Turning Japanese

Twenty-three years is a long time to hold a grudge. That’s how long Paul Schrader’s innovative Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters has been banned in Japan for daring to tell the truth about a controversial figure in the country’s history. The life story of the prolific, sexually ambiguous writer Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual suicide by sword, or seppuku, in 1970, now gets the extras-laden treatment it deserves from The Criterion Collection’s DVD (out tomorrow).

Despite protests, Schrader pressed on with a mostly Japanese crew that risked ruin from an implied blacklist. What they created is an artist’s portrait through a prism. There’s the black-and-white past (influenced by masters like Kurosawa), three novels performed as avant-garde theater and the day of Mishima’s failed coup d’etat of the Japanese military and subsequent suicide, reenacted as a guerilla-style documentary. The sections aren’t tidy — they both illuminate and contradict each other — but they work, aided by Eiko Ishioka’s pop-art sets and Philip Glass’s romantically minimalist score.

Schrader’s emotionally cool, intellectually rigorous approach to his subject honors the writer’s enigmatic nature. Ken Ogata’s central performance encapsulates Mishima the elegant dandy, the obsessive bodybuilder, the conflicted homosexual and the proto-fascist nationalist. With a life this rich, it’s amazing Schrader pulled it off in only four chapters.


Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters will be available tomorrow from The Criterion Collection.