An unusual blog to be certain–in part because it was written by a female–but highly admirable.
http://furinkazanblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/gods-and-buddhas-too.html
Mishima, Bushido and the Hagakure (the “womb of Mishima’s oeuvre”) are all mentioned.
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I was not aware until today that Mishima’s book Forbidden Colors was the subjectof the world’s first Butoh performance.
Here’s the recent Vancouver Sun article on Butoh that tipped me off:
CULTURAL OLYMPIAD: The discrete, ineffable appeal of Butoh
By Kevin Griffin
From Wikipedia:
Butoh appeared first in Japan after the second world war and the student riots there. The roles of authority were being challenged and subverted at this point. It also appeared as a reaction against the contemporary dance scene in Japan, which Hijikata felt was based on imitating the West and Noh and was too superficial.
The first butoh piece was Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), by Tatsumi Hijikata, which premiered at a dance festival in 1959. Based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima, the piece explored the taboo of homosexuality and paedophilia and ended with a live chicken being held between the legs of Yoshito Ohno (Kazuo Ohno’s son) and Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the stage in darkness. Primarily as a result of the misconception that the chicken had died due to strangulation, this piece outraged the audience, and resulted in the banning of Hijikata from the festival where Kinjiki premiered and established him as an iconoclast.
In the very first “butoh” performances, the style was called “Dance Experience” (in English), but in the early Sixties, Hijikata used the term “Ankoku-Buyo” (dance of darkness) to describe his dance, and later changed the word “buyo,” filled with associations of Japanese classical dance to that of “butoh,” a long discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing[1].
It would be interesting to see a Butoh based on, say, Sun and Steel. Or, perhaps even better, on the events of November 25, 1970.
More Butoh:
“We need to stop this accelleration, stop the speed.”
Youtube user natilla has an extensive Yukio Mishima playlist which catalogs most if not all of the Mishima related videos on YouTube, including what appears to be several year’s worth of Tatenokai reunion ceremonies.
h/t Mr. Blake
Some commentary about the death of suspected homosexual Austrian right winger Jorg Haider, mentioning Mishima and Nazis.
I wasn’t aware that David Bowie was at one time a Yukio Mishima fan, but this blog cites the following quote from Thomas Newton Howard, accompanied by the image above.
THOMAS NEWTON SEABROOK: “Bowie now read and enthused – in typically vociferous fashion – about art, literature, and classical music; painting, previously an intermittent distraction, became a full-time hobby. Many of his own artworks – which included a giant expressionist portrait of the Japanese author and nihilist Yukio Mishima – hung from the walls of his Berlin apartment.”
Through the magic of Google, I bring you a Yukio Mishima quote originally posted here, by a creative fellow involved in several interesting pursuits.
Women can bring nothing into the world but children. Men can father all kinds of things besides children. Creation, reproduction, and propagation are all male capabilities. Feminine pregnancy is but a part of child rearing. This is an old truth.Women’s jealousy is simple jealousy of creativity. A woman who bears a son and brings him up tastes the honeyed joy of revenge against creativity. When she stands in the way of creation she feels she has something to live for. The craving for luxury and spending is a destructive craving. Everywhere you look, feminine instincts win out. Originally capitalism was a male theory, a reproductive theory. Then feminine thinking ate away at it. Capitalism changed into a theory of extravagance. Thanks to this Helen, war finally came into being. In the far distant future, communism too will be destroyed by woman.
Woman survives everywhere and rules like the night. Her nature is on the highest pinnacle of baseness. She drags all values down into the slough of sentiment. She is entirely incapable of comprehending doctrine: ‘-istic’, she can understand; ‘-ism’, she cannot fathom. Lacking in originality she can’t even comprehend the atmosphere. All she can figure out is the smell. She smells as a pig does. Perfume is a masculine invention designed to improve woman’s sense of smell. Thanks to it, man escapes being sniffed out by woman.
Woman’s sexual charm, her coquettish instincts, all the powers of her sexual attraction, prove that woman is a useless creature. Something useful would have no need of coquetries. What a waste it is that man insists on being attracted by woman! What disgrace it brings down upon man’s spiritual powers! Woman has no soul; she can only feel. What is called majestic feeling is the most laughable of paradoxes, a self-made tapeworm. The majesty of motherhood that once in a while develops and shocks people has no truth in relation to spirit. It is no more than a physiological phenomenon, essentially no different from the self-sacrificing mother love seen in animals. In short, spirit must be viewed as the special characteristic that differentiates man from the animals. It is the only essential difference.
-Shinsuké in Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima
I swear, I had nothing to do with selecting the quote or posting it originally, I am simply reproducing it here without further comment.
I don’t agree with the assessment of Mishima as “mad.” That’s a word people throw around when speaking about him to separate his work from his suicide, as if his suicide was some sort of “late period” mental decline. It’s dismissive. His suicide was so premeditated and so calculated and so conceptually consistent with his work that I don’t think writing him off as a nut is fair or accurate.
However, I really did enjoy this eloquent and insightful little snippet from the blog “Mediocracy Now.”
Law of the jungle. And like the earthquake, it has its cycles. One can’t hide from the brutality of nature. Mishima preferred to go to meet it, and in the most brutal way possible. His pathology was partly a revulsion at his own cowardice. In school, for instance, I was always scared but masked my fear by doing things that other boys were afraid to do. There is no counselor for that pathology. And it’s the hero’s starting point.
New book on Strength, Courage & Honor
