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Yukio Mishima is a wonderful novelist.

Nietzsche. He’s a reactionary but he diagnoses some of the problems of modernity correctly. He articulates the appeal of the heroic or mythic and the dearth of that in bourgeois society. The Ubermensch (not necessarily the Nazi ideal) is a reactionary response to the crisis of the death of God that needs to be overcome (ironically, I can’t think of a better term off the top of my head than ‘overcome’, so even in my critique I’m still operating within Nietzschean terms).

I enjoyed Mishima Yukio when I was younger, almost as a morbid fascination/character study. As a non-western nationalist, he wasn’t happy with American hegemony/occupation, including the use of Japan as a staging ground for the Korean War (“It was supposed to be our turn to bomb Korea”). Unlike the American conservatives I was used to, he had an actual culture to write about, so he could write florid prose about some aspect of Japanese culture and talk about how it’s being destroyed by neoliberalism and it’s a little bit more reasonable than the things the American right whines about (though it’s important to remember that his cause was abhorrent and fascist).

A lot of his writing subverted my expectations of what the right could look like - though I encountered him before the Alt-Right was a thing. In some ways, I feel like he prepared me for the Alt-right. He was all about the Chad meme and bodybuilding and strong muscular men, he was (most likely) gay, and in one of his novels the protagonist cucks the imperial prince (despite Mishima’s affection for imperial rule). A lot of the Milo Yiannopoulos-type bits and subversiveness and attempts at third-positionism were kinda like :seen-this-one:

Von Clausewitz, Dostoevsky, Limonov, Tolstoy