Mishima – A Life in Four Chapters

A very ambitious and successful film about the life and work of the famous and notorious Japanese writer and political activist Mishima Yukio. Paul Schrader (who of course himself wrote the script, as one of America’s foremost screenwriters) shot the film entirely in Japan with a Japanese cast and largely Japanese crew. Schrader does not tell the life story of Mishima chronologically. The starting point is the last day (25 November 1970) in the writer’s life, the day when he took a general hostage with a few supporters from his paramilitary organisation and committed ritual suicide (seppuku). These events are filmed in colour and a realistic style. Then Schrader returns in black & white to certain events from the life of Japan’s literary enfant terrible. These flashbacks include staging of passages from novels by Mishima, that are very colourful and stylised. Mishima was a radical aesthete who felt very attracted to the beauty of a self- chosen death. Passages from his work evoking this are the main object of Schrader’s portrayal. Schrader wanted to show how misunderstood Mishima was in his own country and to make clear to the world the importance of Mishima, as writer and phenomenon. Not everyone was too keen on that: in 1985 the Tokyo Film Festival refused to even look at the film. GjZ