Where Coincidence Leads

‘There is no coincidence in this world, only inevitability’, insisted Yuuko Ichihara of xxxHolic, and the transdimensional witch’s words are apposite today. My god-daughter Katrin has just been on holiday in Japan; a card from her has arrived today showing one of her destinations, the Kinkakuji temple in Kyoto. Is that not, I thought, the building whose burning Yukio Mishima wrote about in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion? So it was - very oddly, as a stray reference somewhere today had made me think about Mishima an hour or so before I picked the card from the doormat. These days I am more and more inclined to agree with Yuuko-san, and see time as folded and coiled, touching on itself at points that produce resonances, echoes, and bleed-throughs, that we, encased in chronology as we are, call coincidence.

In my teens I was rather captivated by the melodramatic extremity of Yukio Mishima’s life, culminating in a ritual suicide that ended his derisory, doomed-to-fail would-be military coup on November 25^th 1970 (St Catherine’s Day, you may note). ‘The compromise climate of today, when one can neither live beautifully nor die horribly’, he wrote in On Hagakure, his paean to the old samurai ethic: now there’s a creed for an adolescent who’s done little living and has never seen anyone die. I bought all the books, at least the ones readily available in mid-to-late 1980s Bournemouth, of which The Temple of the Golden Pavilion was one.

But it was Mishima’s final work, The Sea of Fertility, I found myself thumbing through again today. This stretching novel – 800-odd pages in the Penguin – is four books bolted together like fate, and is the bleakest, bitterest thing you will ever read. Notwithstanding some readings, which glimpse in its conclusion what a Westerner might call redemption, I think that overarching title expresses nothing more, or less, than an irony so dark and hopeless that it becomes almost unbearable, like the fire consuming the Kinkakuji.

Apart from the climactic, disorientating and beautiful scene in the nunnery garden, I was always most drawn to the episode in the final part of The Sea of Fertility, The Decay of the Angel, where Keiko, the protagonist Honda’s oldest friend, dolls herself up to confront his adopted son Toru with the truth over Christmas dinner. She doesn’t believe, as Honda does, that Toru is the reincarnation of a doomed young lover from the 1910s; a right-wing idealist who killed himself between the wars after assassinating a banker; or a ludicrously beautiful Thai princess who died of a cobra bite. She’s convinced he’s just a nasty, clever, manipulative boy. He’s not pure enough, even pure evil enough, as he might imagine. Keiko is the murderer of all illusions: an ‘angel-killer’, Toru thinks. ‘We are two bored, cynical old people’, she tells him, ‘Can your pride really permit you to call us destiny? A nasty old man and woman? An old voyeur and an old lesbian?’ I rather wanted to be Keiko, telling horrible truths to horrible people. God forgive me, but part of me still does.

Forty years later or nearly, I look at Mishima’s life and I read a story of thorough falsehood, but even if his writing always centres on unbalanced, deluded, and unpleasant people, he almost could not help himself but be truthful there. In The Sea of Fertility’s second instalment, Runaway Horses, Isao Iinuma wants to restore the values of old Japan with a cathartic act of violence, but new Japan continues undisturbed, and that was the fate of Mishima himself. Both fictional revolutionary and real-life rebel sacrificed themselves to an ideal which was, like all political ideals enacted in any real context, compromised with money, desire, and power. Surely someone as clearsighted as Mishima couldn’t have believed in that nonsense? Was that final act not just a way of escaping the consequences of what he had written?

“And the Golden Temple grew until it consumed the entire world; it became sufficient to consume the entire meaning of the world”