Natsuyuki Nakanishi spoke about Yukio Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility before his death. These words paint the closing scene of The Decay of the Angel, the final volume in The Sea of Fertility series: “The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing. The noontide sun of summer flowed over the still garden (translation by Edward Seidensticker).” Nakanishi was fascinated by these words and he envisioned reprising and expounding on them in his own series of works, Touching Down on Land and Touching Down on Water.

Honda, who has watched over Kiyoaki’s rein-carnation through the fourth volume of The Sea of Fertility, visits Gesshu Temple and reunites with Satoko, who has become its monzeki (abbess).

The reincarnated Kiyoaki should be remembered there. But, as its monzeki, Satoko flatly states, “Don't you suppose, Mr. Honda, that there never was such a person? You seem convinced that there was, but don't you suppose that there was no such person from the beginning, anywhere? (translation by Edward Seidensticker)" Kiyoaki never existed in the first place—with these words, Honda's own identity completely crumbles. The last thing that he sees is a scene of overwhelming emptiness: “The garden was empty.”

Nakanishi saw this realm of the “empty garden” as a topological space. In other words, there is an invisible membrane between the realm of reality and the “empty garden.” In his Touching Down on Land and Touching Down on Water series, he seeks to bring to light the nihilistic existence in the boundary area connecting this side to the other side through a membrane. “Imagine the painter's reality. This painter does not work as if they are praying to a higher place. They look at reality with a sense that they are descending from a high altitude or high precipice.

The artist's movements and works are impressive not because their feet are on the ground, but because they are floating above the ground, separated by a thin membrane just before landing,”* explains Nakanishi. This can be seen as an attempt to present a place where paintings, objets d'art, and other things resonate with each other, or a place for a painting that “leisurely” awaits “resonance from infinity.”

Text by Takayo Iida

Note: Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Daikakko: yuruyaka ni mitsumeru tame ni itsu made mo tatazumu [Square Bracket: Lingering forever for a leisurely gaze], Chikumashobo Ltd., 1989, p. 107

Jeff Wall is considered the originator of “staged photography,” which uses elaborate staging to create photographs. With a command of art history and photographic techniques, he creates intricately composed works layering multiple shots. In this work, using meticulous composition painterly photograph of a scene from Spring Snow, the first volume of Yukio Mishima’s posthumous work, The Sea of Fertility. Satoko is destined to marry into the imperial family, but she is consumed by forbidden love for her childhood friend, Kiyoaki. The story portrays her psychological state and Kiyoaki's conflicted feelings. The novel describes a scene in which Honda, who is Kiyoaki’s best friend and the facilitator of the lovers’ rendezvous, is using a car borrowed from a classmate to bring Satoko back to Tokyo after she has secretly made love with Kiyoaki on the beach in Kamakura.

Wall wonderfully recreates this sequence from the novel as a painterly photograph, hinting at the birth of yet another story. By offering a visual framework for the scene in the novel and visually representing a scene that describes the sound of sand falling from her shoe to the floor, Wall hints at vivid realism and the “ephemerality” of the novel's later developments.

Wall studied art history at the University of British Columbia and then at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Like Goya and Manet, he asks how artists can create works that depict the times in which they are living while creating works that leave a strong impression, and also what kind of works are meaningful in contemporary society. The result is a new form expression that is “not painting, film, photography, cinema, painting, or propaganda—though it has strong associations with them all.” Wall is internationally acclaimed as a modern storyteller. He creates works that hold up a mirror to the society in which we live—from scenes of Vancouver, where he was born and raised, to the psychological conflicts of the people of today, who are living with so much stress.

Text by Takayo Iida

In the spring of the year that Yukio Mishima died of suicide, I was 22 years old and I decided to go to America to study, and I was determined to not to return to Japan for a while. I somewhat involved in the student movement, and I witnessed the fall of Yasuda Hall at the University of Tokyo. I was shocked to see and hear the details of the debate between Mishima and the students in that auditorium. I believed that the student side was in the right, and I had serious doubts about the basis for this. I began to think about “Japan” and “kokutai (national essence).”

I heard the shocking news of Mishima’s suicide when I was in Los Angeles. A year after Woodstock, young people’s revolutionary fervor towards adult culture had not dissipated. A wind of Eastern mysticism was blowing through California. When I was asked about Zen and Buddhism, I was ashamed that I knew nothing about the culture of my own country. I temporarily set aside my materialistic view of history and began delving into Buddhist scriptures. This is when I received news of Mishima’s suicide.

I read the four volumes of the completed The Sea of Fertility series. When I reached the final line of Runaway Horses, “the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids,” a passage from Camus’ The Stranger came to mind. When asked by the judge why he killed the young man, Meursault replies that “it was because of the sun.” It seemed to me that absurdity ran through the two of them like a basso continuo.

The conclusion of this was the proposition of a “garden that had no memories, nothing.” I think that my Seascapes, which would later become some of my most famous works, portrayed such a world as ocean landscapes. Mishima's works are like body blows that continue to inflict deep wounds on my psyche even today.

I have decided to show two seascapes that I photographed from Sagami Bay during this year’s New Year holiday.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

From the perspective of a musician, I reconsider the ideas of Yukio Mishima, who seems to swallow paradoxes whole: fiction and reality, the sacred and the profane, the right wing and the left wing, ruin and salvation, and life and death.

First, as evidenced by the soundtrack for the movie Yūkoku, Mishima was deeply influenced by Wagner. Especially when I read a play like My Friend Hitler, I feel as if a dark opera is ringing in my head. It is also very interesting that he sang Ken Takakura’s Karajishi Botan (a gloomy and cheesy enka song) just before he killed himself.

Why on earth did the elegant and intelligent Mishima, who loved Wagner, do that? However, this is of course not a question of which is real Mishima and which is the public facade; rather, both types of music can be said to be in character for Yukio Mishima. This could be similar to the fact that it's always impossible to make simplistic interpretations like “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and Confessions of a Mask are sublime” or “Life for Sale, which was serialized in Playboy magazine, is vulgar.”

I randomly sampled Mishima’s voice to put together a collage, throwing in pieces from his “contradictory” tastes in music in the background. Romantic opera and Showa-era mood songs, free jazz and Edo shamisen kouta, Bach piano music and gagaku, Jimi Hendrix's “noise guitar” and Noh, John Cage's prepared piano and Koji Tsuruta's propaganda military song (with a preposterous title that translates as “holding my comrades’ remains”)—strangely enough, these binary opposites began to blend together in a peculiar way.

I felt as if the vibrations of Mishima's voice were being directly transmitted from the world of the dead. Mishima, who died by suicide 55 years ago, rose up as if it was a natural occurrence and still in his military uniform, he scattered about the words “light,” “darkness,” “passion,” “anger,” “humor,” “love,” “karma,” "earthly desires,” and “enlightenment.”The music reflects a complete disillusionment and astonishment with the globalization, politics, ideology, and art of today. I felt like we were being asked, “You are all living without a care in this base, empty, and ugly society. Can't you die as beautifully as I did?"

Ken Ikeda

Anish Kapoor, an ingenious contemporary artist who fuses European modernism with Indian culture, transforming places into mystical spaces through his work, is said to be a big fan of Yukio Mishima. His works are known for expressing deep spirituality within simple forms, and he has been called an ambiguous artist, embedding dual meanings such as matter/non-matter, light/dark, or earth/sky into a single work.

Kapoor’s artistic vision aligns with Yukio Mishima's worldview. Kapoor's installation, which he refers to as the “VOID,” doesn’t merely represent the Eastern concepts of “nothingness” or “emptiness;” it implies liberation from attachment to Western meanings.

When the void, in the Western sense of the word, returns his gaze, Kapoor tosses lumps of flesh that have taken over a hollowed-out human body as he searches for the whereabouts of the soul. Words left by Mishima just a few months before his death by suicide resonate with Kapoor's work. “Soon Japan will vanish altogether. In its place, all that will remain is an inorganic, empty, neutral, drab, wealthy, scheming, economic giant in a corner of the Far East.”* From these words it is clear that Mishima was also desperately searching for the location of the soul.

The paintings in the series on display in this exhibition are contemplative works that are seeking the presence and whereabouts of souls that have lost their centrality and are floating untethered. The essence of Kapoor's work is not to draw the boundaries between order and chaos, beauty and ugliness, life and death; that is to say, between the surface and the depths. Rather, it expresses the awakening of memories of the soul beyond rational memories in the sensory realm that lies within humans. If we were to turn the skin that covers our bodies inside out, we would be filled with visceral physical sensations that transcend race, gender, and age.

In other words, a topological spatial domain is necessarily inherent to the works of Anish Kapoor. Kapoor has said that, to him, the works are neither abstract nor non-abstract. They are in the liminal space between meaning and meaninglessness. They are clearly just shapes. But there seems to be something behind them. As Kapoor said, “There seems to be something behind it,” and this exhibition confronts the world of Yukio Mishima and tries to unravel what is behind it.”

Text by Takayo Iida

Note: From an essay by Yukio Mishima published in the Sankei Shimbun on July 7, 1970, translation by Andrew Rankin.

Through repeated reincarnation, people experience the transformation and maturation of their souls—Yukio Mishima's The Sea of Fertility is a work whose grand theme stimulates my creative drive.

The spiritual journey of Kiyoaki and Satoko depicted in Spring Snow contains profound questions about love and destiny, and the very nature of human existence. The effect that Satoko's love has on Kiyoaki's soul, and the way she lives her life to the fullest despite giving up on love—these are not merely love stories; they seem to symbolize how people live and the state of their souls.

I wanted to show how these two souls were transformed the moment they met and their love blossomed. By turning this into a work from the perspective of the soul, I want to depict the grand theme of reincarnation in a new form, from my own perspective.

Why do people live, and what do they exist to learn? How does the awareness and growth gained through love contribute to the maturity of an individual's soul? When I came across Spring Snow, I felt that the experience of love is part of a soul’s growth, but also that the level of maturity and the forms that this takes vary greatly.

Satoko's soul matures through her choice to sacrifice her love for Kiyoaki, and as a result, she appears to transcend passion. On the other hand, it appears that Kiyoaki’s soul stops short of understanding love, and he keeps being reincarnated with traces of desire and immaturity still remaining.

My work focuses on the souls of the pair, and it came from a desire to capture the beauty and ephemerality of moments of love and destiny.

Mori Mariko December 6, 2024

The other day I dove into a swimming pool and I watched the rippling water from the inside. The sensation of the light breaking into a rainbow and touching the depths of my brain felt good. But the attendant kept asking me to please stop because it’s dangerous.

I live in a Japan today where even the threshold of life is excessively controlled in order to keep death away. It's hard to create a sight that burns up too much life.

I live in a Japan today where even the threshold of life is excessively controlled in order to keep death away. It's hard to create a sight that burns up too much life.

I moved from France to Japan at the age of five, and I was told over and over again that what I was doing wasn't right, so I learned to live life by suppressing my impulses.

I was happy to learn about Yukio Mishima and to be able to imagine, as a Japanese person, a light that could only be found after “going too far and then going even farther.”

One morning, I tried shouting an imitation of Mishima's speech alone in my room. My body became drenched in sweat and my skin spasmed, and then the color and light of the room changed completely and I collapsed in tears. What I really want to do is to go shopping naked. I want to walk around while I’m peeing.

I’m thinking about freedom. Mishima brought light to places that can’t be touched by superficial words of shared commiseration.

Kotao Tomozawa