“To Alien, or not to Alien”. That is the question you keep asking yourself while reading Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima. And, if you’re anything like me, you’ll also be asking yourself where the dark humour it is supposed to be awash with is to be found. I’m still searching for it, to be honest.

Although the Alien premise (extraterrestrials and flying saucers) is at the center of the story, and very close to the author, since he actually joined the “Japan Flying Saucer Research Association” in 1956, Mishima manages to dive into many philosophical subjects such as identity, moral responsibility, collective survival, hope or the deep human longing to belong to something larger than ourselves. And it’s all tangled up with his own obsessions and the anxieties of postwar Japan, delivered through the peculiar missions of the Ōsugi family and the eerie Cygnus group.

About the Author – Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) was one of Japan’s most dazzling and controversial literary figures. Born in Tokyo in 1925. He wrote with the precision of a philosopher and the intensity of a dramatist. Rising to prominence in the postwar era with Confessions of a Mask, launching a career defined by an extraordinary output of novels, short stories, and plays. His crowning achievement, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy—which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971) and was completed the day before his death—is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction.

Beyond his writing, Mishima lived with a kind of theatrical fervor that made him feel larger than life. He founded his own private militia, embraced extreme physical discipline, and cultivated a public persona that blurred art and reality. His dramatic death—an act of political protest carried out with ritualistic precision (seppuku)—cemented his legend and left a shadow that still stirs debate.

What is it about? – Synopsis

The Ōsugi family have come to a realisation. Each of them hails from a different planet. Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. Already seen as oddballs in their small Japanese town in the 1960s, this extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them closer together; they climb mountains to wait for UFOs, study at home together, and regard their human neighbours with a kindly benevolence. But Father, Jūichirō, is worried about the bomb. He writes letters to Krushev, trying to warn everyone he can of the terrible threat. After all, humans may be terribly flawed, but aren’t they worth saving? He sends out a coded message in the newspaper to find other aliens. But there are other extra-terrestrials out there, ones who do not look so kindly on the flaws and foibles of humans. And a charming young man, who claims to be from Venus too, tempts the daughter Akiko away from the family…

What did I think? – Opinion

Beautiful Star is the first book I read by Yukio Mishima, and it wasn’t at all what I expected. I’d seen it described as a dark comedy from one of Japan’s most celebrated and intense authors, and the premise was irresistible: a seemingly normal Japanese family becomes convinced they are aliens from different planets, tasked with a mission to save humanity from itself.

While I thought I was starting a lean, darkly funny sci-fi satire about a family convinced they’re aliens. What I found was something else entirely. The reading experience was surprisingly challenging. The novel is slow, sometimes tedious and Mishima’s writing style doesn’t really help. It is precise, tense, like every word is carefully carved with a razor. You find yourself reading simple sentences that feel so much more intense than they should.

On occasions it feels more like reading philosophical passages, wrapped into a science fiction novel, and I, personally, found some parts later in the novel to be borderline boring. Especially one moment where the Ōsugi family is visited by three members of the “Cygnus Groups” and Jūichirō has a marathon debate about humanity’s future that nearly bested my patience.

But, I have to admit, that at the end, I was surprised. The ending was not what I expected it to be, strange, ambiguous and very much open to interpretation, if you want it to be. As some time has passed since I read Beautiful Star, I find myself liking the book more. It’s not the best book in my opinion, but, I think that I would have liked it more had I started it with a different mindset. After all, Mishima himself claimed it was “the best work of his career”.

There’s enough in Beautiful Star to fill an entire essay about the different ideas and critiques it represents—the nuclear anxiety after the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the political uncertainty or about how the alien identities and their missions function as Mishima’s mechanism to confront a post-war Japan that he felt had severed itself from its roots, offering polarized, absolute cosmic solutions (total peace or total destruction) to remedy the perceived moral failings of human society.

The final question remains: Are the Ōsugis delusional, or are they the only ones paying attention?

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