Death Writing In Mishima Yukio’s Novels

The death preference in Mishima Yukio’s novels firstly originates from his gloomy childhood, where his sickly condition and morbid cultivation from his grandmother cast great shadow of death on him. Besides, this death preference is closely related to the death experience in the wartime and the impact of Japanese literary tradition where death is greatly favored.In Mishima Yukio’s earlier works, death seems to be romantic and aesthetic in accord with “the Chrysanthemum” in Japanese culture. His novels in the middle period, instead, partake of the brutal and bloody writing of death, which is achieved through the emphasis of “the Sword” in Japanese culture. Death in his later works, at length, becomes transient due to the tide of nihilism.Through the analysis of three different types of death, we can not only find a transition from romance to nihility when Mishima Yukio’s state of mind is concerned,but also a strange feeling of beauty. In his death writing, we can enjoy the beauty of perversion caused by the upsetting world, the beauty of tension brought by the conflicts between life and death, the beauty of Mononoaware punctuated in the tragedies, and the beauty of nihility hidden in the quietness and emptiness. In death writing, Mishima Yukio places his unique aesthetic pursuit.Yet there are also fallacies and extremes in Mishima Yukio’s death writing.Pursuing irrationally the beauty of death, Mishima Yukio claims the more bloody, the more charismatic. Such assertion, in fact, discloses the disrespect of life because death in his writing has already turns cruel and abnormal. In addition, Mishima Yukio has tried to beautify the invasive war into a sacrifice for beauty, which is exactly a kind of self-deception and a reaction against history.