Japanese author Yukio Mishima was one of Bowie’s favorites, with Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea referenced in everything from “Heroes” to Bowie’s regular 1990's internet pseudonym “sailor.”
“Heat,” the final track of The Next Day, opens with a reference to Spring Snow, the first part of Mishima’s last work, the Sea of Fertility quartet, which focuses on reincarnation, glamour, decadence, death and transformation. Text by Mishima is also hidden in "Valentine's Day", in which Bowie presents us with the figure of a frustrated boy planning a school shooting. Mishima writes in "The Torment and the Ecstasy": "... I imagined, on the one hand, satisfied, with how much severity I would punish the teachers and the comrades who tormented me every day one by one, but on the other hand I saw myself also supreme artist, serene and perfect, sovereign of my inner world: poor in appearance, but spiritually richer than anyone else. For a boy so hopelessly reserved and closed, Was it not natural to consider oneself a chosen creature? It seemed to me that I was expected somewhere in the world, called to fulfill a mission that was still unknown to myself."
While living in Berlin in 1977, 30 year old David Bowie hung his expressionist portrait of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima behind his bed. Bowie loved problematic art- art that poses questions rather than rendered subjects pretty. In mishima, he found dialectics and paradoxes and extremes of Japanese culture. To the actress Hideko Muramatsu, Mishima said human beings are made of opposite halves: love and cruelty, tenderness and hatred. “Try to express both sides at the same time. Then the personality you create will be more profoundly expressed.”
Mishima was a gay man who married a woman and had two children; he lived in a European style villa while obsessed with restoring traditional Japanese culture, the power of the emperor and the Japanese army. He worked with a schedule like a banker, but dressed in shades, loud sport shirts, and gold chains. At parties, he’d roll on his back to do impressions of a dog or imitate Marlon Brando, then dismiss everyone before midnight so he could continue writing. Skinny and frail as a child, he worked out his muscles and became a sword master later in life. By the mid-Sixties, he’d set upon two goals: write a masterpiece and die by ritual suicide to protest Japan's loss of culture, decadence, and westernization.
(From Wikipedia) "On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of the Tatenokai (his organized army), under pretext, visited the commandant of the Ichigaya Camp, the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Inside, they barricaded the office and tied the commandant to his chair. With a prepared manifesto and a banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped onto the balcony to address the soldiers gathered below. His speech was intended to inspire a coup d'état to restore the power of the emperor. He succeeded only in irritating the soldiers, and was mocked and jeered. He finished his planned speech after a few minutes, returned to the commandant's office and performed seppuku.
The assisting kaishakunin duty at the end of this ritual (to decapitate Mishima) had been assigned to Tatenokai member Masakatsu Morita, who was unable to properly perform the task. After three failed attempts at severing Mishima's head, he allowed another Tatenokai member, Hiroyasu Koga, to behead Mishima. Ashamed by his inability to decapitate mishima cleanly, Morita then knelt and stabbed himself in the abdomen and Koga again performed the kaishakunin duty. This coup is called "Mishima jiken" (三島事件, "Mishima Incident") in Japan."
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