Yūkoku
Yukio Mishima (1966)
Yukio Mishima’s short story ‘Patriotism’ was first published in 1961 and its author ‘turned filmmaker for two days in April 1965 to shoot an adaptation of his … story’. That quote is from Tony Rayns’s notes for the Criterion Collection edition of Mishima’s film – ditto this summary of its first screenings and reception:
‘[Mishima] shot and postproduced the film in secret and premiered it at a private screening at the Cinémathèque française in Paris in September 1965. Its first public screening was at the Tours Film Festival (at the time, the world’s most prestigious showcase for short films) in January 1966. … When news of Mishima’s film broke in Japan, the response was surprise and intense curiosity. … The film was released theatrically in 1966; it’s still the only high-grossing short film ever distributed in Japan. …’
Following Mishima’s suicide in November 1970, his widow ‘requested that all existing copies of the film be destroyed … in 2005 the original negatives were discovered in perfect condition, in a tea box at a warehouse at [the Mishimas’] home in Tokyo …The film was released on DVD in Japan in 2006 and then in the US by the Criterion Collection in 2008’ (Wikipedia). On a friend’s recommendation, I watched Patriotism (or The Rite of Love and Death) on YouTube[1] and found it amazing.
The twenty-eight-minute, black-and-white film comprises five scenes and features just two characters – Lieutenant Takeyama (played by Mishima) and his wife Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka). A textual prologue explains that Takeyama was a member of a secret society of young military officers whose attempted but eventually unsuccessful coup d’état in February 1936 resulted in Tokyo being placed under martial law. His comrades in the group, which claimed loyalty to the emperor but tried to oust his government, had decided that newlywed Takeyama should not take part in the coup. The mutineers face capital punishment while Takeyama remains a member of the imperial palace guard. Morally compelled to choose between loyalty to the emperor and loyalty to his condemned-to-death friends, Takeyama decides to kill himself by seppuku. Reiko agrees to witness his suicide then to follow suit.
The five scenes describe, in turn, Reiko preparing for her husband’s homecoming, Takeyama’s return and announcement of his decision to die, the couple’s final love-making, the lieutenant’s suicide, and finally Reiko’s. Except for the film’s final shot, in a Zen Buddhist garden, each scene takes place on a Noh theatre stage with a kanji painting backdrop but the stylisation doesn’t stop the action being dynamic and involving. The fourth scene, which shows Takeyama’s self-disembowelment, is both the most technically remarkable and the most notorious. According to Tony Rayns, ‘the aestheticized but realistically detailed presentation of a traditional bushi suicide caused a sensation. Some in the audience fainted …’ Yet Mishima, in honouring what he considers a noble, purifying act, achieves a fine balance between gruesome detail (blood and guts) and suggestive elision (the lather of saliva around Takeyama’s mouth), and not every detail is gruesome. The camera is often on the face of Reiko, who watches with concern, tears and resignation.
Such poignancy is no more than you expect after the very impressive third scene, introduced by text explaining that the lovers ‘are able for the first time in their lives to reveal unabashedly their most secret desires and passions. First the Lieutenant and then Reiko, who has lost all her shyness in the face of death, bids loving farewell to every smallest detail of the other’s flesh’. In sequences that stand comparison with the love scenes in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Mishima and Yoshiko Tsuruoka, with the help of Kimio Watanabe’s camerawork, truly embody the written words. And the episode, because of what is to follow and though beautiful, is persistently underscored by one’s awareness of a central theme in Mishima’s work – the connection between erotic love and violent death.
The version of Patriotism that I watched is accompanied by a new score by the American songwriter and record producer Aaron Embry. My first reaction was to feel Embry’s score, although dramatically effective, served to distract – because it’s Western music – from the experience of watching a specifically Japanese ritual. In fact, this is essentially faithful to Mishima’s original choice of music, the ‘Liebestod’ from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde – a choice that also reflects his broader intentions in filming Patriotism. Tony Rayns notes that Mishima ‘wanted to create a splash of international notoriety to match the reputation he had already built in Japan’. He went about this conscientiously, handwriting the scrolling captions quoted in the previous paragraph in English, French and German, as well as Japanese.
Patriotism is based on an actual coup attempt, the Ni Ni-Roku Jiken of 26th February 1936. Despite this historical setting, Mishima is dramatising what he saw as the terminal decline of militarism in post-World War II Japan. When you watch his film on YouTube, the accompanying menu offers a Japanese television interview with him, also from 1966, in which Mishima recalls his reactions to his country’s surrender in August 1945, deplores the ascendancy of Western materialism in Japan in the twenty years since, and reflects on the prospect and meaning of death. Although he’s cogently articulate, it’s easier to take exception to his ideology when this is put into words. His film’s potent images are harder to resist, not least because the circumstances in which Mishima’s own life ended give Patriotism, in retrospect, the added intensity of personal testament.
6 June 2022
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO-w-cn-pJM
