Mishima’s essential text on the aesthetics of the body
In this endlessly fascinating essay—part bildungsroman, part treatise—from one of Japanese’s most celebrated and controversial modern writers, we witness the transformation of Yukio Mishima from a bookish teenager who avoided fighting in WWII, to a bodybuilder, a warrior, and a writer soaring at the heights of fame in postwar Japan, who ultimately became a leader of a military group who tried to overthrow the Japanese government.Mishima, with measured and poetic self-interrogation, sifts through his own memories, piecing together the complex relations between thought and action, art and the physical body, individualism and nationalism, literature and revolution. He argues that only through the body—conditioning it with weightlifting—can one reach their highest ambitions as an individual; and only within a group can the individual transcend their place in the world and become almost a sort of divinity.
