Find out more about Episode 32 of the Read Literature podcast on the episode page.
- Link to listen
- Notes and sources
- Ways to support the podcast
Read Japanese Literature is supporting earthquake recovery efforts in Wajima City, Japan, especially among artisans working in its traditional Japanese urushi industry.
You can find out how to help the Matsuzawa Urushi Workshop’s Phoenix project at tinyurl.com/urushirecovery.
(U-R-U-S-H-I recovery)
And I’ll explain more about the project at the end of the episode.
This is Read Japanese Literature. My name is Alison Fincher. Read Japanese Literature is a podcast about Japanese fiction and some of its best works. All the works we discuss are available in translation, so you can read along if you want. And you can find out more at ReadJapaneseLiterature.com.
This is part two of our two-part episode about misogyny and Yukio Mishima—if you haven’t listened to part one, I strongly suggest you start there.
Part one begins with a little bit of context about the history of attitudes about women in Japanese culture. We move on to the way those attitudes about women have played into modern Japanese literature—including the work of some of Japan’s most celebrated authors.
In part two, we take a look at Yukio Mishima. We’ll include content from his I-Novel Confessions of a Mask. (An I-Novel is a sort of pseudo-biographical account of an author’s life.) We’ll pull biographical details and examples of misogyny from many of his other novels. And I’ll offer up some of my own theories about Mishima and gender—for whatever they’re worth.
A few quick content warnings for both episodes:
- This episode will, obviously, include a lot of examples of misogyny.
- And there will be two references to rape in two different novels.
The rest of the content warnings apply mostly to part two:
- #1. There will also be allusions to internalized homophobia.
- #2. Yukio Mishima’s sincerely held beliefs are a little hard to puzzle out, as we’ll discuss, but the man said some fascist things. It is never my intention to promote fascism—and Mishima’s political beliefs aren’t really a part of our discussion today.
- #3, Finally, Yukio Mishima’s life story ends with his suicide.
You won’t be able to easily jump around any of these issues—if they are a problem, it’s probably better to skip part two.
Patreon content in this two-parter includes:
- a lot more about the role of women in Japanese history
- And more biography from Mishima’s life
Of course, the main reason to join Patreon is to support the podcast.
For this episode, Patreon supporters helped purchase an important biography of Mishima—thank you.
You can find out more at patreon.com/readjapaneseliterature
Let me pause here to explain why I’ve chosen to talk about Yukio Mishima in my episode about misogyny in Japanese literature.
First, because Misima is one of the best-known Japanese authors in English translation. And one of my purposes in this episode is to call attention to problematic views about women among some of the best-known Japanese authors in English translation.
In some circles of English-speaking readers, Dazai and Mishima have almost cult-like followings. It’s important that the authors’ fans know what they’re signing up for.
Second, because Mishima thought misogyny was a good and admirable thing! In 1954, he published an entire essay titled “Discourse on Misogyny”. I’m going to quote from Michiko Wilson’s partial translation in her essay, “Three Portraits of Women in Mishima’s Novels”.
I think that “misogynist” or “woman hater” is an admirable title.
He goes on to say, “It would be plain audacity for me to claim such a venerable title, and I have never avowed myself to be a misogynist.”
Wilson then goes on to summarize, in six points, Mishima’s other complaints about women from the “Discourse on Misogyny”.
- Women are inferior and stupid.
- They are incapable of grappling with abstract ideas.
- They can never perfect the art of music and architecture.
- They lack a sense of restraint—and to Mishima this is especially a problem because that sense of restraint is necessary for Noh drama.
- They have taught man the art of lying.
- Their social advancement—and remember that’s very timely in 1954—has brought forth the corruption of art and morals, thereby binding man as a mere sexual being.
I’ll clarify that, when it comes to Mishima, you can never be completely sure that he actually means what he’s saying.
Yukio Mishima described his second novel, Confessions of a Mask, as an I-Novel. In Confessions of a Mask, he explains a feeling of “masquerading as a normal person”—behind the facade, he is “becoming the sort of person who can’t believe in anything except the counterfeit”. I think that “mask” is something we have to keep in mind when we think about Mishima’s biography—and about his beliefs.
All of us present a front to the world. That’s possibly even more necessary for celebrities than it is for people who can live more privately. But Mishima—the authentic Mishima—is notoriously difficult to track down. There are moments I wonder whether he was always sure of the difference.
All of this is to say that I’m going to do my best to present Mishima, but something like objectivity is even more difficult for Mishima than it is for other authors.
Even something like his sexuality that seems knowable from his writing and evidence from his personal life is still openly debated in some circles. (I’m not going to engage in the debate—it’s pretty clear Mishima slept with men.)
We’re also not going to do our normal Read Japanese Literature “thing” and close-read any particular Mishima story. I’m going to include lines from Confessions of a Mask that might (or might not) give us some idea of Mishima’s thoughts, especially during his early life. And I’ll include some examples of misogynistic ideas from his novels as we go along.
The man who came to be known as Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925—his birth name was Kimitake Hiraoka. His father was a government official. His grandmother was from the samurai class, which had been dissolved after the Meiji Restoration. Mishima seems to have really loved this samurai family legacy
Mishima’s upbringing was… kinda bizarre. When he was 49 days old, that grandmother with samurai ancestry took him from his mother and moved him into her bedroom. She was a sickly woman, but she had Mishima sleep next to her sickbed until he was 12 years old. Even then, he still had to stay with her once a week. He joked, “At the age of 12 I had a true-love sweetheart, aged sixty”.
His grandmother also forbade him from playing with the neighborhood boys so he wouldn’t learn “bad things”. His only playmates were the maids who worked in his household, the nurses who helped him when he was sickly (he was not a healthy kid), and three specially chosen girls who could set an example of good behavior. In Mishima’s words he was only “called upon to be a boy, a male” when he went to visit his cousins.
Homosexuality has an interesting history in Japan—but not the same kind of legally-complicated one it has in countries where Christianity is the dominant religion. (I’m not trying to dismiss the very real legal hurdles facing the LGBTQ+ community in Japan today. They’re fighting a lot of battles over marriage, adoption, and trans rights. I’m more making an observation about a 2000 year pattern.)
I’m probably due for an episode on homosexuality in Japanese literature, but to summarize… It’s pretty clear that male-male love was acceptable during the Heian Period. During the samurai-dominated Warring States and Edo Periods, older samurai often initiated younger samurai into warrior culture—sometimes that relationship was sexual. Also during the Edo Period, male Noh and kabuki players frequently had male and female sexual partners. All of this was more-or-less accepted within Japanese religious traditions and under Japanese law.
During the Meiji Period, Western influences made homosexuality more of a taboo. Anal sex was briefly outlawed between 1873 and 1883. But it was more the gradual militarization of Japanese culture during the first half of the 20th century that made the Japanese start to harshly criticize men who were too “girly” and judge those who were suspected homosexuals. But, again, homosexuality wasn’t illegal or even as harshly judged in Japan as it was in most Christian countries.
At least according to Confessions of a Mask, Mishima was a very young man when he realized he was attracted to other boys and eventually men. His first experience masturbating was when he saw a picture of a painting of St. Sebastian by Guido Reni. (This is actually not an uncommon story among gay men. St. Sebastian is a strikingly erotic subject for people with a certain set of sexual desires. You can find a link on the episode page to see what I’m talking about.)
Confessions goes on to describe the sorts of boys and men young Mishima desired, especially a “delinquent” classmate named Omi with a strong, maturing body and abundant body hair.
Mishima was still in school when his teachers helped him publish his first story, The Forest in Full Flower, in a literary magazine called Bungei Bunka. This was in 1941. His teachers helped choose his pen name, Yukio Mishima. It was based on the train station they passed through on a trip to the countryside that winter.
But in 1941, the country was already at war. By 1944, Mishima’s last year at school, many people in Japan were struggling for basic survival.
Mishima had other things to think about, like an opportunity to publish his first book—a collection of The Forest in Full Flower and some of his other stories he had composed. If you’ve listened to our episode on “Japanese Literature in WWII,” you might remember that a severe paper shortage made publishing in Japan in 1944 nearly impossible. But Mishima wasn’t daunted—he [wasn’t] a man who was easily daunted. He found his way around the paper shortage by providing his own paper. He had paper through one of his father’s business connections.
He also found his way around severe censoring by convincing the censors that his stories would help “maintain and preserve the literary traditions of our Imperial Nation”.
The original print run of this new book was 4000 copies. Those 4000 copies sold out in just a week. As I’ve said, Mishima was a genius. But also… there was virtually no other literature to buy at the time that wasn’t about the war. There was a lot of pent-up demand.
Mishima graduated in late summer in 1944.. He followed his father’s wishes and enrolled at Tokyo University to study law. He also spent 1944 courting the sister of a friend. Her name was Kuniko Mitani; he renames her Sonoko Kusano in Confessions of a Mask. In the novel (and probably in real life), he finds himself drawn to her beauty and purity. And he tries very hard to fall in love with her. He kisses her, but can’t ultimately summon any sexual desire. So he can see her beauty—he just can’t find himself physically attracted to it. He finds himself trapped, but tells her older brother that he has no intention of marrying her.
Today, we’d describe his thoughts in this second half of Confessions of a Mask as “internalized homophobia”. Honestly, the degree of self-hatred Mishima describes is painful to read.
Eventually, Kuniko married someone else. This is described in Confessions of a Mask. The events must have been occurring almost as Mishima was writing about them, but you can also read about them in some of Mishima’s biographies.
Mishima seems to have felt betrayed. In Confessions, even Mishima seems to realize that doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s almost like he’s more upset he didn’t have more power over her? She didn’t pine over him long enough? Regardless, some biographers read some of his novels in the early 1950s as revenge fantasies against Kuniko.
In early 1945, Mishima received a draft notice for the Imperial Japanese Army. You might expect a man who spent the final 10 years of his life devoted to masculinity and the military would be happy to serve. But this turned out to be an ambiguous moment for Mishima.
The day of his physical examination he had bronchitis. He allowed the examiner to conclude, falsely, that he was in the early stages of tuberculosis and therefore unfit to serve.
And by “allowed the examiner to conclude,” I mean that, at least according to Confessions, he lied about his symptoms. He said to the examiner that “[he’d] been having a slight fever for over half a year, that [his] shoulder was painfully stiff, that [he] spit blood…”
For what it’s worth, the regiment he would have entered was dispatched to the Philippines and mown down. If he had been drafted that day, he would almost certainly have died.
Mishima thought he had been prepared to die. In the Confessions, it’s clear Mishima had spent the entire war expecting to be killed one way or another. But when he found out he was “unfit to serve,” “[his” legs carried [him] running toward something that in any case was not Death—whatever it was, it was not Death…” When he reflected on this, he concluded that “the only thing that had made it at all possible for [him] to look forward to army life was the firm conviction— …common to all men—that [he] alone could never die”.
Nevertheless, the story he said he preferred to tell himself was that he was a “person who had been forsaken even by Death”.
As you may well know, the war ended in 1945. Mishima’s life goes on…
In 1949, Mishima published his second full-length novel, Confessions of a Mask.
Not all of Mishima’s novels were intended to be literary masterpieces. Until almost the end of his life, Mishima devoted about a third of his time to writing popular literature—you know… the kind he was likely to make actual money publishing? As a matter of fact, he published a lot of these stories serially in women’s magazines. One of the first was Thirst for Love, published in 1950.
The heroine—or anti-heroine—of Thirst for Love is a woman named Etsuko. Her philandering husband dies of typhus. She gets stuck in a sexual relationship with her father-in-law. And then she falls in love with the gardener.
There are some differences of opinion about Etusko and whether her depiction is sexist.
To me, there are moments early in the novel that Etsuko feels extremely real? Mishima sympathetically describes how she feels when she is “caressed by [the] skeleton” (her father-in-law) without really knowing what the alternative might be. He thoughtfully describes how she might think about caring for an unfaithful husband on his deathbed.
But then she falls in lust with the gardener—Saburo. And Mishima treats the reader to a pages-long description of a savage village dance. Etsuko gets caught up in the event and throws herself into a clump of wild, sweaty, half-naked men to get to Saburo. She grabs him so hard with her nails that she draws blood. He doesn’t even notice. The book—and Etsuko—continue to get more violent from there.
It’s not so much that women can’t be into violence. They can! It’s that there’s this dramatic shift, not only in her character, but also in the tone of the entire novel.
I should add that, according to Donald Keene, Mishima told his friends that Etusko was really a man! The entire plot shift makes more sense if Etsuko ceases to be a woman, and becomes an opportunity for Mishima to write about the kind of male bodies—and violence—that he described his desire for in Confessions of a Mask.
And Etsuko wasn’t the only female character Mishima described in male terms. He described the heroine of his own After the Banquet as a woman with “a masculine decisiveness coupled with a wild feminine fervor”.
Mishima published his novel Forbidden Colors in 1953.
Between 1951-1953, Mishima published I decided early on in drafting this episode that I was not going to go into whether Mishima’s homosexuality played into his misogyny. I feel safe observing that misogyny is a noted issue in the gay community. But it’s just too far out of my knowledge or experience.
I mention that link here because Forbidden Colors also links homosexuality and misogyny. The Japanese title, Kinjiki, is a euphemism for same-sex love. And Forbidden Colors is Mishima’s most explicitly gay novel.
Forbidden Colors is about a respected post-war author who mens a gorgeous young man at one of Japan’s most exclusive spa resorts. The young man is gay, but engaged to a rich and extremely conventional young woman. The author decides to shape the young man into a weapon to wreak his revenge against the entire female sex. And the author succeeds. Some critics consider the novel semi-autobiographical, casting Mishima not as the young man, but as the author.
The mid-1950s brought new changes for Mishima. He was able to travel abroad for the first time. He visited the US, Brazil, France, Italy, and Greece.
Mishima also took up bodybuilding around 1955 and remade himself. (I think it’s safe to conclude that the effort seems to have been as much aesthetic as it was anything else. Mishima always skipped leg day.)
Personally, I think the choice to remake his body went deeper than just his appearance.
Japanese culture traditionally has two models for how to be a man. There’s the effete taoayameburi and the masculine masuraoburi.
If you’ve been with us a long time, you might remember the medieval Japanese ballads about Yoshitsune and Benkei—the heroic young man driven away by the shogun, his brother, and the young man’s burly friend.
Benkei is huge, muscular, hairy, burly, crude… Yoshitsune is fair, refined, elegant—almost feminine. In one account of their story, Benkei first encounters Yoshitsune while Yoshitsune is playing a flute. In another, Yoshitsune is actually disguised as a woman. Nevertheless, they are both famously powerful warriors.
Starting even during WWII, Mishima wrote to his friends and mentors that Japan’s literature needed to match its war making ability—after all what else did a soldier “dashing through the battlefield” have to “count on”.
In the late 1940s, Mishima called on writers of his generation to “‘hone’ its feminine aspect, while for now subduing its masculine aspect, because that is what “[Japan’s] everlasting history of literature continuously teaches”. And he used those same two terms, taoayameburi and masuraoburi.
In some ways, I wonder if Mishima’s life isn’t partially a struggle to reconcile these two elements of Japanese culture within himself.
(I suspect it’s also telling that one of the earliest memories was admiring a medieval knight—only to be disgusted to discover it was a woman… Joan of Arc.)
Growing up, he was much closer to that feminine ideal. His grandmother raised him to love Noh and kabuki. His father called him “girlish” for his love of literature. He barely passed the draft physical and was then declared unfit to serve—even if it was a mistake.
I wonder if his greater emphasis on the military later in life wasn’t, in part, an assertion that Japan had gone too far in the feminine direction. We certainly know, for example, that Mishima considered the constitutional requirements that Mishima could have no offensive military a way of feminizing Japan.
Mishima’s magnum opus, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy begins with Spring Snow, a tale that stars a feminine hero of the Heian type during the Meiji Era. The second volume, Runaway Horses, stars that hero’s reincarnation, a masculine warrior figure during the 1930s, more like a samurai living in the 1930s.
In 1958, Mishima married Yoko, the daughter of a well-known painter. She was twelve years his junior.
Mishima was more-or-less apolitical until 1960, after “the Summer of Rage” in 1960. The Summer of Rage was a coming together of two events into a major turning point in modern Japanese history—(1) the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty and (2) the Mitsui Corporation’s Miike Coal Mine Strike. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets over the course of several months. Protests grew so violent that [US} President Dwight Eisenhower had to cancel a planned visit.
Mishima’s immediate response seems to have been fear for Japan’s traditions. A secondary concern was that Japan’s pacifism was feminizing its men. One of his first publications after the Summer of Rage was 1961’s story “Patriotism”. “Patriotism” is a story about a lieutenant and his wife commit ritual suicide (seppuku) after an historical army mutiny in 1936. The lieutenant is torn between his loyalty to the emperor and to his army comrades.
Mishima’s depiction of the lieutenant’s wife is one of the loveliest and most generous of his depictions of any woman in any of his work that I’m aware of. But also her role is extremely traditional and subservient. All of her actions are determined by her husband’s principles and what her husband wants. It’s probably worth noting that Mishima himself starred as the lieutenant in the film version of “Patriotism”.
In 1962, Mishima published another overtly political novel—but a weird one. Donald Keene describes it as Mishima’s “most unusual novel” and, I think, I probably describe it as my favorite—Beautiful Star. If you think you know Mishima and you haven’t read Beautiful Star, you absolutely should.
Note that North Americans have to get your copy shipped from the UK. Let’s all bully Penguin to release the book in the US and Canada! It was translated into English by Stephen Dodd.
The premise of Beautiful Star is that all four members of a Japanese family have decided they are from different planets in our solar system. They have been born on Earth to prevent humans from destroying themselves in a great nuclear war.
There’s misogyny even here. Nuclear war is a problem because of the world’s leaders’ “effeminate vanity”.
Many of Mishima’s women are very vain. The daughter in Beautiful Star thinks she is from Venus and is no exception. She is characterized by her “comfortable lazy indifference,” the indifference—the indifference the narrator tells us is typical of “a clever, self-satisfied little minx”. And, of course, her beauty gives her “an increasingly disdainful attitude towards the opposite sex”.
Her brother spouts misogynistic viewpoints throughout, such as, “Human girls are all liars”.
In 1968, Mishima published one of his last novels, Life for Sale. In some ways, it seems to revisit the idea from Confessions that Mishima is a man who has been “forsaken even by Death”. I had planned to provide more evidence of misogyny from Life for Sale—I remember enjoying the book a lot on my first reading, but coming away with the impression the book was pretty misogynist. But skimming back through it for this episode, I realized the story was more of a rebellion against heteronormativity—a kind of assertion that everybody should get married to a member of the opposite sex and have babies and live this normal life that society expects of us.
The protagonist is a 27-year-old salary man who fails to kill himself. He decides to “sell his life” by putting an advertisement in the newspaper. This results in a series of misadventures through which he continues to fail to die. He only balks when a woman tries to marry him and start a family—thus the rebellion against heteronormativity.
I suppose the woman does at least follow some pretty common misogynistic tropes—she’s a manipulative hypochondriac. On the other hand, the only other prominent woman in the novel is a sexy vampire, and she and the protagonist get along swimmingly.
In the fall of 1968, Mishima formed an organization called the Tatenokai or the Shield Society. His recruitment efforts yielded about 100 members. Most of his new recruits were young men from Waseda, one of Japan’s most prestigious universities.
Probably using Mishima’s celebrity, the Shield Society soon gained permission to train with Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF). The SDF is the equivalent of the Japanese military, since Japan can’t have an offensive army.
On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of the Shield Society made a planned visit to a Tokyo SDF base. They took a general hostage and demanded to address the troops on the base. Mishima gave a speech intended to inspire a coup and restore actual political power to the emperor.
His words weren’t well received. The soldiers’ taunts have been variously translated as “kiss your ass”, “dimwit”, and “go screw your own mother”.
The plan was so obviously going to fail that many people think the whole thing was an elaborate suicide plan from the start.
After the failure of his speech, Mishima returned to the office and committed seppuku. Again, seppuku is ritual suicide. And it’s accomplished by slicing open the belly, ideally followed by decapitation by another person.
In the end, Mishima’s suicide barely moved the needle on Japan’s political situation. There was initially some concern Mishima’s actions might revive Japanese militarism. But if anything, his suicide actually weakened the arguments of people who wanted to revise Japan’s constitution so it could have an offensive military.
Donald Keene suggests that, “Perhaps the people most deeply affected by Mishima’s suicide were, paradoxically, non-Japanese who lamented the passing of Japanese traditions and who were profoundly impressed that a man at the height of his career had thrown away his life in the hopes of reminding his countrymen of what they had lost”.
The end of Mishima’s life is also tied to the writing and publication of his magnum opus, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy. It’s Mishima’s parable about 20th century Japan as he saw it—a story of a culture in constant decline. It was published between 1969 and 1971—the year after Mishima’s death.
Mishima used the final volume as a prop in the last bit of the theater of his life. He inscribed the date he resolved to die—the day he did die—on the manuscript as though he completed it that morning. In fact, he had finished the book three months earlier.
Two questions to close with today:
First, why should we look for misogyny in what we read?
As far as I’m concerned, we should always think about the philosophical underpinnings of our books. Otherwise, it’s easy to get sucked into beliefs we don’t share.
Plus we should always think about our heroes. What about them is really worth celebrating, and what are the blots on their legacies? I think this is doubly important when we’re reading in translation. There are only so many texts from a given time period that are available to us as readers. And they shape the way we think about a culture.
Second, why might we want to read books that contain misogyny anyway?
Some books really aren’t worth it for some readers.
I’ve given this example before. When I was having a bad reaction to prescription medication about a decade ago, I hallucinated the girl from the Japanese horror cult classic The Ring. Ergo, I will never, ever watch or read another Japanese horror story. It is not. Worth it. To me.
But… Sōseki… Dazai… Oe… Mishima… These men are some of the most important writers in the canon of Japanese literature. They are some of the most popular Japanese novelists ever translated. And they are some of the most influential writers on the Japanese novelists who followed them. For better or worse, you can’t get a full picture of Japanese literature without them. And, regardless of their flaws, these are writers of real genius.
I’ve read from a lot of books today, especially books by Yukio Mishima. The translation of Confessions of a Mask is by Meredith Weatherby. And you can find the other translators on the episode page. Buy your books from our Bookshop.org page to support the podcast.
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Thank you to the Japanese Literature groups on Goodreads and Facebook and to the Japanese literature communities on BlueSky and Twitter. Members of the Facebook community helped me track down the right biography of Mishima for this project—I really appreciate that.
Thank you to Dr. Rebecca Copeland for brainstorming feedback.
Thank you to Ryan Plocher and Adam Solove for help thinking through the framing of issues in this episode.
And thank you as always to Producer Khaim for today’s music, khaimmusic.com.
And thank as always to Producer Khaim for today’s music, khaimmusic.com.
At the beginning of the episode, I promised to tell you a little more about the Matsuzawa Urushia Workshop’s Project. Here’s their statement:
Japanese urushi has a history of 9,000 years, using the sap collected from natural urushi trees as a raw material. Urushi is used in a wide range of fields such as temple and shrine architecture, Buddhist statues, urushi-ware, decorative items, and art. It continues to have a significant impact on Japanese culture today.
On January 1, 2024, the Noto Peninsula, home to Wajima City, [a symbolic presence in] urushi craftsmanship, was struck by a devastating earthquake. Workshops, homes, equipment, and tools were lost. Some artisans died.
The urushi industry is based on a long accumulation of expertise, so this disaster is a severe blow.
As a result, Matsuzawa Urushi Workshop in Iwate Prefecture is calling for donations to support them. The workshop is also selling spelling Phoenix fountain pens for the reconstruction of Wajima.
Many things were lost due to the earthquake. But without long-term public and private cooperation, the unique, regional urushi culture may disappear. Again, you can find out how to help at tinyurl.com/urushirecovery. There’s also a link on the episode page. Read Japanese Literature is promoting the project solely as a gesture of support.
