How has this short man become a masculinity icon? Credit: Mario De Biasi/Mondadori via Getty Images
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In some ways it’s strange that the online bodybuilding community idolises a slender, unathletic, literary youth. But given his knowledge of weakness, Yukio Mishima, real name Kimitake Hiraoka, understood the addictive pursuit of strength.
Mishima examined strength and weakness in some of the greatest works of 20th-century literature. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), for instance, tells the story of a pathetic, dissolute son of a consumptive Buddhist priest, growing up amid the wartime wreckage of mid-century Japan. The protagonist, Mizoguchi, experiences various indignities while descending into mental illness, culminating with a suicide attempt he ultimately abandons, choosing life instead.
Mizoguchi is based on Mishima’s study of a real-life Buddhist acolyte, Hayashi Yōken, who burnt down the titular pavilion. Albert Borowitz described the arson in his 2005 book, Terrorism for Self-Glorification, emphasising that Japanese authorities attempted to conceal Yōken’s name, for fear of him achieving national celebrity. This anti-hero’s weakness — and resulting madness — arises within the context of a society perceived as both impotent and decadent; striking parallels exist between him and today’s hapless, bullied mass shooters, such as Elliot Rodger and, more recently, Anderson Lee Aldrich.
But Mishima is most often invoked by online admirers in 2022 not for his literary greatness or political insight, but his personal aesthetic. He was, for want of a better word, ripped — lean and well-defined from the practice of weight training, karate and kendo, which he undertook because he wished to experience “the essence of action and power”. The Mishima of the Western cultural imagination, then, is similar to the Oscar Wilde who allegedly told André Gide in Algiers that he put his genius into his life, and only his talent into his works.
It was a life that ended with a picture-perfect tableau: a ritual suicide, alongside a 24-year-old male follower, in the office of a commandment of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, where he had attempted to initiate some sort of national — or at least nationalist — renewal by means of a carefully stage-managed coup. Latter-day dissident intellectuals such as Bronze Age Pervert, writing in Bronze Age Mindset, understand Mishima’s appeal: “A beautiful death in youth is a great thing, to leave behind a beautiful body, and the best study of this pursuit you find in the novels of Mishima, a real connoisseur.”
Mishima’s perfect body was based on both a Western sculptural ideal, rooted in Greco-Roman ideals of beauty, and “silence”: the pull of a “wordless body, full of physical beauty, in opposition to beautiful words that imitated physical beauty”. Language, the stuff of social media posts, hot takes, and the political opportunists running our country, seems to exist to conceal and deceive; Mishima sought the “pure sense of strength” — some ideal that would tether him, body and soul, to “ultimate reality”.
He dreamed big, then. But materially, Mishima was limited. This much is obvious from the 1960 film Afraid to Die, in which he played the starring role as a gangster. He makes a display of leather-clad toughness, chest puffed out as far as his well-defined but concave pectorals can go. But it is almost a camp toughness, a little boy strutting and fretting along the stage in tough-man drag. Mishima, all of 5’4” on tiptoes, is no swaggering Marlon Brando or Burt Lancaster. From the perspective of a functional strength athlete, it is bizarre that he commands so much attention. And yet there he is, even if he is in “hyper-masculinity drag”, admired by all manners of weightlifting intellectuals and dispossessed dissidents.
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SubscribeThere is a whole nother dimension to this you could audit: dignity. There is an indignity to transitioning from one name to another. To subordinating your health or bodily form to a form that fits an aesthetic. Or even your form of death, to something that can be properly consumed by your admirers. I’ve always thought Mishima’s was a story of profound indignity. Maybe it’s prejudice from only having seen the “four chapters” film to inform my knowledge of him.
It feels like an original sin, to have a stage name or to change your name for public consumption in any way. I sometimes consider how vulnerable those who do this feel when they think about people knowing who they truly are. Not only did they craft a public persona – they gave it a name, so that their own achievements are no longer their own, but that of the myth / legend.
The British say “who is he when he’s at home?” and I think you want to be the same person, at the end of the day. To be fundamentally different in public means some kind of retreat.
“To be fundamentally different in public means some kind of retreat.”
Worse than that, I think you have to let go of the real person, which is pretty frightening because there’s no one to return to when you need it.
“To be fundamentally different in public means some kind of retreat.”
Worse than that, I think you have to let go of the real person, which is pretty frightening because there’s no one to return to when you need it.
There is a whole nother dimension to this you could audit: dignity. There is an indignity to transitioning from one name to another. To subordinating your health or bodily form to a form that fits an aesthetic. Or even your form of death, to something that can be properly consumed by your admirers. I’ve always thought Mishima’s was a story of profound indignity. Maybe it’s prejudice from only having seen the “four chapters” film to inform my knowledge of him.
It feels like an original sin, to have a stage name or to change your name for public consumption in any way. I sometimes consider how vulnerable those who do this feel when they think about people knowing who they truly are. Not only did they craft a public persona – they gave it a name, so that their own achievements are no longer their own, but that of the myth / legend.
The British say “who is he when he’s at home?” and I think you want to be the same person, at the end of the day. To be fundamentally different in public means some kind of retreat.
By “transgender females” does he mean men pretending to be women?
Yes
He needs to consider the meaning of “female”
He needs to consider the meaning of “female”
Yes
By “transgender females” does he mean men pretending to be women?
An interesting essay, though perhaps a tad unfair to undersell Mishima given that he went from pathetically physically weak to physical strength through hard work and not solely out of narcissism. I am quite interested that little overt attention was paid to the question of Mishima’s sexuality given how controversial it makes him to certain elements on the right.
The best article I have read about Mishima was by Andrew Joyce
To find it just google. Andrew Joyce, Against Mishima
I had a read of that article. Very interesting.
While I do find very persuasive many of Joyce’s points, I am more convinced by the defence by Reid. I am less inclined to take Mishima’s Confessions as entirely autobiographical and Joyce’s invective seems in part to be rather cherry picked and based on character attacks. In any event, he is a fascinating figure, but first and foremost a writer and artist.
I had a read of that article. Very interesting.
While I do find very persuasive many of Joyce’s points, I am more convinced by the defence by Reid. I am less inclined to take Mishima’s Confessions as entirely autobiographical and Joyce’s invective seems in part to be rather cherry picked and based on character attacks. In any event, he is a fascinating figure, but first and foremost a writer and artist.
The best article I have read about Mishima was by Andrew Joyce
To find it just google. Andrew Joyce, Against Mishima
An interesting essay, though perhaps a tad unfair to undersell Mishima given that he went from pathetically physically weak to physical strength through hard work and not solely out of narcissism. I am quite interested that little overt attention was paid to the question of Mishima’s sexuality given how controversial it makes him to certain elements on the right.
I read this hoping for some intelligent discussion of Mishima, but came away very disappointed. It is not clear to me that Mr. Bateman has read much of Mishima’s work and doesn’t even mention the surely significant fact that he committed Seppuku the day after he completed writing “The Decay of the Angel”, the last book of his “The Sea of Fertility” tetralogy, which is usually considered his masterpiece.
I confess that the physical fitness hobby that Mishima had, interests me just about as much as the sexuality of Franz Schubert or of Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti.
As a notable C.20th writer (again his best known and most accessible work, “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” isn’t even mentioned) deserves better than this,
I read this hoping for some intelligent discussion of Mishima, but came away very disappointed. It is not clear to me that Mr. Bateman has read much of Mishima’s work and doesn’t even mention the surely significant fact that he committed Seppuku the day after he completed writing “The Decay of the Angel”, the last book of his “The Sea of Fertility” tetralogy, which is usually considered his masterpiece.
I confess that the physical fitness hobby that Mishima had, interests me just about as much as the sexuality of Franz Schubert or of Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti.
As a notable C.20th writer (again his best known and most accessible work, “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” isn’t even mentioned) deserves better than this,
I didn’t really understand the point of this essay. If the writer means to say that bodybuilding is largely motivated by personal vanity, then I would agree, but it doesn’t seem very interesting to say that.
By the way, the current number 1 heavyweight boxing champion is Tyson Fury, whose physique is best described as a dad-bod. His erstwhile rival, Anthony Joshua, looks like a God but his career is spiralling downwards after successive defeats to a much smaller man who happens to be a much better boxer: Oleksander Uzyk.
I didn’t really understand the point of this essay. If the writer means to say that bodybuilding is largely motivated by personal vanity, then I would agree, but it doesn’t seem very interesting to say that.
By the way, the current number 1 heavyweight boxing champion is Tyson Fury, whose physique is best described as a dad-bod. His erstwhile rival, Anthony Joshua, looks like a God but his career is spiralling downwards after successive defeats to a much smaller man who happens to be a much better boxer: Oleksander Uzyk.
Given that he was pretty short and wasn’t taking roids and all the other PEDS rampant today, I think Mishima did a decent job with his strength training
Given that he was pretty short and wasn’t taking roids and all the other PEDS rampant today, I think Mishima did a decent job with his strength training
I only read the article because I thought it was going to be about a young Anthony Quinn.
I only read the article because I thought it was going to be about a young Anthony Quinn.
Mishima looks notably unimpressive to me.
Mishima looks notably unimpressive to me.