Ostentiously, perhaps, Mishima leaves the completed manuscript of the fourth part of his tetralogy on the desk in the hallway of his home as he sets out to commit ritual suicide. It is not by chance that the Sea of Fertility closes with a kind of denial that anything it recounted had actually taken place. Thereby Mishima underlines the errancy of fiction, its falsity; he is ready to leave the sham behind him, to follow the course of action he had adopted to its end. He will take his life; his body, trained, supple, ready, awaits the blade of the sword; his head will be struck off by his ‘second’. He dies, because to die already attests to a desire for truth which is the opposite of fiction. But it is only its correlate, and Mishima’s delusion is that action can overcome the inaction to which writing is linked. Writing escapes the measure of action; the life of action is only an attempt to escape writing.
It is Mishima’s greatness to know the limit of the books he wrote – to allow them, especially The Sea of Fertility, to unravel themselves (it is often awkward, ungainly). He is not content with the masterpiece, even though he is capable of them (this is why, indeed, he recognises himself in Bataille – remember Mishima’s remarks on My Mother). But he compensates for this discontent in his fervent nationalism, his militarism, his worship of the emperor. Each member of his army, the Shield Society, is supposed to be related through him to the Emperor. But the Emperor is the idol who must himself be shattered. It is unsurprising that Mishima admired de Gaulle – unsurprising, but disappointing, too, for it is in this temptation he avoids the demand of writing.
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