Sun and Steel

The Body as Argument

Published in 1968, Sun and Steel is Yukio Mishima's autobiographical essay on the turn from words to flesh. By the mid-1960s, Mishima had spent twenty years as Japan's most celebrated novelist, and he had come to regard literary achievement as a kind of disease: the intellectual's habit of living entirely in the head, treating the body as nothing more than a vehicle for the mind. The essay is his account of how bodybuilding, kendo, and eventually the formation of his private militia, the Tatenokai, became the means by which he tried to close the gap between thought and action.

The Argument

Mishima's thesis is that modern civilization has severed the ancient unity of word and deed. The warrior-poet of classical Japan or ancient Greece did not choose between art and action; he embodied both. Mishima argues that the modern writer, by contrast, has become a creature of pure interiority, and that this condition is a form of spiritual death. The sun of the title is the physical world, the steel is the discipline of the body, and the essay traces Mishima's attempt to reenter both after decades of living only in language. The writing is dense, confessional, and at times deliberately paradoxical.

Prelude to Ichigaya

Two years after publishing Sun and Steel, Mishima stormed the Ichigaya military headquarters in Tokyo, delivered a speech calling for the restoration of the Emperor's sovereignty, and committed seppuku. The essay reads differently with that knowledge. It is not a suicide note, but it is the intellectual preparation for one: a man explaining, in the most careful prose he could manage, why words alone were no longer enough. For readers of Mishima, this is the essential companion text to the novels.

About This Edition

Author: Yukio Mishima
Publisher: Lyle Stuart
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9786159424645