Yukio Mishima’s Embodied Aesthetics. Or: are all bodybuilders and martial artists closet fascists?

the finest cloak of invisibility for words is muscle

(Mishima, Sun and Steel, p.57)

 

Mishima’s (Non) Binary

 

In ‘The Ache’ (which I posted here and here), I linked the post-workout ache – and lack of it – to existential questions. I am not the first to do so. A fair few people have turned to literary forms to try to capture and convey what weight-training and bodybuilding are all ‘about’. One such person is the Japanese literary and dramatic giant, lover of muscle and martial arts – oh, and reactionary fascist who tried to lead an ultra-nationalist uprising and ended up publicly committing seppuku to make a point – Yukio Mishima.

 

But first, muscles. In his book, Sun and Steel (1970), Mishima describes his conversion from, as he puts it, the world of words to the world of muscle. This latter world – the world of embodied sense – is, to him, incommunicable in words. Nonetheless, Sun and Steel is his attempt to marshal all the reserves of literary language to try to communicate the incommunicable.

 

The turn to literary writing to try to capture and convey the ‘incommunicable’ intensities (affects) of building-while-being a body-in-process is paradoxical. To move deeper into language to try to capture something that you adamantly claim evades language is a paradoxical and apparently self-contradictory process.

 

Yet, for Mishima, there is a stark binary. There is communication on one side (language), and the incommunicable on the other (body). Or, in his terms, on one side there are words – the world of words, the world of communication (we might say ‘the symbolic order’). On the other, there is a real/m that Mishima reduces to one word: ‘muscle’. This is a world of intensities that cannot be communicated in words. As Mishima writes of his bodybuilding training:

 

The steel taught me many different things. It gave me an utterly new kind of knowledge, a knowledge that neither books nor worldly experience can impart. Muscles, I found, were strength as well as form, and each complex of muscles was subtly responsible for the direction in which its own strength was exerted, much as though they were rays of light given the form of flesh. (Mishima 1970, 23)

 

Of course, if we were to be pedantic, we might suggest that strength training is also a form of ‘worldly experience’. Yet, for Mishima it is unique in that it is principally about changing the body:

 

The nature of this steel is odd. I found that as I increased its weight little by little, the effect was like a pair of scales: the bulk of muscles placed, as it were, on the other pan increased proportionately, as though the steel had a duty to maintain a strict balance between the two. Little by little, moreover, the properties of my muscles came increasingly to resemble those of the steel. This slow development, I found, was remarkably similar to the process of education, which remodels the brain intellectually by feeding it with progressively more difficult matter. And since there was always the vision of a classical ideal of the body to serve as a model and an ultimate goal, the process closely resembled the classical ideal of education. (20)

 

Thus, inexorably, Mishima’s initial binary (the world of communicative words versus incommunicable embodiment) is problematised. His own thought process begins the process of his initial binary’s own deconstruction. As he says, ‘muscles had one of the most desirable qualities of all: their function was precisely opposite to that of words’ (23). Simple. Or so it seems. He continues: ‘Muscles, of which non-communication is the very essence, ought never in theory to acquire the abstract quality common to means of communication’. But then, immediately upon saying this, he adds a portentous ‘And yet. . . .’

 

He is forced to concede that things are not so simple. He has already announced the complication of his binary, a few sentences before:

 

The muscles that I thus created were at one and the same time simple existence and works of art; they even, paradoxically, possessed a certain abstract nature. Their one fatal flaw was that they were too closely involved with the life process, which decreed that they should decline and perish with the decline of life itself. (23)

 

Thus, Mishima injects two further heterogeneous things into the binary. First, aesthetic value: though muscles may be incommunicable, they definitely mean something to him in an aesthetic if not a logocentric sense. Second, he introduces his anxiety or melancholy: any present perfection cannot ward off inevitable decline.

 

Like a kind of hybrid of the late Romantic poet, John Keats, and the celebrant and threnodist of the samurai life, Miyamoto Musashi, Mishima first finds immense incommunicable beauty in something, then laments its impermanence, and then turns to the matter of the inevitability of death.

 

It is perhaps of more than incidental interest that he also laments what he regards as the exclusion of masculinity from the category of beauty: ‘In ordinary life’, he writes, ‘society maintains a careful surveillance to ensure that men shall have no part in beauty; physical beauty in the male, when considered as an “object” in itself without any intermediate agent, is despised’ (44). He then adds (several years before- and a world away from – Laura Mulvey) that ‘A strict rule is imposed where men are concerned. It is this: a man must under normal circumstances never permit his own objectivization’ (44).

 

Thus, we trace the contours of Mishima’s famous quasi-, crypto-, or actual fascism: Romantic melancholy at impermanence, publicly repressed homoerotic desire, a nostalgia for pre-Meiji era feudal Japanese/Samurai ethics and aesthetics, and a fantasy about the idea of a beautiful, tragic/suicidal death. Sun and Steel reads like a kind of Keatsian ode to Miyamoto Musashi – a writer often regarded as arch-theorist and exemplification of samurai ideology, who many take to be the authentic voice of a living world of budo, but who was in fact writing after the end of the era of the samurai and was hence already living and writing in the mode of nostalgia and fantasy.

 

Mishima’s Mirror Stages

 

Before getting drawn into all that, though, I want to note that the most obvious point of connection with my own recent thinking in ‘The Ache’ (and indeed my following post, ‘The Bodybuilding is the Message’, which I posted here and here), arises when Mishima thinks about his relation to his muscles outside the moment and process of training:

 

Away from the steel, … my muscles seemed to lapse into absolute isolation, their bulging shapes no more than cogs created to mesh with the steel. The cool breeze passed, the sweat evaporated – and with them the existence of the muscles vanished into thin air. (26)

 

‘[I]t was as though the muscles themselves had … never existed’ (25), he writes. This sense of disappearance is a problem when one invests one’s entire sense of self and value in lived, felt, embodied muscularity, a la Mishima. ‘This type of existence’, he writes, ‘that derived from rejecting the endorsement of existence by words, had to be endorsed by something different. That “something different” was muscle’ (51).

 

The meaning or value that Mishima condenses into feeling and living in and through one’s own muscles is, for him, the feeling of life itself. Not being able to feel them, then, introduces a kind of existential uncertainty or doubt, perhaps akin to the one I pondered in ‘The Ache’.

 

Lack of an ache demands – as I mentioned in my own reflection – verification of existence by some other means. Mishima writes:

 

Unfortunately, however, a mere sense of existence is not enough to make one perceive that the muscles have escaped dissolution; one needs to afford proof of one’s muscles with one’s own eyes, and seeing is the antithesis of existing. (51)

 

It is a tenet of Lacanian psychoanalysis that establishing a sense of self via identification with an external image (a mirror being the exemplary means) is to establish identity via something other than the self, and hence induce an interminable relation of self-alienation, or misrecognition. Mishima feels this. ‘The subtle contradiction between self-awareness and existence began to trouble me’ (51), he notes:

 

Admittedly, I could see my own muscles in the mirror. Yet seeing alone was not enough to bring me into contact with the basic roots of my sense of existence, and an immeasurable distance remained between me and the euphoric sense of pure being. Unless I rapidly closed that distance, there was little hope of bringing that sense of existence to life again. (52)

 

He craved experiential and affective confirmation of his existence, and pursued this through evermore training: ‘My solace lay more than anywhere – indeed lay solely – in the small rebirths that occurred immediately after exercise’ (61).

 

The Ultimate Sensation

 

Along with discussing bodybuilding in Sun and Steel, as the book progresses, Mishima moves increasingly into his inclusion of martial arts training within his self-creation project (‘I was beginning to dream of my capabilities as a fighting man’ (47)). Evidently, he moves into martial arts because he chases an intensification of experience – or what he calls ‘an attempt to reach the “ultimate sensation” that lies just a hairsbreadth beyond the reach of the senses’ (27).

 

Unfortunately, for Mishima this opens the floodgates to an inescapable focus on the matter of death: ‘Blood flows, existence is destroyed, and the shattered senses give existence as a whole its first endorsement, closing the logical gap between seeing and existing…. And this is death’ (53).

 

Undoubtedly, Mishima had a whole Gordian knot of concerns, anxieties and fantasies, relating to art, himself, Japan, his desires, and so on, all of which culminated in his creation of a right-wing militia, a failed uprising, and his own dramatic and performative suicide in the traditional mode of seppuku. As he says in Sun and Steel, anyone and everyone has an irresistible tendency to ‘create their own small universe, their own “false order”, whenever, at one particular time, they are taken control of by one particular idea’. Mishima was taken control of by ideas.

 

Sun and Steel is widely regarded as Mishima’s apologia for his own subsequent cultural and political acts or performances of seppuku. His more or less obvious fascist aesthetics, and their prominent place within his thinking about physical culture clearly generate discomfort among some commentators who are also fans of physical culture.

 

 

The F Word

 

For instance, a recent Harper’s magazine article about the delights of the bodybuilding ‘pump’, written by novelist Jordan Castro, both quotes at some length from Mishima and also rather insistently seeks to dismiss any connection between Mishima’s physical culture practices and his fascism (Castro 2024).

 

There is a strange dynamic here: pick and choose the cool quotes about how compelling exercise is, but absolutely ignore the overwhelming textual indulgence in fascist aesthetics, and effectively proceed as if they just aren’t there.

 

This partitioning no doubt arises because it feels hyperbolic. Just because we all go to the gym doesn’t mean we all have the same politics, right?

 

Nonetheless, it is not uncommon for people (especially academics) to notice strong affinities between many dimensions of bodybuilding and martial arts aesthetics and ideologies and to see clear connections with the values of fascism. While writers like Castro choose simply to adopt a ‘yeah, right’ kind of non-engagement with the issue, I do think that a big question is whether a similar investment to Mishima in similar physical cultural practices to those Mishima invested in is may or may not be aligned with fascism, in some way, and what risks there might be of a virtual or immanent potential breaking out into the actual.

 

I speak as someone who has spent much more than half of my long life invested in martial arts and strength training, and very much identifying as anything other than fascist.

 

Castro’s strategy of simple dismissal of the obvious aesthetic connection – in Mishima’s text, at least – is unsatisfactory. What is called for is a patient unpicking of the different dynamics at play.

 

The Reality that Stares Back

 

To isolate just two of the impulses animating Mishima’s text, for instance, we can see very different trajectories. On the one hand, writes Mishima: ‘I had begun to believe that it was the muscles – powerful, statically so well organized and so silent – that were the true source of the clarity of my consciousness’ (36). But, on the other hand, and at the same kind of time, for Mishima: ‘Ultimately, the opponent – the “reality that stares back at one” – is death’ (34).

 

Knowing that his muscles were fading by the age of 45, and having failed to orchestrate a broader hyper-traditionalist insular Japanese revolution, Mishima chose the path of a ‘beautiful’ self-sacrificial death – as symbolic as brutally embodied. If his words in Sun and Steel are to be taken at face value, this had to be done before his physical beauty was eroded by the ravages of time and age: ‘More than anything, I detested defeat. Can there be any worse defeat than when one is corroded and seared from within by the acid secretions of sensibility until finally one loses one’s outline, dissolves, liquefies’ (38).

 

However, to state the obvious: the realisation of inevitable death does not necessarily lead one to move from bodybuilding to martial arts to ritual suicide (with or without a ‘let’s organise a revolution’ stage). I recall that I myself gave more or less the exact same realisation for quitting formal martial arts classes when I was 53. I would say to anyone who would listen, ‘I know now that my only definite enemy is sarcopenia’. Sarcopenia is age-related muscle wastage. It is the canary in the coalmine of the arrival of the angel of death. So, rather than towards death, I moved from martial arts to bodybuilding at this particular age, and rather than embracing the idea of an early death, I am rather more revelling in weightlifting’s abilities to extend my sense and feelings of more fully living and feeling life.

 

An Affect Shared

 

The final concerns of Sun and Steel most obviously intersect with or attest to Mishima’s decision to form a militia. His interest here seems to boil down to a realisation that although something may be incommunicable it can nonetheless be shared. His reflections on group suffering relate to the value of the sharing of affect:

 

though verbal expression may convey pleasure or grief, it cannot convey shared pain; though pleasure may be readily fired by ideas, only bodies, placed under the same circumstances, can experience a common suffering. Only through the group, I realized – through sharing the suffering of the group – could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of the individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary – the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it on to ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death – which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors. . . . (69)

 

With this, we are of course clearly entering the terrain of lived embodied fascist aesthetics.

 

But that does not necessarily mean that we cannot both perceive the validity of Mishima’s observations and still avoid becoming fascist. We should not, like Jordan Castro, simply disavow the glaring obviousness of Mishima’s fascism. Rather, we need to show what the other paths trajectories away from or around such an outcome are.

 

There are many. But rather than introducing or advocating values, interpretations and orientations that are fundamentally alien to Mishima’s own, I think it may be most helpful to think about a figure that is central both to Mishima’s project and to fascist aesthetics more broadly. This, I would suggest, can be found in the figure of the hero:

 

I have yet to hear hero worship mocked by a man endowed with what might justly be called heroic physical attributes. Facile cynicism, invariably, is related to feeble muscles or obesity, while the cult of the hero and a mighty nihilism are always related to a mighty body and well-tempered muscles. For the cult of the hero is, ultimately, the basic principle of the body, and in the long run is intimately involved with the contrast between the robustness of the body and the destruction that is death. (33)

 

The brutal, brave, tragic, nihilistic hero is central to fascism, of course. But it is also central to neoliberalism, to the Hollywood action film, to Rousseauian or Thoreauian – maybe even Barthesian – values, and so on. (Barthes’ ‘Woodcutter’ figure in Mythologies is quite, well, mythic, right?)

 

I once had a profoundly homophobic relative. Happily, thanks to divorce, he is no longer a relative. He thought that watching homosexuality on TV or in films might make people become homosexual. The question of whether the incommunicable intensities (affects) provided by strength training and/or martial arts mean the practitioner is ‘becoming fascist’ may perhaps be of the same order as my un-becoming-relative’s thinking. Is learning French ‘becoming French’? Is tapping along to a song ‘becoming drummer’? Maybe, perhaps, a little bit ‘maybe yes’ but also a very great deal ‘no’. What is of more significance is what Stuart Hall would call the discursive conjuncture, what Ernesto Laclau would call the ‘articulatory relationships’ into which practices seem to fall, are forced, or are distanced from – the discursive atmospheres, the structures of feeling that permeate a time and a place and that intersect with individual psychologies, fantasies, neuroses, and so on.

 

Coda

As I wrap up this draft, I am glancing at the clock and thinking about heading off to the gym. When I walk to the door of the gym, I will be full of anxieties – will I get a squat rack, will any of my joints hurt, will I injure myself, will I fail to perform well on the exercises I have planned. Once I walk through the door, it will be like walking onto a stage or into a lecture hall: I will just be ‘on’. All systems go. Whatever happens, I will very soon be having a strange kind of fun.

 

Mishima notes, ‘It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words’ (47). This is what I get from the gym. Yet, this happiness is not spontaneous. In Mishima’s words again: ‘in order to bring about what I refer to here as happiness, an extremely troublesome set of conditions must first be fulfilled, and an extremely complex set of procedures gone through’ (47). Never mind the morning routines, the pre-planning routines of the night before, the micro-routines in front of an around the barbell or kettlebell, there are macro-routines, rituals, rites of passage to be gone through first. As Mishima observes:

 

Obviously, the basis of my happiness was the joy of having completely acquired the qualifications necessary to dwell therein. The basis of my pride was the feeling that I had acquired this precious passport, not through words, but through the cultivation of the body and that alone. (49)