The ghost of Yukio Mishima sits at
The back of the Imperial, 1972,
Two years after his ritual seppuku and failed coup,
To take in Pippin’s opening night on Broadway.
The writer knows little of King Charlemagne or American pop.
He still grasps the musical’s muscular, self-aware quality,
The simple, shallow pleasures contained in the
Young, handsome, typically shirtless title character.
A Wildean by nature, Mishima grins,
Good-natured, as white-faced Western clowns
Sing, kick, thrust, and break the fourth wall while
Manipulating the existentially frazzled Pippin towards
Their desired climax.
Mishima may have been a zealous right-wing nationalist, yet
He enjoyed a joke, the wink at the heart of all grand spectacle.
The spirit is, nevertheless, disappointed once Pippin
Chooses the other trap—the ordinary life, the family—
Over “one extraordinary moment.”
Did the boy really believe any death, especially a great one,
Was an act of futility?
Mishima is confident that, regardless of the Leading Player’s ministrations,
He’d have confidently jumped into the flames,
Become the bird soaring to the sea, the one Pippin merely sings of,
Cementing how words lack meaning
Without action’s purity, it’s poetry.
Whatever Mishima’s spirit feels, including,
beneath his arrogant certainties,
A piqued envy he forcibly buries,
The actors reappear on stage and take their bows,
Alive and well, the spell forcibly broken.
The spirit gloomily returns once more to his final act,
To that miserable, decadent military base in Central Tokyo,
To the irritated, indifferent soldiers beneath that balcony,
To his short blade’s profound, anguished plunge,
To the blood, pain, and ecstasy.
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