Paper short abstract:

This presentation will compare Mishima’s “Ai no shokei” with Hagakure and Nanshoku Ookagami to explore how Mishima understands gay love and updates the shūdō tradition in his attempt to create an autonomous voice for the gay collective in Japan.

Paper long abstract:

The magazine Adonisu was created post-war by Japanese intellectuals, such as Mishima Yukio, Nakai Hideo, Iwakura Tomohide, and comprised of short stories and novels written by famous or anonymous authors who were interested in gay love. The concrete work, “Ai no shokei”, written under the name of Sakakiyama Tamotsu was published in the first special edition of Adonis, called Apollo. “Ai no shokei” is very close to the main literary representers of the shūdō tradition, that is, Hagakure and Nanshoku Ookagami in its content and shape. Mishima describes a customary love story between a nenja, (an older partner) and a wakashū (a young boy). However, in contrast to the previous two works, Mishima’s short novel is very innovative and presents the shūdō tradition from a completely new and modern perspective. Along with the elements that could be described as typically belonging to Mishima‘s aesthetic world (the connection between blood, suffering, eroticism and pleasure), it also includes the inversion of sexual roles (the nenja becomes the passive agent whereas the wakashū becomes the active one), the application of the samurai love code to everyday modern life, the westernization of the male’s body etc. that cannot be found in any other work of the time. By doing that, Mishima not only makes a big contribution to the effort the Adonis group carried out to create an autonomous voice for the big collective of men loving men, but he also formulates a new gay love paradigm far from homoerotic Western ideals. He traces the shūdō tradition to its sources, updates it and shows that a different way of traditional gay eroticism (merging the temptation of the flesh and ennobling moral precepts) is not only possible but even desirable in order to achieve understanding and forgiveness from the society.