주권의 표상 혹은 공백의 터부: 미시마 유키오의 텐노와 미

Abstract

This Article deals with the literature and political performance by Mishima Yukio as a performing arts. Mishima Yukio killed himself by cutting off his stomach(kappuku) at HQ of Japanese Self Defense Army in 1970, shouting that JSDA must become the army of Tenno. His performance has been regarded as an extreme rightist’s insane action. However, this performance could be thought of as a performing arts by which his lifelong artistic work since 1945 was finished. Just after the defeat of the Japanese Empire in WWII, Mishima romanticized the wartime as a space of erotic fulfillment, and conversely defined the postwar era as a dull stage viewed from long-distanced seats. Based on this kind of perspective, he started his career as a writer and wrote several works in which he argued that authentic beauty could never be accomplished in postwar Japan, so it was only possible for artists to make artificial constructions. He tried to reconsider the wartime attackers who killed himself for Tenno as representer of romantic and authentic beauty since 1960s. He regarded them as extreme romanticists who destroyed their minds and bodies not for Tenno himself but for accomplishing the romantic ideal of beauty. He made a kind of parody by killing himself in JSDA HQ and criticized the stuation of postwar Japan where authentic and romantic beauty was primordially impossible. This critical and cruel performance, however, was deeply captured by a sort of legacy of modern Japanese culture, because Tenno which Mishima used as a tool for his performance was a symbol of modern Japan who formed and attained her self-identity between lost and gain.