SOURCE: Hirata, Hosea. “To Slit the Beautiful Body/Text: Mishima's Jouissance to Death.” Literature Interpretation Theory 2, no. 2 (1990): 85-94.

In the following essay, Hirata explores the meaning of death in Mishima's texts and the meaning of Mishima's own textual death.

“[I]t is always something like an opening which will frustrate the structuralist project. What I can never understand, in a structure, is that by means of which it is not closed” (160).

—Jacques Derrida

Mishima Yukio¹: how could we seize this bloody origin—the origin of so many luxurious texts that tightly surround it? Mishima Yukio is a textual product par excellence. It seems that his whole mode of being was to produce his own “self-text.” He kept exhibiting himself. Scattered around us are his words, his books, his images, his photos, his death. It seems that we are forced to read him ceaselessly. His texts are always outward...