Recommend: No<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My first Yukio Mishima story comes in the form of this Penguin Modern Classic. It\u2019s a novella under 100 petite pages in length. It\u2019s primarily concerned with the artifice of modern life, emphasised by casting its protagonist, Rikio (the titular Star), as an actor currently working on set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Artifice is the natural state of things when filming. The struggle Rikio faces is that he can’t view his real life differently from his working life: the artifice in front of the camera is the same artifice he sees with his own eyes in his own life. You feel as though the deliberately manufactured set designs and the pre-planned script he follows in his day job blurs uncomfortably into his personal life. There is a level of disassociation that never lets up. At work Rikio is never himself, always playing a character, but then even off-camera it\u2019s impossible to pin down his identity. The first-person narration is so impersonal and distanced that each real-life event feels as though it is being shown to us in a wide shot, always keeping us at arm\u2019s length from the character\u2019s feelings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The following scene is my favourite. Mishma shows us how completely unhooked his protagonist has become from reality, and how little purpose he has in life. He quite literally does not have his own personality. He could be anyone, and it feels inevitable that he will soon, when the lustre of fame wears off, become no one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nI recall a rare afternoon off: I went shopping on the Ginza, where I witnessed a man being arrested for stealing a pair of cufflinks, under the cover of the crowd gathered there to see me. It felt like we were in a dream: a star and a shoplifter is each a rare encounter, but seeing us together cracked the superstructure of reality. Everyone was watching. The shoplifter was a grungy middle0aged man, and at the time I was still twenty-three, a burning beacon of youth. When they arrested him, the crowd cheered and our eyes met. His face was in agony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At that moment, it felt like this middle-aged man and I were pulled loose from reality, from the gleaming store displays, from the racks lined with shirts of every colour, from the uproar of the crowd. Like a rose plucked down to its stem, the world tore back before my eyes and showed me its interior. It felt like we were in a scene being shot out of order, at the mercy of some unseen director.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That shoplifter was me, only twenty years older! The moment he reached out to touch those handsome cufflinks with their precious stones, reality began to slip away, and he and I switched places. The next shot in the scene was rolling, only he was playing me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Rikio is so dulled by his life that when side characters display real emotion it is a piercing shock to both us and Rikio. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A failing actress (Yuri), very loosely a colleague of Rikio\u2019s, tries to commit suicide by overdosing on pills. The scene is one that shines brilliantly in the rubble of Rikio\u2019s on-set drudgery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe position of her body made the spectacle supreme. With her eyes firmly shut, fake eyelashes and all, and undistracted by her senses, Yuri was submerged. That\u2019s right. Her mind was underwater. Her senses had been caught in the blurred grayness at the bottom of the sea, but her body had made it to the surface, its every curve and crevice bathed in the violent light. When Yuri yelled \u201cIt hurts!\u201d her voice was aimed at the abyss This was not a cry out into the world, and certainly not a message. It was a frank display of physicality, expressed through pure presence and pure flesh, unburdened by the weight of the consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wanted to study her, to watch her do it all over again. She had managed to attain the sublime state that actors always dream of. That two-bit actress had really pulled it off\u2026 without even knowing she had done it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The way that Rikio observes Yuri\u2019s fight with death is disturbing. You\u2019d expect watching a stranger die would be terrifying but in fact Rikio is captivated. Rikio disdains how everything in his life feels like acting, and this has led to his disassociation. He sees her dying as something that cannot be performed and is therefore revered. Is death the only truth left to him?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s probably evident from the way I have praised Star<\/em> that it was very close to be a \u2018Recommend: Yes\u2019. It took a concept that has been covered extensively in literature (famous actors) and gave it a unique spin. Mostly, the writing was very good. I really liked how easily Mishima had Rikio moving between his job on-set, reading lines and re-doing takes, to hiding away from reality off-screen, such that you never see him interacting with, or contributing to, society. Rikio is a recluse and proves that fame and achievement will only make the depth of the Void more painfully obvious: from great heights you can see a great fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was just a little bit of clunkiness in the writing (eg. \u201cLike a rose plucked down to its stem, the world tore back before my eyes and showed me its interior<\/em>.\u201d) and repetition of character interactions (Rikio and his assistant, Kayo) that pushed this out of a \u2018must read\u2019 category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cut-o, cut-o, cut-o.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you get too used to living life this way, the steady flow of real time – where there is no turning back – begins to feel boring and stale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1127"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1157,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127\/revisions\/1157"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}