Madame de Sade
Contemporary Americans may not understand how a writer so far right of center could celebrate the Marquis de Sade, which is what Mishima did in this neoclassical swoon through the raptures of sexual cruelty and degradation. To us, sexual insurrectionists belong on the radical left. But in Mishima’s worldview, eroticized mutilation harked back to Japan’s samurai code, which held that disembowelment was the purest expression of devotion to the emperor. To Mishima, physical brutality was reactionary rather than transgressive.
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His was a political philosophy charged by a long-standing fetish for blood, injury, and premature death (he committed suicide in 1970). As he wrote in Confessions of a Mask, the first time he masturbated was while staring at a painting of Saint Sebastian bound to a tree and pierced with arrows (Mishima assumed the same pose himself in a 1966 photograph). This autobiographical novel is filled with sadistic fantasies: he imagines feasting on a naked, unconscious schoolmate and establishing a “murder theater” in which gladiators would offer up their lives for his amusement. “All the deaths that took place there not only had to overflow with blood but also had to be performed with all due ceremony,” he wrote.
This lyrical suspension is Anderson’s most astute choice, for only on such an altered plane–somewhere between a fairy tale and a nightmare–can Mishima’s heady, mesmerizing, but at times bewildering script coalesce. Continually warping whatever reality he creates, he gives his characters long, poetic monologues that blend their inner and outer selves in a nearly hallucinatory manner. Again and again they return to images of sexual cruelty, as though de Sade’s deeds held their imaginations captive, drawing out parts of themselves that had lain hidden under layers of respectability.
