Night-Blooming Narcissus

By Lance Morow

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF YUKIO MISHIMA by HENRY SCOTT-STOKES 384 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$10.

THE DECAY OF THE ANGEL by YUKIO MISHIMA Translated by EDWARD G. SEIDENSTICKER 236 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

During the '60s, journalists searching for a Western equivalent of Yukio Mishima used to mention Ernest Hemingway. It was a prophetic comparison, but they might as usefully have thought of Edgar Allan Poe reincarnated in Norman Mailer--a garish, night-blooming talent driven by an energetic sense of publicity. Mishima, the literary genius of Japan's postwar generation, often mentioned for the Nobel Prize, delighted in shock and contradiction. He possessed luminous and fertile abilities: his complete works in Japanese are now being collected in 36 volumes. He was also a master of what Russians call posh-lust, a vulgarity so elevated--or debased --that it amounts to a form of art. Hence the muscle-boy photographs he posed for, including one shot of himself wearing a black jockstrap astride a motorcycle. Hence his death, a pseudopolitical ritual suicide at the age of 45 in 1970, performed after he failed to harangue the Japanese army into an uprising to assert the country's imperial traditions.

Henry Scott-Stokes, the author of the first Mishima biography, was the London Times's Tokyo bureau chief during the late '60s. He knew the novelist casually during the last years of his life, and his book is humane, intelligent and, for the moment, probably as close as a Western reader is likely to get to the subject. Scott-Stokes never sensationalizes --Mishima did that for himself--but in addition to his literate examination of the man's work, he surmises that the famous death scene was part of a double love-suicide, a shinju, involving Mishima and Masakatsu Morita, a sullen young leader of Mishima's private army who killed himself at the same time.

Actually, the whole of Mishima's career may have been a rehearsal for that death. Born to an upper-middle-class Tokyo family, he had a fairly sinister childhood. He was raised as a little girl by his grandmother, who kept him much of the time in her gloomy sickroom. The fetid memories of such an upbringing formed much of the basis of his 1958 novel, Confessions of a Mask. "Something within me responded to the darkened room and the sickbed," he wrote elsewhere. He was fascinated, too, by death, which for him possessed an erotic attraction. His first sexual experience seems to have occurred while he was gazing at a portrait of St. Sebastian, body pierced with arrows. Years later, with typically gorgeous effrontery, he posed for a photo in which he himself was St. Sebastian. Poshlust again. What rescued Mishima from merely exotic decadence was his creative vigor and intelligence. He found a larger context for his obsessions in the Japanese martial tradition, which formalized his bloody impulses and created in him a kind of reverence for heroic self-slaughter, the ultimate self-abuse. He lived the anachronistic code of bunburyodo, the samurai tradition of art and action. Or he lived it some of the time. He played other roles as well, among them that of a conventional husband (he was married for twelve years and had two children). He was also a thoroughly Westernized man of letters, as if in his steady contemplation of death he wished to possess as many lives as possible.

Mishima's last work, The Sea of Fertility, is a four-volume cycle of which The Decay of the Angel is the final part, finished on the morning of the author's suicide. Encompassing four Japanese generations and more than 70 years of the country's most complex history, the tetralogy is a daring, not always successful enterprise. At its best it has a brilliant, erratic, lunar clarity. Mishima did not believe in reincarnation, yet the premise of all four novels--Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of the Dawn and The Decay of the Angel --is reincarnation. The unifying figure throughout is a lawyer-voyeur named Honda, who has devoted his life to tending the various incarnations of his boyhood friend, Kiyoaki Matsugae.

Symbolically, Matsugae's last incarnation--as a preternaturally evil young orphan--turns out to be a fraud, just as modern Japan has turned into a polluted and plastic travesty of its disciplined traditions. The Decay of the Angel is nonetheless a wonderfully frigid dance of death in which Mishima, like a Japanese Prospero, gathers all his artistic belongings together. In its austerity it is among the best of Mishima's novels. Perhaps there was something solipsistic in Mishima's terminating both his work and his life simultaneously, making his entire world self-destruct at the same instant. What remain, of course, are his queer, lovely works, like dividends from an insane dictator's Swiss bank account.--Lance Morrow

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