Yukio Mishima's Report to the Emperor, by Richard Appignanesi

Sex and seppuku in a Japanese garden

Hurrah for the World Cup. It has made us see the Japanese as normal, passionate people. Conventionally, though, we have seen them as incomprehensible, emotionless, robot-like, hermetically sealed in their Zen spirituality and martial aestheticism. The West has admired their quaint aesthetics (exquisite gardens, curious architecture and funny tea-ceremonies) and feared their awesome traditions (samurai, bushido, ninja, kamikaze).

But Japan presented the West with a special problem. Japanese studies remained largely in the hands of Japanese experts, and the West could not exercise the authority it took for granted in the case of Islam, India and China. Even after its defeat in 1945, when Japan was tamed and contained, it remained in control of its past. The Japanese could represent themselves, to their new generations and the world, according to their own categories of thought.

Yukio Mishima, the great Japanese novelist, playwright, actor and all-round dissenter, was obsessed with taking Japan back to its authentic categories, and rebuilding the nation according to the "the spirit of Japanese history". He wanted to build the feeling of sanctity and rapture in everyday life. On 25 November 1970, the day he completed his four-volume masterpiece, The Sea of Fertility, Mishima committed seppuku, or ritual suicide by disembowelment and beheading.

What led Mishima to commit such a shocking act? This is the central quest of Richard Appignanesi's meticulously researched and highly ambitious novel. Cleverly structured and gracefully written, part political thriller and part exploration of a "terrorist mind", Yukio Mishima's Report to the Emperor takes great pains to avoid the standard pitfalls of the Western gaze. Appignanesi's Japan is far removed from the Orientalist image of a cold, impersonal and machine-like culture. Appignanesi has constructed a Japan that is full of complex, rounded human beings, overflowing with pain, sorrow, expectation and desire.

But by sidestepping conventional Orientalism, Appignanesi has invented a new, totally politically incorrect, form of Orientalism. While Mishima's enigmatic life is presented through Japanese conventions, these notions have been filtered through Appignanesi's Catholic secularism. In place of the Holy Trinity, we have the constructed Japanese equivalent of sex, aesthetics and ethics. Thus the intricacies of Japanese culture, its notion of beauty and morality, all come down to sex. Mishima's genius, his overtly masculine novels in the samurai-warrior tradition, his patriotic desire to purify Japanese constitution of its Western impurities, his rage against his country being mesmerised by Western materialism, his mission to restore divinity to the Emperor – all are a product of his alleged homosexuality. In fact, Mishima was happily married with two children, and dearly loved his wife, Yoko.

So we end up with a Japanese replica of a Catholic-Italian-Englishman's fanciful imitation of an Japanese garden. It is a garden that the feminists, the gay community, and the Japanese themselves, will find good reason to hate. Still, if Kazuo Ishiguro can represent the English as angst-ridden anal retentives, why can't Appignanesi represent the Japanese as nostalgic puritans and infantile homosexuals – the whole bloody lot of them?