in the fascist weight room

December 14, 2024 1:55 PM

“Thanks to the sun and the steel, I was to learn the language of the flesh,” Mishima announces in the book’s opening pages. Here, steel is a reference to body-building equipment and weapons. The sun has a more complicated significance. It is a metonym for the Japanese flag, object of Mishima’s nationalist ardor, and a blazing light that cauterizes decadence, but it is also a malign energy. “In the summer of the defeat, in the year 1945,” says Mishima, the sun “had become associated with a pervasive corruption and destruction.” Its radiance is at once deceitful and sadistically revelatory. (In The Fascist Weight Room: 1968’s dangerous and grandiose fantasies, in Bookforum)
posted by mittens (10 comments total)

counterpoint (slyt, 1 min)
posted by lalochezia at 2:06 PM on December 14 [3 favorites]

I remember reading Sun and Steel in the 1980s, and seeing the Schrader biopic. Never thought I would grow up into Mishima's fever dream. Snowy peaks indeed.

This is an excellent essay, very well put together, lovely prose.

It feels almost embarrassing to say it makes me want to read Mishima again
posted by chavenet at 3:34 PM on December 14 [5 favorites]

Mishima’s life throws the end state of fascism into stark relief — either you kill yourself, or you live long enough to murder others. The cult of action doesn’t allow anything else.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:44 PM on December 14 [5 favorites]

This here is why I exercise on a bicycle, the most leftist exercise method available to the dapper urban gentleman.
posted by turbowombat at 5:26 PM on December 14 [7 favorites]

I first encountered Yukio Mishima when, shortly after his ritual seppuku, a magazine (I want to say Life, but I'm not 100% sure of that) published photos of the severed heads of Mishima and one of his followers, which is how I came to see them in a magazine that I was sifting through for photos for a collage project that I was doing in Catholic grade school. Those nuns didn't vet their magazine donations very carefully! I'm surprised that we didn't get a Playboy in there as well.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:08 PM on December 14 [1 favorite]

This is a very good article.

Signed,
A Mishima Non-fan
posted by CCBC at 11:38 PM on December 14 [1 favorite]

This here is why I exercise on a bicycle, the most leftist exercise method available to the dapper urban gentleman.

developing sarcopenia to own the fash

i wonder why no one associates lurid prose, philosophical tracts, and poetry with ultra-nationalism because of these treatises. buying the idea that muscle is right-wing is *agreeing* with the fascists
posted by daveliepmann at 1:33 AM on December 15 [2 favorites]

almost embarrassing to say it makes me want to read Mishima again

see the sea, the sea [g/irismurdochjapan] &c
posted by HearHere at 11:52 AM on December 15

His 1966 black and white film Patriotism (slyt, 29 min) seems relevant to the issues the article discusses.
posted by vitia at 1:23 AM on December 16

Great piece. I want to say it's well-written, except that even if it was poorly written, it would still be a luminous piece on the strength of its ideas. Thanks for posting this!
posted by dmh at 1:45 AM on December 16