The title of this post is an inherent question when dealing with an adaptation. A great example of this quandary isPatriotism. We are dealing with translated version of Mishima's texts. However, he was a writer who was in love with the Japanese language. This requires a bit of explanation. In Japanese, there are three different "alphabets": hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are similar to our letters in the alphabet as they are characters that make sounds (put the sounds together, and you have words). Kanji are characters that represent whole words. Today in school, Japanese children only have to learn about 2,000 kanji. However, in this history of Japanese language, there are over 10,000! But, much like our vocabulary, words fall out of favor (you do not hear many people using "thee," "thou," "shalt," "wither," "whence," etc.). But Mishima delighted in archaic, detailed language, and often incorporated kanji that was outdated or rarely used to be as precise in his writing as he could. It was not uncommon for Japanese people reading Mishima to have to rely on dictionaries just to make out what he was saying, so imagine the challenge faced by translators.
"Patriotism" is a good example of Mishima's attempts to describe two specific things: human bodies and ritual suicide. His descriptions are graphic and exact (Sargent's translation is sufficient but not extensive). However, when adapting his favorite work to film, he chose a silent approach, with a few words on a scroll as a kind of intertitle prelude to what was about to happen (much like opera), allowing the images to stand for what his words attempted to describe. Yet, these are two different mediums. Which do you personally feel portrays the message of the piece better (and by better, that could mean realistically, artistically, ideologically). There is no right or wrong answer to this. I am interested in what you think.