Författare: Alexander Howard Senior Lecturer Discipline of English and W

In this month’s massive Los Angeles fires, so far 24 people have died, thousands of structures have been destroyed and approximately 16,308 hectares have been burned. The fires are already among the most destructive in California’s recorded history.

And as happens when major fires erupt in Los Angeles, radical (Marxist) urban historian Mike Davis’s 1998 book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster is being shared. Specifically: its controversial third chapter, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.

Its publication sparked intense backlash. Certain journalists, a former real estate developer and a Malibu realtor masquerading as a neutral fact checker led attacks on Davis’ claims and character. Some minor errors (corrected in subsequent editions) were found in the book’s 831 footnotes.

But, as confirmed by Richard Walker (then chairman of the geography department at the University of California, Berkeley), Davis’ essential arguments were “completely accepted wisdom among scholars who work in the area of environmental hazards”.

A firefighter battles the Palisades Fire in Mandeville Canyon.
Jae C. Hong/AP

Davis, who died in 2022, painted a vivid, if pessimistic picture of Los Angeles as both a real and imagined city perpetually on the brink of catastrophe. “No other city seems to excite such dark rapture,” he wrote. Its obliteration “is often depicted as, or at least secretly experienced as, a victory for civilisation”.

Indeed, in 2025, conservative commentators and influencers are taking a perverse pleasure in the challenges facing California, viewing the state as some sort of stand-in for elite or progressive values. Some right-wing media and pundits have eagerly framed the wildfires as proof of liberal mismanagement or flawed policy decisions.

High-risk housing

A Californian born 19 km outside Los Angeles, Davis was no government apologist. Nor, one of his former editors writes, would he have “celebrate[d] misery”. In fact, Davis’ daughter Róisín’s childhood home and school burned in this month’s fires. In 2020, Davis wrote:

After every fire emergency, [Governor of California, Gavin] Newsom and other liberals call for urgent action to reduce emissions. But in doing so, they deliberately elide the question of what needs to be done on the ground, here and now.

Mike Davis argued too much Californian housing is built in high-fire-risk areas.
Verso

In the 20-odd years since his book was published, he continued, too much new housing in California had been built “profitably but insanely, in high-fire-risk areas”. Fire experts call these areas “the wildland-urban interface”.

In 2020, Davis reported, “by one estimate, a quarter of the state’s population now lives in these interface areas – with scores of new developments and master-planned communities in the pipeline”.

Experts say there is a “perfect storm” of factors at play in the current fires, including long-term climate change and extreme weather conditions playing out in a densely populated areas.

Davis’ politically strident, stylishly written book explores the interplay between urban development, natural disasters, man-made catastrophes and cultural narratives.

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn

In The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, Davis harrowingly described a 1930 Malibu fire unintentionally ignited by walnut pickers in the Thousand Oaks area. It “quickly grew into one of the greatest conflagrations in Malibu history”, driven by the region’s unique geological features and fierce Santa Ana winds.

Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames, 1,100 firefighters could do little except save their own lives. As the firestorm unexpectedly wheeled toward the Pacific Palisades, there was official panic.

A hundred patrolmen were posted at the Los Angeles city limits to tell residents to evacuate.

This was nearly 100 years ago – but Malibu had already long been subjected to rampant and unregulated property development, Davis wrote. Among other effects, this had drastically altered the chemical composition of the area’s soil. Malibu was spared from total annihilation only when “the fickle Santa Ana abruptly subsided”.

Aerial view from airplane survey of the Malibu mountains fire, October 1930.
UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, CC BY

“In hindsight,” Davis argued, “the 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development”. However, no such discussion ever took place.

Despite a series of subsequent fires between 1935 and 1938, which destroyed nearly 400 homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials persisted in prioritising real estate expansion in environmentally sensitive areas where, as Davis notes, “wildfire is king”. They chose to ignore the growing risks to people, animals and the natural habitat.

Davis took a dim – and provocative – view of the levels of state expenditure and ecological costs required to maintain the lifestyles of affluent families who choose to “seek sanctuaries ever deeper in the rugged contours of the chaparral firebelt”.

An imagined urban dystopia

By 1998, Los Angeles had been destroyed in novels and films no fewer than 138 times, wrote Davis. The Thousand Oaks fire, he mused, “may have given Nathanael West the idea for the burning of Los Angeles in his novel” The Day of the Locust, published in 1939. (And adapted for film in 1975.)

Poster of the movie The Day of the Locust.
Wikipedia

In this darkly satirical masterpiece of modern American fiction, West presents the city as both a dream factory and a pressure cooker primed to explode. Ultimately, the simmering tensions of an urban dystopia overrun by disillusioned dreamers appear to erupt into a hallucinatory frenzy of chaos and violence. The lines between reality and fantasy dissolve.

The book concludes with West’s mentally unstable protagonist imagining Los Angeles ablaze:

as a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hill street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches.

These fictional destructions illustrate the city’s enduring role as the ultimate stage for cataclysm and reinvention in the collective cultural consciousness.

“The City of Angels is unique, not simply in the frequency of its destruction, but in the pleasure that such apocalypses provide to readers and movie audiences,” wrote Davis. “The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific or be swallowed by the San Andreas fault.”

Firefighters deploy structure defense against the Palisades wildfire.
Allison Dinner/AAP

Commercial greed over common sense

Davis’ Los Angeles is a place where – as he comprehensively details – commercial greed overrides common sense and the social good, where institutional racism marginalises vulnerable communities, and where wilful political inertia ensures history repeats itself with devastating consequences.

This lies at the heart of Ecology of Fear. The book, at its core, presents two central arguments. First, he argues America’s democracy is unsustainable, due to its growing disparity in wealth and power. His second argument emphasises the dominance of economic interests over environmental concerns, which inevitably spawns (or exacerbates) crises. When these crises erupt, they disproportionately affect those least prepared to handle the consequences.

Verso

Davis strikingly illustrates this in The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, by juxtaposing two very different kinds of government response to fires, in very different neighbourhoods.

In Malibu, government resources have historically been swiftly mobilised to rebuild the fire-damaged homes of the wealthy, he writes. However, the fires in Los Angeles’ downtown slum tenements, like the 1993 Burlington Apartment fire that killed ten people (including seven children), receive comparatively little support or media attention. For Davis, it’s just one example of how socioeconomic status determines how lives and properties are valued. It’s a convincing one.

He examines how existing power structures and social dynamics intensify the impact of natural disasters. At the same time, he explores how these disasters are further exacerbated by the city’s inherent vulnerability to such events, including susceptibility to fires, earthquakes, floods and an increasingly volatile climate. These historical, longstanding factors, which Davis covers in great detail, underscore how Los Angeles’ geographical and social configurations leave it especially exposed to danger.

If there has been “a fatal flaw in the design of Southern California as a civilisation”, he argues, it has been “the decision to base the safety of present and future generations almost entirely upon shortsighted extrapolations from the disaster record of the past half-century”.

In his book, he traces natural disaster and climate change in the region over centuries – and shows that LA’s urbanisation occurred “during one of the most unusual episodes of climactic and seismic benignity since the inception of the Holocene”.

Our thinking, he insists, is totally skewed as a result. “These spans are too short to serve as reliable proxies for ecological time or to sample the possibilities of future environmental stress,” he writes. “In effect, we think ourselves gods upon the land but we are still really just tourists.” Läs mer…

“Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever,” read the note Yukio Mishima left on his desk shortly before he left home for the final time.

Mishima, who would have turned 100 today, often touted as a potential Nobel Prize winner, was one of the most acclaimed Japanese writers and seductive prose stylists of all time. He is also one of the most controversial figures in Japanese history, due to his ultra-nationalist politics, reactionary proclamations – and shocking death by ritual seppuku (suicide) after he led a failed coup attempt.

Mishima was first catapulted to literary stardom with his semi-autobiographical second novel Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no Kokuhaku) (1949), set against a pre-war backdrop marked by imperialistic fervour and right-wing extremism, and featuring a gay protagonist.

But he worked across nearly every genre: fiction, drama, poetry, autobiography, criticism. He also threw himself into film, music, dance, bodybuilding and martial arts.

Mishima’s work and unusual life story has inspired artists like filmmaker Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver, musician Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, and cultural icon David Bowie. They were drawn to his finely wrought and transgressive explorations of beauty, violence, eroticism and death.

Bowie, in particular, was heavily influenced by Mishima’s performative approach to art and existence. Bowie name-checked Mishima in the lyrics of one of his last songs and famously slept under a portrait of the author, which he painted in 1977.

David Bowie name-checked Mishima in his lyrics and slept below a portrait he’d painted of the Japanese writer.
AAP

Over time, Mishima grew increasingly disillusioned with the post-war trajectory of Japan, which he believed had forsaken its traditional values in favour of the hollow promises of Westernisation and globalisation. This shift, he argued, was symbolised by the demotion of the emperor from divine figurehead to a mere ceremonial symbol in an increasingly prosperous, democratic state.

Convinced the Japanese spirit was in terminal decline, he turned to traditionalism and nationalism. In 2025, with nationalist rhetoric and debates about cultural identity in the news, Mishima’s concerns about the erosion of tradition, problematic as they are, feel strikingly relevant.

An audacious attempted coup

On the morning of November 25 1970, just after completing the final instalment of his magisterial The Sea of Fertility (Hōjō no Umi) novel cycle, Mishima and four members of his private militia, the Shield Society (Tatenokai), staged the audacious coup attempt that would end in his death.

Mishima was carrying an attaché case and an antique samurai sword when he arrived at the Japanese Self-Defense Forces in Ichigaya, Tokyo. He had arranged to meet with General Kanetoshi Mashita, the commander of the Eastern Army.

After they exchanged pleasantries, the author and his young acolytes overpowered Mashita, taking him hostage and barricading themselves in his office. Mishima demanded the general summon the thousand-strong garrison stationed at the base, to assemble in the courtyard beneath Mashita’s office.

His goal was to inspire the soldiers to rise up against Japan’s post-war government, overthrow its democratic constitution and restore the emperor to his pre-war position of divine authority.

As Mishima delivered his manifesto, the crowd below laughed at him.
AAP

Stepping onto the sun-drenched balcony, Mishima, dressed in the brown uniform of the Shield Society and sporting a headband adorned with the symbol of the Rising Sun, unfurled a written manifesto and began to speak. But the crowd below drowned out his exhortations with jeers and laughter.

Crestfallen, he retreated back into the building. Taking off his watch and most of his clothes, he started, with the assistance of his followers, to prepare the stage for his premeditated – and carefully choreographed – final act.

Kneeling down, Mishima picked up a foot-long dagger and drove it deep into his stomach. Standing behind him was 25-year-old Masakatsu Morita, tasked with severing Mishima’s head from his body, in accordance with the traditional samurai ritual of seppuku. The grisly task finally completed, Morita also died by suicide.

Mishima’s death shocked the world. Salacious tabloids speculated wildly about the more intimate details of Mishima’s relationship with Morita. The nation’s scandalised leaders quickly issued statements condemning the world-famous author’s militancy. The Japanese literary community distanced itself.

Meanwhile, interested onlookers tried to make sense of it all. Why had Mishima done it? What was he hoping to achieve?

Child prodigy

Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo on January 14 1925. His birth name was Hiraoka Kimitake. Something of a child prodigy, he was educated at the prestigious Peers School (Gakushūin), and graduated from the University of Tokyo with a law degree. After a brief stint working at the Ministry of Finance, he set his sights on finding fame as a writer.

Mishima, age 6.
Wikipedia

Mishima’s literary aspirations can be traced back to his childhood. He began writing poetry at the age of six. By the time he hit his early teens, Mishima, who took inspiration from classical Japanese poetry and modern Western writers like Oscar Wilde and Rainer Maria Rilke, had composed over a thousand poems, along with several short prose works.

His literary career began in earnest in 1944, with the publication of A Forest in Full Bloom (Hanazakari no mori), a collection of short stories. It was followed four years later by his debut novel, The Thieves (Tōzoku), about love and death in Japan in the immediate post-war period. Notably, it featured an introduction by Mishima’s sponsor and champion, Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese novelist to win the Nobel.

A hidden self and violent fantasies

Then, Confessions of a Mask made him a household name in Japan. It tells the tale of a young gay man, Kochan. Acutely self-aware, the precocious Kochan understands he is different. He emphasises artifice and performance:

Everyone says that life is a stage. But most people do not seem to become obsessed with the idea, at any rate not as early as I did. By the end of childhood I was already firmly convinced that it was so and that I was to play my part on the stage without once ever revealing my true self.

By the same token, Mishima’s narrator is more than happy to confide in the reader:

that is not the usual matter of ‘self-consciousness’ to which I am referring here. Instead it is simply a matter of sex, of the role by means of which one attempts to conceal, often even from himself, the true nature of his sexual desires.

Kochan’s sexual and psychological desires, he candidly reveals, often take on a disturbingly violent intensity. Earlier in the book, he admits to “delighting in imagining situations in which I myself was dying in battle or being murdered”.

These impulses persist throughout Kochan’s childhood and adolescence. In September 1944, the now 20-year-old Kochan, having graduated from university, is sent to work in a factory. He explains, in characteristically expansive prose, that the factory

operated upon a mysterious system of production costs: taking no account of the economic dictum that capital investment should produce a return, it was dedicated to a monstrous nothingness. No wonder then that each morning the workers had to recite a mystic oath.

It takes a moment for the reader to appreciate what Kochan, who is taken aback by what he sees, is getting at:

In it all the techniques of modern science and management, together with the exact and rational thinking of many superior brains, were dedicated to a single end – Death.

He continues:

Producing the Zero-model combat plane used by the suicide squadrons, this great factory resembled a secret cult that operated thunderously – groaning, shrieking, roaring […] it did in fact fact possess religious grandeur, even to the way the priestly directors fattened their own stomachs.

This unsettling, morbid passage is typical of Mishima. It offers an unflinching critique of industrialised modernity, simultaneously presenting the factory as a quasi-sacred, swollen and explicitly sexualised sort of space.

Not long after this, Kochan admits to “having completely lost the desire to live”. He takes solace in being “surrounded by such a bountiful harvest of so many types of death”, including in “an air raid”, “military service”, or “from disease”.

Despite this, he survives the war. Yet his survival feels almost like a betrayal of his desires. He confesses a “feeling of being neither alive nor dead”.

Yukio Mishima at his home in Tokyo, 1966.
Nobuyuki Masaki/AAP

While we need to be cautious when drawing direct parallels between fiction and the author’s life, Mishima, like many others of his generation, seems to have felt the same way.

Exposed to a heady concoction of wartime propaganda and emperor-worship, he struggled to make sense of what defeat meant for post-war Japan, and to come to terms with Emperor Hirohito’s abdication of divine authority.

These themes come to the fore in the title story of a new English collection of Mishima’s stories, Voices of the Fallen Heroes (Eirei no koe), published this month to mark his centenary.

A dangerous blend

As his dramatic and divisive actions on November 25 1970 demonstrate, Mishima fervently embraced the idea of a glorious militaristic past. In a very real, if unnerving sense, Mishima’s commitment to this vision culminated in his final, dramatic act.

During his lifetime, he was labelled “a sensationalist, a contrarian, an irrationalist, an egomaniac, a fake, a buffoon, a nihilist, a genius, a fascist, a madman”.

His life invites us to reckon with the intersection of art, politics and identity in ways still painfully relevant today. It also raises a host of related questions. Would he have been remembered as a towering figure in world literature if not for the manner of his death? I think he would, though others might disagree.

What we can say for certain is that Yukio Mishima is not just a literary icon – he is a cautionary reminder of the complex, sometimes dangerous relationship between creativity and fanaticism. Läs mer…