A Crush on Death

By * Lance Morrow

MISHIMA

A BIOGRAPHY

by JOHN NATHAN 300 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

At 45, Yukio Mishima had written 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 volumes of short stories and as many books of essays. He was Japan's literary exotic, sometimes mentioned for the Nobel Prize--a slick self-promoter and deliberately flashy vulgarian who redeemed his excesses with a gift that sometimes approached genius. In November 1970 he committed his famous ritual suicide (seppuku) after attempting to incite the Japanese army to a ridiculous uprising in behalf of the country's imperialistic traditions.

That spectacular exit dictated forever the critical terms on which Mishima and his works would be discussed. Perhaps he intended it that way. No writer who devoted as much creative energy to his life as to his novels could have found a valedictory image more arresting than a photograph, distributed round the world, of his own severed head.

Mishima's samurai patriotism doubtless had a certain crackpot authenticity. He and his small private army were allowed to train with Japan's self-defense force. At the end, he was fanatically Japanese, yet he also cared deeply about foreign opinion. He has been lucky in his posthumous biographers in the West. The first, English Journalist Henry Scott-Stokes, last year published a sensitive and sympathetic analysis (The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima) that appreciated Mishima's accomplishments while explaining them in terms of his lurid narcissism.

Unlike Scott-Stokes, John Nathan wrote his biography with the cooperation of Mishima's family. An associate professor of Japanese literature at Princeton, Nathan acted for a time as Mishima's translator; among other things, he impressed Mishima the muscle builder by being able to beat him at arm wrestling. Nathan's access to Mishima's family and friends yields fascinating gossip: details of the damp sickroom in which Mishima's dictatorial grandmother raised him until he was twelve, of his puritanical father's efforts to steer him away from writing and into the respectable civil service. When Mishima was only four, his father thought that he would instill manliness in him by holding him as close as possible to a train speeding by; the child's face remained as impassive as a No mask. Later his father would burn Mishima's youthful writing efforts whenever he caught him at them.

Bright Widow. Nathan records Mishima's entrance into Tokyo's homo sexual world, which evidently began as a kind of professional voyeurism, the young author detachedly taking notes on the scene at a gay bar. Homosexuality sometimes figured in Mi shima's work, notably in his autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask. But it remained only one compartment of his extremely varied private life. Despite the flamboyant outrages he en joyed committing, Mishima had a surprising appetite for respectability. In 1958, partly because he thought it was expected of him, partly because he wanted to please his mother, who apparently was about to die, Mishima married. It must have been a complicated alliance; yet, strangely, it seems to have been a happy one. In some ways the most attractive character in Nathan's book is Mishima's bright, brisk widow, the mother of his two children.

Nathan subordinates Mishima's work to his life. That may be unwise; without the evidence of his literary achievement, especially his last work, the tetralogy that he called The Sea of Fertility, Mishima might seem a kind of psychotic Japanese version of Monty Rock III.

Nathan writes with a certain dis taste for Mishima -- which is natural enough since Mishima was, for all his exuberance and charm, a squirmingly unpleasant character; his brilliance had the phosphorescence of decay. All his life, he was explicitly and erotically in love with death. Suicide was the only act, he believed, that could make him comprehend his own existence. Just after Mishima disemboweled himself, his mother said: "This was the first time in his life that Kimitake [Mishima] did something he always wanted to do. Be happy for him."

* Lance Morrow

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