Paul Schrader’s ‘Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters’ to Finally Screen in Japan After 40-Year De Facto Ban 

Paul Schrader’s ‘Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters’ to Finally Screen in Japan After 40-Year De Facto Ban 

If all goes according to plan, a most curious lacuna of Japanese cinema history could soon come to a close.

The upcoming 38th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival revealed Wednesday that it has programmed a retrospective screening of Paul Schrader’s now-classic literary biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. It will be the film’s effective Japan premiere — some 40 years late.

The film’s path to Japanese screens has been tortured in the extreme — and in many ways, it’s a marvel that it even exists. Co-written and directed by Schrader less than a decade after he became a Hollywood name for scripting Taxi Driver, the film was backed by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas’ Zoetrope Pictures during one of its most active periods. Shot entirely in Japan with an all-Japanese cast, the movie vividly explores the life and ideas of the country’s most controversial literary iconoclast, Yukio Mishima, the novelist nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times before taking his own life by ritual suicide after leading a failed attempt to restore Japan’s emperor to power via coup d’état. A staggeringly original work of literary adaptation, the film interweaves episodes from Mishima’s life with stylized dramatizations of moments from his books, as an aching Philip Glass score serves as cinematic connective tissue.

The film has been a critical sensation ever since its release. It won the Best Artistic Contribution award at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, and Roger Ebert later called it “the most unconventional biopic I’ve ever seen, and one of the best.” The Criterion Collection restored and reissued the film in 2008, ensuring its cult classic status, while directors from Martin Scorsese to Guillermo del Toro have publicly cited it as Schrader’s masterpiece.

But it was an unmistakable flop in its day, and in no small part because of its forbidding reception in Japan.

Despite being co-financed by the country’s leading studio, Toho Towa, and starring revered local actor Ken Ogata in the title role, the film’s theatrical ambitions in Japan were derailed before it ever had a chance to reach the public. By the mid-1980s, Mishima’s standing in Japan remained deeply conflicted: revered in literary circles as a stylist of rare brilliance and a frequent Nobel contender, but also mythologized by the far right as a martyr for imperial restoration. His lurid end — public seppuku after the failed coup attempt in 1970 — left him both an enduring cultural icon and a radioactive subject.

The movie’s frank depiction of Mishima’s bisexual obsessions and radical political drive, not to mention the involvement of foreign filmmakers like Schrader, Coppola and Lucas, drew a boycott from Mishima’s widow and incensed the ultra-right-wing political groups that continued to lionize him. Tokyo theaters reportedly received threats of violence, and Toho quickly withdrew its support for a domestic release. The film was also pulled from that year’s Tokyo International Film Festival.

To this day, the specter of those initial threats, and the political sensitivities they exposed, has kept distributors and festival programmers cowed. Although the film has occasionally surfaced in academic settings, it has remained officially unseen by general Japanese audiences.

Sources close to the Tokyo Film Festival told The Hollywood Reporter Wednesday that a screening of Mishima at this year’s edition, running Oct. 27 to Nov. 7, has been set for Oct. 30. They said Schrader has expressed interest in returning to Japan to discuss the film at the festival, but his attendance is still uncertain, and perceived sensitivities could make promoting the screening “difficult” for organizers. The decision to finally screen the film was made in light of this year’s 100-year anniversary of Mishima’s birth in 1925, they said.

Over the years, Schrader, now 79, has repeatedly said he considers Mishima his finest work as a director (while Taxi Driver remains his favorite as a screenwriter). Reflecting on his 50-year career at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, where he received an honorary Golden Lion, he said: “My favorite is Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, just because it’s the damnedest thing. I still can’t believe I ever made that film.”