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Mishima rules and to get the full effect you should read Forbidden Colors. Unlimited seething hatred piled on top of cruelty and deceit, all without any kind of a comfortable background of "oh no this guy really didn't think like that" because he did. He wasn't insane, he wasn't damaged, he just wasn't a very nice guy (unless you happened to be a supple young man). Kawabata's Palm of the Hand Stories, a few of which were already obliquely mentioned in the OP, are a series of enigmatic and often nearly perfect short stories that at times seem to predict the minimal but explosively revealing short stories written in the 80s in America (Carver, before him O'Connor and sort of Hemingway) but with a bit more oddity and a little of the weirdness you'd expect to find in someone writing on the other side of the world. Fry Pappy posted:Can we also talk about manga? There's a whole goddamn forum for that keep it in there. If this thread gets cluttered up with anime horseshit it'll be worthless. raton fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Dec 13, 2009 |
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Dec 13, 2009 22:18
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Vicious Owl posted:Agreed, I don't think his references are contrived. I swear Murakami is just a playful retarded cousin of Mishima: William T. Vollmann, speaking to the PEN center posted:About [Mishima's] death, or at least about its supposed inevitability, a little more should be said. In Sun and Steel he bitterly complains about the fact that men cannot objectify themselves, and from the context it’s evident that he means objectify their bodies as women can. “He can only be objectified through the supreme action—which is, I suppose, the moment of death, the moment when, even without being seen, the fiction of being seen and the beauty of the object are permitted. Of such is the beauty of the suicide squad.” Mishima wrote those words in that languorously white house of his, which might be considered a little peculiar for the abode of a Japanese nationalist given its urns, its Greekish statues, and its European horoscope mosaic, that house which serenely bides and forebodes behind its white wall. If anything, it makes me think of the residence of the minister Kuruhara in the second volume of the tetralogy, Runaway Horses, whom Isao stabs to death in punishment for the crime of sacrilege. Kuruhara is, among other things, another Honda. The body hates the words (so, at least, the self-hating words say). The body freely, guiltlessly kills and copulates, marches, overthrows, makes history. It can do everything. But what’s it made of? The white ants are already eating it. When Mishima, naked but for his loincloth, sits on the tatami mat for yet another photograph (if you knew him only by this image, you wouldn’t suspect that he lives amid French engravings of nineteenth-century experimental balloons), when Mishima leans on the staff of his sheathed sword, his face, which to others, including himself, may evince resolution, to me betrays resignation, even vacancy, as if it cannot escape its own clay. Yukio Mishima, talking about the white ants Vollmann mentions posted:In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all; then . . . came the flesh. It was already . . . sadly wasted by words. First comes the pillar of white wood, then the white ants that feed on it. But for me, the white ants were there from the start, and the pillar of plain wood emerged tardily, already half eaten away. z0031 posted:That's a pretty good way of putting it. I really think, though, that he had women issues just going so far off Spring Snow and what I've read about the plot of Forbidden Colors. I had to check, but apparently it wasn't even clear if he was gay or not? I'm sort of assuming he based Kiyoaki largely on himself. Mishima never thought about sex the way most people do. It was always bound up in his severe issues with beauty and aesthetics and their tyrannical presence in his life. His hatred of women is intimately tied up with their style of passivity and their kind of beauty, which he does not like. But yeah, he gay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeMt2Rjo-yY#t=1m00s Love Mishima. Mishima rules. Books like Mishima's books are the reason I read. Each one exists in a space that was not there before the book was written, and yet those spaces are not safely separate from our world like Murakami's are, but set right up against it, very much eager to invade. raton fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Feb 21, 2010 |
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Feb 21, 2010 11:02
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