Seen through the lens of a career, Yukio Mishima is a difficult author to classify. In the introduction to this new collection of the author’s stories, Voices of the Fallen Heroes, Mishima biographer John Nathan notes that, by his death at the age of forty-five, Mishima had written dozens of novels, forty plays and 170 short stories. Such an impressive tally necessitates variety. However, the last decade of the author’s life—from which editor Stephen Dodd selects all of the stories here—was unified by a virulent patriotism that found its real-life consummation in Mishima’s theatrical suicide, committing seppuku after delivering an impassioned but ill-received speech intended to incite military insurrection. While the stories in Voices feel at first eclectic in nature, it is possible to see Mishima’s burgeoning nationalist sentiment, specifically tied up with a personal fear of ageing, a resentment of those who waste their youth, and the impact of such profligacy on the spiritual purity of the Japanese nation.
Mishima was notoriously fearful of ageing, as well as being open in his desire for a brotherhood that he believed only Spartan-like military training could provide. It is thus possible to interpret Mishima’s political reasoning, both in this collection and in his real-life actions, such as the establishment of his own autonomous military society, as a framework that allowed him to ratify his own desire for youthful action and the companionship of patriotic young men. In contrast, he has little affection for the younger generation caught up in the materialism he saw as a facet of a now toothless Japan beholden to the West. Mishima wished for a Japan that was unshackled and resurgent on its own terms, spearheaded by a younger generation faithful to traditional ideals.
In this volume, the young are instead represented as a spiritually-bereft generation that turn in desperation to either vapid materialism—such as is the case in “Cars”, where a young girl is willing to sell her body for a fancy car—or, in more extreme cases, to narcotics, such as in “Moon”, where the three young protagonists fill their time doing drugs and pretending to be household appliances. “Their eyes seemed filled with dreams,” comments the narrator, “but they dreamt of nothing.” The potential of youth in these stories is always wasted, often through the devious manipulation of the establishment. The exploitation of the younger generation by the old is perfectly clear in another story in the collection, “True Love at Dawn”, in which a middle-aged couple use the bodies of two unwitting students to rekindle the raw passion present at the beginning of their relationship. While the scheme works beautifully for the older couple, the two younger characters in “Love” exhibit such a deep self-loathing that they barely feel slighted by such an act.
No piece better illustrates this sense of wasted youth and spiritual deficiency, however, than the titular story “The Voices of the Fallen Heroes”, which centers on a séance conducted by two monks that inadvertently conjures the angry spirits of dead Japanese soldiers. The first to arrive are those involved in the real-life February 26 Incident of 1936, in which a faction of the military attempted a coup d’état to restore absolute power to the emperor, the same desire Mishima publicly expounded before his death. Once this insurrection failed, Emperor Hirohito refused to condone the soldiers’ actions, which had included the assassination of a number of government officials, and branded them rebels. In the aftermath of the event, many of these renegade soldiers were summarily executed or imprisoned. One of the key aims stated in their manifesto was to rectify Japan’s course from what they saw as a policy of heedless modernization and greedy materialism. In “Voices”, their choral lament begins in kind:
Great buildings rise, but Righteousness collapses.
Their windows gleam with the fluorescent light of frustrated desire.
The sun rises day after day in clouds of smog.
Emotions are dulled, and sharp angles worn smooth.
A passionate and heroic spirit has vanished.
The military voices, which later swell in number with the addition of those kamikaze pilots lost at sea, decry the fate of a “strangled” youth that lost its spirit when Hirohito—the country’s ruler before, during, and for some time after the war—renounced his divinity, rendering their ultimate sacrifice meaningless. Nathan calls “Voices”, which was published in 1966, Mishima’s “first overtly political fiction”, but the rumblings of his political views are evident throughout this collection.
Alongside the sense of cultural loss in these stories is Mishima’s fear of ageing. In Voices of the Fallen Heroes, characters either possess a beauty that belies their years or are else ravaged by the cruelty of time to look much older. The grief of Mishima’s ageing here encompasses the transience of a mortal self tightly bound to cultural heritage—the loss of one seems the loss of both.
Although it is possible to view Mishima, a larger-than-life character, as an anomaly, the loss he felt so keenly is one that continues to fuel a wider nationalism both in Japan and abroad. Under such a perceived attack on tradition and the resulting fear of identity oblivion, Mishima’s extreme measures appear as rational to his characters as they did to the author himself. Voices of the Fallen Heroes thus offers a fascinating glimpse into the origins of a nationalist ideology that, fuelled by a sense of modern decline, is steadily on the rise throughout much of the world.
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