The Sun & The Steel by Yukio Mishima

All the aimless young men who have spent the past couple years listening to Cobra Tate on podcasts would do well to pick up Yukio Mishima instead. Then again, when it comes to controversial models of masculinity, perhaps Mishima is lateral move. In any case, his 1968 manifesto-memoir The Sun & The Steel prefigures many concerns of the modern day “manosphere,” dealing with these themes in a manner that is both vigorous and lyrical. In his testament of vitalism, one finds the same overwhelming concern for strength, charisma, and legacy. But compared to Mishima, no one in our won age has articulated these ideas as eloquently, nor as hauntingly.

The Solar Man & The Lunar Man

Weakness is the great nemesis haunting Mishima throughout The Sun & The Steel. Like many in our own time, he is obsessed with stamping out the weakness in his life, pushing himself and his body beyond its assumed limits, while also calling out anyone else (i.e. pretty much everyone else) who might foster frailty in a society. Above all, he sees the difference between strength and weakness as black and white—or to use the analogy found throughout the book—the difference is night and day.

The sun rules the day while the moon lingers in the night. The self-effulgent sun brilliantly displays its independent power; the pale and parasitic moon dimly reflects light stolen from the sun. While the sun is a constant source of new and living light, the moon sustains itself with second-hand scraps—and its supply waxes and wanes.

Clearly, Mishima strove to be a son of the sun rather than man of the moon. By working out and lifting weights in the sunshine, he felt transfigured by its light and suffused with its strength. When he observes how his skin had tanned brown, he feels himself “branded” by the sun as a member of “the other race”—the solar race.

The struggle between solar and lunar mindsets running throughout this book also embodies a critique of critics. For Mishima, most people in the modern world—and almost everyone in the literary world—are crippled by a lunar tendency towards self-consciousness and excessive reflection. Just as the moon has no light aside from that which it reflects from the sun, these lunar people have no original ideas or life of their own; they only offer mere reflections or cheap commentary when compared to more solar individuals.

While he claims to have found bold thoughts in the bright light of day, most of his contemporaries simply pen their small, quiet, dim thoughts, which were found in their small, quiet, dim evenings, spent in their small, quiet, dim studies. To Mishima these people are not only insufferable—they are literally lunatics, whose lunar lifestyle manifests itself not only in their weak writing, but in their weak bodies:

The men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. They sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen. They rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these the sun had had a hand.

A Muscular Philosophy

While most philosophers busy themselves with abstractions and the intellectual exercises of syllogisms, Mishima concerns himself with the concrete life of the body. His philosophy of the physical is as relentless as it is refreshing. In a way, The Sun & The Steel reinterprets an old pensée from Pascal: “The heart has reasons of its own, of which Reason knows nothing.” But in Mishima, Reason finds itself outrun by not the heart and its intuitions, but the body and the consciousness suffused throughout each of its muscles.

How did the groups of muscles, normally so heavy, so dark, so unchangingly static, know the moment of white-hot frenzy in action? I loved the freshness of the consciousness that rippled unceasingly beneath spiritual tension, whatever kind it might be. I could no longer believe that it was purely an intellectual quality of my own that the copper of excitement should be lined with the silver of awareness…. For 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.

The life of the mind rests upon the life of the body. This principle hardly needed be mentioned, as it was so obvious in the ancient world. Plato’s career was founded upon wrestling matches long before he was known for his debates. Likewise, he recommended that students begin their studies in the gym and music before moving on to philosophy. In ancient Christianity, the physical practice of fasting grounded prayer and theology; without this discipline of the body, the soul would remains opaque to contemplation and theological conversations would dwindle into idle chatter. Even in our modern world, we find all the great human desires within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs first founded upon security in our physical existence.

Far from being a vain exercise in aesthetics, the cultivation of our bodies leads to the cultivation of our minds. But Mishima points out that many might find the sculpting of our physique might as superfluous as a liberal arts education:

The groups of muscles that have become virtually unnecessary in modern life, though still a vital element of a man’s body, are obviously pointless from a practical point of view, and bulging muscles are as unnecessary as a classical education is to the majority of practical men. Muscles have gradually become something akin to classical Greek. To revive the dead language, the discipline of the steel was required; to change the silence of death into the eloquence of life, the aid of steel was essential.

The healthiest passages are when this book reads like a love letter to weightlifting. Entering a gym for the first time can be quite a culture shock to the uninitiated. Various machines stand scattered around like a medley of medieval torture devices; endless rows of dumbbells line the walls like rounds of ammunition; masochism and machismo blend together in the faces of dudes lifting weights in front of the mirror—pushing themselves into pain, seeking out suffering. Mishima describes his own first encounter with weightlifting in a more contemplative yet still intimidating mood:

It was thus that I found myself confronted with those lumps of steel: heavy, forbidding, cold as though the essence of night had in them been still further condensed.

On that day began my close relationship with steel that was to last for ten years to come.

The nature of this steel is odd. I found 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.

The Romantic Eclipse of Death

Here we come upon a paradox that lies beneath Mishima’s life and work: What does it mean that someone who wishes to be a solar man begins to the adopt the properties of the steel, which are the condensed essence of night?

In the most generous and healthy sense, the light of the muscles triumphs over the darkness of the weights. Now, the weights which were once heavy have become light. He writes that through his lifting the steel in the sun, his muscles became like “rays of light given the form of flesh.” By a kind of hermetic response, his muscles took the darkness of the weights and emerged with an even stronger brilliance.

However, the truth is that an eclipse took place in Mishima. As he became accustomed to lifting the darkness, the darkness entered into him. Rather than undertaking these exercises for his health or his life, all this work was oriented toward his death. To borrow a line from St Paul, it seems he was sculpting a “vessel for destruction” (Rom 9:22). Depths speak to depths, and the dark and hidden heaviness of the weights seemed only to strengthen something dark and hidden in him:

Beyond the educative process there also lurked another, romantic design. The romantic impulse that had formed an undercurrent in me from boyhood on, and that made sense only as the destruction of classical perfection, lay waiting within me. Like a theme in an operatic overture that is later destined to occur throughout the whole work, it laid down a definitive pattern for me before I had achieved anything in practice.

Specifically, I cherished a romantic impulse towards death, yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle; a peculiar sense of destiny made me believe that the reason why my romantic impulse towards death remained unfulfilled in reality was the immensely simple fact that I lacked the necessary physical qualifications. A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensable in a romantically noble death. Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate. Longing at eighteen for an early demise, I felt myself unfitted for it. I lacked, in short, the muscles suitable for a dramatic death. And it deeply offended my romantic pride the it should be this unsuitability that had permitted me to survive the war.

For all that, these purely intellectual convolutions were as yet nothing but the entangling of themes within the prelude to a human life that so far had achieved nothing. It remained for me some day to achieve something, to destroy something. That was where the steel came in—it was the steel that gave me a clue as to how to do so.

On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four members of his Tatenokai militia broke into the Camp Ichigaya military base in central Tokyo, where he stepped out on a balcony to deliver one last manifesto to soldiers gathered below. His words spoke of overthrowing the state, restoring the divinity of the Emperor, and recovering the nobility of the old Japanese order. After thrice shouting “Long live the emperor!”, Mishima took his sword to his stomach, and committed seppuku.

While his ritualistic death had no political effect upon the soldiers, it seems that was never the point. Given passages such as the one above, it’s hard not to read The Sun & The Steel as one long suicide note. Mishima published this work in 1968, two years before his death. Through this work, we see his death was not political, but aesthetic.

Mishima wanted to be immortalized as a healthy man who met his death on the balcony, emblazoned by the sun, rather than a weak and wrinkled man who died in his sleep. He wanted as much control over his death as he did over his body or his writing. In the end, it was all craft to him. His longing for a dramatic end to his life was satisfied.

His youthful desire for death to meet him in his prime reminded me of Inazo Nitobe who wrote in Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899):

The glorification of seppuku offered, naturally enough, no small temptation to its unwarranted committal. For causes entirely incompatible with reason, or for reasons entirely undeserving of death, hot headed youths rushed into it as insects fly into fire; mixed and dubious motives drove more samurai to this deed than nuns into convent gates. Life was cheap—cheap as reckoned by the popular standard of honor. The saddest feature was that honor, which was always in the agio, so to speak, was not always solid gold, but alloyed with baser metals. No one circle in the Inferno will boast of greater density of Japanese population than the seventh, to which Dante consigns all victims of self-destruction!

A Concluding Contradiction

Knowing how he met his end makes The Sun & The Steel a frustrating read. Many have seen Mishima as a schizophrenic at war with himself; at several points, we can see that his memoir and his manifesto seem to be at odds with one another. For as much as critiques the “nocturnal thinking” of his contemporaries, Mishima admits that he was a night owl who conducted his own writing routines in those darkest hours in the middle of the night. His vain obsession with his own image bore all the marks of the self-absorbed and self-reflective lunar individuals he decries. Maybe lunar people are scared of the power within them. Maybe Mishima stared into that abyss too much and became the abyss.

Maybe it was his infatuation with that power—at once both vital and deadly—that led him to kill himself. The same who desired that “the edge of my spirit and the edge of my body would meet and fuse together in a single shoreline” ended up separating his spirit from his body the edge of a sword—what the steel of weights had brought together, the steel of a blade had split apart. The same man who began his book by talking about his longing to be member of the solar race ends his book with a poem about Icarus flying too close to the sun, and crashing back down to earth:

Why did the soft, indolent earth thus
greet me with the shock of steel plate?
Did the soft earth thus turn to steel
Only to show me my own softness?

Perhaps what is most frustrating about Mishima is that he got what he wanted. “My dreams became, at some stage, my muscles” he wrote, and those muscles persist in our memories; we will never have a memory of him as a tired, old man. And in a sense, he is right. All of us wish for death to come for us while we’re still alive. Why not have it meet us when we are most alive? But still we should also ask him: how strong is all this strength if it ended up killing you?

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The Sun & The Steel by Yukio Mishima

Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe