Henry Scott Stokes (1938–2022)

Stokes and Mishima were pals, and he was the only foreign journalist present at Mishima’s death, so of course it was irresistible for him to write a book like this one. It’s mixed—really good on his personal memories of partying with Yukio, his creepy huh-huh-huh laugh and physical traits, and impressions of the man’s complex psychology and pathologies (the treatment of Mishima’s homosexuality is to a certain degree couched in the language of its era but Stokes has nothing to prove in re his own lady-oriented virility) and how they fit into his worldview of blood and Eros; and how that was manifested in his writing and the worldbeating ambitions he had for that writing, ultimately unfulfilled; and how that fits into his bodybuilding obsession and desire to die at the height of his magnificence; and how that fits into his belief that Japan had had too much “chrysanthemum” and not enough “sword” since the end of the War; and how that fits into his fixation on and vicarious identification with the Emperor (like a Holy Ghost to Mishima! If two people love each other, the Emperor is the third leg in the tripod of their love, the one who gives it meaning); and how that meshes with the motives behind the formation of his Tatenokai or “shield society”; and how it all came together into his final clownish/majestic coup attempt and seppuku.

That’s actually a lot of things Stokes is good on, looking at the list, but much of the book is taken up by insight-light reportage on Mishima’s early life (he was dressed as a girl by his grandma and was humiliated when they rejected him from the Imperial Japanese Army as whatever their equivalent of a 4F was) and sort of plot-summary-level literary analysis (though Mishima’s plots and structures are often better than his characters, so this part was enjoyable and gave me reading ideas even if it didn’t seem to have a tonne put into it. Also, he convincingly reads The Sea of Fertility as a skeleton key to Mishima’s progressive disenchantment with the richness of living, in which he had previously, theatrically, as-though-watching-himself-in-the-mirrorly indulged, and his erotic embrace of death-worship alongside Emperor-worship—though only of a sort, always only of a sort with Mishima).

Ultimately Stokes comes back around to the suicide, which he opens by treating in an as-it-happens journalistic way and closes by casting as a kind of detective story: why did he do it? All of the above matters come into it, but Stokes embraces the theory that the x-factor was a secret sexual relationship between Mishima and Masakatsu Morita, his second-in-command in the Tatenokai, and that Morita was the one who pushed the dilettantish Mishima, who treated the society somewhat as his toy (Stokes’s description of romping around Mt. Fuji with the boys on their “field exercises” is unforgettable), to step up to what Morita with his dazzled eyes saw as the great man’s destiny. (Morita also killed his putative lover, serving as the second to his seppuku, and then killed himself.) It’s plausible in the light of what retroactively seems like a gathering of evidence on the bizarre happenings of that day, and I recommend it to anyone who’s ever read Mishima and come away wondering what for fuck’s sake was roiling and boiling inside this man.… (mehr)