Mount and blade japan
He thought his potential unlimited.”īlame the Tokyo Olympics. From a young age, according to one of his contemporaries, Mishima “believed that he could become whatever he liked-the Emperor of Japan, a literary genius, even the kamikaze of beauty. Novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, polemicist and eventual leader of a private militia-throughout his life, the bisexual aesthete was ever protean: existence was for him a “momentary shadow,” sustained first by words and later by muscle. Mishima’s own capacity for change was marvelous. Why for some disaffected young men, moved by his romantic and imperialist ideals, his sculpted body might have served as the archaic torso of Apollo, declaring, “You must change your life.” Studying this portrait, you can see why university students of a certain stripe looked up to him, why they joined the militia he founded late in life and went as far as the slopes of Mount Fuji to train with him. His right hand is drawing out of its sheath, upward into the frame, the naked blade of a samurai sword.
In the center of this target, his grim mouth forms the bull’s-eye the outer rings drape his shoulders and pectoral muscles like a mantle of blood. Sebastian-a picture of whose “white and matchless nudity” moves the frail narrator of Mishima’s novel Confessions of a Mask to his first ejaculation. Superimposed on this fierce portrait are the concentric rings of a red target, as though Mishima were about to be feathered with arrows like St.
His forearms are unusually furry for a Japanese man, his concave stomach bifurcated by a line of black hair. (A humanizing touch: his ears stick out slightly too far.) In a suit he might seem ordinary, at best of average build, but shirtless he is a panther ready to spring. His left cheekbone and the strong bridge of his nose catch the light. He poses on the cover of my old Grove Press edition in the aspect of a warrior, stripped to the waist, forehead bound in a hachimaki, looking out from under heavy brows. In this long essay, he confesses his erstwhile estrangement from the body, boasts of reconciling himself to it and outlines the aesthetic philosophy his fitness program fulfills. One author who did seem to share my passion was the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, most plainly in his nonfiction book Sun and Steel.
I am met with stares of incomprehension, skepticism, even scorn when the subject of exercise comes up, as though firm biceps were a sign of brainlessness, cultivation of the body an eccentric, vaguely disreputable pastime, like taxidermy. Despite this rhetoric, there remains in such circles a deep suspicion of physical culture. Fashionable intellectuals often speak these days not of people being harmed, exploited, killed, but of bodies.
Later, as I read my way through libraries and English literature syllabuses, I found few writers who were kindred spirits in this regard. Physical development, building a liquid fluency in the body’s language, felt like a vindication of my existence. My body felt inadequate in my early teens: growing up in Florida, I remember the discomfort I felt at pool parties, remember being shy about my height, my inadequate chest, my skinny arms. I grow more tolerant of limits as I get older, but accept few wholesale excuses. While feverish, on zero sleep, in concussed recovery from a hit-and-run collision that could have killed me. I have hit the gym before unwrapping gifts on Christmas morning, have gone running in hundred-degree heat and new-fallen snow. Since then, physical training of some kind has been a constant. Within a year or two, I had largely abandoned kung fu but taken up vinyasa yoga a year later, I made the college rowing team. I started lifting weights at seventeen, the same age at which I began studying martial arts.