Articles
The Significance of Flying Saucers in Yukio Mishimaʼs Beautiful Star
Abstract
The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a plethora of UFO sightings around the world, so it is not surprising that Yukio Mishima’s novel Utsukushii hoshi (BeautifulStar) features spaceships from other planets. If Carl Jung was correct to describe UFOs as symbols of the unconscious rising to a state of consciousness, what specific forms of conscious reality was Mishima aiming to bring to light through his novel? This article suggests that Mishima employs the UFO trope in order to discuss certain problematic aspects of postwar Japanese culture which demanded his attention.The article undertakes close readings of three such aspects: politics, aesthetics, and other worlds. Politics mattered because Mishima was writing in 1962, a time of intense superpower conflict and anxiety over nuclear war. The extraterrestrial characters in the novel voice solutions to humanity’s political problems at the time. Mishima explores aesthetics to imagine a utopian alternative to what he saw as the oppressive atmosphere of postwar capitalist Japan. He portrays other worlds in the novel to demonstrate that better worlds are imaginable, and to show that no postwar suburban dream is so dull that it cannot be turned into a story of universal significance.