Mishima theory

Here is a theory on Mishima Yukio's coup attempt/double suicide with his lover. It was forwarded to me by Mark Roberts, I forget the original author:

When Mishima Yukio, who had been a young member of the Japanese Romantic School, attempted to reenact the Showa Restoration in Showa 45, it was literally a farce, a fact that Mishima did not attempt to conceal. In the same way, the last character to be reincarnated (repeated) in The Sea of Fertility is an imitation; The Sea of Fertility ends in a "sea of emptiness."

In this manner, Mishima, by re-evoking the spirit of Showa, put an end to it. Borrowing the words of Marx, this non-tragic farce existed so that we could part cheerfully from Showa. There is probably no spectacle more ridiculous than the Right and conservatives attempting to appropriate Mishima's death. His action was entirely ironic: What he attempted to realize was the destruction of the very thought that aims at realizing something. It is not that the Japanese culture he aimed to defend had nothing in it, but, rather, it was this very nothingness in the culture that he aimed to defend.

Near the end of The Decay of the Angel, the last volume in The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, the woman questions the protagonist Toru: "Kiyoaki Matsugae was caught by unpredictable love, Isao linuma by destiny, Ying Chan by the flesh. And you? By a baseless sense of being different, perhaps?" Having been made to realize that he is a counterfeit, lacking in necessity, Toru plans to commit suicide in order to prove that he is genuine, but he fails. One can say that in this work, Mishima used the narrative framework of metempsychosis to capture the history of modern Japan. In this context, what does it mean that the protagonist of the final volume is a counterfeit?

According to Mishima's way of thinking, the emperor should have died in Showa 20, even as his supporters predicted at the time. He would have thereby become a god. But with his renunciation of divinity, the emperor lived on as a symbol of postwar national unity. Mishima scorned this emperor personally. The reincarnated emperor after the war was nothing more than a counterfeit, but it was no different from Mishima's self-contempt at having survived what should have been the "Final War." For Mishima, in order for an object to attain a genuine, absolute beauty (divinity), it must be burned, like Kinkakuji (the Temple of the Golden Pavilion). Mishima's suicide signifies, as well, the killing of the postwar emperor.