Wordsmoker

As Rene Sance so eloquently reminded us, Mishima Yukio’s acclaimed writings and spectacular death resonated deeply throughout 1970s Japan. Mishima’s rhyming of samurai ethics with a form of Emperor worship that retained the most virulently totalitarian and even fascist overtones of wartime ideology seemed to bespeak a potential within Japanese culture to be tempted into repeating the mistakes of World War II once more. In a period where the ultra-right and the ultra-left both habitually engaged in outright terrorism to further their respective goals (a practice the ultra-right engages in even today), Mishima’s acts, as excessive and immediately ineffectual as they were, still resonated as a sign of the Japanese political sphere’s potential volatility, and were thus received with a certain gravity both within Japan and without.

Yet, this reaction to Mishima, which has been handed down in both Japan and abroad (for example, in Paul Schrader’s 1985 art-house hit, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters) obscures the campy side of Mishima’s life and legacy, the side that indulged in winking star turns in stylish crime capers and wrote the screenplay for the movie debut of Japan’s first, and still most beloved, transvestite star of stage and screen, Miwa [née Maruyama] Akihiro. But even more interesting than Mishima’s own appreciation of camp may be later receptions of Mishima as camp.

Mishima’s legacy may be at its most volatile and complex within Japan’s gay culture, which found itself left with a compelling and undeniably brilliant figure who spoke openly about same-sex desire but married it not to the burgeoning gay culture of the time (which he openly mocked as degraded and abjecting in works like Forbidden Colors), but rather to the politically radioactive, misogynistic neo-fascism that led to his suicide. Was it possible to work with Mishima’s erotic imaginary without having to embrace his political stance? Or was homosexuality in Japan forever to be marked by a hysterically homosocial adherence to self-annihilation as the ultimate expression of repellently humorless and intolerant machismo?

In 1983, there came one possible answer in the form of what is now remembered as Japan’s first gay “pink” film, Nakamura Genji’s Beautiful Mystery. Pink films were a staple of film studio production throughout the 1960s and 70s, continuing on until they were displaced by home video in the late 1980s. “Pink” films were organized around sexual scenes but did not show actual sex acts due to censorship codes at the time (Oshima Nagisa, fed up with these restrictions, ended up having to go to France to make his real-sex arthouse epic In the Realm of the Senses because of these restrictions). They tended to be quite stylish and diverse, often becoming the launching pads for the careers of quite a few critically acclaimed directors. Alternately, as was the case in American exploitation cinema as well, the comparative freedom of the pink film genre made it suitable for experiments in form that were discouraged in more “respectable” studio systems.

Beautiful Mystery, like Schrader’s filmic biography, dwells on Mishima’s preparation for his final act. But where Schrader’s film is solemn to the point of airlessness, Nakamura’s film is endearingly and intentionally goofy. The protagonist is a young man who approaches the leader of a paramilitary troop of patriotic and exercise-obsessed young men who are clearly modeled on Mishima’s Shield Society; even the leader’s name, Mitani Makio, is a play on Mishima’s – “Three Valleys” in place of Mishima’s “Three Islands.”

Our young recruit, stripped to his fundoshi, is incorporated into the troop through a blood-sharing ceremony that involves promiscuous wound-kissing, and then is initiated more privately by his mentor into the sexual side of samurai bonding in a deliberately tawdry deflowering scene that takes place behind an artfully positioned chair (the next morning, the recruit is shown comically wincing from his sore butt as he toddles into the kitchen for some OJ).

The recruit and his mentor form a special bond, and even a homey domestic life together, which begins to stand in contrast to the austerity of the Mishima-style sexuality that is supposed to be a part of the training for patriotic self-sacrifice – an “etiquette of the body,” as one character, Mitani’s sexy second, puts it as he makes his own play for the recruit and his apparently irresistible poufy hair (it was the early 80s, after all).

But the emotional core of the movie persists in showing the audience scenes of blissful coupledom breaking out even as the sexuality is supposed to be a samurai-style solidification of hierarchy. As Mitani leads his troop through more and more elaborate rehearsals for their eventual deaths, the recruit and his mentor get more and more involved in the aesthetics of the whole thing – but also in the domestic life they lead at home. The final two sexual scenes in the movie are a juxtaposition of these two vectors of desire in extremis. In the first, Mitani leads the whole group in a simulation of mass ritual suicide, pretending to cut his belly before his second pretends to cut off his head. Then, another member of the troop pretends to cut off the second’s head, and then they all slump together, covered in little scraps of paper that are meant to simulate snow (and which the recruit was previously shown cutting up old magazines to make). This rehearsal quickly devolves into a massive orgy, the fundoshi-clad troops writhing around in the fallen confetti as they weep and then eventually come, overstimulated by the stunning beauty of Mitani’s simulated, patriotic death.

But this communal expression of commitment to self-annihilation is followed by an extended scene between the recruit and his mentor, who enjoy a last, tender night alone together before the actual act, which is scheduled for the next morning. This scene then leads into the next, when our couple is shown oversleeping, missing the siege and the suicides the others end up performing without them. They then decide to try to commit ritual suicide out of solidarity, using kitchen knives and Kleenex in place of swords and white cloth, but end up chickening out. The last scene is “two years later,” and our heroes are shown settling into a comfortable life running a small gay bar, dressed in comically inept, dowdy drag but seeming happy and prosperous.

Beautiful Mystery, then, incorporates the legacy of Mishima’s aesthetics by embracing the sexiness of its celebration of masculinity and ritual while also consistently undercutting its fascist politics through parody and absurdism. It is a balancing act that resembles that of Bruce LaBruce’s funny/sexy experiments with skinhead porn. It is a nice counterbalance to receptions of Mishima that ignore the troubling politics of his aesthetics in favor of a kind of hagiography of Mishima As Artist and/or Tragic Homosexual, but also resists the condemnation of Mishima typical of Leftist critics both in Japan and abroad who attempt to reject his politics by associating it with a perception of compromised masculinity that homosexuality supposedly represents. Sexy, funny, and surprisingly political, Beautiful Mystery demonstrates the subversive powers of satire possible within a genre already identified with taboo-breaking and a certain level of tastelessness that facilitated the confrontation with aspects of culture that proved much more difficult to deal with directly in “higher” forms of art.