Customer Reviews

Sun & Steel (Japan's Modern Writers)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In Sun and Steel, Yukio Mishima, one of Japan's most important writers, offers an intimate look at how he reconciled his life with the creative process.

From the outset, it is clear that Mishima advocated an "active" creativity and that he held in contempt those who used words to convey experiences yet denied their own heroic capabilities.

For Mishima, art, action and creativity had to embrace the tragic. To be a hero meant sacrifice of the highest order and suffering life's strangest and most difficult problems. "He who dabbles in words can create tragedy, wrote Mishima, "but cannot participate in it."

Mishima begins Sun and Steel by telling us that, for much of his life, he held an unnatural view of the world, due to the fact that his awareness of words preceded his awareness of his body. This isolated him, he says, and he spent much time at his bedroom window simply watching the world go by.

"Words," says Mishima, "are a medium that reduces the world to an abstraction...and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded, too."

Mishima explains how he attempted to overcome this "corrosive function of words" with physical discipline of the body. Because his early years were suffused with words, as an adult, he seeks balance in life with a preoccupation with the physical. His body, he says, came to be a metaphor of the human condition and allowed him to directly experience the tragic in life.

Life, says, Mishima, can be intellectualized, but the only thing that imposes dignity on life is the element of mortality that lies within. Here we have the key to both Mishima's writing and his own life and death.

As Mishima continues to impose a rigorous discipline over both his mind and body, he comes to realize that the mind and body are truly inseparable. "I was driven to the conclusion that the 'I' in question corresponded precisely with that physical space that I occupied."

In taking up the practice of Kendo, Mishima comes to the realization that he desires neither victory nor defeat unless he also has conflict. The battle is emphasized, not the goal.

Anyone can conquer what lies beneath him, says Mishima, and it is the process of overcoming higher and higher obstacles that brings one into the sphere of the tragic.

Mishima finally comes to the conclusion that, "The most appropriate type of daily life...was a day-to-day world destruction." Mishima had thus become a nihilist, a hero who could look death in the eye and choose to act anyway.

Although seemingly severe and extreme in outlook, Sun and Steel reveals Mishima to be a man who advocated moderation instead. His desire to create is balanced with a desire to nothingness; he lives his life in an area that is inaccessible to words or action alone.

Those who have read Mishima's fiction and found it inaccessible will benefit greatly by reading Sun and Steel. Those who have read and enjoyed his words will, with Sun and Steel, arrive at a deeper and fuller understanding of this complex and fascinating man.

Had we only been able to read these words prior to November 1970, we might have been able to both understand and appreciate the circumstances surrounding Mixhima's tragically heroic death. It is still not too late.

This book is a literary type that was once common in Japan, the self-obsessive partial memoir. But Mishima's style, tone, and content are absolutely unique.

He writes about the relation between world and word, body and mind or spirit. But to me, the most interesting aspect of this book, and Mishima's whole outlook is something that's often overlooked. It is this, he could not stand ugliness. He shrank from (his own perception of) ugliness as we would from a rabid rat. So then, how did he define beauty and ugliness? You may call it shallow but no matter, this book makes no apologies: beauty or ugliness lie in physical appearance, body and face.

To most of us there are many kinds of beauty, and maybe that multi-perception keeps us going - we see or imagine the beauty of inner virtue, selfless giving, artistic projection, humility or humor and so on. A wide expansive definition.

But there's room on your bookshelf for somebody who takes an uncompromising view: beauty is the beauty of your body and your appearance. While it can be crafted and guided by external method (who knows what Mishima would have thought of the cosmetic surgery craze now sweeping China), ultimately physical beauty to him is the only important projection of the soul.

The insanely monomaniacal American football coach Vince Lombardi once said "Winning isn't everything - it's the only thing". This book, despite all its meandering and subtle threads, is really saying just that, about beauty - it's the only thing. And Mishima, at mid-life, was losing all illusions about attaining or retaining any personal beauty.

Of course what sheds the interesting backlight on this book for most readers is Mishima's dramatic seppuku at Ichigaya Japan self-defense force headquarters. (Reminds me of the wit who stated, when informed of Sylvia Plath's suicide, "Good career move".) People read this book to try to unravel the mystery of it.

But in light of what I've said above, about beauty and Mishima's uniquely narrow definition of it, this book leaves no mystery to his action. Just as Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray slashed the ugliness accumulated on his horribly aging portrait, Mishima, lacking a magic painting, did just the same to his own body - sentenced it to death for the crimes of aging and ugliness.

It is entirely summed up by the following single line from 'Sun and Steel':

"I had already lost the morning face that belongs to youth alone."

Sun and Steel is most accessable if you are already familiar with the life of Mishima. It is his most honest, unadorned writing. It is filled with his death romanticism and also with his frantic quest for beauty, strength, action and his obsession with aging and longevity. It is a passionate piece of writing, consisting of one paragraph around 100 pages in length. His fetish for militarism is evident towards the end of the book, and he begins with an almost embarrassed admission of his age and stature as a "mature' writer, reflecting his obsession with eternal youth and glorious death. To sum up, this book is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it is quite likely the most honest and naked autobiographical writing ever.

This isn't Mishima's best work. Mostly because he is too close to the subject. At once a guide book on his beliefs and how he transformed himself from "bookish" into a physical specimen. But you can see his troubled focus shift from the internal Mishima to the external Mishima.

To me this is an explanation of something even Mishima doesnt understand. More of a catharsis of the self than a clearly defined work.

Many of the descriptions of Mishima's internal evaluations sound almost as if he was dealing with aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder. Which would make his style of death even more ironic and symbolic.

Don't get me wrong, this is true Mishima -- makes us think and examine ourselves even as he talks of himself.

Any work by Mishima is worth reading and adding to your collection. It took me years to find a copy, now it is available for everyone -- I wouldn't hesitate to buy or read.

-Mike

Every author should write at least one of these books of personal reflection. This is not the only place you can get a glimpse of the inner workings of Mishima's mind ("Confessions of a Mask" and "Patriotism" are good examples).

Of course, this is assuming the book accurately reflects the author's views. If you have read Mishima biographies such as Stokes' "Life and Death of Yukio Mishima" you might agree that "Sun and Steel" is a true reflection of the author's feelings. Otherwise, you might not have a good frame of reference.

It's a good idea not to make this the first of Mishima's works that you read (the aforementioned biography and "Confessions of A Mask" are suitable prerequisites). However, it is an interesting work in its own right.

My main reason for not giving this book 5 stars is that I was longing for more depth into his character than could be provided in so short a work; but maybe that's just because of my fascination with the author's life.

Mishima's life and philosophy is something which conventional thinkers seem to find frightening enough to label "mysterious." Or perhaps they're engaging in some kind of rictus orientalist trope in using such words. The fact that this book exists indicates Mishima isn't mysterious. Mishima's motivations are much like the motivations of many other men, across many cultures. He lays his ideas out logically, clearly, and in a fair amount of detail. I'm not surprised some people continue to find him mysterious: someone who isn't a man, literally or figuratively, will have a hard time with it.

Mishima wished to live a proper life, rather than the decadent urban life of the mind he chose early in life. The proper life for a man is that of the hero. Mishima knew that heroism involved having the body of a hero. This book is about his quest for physical perfection, and how it relates to a life of actions. You're probably not going to understand any of this unless you're a philosophical man who has pushed his body to the limits. If you're a smug cube monkey or a college professor, unless you lift weights and get into fights to test your mettle, you have about as much chance of understanding Mishima as I do of understanding the psychological and physiological intricacies of menstruation. Rejoice though, cube monkeys: even though this book will always remain opaque to you, the modern world is yours.

No, this isn't Mishima's best work. It is however, his most personal, and perhaps his most important work. No, he didn't kill himself because he was an aging fairy who wasn't pretty any more, like some numskull said in a review above. That's an object lesson in how one can read and comprehend the words, and not understand anything, because you haven't lived the same kind of life. You certainly don't need to read "confessions of a mask" to understand this book. You just need to be self reflective and have lived to physical extremes.

Who should read this? Weight lifters who like philosophy, anyone who fights for a living, people who Nietzsche was writing for, serious martial artists, political radicals are the types of people who could get something out of this book. Pretty much everyone else might as well try their hands at Swahili poetry, or becoming a Kumis taster.

Sun and Steel is a book-length essay which describes Mishima's effort to recover himself from the "corrosive" nature of words through developing his physical beauty and prowess. On the most superficial level it is about bodybuilding. On another level, it is about a man attempting to reclaim his identity later in life, and doing so with discipline and knowledge of the nature of time.

I am honestly not sure that this book is worth reading unless you are generally familiar with Mishima's biography and work. I would recommend that people interested in this book first read Confessions of a Mask and at least one of the novels.

The exception to this recommendation would be readers looking for specific work on bodybuilding in literature. As I side note, I found it interesting to note the similarities between what Kathy Acker and Mishima had to say on the subject. (Wouldn't Mishima have been horrified by the comparison?)

The essay seems written more quickly than other works in the Mishima canon. I had trouble engaging with it at times, and found it more interesting biographically than as a work in its own right.

The book is bound with an Epilogue called F104 and a poem called Icarus. The Best translation felt competent, although there were some noticable typographic errors which I hope were corrected in later editions of the book.

Whoa! I can hardly say anything bad about this book, except that the author must have been at least a little nuts to write it. The passion and honesty with which he writes about his own (self-diagnosed) shortcomings, as well as his obsessive attempts to remedy them, are pleasantly eerie. In an age when physical valour counts for little, and in a discipline--literature--where so many practicioners despise the cultivation one's own flesh, this book is an original. Highly entertaining.

This book is a series of essays and recollections from a writer that would rather kill himself than betray his beliefs. If you ever saw the movie "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters," most of the dialogue comes from this book. The opening line is the opening line in the movie. He recounts his life and his transformation of being a wimp into a modern day samurai literary warrior. At times it is a difficult read and then you get to the very Zen-like (I hate using that phrase) line: "For me muscles had one of the most desirable qualities of all: their function was precisely opposite to that of words." Japanese artists make their greatest impact with their subtlety, at times there is none in this book and at other times it is too overwhelming. For a writer that gave his life for his art, this book helps answer why.

Sun and Steel is on its face a story about physical and ideological transformation through the realization and experience of bodybuilding and martial arts. For westerners in the post-Schwarzenegger world, "sun and steel" conjures images of ye olde California body-building culture, and Mishima's work has some aesthetic connection with that, too. However, it needs to be remembered that sun and steel in the Japanese context have very different meanings, referring both to the Japanese artistic and martial traditions and to Imperialism and militarism. While it is not the topic per se of this book, the meaning of the book is the conflation in Mishima's mind of these three things--the physical body, traditional Japanese aesthetics, and WWII-era totalitarianism. While it is not quite fair to call Mishima a fascist, one does need to answer the question of why Mishima's costumes for photos included loin clothes, swords, and modern military uniforms, but not traditional armor. Or why his books are about soldiers and martial artists but he didn't write historical novels of the Edo or Sengoku periods. Or why he studied karate, kendo, and iaido rather than enrolling in a traditional school of martial arts. Or why he took up western-style body-building rather than engaging in traditional Japanese physical culture. In discussing the Shield Society, his private army, Mishima described a triangular relationship between comrades and the Emperor, where the Emperor acted as a mystical bond between men. And in an interview, the headmaster of a school of traditional bujutsu described the emphasis on death as a modern and decadent misunderstanding of the samurai, who valued life, as they valued service and success over romantic death.

Sun and Steel is a fascinating book, eccentric if not unique. And it will probably be enjoyed by anyone seriously at odds with modern times. But it is not written by a true reactionary so much as by an aesthetic who remained true to the visions of his youth. Mishima's opposition is to the democracy that forcibly replaced the mid-20th century Imperial system, not to the modernity that supplanted Japan's traditional values, arts, and politics.