THE EMPEROR REPRESENTS time immemorial, that fabulous Japanese treasure that cast the author of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea into a state of vertigo. Mishima was so moved by the Emperor’s personification of time that he offered him his own death as a rhetorical flourish. He committed hara-kiri on November 25, 1970 in the company of his young lover. Perhaps death is sweeter when your eyes are fastened on the nape of a man’s neck, offered up to your gaze, or when the object of your desire finishes you off. Mishima wanted to eliminate the present by establishing Japan in the future perfect, a tense that lives only in grammar books. Fascists are obsessed with rules, which allow them to intervene in the passage of time. In the real world, the past can be bought with a single currency only, and that is death. One’s own death. What a strange bird that Mishima was! Interesting, but a little nutty around the edges. There’s something manga about hara-kiri. Mishima should be reread in the context of graphic novels. The whole world witnessed the scene on TV. Mishima immediately became a rock star, the first writer whose death was filmed according to his wishes. And so he was able to steal the thunder from his old master Kawabata. Kawabata might have won the Nobel Prize, but Mishima came to represent Japan itself. Watch out for intellectuals who lift weights until their eyeballs pop out. This double potency (a refined mind in a muscled body) can go to a person’s head. An intellectual who can put you down for the count will always end up haranguing a crowd, sleeves rolled up and bathed in sweat. Mishima’s crowd didn’t show up that day, though he wanted his death to lift up the nation’s youth. Youth, rising to its feet, singing the pure song of the people. Mishima’s crowd was sitting in front of the tv set. The seated crowd. The “sitting men” who provoked such disgust in Rimbaud. Mishima refused to accept the new values Japan had adopted after Hiroshima, and he wanted to return the Emperor, the last guardian of Time, to his former glory. But by trying to legitimize the Emperor, Mishima himself became the Empire of the Rising Sun for the length of time it took him to die. The shepherd who counts his sheep is also the guardian of sleep. Now that Mishima is dead, Japan sleeps on.