Kyle Qian's Reviews > Sun & Steel

Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
...
Or do I then
Belong, after all, to the earth?"

It's easy to read Sun and Steel as ostensibly about the contradiction and reconciliation between words and the flesh, art and action—a forceful and serious reflection on prose, in prose, by a controversial man of letters, remembered as much for his works as he is for his failed coup and subsequent death by seppuku. Much like its subject, this autobiographical work defies straightforward categorization. Mishima bends words to his will with a skillful annealing of metaphors and imagery, forging an incisive blade of critique, confession, and memoir.

I picked up this work mostly expecting an extended reflection on the twin virtues of physical and intellectual vitality—a view that at some point in history seemed obvious—and I did at least get that:

If my self was my dwelling, then my body resembled an orchard that surrounded it. I could either cultivate that orchard to its capacity or leave it for the weeds to run riot in.

Who pays any attention to a physical education theorist grown decrepit? One might accept the pallid scholar’s toying with nocturnal thoughts in the privacy of his study, but what could seem more meager, more chilly than his lips were they to speak, whether in praise or in blame, of the body? So well acquainted was I with poverty of that type that one day, quite suddenly, it occurred to me to acquire ample muscles of my own.

Makes sense. Same to his reflections on his personal experience of the primacy of words and his childhood alienation from the flesh:

When I examine closely my early childhood, I realise that my memory of words reaches back far farther than my memory of the flesh. In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all; then—belatedly, with every appearance of extreme reluctance, and already clothed in concepts—came the flesh.

As well as his contempt toward the vicious:

I had always felt that such signs of physical individuality as a bulging belly (sign of spiritual sloth) or a flat chest with protruding ribs (sign of an unduly nervous sensibility) were excessively ugly, and I could not contain my surprise when I discovered that there were people who loved such signs. To me, these could only seem acts of shameless indecency, as though the owner were exposing his spiritual pudenda on the outside of his body.

His obsession with a glorious and dignified death, however, made no sense to me at first:

A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensable in a romantically noble death. Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate. Longing at eighteen for an early demise, I felt myself unfitted for it. I lacked, in short, the muscles suitable for a dramatic death.

It's perhaps tempting to dismiss this as mere morbid reverie, a fanaticism born of some twisted combination of neurotic idealism and childhood trauma. While that might not literally be wrong per se, I have to assume that a man as militantly meticulous with his self-fashioning as Mishima included these parts with a purpose.

Mishima speaks rather freely on the topic of death itself and what a worthy death requires and ent[r]ails, but he is rather oblique about the bigger picture. A few hints exist, however:

When I was small, I would watch the young men parade the portable shrine through the streets at the local shrine festival. They were intoxicated with their task, and their expressions were of an indescribable abandon, their faces averted; some of them even rested the backs of their necks against the shafts of the shrine they shouldered, so that their eyes gazed up at the heavens. And my mind was much troubled by the riddle of what it was that those eyes reflected.

In an uncommonly tender moment, Mishima reflects on this childhood sight of the shrine-bearers, a memory that continues to surface throughout the work as an ideal of simultaneously lofty yet utterly ordinary importance. Mishima recalls trying to apprehend the scene with his word-addled adolescent mind, yet ultimately failing at the time to grasp the obvious:

They were simply looking at the sky. In their eyes there was no vision: only the reflection of the blue and absolute skies of early autumn.

Later, several passages more explicitly expound on his desire to be among the shrine-bearers:

At the moment when I first realized that the use of strength and the ensuing fatigue, the sweat and the blood, could reveal to my eyes that sacred, ever-swaying blue sky that the shrine bearers gazed on together, and could confer the glorious sense of being the same as others, I already had a foresight, perhaps, of that as yet distant day when I should step beyond the realm of individuality into which I had been driven by words and awaken to the meaning of the group.

Mishima even makes a clear connection between the desire to be among a group and his apparent feeling of individual unworthiness. We start to see a little more:

From the outset words had worked to drive me farther and farther from the group. Moreover, feeling as I did that I lacked the physical ability to blend with the group, and that I was therefore constantly rejected by it, I desired somehow to justify myself. It was this desire that led me to polish words so assiduously.

Seeing all this, it's no wonder Mishima possessed his distinctly militaristic orientation. One can certainly achieve a degree of physical group identification through cultivating an orchard of bulging muscles and wearing a military uniform. This is uniformity in a sense—in the sun and armed with steel, we are equals.

But what of the soul? Mishima offers a simple metaphor:

Let us picture a single, healthy apple... The inside of the apple is naturally quite invisible. Thus at the heart of that apple, shut up within the flesh of the fruit, the core lurks in its wan darkness, tremblingly anxious to find some way to reassure itself that it is a perfect apple. The apple certainly exists, but to the core this existence as yet seems inadequate; if words cannot endorse it, then the only way to endorse it is with the eyes... There is only one method of solving this contradiction. It is for a knife to be plunged deep into the apple so that it is split open and the core is exposed to the light... Yet then the existence of the cut apple falls into fragments; the core of the apple sacrifices existence for the sake of seeing.

And in case the conclusion weren't clear enough:

The self-awareness that I staked on muscles could not be satisfied with the darkness of the pallid flesh pressing about it as an endorsement of its existence, but, like the blind core of the apple, was driven to crave certain proof of its existence so fiercely that it was bound, sooner or later, to destroy that existence. Oh, the fierce longing simply to see, without words!

Mishima's essential tragedy thus reveals itself. Here is a man who so desperately craved proof of his own humanity that he fixated on the one unescapable shared reality he could imagine—unity in death, as if to say, 'I am not worthy, yet all worthy men die. Therefore, in death I too shall become worthy. I too shall be beautiful.'

The tragedy, then, lies in Mishima's utter inability to perceive any other meaningful shared reality between him and his fellow man—one to live for, anyway. He was a man whose outward eye could see the ordinary transcendent, but whose inward "I" was blind to its own transcendent nature. "Oh, the fierce longing simply to see, without words!"

Sun and Steel presents as "a twilight genre between the night of confession and the daylight of criticism," and after the critical first half gives way to the more confessional final pages, we're treated finally to an uncharacteristically wistful bit of poetry, copied below in its entirety. It's as if, by then, he's purposefully worn himself out by the force of prose that came before it.

By then, the ironclad critical exterior is pierced like skin and the fleshy confession is torn aside; as tissue and prose alike evaporate into the air like radiant trails of sweat, we see the exposed core of this apple at last. Was it the same core that he witnessed after he disemboweled himself on the deck of Camp Ichigaya? Did he see himself clearly at last, by way of the proverbial blade he's spent his whole life forging for that moment?

What did he feel in that moment? Mishima, the insurgent. The proud nationalist. The absurd aesthete. The spurned idealist. The modern samurai. The late bloomer. The writer, the lover, the man. The boy.

Did he feel his core "overflow with the infinite joy of being one with the world?" Did he feel the "euphoric sense of pure being?" Or perhaps, at the final moments of his absurd annihilation, steel in flesh beneath the muscled husk, those waxen wings hid the weight of longing sadness after all?

ICARUS

Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
Why, when balance has been strictly studied
And flight calculated with the best of reason
Till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain—
Why, still, should the lust for ascension
Seem, in itself, so close to madness?
Nothing is that can satisfy me;
Earthly novelty is too soon dulled;
I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,
Closer and closer to the sun’s effulgence.
Why do they burn me, these rays of reason,
Why do these rays of reason destroy me?
Villages below and meandering streams
Grow tolerable as our distance grows.
Why do they plead, approve, lure me
With promise that I may love the human
If only it is seen, thus, from afar—
Although the goal could never have been love,
Nor, had it been, could I ever have
Belonged to the heavens?
I have not envied the bird its freedom
Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature,
Driven by naught save this strange yearning
For the higher, and the closer, to plunge myself
Into the deep sky’s blue, so contrary
To all organic joys, so far
From pleasures of superiority
But higher, and higher,
Dazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence
Of waxen wings.

Or do I then
Belong, after all, to the earth?
Why, if not so, should the earth
Show such swiftness to encompass my fall?
Granting no space to think or feel,
Why did the soft, indolent earth thus
Greet me with the shock of steel plate?
Did the soft earth thus turn to steel
Only to show me my own softness?
That Nature might bring home to me
That to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things,
More natural by far than that imponderable passion?
Is the blue of the sky then a dream?
Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged,
On account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxication
Achieved for a moment by waxen wings?
And did the heavens abet the plan to punish me?
To punish me for not believing in myself
Or for believing too much;
Too eager to know where lay my allegiance
Or vainly assuming that already I knew all;
For wanting to fly off
To the unknown
Or the known:
Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?