Customer Reviews

Mishima: A Vision of the Void

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As a fan of Mishima Yukiyos work, I hoped that the other two reviwers of this book were mistaken, perhaps close minded, or otherwise wrong. However, they are right on target. Part biography and part "literary analysis", the book does neither well. The first half of the book is almost exclusively summaries of Mishima's major novels, with lengthy qoutes and plot summaries with no serious analysis. As a reader I get the feeling that Yourcenar wishes to bath in the literary sucess of Mishima by retelling his novels. I would be willing to forgive the first half of the book if the second had contained sharp, clear analysis. Instead the book makes wild claims with no support (I particularly enjoyed the line to the effect of "Confessions of a Mask describes all young people in Japan between 15 and 25 after world war 2"). The Sea of Fertility - Mishima's masterpiece - recieved a page of discussion after a length plot summary.

Since I didn't listen to the other reviewers, I hope others will.

This book is of little value to both Mishima fans and novices. The novices will want biographical information, of which Yourcenar gives precious little - sure, all the really important stuff is there, but it's outlined in a very sketchy, couldn't-be-bothered way - and certainly far less than either John Nathan or Henry Scott-Stokes. The fans will want information that isn't available anywhere else, of which there is none whatsoever in this book. So what does Yourcenar talk about? The literature, primarily. That would be good, if not for one thing - Yourcenar is an author herself, and she seems to be out to prove her own literary worth. Thus, the book is made of torturedly "sophisticated" sentences, bizarre assertions of the nature of "those who love life love death the most" (not an exact quote, but a very accurate paraphrase), and of course, some namedropping. Yourcenar mentions D'Annunzio, Cocteau, Lautreamont, and others, with very little cause. She also knocks down a few straw men here and there (randomly, in one footnote, she spontaneously accuses nameless people of accusing Mishima of being a snob, and proceeds to prove them wrong), and once proudly proclaims that Mishima was a reader of her own literary work. Bully for her, I guess.

The literary analysis really isn't that good, either. Admittedly, a cursory read may have the effect of helping people see why they like or dislike Mishima's writing, even if Yourcenar's own musings on the matter aren't very inspiring, but it really doesn't say anything. Some of the man's works are barely given a mention - the "discussions" of After the Banquet and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea take up about a page, combined. Others are given whole chapters, but even then, there is little serious attempt at character analysis - for instance, Ying Chan, the doomed beauty of The Temple of Dawn, is described as "careless" or "thoughtless" or something to that effect, with no justification for this whatsoever, and no further attempt is made to understand her. The part dealing with The Decay of the Angel is effective, but only because it makes the reader remember that incredible novel - it is Mishima who is responsible for the effectiveness, and not Yourcenar.

So what's Yourcenar's point? Apparently, that Mishima had a special vision of a "Buddhist Void" unique to him that inscrutably exhorted him to commit suicide. That's about it. To this end, she gives probably a lot more attention than is necessary to some of Mishima's lesser, later political works - but almost none, paradoxically, to his essay Sun and Steel. This is why she glosses over biographical details - because in her opinion, they have little to no bearing on Mishima's life. A few anecdotes, such as the "green snake" incident, are related with much self-conscious weightiness, as if they held some kind of magical key to Mishima's work. All of these anecdotes are also related by either Nathan or Scott-Stokes in their respective biographies with much less sophomoric interpretations. Yourcenar continues with a rhapsodic summary of the story "Patriotism," which has no value to any reader who has read the source material, and only ends up conveying the impression that Yourcenar is far more fond of blood and death than Mishima ever was. She ends with a poetization of Mishima's last day, in which she waxes eloquent and ecstatic on the subject of ritual disembowelment and decapitation. This culminates in the last paragraph of the book, a completely unnecessary and grotesque extended metaphor that says nothing and isn't even worth reading.

When the book doesn't make goofy conclusions from its superficial collection of facts, it resorts to just praising Mishima's work. On this there is no argument from me, as I am a big fan of Mishima and agree wholeheartedly with Yourcenar's praise. However, her book contributes nothing new to the exciting field of praise, either. Truth be told, I have a hard time understanding why this book was even written. At 150 pages, it's barely even a book; it fails as a biography and as literary criticism. Even at its best, it just isn't very good; you'd do much, much better with either of the two primary Mishima biographies.

Having recently finished Spring Snow, which perked in me a keen interest in learning more about Yukio Mishima, I made the mistake of picking up the first book about the author that I came upon, which happened to be this slender volume. Granted, given the size of the book, I didn't expect it to be the definitive biography of the man. But somehow this book managed to disappoint. It somehow failed to deliver on even my modest expectations.

The first problem is that I don't know exactly what the book is. It begins at the beginning of his life and ends with his death, yet it's not a biography. The author makes some interesting observations and provides some insight to a number of his books, but it's too inconsistently done, with a few sentences used to discuss some books and pages for others, to be considered literary criticism. It's sort of like an essay, ( I noticed after I finished reading it that the dust jacket claims it's an essay) yet it doesn't have a premise, or at least not a firm one, and doesn't end with a conclusion other than Mishima's death. So the result is that I never really felt grounded in this book.

Further, sometimes her writing is annoying, like when she lectures us about fascism in the West, (displaying either a lack of historical education or a skewed interpretation based on political biases) or when she tells us Mishima liked one of her novels.

I won't say I hated it as much as other reviewers, because given the subject, there were points in the book that interested me. But next time when I want to read a biography, I'll go right to the authoritative ones.

Thank you for a well-priced book in good condition. Thanks also for the prompt delivery.

MISHIMA: A VISION OF THE VOID is a peculiar essay on the life and work of the Japanese writer by Marguerite Yourcenar, a French author best known for her "Memoires d'Hadrien". The book consists of 151 pages in which Yourcenar waxes lyrically about Mishima's growth as an author, some of the themes of his books, and the persistent pessimism that seems to have led to his suicide.

This book is very weird, I can only marvel that a publisher initially accepted it, nevermind that it has been translated into at least English and Romanian. It offers no surprising perspective on Mishima's work, and cannot be used to get a brief plot summary of an unknown work, since it assumes that one has read Mishima's oeuvre (at least those works translated into foreign languages). One cannot gain from it any interesting facts about Mishima's life, and in fact Yourcenar assumes that one has already read the biographies of Scott-Stokes and Nathan.

MISHIMA: A VISION OF THE VOID may have value as a tribute by one author to another, but it should have been published in limited quantities as a pamphlet, instead of being pitched as a meaningful contribution to Mishima criticism. If you love Mishima, delight in his works and enjoy the two major biographies. Give Yourcenar's work a pass.

Yukio Mishima is clearly an enigmatic, unique, bizarre, and interesting artist. I read many of his novels years ago but little of his personal history. This brief biography by Marguerite Yourcenor gives the basics of the author's life. Yourcenor's occasional self-referential comments do not really detract from this biography but neither do they add to it. Reading this biography certainly doesn't make me want to run out and buy any of Yourcenor's novels. In any case, the pace of the biography builds up nicely to the finale of Mishima's ritual suicide in an almost comic close to his life. The beauty and symbolism of Mishima's final act are layed bare in visceral physicality by Yourcenor. While the overall writing style of the biographer is tepid, the brief duration and fact filled chronology of this biography make it a fair source for those wanting exposure to the esential biographical facts of Yukio Mishima's life.