Mishima’s Sword

Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend  by Christopher Ross.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I lived in a southern city in China called Guangzhou. At that time Guangzhou was more vibrant than ever.  People were pouring into this so-called Window of the South Wind city to look for opportunity. Many success stories were made…

Today when I think of the time I lived in Guangzhou, my deepest memories for the great city were not the many magnificent things that happened there. The images that often flash back to my memory about Guangzhou now are, surprisingly, the times that I was engrossed in reading Japanese literature in a small and simple apartment…

From Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji to Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, The Izu Dancer, Thousand Cranes, and The Old Capital to Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow…  I was immersed in the beauty of Japanese literature and fully enjoyed the world I was put in by the great authors. I was especially fond of Spring Snow. Just like Mishima believed that “most Japanese literature came from the tender-soul or feminine tradition, represented by peace, the beauty of elegance, and refinement,” Spring Snow led me to ponder this exact same belief.

Among modern Japanese authors of his time, Yukio Mishima was the most productive, influential, and eccentric.  As we learn in Mishima’s Sword, “He wrote forty novels, hundreds of essays, and twenty volumes of short stories. He also penned eighteen major and many minor plays and saw them all staged and performed.” His spectacular suicide by seppuku in 1970 brought timeless wonder and interest about him as an author and as a human being. Decades later, British author Christopher Ross started a journey to search for the very sword that Mishima used to commit seppuku.

Not following the method of traditional biographical writing, Ross introduces his readers to little of Mishima’s life and work, but focuses more on trying to reveal the reasons why Mishima killed himself. Along Ross’s search for Mishima’s sword, readers get chances to glimpse the origin and history of Samurai, the spirits of Bushido, the making of Japanese swords, and the Japanese society now and then.  All these, along with brief but fascinating accounts of Mishima’s life experiences, thoughts, and works, help today’s readers understand more about Mishima’s suicide.

Throughout the book, the author is engaged in exploring his own life that happens to overlap Mishima’s. As a human being, an author, and a person that pretty much has been involved in Japanese language and culture, Ross muses from the first page to the end what the true meanings of making one’s life and death magnificent are!

 Readers who are interested in Mishima, Japanese literature, and Japanese culture and history, will love to turn the pages of this well-written book.

                             ~ Duan L.