First Impressions on 'Beautiful Star' by Yukio Mishima: A look into mankind's fears

Finally posting something a little different in the book club community after having quite a heavy focus on comic books over the last few months! While much of my attention has been focused on comics within the reading world, I have also been reading through a book that my another surprise pick from my girlfriend. I mentioned in another post that we've taken to surprising each other with book picks, something I really enjoy given it allows us to glance through a book shop's collection and find something for the other, which leads to us reading something we otherwise probably wouldn't stumble across ourselves. It's a great idea that has definitely pushed me out of my reading comfort zone, beyond the things I think I would like and into the stories and authors I have never heard of before but now get to enjoy. I think sometimes with reading, many of us get caught up in the genres and types of stories we prefer the most, almost pushing ourselves into some sort of corner where we rarely explore beyond those genres. At least, that's how it can be in my case. And I think this next pick definitely led to me discovering an author that surprised me in many ways. I think the best way to explain this is to give a bit of context on the author, who appears to have lived a live that sounds like a literary tale in its own.

The author's past is lengthy, rich in Japan's deep past and complex political situations. I'll try to summarise things quickly as to avoid really writing a lot about all of his life and events, as well as the past events that led to some of his actions, but in short: Mishima found fascination in the military, leading to him wanted to experience military life first-hand. With this came a later plan to attempt to perform a coup. Yes, this author tried to take over Japan. To which the attempt was a failure and the author, in traditional Japanese fashion, chose to perform seppuku. This is a pretty nasty death ritual and form of suicide in which the person stabs themselves in the abdomen. It's an incredibly brutal form of suicide that requires two people as another is entrusted with performing a swift cut at the neck to quickly end things for the person performing the main act, ultimately attempting to relieve that person of their pain. This act is considered one of redemption, to take their own life and be forgiven for their mistakes or prior actions. It's a pretty crazy story to hear from an author that wrote stories about aliens and Cold War paranoia. And yes, that means that this author was one that lived in the 60s. This wasn't even that long ago!

So Beautiful Star is a book written by a Japanese man that once attempted to perform a coup and then performed ritual suicide. If that doesn't interest you already, then I don't know what would. With that bit of context on just some of the author's life, Beautiful Star will start to make a bit of sense to you with the little bit of context over its story. Set in the era of the Cold War, at the height of the Soviet Union and its tensions with the United States, Japan is still feeling the aftermath of being hit by two nuclear bombs, with the act being only a mere two decades prior. It's hard to imagine what a nation must feel only a few short years after being hit with a weapon (not once, but twice) that had never been seen before. A new form of destruction to which the evils of a government chose to test them upon the citizens of a nation. This was a new weapon that killed long after it had impacted and disappeared. Impacting generations of people with its power. Radiation becoming a bigger fear as the years went by, as families saw the impacts of radiation sickness with increased rates of cancer, child deaths, and deformities. The real horrors only appearing long after the bombs had landed.

Beautiful Star takes the panic of the Cold War era and places a family that feel they don't fit in with the modern world. The fear of war, the mentality of those in the present. Everything around this family has them incredibly certain that they're actually not of this world, having been aliens that derived from various planets within the solar system and found their ways to Earth. Each of them assume they have a purpose for having arrived at Earth. There's this feeling of slight superiority over humans given they feel as if they're void of the usual nonsensical aspects of human life, the drama and emotion that comes with the complexities of human condition. Things like love seem pointless to them. They feel a more logical reaction to their surroundings rather than a reactionary mentality. This family believes that their purpose is to elevate the human race and save them from themselves, to show them a more peaceful and prosperous future that has them seeking life in the stars rather than conflict in the dirt. With the challenges in Japan that came about after the acts of the Second World War, it shows a group of people that are incapable of fitting in. Seeing the horrors of reality and incapable of just shrugging it all off and going about their mass consumerism and ignorance. It's an interesting idea so far that a family would assume they're of another planet, to feel a belonging to dot in the night sky rather than the culture and society that surrounds them.

I quite like the idea of escapism within the story so far. At this point there are no real signs that this family truly is not of this world, and the way it reads, it tells us of a group of people within a space that they just can't seem to connect with. I've mentioned Japan's troubled past with the experience of nuclear weapons, and I think it's more so relevant and personal to the people with the ongoing Cold War threat of additional use of such weapons around the world from two significantly larger nations. If there's one group of people to feel that anxiety, it'd be the Japanese with their firsthand experience. And the book handles that paranoia well, down to the level in which one of the "aliens" forms a formal letter to the Soviet Union and mails it directly to Russia to address them on the idea of establishing peace, to put down their differences with the west and to promote communication rather than escalation with the testing of future weaponry. So far I have no idea where this book is actually heading. I'm quite a few chapters in and it still seems to be giving depth into the main characters, detailing the world that they're in and really stretching this introduction out. One thing is certain: it really plays on the idea of fear within humans, and how fear controls us.