Postwar Tough Guy From Tokyo : ACTS OF WORSHIP <i> by Yukio Mishima translated by John Bester (Kodansha International: $17.95; 205 pp.)</i>

Living in post-heroic Japan, Yukio Mishima wanted something to revere. Not content merely to think worshipful thoughts, he pumped muscle into his frail frame, donned a French-designer military uniform, and, between cameo roles in yakuza (mob) flicks and photography sessions (with sword in the snow, arrow in the armpit, rose clenched in the teeth), set out to battle secular corruptions of every kind.

He thus came to appear a hero, which proved fatal, since Mishima had no faith in the world of appearances. Heroes could not just dress the part, they had to act it. Yet without a war in which he could actively be heroic, Mishima staged wars in his writing, where he fought on behalf of romantic passion, the sea, the Emperor, etc. Then he took a scene he had enacted countless times in his fiction--of ritual self-sacrifice--and made it the last act of his life.

If we continue to take notice of this by turns brilliant and erratic writer 20 years after his death, perhaps it is because Mishima, almost alone of his generation, tried to reclaim an aura lost amid the smug, complacent materialism of postwar Japan. The exquisite style should not camouflage the fact that Mishima was a political writer on a mission: to reconsecrate a homeland on which might once again shine a sun “speckled with golden dust.”

This is the language of the seven stories collected here--all, to varying degrees, literary “acts of worship.” As such, they represent minor if telling repetitions of rituals enacted on a grander scale, often with greater coherence or conviction, in “Confessions of a Mask,” “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” or “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.” John Bester, the accomplished translator, alerts us in his preface to traits as common to Mishima as they are to other great writers: “a certain restriction of theme; an evident self-indulgence.” A few of these stories succumb to such liabilities. Some use them to impressive effect.

A regular, even obsessive, subject of these writings is youth, as it edges toward the brink of some wickedness. Stories like “Cigarettes” and “Martyrdom” put a nearly playful use of decadent images to a serious purpose: “to overthrow the bourgeois world.” In “Fountains in the Rain,” a boy whips himself into a romantic frenzy, not for his girlfriend--which would be a banal and predictable romance--but for the chance to walk out on her.

Even a fable like “Sea and Sunset,” becomes an excuse to follow a young French shepherd who, bedazzled by a vision exhorting him to “go East,” joins the Fifth Crusade, suffers en route in an Alexandrian slave market and later makes passage to India and eventually to a Zen monastery in Japan. It is Mishima’s nod to Flaubert’s “Salammbo,” whose Orientalist style he evidently admired.

“Raisin Bread” features an international cast of barbiturate-popping, suicide-talking drifters, who perform in succession the twist and a “primitive dance ritual” at a beach party, replete with bonfire, roasting pig and conga drums. These preliminaries, along with asides to the shark-nuptial passage in Lautreamont’s “Maldoror,” make possible the kinky menage a trois during which the hero munches on a moldy piece of raisin bread, “bitter and sour as ever, and the more he ate the more it clung around his mouth.”

However noxious, these youthful flowers of evil are preferable to Mishima’s ode to healthy adolescence, the long and turgid “Sword.” “Nothing matters but training.” “We’re here to suffer, not enjoy ourselves.” Such lines are repeated by a group of young men, anxious to improve both fencing skills and character. Their submission to martial austerities, familiar at once to readers of Japanese comics and fans of Rocky/Rambo, is predicated on a befuddled wish: “He couldn’t understand why society in general wasn’t uncomplicated and beautiful, like the world of sport.”

The title story, and by far the finest work in the collection, is a haunting portrait of devotion to an ideal, at the cost of human feeling. A widow, age 45, who “lacked all feminine appeal,” becomes housekeeper to her poetry tutor. She is consumed by a “need to look up to someone,” while he is consumed by the memory of a lost love. Deformed by “excessive self-awareness, like wings unsuitably large for the body,” he responds to his admiring housekeeper with a medieval injunction (“the importance in art of concealing one’s emotions”), calculated to repress and stifle love.

At his best, Mishima remained equally alert to the sublimity, the cruelty and the silliness made possible by excessive devotion. “Acts of Worship” well documents the visions and the delusions projected by Mishima’s devotional art.