AGAINST AND BEYOND “MISHIMA”: READING COUNTER-PRODUCTIVITY TO TOTALISATION IN MISHIMA YUKIO'S TAIYŌ TO TETSU AND KINJIKI

Abstract

Mishima Yukio (1925-1970) is known to be an author that exerted a tight control over the meaning he intended for his texts to convey. Scholarship has tended to reinforce Mishima’s control through totalised readings of Mishima, which reduce Mishima’s texts to mere representations of the author’s biography and intellectual ideas. Due to this conflation of Mishima and his texts, there is a lack of discussion on how those texts potentially slip away from the attempts of scholars to read them in a totalising relation to Mishima. This thesis analyses two texts by Mishima that offer a way to address the gap between author and text: the manifesto Sun and Steel (1965-1968) and the novel Forbidden Colors (1951-1953). I focus on how these texts display counter-productivity to a totalised reading of Mishima’s corpus. Although Sun and Steel appears as a manifesto which imposes Mishima’s authorial intentions over his entire oeuvre and thus obstructs alternative ways of reading Mishima, certain counter-productive elements of the text paradoxically contest its ostensible project to minimise the gap between author and text. This allows Sun and Steel to be read instead as a counter-manifesto that highlights the author-text gap by encouraging its readers to read against the grain and form their own interpretations of Sun and Steel as well as other Mishima texts. Forbidden Colors extends this line of inquiry through its portrayal of the close connection between counter-productivity, character development and openness to possibility. The novel suggests that a reader can only read Mishima’s texts in an ethical way by paying attention to the counter-productive elements of those texts. In this way, Sun and Steel and Forbidden Colors encourage a new way of reading Mishima that looks beyond preconceptions of his life and aesthetics to analyse how his texts trouble, deviate from and resist totalisation.