SOURCE: Mengay, Donald H. “Body/Talk: Mishima, Masturbation, and Self-Performativity.” In Genealogy and Literature, edited by Lee Quinby, pp. 193-210. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Mengay examines Mishima's portrayal of the Japanese identity in a Westernized society.

The social upheavals caused around the world by western imperialism were also felt in Japan, despite the fact that the west never established a formal colonial bureaucracy there. One of the early outcomes of the western “influence,” which began with an act of aggression, the American insistence in the 1860s that Japan open its borders, was the reconfiguration of the terms of a debate about the individual's relation to society. As H. D. Harootonian and Masao Miyoshi point out, this discussion, as well as a more general one related to modernity and modernization, began in Japan well before the invasion by the west.¹ An effect of...