Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend - Softcover

Ross, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007228112 ISBN 13: 9780007228119

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2006

Synopsis

The quest for Mishima’s sword – the stunning new book from Christopher Ross, Sunday Times top 10 bestselling author of Tunnel Visions.

Yukio Mishima was three times nominated for the Nobel Prize and regarded as Japan's leading contemporary writer. In 1970, he committed ritual suicide by disembowelment and decapitation, his head cut off by a 16th-century sword made by a master smith. He left a wife and two children, and a note on his desk in his study read: 'Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever.'

The sword was returned to his family. There is no trace of it now. Christopher Ross will try to find it, while investigating the contradictions of a uniquely complex character. While he goes on his journey, he will reflect – as he did so well in Tunnel Visions – on what the sword meant to Mishima and on the questions posed by his extraordinary death. Is a real man a man of action or a man of words?

Mishima was also a film director, a composer, and a body-builder who formed his own private militia. He was the first civilian to be allowed to fly in an Airforce jet and circled the globe seven times. He was happily married and also a homosexual who modelled for bizarre photographs featuring martyrdom and suicide. Four members of his militia helped him to his death. All were dressed in sumptuous dress uniforms. Mishima was beheaded by a 25-year-old who was probably his lover.

He had decided to die the death of a Samurai. What is this Samurai code and could it teach us anything today? Christopher Ross will travel around Japan, talking to Mishima's friends and family, critics and political activists, Yakuza gangsters, bosozoku ('speed tribe') bikers, following the writer's traces and visiting places in search of an understanding. Mishima's Sword is an unusual philosophical quest; a travel book, but also an account of Ross's interior journey – superimposed on the mind of a man dead for thirty years.

About this title

Review:

PRAISE FOR TUNNEL VISIONS:

‘This is one of the most original and surprising books that I have read for years: a reflection on city life by an unusual mind that proves just how extraordinary the ordinary can be.’ Christopher Matthew, Daily Mail, (Critics Choice)

‘Ross has produced a truly brilliant book.’ Gary Younge, Guardian

‘Very funny... a parable of our times.’ Iain Sinclair, Daily Telegraph

‘ . . this unique, utterly original little philosophical tome. This is pop philosophy in its best sense: a kind of subterranean Sophie's World, but more adult, darker-edged, its modest wisdom harder won.’ Literary Review

From the Author:

Q: Why Mishima?
A: In writing about Mishima I realized I could explore issues that matter to me. He was a great writer, disciplined and committed to his ideas about art. Yet he was also a Japanese nihilist struggling to find a way out from under the crush of a meaningless universe and the particular rapid decay of his own national culture under relentless assault from the West.

Q: And did he succeed?
A: He believed that ‘reality’ was fluid and that the overlap between imagination and the world was an illusion, that no real distinction need be made. He sort of went along with Nietzsche’s solution, the idea of self-becoming, willing yourself into a persona, revealing your own qualities, helping you lead a life characterized by strength and creativity. But this is only one way of looking at it. He was also keen to avoid the physical decay of aging – he told Nagisa Oshima the film director that he was terrified of cancer - and therefore his suicide seems inevitable.

Q: All this seems, well, a bit humourless.
A: Yes, it is not a bundle of laughs. Although in my book there are plenty of funny moments and I too adopted a writing persona. One reviewer called me a nerd’s nerd. I am not really. I felt obliged to enter into character in working on this book, and I hope a closer reading will reveal that I do not take that many of Mishima’s notions all that seriously. I am being ironic. I feel I may have expressed this a little bit too subtly though.

Q: The book is written in short paragraphs.
A: Yes. I had in mind a Japanese essay style called zuihitsu, which means to follow the (writing) brush. The idea is that each section is in some way triggered by something previously written. It might be a word, an idea, a colour, a noise; but the link, like an echo, is there. This sort of free association was thought to be an honest and non-contrived way of writing. It resembles a cinemagraphic jump cut technique with an extra element. Some readers will get it, others will find it disorientating. But I wanted to structure the book according to Japanese aesthetics, as a kind of tribute to Mishima.

Q: Many biographers, having spent time with their subject, end up hating or at least disliking their quarry. Do you?
A: I found myself going through stages. I suspect that I am one of very few people who have read everything Mishima wrote and just about every biography and memoir about him. In Japan there is a mini Mishima industry and new titles are published every year, so it was a struggle to wade through this stuff. The human mind is a simplifying mechanism and tries to take instant positions. Hence the reaction to a life which ended so dramatically is often extreme. Dismissing Mishima as a madman. Or a grotesque. Or a mad misogynist. Or a self hating homosexual masochist. I found myself trying on each of these ‘snap-shot’ positions as I worked. But now, having stopped writing (you never finish a book) I have arrived at a more considered opinion.

Q: And how would you sum Mishima up then?
A: He was a great writer. I would advise anyone new to Mishima in English translation to start with his short stories. I particularly like ‘Acts of Worship,’ the title story is a masterpiece of concision and characterization. He set an example of how to work hard. He was largely uninterested in the world, other than as a means to understand his primary subject, himself. Indeed, he was so self-focused that it is possible to make a strong case that he was a narcissist in a pathological sense. We can only speculate why. He had a dysfunctional childhood and was fought over by his dominant grandmother and his mother. This kind of emotional tug of war is probably highly damaging to a sensitive child. He also had the courage of his convictions. Many people, including some of my reviewers, point out in a spirit of criticism that Mishima’s seppuku (formal suicide by cutting his stomach) was botched. That it took four hacks to behead him etc. Well the facts are undeniable, but it is worth pointing out that he did cut his own stomach, something none of his critics could manage, I would guess. It is a mark of strength as well as hinting at a position, for modern minds, on the madness spectrum.

Q: The book is about more than Mishima?
A: Yes. I have used Mishima’s end as a frame story to investigate other related topics. I have explained about bushido, the Japanese samurai code; about the processes by which a Japanese sword is manufactured; about michi, or Ways, the idea of a craft or martial discipline being a means to self development or at least self revelation. I hope too that I have shown something of contemporary Japanese life.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0007228112
• ISBN 13: 9780007228119
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272