Yukio Mishima born 14 January 1925 (d. 1970)Yukio Mishima was the public name of Kimitake Hiraoka, a Japanese author and playwright, famous for both his highly notable nihilistic post-war writings and the circumstances of his ritual suicide by seppuku.
Mishima's early childhood was dominated by the shadow of his grandmother, Natsu, who took the boy and separated him from his immediate family for several years. Natsu was of a minor retainer family which had been related to the samurai of the Tokugawa era; she maintained considerable aristocratic pretensions even after marrying Mishima's grandfather, a commoner but nevertheless a bureaucrat who had made his fortunes in the newly-opened colonial frontier. She was stubborn, and also prone to violent, even morbid outbursts bordering on madness, which are occasionally alluded to in Mishima's works. It is to Natsu that some biographers have traced Mishima's fascination with death, and to the exorbitant; she read French and German, and had an aristocrat's taste for the Kabuki. Natsu famously did not allow Mishima to venture into the sunlight, to engage in any kind of sport, or to play with boys; he spent much of his time alone, or with female cousins and their dolls.
Mishima returned to his immediate family at 12. He entered into a relationship with his mother that some biographers have described as nearly incestuous; it was to his mother that he turned always for reassurance and proofreading. His father, a brutal man with a taste for military discipline, employed such tactics as holding the young boy up to the side of a speeding train; he also raided the young boy's room for evidence of an 'effeminate' interest in literature, and ripped up adolescent Mishima's manuscripts wantonly. Mishima is reported to have had no response to these gestures.
At 12, Mishima began to write his first stories. Although his father had forbidden him to write any further stories, Mishima continued to write secretly every night, supported and protected by his mother Shizue, who was always the first to read a new story. After school, his father, who sympathised with the Nazis, wouldn't allow him to pursue a writer's career, but instead forced him to study German law. Attending lectures during the day and writing at night, Mishima graduated from the elite Tokyo University in 1947. He obtained a position as an official in the government's Finance Ministry and was set up for a promising career.
However, Mishima had exhausted himself so much that his father agreed to Mishima's resignation of his position during his first year in order to devote his time to writing.
Mishima began his first novel, TÅzoku (Thieves), in 1946 and published it in 1948. It was followed up by Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask), an autobiographical work about a young latent homosexual who must hide behind a mask in order to fit into society. The novel was extremely successful and made Mishima a celebrity at the age of 24.
Mishima was a disciplined and versatile writer. He wrote not only novels, popular serial novellas, short stories, and literary essays, but also highly-acclaimed plays for the Kabuki theatre and modern versions of traditional Noh drama.
His writing gained him international celebrity and a sizeable following in Europe and America, as many of his most famous works were translated into English.
After Confessions of a Mask, Mishima tried to leave behind the young man who had lived only inside his head, continuously flirting with death. He tried to tie himself to the real, physical world by taking up stringent physical exercise. In 1955, Mishima took up weight training, and his workout regimen of three sessions per week was not disrupted for the final 15 years of his life. From the most unpromising material he forged an impressive physique, as the photographs he took show. He also became very skillful at Kendo (the Japanese martial art of swordfighting).
Although he visited gay bars in Japan, Mishima reportedly remained an observer, and had affairs with men only when he travelled abroad. After briefly considering an alliance with Michiko Shoda — later the wife of Emperor Akihito — he married Yoko Sugiyama in 1958. Over the next three years, the couple had a daughter and a son.In 1967, Mishima enlisted in the Ground Self Defense Force (GSDF) and underwent basic training. A year later, he formed the Tatenokai (Shield Society), composed primarily of young patriotic students who studied martial principles and physical discipline and who were trained through the GSDF under Mishima's tutelage.
In the last ten years of his life, Mishima acted in several movies and co-directed an adaptation of one of his stories, Patriotism, the Rite of Love and Death.
On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of the Tatenokai under a pretext visited the commandant of the Ichigaya Camp - the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan's Self-Defense Forces. Once inside, they proceeded to barricade the office and tied the commandant to his chair. With a prepared manifesto and banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped onto the balcony to address the gathered soldiers below. His speech was intended to inspire them to stage a coup d'etat and restore the Emperor to his rightful place. He succeeded only in irritating them and was mocked and jeered. Unable to make himself heard, he finished his planned speech after only a few minutes, stepped back into the commandant's office and committed seppuku. The customary decapitation at the end of this ritual had been assigned to Tatenokai member Masakatsu Morita. But Morita, who was rumored to have been Mishima's lover, was unable to perform this task properly: after several failed attempts, he allowed another Tatenokai member, Hiroyasu Koga, to finish the job. Morita then attempted seppuku and was also beheaded by Koga.
Mishima prepared his suicide meticulously for at least a year and no one outside the group of hand-picked Tatenokai members had any indication of what he was planning. Mishima must have known that his coup plot would never succeed and his biographer, translator, and former friend John Nathan suggests that the scenario was only a pretext for the ritual suicide of which Mishima had long dreamed. Mishima made sure his affairs were in order and even left money for the legal defence of the three surviving Tatenokai members.
Much speculation has surrounded Mishima's suicide. At the time of his death he had just completed the final book in his The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. He was recognised as one of the most important post-war stylists of the Japanese language.Mishima wrote 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 books of short stories, and at least 20 books of essays as well as one libretto. A large portion of this oeuvre comprises books written quickly for profit, but even if these are disregarded, a substantial body of work remains.
Mishima espoused a very individual brand of 'nationalism' towards the end of his life (and in death). Hated by leftists (particularly students), in particular for his outspoken and, in their view, anachronistic commitment to the bushido code of the samurai, he was also hated by mainstream nationalists for his contention, in Bunka Boeiron (A Defense of Culture), that Emperor Hirohito should have abdicated and taken responsibility for the war dead.
While his end may have been intended as a sort of spiritual testament, the theatrical nature of his suicide, the camp nature of photographs he posed for and the occasionally bathetic nature of his prose have taken their toll on his legacy. In both Japanese and Anglo-American academia today, Mishima is virtually unspoken of, especially as his ostensibly 'right-wing' opinions are not politically correct. Nevertheless, outside of academia Mishima's works remain popular both in Japan and throughout the rest of the world.