Patriotism

I remember reading that Yukio Mishima’s film Patriotism (Yūkoku) (1966) had been found in his former home in 2005. His wife, who died ten years before the discovery, had requested that all copies of the film be destroyed after his suicide in 1970, and so none were thought to exist for a number of years until the negative was found in a wooden box.

Patriotism is a film directed by Mishima and based on his short story of the same name, published in Death in Midsummer and Other Stories. It’s thirty minutes long, black and white, and silent, adopting the style of modern Nō theater, with intertitles to provide context. Part of that context is the February 26 Incident, an attempted coup d’état in Japan.

Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama (played by Mishima), ordered to execute fellow countrymen, chooses instead to kill himself. His wife, Reiko, agrees willingly to join him in “another world.” The film is divided into scenes (five, I think), and we’re shown the progression leading up to their deaths and then the suicides themselves. The couple make love for the last time, and a series of close-ups—shoulders, necks, chests, hair, backs, lips—tell the story of their bodies in love, and then in death.

The lieutenant’s suicide is graphic, with blood splattering and entrails seeping out, and is strikingly realistic for its time. What I found most compelling, though, are the wife’s subtle facial expressions, which convey more than dialogue ever could. In both the short story and the film, I found myself hoping Reiko might come to her senses after her husband kills himself, but she doesn’t and instead follows him, though her death is depicted less graphically.

Mishima would commit seppuku himself only four years later, and watching the film, it’s hard not to wonder what influence it may have had on his own death. Had he already decided this would be his end? Was the film a kind of rehearsal? Or was something else at play—perhaps that he created a work of art without consciously linking it to himself, only for it to shape him later? I tend to think the latter. The film doesn’t point directly to his suicide or any fixed plan but it does feel like a kind of foreshadowing, a work born of the same mind that would eventually enact a similar fate.