Harriet Sergeant

Much possessed by death

On the 25 November, 1970 after a failed coup d’état, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima stuck a knife into his belly, then had his head cut off with his own sword.

Twenty years later I enjoyed a brief flirtation with a member of Mishima’s private militia, the Tate no Kai or Shield Society. Matsumura, like Mishima, proved a series of contradictions. A right-wing nationalist who owned a coffee shop in the centre of Tokyo, he had spent the 1960s cracking left-wing students over the head with a drain- pipe. His best friend, Morita, Mishima’s second-in-command, had beheaded the writer before killing himself. But Matsumura also spoke fluent English, enjoyed arguing with me and baked an excellent cheesecake. He railed against the West and dismissed democracy as ‘just another attempt to colonise us’. Like Mishima he believed happiness came with living with the possibility of a violent death. He had been born in the wrong age to be a samurai and die for his lord. He scorned Mishima for faking a cause. Instead he climbed mountains, ‘always beyond my ability’. Sometimes he spent the night on ledges where a single turn could send the sleeper hurtling into the depths. ‘The danger makes me ecstatic. Can you understand that?’ He shook his head. ‘I believe no Westerner can. Westerners want life at any price.’

Christopher Ross in his new book, Mishima’s Sword explores just that contradiction. At the time of his spectacular death at the headquarters of the Eastern Defence Forces in Tokyo, Yukio Mishima was Japan’s foremost man of letters. He had been nominated three times for the Nobel Prize. He had written 40 novels, hundreds of essays and 20 volumes of short stories as well as 18 major and many minor plays, all performed in his lifetime.

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