45. The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima was born in 1925 and grew up in the period before the Second World War. He was sixteen when the war began, and lived his late teenage years in the expectation of conscription and violent death. But he flunked his army medical and spent the latter part of the war working in a factory. Survival, and the end of the war, he experienced as disaster. ‘For me – me alone – it meant that fearful days were beginning,’ he wrote. ‘It meant that, whether I would or no, and despite everything that had deceived me into believing such a day would never come to pass, the very next day I must begin my life as an ordinary member of society. How the mere words made me tremble!’

As the war ended there were a spate of suicides, mainly among military leaders, but also among civilians, one of whom was the writer Hasuda, a friend of Mishima’s. Hasuda had written: ‘I believe one should die young in this age. To die young, I am sure, is the culture of my country.’ Mishima would not have disagreed. Many of the novels, plays and short stories he later produced are preoccupied by the idea of suicide and violent, young death. The persistence of the theme makes one suspect that it was not just the war that shaped this element of his psyche. He wrote in Confessions of a Mask that from an early age ‘My heart’s leaning towards Death and Night and Blood would not be denied.’

Hara-kiri, or, as it is also known in Japan, seppuku, is especially prominent in his fiction. Seppuku is the ancient ritualized form of self-killing involving the cutting open of one’s own belly, usually in tandem with an accomplice called a kaishaku who delivers a decapitating sword-blow. All of these suicides were of young men with firm, beautiful flesh: Mishima was bisexual, and his fascination with seppuku had an undoubted homoerotic aspect. He was a fanatical body-builder, and in the essay 'Sun and Steel' he candidly outlined the reasons, linking physical beauty with death: ’Specifically, I cherished a romantic impulse towards death, yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle.’

The death thus predicted by his fiction occurred on November 25 1970. It was part of a carefully-engineered drama. Mishima had spent the last two years training a private army, the Tate no kai (‘Shield Society’). It was with a detachment of five of these Tate no kai that he occupied the administrative headquarters of the army in Tokyo, taking a senior general hostage. Mishima demanded that the soldiers of the nearby barracks assemble to listen to him speak, or he would kill the general. When a crowd of several hundred had formed, Mishima came out onto a high balcony and harangued them for several minutes, calling on them to rise and overthrow the constitution. He was met with laughter and jeers. He then went inside, and, stripping to the waist and kneeling down, thrust a foot-long dagger into his belly. As he gasped on the carpet, completing the cross-cut that would disgorge his entrails, he was beheaded by one of his men acting as kaishaku. A second soldier then knelt in turn, and was himself beheaded by another of the soldiers.

Mishima’s death was greeted with incredulity in Japan, where seppuku had become virtually unknown since the end of the war. No-one, it seemed, had taken his many graphic predictions of his own death seriously. But his last book went some way to explaining what had happened. This was The Decay of the Angel. The deadline for the final instalment of this work was due on November 25 1970, the day on which he had killed himself. It had been duly completed and mailed that morning. The date that appears on the last line of the novel is also ‘November 25 1970’.

The Decay of the Angel is the last book in Mishima’s longest work, the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility. The book’s title in Japanese is Tennin Gosui, which literally means Five Signs of the Decay of the Tennin: a tennin in Buddhist theology is a supernatural being roughly equivalent to a Christian angel, but vulnerable to death. The signs or omens of a tennin’s decline, five in number, give the book its title.

Mishima’s contention in The Decay of the Angel is that eternal beauty is the prize of those who ‘cut time short’, and that in order to achieve a beautiful life, one must die a beautiful and young death, before decay has set in. The main character, who has missed his chance to do this, meditates:

Some are all the same endowed with the faculty to cut time short at the pinnacle. I know it to be true, for I have seen examples with my own eyes.
What power, poetry, bliss! To be able to cut it short, just as the white radiance of the pinnacle comes into view...
Endless physical beauty. That is the special prerogative of those who cut time short. Just before the pinnacle when time must be cut short is the pinnacle of physical beauty.
Clear, bright beauty, in the knowledge that the radiant white pinnacle lies ahead.

The meaning of the title is clear. Mishima himself was the angel threatened by decay. He knew that the death-signs were slowly becoming visible on his body, that the flesh was becoming corrupt. Mishima believed that writing could only do so much. The body had its own urgent language, one inexpressible in words. His seppuku was a carefully-orchestrated gathering of forces, sexual, aesthetic, political, literary, all converging on that same morning in November, with the aim of fixing beauty forever.

Consulted:
Ross, Christopher: Mishima’s Sword (2006)
Stokes, Henry Scott: The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (1975)

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