da redazione
Segnaliamo, riportandolo integralmente, questo interessante articolo a firma di Damian Flanagan, apparso su https://mainichi.jp/ in data 20 Novembre 2020; l’articolo è in inglese e giapponese, speriamo possa suscitare in voi lo stesso interesse che ha suscitato a noi; attendiamo i vostri commenti. Nell’articolo si parla di due personalità del calibro di: Friederich Nietzsche e Yukio Mishima. Apparentemente agli antipodi: cronologicamente, geograficamente e culturalment. Nietzsche filosofo tedesco, saggista e poeta, non confinabile esclusivamente alla immagine cristallizzata di padre del mito del superuomo, della nascita della tragedia cui appunto, Mishima, reincarnazione dell’antico Samurai, autore, attore anch’egli figura assai articolata, si accosta fino ad assumerlo in sè, il pensiero nietzschano alla luce del «Sol Levante». Nella tipica tragicità dei grandi “eroi” di un tempo, Mishima incarna in sè la cultura di un mondo lontano, riassumendo nell’autore nipponico tutta la severità (grandezza n.d.r.) della propulsione della visione nietzschiana. Da noi lontanta ogni benchè minima lettura pseudo- politica delle due grandi figuri della nostra modernità.
Per l’originale in lingua giapponese si prega di visitare il link seguente: Japanese version
By Damian Flanagan
Toward the end of the World War II, a shy, precocious 19-year-old youth, seething with inner turmoil and frustrations, discovered a book called “The Birth of Tragedy.” It was to become a never-to-be-forgotten moment of epiphany and liberation.
Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian as an all-embracing primeval force from which we all emerge and to which we finally return was to be a tremendous source of solace and inspiration to a painfully reserved and isolated youth. His name was Kimitake Hiraoka, but at the age of 16 in 1941 he had first published a work under a pen name: Yukio Mishima.
As the war situation worsened, the notion that all the turmoil and frenzy of both his exterior and interior worlds could be used to create sublime Apollonian visions of art offered to Mishima’s mind a sense of transcendence that was at the core of his life and creative work for the rest of his life.
Mishima’s bond with Nietzsche was described by Mishima’s father after his son’s death of a special intensity. One week before his real, planned death at the age of 45 in 1970 — his final return into the consuming fires of Dionysian chaos — Mishima talked in an interview about the lifelong impact on his imagination of “The Birth of Tragedy” and “Zarathustra.” After the shocking ritual suicide, Mishima’s mother left a copy of Nietzsche on Mishima’s shrine for him to read for all eternity.
Mishima didn’t just write and talk Nietzsche, he was, in the truest sense of the word, the “ubermensch,” a person of constant transformations (“ubergehen”). Mishima lived and breathed Nietzsche. By sheer force of will, he turned his sickly, weak body into his own beauteous creation: muscular and fit. Believing himself to be living in a cave, he stepped into the sunlight, sunbathing every day as part of his rituals. Refusing to accept any barrier that stood in his way, he would be a movie star, a photographic icon, a playwright and director, a world traveler, a general of his own army. He wrote in a vast diversity of styles from Kabuki plays to sci-fi novels.
Just about everything connected in some sense to Nietzsche. When Mishima departed on his first round-the-world trip in 1951, a highlight was to travel to Greece and sit on the steps of the ruins of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens. When he undertook an iconic photoshoot in the early 1960s, he famously placed a hammer next to his head alluding to Nietzsche’s line about philosophizing with a hammer.
But perhaps most significantly of all, when Mishima finally designed a house of his own — an incongruous Spanish-Italianate creation in modern Tokyo — he planted at the centre of the small garden a statue of Apollo.
It was here every day that he took a late breakfast and sunbathed. The Apollonian vision was at the centre of Mishima’s creative universe and everything in his life moved around it.
How must it have been that final morning when he bade that statue one final goodbye, signifying that visions of art, the dreams of beauty were over. Somewhere in the Dionysian maelstrom, Nietzsche and Mishima must be even now comparing notes.
