Apparently the blog issue regarding Mishima's seppuku death is the most 'hit' item on this 100,000 hit blog...so there are quite a few strange people out there.Now the reason I first put Mishima and his chosen way of death on the blog years ago was basically because I worked for 30 years as a clinical nurse and consultant in end stage terminal care and pain control; and then I worked in mental health for awhile and suicide was often coming up as a topic. I have no problem at all with people committing suicide based upon Mishima's noble notion: that the death should be incredibly painful and in private and done in a way to illustrate that the pain of death was worse than the pain of living and you only ever did it as a political statement to basically, in death, make yourself a bit larger than life. I've got no issue with that at all. That is actually noble. No pills, no car crashing, just a bloody big knife twisting in the guts, and you do it yourself. The primarily important thing for Mishima was that the death was discrete, his self killing, etc, although having his friend there to cut off his head kind of made it into a public event due to photography...but all in all, Mishima chose Seppuku for very valid reasons relating to Japan and the dishonour of the Empire. I do think that this is a noble form of self killing: that it be intensely more painful than life, and that it be done basically in secret and very neatly so as no one is harmed when they find the body.
I dont think death is much to be scared about.
When locking up the Hospice gates some years ago at night one of my colleagues said 'don't you need a torch to go out there in the dark?' and I replied 'darlin, i've walked along with so many hundreds of people into their nights and deaths that it is the darkness that should be afraid of me.' I actually said that. It was a real Frank Drebbin of Police Squad moment...you don't get many moments in a life time to say something really profound as well as really silly-ful of bravado, and also really deep. I did it.
I don't work at titrating pain control for people at death's door any more and I'm really happy not to do so any more. 30 years was enough for many lifetimes.
The thing about Mishima is that he is such a fucking good writer that it is a crying shame he never got the Nobel Prize, it really is. He's much better than a lot of them, he just didnt have an 'acceptable philosophy'...and when did that matter, ever, in art?
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