A short Goodreads Review of Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima that I wrote a little while ago.
I have to say – I do not quite get the adoration that people have for this book on YouTube.
People talk about it as a kind of masculine self-help book about mastering the “discipline of the steel”, weightlifting and weapons, and embracing your physical being and physical experience.
The book does detail Mishima's journey to leave his room and transform himself through lifting steel, running, and fencing. Flirtations with the military, etc. Yet it isnt simply that, as the subtitle suggests "Art, Action and Ritual Death", it presents a worldview on relationship between word (spirit) and action (body) and their reconciliation in death.
One of the notions that I was sympathetic to is that there is a problem of overindulging in introspection and the idea that the ‘surface’ of things might contain its own kind of depths (of experience) and that the ‘depth’ within oneself are a series of eddies that lead nowhere. Mishima writes near the beginning of the book:
“Yet why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss? Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface? […] I could not understand the laws governing the motion of thought – the way it was liable to get stuck in unseen chams whenever it set out to go deep; or, whenever it aimed at the heights, to soar away into boundless and equally invisible heavens, leaving the corporeal form undeservedly neglected.”
That idea is somewhat appealing to me, which is probably why I read the book, that and as an insight into the author’s suicide. And there is a lot of insight into the latter – the book would seem in retrospect to be a manifesto for his eventual death by seppuku.
There is a long critique of the intellectualist’s neglect of bodily experience and embrace of ‘nocturnal thought’ – which seems to be why there is a focus on the ‘corrosive’ nature of thought and words.
There is a lot of ontological speculation about the relation or tension between words and action and the spirit and the body, which in the epilogue he suggests need to be balanced. This speculation is interesting at times, and sometimes rather vague.
A lot of the book is about embracing the discipline of the steel and the sense of power and efficacy that one gains from this. Yet, the aim is not a better quality of life, but a better quality of death. To attain a beautiful body required for a noble death.
The underlying fixation on self-annihilation in service of the group and attaining a beautiful death that clearly resonates with fascistic ideals that are deeply odious.
