I. MISHIMA AND BOWIE

No major twentieth-century writer had a stronger sense of the constructed, mask-like nature of personal identity, wrote more obsessively about it, or acted it out more publicly or flamboyantly in the ‘performance’ of his own life than Yukio Mishima. Both personally and professionally, he intrigued and dazzled the Japanese public by playing, often with great success, a dizzying array of roles and by assuming, often at the apparent risk of inconsistency, a number of different and sometimes contradictory personae: a high-cultural novelist, playwright, essayist and film-maker who was also a low-cultural bitplayer in gangster movies and devotee of body-building; an extoller of suble Japanese aesthetic and spiritual traditions and critic of ‘Western materialism’ who himself lived an opulent lifestyle in a kitsch ‘anti-Zen house’ (as he called it), full of faux-Greek statues, garish rococo furniture, and Victorian bric-a-brac; a ‘perverted’ sadomasochistic homosexual (according to his own self-depiction) who also played the part of a dutiful son and staid married man and father; an eminent, internationally famous man of letters, often named as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize, who ended his life as a sword-wielding right-wing terrorist attempting to stage a coup d’état – the ‘act of a madman’, as the Japanese prime minister, among others, described it. One could extend this list even further, but perhaps the point has been sufficiently made. Mishima presented the world with such a diverse array of personae that one naturally wonders which, if any, was the ‘real Mishima’. As one of the Western Japanologists who knew him best remarked: ‘Mishima struggled hard to find a persona in which he felt comfortable – like a man in search of a perfect suit of clothes’.

It was perhaps this flamboyantly performative aspect of Mishima's life and work that David Bowie initially found so attractive – just as he was also attracted to the kabuki theater, another flamboyantly performative aspect of Japanese culture.