The Suicide's Art

By LANCE MORROW

RUNAWAY HORSES by YUKIO MISHIMA

Translated by MICHAEL GALLAGHER

421 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Yukio Mishima completed his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, one November morning in 1970. Then he dressed himself in the somewhat Grau-starkian uniform of his private army, the Shield Society, and led a group of young right-wing followers to a military headquarters in western Tokyo. There, in a violent and extravagantly eccentric display of the artist engage, he broke into the commander's office, harangued some mocking soldiers from a balcony about the disgraces of fading Japanese imperial tradition, withdrew and committed harakiri. A companion ritually lopped off the head of Japan's most celebrated postwar literary talent, a man who had often been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

It was a high price to pay for an artistic effect, but Mishima's death did at least serve to endow his last works, now being published in English translation, with an eerie sense of death anticipating art. This is especially true of Runaway Horses, the second volume of the tetralogy; for its subject is right-wing rebellion and, presented in weirdly loving detail, the beauties of seppuku (ritual suicide). Camus said that "suicide is something planned in the silence of the heart, like a work of art." In Mishima, for all of the peculiar sensationalism of his death, there is a shocking aesthetic correspondence between the man's art and his final act.

The luxury of fiction allowed Mishima the license of idealization difficult to discover in his actual self-destruction. His fictional suicide is Isao lunuma, a right-wing student with an obsessional love of Samurai tradition and a hatred for the 20th century's destruction of imperial values. lunuma enjoys an almost erotic anticipation of the moment when he will solemnly disembowel himself for the Emperor. In the 1930s, he assembles a group of similarly obsessed conspirators to plot the assassinations of Japan's leading industrialists, hoping to precipitate a general uprising against the corruption of Japan's ancient national spirit.

lunuma's own father betrays the conspirators to the police, but because of the nationalistic sympathies the plot has aroused, the son is eventually released. Then, with his zealotry intact, lunuma proceeds alone to his assassination target as planned, and commits the suicide he had desired--in the book's last sentence, which is touched by Mi-shima's lucid, kinetic imagery. "The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids."

That is, of course, lurid imagery as well--blood and the imperial sun. Mi-shima's sensibility was at once delicate and apocalyptic. Like Spring Snow, the first volume of The Sea of Fertility, Runaway Horses shivers with fragile yet highly wrought detail. Here Mishima also experiments, to lovely effect, with the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, lunuma, it seems, may be the reincarnation of Kiyoaki Matsugae, the doomed young lover of Spring Snow.

Entanglements--across novels and across generations--are deep and haunting. The interplay is both vertical and horizontal in time. With rich intelligence, the author touches, sometimes brilliantly, on his old themes of the East's collision with the West, of rationalism and passion, thought and action.

Mishima claimed that his tetralogy contained everything he knew about life -- and presumably about death. That may have been intended in part as a rationalization for his suicide, though some Japanese have suspected that he killed himself, on a crank's political pre text, because his creative powers were failing. Western readers will have to wait for the rest of the tetralogy to make a judgment. The first two works are sometimes stunningly good; yet in both there is an odd moral frigidity, a special chill evident in his earlier works as well. For all his gifts, Mishima seems to have written too often with the dead pan menace of the kendo expert he was -- a tense restraint broken only by a violence that is curiously narcissistic.

Even his flamboyant suicide may not be enough to endow his works with the human blood they lack.

sb Lance Morrow

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