Death by Mishima & Hugo

I find that making connections across stories is one of the key joys of reading books.

Yukio Mishima’s novels are full of grandeur, zeal and an avid fascination for death as the ultimate blooming of beauty - in a combustion of golden flames, or in an explosion of morning light. He showed patriotism and masculinity in a morbid light - like watching an invalid gape at a beautiful actress - as both salvation and demise. Mishima makes death feel as alive as life, in all its incomprehensible forms. Suicide is admired as a display of power over personal destiny. His characters’ personal deaths are neat; with no messy aftermath, there is always a taste of futility behind the fatal act as society remains quite undisturbed.

This feeling from Mishima’s particular approach to death reminded me of Victor Hugo’s combat against the death penalty in his book Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné. The man’s crime is never mentioned, for that is not the point. The writer does not wish that the reader judge the prisonner as those in red robes did, but that the reader empathizes with him. Just like how Mishima’s characters often die with selfish, stubborn loyalty to a vague idea, it is the act of death which is the entire focal point of the essay.

However, the deep divide between the two is the result of freedom. In one instance man is robbed of it, whereas in another he is exercising it fully. Whether these approaches elicit pity or admiration, the feeling of death is always the same. Inevitable, sad, unjust, and even ridiculous as a very quick slash of a knife on the neck or at the gut closes the thread of what could have been. While Mishima’s elitist obsession with youth paints this tragedy with the brush of beauty, Hugo’s conviction adds raw depth to the final act. A socialist, egalitarian hand raises the beggar and shows a man worthy of dignity by the necessity of life.

Both writers protest the expectations set by society at their time, and through prose reveal a face of death which can be controlled.