Travels with Honda

By LANCE MORROW

THE TEMPLE OF DAWN

by YUKIO MISHIMA

352 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

The serial publication of Yukio Mishima's last works, a tetralogy called The Sea of Fertility, has the eerie effect of making him seem the fastest and most prolific dead writer in history. A bit more than a year ago came the English translation of the first posthumous volume, Spring Snow. Last summer it was Runaway Horses. Now we have The Temple of Dawn.

Mishima sealed this literary package with his ritual suicide in 1970, when he was only 45. Unlike, say, Ernest Hemingway, who shot himself at 61 in apparent despair over a deteriorating mind, Mishima killed himself in what seemed a gesture of robust if wasteful heroism, the ultimate act of self-control. Since his death was so theatrically deliberate, the temptation is strong to judge the tetralogy as an artistic and philosophical suicide note to the world. The note is now three-quarters completed for English-language readers. It is fascinating and ambitious, but the final message (and literary value) is still difficult to decipher.

The first three interconnected books are extraordinarily good. Mishima uses the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation to link various characters throughout the 20th century with changing manners, politics and national psychology in Japan. In The Temple of Dawn, he also discourses widely and sometimes pedantically about Buddhist theory; that is unfamiliar country for most Western readers. But Mishima's intensely poetic moral sense communicates his own fascination with such subjects.

In Spring Snow, the dreamy and aristocratic hero Kiyoaki Matsugae died a vaporously youthful death. He becomes Isao, the fanatic young political conspirator of Runaway Horses. In The Temple of Dawn, Kiyoaki/Isao is again transformed, this time into Ying Chan, a lovely Thai princess. The witness to all three incarnations is a wonderfully subtle spiritual voyeur named Honda, a rationalist Japanese judge and lawyer. Honda, like a principle of embattled moral intelligence, acts as Mishima's civilized guide through the mysteries of love, death, political tragedy and reincarnation.

If Mishima had written nothing else, his account of Honda's excursion to Benares, the holy Indian crematory site on the Ganges, would be considered a small masterpiece, on the order of E.M. Forster's visit to the Malabar caves in A Passage to India. Among the funeral burnings Honda finds an appalling filth and holy joy that amaze him: "A black arm would suddenly rise or a body would curl up in the fire as though turning over in sleep." The scene "was full of nauseous abomination, the inevitable ingredient of all times deemed sacred and pure in Benares." And yet "there was a flashing animation in the flames, as though something were being born."

Mishima takes Japan from the late '30s through the war and the postwar period into the perplexed affluence of the '50s. Eventually, Honda becomes joylessly rich. He degenerates from spiritual voyeur into Peeping Tom--a transformation reflecting Mishima's own contempt for the vulgarization and materialism of postwar Japan. As the novel ends, Honda, who has begun to sound like a Japanese Humbert Humbert in his pursuit of his Thai princess--now a student in Japan--secretly watches her in a lesbian embrace. Then Honda's mansion at the foot of Mount Fuji burns to the ground like a pyre at Benares, the flyaway ashes sporadically sizzling into his new swimming pool. The combination of filigreed Oriental pornography and slightly cheap Goetterdaemmerung has sometimes been a contaminating tendency in Mishima's work. But the rest of the book plausibly suggests a writer whose gifts amount at least to minor genius.

--Lance Morrow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.