The motive and process of remaking himself into his ideal is depicted in Sun and Steel (1968). This book manifested Mishima's abhorrence of Japanese intellectuals (like Shunsuke), whose overevaluation of intelligence made them conceited, physically unattractive armchair theorists. He praised muscular beauty, which became synonymous with action in his aestheticism. Muscle and action were the antitheses of what a sedentary and meditative writer would embody.

Sponsor Message.

Thus, by placing muscle, action, and beauty (and by extension, warrior and masculinity) in the same category, he emphasized their superiority to intelligence and language (writer and femininity). Gazing at his Greek-godlike body, Mishima felt his transition from man of language to man of muscle to be a rebirth of himself, who used to be a "grotesque old man of twenty-five years of age," as he wrote in "Watashi no henreki jidai" ("My Wandering Years") in 1964.

Mishima's Exhibitionism and His Preparation for Death

Mishima now turned exhibitionistic--modeling for nude photographs, appearing on stage and in movies, recording songs, and indulging in masquerades and pageantry as the general of his private army. But his obsession with action, acting, and exhibitionism resulted in a paradox--although he loathed language, which he identified with femininity, he nevertheless remained a writer.

He tried to justify this paradox by resorting to an old notion of the harmonious blend of "sword and chrysanthemum" or warrior and writer. This resolution, however, contradicted what he repeatedly asserted: his wish to die as a warrior.

Mishima developed an intriguing paradox about his muscled body. He found that the construction of a body required pain; for if one had a beautifully sculpted body and yet needed to feel life within it, the surest way to affirm its life was pain, or more exactly, bleeding. To him, the untrained body was not a body. It was a symbol of unmanliness; it was dead from the start.

Hence, the paradox: A body worthy of being called masculine required pain and blood. Naturally, the most appropriate profession for this type of "bleeding" was that of a military man. His profession was ideally to die; and being a man of action, he was liberated from "language."

At the same time, Mishima developed a unique theory about the military uniform. It required a sculpturelike body; it was exposed to danger--to being "pierced by a bullet and stained with blood" (Sun and Steel). All these theories then prompted a notion that the moment he started pumping-up his body, he started preparing for self-willed death.

Conclusion

Mishima provides a fascinating study of a writer obsessed with the quest for masculinity. It led him to homosexual interests, masculine cults, male bonding, militaristic activities, and finally to the most masculine form of death. As a result, in his scheme of aesthetics, homoeroticism became inseparable from suicide.

He is unique among the world's writers in that he linked homoeroticism with self-willed death and put this theory into action. In so doing, he kept masking and unmasking his sexual orientation by overexposing it in massive pageantry. Of course, to put people in ambiguity about his sexuality was what the mask was always intended to achieve.

Blending elements from indigenous traditions and recently imported Western discourses of sexual identity, Japan is home to one of the most diverse and dynamic queer cultures in Asia.

The trajectory of the treatment of same-sex love in Japanese literature differs radically from that in Western literatures, but offers many interesting texts that include male-male or female-female love.

Sadomasochistic literature, one of the most controversial forms of lesbian and gay writing, confronts such issues as domination, submission, uniformity, and humiliation and poses a constant challenge to them.

Sebastian's broad and long-standing presence in queer artistic production suggests that he functions as an emblem of the feelings of shame, rejection, inverted desire, and loneliness endured by queer people in a homophobic society.

Tokyo is home to a vast entertainment world that supports hundreds of venues for individuals with diverse sexual and gender identities and interests.

Jean Genet's work has left a powerful legacy to post-modernity and remains a provocation to questions of gay identity.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

J. K. Huysmans, an important figure in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, exemplified a style of homosexuality at a pivotal moment in the emergence of a gay identity.

One of Germany's greatest twentieth-century authors, Thomas Mann encoded his own homosexuality in his novels but thought that homosexuality led to the destruction of social institutions and the death of the individual homosexual.

Best known for his genius in art and architecture, Michelangelo was also an accomplished author of homoerotic poetry.

The aesthetic of the important and influential Victorian critic Walter Pater reflected a homosexual sensibility.

Marcel Proust is the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, one of the major achievements of Modernism and a great gay novel.

Whether or not the Marquis de Sade was himself bisexual, homosexual activity is an important item in his program of revolutionary sexual libertinism.

Although he has had various embodiments throughout history, Sebastian has long been known as the homosexual's saint.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.

The art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the first German to have been publicly acknowledged as a homosexual, developed an aesthetic deeply rooted in his homosexuality.