Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

Where lies the line between fact and fiction, the intersection of the word and the sword?

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters explores this theme by presenting the final day in the life of Yukio Mishima intercut with interludes based on three of his most popular (and it would seem autobiographical) novels, in addition to some sequences from Mishima’s past. The scenes set within his novels exhibit a stylized visual philosophy, designed in bright colors that act in opposition to the more muted tones of the present (which are reminiscent of political thrillers like Z by Costa-Gravas) and the black/white shades of the past. Eiko Ishioka’s sets feature proportions and angles that skew from reality, ultimately representing a reader’s headspace when traveling through the narrative of each novel: every visual space becomes a place where the emotional and the physical collide to create meaning.

Philip Glass’s score punctuates the rhythm of the movie, providing a repetitive theme that lulls the viewer into a meditative state. The music provides tension and peace in equal measure. When Glass varies the theme within a piece, however, the change helps the viewer to understand the importance of the visual moment, akin to a glimpse of nirvana through the clouds of self-reflection.

Paul and Leonard Schrader’s script contributes to the old argument of whether authors’ lives are important to understanding their work. Mishima’s novels foreshadow and inform his final act: each book is a precept or code for how wants to shape his final reality. He writes so that he can make physical his inner desires and principles. The caveat to the symbiosis between Mishima’s work and life is that the connections can only be made after he dies – as Mishima commits suicide, so too do his novels reach their climaxes in a beautiful montage that concludes with the symbol of imperial Japan that Mishima failed to return to glory: a rising red sun.

Mishima transcends typical biographical fare because it refuses to over-explain the diverse threads that made up Mishima’s oft-contradictory life. Instead, the film depicts his life within the context of his work, using their themes as a framework upon which to analyze Mishima as both a human being and a symbolic figure. The plot hops all over Mishima’s fictional and non-fictional lives, the script denying the viewer the easy tropes that one expects from biographies in order to paint more impressionistic and occasionally abstract strokes about the truth of Mishima’s life, or at least his search for that elusive ideal. The final argument of Mishima is that truth is subjective and spread across the stories that we tell, fictions inspired by our slight perceptions of reality, small verses contributed to an epic that we will never read in its entirety.