Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

“Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.”
- The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, Yukio Mishima

I remember the moment I finished reading Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. I was immediately overwhelmed by the thrilling, provocative, and personal rush that had overcome my mind and heart. It led me to read more and more of his novels, to the point where he undoubtedly became my favorite author. Not just because his stories were so incredible - but also because his story was so incredible.

On every page of Mishima’s writings, you gain insight into one of the most troubled souls throughout human history - one who, as we see in Confessions of a Mask, hides his true self away and replaces it with a facade... or in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion grapples with understanding the concept of beauty... or in The Sound of Waves where true love is overcome by man’s desire to be independent... Yukio Mishima had a way of achieving a certain insight into the human mind like no other.

Paul Schrader took everything I love and pity about Mishima’s life and put it on the screen the way Mishima would have wanted. A display of beauty, pure as poetry with “a splash of blood,” and powerful like thunder reverberating across distant waves, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters was able to represent in cinematic form what Mishima did to prose, poetry, and performance.

And the score. Oh the score. Philip Glass elevated the film with the same melancholic beauty that was so present in Mishima’s life. Here’s how Mishima would put it:

“Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.”
- The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

The film humanizes Mishima and makes it clear that the storytellers have a deep respect and love for his life and legacy. His story is wild, and wildly controversial - but his art humanized him. The creators of this film used that to their advantage, humanizing Mishima’s troubled soul by incorporating his own stories and combining it with his own life. As is discussed in the film, art has the power to last longer than human life - and if that weren’t the case, I wouldn’t be so moved by this story about a man who I’ve always felt a strange, uncomfortable, distant kinship with. Mishima is my favorite author because he can portray the most intimate thoughts we fail to articulate, and Schrader executed his with the same ease and beauty.

From The Sound of Waves:

“Even so, when that day’s fishing was almost done, the sight of a white freighter sailing against the evening clouds on the horizon filled the boy’s heart with strange emotions. From far away the world came pressing in upon him with a hugeness he had never before apprehended. The realization of this unknown world came to him like distant thunder, now pealing from afar, now dying away to nothingness.”

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

RRR: Throwing Tigers and Touching Hearts