>Everyone talks about this book like "Ha ha, gay man likes muscles"
>It's actually one of the most intense philosophical works on the nature of reality and the human sin of abstraction
Why does this book filter so many people?
>Everyone talks about this book like "Ha ha, gay man likes muscles"
It all stems from being a gay man who likes muscles and cums while enacting seppuku though, unironically.
But he wasn't gay, that's the thing
He wasn't gay, but he was a homosexual
You've never actually read Mishima. This is just a random excerpt whose validity you haven't bothered to verify that you got from some other IQfy post you half read.
i've read mishima and he was gay.
What type of straight man writes a "fictional" story about a closeted homosexual in Japan that happens to do everything the author did irl?
You are being moronic. I've read all of his major works. I'm actually a huge fan. Negating the fact he was a homosexual, and the importance it had in his writing, is just ridiculous. He even wrote for a gay magazine under a pseudonym. Look up "Ai no shokei". There are also interviews in which he defends homosexuality as an accepted practice in Japan before the arrival of Christian missionaires. There are testimonies of young male lovers about how he would cum while enacting seppuku, which was also corroborated by a movie director whose name I can't remember right now, I think it was Domoto Masaki, but I might be mistaken.
>This is just a random excerpt whose validity you haven't bothered to verify that you got from some other IQfy post you half read
It comes from "Persona", a biography of Yukio Mishima written by two Japanese writers. It's literally on the file name, moron.
He literally admits on his correspondence with Kawabata that Confessions is an autobiographical novel.
He was gay but he fetishized masculinity and would probably become violent if he saw leather daddies gyrating on a wiener float at a modern pride parade.
Then what is he?
The abstract is more real than the sensible.
By definition, it is not.
When the sensible is gone, the abstract will still be, as it is not among the sensible.
What makes you believe the abstract will survive the death of the sensible?
It's just not there. The sensible does not exhaust reality.
I get that they are two fictional stories but if you can read Confessions of a Mask and Forbidden Colors and not see the obvious complete fruitcake self-insert main characters then I don't know what to tell you
yeah seriously, why would you write a book like Confessions that's made up entirely of known facts about your real life, except for the part where the protagonist is gay?
>When action views itself as reality and art as falsehood, it entrusts this falsehood with authority for giving final endorsement to its own truth and, hoping to take advantage of the falsehood, sets it in charge of its dream
Literal schziobabble
But he is right with no doubt.
He was writing a philosophical work like a work of fiction
Wagner is the prime representation of that line of thought in European culture which rejects contemplation as an end in itself, and is in this, and many other respects, Europe's first vitalist artist. Mishima was always attracted to Wagner, with his fusion of eros and thanatos, worship of youth, nationalism, etc. Tristan and the Ring were influences on Patriotism and The Sea of Fertility, and in the prior this is made particularly obvious by Mishima using the music from Tristan in the film adaptation.
>Hand−in−hand with the dissolution of the Athenian State, marched the downfall of Tragedy. As the spirit of Community split itself along a thousand lines of egoistic cleavage, so was the great united work of Tragedy disintegrated into its individual factors. Above the ruins of tragic art was heard the cry of the mad laughter of Aristophanes, the maker of comedies; and, at the bitter end, every impulse of Art stood still before Philosophy, who read with gloomy mien her homilies upon the fleeting stay of human strength and beauty.
>To Philosophy and not to Art, belong the two thousand years which, since the decadence of Grecian Tragedy, have passed till our own day.
>Art is the highest expression of activity of a race that has developed its physical beauty in unison with itself and Nature; and man must reap the highest joy from the world of sense, before he can mould therefrom the implements of his art; for from the world of sense alone, can he derive so much as the impulse to artistic creation.
- Art and Revolution
>The path of Science lies from error to knowledge, from fancy ("Vorstellung") to reality, from Religion to Nature. In the beginning of Science, therefore, Man stands toward Life in the same relation as he stood towards the phenomena of Nature when he first commenced to part his life from hers. Science takes over the arbitrary concepts of the human brain, in their totality; while, by her side, Life follows in its totality the instinctive evolution of Necessity. Science thus bears the burden of the sins of Life, and expiates them by her own self−abrogation; she ends in her direct antithesis, in the knowledge of Nature, in the recognition of the unconscious, instinctive, and therefore real, inevitable, and physical. The character of Science is therefore finite: that of Life, unending; just as Error is of time, but Truth eternal. But that alone is true and living which is sentient, and hearkens to the terms of physicality (Sinnlichkeit). Error's crowning folly is the arrogance of Science in renouncing and contemning the world of sense (Sinnlichkeit); whereas the highest victory of Science is her self−accomplished crushing of this arrogance, in the acknowledgment of the teaching of the senses.
>The end of Science is the justifying of the Unconscious, the giving of self−consciousness to Life, the re−instatement of the Senses in their perceptive rights, the sinking of Caprice in the Want of Necessity. Science is therefore the vehicle of Knowledge, her procedure mediate, her goal an intermediation; but Life is the great Ultimate, a law unto itself. As Science melts away into the recognition of the ultimate and self−determinate reality, of actual Life itself: so does this avowal win its frankest, most direct expression in Art, or rather in the Work of Art.
>The actual Art−work, i.e. its immediate physical portrayal, in the moment of its liveliest embodiment, is therefore the only true redemption of the artist; the uprootal of the final trace of busy, purposed choice; the confident determination of what was hitherto a mere imagining; the enfranchisement of thought in sense; the assuagement of the life−need in Life itself.
>The Art−work, thus conceived as an immediate vital act, is therewith the perfect reconcilement of Science with Life, the laurel−wreath which the vanquished, redeemed by her defeat, reaches in joyous homage to her acknowledged victor.
- The Artwork of the Future
>In the struggle to give the wishes of my heart artistic shape, and in the ardour to discover what thing it was that drew me so resistlessly to the primal source of old home Sagas, I drove step by step into the deeper regions of antiquity, where at last to my delight, and truly in the utmost reaches of old time, I was to light upon the fair young form of Man, in all the freshness of his force. My studies thus bore me, through the legends of the Middle Ages, right down to their foundation in the old-Germanic Mythos; one swathing after another, which the later legendary lore had bound around it, I was able to unloose, and thus at last to gaze upon it in its chastest beauty. What here I saw, was no longer the Figure of conventional history, whose garment claims our interest more than does the actual shape inside; but the real naked Man, in whom I might spy each throbbing of his pulses, each stir within his mighty muscles, in uncramped, freest motion: the type of the true human being.
- A Communication to my Friends
Wagnergay, have you ever watched a Wagner opera? Will you ever go to Bayreuth?
Bayreuth is a shadow of its former self. Its only purpose now is as a historical monument.
Bayreuth was always a shadow, you're delusional to think otherwise
>closest thing to Wagner's intentions
>a shadow
Unbelievably stupid.
>literally built and designed by Wagner
When I least expect it I always run into the Wagnergay.
It's not fashionable to be homosexual and romantic for the old world/ I thought the veneer of queer community (which hopes to retroactively integrate Mishima's writing) was obviously fake in the way a front of house girl interacts with the alcohol rehab guys and Mexicans working back of house (if you've worked a restaurant). They can emotionally castrate themselves and file Mishima as Fascist or integrate him under a non threatening "wholesome" identity. Either way he loses his substance in the exact way he predicted/ His homosexuality is bound to his love of the old world. If you've really lived (this goes out to all the trannies) you realize the depths which previously were blocked off by conventions of male and female. In a word, Modern. Which makes the queer horde all the more obtrusive and disgusting: their brazen appeal to these depths despite incessant suckling from the teat of the oppressor. Two go hand-in-hand, but that is truly revolutionary perspective and cannot be allowed in the open. (Incitement to doable action, picking up a dumbbell...)
He was also known for liking 13-14 year old girls like a normal healthy Japanese man and to be fair there is no account of him sleeping with men. There are only accounts of him performing a mock seppuku, getting hard, and then ejaculating without touching himself. I like sun and steel and it helped me fix my thinking.
I hope you're joking anon.
About which part? Sun and Steel is a great read and being too big of a nerd will ruin you. It's good to know how to move into your body.
Your picture is of Mishima with a gay transvestite.
That's actress Eiko Muramatsu anon. Not his transvestite friend.
Damn, I've always thought it was the transvestite.
He was friends with a transvestite and there are pics of him with her. The only reason I'm bringing up Yukios sexuality is people in the west blame repression on people having weird explosive episodes. Yukio Mishima was only repressed as an adolescent who didn't go outside. He basically outlined everything he is in Confessions of a Mask and people in Japan didn't have a reason to be in the closet. He is probably a genuinely strange / unusual character who was extremely upfront about what he wanted. He constantly talked about wanting a violent end and his seppuku after kidnapping the Mayor was "political" but mostly done to satisfy his desire for a violent end and also out of fear of aging more so than repression or other Freudian ideas.
>does this look like a gay guy to you?
yeah
If anything, he's bi because he has the same Japanese thing where they're into 13-14 year old girls. Him being gay and not a mentally ill freak who gets hard and ejaculates at the thought of seppuku or Greek statues is another thing. His book Confessions of a Mask show a world without represssion. Japan didn't have the same taboos about homos the west had and he wasn't in the closet about anything, he is just really fricking weird.
imo if you have sex with men you're gay, and also having sex with women doesn't diminish that. bi just means gay guy who fricks women sometimes
But he didn't have sex with men. He'd just commit seppuku in front of them, get hard, and ejaculate without touch himself and then leave. There isn't an account of him penetrating buttholes. I'm on the fence on this one, he might just be weird.
He jerk offd furiously to a painting of Saint Sebastian
I also jerk offd to this painting
Are you gay?
No I'm just attracted to the male form
There are a lot of authors out there. If you only want to read stuff from straight authors go ahead, but Mishima was clearly a gay sodomite homosexual little jap.
I think it was more complex that a simple gay/not gay. His sexual stimuli was centered towards the male body and pain and/or visceral violence. He was into dude torso but he never fricked/been fricked a dude.
Idk where that puts him but this is definitely more than haha bro was gaye lole.
Just my 2c.
>Yeah, he was physically attracted to the male form, but was he gay????
he was a masochistmaxxed volcel
It is genuinely confusing because he likes 13 - 14 year old jap girls too.
a question IQfy asks daily
>on the nature of reality
using this expression is a dead giveaway that you're a midwit. don't.
unless you have some sense in your mind of how you are retaining the metaphorical connection to natura's meaning of "birth", you should not be inserting the word nature here.
also you are doing that thing people do where they say a work is "philosophical" to mean "it rly makes U think...", I recommend avoiding the word "philosophical" completely, it's noise.
What do you mean when you say a work is "philosophical"?
Did Mishima ever comment on Otoya Yamaguchi? Seems like the kinda guy he'd respect
Yamaguchi used toothpaste to write 'Would that I had seven lives to give for my country' on his jail cell wall before committing suicide. Mishima had the same words written on his headband during his failed coup.
well as men our hard wiener contains the creative impulse to which life comes forth so its only natural as artists we would be interested in looking at wieners and naked men not in a gay way but to study the essence of art
>the human sin of abstraction
Can you expand on this?
Mishima rejects Platonism.
He hates words I think
Is it actually though? Because if it is, I'll read it, but it seems like it's a pornographic romp for gay people from the screens posted ITT.
I honestly doubt anyone in this thread, including OP, has actually read it.
But it really is very good, you should read it, it's short and easily done in a few hours.
I'll check it out but if it gets too gay imma put it down. I don't like that shit
What I don't get is why westerners are such weebs that they're so desperate to suck off this jap and other japs. Japanese suck and got eternally BTFO'd by America. Their mindset is incompatible with the West. You might as well be a shitlib into buddhism or hinduism.
Mishima's writing aligns more with early Hellenic thinkers like Anaximander and Parmenides and the west more than Japanese thinking.
>He was gay because he had big muscles! Only gay people like big muscles! You don't want to be gay, do you? Be weak and don't work out!
said no one itt. he had sexo with men but not exclusively so. /threa/ closed. and no he wasn't gay. Because:
>Their mindset is incompatible with the West.
The japanese had no concept of that pre meji. And post meji they just forbade homosexual interactions to appease their western puppet players. The words gei and other western rainbow terms and associated subcultures didn't even exist linguistically before western cultural assimilation post wwII.
Don't believe me?
Here's a list: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/lgbtq-identities/
a homosexual by any other name
He didn't have sex with men, he'd do a mock seppuku, get hard, and ejaculate with no stimulation whatsoever and then get up and leave. It was kind of a freak show, but all accounts of people who'd seen him do it he wouldn't even touch them.
>He didn't have sex with men
... Yeah, sure. Honestly, even dismissing the ample first hand accounts, how do you read forbidden colors, sun and steel or confessions without assuming that they are mostly autobiographical... it's just stupid. His whole work is about him trying to integrate with his homoerotic masochism. We don't know if he put it in or w/e exactly you plebs are obsessed with but he def desired sexual acts with MEN as the focal point of his desire and he DID meet young guys from parks on his travels and dated akihiro maruyama amongst others.
>but he def performed sexual acts with MEN as the focal point
I'm willing to believe that he may just have coomed watching the guys he invited to his hotel suites like some ppl do but he defo had homosexual urges and coomed to those in the presence of other men.
That makes a lot of sense because in confessions he outright states that he has a thing for blonde young european looking guys... well especially for literally eating them apparently or at least imagining doing so.
>well especially for literally eating them apparently or at least imagining doing so.
Tho, tbh I took that less literally and more as hyperbole. Fingers crossed they won't unearth a twink massgrave at his mansion.
Are you kidding? That'd be insanely based. He'd be the most successful person to also be a cannibal serial killer that I know of.
When I read those books I got the impression he was on the cusp of becoming a serial killer / eating people. He may have been more of a Jeffrey Dahmer type but because he was talented at writing he ended up being well received by literary fans and he only really ever hurt himself.
I kind of took it more as an intentional affront to westerners reading his work. In fact I think he really hates Christianity specifically for ruining pre meji homosexual friendly japan and while actually cooming to the martyr shtick also using to whole thing to just piss on Christianity. That'd be my justification for reading it as hyperbole.
Basically I'm trying to say: Sure he was kinda jerking it to implications of his own violent death and like muscles and homosexual warrior culture but he might have egged it on in to riled up westoids.
I don't know, he liked the masochistic martyrdom of Christianity and Japan really wasn't repressive to gays. I think he just legitimately liked violence in an erotic way.
>I think he just legitimately liked violence in an erotic way.
I think so too. But the more ludicrous descriptions of his wank fantasies, esp. in confessions might be some kind of:
>So, you got this whole repressive, religous framework you tried imposing on us. Heh, jokes on you I'm cooming to that shit.
>Heh, jokes on you I'm cooming to that shit.
and in the most homosexual way possible.
I think this also might be a case of him, at least at first, not quite understanding what he was looking at. He may have been oblivious to the fact that most of the art work he may or may not have coomed to was already made by subversive artists to low key dunk on Christianity. He may have figured it out later on but I can absolutely see a young mishima thinking he was some kind of smart alec for pointing at the homoerotic undertones of catholic martyr paintings.
>Japan really wasn't repressive to gays
I'm not too sure on that, actually. They did def. try to stamp it out. And had a short-lived legal ban on it in the 19. century iirc.
Not in post war Japan. Yukios first book is his gayest and very well received despite of that.
>Not in post war Japan.
but how was it during or shortly before the war? It kinda struck me as odd that he was so ashamed of his slightly effeminate interests and leanings as a child?
He was ashamed of his weakness, not his homosexuality. Westerners are repressed in that way, the Freudian repression ideas don't really apply to his sex life.
Yeah, I understood that being weak and shy was the source of his shame later on but
in confessions, he recalls getting the eye for dressing up as a sorceress he saw in at some venue and later on forcing himself to butch it up in front of his girl playmates which struck me as odd since I always assumed that japan not only tolerated but somewhat revered effeminate swishy men but that part read exactly like the kind of western repression I encountered when younger. Is that just some abberation? It's also kinda weird because akihiro miwa is the same generation and basically the exact opposite.
I also found that childhood account of his totally disconnected from the rest of his experience and still he felt it was worth mentioning. I would have expected it building up to something like cross-dressing later on but then it's just his violent murder sex fantasy shtick later on.
It’s a good read and plenty of people feel the same. Getting tilted by posts that don’t show respect to Mishima is pointless. You’ll find people on this board that will unironically call Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Kierkegaard, etc. morons. The only sane option is to indulge in your homoerotic philosophy and ignore the critics
Was this that guy who talked about how he and his friends were just waiting to die in ww2?
why didn't mishima hurt other people instead of himself
because he would have needed a context in which he could paint himself as a hero, like the princes in the western fairy tales he so revered.
Literary an essay on why you shoud go to gym instead of reading that shit