simazhi 's review for:

Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima

4.0

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I like Mishima. He went a little over the top at the end of his life, committing seppuku and all that.

For me, the most interesting parts revolve around the dichotomy of the body and the mind. Especially since I am an advocate of embodiment in linguistics I feel that these are tied together. The book starts alright:

What I was seeking, in short, was a langauge of the body.(p. 8)

This is followed shortly by the characterization of himself as a special case, someone who first had the mind and only then found the body — I would argue that this is not the case, but then again, this is a literary essay.

When I examine closely my early childhood, I realise that my memory of words reaches back far farther than my memory of the flesh. In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all; then — belatedly, with every appearance of extreme reluctance, and already clothed in concepts — came the flesh. It was already, as goes without saying, sadly wasted by words.(p. 8)

And then my favourite passage deals with him fully embracing both 'words' and 'flesh', thus becoming the ultimate masculine man in most modern paradigms of (traditional) East-Asian male masculinity: a convergence of 文 and 武.

More than anything, I detested defeat. Can there be any worse defeat than when one is corroded and seared from within by the acid secretions of sensibility until finally one loses one's outline, dissolves, liquefies; or when the same thing happens to the society about one, and one alters one's own stile to match it?
Everyone knows that masterpieces, ironically enough, sometimes arise from the midst of such defeat, from the death of the spirit. Though I might retreat a pace and admit such masterpieces as victories, I knew that they were victories without a struggle, battleless victories of a kind peculiar to art. What I sought was the struggle as such, whichever way it might go. I had no tasted for defeat — much less victory — without a fight. At the same time, I knew only too well the deceitful nature of any kind of conflict in art. If I must have a struggle, I felt I should take the offensive in fields outside art; in art, I should defend my citadel. It was necessary to be a sturdy defender within art, and a good fighter outside it. The goal of my life was to acquire all the various attributes of the warrior.
During the postwar period, when all accepted values were upset, I often thought and remarked to to others that now if ever was the time for reviving the old Japanese ideal of a combination so letters and the martial arts, of art and and action. For a while after that, my interest strayed from that particular ideal; then, as I gradually learned from the sun and the steel the secret of how to pursue words with the body (and not merely pursue the body with words), the two poles within me began to maintain a balance, and the generator of my mind, so to speak, switched form a direct to an alternating current. My mind devised a system that by installing within the self two mutually antipathetic elements — two elements that flowed alternately in opposite directions — gave the appearance of inducing an ever wider split in the personality, yet in practice created at each moment a living balance that was constantly being destroyed and brought backt o life again. The embracing of a dual polarity within the self and the acceptance of contradiction and the collision — such was my own blend of "art and action".(pp. 48-49)

(version dates from 1980)