MAKING HIS POINT The ever-gradiose Mishima (Ken Ogata) visualizes himself as St. Sebastian.

Photograph: Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

Is the sheer audacity of Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters the result of clever originality or sheer naïveté? While the popular Japanese novelist, who committed seppuku in 1970 after taking over a Tokyo military base with members of his private army, enjoyed great fame in the West, very few viewers of a Hollywood biopic would have known much about his monarchist, hard-right politics. But that didn’t stop Schrader from making an impossibly dense film about Yukio Mishima that went over the heads of many audience members in 1985. The results didn’t set the box office on fire, but they make for a perfect two-disc Criterion Collection edition: This time, the special features feel less like extras and more like integral pieces of a grand puzzle.

Of course, summarizing the life of someone as complicated as Mishima would have been a fool’s errand to begin with, which is probably why Schrader decided to not even try. The product of a troubled childhood, Mishima not only became Japan’s foremost novelist but also one of its strangest social critics. While most artists tend to challenge their societies as progressives, Mishima was an unabashed reactionary. Although his books display surprising depths of sensitivity, he spent the last years of his life building up a cadre of followers who, like him, wanted to revive the samurai code. His infamous final act of staging a minicoup—only to commit public suicide after his plea to overthrow Japan’s civilian government—fell on deaf ears. His ritual self-disembowelment was preceded by a fiery speech to assembled soldiers denouncing Japan’s slide toward Western decadence and ineffectualness. Despite such macho theatrics, as well as a wife and two kids, Mishima was also a somewhat-closeted homosexual. (His orientation appears to have been an open secret, but the references to his homosexuality are but one of the reasons why Mishima was never released in Japan.)

In standard biopic fashion, Schrader’s film begins at the end, showing Mishima (Ken Ogata) meticulously donning his uniform and assembling his men for their final act. The film repeatedly cuts to this fateful day, but the story we get in between is far from linear. It is structured around sections titled “Beauty,” “Art,” “Action” and “Fusion of Pen and Sword,” each focusing on a different aspect of the artist’s persona. Scenes from the novels The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House and Runaway Horses are used as emotional linchpins within each part of the film: The novels’ protagonists also serve as veiled stand-ins for the author, further fragmenting our image of Mishima.

It’s a bold approach, but that’s nothing compared with the stylistic shifts involved: Schrader films each part of Mishima’s life in a different cinematic style (classical black and white for the postwar period, handheld realism for the final day, etc.), and he stages the scenes from the novels in a similarly stylized fashion, using Noh-like grand gestures and deliberately artificial settings. To create the elaborately theatrical sets—one wants to call them operatic—the director employed the services of the legendary designer Eiko Ishioka, then a relative unknown. The resulting film feels like a dream—both in its bizarre, surreal environments and in the drifting ease with which it jumps back and forth between them. (A hauntingly minimalist Philip Glass score doesn’t hurt either.)

In short, Schrader’s film, beautiful and hypnotic as it is, resolutely refuses to give us a full, realistic portrait of the man. As a result, one of the most invaluable extras in this set (which also includes several making-of videos) turns out to be an hour-long BBC documentary about Mishima, which serves to fill in gaps. At the same time as Schrader’s biopic, Criterion is releasing “Patriotism,” a 30-minute 1966 film directed by and starring Mishima himself. That disc comes with its own special features, but at barely half an hour, “Patriotism” might have made an ideal addition to the Mishima set. However, one suspects, given the hostility of the writer’s estate toward Schrader’s film, that would have been a nonstarter.

Mishima flirts with alienating its audience but ultimately doesn’t, thanks to the easy emotional shorthand with which Schrader depicts his central character. In fact, the film feels somewhat of a piece with Schrader’s best-known work: his scripts for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. (Indeed, Schrader once said that if Mishima didn’t exist, he would have had to invent him.) Like Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta, his Mishima is a sociopath dreaming of self-annihilation. As depicted in this lovely and ultimately bewitching film, his journey is one long quest toward bloody, gruesome oblivion.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters ($39.99) and “Patriotism” ($24.99) are now available from the Criterion Collection.