If ever there was a film to stumble upon late at night after you've been smoking pot, Beautiful Mystery is it. Though filmed in 1982, it details a band of young Japanese men prepared to fight and die for their country, and the military classroom scenes give it a World-War-Two period aura. This atmosphere interweaves with characters shopping in record stores and throwing frisbees, oh, and tying each other up and finger-fucking and raping each other with the help of tubs of Nivea Creme.
Beautiful Mystery - which runs for sixty minutes - appears to be loosely based on Yukio Mishima's Shield Society, a cult-like military-training cell that Mishima established in 1968. This film, which veers between satire, drama and outright piss-take comedy (elsewhere it has been called the first Japanese gay porn film) implies that Mishima was training his charges for a takeover of the establishment, seizing radio stations and the media, and then, presumably, staging a total coup. Elaborately staged dramas - replete with young enlistees fanning fake snow over the stage - celebrated the cult of the Samurai, and the nobility of suicide in the advent of failure, grand success, or just about anything. After a day's blackboard instruction, gym training and play-acting, orgies took place with all group members rolling around in noisy ecstasy scattering paper snowflakes off each others' mawashis as they 69, pull-off and fuck each other for hours.
Progressions through the ranks of the Society were marked with presentation of a military-stle uniform, the jacket of which was kept on while the elated promotee was fucked dry against a wall. When two of the most accomplished recruits sleep through their alarm after they unexpectedly swapped anal-sex roles the night before, they wake in horror at their disorganisation and choose to actually commit suicide, as they have been taught. When they find they lack the courage to go through with putting steak knives into their guts, they move to Tokyo where they work out their lives in bad drag as sex-bar hostesses.
It seems a safe bet that the action of Beautiful Mystery exaggerates what took place in Mishima's actual Shield Society but Mishima's real-life story lends itself to any manner of fantastical possibilities. Initially raised by his weirdo-grandmother who rarely allowed him to venture outside and prohibited him to play with other boys, Mishima then returned to his parents, where his brutally strict father would often hold his young son close up to the sides of speeding trains. A budding poet and playwright, Mishima lied to avoid being drafted into the army during World War Two, but apparently later suffered survivor-guilt and felt he missed the chance to die nobly as a war hero.
In the late 1940s, Mishima enjoyed major success as a writer, with "Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask)" an autobiographical novel about a closeted homosexual a bestseller. Producing a rich body work that included Kabuki plays, Noh dramas, novels, short stories and poems, Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times.
As for the 1950s, Mishima turned to physical discipline and an interest in ritual suicide, which he enacted in 1970 in theatrical style breaking into the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese Defense forces announcing he was staging a coup. He was met with laughter and general dismissal, then a top-ranked member of the Shield, who was rumoured to also be his lover, failed to kill Mishima so another Shield member stepped in and performed Mishima's beheading.
Nakamura's take on Mishima seems to centre around the statement that many impressionable young men were left in permanent states of psychic instability after falling under the influence of evil Svengalis such as Mishima. I could have done without the title cards that announce as much at the end of the film, but up until then, I was absolutely fascinated.
