Japan: Hara-kiri - literally, "belly cut" - is the method of ritual suicide of the samurai, death by disembowelment and decapitation. Its complex formality is a fusion of aesthetic performance, dignified valour and blood-letting.
There are variations of hara-kiri, differentiated by their intentions: junshi is practiced by one who wishes to follow his lord to death; kanshi expresses admonition or remonstrates with a superior; inseki-jisatsu signals expiation for a misdeed; and funshi conveys indignation, a protest against injustice.
The suicide of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima in 1970 at age 45 fell into the last of these categories. At the time of his death, Mishima was Japan's most famous writer, three times nominated for the Nobel Prize. He had written 40 novels, hundreds of essays, 20 volumes of short stories and several plays. But he was at odds with his own nation. Indignant at the "emasculated" state of Japan under the peace constitution, Mishima had formed in 1968 a 100-strong private militia - the right-wing Tate no Kai (its stated, signed-in-blood purpose: the defence of the Emperor and the upholding of Japan's traditional culture) - and, two years later, attempted a coup.
When it was clear the coup was failing, Mishima retreated to the office of an army general whom he had taken hostage, stabbed himself in the stomach with a 16th-century sword, then endured the botched hacking of his suicide assistant. The kaishaku, or assistant, should make a clean cut to the neck, leaving a flap of skin unsevered so that the head remains attached to the body. Mishima's was nervous and nauseous; after three badly aimed whacks, his kaishaku handed the sword to another comrade who decapitated Mishima.
Mishima's Sword is Christopher Ross's second work of non-fiction; Tunnel Visions: Journeys of an Underground Philosopher described his 16-month stint as a station assistant at London's Oxford Circus. Ross, who lived in Japan for five years, sets himself a few questions: Is Mishima's life (or death) significant? Why did Mishima kill himself? What happened to Mishima's sword? And what does any of it mean to him, Ross?
As a boy, Mishima was sickly and effeminate, aesthetically inclined, obliged to sleep in his grandmother's bedroom and forbidden male companionship and rough play. His PE teacher called him "grandmother duck". In early adulthood, he transformed himself into what Ross calls a "hypertrophy of maleness". He remade his body through bodybuilding and martial arts, took charge of his sexuality (Mishima was "a homosexual husband with two children and a string of male lovers"), and stated that he was, in his writing, "trying to get back to the rough-soul tradition of the samurai", which he felt had been effaced by Japan's post-war emphasis on the feminine.
Ross wonders if Mishima was simply projecting his own problems and concerns onto the nation, that having been brought up as a feminised boy who struggled to become a man - "a would-be warrior confined within an era of peace" - Mishima felt compelled to insist that all of Japan adopt the same preoccupations. "How else might a homosexual narcissist love his country, other than as an image of a muscle-man, a reflection of himself?"
Ross's own obsession with martial arts began as a child, fed on Bruce Lee movies and the Kung Fu television series. His first serious study was as a teenager under the Lung brothers, one of whom eventually, along with his wife, pursued gender reassignment. Ross writes, in typical deadpan: "Although I believed in liberal values and still do, and was certainly not hostile to transsexuals, I felt that a double sex change linked to the practice of satanism was a heavy hint that I should direct my energies elsewhere."
Years later, Ross found himself in Japan. Following the bankruptcy of the school where he had been teaching English, he ended up living in the Old Kimono Factory in Tokyo and it was there that he and his ex-pat housemates, in an effort to shake up their indolent lifestyle, began the obsessive practice of martial arts.
Ross is a very likeable narrator, his tone one of respectful curiosity, sometimes bemused but never superior. He knows a 19th-century Wazen bowl when he sees one but never derives cheap humour from the ignorance of other gaijin (non-Japanese). The book grazes on a variety of subjects: Mishima's fiction, swordsmithing, the Japanese written language, the militarisation of Japan's high culture, an unsolved quadruple knife murder in Tokyo, samurai tradition, an oddly riveting 48-hour nosebleed. There is an amusing vignette in an S&M club, where Ross goes to meet a source - an ex-lover (of sorts) of Mishima's who claimed the writer liked to role play, with (surprise) Mishima pretending to commit hara-kiri while his partner watched.
The sword search never quite comes to life. What interested Ross, and me, was not finding the object but the characters encountered in the search and the links between an individual and a national psyche. Late in the book, he concludes that the sword is more real to him as an archetype than as two feet of edged steel. No matter. The book - surprisingly light of touch for one that revolves around ritual disembowelment and a death obsession - is an enjoyable and idiosyncratic look at Japan and one of its most notorious sons.
As for the enigma that is Mishima, it remains. Not surprising, given that his was a life of self-invention. Art critic Donald Richie, who was a friend, remarks that Mishima was postmodern before the idea of postmodernism had been articulated. He believed "that you might, by exercising your will, make yourself into nearly anything".
Nobel-prize winner Yasunari Kawabata thought Mishima a talent that only comes along once every 300 years, while Gore Vidal called him a B-list author with only one topic: himself. Ross seems to regard his subject with perplexed affection and - though fascinated by Mishima's life - appears to side with those who think his death a wasteful and excessive gesture.
Molly McCloskey's latest novel, Protection, is published by Penguin Ireland
Mishima's Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend By Christopher Ross. Fourth Estate, 243pp. £14.99