The Greek ideal in Mishima Yukio's Apure novels

Written during a ten-year period, from 1946 to 1956, Mishima Yukio's apure novels--Confessions of a Mask, Thirst for Love, Forbidden Colors, The Sound of Waves, and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion-- set the stage for the canon of his works thereafter and demonstrate a significant knowledge of Greece and the Greeks. Essentially, Mishima appropriates a sense of male beauty from classical Greek models, yet because of his particular socio-historical context--national despondency and feelings of alienation plagued postwar Japan--this appropriation becomes ambivalent. That is, while Mishima seems to endorse the values of Greek depictions of homosexuality--its redemptive possibility--he simultaneously undermines them. His homosexuality attracts him to the ancient Greeks; his social identity, to the modern Japanese. And in a desperate search for a separate and personal world of homosexual beauty, he finds male beauty, and underneath this male aesthetic lurks nihilism. Herein lies the key, that tension between the Greek ideal and the nihilistic, not only to his works but, also, just as importantly, to his life and his death.