RELENTLESS COMPROMISER

REMEMBER WHEN PAUL SCHRADER MADE THE BEST BIOPIC OF ALL TIME?

Infamous Japanese iconoclast Yukio Mishima once said “I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line…,” a sentiment which suggests that his eventual suicide came only once his creative resources had run dry. Yet, as Paul Schrader’s sublime film “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” so fluidly illustrates, Mishima ended his life with a self-administered sword thrust to the chest not because he was out of words, but rather because the page had never been a sufficient canvas for his artistic expression, or one to which he had ever intended to confine himself.

In his novel “Runaway Horses” (the second installment of the informal tetralogy referred to as “The Sea of Fertility”), Mishima articulated: “Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.” Those words ostensibly belong to the novel and not the novelist, but Mishima’s fevered yearning for a harmony between pen and sword demands that we accept the consistent ideology of his heroes as that of their creator. Whereas most authors are encouraged to write what they know, Mishima wrote who he was, assigning names to the slivers of his persona so that his novels wouldn’t read like manifestos.