ABSTRACT
Obviously, from many angles, Mishima’s nationalism was in keeping with the ontologization of cultural loss and the “palingenetic politics of time” integral to reactionary modernism and at the very foundations of fascist ideology, as I have detailed them in the chapters on Kawabata. But the mythic essence of the nation is embodied, for Mishima, not in the people (the Volk or minzoku) but in the institution of the emperor.
