An Englishmen Attempting to Mimic a Quest as a Hook for a Travel Book: Christopher Ross's "Mishima's Sword"

The gimmick of the account of travel in Japan by British ex-barrister Christopher Ross (author of Tunnel Visions: Journeys of an Underground Philosopher) is Mishima's sword. The sword with which Mishima Yukio cut open his belly on 25 September 1970 at the age of 45 was not a particularly finely crafted one. Mishima's real seppuku was considerably more hideous than the one he enacted in his own film adaptation of his novella Patriotism: he plunged the knife in too deeply, and his protégé twice failed in delivering the coup de grâce, hacking Mishima's neck rather than lopping off his head. Mishima's wife (who did not slit her throat like the wife in "Patriotism," and lived for many decades attempting to cleanse Mishima's reputation in various ways) did not want the blood-stained sword, and it disappeared.

Ross spent some time in Japan during the early 1990s, and returned on the quest to provide material for a book in 2000: "I would look for the sword, but more than that, I would search for answers to a large and multiplying number of questions posed by this man's anachronistic death". He visited sword makers, the collector who gave Mishima the sword, recalls his own martial arts during his adolescence (which may not be over...), and reaches the far from original conclusion that Mishima knew that the extremely reactionary political demands made by Mishima and his toy soldiers/private army (the Tate no Kai militia) had no chance of being seriously considered, and were a pretext for suicide. Americans who knew Mishima (Donald Keene, Edward Seidensticker, et al.) have convincingly explained that Mishima felt he had completed his literary work and had a horror of aging and did not want the muscles he had so assiduously grown to decay. The exhibitionist self-maker wanted to stage a spectacular death rather than age and/or find more forms or subjects to write about seem to me far more

The qualities of the sword -a 16^th-century one smithed by Seki no Magoruku and given to Mishima in 1966 by the owner of the Taiseidô Bookstore- do not make sense of Mishima's seppuku, no more and probably less than the political slogans the troops of the regular army shouted down before he went in and disemboweled himself. Ross acknowledges that "Mishima was quite dismissive of the mystique surrounding the Japanese sword," was not a connoisseur or expert on them.

Ross has no new insights into Mishima, but engagingly writes bout his travels, the unwillingness of most anyone in Japan who had personal connections with Mishima to talk to him, and the cult of Japanese swords. A particularly ludicrous dead end involves donning a fundoshi to talk to someone who would only meet the author at an s&m club.
Along the way, Ross records platitudes about Japanese culture (in general or bushido - the tao of warriors-in particular) to explain WWII atrocities, etc.

The paragraphs are short, the sentences not always grammatical, the words not always correctly spelled (I mean the English ones, not the large number of romanized Japanese ones).

Anyone curious about Mishima would do better to read Mishima (Madame de Sade is one I've written about here) or the biographies by Nathan or Stokes or the stylized movie made by Paul Shrader (which the widow prevented being shown in Japan)... or to see what Mishima considered a "beautiful death," "Patriotism," written, directed by, and starring Mishima Yukio.

But if one is interested in Christopher Ross, this might be recommended as a continuation of the somewhat self-deprecating but very arrogant "underground philosopher"...