Between Mishima to Oshima

Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) is considered one of the most prominent writers and poets of postwar Japan. Filmmaker Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013) was one of the leading ideologues and creators of the movement that came to be known as the "Japanese New Wave" in the 1960s and 1970s. The two were radical artists who occupied opposing political and cultural poles, yet both shared the conviction that art should "strike at society" and shake its social structures. A comparison of adaptations of Mishima's works with Oshima's films reveals several overlapping obsessions: Japan's sociopolitical fractures, transgressive sexuality, violence, and the search for national identity in the aftermath of the empire's collapse.

Mishima's complex identity as both a man and an artist combined Japanese neoclassical aesthetics with European decadence, overt homoeroticism, and ultraradical nationalism. His political development during the 1960s was characterized by an absolute rejection of modern, bourgeois, materialistic Japan, which he regarded as a debased culture that had been Americanized and had lost its soul. He despised both liberal and socialist politics, viewing the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (ANPO) as a national humiliation. His position did not stem from conventional party nationalism, but rather from a radical aestheticization of the institution of the Emperor (Tennō). For him, the Emperor was not a flesh-and-blood political leader but the embodiment of the "spirit of the nation" – an abstract symbol of purity and beauty, and the source of Japanese cultural and spiritual identity. Only a return to absolute obedience to the Emperor, understood in this sense, could purify Japan of corrupting Western influence. The militia group the "Shield Society," which Mishima founded in 1968, stormed a Japan Self-Defense Forces base in Tokyo on November 25, 1970. At the climax of the action, Mishima committed ritual suicide by seppuku according to traditional conventions. In this act, he gave absolute expression to the central theme of his life: the union of beauty, the sword, and death. 

"Conflagration" (1958), directed by Kon Ichikawa, is an adaptation of Mishima's "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" (1956). In the literary source, the protagonist is a young monk who burns down a temple as an act of aesthetic redemption – a liberation from the dominion of eternal, abstract beauty and its transformation into a fleeting, living event. For Ichikawa, however, this is not merely an act of aesthetic redemption but also an expression of social and existential anguish in a Japan corrupted by war and its aftermath. "School of Flesh" (L’École de la chair, 1998), directed by French filmmaker Benoît Jacquot, is an adaptation of the novel Nikutai no gakko (1963). The relationship between an independent, mature businesswoman and a young man becomes a psychological battle in which the boundaries between exploiter and exploited, erotic desire and class domination, become blurred. This reflects Mishima's preoccupation with the relationship between power, eroticism, and social status. "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" (1985), by filmmaker and screenwriter Paul Schrader, is an ambitious and compelling attempt to capture Mishima's life and work, combining the biographical and historical framework of the November 1970 protest action with memories of his childhood and adulthood and striking adaptations of passages from three of his major works. 

Nagisa Oshima mounted a sharp critique of the Japanese state, which he believed had undergone no genuine purification from the imperial fascism that preceded 1945. Under American patronage, the old hierarchical and authoritarian structures had undergone merely formal "modernization." The Emperor remained a symbol, while the state apparatus continued to oppress the individual. Oshima argued that this oppression had a mirror image in Stalinist and institutionalized leftism, which, in the name of party discipline, betrayed mass movements and suppressed independent critical thought. In his opposition both to state oppression and to society's self-image as a homogeneous, egalitarian, and harmonious community, Oshima places at the center of his films the silenced national and social Other: the Korean minority, marginalized youth, criminals, rapists, and social deviants. For him, Japanese national identity is not a sacred biological or historical given but a violent ideological structure that demands constant deconstruction. Oshima's politics and aesthetics are grounded in a persistent stance of negation and dissent: an absolute rejection of any hierarchical, institutional, or collective structure that claims to speak on behalf of the individual. Accordingly, he adopts a modernist, fragmented, discontinuous, and Brechtian aesthetic. He does not seek classical beauty or the harmony of word and sword found in Mishima's work. In Mishima, sexuality and homoeroticism are inextricably linked to heroic death, suffering, sadism, and the fetishization of the male body. Death represents a fusion of beauty, violence, and transcendental ideology. Oshima, by contrast, conceives of sexuality as a material, instinctual, and potentially liberating force that exists in opposition to the state and the law. Death is instead opaque, cruel, and sordid, or becomes an instrument through which the state suppresses life.

In "Cruel Story of Youth" (1960), the breakthrough film of the Japanese New Wave, a young man and a woman who extort wealthy men serve to illustrate the connection between the failure of institutionalized leftism and the nihilism of the younger generation. "Violence at Noon" (1966) is based on the true story of a serial killer and rapist active in Japan. The film focuses on the murderer and his complex relationships with two women connected to him – his wife and one of his victims, who becomes bound to him in a relationship of subjugation. The film links the individual's violent and sexual drives to the failed attempt to establish a socialist agricultural commune. Collective ideology proves incapable of confronting the dark and irrational impulses of human beings. Violence is not an aberration from the social order but rather a direct product of the oppression and suffocation inherent in both traditional and modern Japanese society. "Empire of Passion" (1978) is a ghost story set in a village during the Meiji period in the late nineteenth century. A young woman and her younger lover murder her elderly husband. The husband's spirit returns to haunt them and the village. Oshima shows how the traditional Japanese village, often perceived in national mythology as a source of harmony and order, is in fact a space of sexual repression, jealousy, mutual surveillance, and oppressive collective punishment.