Yukio Mishima

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 25th of November 1970, Yukio Mishima stepped onto a balcony at a military base in central Tokyo and shouted to the soldiers below, "Where has the spirit of the samurai gone?" The men jeered. Helicopters drowned out his words. Minutes later he was dead by his own hand, a sword having opened his belly in the ancient ritual of seppuku. The man on that balcony was one of the most important postwar stylists of the Japanese language. He was born Kimitake Hiraoka on the 14th of January 1925, and over forty-five years he became a novelist, a playwright, an actor, a model, a martial artist, and finally the leader of a failed coup. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He posed half-naked in the snow with a sword. He won a magazine poll for the country's most dandy man. How does a frail, sun-starved boy kept indoors by his grandmother become the figure who dies trying to summon back the divinity of an emperor? And why would a writer at the height of his fame plan, for a year in secret, the most theatrical death of his century?

• 2. The Grandmother's Shadow

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  Natsuko, Mishima's grandmother, took the boy from his immediate family for several years and would not let him into the sunlight. She forbade sport. She forbade play with other boys. He spent his hours alone or with female cousins and their dolls. Natsuko had been raised in the household of Prince Arisugawa Taruhito, and she kept aristocratic pretensions long after marrying Sadataro, a bureaucrat who made his fortune on the colonial frontier and became Governor-General of Karafuto Prefecture. Through Natsuko, who was a granddaughter of the daimyo Matsudaira Yoritaka, Mishima descended from Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Natsuko was prone to violent outbursts, which appear in glimpses across Mishima's works, and some biographers trace his fascination with death to her. Against the grandmother stood the father. Azusa had a taste for military discipline and feared Natsuko's softness was ruining the boy. When Mishima returned to his parents at the age of twelve, Azusa held him close to the side of a speeding steam locomotive. He raided the boy's room for any sign of an effeminate interest in literature and tore his manuscripts apart. The mother quietly resisted. She was always the first to read a new story, and she protected the writing her husband tried to destroy.

• 3. Birth Of A Pen Name

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  In 1941, at the age of sixteen, Mishima was invited to write a short story for the Hojinkai-zasshi, in which a narrator feels his ancestors still living within him. His teacher was so impressed that the editorial board decided to publish it. To shield the boy from his father's anger, the editors invented a pen name. They took "Mishima" from Mishima Station, which two board members passed through on their way to an editorial meeting in Shuzenji, Shizuoka. "Yukio" came from yuki, the word for snow, after the snow they saw on Mount Fuji as the train went by. Mishima had entered the elite Gakushuin, the Peers' School in Tokyo, at the age of six. He began writing stories at twelve, drawing from the Kojiki and Greek myth, and from European writers including Raymond Radiguet, Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Friedrich Nietzsche. After six years as a pupil he became the youngest member of the literary society's editorial board. One mentor shaped him above the rest. Hasuda Zenmei, an ardent nationalist and admirer of the Edo scholar Motoori Norinaga, praised the young writer as "a heaven-sent child of eternal Japanese history." At a farewell party before shipping out as a first lieutenant, Hasuda told Mishima, "I have entrusted the future of Japan to you."

• 4. The Death He Escaped

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  On the 10th of February 1945, an army doctor mistook Mishima's cold for tuberculosis and declared him unfit for service. He was sent home. In Confessions of a Mask he later hinted that he might have lied to secure the diagnosis. He wrote of running through the barracks gate, of the pressure of a smile he could barely conceal, and of realizing that his future life would never reach heights enough to justify having escaped death in the army. The unit he would have joined was sent to the Philippines, where few survived. His parents were ecstatic that he would not go to war. His own mood was harder to read, and his mother once overheard him wish he could have joined a "Special Attack" unit. In a letter from April 1945 he wrote that the entire cultural class of Japan should kneel before the kamikazes and offer up prayers of gratitude. When Emperor Hirohito announced surrender by radio on the 15th of August 1945, Mishima vowed to protect Japanese cultural traditions. He wrote in his diary, "Only by preserving Japanese irrationality will we be able contribute to world culture 100 years from now." Death pressed in from every side that year. Four days after the surrender, his mentor Hasuda shot dead a superior officer who blamed Japan's defeat on the Emperor, then turned the pistol on himself. In October his beloved younger sister Mitsuko died of typhoid fever at the age of seventeen, after drinking untreated water. Researchers have speculated that his guilt at surviving the war marked his life and his writing, and perhaps fed the suicide still twenty-five years away.

• 5. The Mask And The Mirror

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  Confessions of a Mask, published in 1949, made Mishima a celebrity at the age of twenty-four. The semi-autobiographical novel follows a young homosexual man who hides behind a mask to fit into society. It had been Yasunari Kawabata who opened the door. Uncertain whom to trust among the leftists then dominating Japanese letters, Mishima brought his manuscripts to Kawabata in Kamakura in January 1946 and asked for help. Kawabata's recommendation got The Cigarette into print that June. Mishima's range across the next decade was enormous. The Sound of Waves, drawn from his love of Greece and the legend of Daphnis and Chloe, became a best-seller, though leftists accused it of glorifying old-fashioned Japanese values and some began calling him a fascist. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, published in 1956, fictionalized the burning of the Kinkaku-ji temple in Kyoto by a mentally disturbed monk. Andrew Rankin described the work as marked by its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death. Not every ambition landed. Kyoko no Ie, published in 1959, split its author into four young men: a boxer, a painter, an actor, and a nihilistic businessman who practiced "absolute contempt for reality." Mishima called it his research into the nihilism within himself. It sold 150,000 copies in a month yet was branded his first failed work, a harsh psychological blow.

• 6. Steel And Self-Display

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  In 1955 Mishima took up weight training to overcome a weak constitution, and for the final fifteen years of his life he never let his three-sessions-a-week regimen slip. In Sun and Steel, his 1968 essay, he attacked intellectuals who exalted the mind over the body. He earned a 5th Dan in kendo, became 2nd Dan in battojutsu, and 1st Dan in karate. The new body became a public image. Mishima starred in Yasuzo Masumura's 1960 film Afraid to Die and even sang the theme song. He appeared in Black Lizard and in Hitokiri, and directed and performed in a film of his own story Patriotism. The photographer Eikoh Hosoe shot him for the collection Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses. The American writer Donald Richie watched him pose in the snow in a loincloth, armed with a sword, for one of Tamotsu Yato's photoshoots. The display won him fame of an unusual kind. In the men's magazine Heibon Punch, Mishima took first place in the 1967 "Mr. Dandy" reader poll with 19,590 votes, beating Toshiro Mifune by 720. In a later "Mr. International" poll he came second behind French President Charles de Gaulle. By the late 1960s the Japanese media had begun calling him a superstar, the first celebrity to wear that word.

• 7. The Turn To The Emperor

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  In the summer of 1960, Mishima watched the massive Anpo protests against the revised security treaty binding Japan to the United States. He did not march, but he walked the streets to observe and kept extensive newspaper clippings. In a commentary for the Mainichi Shinbun he accused leftist groups of falsely wrapping themselves in the banner of defending democracy. Soon after, he wrote Patriotism, glorifying a young army officer who kills himself after the failed February 26 revolt. His nationalism hardened into devotion to the emperor. In his 1966 story "Voices of the Fallen Heroes," he denounced Hirohito for renouncing his own divinity, arguing that the renunciation made the deaths of the February 26 rebels and the kamikaze meaningless. He praised the Hagakure, the Edo treatise on warrior virtues by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, calling it the source of his vitality as a writer. He wrote that even a futile death that bears neither flower nor fruit has dignity, asking how those who value the dignity of life could fail to value the dignity of death. A trip to India in September 1967, where he met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Zakir Hussain, deepened his fear that the Japanese had grown too enamored of Western materialism to guard their own traditions. He came to believe the values worth dying for were the Three Sacred Treasures and the Emperor, not freedom, democracy, or any political system, which he dismissed as secondary issues.

• 8. The Shield And The Sword

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  On the 5th of October 1968, Mishima formed the Tatenokai, or Shield Society, a private militia drawn mostly from right-wing college students. He took no outside money, funding it with royalties from his writing. The group trained in kendo and long-distance running, with live-fire drills he oversaw himself, and its membership was fixed at exactly 100. The idea had grown from his own basic training with the Ground Self-Defense Force in 1967, which he undertook under his birth name so the other soldiers would not recognize him. The plan that ended his life was prepared for at least a year in total secrecy. Mishima arranged for a department store to send his two children Christmas gifts every year until they grew up, and paid in advance for their children's magazines to be delivered every month. He left money for the legal defense of the three Tatenokai members who would survive. On the day itself, he and four members took the base commandant hostage and tied him to a chair. Mishima wore a white hachimaki headband bearing a phrase from the last words of Kusunoki Masasue, the loyalist samurai who died defending the emperor in the fourteenth century. After his speech failed, he committed seppuku. His second, Masakatsu Morita, could not sever the head after three attempts, and Hiroyasu Koga stepped in to finish. Morita, who had refused to let Mishima die alone despite being told "Morita, you must live, not die," then knelt and stabbed himself, and Koga acted as his second too. Mishima's translator and biographer John Nathan argued the coup was only a pretext for the ritual death Mishima had long dreamed of. His friend Henry Scott-Stokes recorded a darker confession from September 1970: "Japan is under the curse of a green snake. There is a green snake in the bosom of Japan." Years later Scott-Stokes was told the green snake meant the U.S. dollar.