2006 Reading List - Mishima's Sword
Book Ninety-one
Mishima's Sword by Christopher Ross
I got this as a present from Soulman, who thought it looked cool and that I might be interested in it. Bless his heart, he was right... *grin*
Yukio Mishima is considered one of Japan's greatest modern writers. A repeated contender for the Nobel Prize, and one of those strangest of people, a writer-celebrity. He was an avid bodybuilder, a student of history, and one of the very few people in the modern age able to write a new Noh or Kabuki drama. He was a militarist, a hedonist and a homosexual with a wife and children.
All in all, a very complex man.
On November 25th, 1970 Mishima led his private militia, The Shield Society, onto the grounds of the Ichagaya headquarters of the Self Defense Force. He attempted to incite a coup which, since the soldiers on the base weren't particularly eager for one, was unsuccessful. I doubt he was surprised, because he and his second in command Masakatsu Morita were prepared to commit seppuku, the death by ritual disembowelment so preferred by the samurai of old.
Seppuku is not a pleasant way to die. First you plunge a dagger into your belly, just below the navel. You then move from right to left across your abdomen. Then a cut upwards so your intestines unspool onto the floor. All of this, mind you, without an unseemly display of agony. At the last moment, your second will cut your head off from behind, ideally leaving a small bit of skin intact at the throat so your head doesn't roll around ungracefully. Mishima did a bang-up job on himself, but his second was clumsy. The first cut went into Mishima's shoulder, the second into his jaw. Another man took over, and the third cut took off the writer's head.
As you might expect, this shocked people in Japan, and those worldwide. Seppuku had been outlawed for many years, and was considered an unpleasant remnant of an unnecessary past. Mishima got everybody's attention in a big way, and made people think again about what Japanese culture had become. For good or ill, most people put Mishima in the "brilliant maniac" category, and wrote him off.
Christopher Ross, a longtime student of martial arts and a resident of Japan for five years, wondered where the sword went.
And so he came back to Japan, looking for Mishima's sword. On the way, he ended up learning more about Japanese history, manners, culture, craftsmanship, suicide, gay bathhouses and, of course, Mishima, than he had ever expected.
The book is written like a diary, which has some good points and some not so good. It's very readable, and done in an interesting style. The most readable moments are when he's talking about his actual quest to find Mishima's sword. When he starts getting into history, however, he starts to sound more like a history book. When he tries to get into Mishima's mind, he starts to sound kind of the way that Mishima does in his books. This makes reading the book an inconsistent effort, which rather parallels both his subject, Mishima, and his goal.
The drawback to the diary style is that he includes several events that are only tangentially related to the search for Mishima's sword - an unexplained, chronic stomach pain and nosebleeds, a very polite visit from the local Yakuza and so on - which do not get resolved. I know they're not important to the story, really, and I know that human existence doesn't follow narrative causality, but why was he bleeding from the nose so heavily that he needed to be hospitalized? Why were the Yakuza looking for the man who had lent Ross his bar/home while he was away? I know Ross didn't have to answer these questions, but I kind of wish he had.
Someone, I forget who, once remarked that being a storyteller is kind of like being the guy who packs a hiker's backpack. You want to put in only the things that the hiker (reader) will absolutely need, and you have to make sure the hiker will use them in the course of going up the hill. If the hiker gets to the top with, say, a '72 Volkswagen in his pack that he didn't need to lug up the hill, he's gonna be pissed....
All that aside, though, it's an excellent tour through a variety of subjects, all of which shed more light - but never enough, of course - on a very interesting, complex, sad, talented man.
Mishima's Sword by Christopher Ross
I got this as a present from Soulman, who thought it looked cool and that I might be interested in it. Bless his heart, he was right... *grin*
Yukio Mishima is considered one of Japan's greatest modern writers. A repeated contender for the Nobel Prize, and one of those strangest of people, a writer-celebrity. He was an avid bodybuilder, a student of history, and one of the very few people in the modern age able to write a new Noh or Kabuki drama. He was a militarist, a hedonist and a homosexual with a wife and children.
All in all, a very complex man.
On November 25th, 1970 Mishima led his private militia, The Shield Society, onto the grounds of the Ichagaya headquarters of the Self Defense Force. He attempted to incite a coup which, since the soldiers on the base weren't particularly eager for one, was unsuccessful. I doubt he was surprised, because he and his second in command Masakatsu Morita were prepared to commit seppuku, the death by ritual disembowelment so preferred by the samurai of old.
Seppuku is not a pleasant way to die. First you plunge a dagger into your belly, just below the navel. You then move from right to left across your abdomen. Then a cut upwards so your intestines unspool onto the floor. All of this, mind you, without an unseemly display of agony. At the last moment, your second will cut your head off from behind, ideally leaving a small bit of skin intact at the throat so your head doesn't roll around ungracefully. Mishima did a bang-up job on himself, but his second was clumsy. The first cut went into Mishima's shoulder, the second into his jaw. Another man took over, and the third cut took off the writer's head.
As you might expect, this shocked people in Japan, and those worldwide. Seppuku had been outlawed for many years, and was considered an unpleasant remnant of an unnecessary past. Mishima got everybody's attention in a big way, and made people think again about what Japanese culture had become. For good or ill, most people put Mishima in the "brilliant maniac" category, and wrote him off.
Christopher Ross, a longtime student of martial arts and a resident of Japan for five years, wondered where the sword went.
And so he came back to Japan, looking for Mishima's sword. On the way, he ended up learning more about Japanese history, manners, culture, craftsmanship, suicide, gay bathhouses and, of course, Mishima, than he had ever expected.
The book is written like a diary, which has some good points and some not so good. It's very readable, and done in an interesting style. The most readable moments are when he's talking about his actual quest to find Mishima's sword. When he starts getting into history, however, he starts to sound more like a history book. When he tries to get into Mishima's mind, he starts to sound kind of the way that Mishima does in his books. This makes reading the book an inconsistent effort, which rather parallels both his subject, Mishima, and his goal.
The drawback to the diary style is that he includes several events that are only tangentially related to the search for Mishima's sword - an unexplained, chronic stomach pain and nosebleeds, a very polite visit from the local Yakuza and so on - which do not get resolved. I know they're not important to the story, really, and I know that human existence doesn't follow narrative causality, but why was he bleeding from the nose so heavily that he needed to be hospitalized? Why were the Yakuza looking for the man who had lent Ross his bar/home while he was away? I know Ross didn't have to answer these questions, but I kind of wish he had.
Someone, I forget who, once remarked that being a storyteller is kind of like being the guy who packs a hiker's backpack. You want to put in only the things that the hiker (reader) will absolutely need, and you have to make sure the hiker will use them in the course of going up the hill. If the hiker gets to the top with, say, a '72 Volkswagen in his pack that he didn't need to lug up the hill, he's gonna be pissed....
All that aside, though, it's an excellent tour through a variety of subjects, all of which shed more light - but never enough, of course - on a very interesting, complex, sad, talented man.