were no other writers as good as Mishima in the latter half of the 20th century.
From the eyes of an American writer
Mishima woke me up.
I set the theme of my college thesis on Mishima's life.
As part of my preliminary research, I read a biography of Mishima ("The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima") written by Henry Scott Stokes, an English journalist close friend of Mishima, to learn his thoughts on politics and history.
As a young man who was a prisoner in the liberal bastion of an American university, Mishima's views on politics are shocking.
Mishima has a positive view of Japan's past and how novel it is.
His shocking final moments as a prisoner of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) facility, where he committed suicide, have led to a tendency to be dismissed as "right-wing" and "weird" by liberal American academics. Still, as a student at the time, I doubted that it could dismiss his views so quickly in light of Mishima's excellent literature.
What was Mishima trying to say in the last days of his checkered life, and especially in his "dramatic" last days?
The idea running through his masterpiece, Sea of Fertility, which consists of four volumes, including Spring Snow, is the idea of reincarnation, the rebirth of the soul.
The death of one person is not the end of the soul.
What we try to do in this life will affect the next one.
In other words, the soul has the power to transcend time.
A legacy that connects the past with the future
It is still often heard that Mishima was a "right-winger," but I think that is a big mistake.
Mishima is neither "right" nor "left," and it seems more appropriate to think of the direction as "front" and "rear."
The way he fused the two, that is to say, the way he tried to connect the past and the future, is his real legacy.
As a person who lived before, during, and after the war, Mishima experienced the collapse of civilization around him.
I imagine that the sense of division made Mishima dizzy.
As the playwright and critic Fukuda Kozon pointed out, post-war Japan, in a sense, was no longer Japan.
Japan fought against the liberal powers and challenged them to transcend the modern era, only to lose the war and be occupied by the enemy.
Many Japanese felt compelled to interpret this as a fatal blow to civilization.
The mood that Japan's future had nothing to do with its past and that it had no choice but to dismiss the past and "look up and walk away" was prevalent in post-war Japan.
I feel it is still prevalent in post-war Japan.
However, Mishima does not take the post-war period for granted.
He believed in the reincarnation of Japan's soul.
It reminds me of the comparative civilization scholar Eiji Hattori's "Reincarnating Civilization."
Civilizations are always being reincarnated.
To put it more strongly, a person alive today is always trying to bring the past back to life.
It reminds me of people who have died.
We want to remember those who are no longer here and welcome into our midst once again those lost to death.
It is necessary for any country and at any time, but in post-war Japan, when we did our best to build a "new Japan," did we not lose our humanity?
Refusing to Abandon the Past
Mishima refused to abandon Japan's past.
His suicide on November 25, 1970, was goodbye to post-war Japan, a goodbye to future Japan, free from the spell of self-history, and a halo to the future Japan that would come one day.
Mishima's "Patriotism or the Rite of Love and Death" in his last days and, at the same time, his new journey to "love of his country."
Mishima must have had a strong belief in the afterlife, both in his case and that of Japan.
As we live in the "post-war" era, I would like to rethink the importance of historical connections.
William Faulkner, a writer from my country, the Southern United States, was also a man of letters who often wondered what the present means after the Confederate defeat to the liberal Union in the Civil War.
Faulkner pointed out that post-war Japan was similar to the "post-war" South in the Civil War.
A phrase from Faulkner's book resonates with me.
The past is not dead. The past is not dead, nor has it passed away. The past is always close to the present.
Man is a memorable being.
Or, to be more precise, they are unforgettable.
Isn't it Mishima's teaching that we should revive the past with our lives?
Feist - Past In Present
'Reincarnation' Connecting Yukio Mishima and Civilization
Jason Morgan Associate Professor, Komazawa University
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death, the novelist, Yukio Mishima, is again in the spotlight.
The author, who was born in the United States, is also a fan of Mishima.
More than 20 years ago, when I was a university student, I picked up his works.
When I was a student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, I picked up a copy of Mishima's book from the library shelves and was immediately drawn to it.
It was the English translation of "The Snows of Spring," the first volume of "The Sea of Fertility.
I read "Confessions of a Mask," "The Golden Pavilion," and so on, one after another.
I was surprised at the brilliance of his works.
I can assure you that there were no other writers as good as Mishima in the latter half of the 20th century.
From the eyes of an American writer
Mishima woke me up.
I set the theme of my college thesis on Mishima's life.
As part of my preliminary research, I read a biography of Mishima ("The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima") written by Henry Scott Stokes, an English journalist close friend of Mishima, to learn his thoughts on politics and history.
As a young man who was a prisoner in the liberal bastion of an American university, Mishima's views on politics are shocking.
Mishima has a positive view of Japan's past and how novel it is.
His shocking final moments as a prisoner of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) facility, where he committed suicide, have led to a tendency to be dismissed as "right-wing" and "weird" by liberal American academics. Still, as a student at the time, I doubted that it could dismiss his views so quickly in light of Mishima's excellent literature.
What was Mishima trying to say in the last days of his checkered life, and especially in his "dramatic" last days?
The idea running through his masterpiece, Sea of Fertility, which consists of four volumes, including Spring Snow, is the idea of reincarnation, the rebirth of the soul.
The death of one person is not the end of the soul.
What we try to do in this life will affect the next one.
In other words, the soul has the power to transcend time.
A legacy that connects the past with the future
It is still often heard that Mishima was a "right-winger," but I think that is a big mistake.
Mishima is neither "right" nor "left," and it seems more appropriate to think of the direction as "front" and "rear."
The way he fused the two, that is to say, the way he tried to connect the past and the future, is his real legacy.
As a person who lived before, during, and after the war, Mishima experienced the collapse of civilization around him.
I imagine that the sense of division made Mishima dizzy.
As the playwright and critic Fukuda Kozon pointed out, post-war Japan, in a sense, was no longer Japan.
Japan fought against the liberal powers and challenged them to transcend the modern era, only to lose the war and be occupied by the enemy.
Many Japanese felt compelled to interpret this as a fatal blow to civilization.
The mood that Japan's future had nothing to do with its past and that it had no choice but to dismiss the past and "look up and walk away" was prevalent in post-war Japan.
I feel it is still prevalent in post-war Japan.
However, Mishima does not take the post-war period for granted.
He believed in the reincarnation of Japan's soul.
It reminds me of the comparative civilization scholar Eiji Hattori's "Reincarnating Civilization."
Civilizations are always being reincarnated.
To put it more strongly, a person alive today is always trying to bring the past back to life.
It reminds me of people who have died.
We want to remember those who are no longer here and welcome into our midst once again those lost to death.
It is necessary for any country and at any time, but in post-war Japan, when we did our best to build a "new Japan," did we not lose our humanity?
Refusing to Abandon the Past
Mishima refused to abandon Japan's past.
His suicide on November 25, 1970, was goodbye to post-war Japan, a goodbye to future Japan, free from the spell of self-history, and a halo to the future Japan that would come one day.
Mishima's "Patriotism or the Rite of Love and Death" in his last days and, at the same time, his new journey to "love of his country."
Mishima must have had a strong belief in the afterlife, both in his case and that of Japan.
As we live in the "post-war" era, I would like to rethink the importance of historical connections.
William Faulkner, a writer from my country, the Southern United States, was also a man of letters who often wondered what the present means after the Confederate defeat to the liberal Union in the Civil War.
Faulkner pointed out that post-war Japan was similar to the "post-war" South in the Civil War.
A phrase from Faulkner's book resonates with me.
The past is not dead. The past is not dead, nor has it passed away. The past is always close to the present.
Man is a memorable being.
Or, to be more precise, they are unforgettable.
Isn't it Mishima's teaching that we should revive the past with our lives?
Feist - Past In Present
