Word: mishima
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...LIFE AND DEATH OF YUKIO MISHIMA by HENRY SCOTT-STOKES 384 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...first three interconnected books are extraordinarily good. Mishima uses the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation to link various characters throughout the 20th century with changing manners, politics and national psychology in Japan. In The Temple of Dawn, he also discourses widely and sometimes pedantically about Buddhist theory; that is unfamiliar country for most Western readers. But Mishima's intensely poetic moral sense communicates his own fascination with such subjects...
...Horses. In The Temple of Dawn, Kiyoaki/Isao is again transformed, this time into Ying Chan, a lovely Thai princess. The witness to all three incarnations is a wonderfully subtle spiritual voyeur named Honda, a rationalist Japanese judge and lawyer. Honda, like a principle of embattled moral intelligence, acts as Mishima's civilized guide through the mysteries of love, death, political tragedy and reincarnation...
...Mishima had written nothing else, his account of Honda's excursion to Benares, the holy Indian crematory site on the Ganges, would be considered a small masterpiece, on the order of E.M. Forster's visit to the Malabar caves in A Passage to India. Among the funeral burnings Honda finds an appalling filth and holy joy that amaze him: "A black arm would suddenly rise or a body would curl up in the fire as though turning over in sleep." The scene "was full of nauseous abomination, the inevitable ingredient of all times deemed sacred and pure...
...Mishima takes Japan from the late '30s through the war and the postwar period into the perplexed affluence of the '50s. Eventually, Honda becomes joylessly rich. He degenerates from spiritual voyeur into Peeping Tom-a transformation reflecting Mishima's own contempt for the vulgarization and materialism of postwar Japan. As the novel ends, Honda, who has begun to sound like a Japanese Humbert Humbert in his pursuit of his Thai princess-now a student in Japan-secretly watches her in a lesbian embrace. Then Honda's mansion at the foot of Mount Fuji burns...