Defining Favourites: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

This biopic about the controversial Japanese author and nationalist remains one of the most beguiling ever made.

Photo: Janus Films

Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another — akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.

Directed by Paul Schrader
Screenplay by Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader, Chieko Schrader
Produced by Mataichirô Yamamoto, Tom Luddy
Starring Ken Ogata, Kenji Sawada, Toshiyuki Nagashima, Yasosuke Bando
Premiere Date: May 15, 1985
Running Time: 120 minutes

There are many words one can use to describe Yukio Mishima. On one side, you’ll have people calling him a patriot, a traditionalist, and a hero. Others will also call him a fanatic, lunatic, and a fascist. Being one of the most prolific Japanese authors of the post-WWII days, it’s hard to get a clear reading on what exactly did Mishima himself stood for through his life, given the fact that he also represented the defiance of taboos while sticking so closely to tradition. These anomalies would be enough to make for a very fascinating subject for a biopic, the sort that no traditional biopic can capture properly. So Paul Schrader opts to tell many stories about Mishima: among them Yukio Mishima’s final days and his own writing.

Mishima’s story perhaps gained more notoriety after his attempted coup d’état on November 25, 1970 – which later culminated in himself committing seppuku. The first chapter of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters starts on this day, being titled “Beauty” is centered around Yukio Mishima’s vision of what it is that he considers to be beautiful on the daily. But that’s also where Paul Schrader is introducing a very unconventional method to telling the audiences the story of an author like Yukio Mishima, as we’re sensing his interiority being expressed through his boundary-breaking writing. As such, Schrader even intersperses pieces from his own text into his life story, and evidently, it becomes crucial towards understanding how Mishima’s mind had worked.