“5.6. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

The question of aesthetics is front and center in this work. More than anything, Mishima seemed obsessed with the idea of aesthetic perfection both in art and body, ideas and form. To that end, he became a body-builder — attempting to reconcile the physical state of his body with the aesthetic perfection of his word. The gap between “word” and “action” was an obsession of his, only to be answered by the sculpting of the body and the unity of his ideology with his action — ritual suicide.

The idea is essentially that his ability to interface with the world was limited to the realm of language. The physical, material reality was always mediated through language. This is indicative of a particular kind of paralysis that comes from being reflective more than active. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” as Socrates says. The problem is that over-examination leads one to be simply unable or unwilling to interface with the physical world.

It is reminiscent of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus argues that the limits between language and the world are apparent in the physics and logic of language itself. It is through the use of language that there’s necessarily a barrier of translation. Even talking about this barrier is impossible due to the structure of language as a descriptor layer.

For Mishima, overcoming this barrier meant becoming especially intimate and close with the physical realm — to attempt to unite what he saw as contradictory elements. Becoming a body-builder, the ultimate expression of physicality, or becoming a general and drill instructor are particular aspects of a masculinist form of the physical. It makes me wonder, as a side note, what he said about femininity.

One has to really wonder how “real” this desire and these questions are. Mishima was a nationalist and extreme right-winger who sought to “revive” the Japanese “warrior” spirit, but how real was that vision of the “warrior?” If one looks at the history, it seems more of a mythologized story of what Japanese culture was.

This is where Masaki Kobayashi comes in. Kobayashi, a contemporary of Mishima’s, approached the question of samurai honor from the exact opposite direction. In many ways he was the exact opposite of Mishima. Where Mishima was an extreme right-winger, Kobayashi was a socialist. Where Mishima was a nationalist, Kobayashi was a realist who saw things like “honor” for what they were — fantasies.

The very act of mythologizing seemed antithetical to Kobayashi as a person. He grew up in Imperial Japan during its expansionist fervor. He saw the atrocities of both Western and Eastern powers — something that instilled in him a pacifism that lasted his entire lifetime. As anyone can tell you who’s lived in a country obsessed with war, the act of mythologizing is front and center in both the political and the everyday. The Iraq War, for example, was characterized by every propagandistic attempt at making an evil act palatable — an entire media apparatus designed to manufacture consent for atrocities. This very mechanism would have been visible in Imperial Japan, where Kobayashi saw through it. He then did what any inquiring mind might do — extrapolate this apparently “new” phenomenon into the past, to examine how contemporary mythmaking might look like past mythmaking, which, again, looks like future mythmaking.

My admiration for Kobayashi is manifold — not just as a talented director and artist, but as a person. His work properly interrogates the assumptions and messages of the state, along with the messages we tell each other about the world we inhabit: that our everyday actions are just, as though the story masks the material.

Mishima is exactly the kind of person who buys into myths and believes they’re more real than what’s going on. One has to wonder why. It seems that Paul Schrader’s answer is that the temporal limits of body and matter make myth much more palatable. Mishima understands he may some day die — he may turn to ash and his worldly existence would pass — but if he’s able to leave a myth, he’s able to make himself larger than his corporeal form. He’s able to unite that material with the immaterial, and make his physical existence eternal.

His failure in this very narrow view of his project is debatable. What actually happened? He attempted a coup against the post-war Japanese government. He believed that his influence would spur the Japanese Self-Defense Forces into action; that, as men, they would feel the same about their apparent castration by Western forces in the wake of World War II. Instead of being spurred to rebellion, they jeered his speech, laughed at him, and drove him inside where he ultimately committed seppuku. His second failed to cut his head off in one swipe and was forced to cleave at it.

Who knows what he felt about his project in his final moments after being subjected to ruthless mockery by both his hoped comrades and brutality by his actual comrades. The defeatist read is that his entire project was a failure — he lived a life larping as some kind of revolutionary who, at the time of revolution, was almost literally mocked to death. On the other side, Mishima undoubtedly left a legacy. He was a brilliant writer, an adept theorist, and someone who showed that a holistic form of hard work requires body and soul. People still read his work; his life spawned all kinds of legends about a tortured soul and a man so committed to his vision that he took it to its logical conclusion.

This split is exemplified in Kobayashi’s magnum opus and one of the greatest works ever put on film: Harakiri (1962). The film is a complete masterwork — fully deconstructing the vision of “samurai honor” that people like Mishima held dear. Honor, it turns out, is heavily constrained by material circumstance. What it means to be an honorable person is heavily defined by the limits of your wealth. The samurai class, a class above most, was allowed to hold on to the conceit that they were the most honorable, the most wise, despite being essentially just another class.

Mishima believed deeply in the pre-war honor of the samurai. For Kobayashi, it’s a conceit; for Mishima, it was a forlorn way of life begging for re-establishment. He believed deeply in the unity of the pen and the sword — the old samurai dictum about living a cultural life combined with a warrior’s life. His philosophy rings similar to that of Things Fall Apart protagonist Okonkwo, an Igbo warrior who watches his way of life be torn apart piece by piece. His sole external rebellion against this system ends his life, and his legacy is left to the people who remained. For all of its ridiculous undertones, it is undoubtedly poetic — and of all the things the film does, capturing this very specific contradiction is one of its greatest achievements.