A Devil of a Job

Mishima and the masochistic drive

Author: Roy Starrsa [ show biography ]

DOI: 10.1080/09697250903407583
Article Requests: Order Reprints : Request Permissions
Published in: Angelaki, Volume 14, Issue 3 December 2009 , pages 85 - 99

To cite this Article: Starrs, Roy 'A Devil of a Job', Angelaki, 14:3, 85 - 99

In fact, it is obvious that, even in their supposedly passive phase, the exercise of a drive, a
masochistic drive, for example, requires that the masochist give himself, if I may be
permitted to put it in this way, a devil of a job.

Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis 200

Few writers since the Marquis de Sade himself have made a more public and provocative
“performance” of their “perverse” sexuality - a sexuality, that is, contaminated by
violence - than the Japanese novelist, playwright, and right-wing activist Yukio Mishima
(1925-70). Much of his life seems to have been spent in rehearsal for his final act: a
samurai-style ritual suicide by seppuku - a gruesome process of self-disembowelment and
decapitation, explicitly designed to cause oneself maximum pain as proof of one's
“sincerity.” He had “rehearsed” this not only in his fiction and on film but, as we now
know from his former lovers, even in his “actual” sexual life.1 Indeed, with a writer such
as Mishima it is difficult to draw a clear line between the “life” or the “man” and the
“art” or the “text.” In a sense, he made a “text” out of his whole life, a text that signified,
more than anything else, sexual perversity. As one of the most interesting recent writers
on Mishima, Nina Cornyetz, has pointed out, he “performed” his sadomasochistic
sexuality in an unprecedentedly wide and diverse range of media and sociocultural sites:
all these “life-acts, discursive productions, and art-acts” may be regarded as interrelated
“texts” constituting a “gestalt, or performative bundle” and “what Mishima performed in
these varied venues were (often hyperbolic or theatrical) reiterations of ways of
textualizing/de-textualizing (materializing) desire and sexual/gender performances.”2

But, not only did Mishima make a spectacular public performance of his “perverse”
sexuality, he also wrote the first in-depth analysis or diagnosis of its psychological
“origins” - long before any biographer, critic, or psychoanalyst attempted that thorny
task: his autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask [Kamen no kokuhaku, 1949]. Of
course, as with any novel that seems obviously “autobiographical,” its use as raw
biographical “source material” is problematical. In this particular case, however, it must
be said, first, that Mishima's legion of biographers have been unanimous in accepting the
work as factually accurate in its main details, especially in its depiction of the rather
bizarre circumstances of Mishima's childhood.3 But, of course, the issue of the novel's
“factual accuracy” is only the “surface level” of the problem. The Confessions is a
psychological novel; much of its “action” takes place within the narrator's mind - in fact,
a crucial role is played by his sadomasochistic “fantasy life.” Biographers can confirm,
for instance, that the boy Mishima was compelled to sleep with his grandmother until he
was twelve, but there is no way to confirm whether that boy actually did respond by
withdrawing into the gruesome fantasy world depicted in the Confessions. Judging by
Mishima's actions and “performances” later in life, his biographers have found his
psychological self-portrait as a budding sadomasochist to be highly credible - even
though ultimately there is no absolute proof of its veracity. (And the same can be said, of
course, for any kind of autobiography once it departs from “verifiable facts.”) The
question I am more interested in addressing here, however, relates not so much to the
factual accuracy of Mishima's self-portrait (even in indeterminable psychological terms)
as to its psychological power: to what extent did the image he constructed of himself at
the age of twenty-four, in the Confessions, become what Lacan calls a “master signifier,”
thus casting a “shadow of cruelty” over the remainder of his life and work? Of course, it
is highly likely that the sadomasochism Mishima manifested or “performed” in later life
had its origin in certain traumatic events or experiences of his childhood, whether or not
these were exactly as depicted in the Confessions. But these traumas were, in a sense,
“raw material” that Mishima was able to shape to his own purposes as both an artist and a
man, beginning most conspicuously in his “debut novel,” the Confessions. We must
examine first, then, exactly what he made of them in that novel.

What Mishima principally “confesses” in Confessions of a Mask is that he became aware

of “my heart's leaning toward Death and Night and Blood” very early in his childhood
and that these sadomasochistic proclivities, together with the homosexuality he
associated with them, weighed on him throughout his youth like an inescapable destiny.4
Despite his best efforts to conform to social convention as a “normal boy” who dated and
desired girls, he argues, he found that he was sexually aroused only by “transgressive”
forms of erotic fantasy: for instance, by imagining himself as St Sebastian pierced by
arrows (an imaginative act that occasioned his first orgasm), or by imagining himself
butchering and eating one of his handsome male classmates. This early and inescapable
nature of his sadomasochistic homoeroticism, Mishima assures us, is what convinced him
to accept what he calls the “Augustinian” philosophy of predestination.5

This deterministic view of the formation of his character as a sadomasochistic

homosexual is the clearly and explicitly stated philosophical argument at the centre of the
Confessions. The emotional coefficient of this philosophic idea is the palpable state of
fear that pervades the whole text, a paranoid sense of the world as constantly impinging
on and threatening the self. Early in the first chapter the protagonist/narrator tells us that:
“I was handed, so to speak, the menu of the sum-total of my life-problems before I could
even read it.”6 Lest the reader have any doubt on this score, he recalls that he first
experienced homosexual urges when he was a mere four years old, and goes on to give
detailed accounts of a series of such experiences throughout his childhood. Similarly,
with his masochistic and sadistic urges, he recounts, for instance, how already as a boy he
derived a quasi-erotic pleasure from imagining his own violent death and, still more,
from imagining the violent deaths of handsome fairy-tale princes. Thus, before he knew
what was happening, his sexuality was contaminated by violence, directed either inwards
or outwards.

In the Confessions, Mishima approaches his “self-analysis” not so much with the gentle,
sympathetic touch of a poet as with the ruthless efficiency of a man of science: his intent
was, as he boasted to his editor, to “turn upon myself the scalpel of psychological
analysis” in order to “dissect myself alive” - which suggests that the writing itself was a
kind of masochistic exercise.7 And “dissect” himself he certainly did. Few writers
outside of the Marquis de Sade or, more recently, Jean Genet, have revealed their
fantasy-lives with more devastating honesty. The “inner parts” which stand exposed are
sometimes, like most inner parts, rather gruesome to look upon, including as they do
scenes of homosexual sadism and masochism, autoerotic narcissism and even
cannibalism. Since this was Mishima's debut work in the postwar literary world - not
quite his first novel but the novel which made his reputation - one suspects that he was
out to shock his readers, a tried and true way for any ambitious young writer to draw
attention to himself. If so, his strategy was brilliantly successful - the work made him
famous literally overnight.

Mishima's depiction of himself in the Confessions as a narcissistic, sadomasochistic

homosexual seems to conform quite closely to the Freudian model. Although no actual
mention is made of Freud's theories, reference is made, as an aside in brackets, to the
findings of Magnus Hirschfeld, one of Freud's own sources on “sexual perversion”:

(It is an interesting coincidence for me that Hirschfeld singles out “pictures of St

Sebastian” among all works of art as the special favourite of homosexuals. It is easy to
conjecture from this that in the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, especially
congenital homosexuals, the homosexual and the sadistic urges are inextricably linked.)8

Hirschfeld was a late nineteenth-century German sex pathologist who, along with Krafft-
Ebing and a number of other German psychiatrists, devoted much research to the problem
of homosexuality, perhaps because of its prevalence among the Prussian officer class.
Freud, in turn, drew heavily on the data gathered by these earlier researchers in forming
his own theories on the “sexual aberrations,” as he himself acknowledged.9

But an important difference between Freud and Hirschfeld - or, at least, Hirschfeld as
interpreted by Mishima - lies in the former's rejection of the idea of “congenital
inversion.” While not categorically denying the role played by physical constitution and
heredity,10 Freud, of course, placed great emphasis on certain conditioning factors of
early childhood which determine the individual's sexual “object choice.”

On the level of the novel's philosophical argument, as we have seen, the narrator of the
Confessions prefers to transfer blame from his family to some larger force - nature or the
entire cosmos - for his “tragic destiny,” and thus resorts to such ideas as “congenital
inversion” and the “Augustinian theory of predetermination.” This widens his argument,
and gives more universal implications to his philosophic nihilism. But, from a
psychological point of view, it also allows him to indulge his primal masochistic sense of
being a victim, an innocent victim of malevolent cosmic or natural forces, a victim who
was handed “the menu of the sum total of my life-problems before I could even read it.”

If one looks in Mishima's early childhood for what Freud referred to as “the mechanism
which gave origin to (his) inversion” - or, more specifically, for the origins of his
masochism - one finds almost a classic, textbook case. The only unusual element is that
here the primary object choice is not so much the mother as the grandmother. Even so,
the intensity of the relationship cannot be doubted:

My parents lived upstairs. Giving the excuse that it was dangerous for a baby to be raised
upstairs, grandmother took me from my mother's arms when I was forty-nine days old.
My bed was lined up beside her sick-bed, and I was raised in her sick-room, constantly
closed up and stifling with the stench of sickness and old age.11

The grandmother makes exclusive demands on the boy's affections, and she also
overprotects him:
Worried about my weak constitution and also that I might learn bad things, grandmother
forbade me to play with the local boys, so that my only playmates, besides the maids and
nurses, were three girls she had chosen from among those of our neighborhood.12

Thus, when he is taken to play with a girl cousin, who expects him to act like a boy, he
already feels obliged to wear a “mask” of masculinity - to pretend, for instance, to enjoy
war-games - and recognizes already that “it was exactly what people saw as my true self
that was really playacting.”13

It is hardly surprising, then, that the boy, raised in this exclusively, oppressively feminine
atmosphere, both identifies strongly with women - as revealed most conspicuously when
he dresses as the female performer Tenkatsu - and harbors a romantic longing for men,
especially those “rough,” low-class men who represent the opposite extreme to his
grandmother's ideal of aristocratic gentility.

His abnormal intimacy with his grandmother continues until his twelfth year, when his
father “ … finally reached the belated decision to claim me back into his own
household.” When this happens, his grandmother acts for all the world like a jilted lover:

Grandmother embraced my photograph day and night, weeping profusely, and if I broke
our agreement that I would stay with her one night a week, she would immediately throw
a fit. At thirteen I had a sixty-year-old lover who loved me with a wild, inordinate
passion.14

The effeminacy, passivity, paranoia, and masochism produced in the protagonist, one
might assume, by his bizarre childhood, all come to the fore in the first great erotic
experience of his life, when he “falls in love” with his virile older classmate, Omi. But
the ambivalence of his feelings about playing the passive, feminine role in relation to the
older, stronger boy is evident from the start. There is a strong suggestion of “penis envy”
in the way Omi is first presented: as a young man of superior potency, who is “a man of
experience” (with girls) and whose “thing is so big!”15 In the scenes which follow, great
emphasis is placed on his feet and hands, and on his socks and gloves - all, as Freud
pointed out, familiar phallic symbols.16 This series of phallic motifs is brought “to a
head” in the climactic scene in which the protagonist fights with Omi for possession of a
swinging log. The scene is charged with a high-tension sexuality, both because of the
strongly phallic character of the log itself, which “… swung back and forth rhythmically,
with a battering-ram motion …” and because of Omi's aggressive posture as he stands
astride the log: “his posture made him look exactly like an assassin brought to bay.”17
The protagonist's contradictory feelings as he mounts the log are partly sexual, in a
masochistic/erotic way: a desire to yield himself to the mastery of the stronger boy, to be
slain by this handsome “assassin” - indeed, as he confesses, “an impulse towards
suicide.”18 And, as Omi teasingly flutters his gloved fingers at him, this masochistic urge
is amply satisfied: “In my eyes [his fingers] were the sharp points of a dangerous weapon
about to pierce me through.”19

But there is another side to the protagonist's motivation in daring to mount the log: a
jealous desire to possess this symbol of phallic potency for himself, to himself become
the active, dominant male. This willful, power-hungry aspect of his psychology also
shows itself in his sadistic fantasies, culminating in the imagined act of dining on his
fellow classmate. What Freud has to say on the relation of sadism and masochism - and
even on the connection of the former with cannibalism - seems entirely apropos here:

Sadism and masochism occupy a special place in the perversions, for the contrast of
activity and passivity lying at their bases belongs to the common traits of the sexual life.

That cruelty and the sexual instinct are most intimately connected is beyond doubt taught
by the history of civilization, but in the explanation of this connection no one has gone
beyond the accentuation of the aggressive factors of the libido. The aggression which is
mixed with the sexual instinct is, according to some authors, a remnant of cannibalistic
lust - that is, a participation of the domination apparatus …

The most striking peculiarity of this perversion lies in the fact that its active and passive
forms are regularly encountered together in the same person. He who experiences
pleasure by causing pain to others in sexual relations is also capable of experiencing pain
in sexual relations as pleasure. A sadist is simultaneously a masochist, though either the
active or the passive side of the perversion may be more strongly developed in him and
thus, represent his preponderant sexual activity.20

Obviously we might discern, in the sadistic/masochistic, active/passive dialectic of

Mishima's pathological sexuality, the psychological coordinate, if not the psychological
source, of his lifelong obsession with the active/passive dialectic of philosophic nihilism
as first defined by Nietzsche.21 His entire life and work may be seen in terms of his
struggle to overcome the passivity, masochism, and fear which were the natural heritage
of his childhood. By sheer force of will, the sickly, “effeminate” boy turned himself into
a muscle-bound warrior who, on the last day of his life, wielded his samurai sword to
inflict wounds on some of the highest-ranking officers of the Japanese Self-Defense
Force, before dying himself like a traditional “hero,” by seppuku. Seemingly the victim
had become the victimizer, the terrorized the terrorist - although one might well question
- and I will question - whether, by his final suicidal act, Mishima had really escaped from
the primal masochism of his psychology and its concomitant death drive.

In other words, the impression we get from the Confessions that Mishima was primarily a
masochist, albeit one who was struggling mightily to free himself from his masochism, is
only confirmed by the remainder of his life and work after he published that “debut
novel” - including, of course, his ultimate suicide by seppuku (although, as we shall see,
some of his interpreters have tried to present that “last act” in more “heroic” terms).
Indeed, in a more literal and rather prurient way, this impression has also been confirmed
lately by the “testimonies” of some of Mishima's aging ex-lovers, who have begun to
“tell all,” even to passing Western journalists. The picture that emerges from these candid
revelations certainly confirms the fact that his early “confessions” were not mere play-
acting or exaggerated posturings for the sake of fictional self-dramatization: his core
sexual constitution was indeed of a highly “eccentric” and death-driven nature. One ex-
lover, for instance, tells of how quickly he got bored with Mishima's “role-playing”
games, which were obviously designed exclusively for his own satisfaction:

Mishima liked to pretend he was committing seppuku. I had to watch, and eventually he
brought along a sword and showed me how to stand behind him as a kaishaku [beheader].
He also had other props. He would write out a death poem … And oddest of all, he pulled
a huge length of red cloth from his briefcase. What's that? I asked him before we started.
“Blood,” he said. “Blood and guts.”

I was impressed the first time we did this. Mishima got hard at once and as he died he
came. Without touching himself at all. I had never seen anyone do that before. I didn't
find the role-playing at all arousing and wanted him to fuck me, but he didn't want to - I
think I was just a witness to something he wanted to do in front of an audience - and after
we had reenacted his bloody death on three “dates” in a row I decided not to see him any
more. I wasn't surprised when he did himself in later. I think he'd spent a long time
thinking about it.22

Another “witness” who knew Mishima personally is Donald Richie, the eminent expert
on Japanese cinema, who told the same journalist that “Mishima's taste in men ran to two
main types. Willowy Peers School boys studying literature or French, essentially himself
at that age. He often had one in tow. Or meaty butch types, sometimes foreigners, whom
he liked to be rough with him.”23

What these and other eyewitness anecdotes seem to confirm is that Mishima's primary
sexual economy was masochistic/narcissistic rather than sadistic: in the above sexual
encounter as recalled by one of his ex-lovers, he achieved a climax “on his own” (though
under “another's gaze”) merely by acting out his ritual suicide by disembowelment. As
we have seen, Mishima's traumatic early childhood - especially the “feminization” he
suffered at the hands of his grandmother, the effects of which were only aggravated later
by his fascistic father's brutal treatment and rejection of the “effeminate” boy - made him
a “classic case” of the self-loving/self-hating “narcissistic-masochistic character” type,24
but by a tremendous effort of will he attempted, as it were, to reverse the flow of his
“libidinal current” from a negative to a positive pole. (And many of his fictional heroes
reenact the same psychodrama - it is at the heart of many of his major novels and plays.)
This was an attempted psychological revolution - from masochist to sadist, from man of
words to man of action, or, in the Nietzschean terms he favored, from passive to active
nihilist - that proved ultimately, despite his almost inhuman efforts, an impossibility. In
the end he succumbed willingly - if not quite with the autoerotic jouissance of his
fantasies - to the death drive of the narcissist/masochist.

As will be readily apparent from all this, much about Mishima's “sadomasochistic”
psychology seems readily explicable in “classical” Freudian terms - and, like numerous
other writers on Mishima, I too made free use of Freudian theory in my earlier analysis of
the man and his work.25 What I would like to argue here, however, is that the
refinements or even “corrections” made to Freud's model of “sadomasochism” by three
later writers on the subject, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Paul Sartre -
although each approaches the subject from a very different perspective - help us to
understand “the case of Yukio Mishima” with even greater insight and clarity, and in a
way that also has considerable relevance for our interpretation of his work. Furthermore,
from a wider psychoanalytical perspective, it seems to me that the “Mishima case” may
also be taken as an interesting example of empirical support for the “revisions” of Freud
by Lacan in particular.

In his famous essay on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, “Coldness and Cruelty,” Deleuze
challenges the Freudian conflation of sadism and masochism and, through an in-depth
study of Sacher-Masoch's fiction, makes a convincing case for the fundamental disparity
between his masochistic “language” and “world” and that of the Marquis de Sade. He
argues that the “concurrence of sadism and masochism is fundamentally one of analogy
only; their processes and their formations are entirely different …”26 Calling for a more
accurate diagnosis of psychological symptoms, he recommends that the so-called
“sadomasochistic entity” be “broken down into discrete clinical entities”; otherwise it is
“liable to become a crude syndrome that fails to satisfy the demands of genuine
symptomatology.”27

In her largely Lacanian study of Mishima's psychology, Cornyetz rather summarily

dismisses Deleuze's insistence on the radically separate economies of sadism and
masochism as of any relevance in this case at least, claiming that Mishima's “corpus
confounds attempts like Deleuze's to sever one economy from the other.”28 Mishima's
Confessions, she points out, are filled with “violent, erotic language, but from the
perspectives of both victim and torturer” - thus belying, according to her, Deleuze's idea
that the Sadean/Masochean language of an extreme “meeting of violence and sexuality”
is the “product of a masochistic aesthetic linked to a specific language of violence from
the perspective of the victim.”29 In his final act, too, Mishima served as his own
executioner, disemboweling himself in the traditional samurai way. Thus, she argues, he
was “simultaneously the 'true' sadist and the 'true' masochist. (Once again, defiantly
defying any attempts to produce a unified, coherent 'subjectivity' qua sexual
predilection/perversion.)”30

But surely it could be argued that the sadist (qua sadist at least) is one who enjoys
inflicting pain on others, not on himself. And surely suicide is the ultimate masochistic
act - regardless of how impressively dressed up it is with sword-wielding “samurai”
heroics. Deleuze does indeed concede that sadists and masochists sometimes seem to
enjoy reversing roles, but in each case the primary economy remains primary. It is not
that the sadist turns into a masochist, or vice versa, but “what we have in each case is a
paradoxical byproduct, a kind of sadism being the humorous outcome of masochism, and
a kind of masochism the ironic outcome of sadism.”31

Lacan's view of “sadomasochism,” unlike Deleuze's, comes from within the

psychoanalytical tradition, but he too disagrees with Freud in one pertinent respect
(pertinent, that is, to the “Mishima case”): he sees masochism rather than sadism as
primary. For Lacan, the “decentered” human subject is fundamentally masochistic,
dominated by others: it looks towards others for its meanings and even its desires; it is
eternally dissatisfied with its sense of self, which it knows at some level to be false;
therefore it feels a strong masochistic impulse to attack itself. Even when it attacks others
it is, so to speak, attacking itself in others (as in the phenomenon of “infantile
transitivity,” wherein one infant hit by another claims that, actually, he hit the other - or
vice versa).32 In words that seem entirely apropos to Mishima, Lacan held that “sadism
is merely the disavowal of masochism.”33 This was not an incidental observation - in
fact, it cuts to the very core of his concept of the structure of both sadism and
masochism.34

What exactly, then, does Lacan mean by it? In his treatment of the drives, including
sadism and masochism, Lacan emphasizes what might be called their “boomerang effect”
(if I may be forgiven an antipodean metaphor) or what he calls the “polarity of the drive
cycle”:35 “What is fundamental at the level of each drive is the movement outwards and
back in which it is structured.”36 Again:

… in the profound relation of the drive, what is essential is that the movement by which
the arrow that sets out towards the target fulfills its function only by really reemerging
from it, and returning on to the subject. In this sense, the pervert is he who, in short
circuit, more directly than any other, succeeds in his aim, by integrating in the most
profound way his function as subject with his existence as desire … It is not when the
object in one's sights is not good that one becomes a masochist.37

Drives, then, have a circular path, and Freud himself designated the two poles of this path
with active and passive verbs: as in the pleasure of seeing and being seen for the
Schaulust or scopic drive, or the pleasure of tormenting and being tormented for
sadomasochism.38 But there was something even Freud was reluctant to admit,
according to Lacan, and this reluctance formed “an obstacle to the understanding of
masochism”:
Freud articulated in the most categorical way that at the outset of the sado-masochistic
drive, pain has nothing to do with it. It is a question of a Herrschaft, of Bewltigung,
violence done to what? - to something that is so unspeakable that Freud arrives at the
conclusion, and at the same time recoils from it, that its first model, in accordance with
everything I have told you, is to be found in a violence that the subject commits, with a
view to mastery, upon himself.39

Pain enters the sadomasochistic equation only with the appearance of the other, and when
the subject of the drive has taken himself as the end, the terminus of the drive.”40 He
becomes a
sadistic subject, in so far as the completed loop of the drive will have brought into play
the action of the other. What is at issue in the drive is finally revealed here - the course of
the drive is the only form of transgression that is permitted to the subject in relation to the
pleasure principle.41

In this way, finally, the “subject will realize that his desire is merely a vain detour with
the aim of catching the jouissance of the other - in so far as the other intervenes, he will
realize that there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle.”42

Because of this paradoxical kind of “one-way reciprocity” or, more precisely, reciprocity-
for-the-sake-of-the-subject-alone (since, as we shall see, Lacan agrees with Freud that
true reciprocity characterizes love but not the drives), always at work in the
sadomasochistic drive, Lacan judges sadism to be secondary to masochism in what he
calls the “structure of perversion”: “Strictly speaking, it is an inverted effect of the
phantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as object, in his encounter with the
division of subjectivity.”43 Furthermore, “… the subject assuming this role of the object
is precisely what sustains the reality of the situation of what is called the sado-
masochistic drive, and which is only a single point in the masochistic situation itself.”44
As further proof of his claim regarding the secondary nature of sadism, Lacan points to
the paradoxical reversal by which the sadist himself becomes object, without realizing it:
“I will ask you to look at my article Kant avec Sade, where you will see that the sadist
himself occupies the place of the object, but without knowing it, to the benefit of another,
for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic pervert.”45

Conversely, since no drive is ever purely active or passive, even the masochist is driven
to take action of sorts - for instance, to “make himself” suffer. Lacan agrees with Freud's
distinction between two fields - of love and of the drives - and also that there is
reciprocity in the field of love but in the field of the drives “it is a question of a pure
activity durch seine eigene Triebe, for the subject.”46 “In fact, it is obvious that, even in
their supposedly passive phase, the exercise of a drive, a masochistic drive, for example,
requires that the masochist give himself, if I may be permitted to put it in this way, a
devil of a job.”47 Needless to say, this seems entirely apropos to Mishima's case - the
extraordinary lengths to which he went to satisfy his masochistic drive made his life a
“devil of a job” from early childhood until the very moment of his untimely death.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that some recent “Lacanian” interpreters of Mishima have
not quite taken the right message from the master regarding masochism - especially in
regard to its primary nature. The Lacanian psychiatrist Danielle Bergeron, for instance,
duly notes the boy Mishima's victimization by his grandmother, who exploited him for
her own jouissance, and also his “failure of masculine identification” because of his
father's absence during the crucial phallic stage; she then claims that Mishima saved
himself from madness or death by taking refuge in the fantasy world of his writing, a
world filled with sadomasochistic imagery that “captivated young Mishima's imagination
and drained the energy of his death drive.”48 Regarding the scene in the Confessions
where Mishima achieves his first masturbatory orgasm by identifying himself with the
naked arrow-pierced martyr St Sebastian as painted by Guido Reni, Bergeron argues that
it “clearly reveals what had been building up for Mishima, piece by piece, since
childhood and was to be the source of that brutal and violent experience: an originary
fantasy about sacrificing his life for the Other's jouissance and Cause.”49 So far so good -
this seems an accurate enough diagnosis of Mishima's primary masochism and its origins.
The problem starts when Bergeron begins to wax lyrical about Mishima's later-life move
“from the pen to the sword” as a “quest for the phallus.”50 His almost uncontrollable
death drive, she assures us, “would have carried him away, had it not been channeled into
his writing, then projected onto the social scene on the path of the samurai warrior.”51
Her argument here - claiming a therapeutic and even social value for Mishima's
performances of his new persona as bodybuilder, martial artist, and neo-fascist terrorist -
is reminiscent of the “lawyerly” defenses Mishima himself advances in fictive form to
justify the violent and destructive actions of his nihilist anti-heroes.52 Seeming to
swallow whole a fantastic concoction of Romantic/orientalist clichs and stereotypes about
bushido, the “heroic” code of the warrior - or, at least, Mishima's personal and rather
eccentric version of it - she swells with admiration for the way Mishima succeeded in
becoming a “tragic hero” by committing seppuku or ritual suicide by disembowelment
and decapitation. This final act, she assures us, “returned to Mishima his masculinity …”;
he thus “accomplished his mission: to unite, in the violence of muscles, words and flesh
in a new language supported by masculine ethics - and in so doing, to give meaning to his
death.”53 But it could be objected that there is something problematic about the way
Mishima thus successfully “channeled” his death drive and “accomplished his mission”:
afterwards he lay dead on the floor, disemboweled and decapitated. Needless to say, not
everyone would regard this as a successful therapeutic outcome.

The scholar of Japanese literature, Cornyetz - perhaps because she is more familiar with
the realities of Japanese history and culture - is far less enthusiastic than Bergeron about
Mishima's sanguinary heroics. In fact, she sees his suicide as a “perverse act,” not ethical
in the Lacanian sense because, for one thing, his desire for death was not really his own
desire; it was “the desire of the Other as law,” imposed on him by a society that
disapproved of his assumed persona as “pervert and homosexual.”54 In other words, his
desire for death was a masochistic desire - with this I would certainly agree.

But Cornyetz then goes on to put her own rather odd construction on Mishima's suicide.
Perhaps because of her self-professed effort to take Mishima's politics “seriously” -
which, indeed, she accuses earlier writers on Mishima such as Noguchi Takehiko,
Marguerite Yourcenar and me of failing to do - she insists, somewhat contradictorily to
her above argument, on desexualizing Mishima's final act, presenting it as “homosocial”
rather than “homosexual” or masochistic: “Homosociality replaces radical
sadistic/masochistic/anti-relational homosexuality.”55 In other words, Mishima formed
his own Platonic “band of brothers” - his “hundred-man army” was not intended, as some
joked at the time, as a kind of neo-fascist excuse for a male harem:

In the end Mishima's radical gesture toward a liberation of desire from the dictates of the
social collapsed into a capitulation to a socially acceptable homosocial matrix. In the
process, the desire of the Other dictated his jouissance-in-death, and, unsublimated and
perverse, Mishima became a fascist.56

This dramatic account of how Mishima “became a fascist” by his final act is actually, in
my view, the most interesting and original part of Cornyetz's argument, but ultimately I
find her attempt to “desexualize” Mishima's “final performance” unconvincing. Certainly
Mishima himself may have wanted the public to view his death in this purely political,
asexual way, but was not this yet another attempt by him at “mask-wearing,” a rather
unconvincing “sleight-of-hand” intended to deflect the public's gaze away from the real
object of his desire? Indeed, we must remember that his suicide was a “double suicide” -
his kaishaku, the young man who performed the “service” of cutting his head off - also
followed him into death, and thus, inevitably, this “last performance” has often been
popularly portrayed as a traditional kabuki-style shinj or “lovers' suicide.” Of course this
in itself proves nothing, but the vast weight of other evidence too - indeed, Mishima's
whole life and work - makes it difficult to believe that his final act was not motivated in
large part by homoerotic masochism. Also, one might question whether it is really
necessary to separate Mishima's politics from his sexuality in order to prove that one
takes his politics “seriously” or does not regard his right-wing political activism as a
“sham?” To emphasize the psychosexual roots of Mishima's - or anyone else's - politics is
not to trivialize or to ignore those politics. As Nietzsche said: “The degree and kind of a
man's sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.”57 Or, as Gore Vidal
put it more succinctly: “Sex is politics.”58

In Lacanian terms, we might say that sadism - which was actually disguised masochism -
became Mishima's “master signifier,” that psychic deep-structure from which all else
derived, including his “homofascism.”59 Of course, Mishima's Confessions, his first and
most revealing “self-portrait,” must be regarded, on one level at least, as a writer's self-
dramatization for fictional purposes. Fictional personae are, almost by aesthetic necessity,
exaggerated self-dramatizations. As “intelligent readers” we can all easily understand and
acknowledge that. And, with the “real-life” Mishima too, we have to an extreme degree
the sense of someone “performing himself” or “performing a self” or performing a public
or fictive persona. But the important question then becomes: in that case, why did
Mishima himself seem to forget the contingency, artificiality or fictionality of that “self-
dramatization?” At what point did he begin to confuse his public or fictional persona with
his “real self” - or perhaps even begin to “prefer” it to his “real self?”
One of Mishima's earliest and most insightful biographers, John Nathan, remarked that,
until Mishima wrote the Confessions, “his past, like any past, was rich with ambiguity -
to say the least, inconclusive. When he finished the Confessions, he had more than just a
past; he had a history.”60 And he notes that Mishima himself described how he felt
“relief” after finally diagnosing himself as a sadomasochistic homosexual, “the
temporary relief a man feels when the incurable disease he has lived in fear of is finally
diagnosed in him and named.”61 Most significantly, Nathan also recognizes the central
fact that it was on the basis of this possibly flawed self-construction that Mishima
founded the rest of his life: “The confession which issued from Mishima's hypothetical
mask was not so much an account of the past as a prophecy of the future.”62

In short, Mishima's precocious self-analysis and self-diagnosis as a sadomasochist in his

brilliant debut novel, Confessions of a Mask, presented him with both great literary
success and equally great personal opportunity. He was still a young man, only twenty-
five, and thus with the prospect of a long life ahead of him, a life that conceivably could
have been liberated from those “heart's leanings towards Death and Night and Blood” he
had dwelt upon so much, and so much lamented in his Confessions. One might well ask:
having diagnosed his psychosis and its origins so precisely, with such impressive
detachment, why did he not then seek therapeutic or psychiatric help? A nave question
perhaps, but something can be learned sometimes by asking nave questions. Mishima was
no “ordinary” sadomasochist, after all. Far from being an “unconscious” victim of his
own uncontrollable urges, he was a highly intelligent, highly self-conscious intellectual,
and thoroughly conversant with the psychological theory of his day. It would have been a
relatively easy matter for him to take the next step - towards a therapeutic cure. But he
never took it. Rather, he preferred to indulge his “perverse proclivities,” even though this
was obviously a dangerous thing to do. One wonders why. Why did Mishima choose to
adhere so loyally or stubbornly to the “masochistic solution” to his life-problem first
revealed to him in early childhood?

Perhaps he had already invested too much in his self-construction as sadomasochist -

professionally, psychologically, philosophically, even morally in a “perverse” sort of
way. Professionally, for instance: the great overnight success of his Confessions had
obviously convinced him that his personal sadomasochistic psychodrama was central to
his creativity. And, of course, Mishima would not be the first writer or artist to forgo
being “cured” for the sake of his art.

But he also viewed this as a philosophical decision, a function of his deterministic

nihilism: his nihilism both explained and “justified” his “heart's leaning towards Death
and Night and Blood” and also made any notion of a “cure” seem meaningless. Actually,
there is much in Mishima's own life and thought that contradicts the deterministic
message of the Confessions - needless to say, he was by no means a consistent thinker.
When he took up bodybuilding, for instance, he derided all those contemporary Japanese
writers and intellectuals who led stereotypically unhealthy lifestyles, suggesting that they
could easily “cure” themselves of their dark moods and despairing worldviews with just a
little physical training. And, of course, his own strong-willed efforts to transform himself
from a sickly, effeminate passive nihilist and masochist into a healthy muscle-bound
active nihilist and sadist also belied his self-proclaimed deterministic philosophy.

In moral terms, too, Mishima had a kind of vested interest in his self-construction as
“sadomasochist”: it was an essential part of what made him different, unique, morally
elite. Influenced by his wide readings in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European
literature, he liked to imagine himself as a Romantic rebel - a combination of Lord
Byron, Oscar Wilde, and the Marquis de Sade - with a corresponding desire to pater le
bourgeois.63 Thus sadomasochism was not simply a source of erotic pleasure for
Mishima; it was the insignia that marked him off as a privileged member of a
Nietzschean moral elite, a select club of bermenschen who were “beyond good and evil.”

But perhaps his psychological investment in his self-construction as sadomasochist was

the most powerful of all the forces binding him to that identity: in a way that is actually
more common than might be thought, he had developed a dependency on his disease,
seeing it as a core part of his identity since early childhood. Although “letting go of it”
may have been a precondition for psychological health, it would also have meant losing
something that seemed essential to his sense of identity - both as a man and as a writer.
The patient's “resistance to a cure” is, of course, a well-known psychological
phenomenon - indeed, Freud recognized it as such a common response that he predicated
much of his psychoanalytic practice upon it. Not only is the cure potentially painful but
also the patient may experience a certain “identity-loss trauma” in being rid of long-held
signifiers of his or her identity - even if those signifiers happen to be pathological
symptoms. For Mishima after his Confessions, sadomasochism was such a core part of
his identity - it had become exactly what Lacan calls a “master signifier” - that it would
have been very difficult for him to conceive of himself as himself without it. To cease
being a sadomasochist would have been to cease being “Yukio Mishima” (that name
itself, significantly, a pseudonym). This was the one “mask” he was loath to remove - no
doubt because he feared that, without it, he would become a powerless nonentity - or,
what's worse, a bourgeois mediocrity!

To suggest the deeper ontological, even metaphysical, level of lack or need that bound
Mishima to his masochistic drive, we might also invoke the term aphanisis, in the
Lacanian sense that denotes a disappearance or “fading of the subject,” the sense of a loss
of being (the “departure of the unconscious as such - the closing”) that overtakes the
subject “petrified” by being reduced to a mere signifier “in the field of the Other.”64
From this psycho-ontological perspective, masochism in extremis may be seen as the
subject's last defense against the danger of his own perceived nothingness. His motto
might be: “I suffer, therefore I am.” The paradox at the center of Mishima's life and work
is that he - and his fictional heroes - seemed to feel most alive at the moment of death,
when plunging a sword into their abdomen.

To help further clarify our understanding of this central paradox, this crucial psycho-
ontological aspect of Mishima's masochism, we may turn to a third profound thinker on
the subject: the leading “existentialist” philosopher, Sartre. Sartre's early and still highly
illuminating analysis of sadism and masochism - which obviously had a major influence
on Lacan - is presented at some length in his philosophic masterpiece, Being and
Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. For Sartre masochism is a
fundamental ingredient of the first of two possible attitudes towards the Other, along with
love and language. The failure of one attitude or approach occasions a resort to the other
approach (the second attitude being characterized by indifference, desire, hate, and
sadism), although the two attitudes are not absolutely discrete: “each of them is in the
other and endangers the death of the other.”65 Thus the movement between the two is
circular rather than linear or consecutive. By adopting the first attitude “the for-itself tries
to assimilate the Other's freedom.”66 Thus Sartre envisions human relations as
fundamentally a power struggle or conflict. “Conflict is the original meaning of being-
for-others.”67

Like Lacan, then, Sartre emphasizes the many ways in which we fashion ourselves “for
the Other” and the potential for violence engendered by this intersubjective dependency.
He points, for instance, to the power of the Other's look: it is the gaze of the Other that
first “fashions my body” and seems to hold “the secret of what I am” (qua object).68
Because the Other seems thus to possess my being, “I wish to recover it, or, more exactly,
I am the project of the recovery of my being.”69 But in order to be the “foundation of
myself” I must “assimilate the Other's freedom. Thus my project of recovering myself is
fundamentally a project of absorbing the Other.”70

But for the masochist this project is reversed. Since masochism arises as a reaction
against the despair of disappointed love - and all love is ultimately disappointed, in
Sartre's worldview - the masochist's attitude is opposite to that of the lover: “instead of
projecting the absorbing of the Other while preserving in him his otherness, I shall
project causing myself to be absorbed by the Other and losing myself in his subjectivity
in order to get rid of my own.”71 Here is the crucial point of Sartre's brilliant analysis of
masochism: the psycho-ontological root cause of the masochist's urge towards self-
objectification:

I refuse to be anything more than an object. I rest upon the Other, and as I experience this
being-as-object in shame, I will and I love my shame as the profound sign of my
objectivity. As the Other apprehends me as object by means of actual desire I wish to be
desired, I make myself in shame an object of desire.72

But Sartre also notes that the masochist pays a terrible psychological and moral price for
this self-objectification: “Masochism, like sadism, is the assumption of guilt. I am guilty
due to the very fact that I am an object, I am guilty toward myself since I consent to my
absolute alienation …”73 Masochism, he continues, is a species of vertigo “before the
abyss of the Other's subjectivity.”74 I “apprehend my subjectivity as a nothing …”75

Nonetheless, Sartre sees the masochistic project to be as much of a failure as love, since
the masochist can never completely reduce himself to an object - he will always be aware
of his own transcendence:
The more he tries to taste his objectivity, the more he will be submerged by the
consciousness of his subjectivity - hence his anguish. Even the masochist who pays a
woman to whip him is treating her as an instrument and by this very fact posits himself in
transcendence in relation to her.

Thus in every way the masochist's objectivity escapes him, and it can even happen - in
fact usually does happen - that in seeking to apprehend his own objectivity he finds the
Other's objectivity, which in spite of himself frees his own subjectivity. Masochism
therefore is on principle a failure.76

But perhaps, one might suggest, masochism allows for even more paradoxical reversals:
what if, for instance, the masochist's “secret intention” all along was to recover his
subjectivity? Sartre himself seems to allow for this possibility when he points out that the
masochist's “perpetual effort to annihilate his own subjectivity is accompanied by the
exhausting and delicious consciousness of failure so that finally it is the failure itself
which the subject ultimately seeks as his principal goal.”77 A moral failure, no doubt, in
Sartrean terms, but for the masochist himself a kind of psycho-ontological success (albeit,
of course, a temporary one), in that ultimately it confirms and affirms his tenuous -
sometimes even psychopathically negated - sense of being. In this sense, again, the
masochist's motto might be: I suffer, therefore I am. But, of course, Mishima shows too
where this program of “self-destruction for the sake of self-affirmation” can lead in
extreme cases: a paradox neatly encapsulated in the rather pitiful words of his suicide
note, which read: “Life is short, but I want to live forever.”

In short, Mishima had a huge investment - one might say he had staked everything he
owned - in his self-construction as “sadomasochist.” Thus, far from seeking a way out of
what others might regard as a deadly psychological trap - a flirtatious game with the
death drive - he sought ways to tighten its grip on his mind and his identity - sexually,
psychologically, aesthetically, politically, philosophically. Indeed, he sought nothing less
than to hypostatize his “sadomasochism” as the very essence of his identity. This
malevolent but dynamic “radioactive core” was what made him, after all, not only a
“dangerous thinker” - as he liked to boast - but a dangerous man in general; a man of
action rather than a mere writer or intellectual; an explosive violence-prone macho man
not to be trifled with.78

But what could he have done? Could a man like Mishima, so painfully de-centered, ever
have “centered” himself? Could he have found himself by losing himself - perhaps by
embracing the inner void free of all signifiers rather than by trying to hide it behind the
mask of a sadomasochist? If he could have done that, perhaps he might have found the
answer to the old Zen koan: what was your original face before you were born?