And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
"You were so beautiful when you wanted to die. When you wanted to live, you became so ugly."
On November 25, 1970, Yukio Mishima, prolific author of essays, novels, plays, poetry committed seppuku, recruiting his teenaged lover for the final motion of decapitation.
It was messy: apparently it took several strikes to behead Mishima.
Prolific writer, who is considered by many critics as the most important Japanese novelist of the 20th century. Mishima's works include 40 novels, poetry, essays, and modern Kabuki and Noh dramas. He was three times nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. Among his masterpieces is The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956). The tetralogy The Sea of Fertility (1965-70) is regarded by many as Mishima's most lasting achievement. As a writer Mishima drew inspiration from pre-modern literature, both Japanese and Western. Mishima ended his brilliant literary career by suicide in 1970.
"How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier." (from Runaway Horses, 1969)
Yukio Mishima was born Kimitaka Hiraoka in Tokyo, the son of a government official. Later he changed his name into Yukio Mishima so that his anti-literary father, Azusa, wouldn't know he wrote. The name Yukio can loosely be translated as "Man who chronicals reason." On his father's side Mishima's forebears were peasants, but his ambitious grandfather eventually climbed to the position of the governor of the Japanese colony on the island of Sakhalin. Mishima's mother, Shizue Hashi, came from a family of educators and scholars.
Mishima was raised mainly by his paternal grandmother, Natsu Nagai, a cultured but unstable woman from a samurai family, who hardly allowed the boy out of her sight. During World War II Mishima was excused military service, but he served in a factory. This plagued Mishima throughout his life - he had survived shamefully when so many others had been killed. "I believe one should die young in his age," wrote Mishima's friend, the writer Hasuda, who committed suicide after the war. In February 1944, Mishima received a silver watch from Emperor Hirohito's own hand at the graduation ceremony – "he was splendid, you know, the emperor was magnificent on that day", Mishima later said.
Mishima entered in 1944 Tokyo University, where he studed law, and then worked as a civil servant in the finance ministry for eight months before devoting himself entirely to writing. Mishima's first book, Hanazakari (1944), a pastiche of decorative classical prose, appeared when he was just 19-year-old. In 1946 Mishima met Kawabata Yasunari, who recommended Mishima's stories to important magazines. His first major work, Confessions of a Mask (1949), dealt with his discovery of his own homosexuality. The narrator concludes, that he would have to wear a mask of 'normality' before other people to protect himself from social scorn. Mishima admired Oscar Wilde, of whom he published an essay in 1950.
The largely autobiographical work reflected Mishima's masochistic fantasies. His preoccupation with the body, its beauty and degeneration, marked several of his later novels. Mishima wished to create for himself a perfect body that age could not make ugly. He started body building in 1955 and he also became an expert in the martial arts of karate and kendo. Perhaps preparing for his death, Mishima liked to pose in photographs as a drowned shipwrecked sailor, St. Sebastian shot death with arrows, or a samurai committing ritual suicide. In 1960 he played a doomed yakuza, Takeo, in Yasuzo Masumura's film Karakkaze Yaro (Afraid to Die). At the end Takeo is killed, dying in a stairway. Many of Mishima's later short stories and novels delt with the theme of suicide and violent death.
''Let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work.'' (Mishima: A Vision of the Void by Marguerite Yourcenar, 1985)
AI NO KAWAKI (1950, Thirst for Love), written under the influence of the French writer François Mauriac, was a story about a woman who has become the mistress of her late husband's father.
KINKAKUJI (1956, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) was based on an actual event of 1950. It depicted the burning of the celebrated temple of Kyoto by a young Buddhist monk, who is angered at his own physical ugliness, and prevents the famous temple from falling into foreign hands during the American occupation. "My solitude grew more and more obese, like a pig." (from Temple of the Golden Pavilion)
The Sound of Waves (1954) has been filmed several times. The story, set in a remote fishing village, tells of a young fisherman, Shinji, who meets on the beach a beautiful pearl diver, Hatsue, the daughter of Miyata, the most powerful man in the village. Hatsue is loved by another young man, Yasuo. Miyata forbids Hatsue to continue seeing Shinji, but when Shinji shows his courage during a storm, he finally gives him and his daughter his blessing. The first film version from 1954, directed by Senkichi Taniguchi, was shot on location in the Shima Peninsula in Mie Prefecture, home of Japan's famous women pearl divers.
Mishima's reputation in Japan started to decline in the 1960s although in other countries his works were highly acclaimed. This decade and the next have been characterized as something of a Golden Age in the translation of Japanese fiction into English. Donald Keene, who translated several of Mishima's plays and the novel UTAGE NO ATO (1960, After the Banquet), developed a lifelong friendship with the author. KINU TO MEISATSU (1964, Silk and Insight), which John Nathan politely refused to translate (saying that the "I don't think I could make it work in English"), dealt again lost ideals, but this time the story was set in the world of silk textile manufacturing and was based on a real strike that took place in 1954, at the textile manufacturer Omi Kenshi. The central characters are an old-fashioned factory owner, Komazawa, and a manipulating political operator, Okano. Also After the Banquet, set behind the scene of politics, drew from real-life occurrences and provoked a legal suit for violating privacy.
Mishima was deeply attracted to the patriotism of imperial Japan, and samurai spirit of Japan's past. However, at the same time he dressed in Western clothes and lived in a Western-style house.
In 1968 he founded the Shield Society (Tate no Kai), a private army of some 100 youths in uniforms worked on de Gaulle's uniform, who were dedicated to a revival of Bushido, the samurai knightly code of honour. In 1970 he seized control in military headquarters in Tokyo, trying to rouse the nation to pre-war nationalist heroic ideals. His coup d'état was doomed from the beginninbg.
On November 25, after failure, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual disembowelment) with his sword within the compounds of the Ground Self-Defense Force. Before he died he shouted, ''Long live the Emperor.'' As he fell on the carpet, he was beheaded by one of his men, acting as a kaishaku, the one who delivers the decapitating sword-blow. After his death, Mishima's wife had the negative of Patriotism (1966) burned, a film in which Mishima played the leading role and committed suicide at the end.
On the day of his death Mishima delivered to his publishers the final pages ofTennin Gosui (The Sea of Fertility), the authors account of the Japanese experience in the 20th century. Mishima based the theme on the Buddhist idea of the transmigration of the soul. The first part of the four-volume novel, Spring Snow(1968), is set in the closed circles of Tokyo's Imperial Court in 1912. It was followed by Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970) and Five Signs of a God's Decay (1971). Each of the novels depict a different reincarnation of the same being, Honda, who dies at the age of twenty: first as a young aristocrat, then as a political fanatic in the 1930s, as a Thai princess before and after World War II, and as an evil young orphan in the 1960s. The tennin in the tetralogy's Japanese title refers to a supernatural being Buddhist theology, who has similarities with the Christian angel but who is mortal.
"Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision. However grave the matter at hand might be, if one neglected it for long enough, the act of neglect itself would begin to affect the situation, and someone else would emerge as an ally. Such was Count Ayakura's version of political theory." (From Spring Snow, 1968)
On November 25, 1970 Yukio Mishima stood on a balcony in front of some one thousand servicemen at the Tokyo command of the Eastern Headquarters of Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Forces, and exhorted them to rise up against Japan’s postwar Constitution, which prohibits the country from having an army and forbids war. He then turned back to the room where he and four followers had barricaded themselves and proceeded to perform harakiri, ritual Japanese suicide. This involved driving a razor-sharp Japanese sword into his stomach and then having his head sliced off by a waiting friend. On the day of his death Mishima had delivered to his publishers the final pages ofTennin Gosui (The Sea of Fertility), the author’s account of the Japanese experience in the twentieth century.
The Way of the Samurai
Mishima’s aesthetic ideal was the beauty of a violent death in one’s prime, an ideal common in classical Japanese literature. As a sickly youngster, Mishima’s ideal of the heroic death had already taken hold: “A sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling . . . the ways they would die.”
He was determined to overcome his physical weaknesses. There is much of the Nietzschean “Higher Man” about him, of overcoming personal and social restraints to express his own heroic individuality.
His motto was: “Be Strong.”
World War II had a formative influence on Mishima. Along with his fellow students, he felt that conscription and certain death waited.[14] He became chairman of the college literary club, and his patriotic poems were published in the student magazine.[15] He also co-founded his own journal and began to read the Japanese classics, becoming associated with the nationalistic literary group Bungei Bu, that believed war to be holy.
However, Mishima barely passed the medical examination for military training. He was drafted into an aircraft factory where kamikaze planes were manufactured.
In 1944, he had his first book, Hanazakan no Mori (The Forest in Full Bloom) published, a considerable feat in the final year of the war, which brought him instant recognition.
While Mishima’s role in the war effort was obviously not as he would have wished, he spent the rest of his life in the post-war world attempting to fulfill his ideals of Tradition and the Samurai ethic, seeking to return Japan to what he regarded as its true character amidst the democratic era in which the ideal of “peace” is an unquestioned absolute (even though it has to be continually enforced with much military spending and localized wars).
In 1966, Mishima wrote: “The goal of my life was to acquire all the various attributes of the warrior.” His ethos was that of the Samurai Bunburyodo-ryodo: the way of literature (Bun) and the Sword (Bu), which he sought to cultivate in equal measure, a blend of “art and action.” “But my heart’s yearning towards Death and Night and Blood would not be denied.” His ill-health as a youth had robbed him of what he clearly viewed as his true destiny: to have died during the War in the service of the Emperor, like so many other young Japanese. He expressed the Samurai ethos: “To keep death in mind from day to day, to focus each moment upon, inevitable death . . . the beautiful death that had earlier eluded me had also become possible. I was beginning to dream of my capabilities as a fighting man.”
In 1966, Mishima applied for permission to train at army camps, and the following year wrote Runaway Horses, the plot of which involves Isao, a radical Rightist student and martial arts practitioner, who commits hara-kiri after fatally stabbing a businessman Isao had been inspired by the book Shinpuren Shiwa (“The History of Shinpuren”) which recounts the Shinpuren Incident of 1877, the last stand of the Samurai when, armed only with spears and swords, they attacked an army barracks in defiance of Government decrees prohibiting the carrying of swords in public and ordering the cutting off of the Samurai topknots. All but one of the Samurai survivors committed hara-kiri. Again Mishima was using literature to plot out how he envisaged his own life unfolding and ending, against the backdrop of tradition and history.
“A samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function’, one cog in a machine.”
The Feminization of Society
One of the primary themes of interest for the present-day Western reader of Mishima’s commentary on Hagakure is Mishima’s use of Jocho’s observations on his own epoch to analyze the modern era. Both seventeenth century Japan and twentieth century Japan manifest analogous symptoms of decadence, the latter due to the imposition of alien values that are products of the West’s cycle of decay, while those of Jocho’s day indicate that Japanese civilization in his time was in a phase of decay. Therefore, those interested in cultural morphology, Spengler’s in particular, will see analogues to the present decline of Western civilization in Jocho’s analysis of his time and Mishima’s analysis of post-war Japan.
The first symptom considered by Mishima is the obsession of youth with fashion. Jocho observed that even among the Samurai, the young talked only of money, clothes, and sex, an obsession that Mishima observed in his time as well.
Mishima also pointed out that the post-war feminization of the Japanese male was noted by Jocho during the peaceful years of the Tokugawa era. Eighteenth-century prints of couples hardly distinguish between male and female, with similar hairstyles, clothes, and facial expressions, which make it impossible to tell who is the male and who the female. Jocho records in Hagakure that during his time, the pulse rates of men and women, which usually differ, had become the same, and this was noted when treating medical ailments. He called this “the female pulse.”[41] Jocho observed: “The world is indeed entering a degenerate stage; men are losing their virility and are becoming just like women . . .”
Celebrities Replace Heroes
Jocho condemns the idolization of certain individuals achieving what we’d today call celebrity status. Mishima comments:Today, baseball players and television stars are lionized. Those who specialize in skills that will fascinate an audience tend to abandon their existence as total human personalities and be reduced to a kind of skilled puppet. This tendency reflects the ideals of our time. On this point there is no difference between performers and technicians.
Intellectualism
Mishima held intellectuals in the same contempt as Westerners who were also in revolt against the modern world, such as D. H. Lawrence, who believed that the life force or élan vital is repressed by rationalism and intellectualism and replaced by the counting house mentality of the merchant, not just in business but in all aspects of life. Jocho stated that:The calculating man is a coward. I say this because calculations have to do with profit and loss, and such a person is therefore preoccupied with profit and loss. To die is a loss, to live is a gain, and so one decides not to die. Therefore one is a coward. Similarly a man of education camouflages with his intellect and eloquence the cowardice or greed that is his true nature. Many people do not realize this.
Mishima comments that in Jocho’s time there was probably nothing corresponding to the modem intelligentsia. However, there were scholars, and even the Samurai themselves had begun to form themselves into a similar class “in an age of extended peace.” Mishima identifies this intellectualism with “humanism,” as did Spengler. This intellectualism means, contrary to the Samurai ethic, that “one does not offer oneself up bravely in the face of danger.”
The law
“The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man’s desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written in a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such a desire. The law, therefore, of its very nature is aimed at a tiny minority of mankind.”
Cult of the Hero – A Mighty Nihilism
“Facile cynicism, invariably, is related to feeble muscles or obesity, while the cult of the hero and a mighty nihilism are always are always related to a mighty body and well-tempered muscles. For the cult of the hero is, ultimately, the basic principle of the body, and in the long run is intimately involved with the contrast between the robustness of the body and the destruction that is death.”
On Art
“…there is no discipline so easy to speak of and so difficult to perform as the Combined Way of the Warrior and the Scholar. I decided that nothing else could offer me the excuse to live my life as an artist. This realization, too, I owe to Hagakure.”
On Women
Women can bring nothing into the world but children. Men can father all kinds of things besides children. Creation, reproduction, and propagation are all male capabilities. Feminine pregnancy is but a part of child rearing. This is an old truth.Women’s jealousy is simple jealousy of creativity. A woman who bears a son and brings him up tastes the honeyed joy of revenge against creativity. When she stands in the way of creation she feels she has something to live for. The craving for luxury and spending is a destructive craving. Everywhere you look, feminine instincts win out. Originally capitalism was a male theory, a reproductive theory. Then feminine thinking ate away at it. Capitalism changed into a theory of extravagance. Thanks to this Helen, war finally came into being. In the far distant future, communism too will be destroyed by woman.
Woman survives everywhere and rules like the night. Her nature is on the highest pinnacle of baseness. She drags all values down into the slough of sentiment. She is entirely incapable of comprehending doctrine: ‘-istic’, she can understand; ‘-ism’, she cannot fathom. Lacking in originality she can’t even comprehend the atmosphere. All she can figure out is the smell. She smells as a pig does. Perfume is a masculine invention designed to improve woman’s sense of smell. Thanks to it, man escapes being sniffed out by woman.
Woman’s sexual charm, her coquettish instincts, all the powers of her sexual attraction, prove that woman is a useless creature. Something useful would have no need of coquetries. What a waste it is that man insists on being attracted by woman! What disgrace it brings down upon man’s spiritual powers! Woman has no soul; she can only feel. What is called majestic feeling is the most laughable of paradoxes, a self-made tapeworm. The majesty of motherhood that once in a while develops and shocks people has no truth in relation to spirit. It is no more than a physiological phenomenon, essentially no different from the self-sacrificing mother love seen in animals. In short, spirit must be viewed as the special characteristic that differentiates man from the animals. It is the only essential difference.
Mishima committed ritual suicide on November 25, 1970. Below are his last words. It is not the complete text but relevant excerpts.
CONDEMNATION OF POST WORLD WAR II JAPAN
We have watched as postwar Japan has become infatuated with economic prosperity and forgotten the foundational principles of the nation. Citizens have lost their solidarity, rush ahead without correcting fundamental problems, have fallen into stopgap measures and hypocrisy, and have cast their own souls into a state of emptiness. Politics is just a facade over a mass of contradictions, self-preservation, lust for power and hypocrisy. Any long-term plans for the nation a hundred years from now have been consigned to foreign countries. We have watched with gritted teeth as the the shame of defeat has been ducked and avoided rather than wiped away, and as Japanese themselves sully their own history and traditions.
MISHIMA SEES MILITARY AS HOPE OF JAPAN TODAY
Even now we dream of the SDF as the only place where the true Japan, true Japanese, and the true soul of the warrior remains. Furthermore, it is clear that legally the SDF is unconstitutional. The fundamental issue of the nation’s defense has been weaseled around with an opportunistic legal interpretation, and we have seen how having a military that does not use the name “military” has become the source of corruption of Japanese souls and the degeneration of morality. The military, which should hold the loftiest honor, has been subject to the basest of deceits. The SDF continues to bear the dishonorable cross of a defeated nation. The SDF is not a national military, has not been accorded the foundational principles of a military, has only been given the status of a physically large police force, and even the target of its loyalty has not been made clear. Postwar Japan’s long slumber enrages us. We believe that the moment the SDF awakens will be the same moment Japan awakens. And we believe that if the SDF does not awaken itself, Japan will also fail to awaken. And we believe that our greatest duty as citizens is to exert all our effort, however feeble, to work towards the day when, through constitutional reform, the SDF can be made into a true national military and stand upon a military’s foundational principle.
Four years ago I entered the SDF alone with this ambition, the next year I formed the Shield Society. The fundamental principle of the Shield Society is the resolve to sacrifice our lives so that the SDF might awaken, to make it into a national military, a national military with honor. Since constitutional reform was already difficult under the parliamentary system, a domestic security operation* offered our only chance. So we aimed to cast aside our lives as the vanguard of a domestic security operation and become the keystone of the national military. A military protects its nation, a government is defended by the police. When we arrive at the stage where the government can no longer be effectively defended by the police, a deployment of the military will make it clear just what the nation is, and the military will revive its foundational principle. The foundational principle of a Japanese military can only be “protecting Japanese history, culture and tradition centered on the emperor.” In order to correct the twisted foundation of this nation, we, though few in number, trained ourselves and volunteered ourselves to this task.
Ever since that day, we have been watching the SDF carefully, moment by moment. If, as we had dreamed, the soul of the warrior still remained in the SDF, how could it ignore this situation? Protecting the very thing that negated it, surely that is a logical contradiction. If you are men, how could a man’s pride allow this? Even after enduring and enduring, rising up with firm resolution once the last line of what you are supposed to protect has been crossed is what it means to be a man, what it means to be a warrior. We desperately strained our ears. But from nowhere in the SDF did we hear a man’s voice rise in response to the humiliating order to “protect that which negates you.” Now that it has come to this, with the awareness of your own power, you knew that the only path forward was the correction of the twisted logic of the nation, but the SDF has been as silent as a canary with its voice stolen.
We were sad, angry, and finally enraged. Gentlemen, can you do nothing without being given a mission? But, sadly, the mission accorded to you will ultimately not come from Japan. It is said that civilian control is the basic principle of a democratic military. However, in England and America civilian control means financial control over military administration. Unlike Japan, it does not mean that the military is castrated without even the right to make personnel decisions, manipulated by treacherous politicians, or used as a pawn in partisan politics.
CONDEMNATION OF CURRENT JAPANESE MILITARY
Furthermore, it seems the SDF has swallowed the flattery of politicians and is walking the path of even deeper self-deceit and self-desecration. Where has the soul of the warrior gone? How will you go on, as nothing but a giant armory whose soul is dead? During textile negotiations, textile workers called the LDP traitors. Yet although it is clear that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which concerns the long-term security of the nation, is the rebirth of the 5:5:3 Unequal Treaty, not one general from the SDF has cut his stomach in protest.
What does the return of Okinawa mean? What does the defense of the mainland mean? It is clear that America doesn’t want Japanese territory being defended by a true autonomous Japanese military. If we can’t revive our autonomy within the next two years, the SDF will end forever as, in the left-wing’s words, mercenaries for America.
ANNOUNCEMENT OF RITUAL SUICIDE TO INSPIRE REVOLUTION
We waited four years. The last year we waited with particular passion. We can wait no longer. We cannot wait for those who would desecrate themselves. But another thirty minutes; let us wait the final thirty minutes. We rose up together and together we will die for righteousness. To return Japan to Japan’s true form, that is why we die. Is it enough to insist on the sanctity of life, even when the soul is dead? What sort of military holds nothing above the value of life? Gentlemen, we are now going to show you a value even greater than the sanctity of life. That is not freedom, nor democracy. It is Japan. The country of history and tradition that we love, Japan. Is there no one here who will throw their bodies against this degenerate constitution and die? If there is, stand with us and die with us now. We have undertaken this action in the fervent hope that you, gentlemen, who have the purest of souls, may be reborn as individual men and as warriors.
Paul Schrader's "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" (1985) is the most unconventional biopic I've ever seen, and one of the best. In a triumph of concise writing and construction, it considers three crucial aspects of the life of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima (1925-1970). In black and white, we see formative scenes from his earlier years. In brilliant colours we see events from three of his most famous novels. And in realistic colour we see the last day of his life.
Hagakure contains the teachings of the samurai-turned-priest Jōchō Yamamoto (1659-1719), and was for generations preserved as moral and practical instructions for daimyo and samurai of Saga Han, a large domain in northwestern Kyushu. It later became known all over Japan, and during the Second World War Jōchō’s precept ‘I found that the Way of the Samurai is death’, became a slogan to spur on Kamikaze pilots.
The Sea of Fertility is a tetralogy of novels written by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. The four novels are Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel. The series, which Mishima began writing in 1964 and which was his final work, is usually thought of as his masterpiece.
In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima creates a haunting and vivid portrait of a young man’s obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive quest to possess it fully.
Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death is a book by Yukio Mishima. It is an autobiographical essay, a memoir of the author's relationship to his body. The book recounts the author's experiences with, and reflections upon, his bodybuilding and martial arts training.
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Blood flows, existence is destroyed, and the shattered senses give existence as a whole its first endorsement, closing the logical gap between seeing and existing . . .And this is death. In this way I learned that the momentary, happy sense of existence that I had experienced that summer sunset during my life with the army could be finally endorsed only by death.
The Aesthetics of Transience and the Performance of Death: A Comprehensive Analysis of Yukio Mishima
The literary and political legacy of Yukio Mishima, born Kimitake Hiraoka in 1925, constitutes one of the most complex and scrutinized chapters in twentieth-century world literature. Mishima was not merely a prolific novelist and playwright; he was a performance artist of the self, a man who viewed his body, his writing, and his eventual death as a unified aesthetic project. His life spanned the most turbulent periods of modern Japanese history, from the height of imperial militarism through the devastation of World War II and the subsequent rapid Westernization of the postwar era. Throughout his career, Mishima grappled with the tension between traditional Japanese values and the encroaching materialism of the West, a conflict that ultimately culminated in his ritual suicide at the age of forty-five.
The Formative Psychogeography of Kimitake Hiraoka
The psychological architecture of Yukio Mishima began to take shape within a domestic environment defined by profound isolation and starkly opposing familial influences. Born into a family of high civil servants, the young Kimitake was immediately removed from the care of his parents by his paternal grandmother, Natsuko. This sequestration, which lasted until he was twelve years old, took place largely within a darkened sickroom where Natsuko, a descendant of a daimyo who maintained strict aristocratic claims, oversaw his upbringing.
During these formative years, Kimitake was forbidden from engaging in typical childhood activities. He was kept away from other boys and the sunlight, spending his days with female cousins and playing with dolls. This environment fostered a delicate constitution and a hyper-sensitive, bookish disposition, but it also introduced him to the world of classical Japanese performance arts. Natsuko’s influence was instrumental in developing his deep appreciation for Kabuki and Noh theater, forms that would later influence his own dramatic writing. However, this period also instilled a sense of alienation and a fascination with the morbid and the tragic, which would become hallmark themes in his later work.
The transition back to his immediate family at age twelve brought him into direct conflict with his father, Azusa Hiraoka. A senior official in the Ministry of Agriculture with a penchant for military discipline, Azusa viewed his son’s literary interests as "effeminate" and unmanly. In a series of attempts to "toughen" the boy, Azusa subjected him to extreme parenting tactics, such as holding him close to speeding locomotives and raiding his room to destroy manuscripts. This paternal hostility necessitated a "double life" for Mishima; he wrote in secret, supported by his mother, Shizue, who became his most devoted reader and protector. This fundamental need for concealment and the performance of a public persona while harboring a secret internal life provided the psychological basis for his breakthrough novel, Confessions of a Mask.
Educational Trajectory and the Emergence of the Pen Name
Mishima’s education at the Gakushuin, or the Peers' School, further cemented his status as a brilliant but isolated outsider. Originally established for the education of the imperial family and nobility, the school provided an environment where his intellectual gifts were recognized by his teachers, even as he struggled to fit into the rigid social hierarchy. By the age of sixteen, he had published his first short story, "The Forest in Full Bloom," in the prestigious magazine Bungei Bunka. To protect him from his father's wrath, his teachers helped him adopt the pseudonym Yukio Mishima, a name that would soon become synonymous with literary genius and controversy.
Biographical Milestone
Year
Significance and Impact
Birth as Kimitake Hiraoka
1925
Born in Tokyo to a family of high civil servants.
Sequestration by Natsuko
1925–1937
Early exposure to aristocratic traditions and female-dominated environment.
First Publication
1941
"The Forest in Full Bloom" establishes his early literary genius.
University of Tokyo
1944–1947
Studies jurisprudence, graduating in 1947.
Ministry of Finance
1947–1948
Briefly pursues a bureaucratic career before resigning to write full-time.
Publication of Confessions of a Mask
1949
Propels Mishima to national and international fame.
Bodybuilding and Martial Arts
1955–1970
Radical shift toward physical discipline and Bunbu-ryodo.
Formation of the Tatenokai
1968
Establishment of a private militia for ideological defense.
Ritual Suicide (Seppuku)
1970
Final act of performance following a failed coup attempt.
The wartime experience served as a critical psychological crucible for Mishima. In 1944, as the conflict intensified, he entered the University of Tokyo to study law, but his education was briefly interrupted by conscription into the army in early 1945. However, a medical misdiagnosis of tuberculosis—resulting from a mild cold—led to him being declared physically unfit for service. This exemption spared him from the war's final, violent months, yet it left him with a lifelong sense of unfulfilled duty and shame. He saw his peers die while he remained in the "safety" of a factory job, a disparity that fueled his later obsession with the beauty of early death and the desire for a heroic, martial end.
The Emergence of the Mask: Sexuality and Self-Construction
The 1949 publication of Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no Kokuhaku) transformed Mishima from a promising writer into a major cultural figure. The novel is widely interpreted as a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s own coming of age in imperial and postwar Japan, detailing the struggles of a protagonist named Kochan. Through Kochan’s internal monologue, Mishima explores the realization of homosexuality within a deeply conservative military society.
The central motif of the "mask" refers to the false personality that Kochan develops to present himself to the world. Finding his own desires—characterized by an attraction to masculinity and a morbid fascination with death—at odds with societal norms, he engages in a "reluctant masquerade". This process is portrayed not merely as a survival tactic but as a pervasive act of self-deception that eventually becomes an inextricable part of his identity. Kochan attempts to convince himself that the mask is his face, mimicking his classmates and forcing himself into a relationship with a woman named Sonoko, though he remains emotionally and physically unresponsive to her.
Eroticism, Martyrdom, and the Saint Sebastian Motif
A defining moment in the novel occurs when the protagonist encounters a reproduction of Guido Reni’s painting of Saint Sebastian. The image of the young martyr, bound and pierced by arrows, triggers Kochan’s first sexual awakening, establishing a profound link in his psyche between beauty, physical agony, and religious or patriotic sacrifice. This fascination with martyrdom is a recurring thread in Mishima’s work, suggesting that true beauty is only attainable at the moment of destruction or death. Critics have noted that Confessions of a Mask serves as the key text for understanding Mishima's later obsession with combat and his eventual ritual suicide.
The international reception of the novel was significant. Translated into English and praised by figures such as Gore Vidal and James Baldwin, it propelled the young author to global fame. For international readers, Mishima provided a "startlingly candid" look into the darkness of the human mind and the complexities of postwar Japanese identity. However, domestic reception was more nuanced, with some critics viewing the work as an uncomfortable rejection of traditional Japanese reticence in favor of Western-style psychological confession.
Aesthetic Extremism: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
If Confessions of a Mask explored the internal landscape of the self, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji), published in 1956, turned its gaze toward the external world of absolute beauty and its potential for destruction. The novel is a fictionalized account of the actual 1950 arson of the Kinkaku-ji temple in Kyoto by a Zen acolyte. Mishima uses this historical incident to explore his preoccupations with the "corrosive" nature of beauty and the inability of the flawed individual to exist in its presence.
The protagonist, Mizoguchi, is an ostracized stutterer who grows up in bleak poverty. His stutter serves as a physical manifestation of his inability to connect with the world, a barrier of language that isolates him from his peers. Mizoguchi becomes fixated on the Golden Pavilion, a structure his father had praised as the ultimate symbol of aesthetic perfection. As an acolyte at the temple, his obsession grows; he views the temple as a sentient entity that monitors his every move, its beauty becoming a "deadly enemy" that prevents him from achieving happiness or intimacy.
The Nihilism of Destruction
Mizoguchi’s decision to burn the temple is presented as an act of liberation. He believes that by destroying the temple, he is removing the standard against which his own ugliness and stuttering are measured. Mishima explores the idea that "lasting beauty" is an affront to the human condition, which is essentially fleeting and transient. The arson is thus a philosophical attempt to reconcile the self with reality by eradicating the unattainable ideal. The novel remains one of Mishima’s most acclaimed works, praised for its psychological depth and its "blade-edged chill".
Theme in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Symbolic Representation
The Stutter
The barrier between the internal self and external reality; the failure of language.
The Golden Pavilion
Absolute, permanent, and unattainable beauty.
Arson
The act of "bending the world" to fit one's own internal ideals; liberation through destruction.
Father Dosen
Hypocrisy within religious institutions; the corruption of traditional values.
Kashiwagi
Nihilism and the rejection of faith in favor of destructive knowledge.
Sun and Steel: The Metamorphosis of the Body
By the mid-1950s, Mishima’s focus began to shift from the purely literary to the physical. He became increasingly dissatisfied with the "nocturnal thought" and the sedentary lifestyle of the writer, which he viewed as a form of slow corruption. In 1955, he took up bodybuilding, weightlifting, and the martial arts of Kendo and Karate. This transformation from a "pallid bookworm" into a tanned athlete was not merely a matter of health; it was a profound philosophical reorganization.
In his 1968 essay Sun and Steel (Taiyō to Tetsu), Mishima articulated his belief that language "veils reality" and that words are like "white ants" that consume the essence of truth. He sought to "pursue words with the body" rather than the other way around. Through the "discipline of the steel," he believed he could transcend the limits of language and achieve a form of "physical eloquence" that was only possible in a state of extreme exertion or danger.
Bunbu-ryodo: The Way of the Pen and Sword
Mishima’s new lifestyle was modeled on the samurai ideal of Bunbu-ryodo, the dual way of literature and the sword. He argued that a writer must balance their intellectual pursuits with physical action and the readiness for ritual death. Muscles, in his view, were akin to a "classical Greek" language—a way of communicating the "eloquence of life" through the "silence of death". This pursuit of physical perfection was ultimately directed toward a single goal: the attainment of a "beautiful body" worthy of a noble, ritualistic end.
This philosophy also contained a sharp critique of contemporary Japanese intellectuals, whom he dismissed as "physically unattractive armchair theorists". He viewed the postwar intellectual class as having abandoned the martial spirit of Japan in favor of Western-style materialism and "empty intellectualism". Mishima’s rejection of these values was both personal and political, setting the stage for his later paramilitary activities.
The Sea of Fertility: A Tetralogy of National Decline
The definitive work of Mishima’s late career is the Sea of Fertility (Hōjō no Umi) tetralogy, written between 1965 and 1970. Comprising four novels—Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel—the series is a sprawling saga of 20th-century Japan that uses the Buddhist concept of reincarnation to explore themes of national identity, spiritual decline, and the futility of human ambition.
Book I: Spring Snow (1969)
Set in 1912 during the transition from the Meiji era to the Taisho democracy, the story follows Kiyoaki Matsugae, the son of a nouveau-riche baron, and his friend Shigekuni Honda. Kiyoaki is a quintessential Mishima hero—a sensitive, melancholy dreamer caught between his own capricious desires and the rigid expectations of the aristocracy. His illicit affair with Satoko Ayakura, who is engaged to an imperial prince, leads to her renouncing the world for a nunnery and Kiyoaki’s own early death at age twenty. Dying, he tells Honda they will meet again "beneath the falls," initiating the cycle of transmigration.
Book II: Runaway Horses (1969)
The soul of Kiyoaki returns in 1932 as Isao Iinuma, a young Kendo master and political fanatic. Honda, now a judge, recognizes the reincarnation after discovering three moles on Isao’s side. Isao plots a series of assassinations against financial elites (zaibatsu) to restore the "true" spirit of Japan and the Emperor’s power. Despite Honda’s efforts to save him, Isao eventually commits seppuku after successfully assassinating a prominent businessman, a death Isao views as the ultimate samurai ideal.
Book III: The Temple of Dawn (1970)
The narrative shifts to the wartime and postwar years (1940–1952), as Honda encounters the third incarnation: a Thai princess named Ying Chan. The novel explores Honda’s own aging and his growing obsession with the princess, whom he views with a voyeuristic detachment. This segment of the tetralogy is noted for its deep meditations on Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, particularly the nature of karma and the "emptiness" of the material world. Like the previous incarnations, Ying Chan dies at age twenty.
Book IV: The Decay of the Angel (1971)
The cycle concludes in 1970 with Honda, now in his late seventies, adopting Toru, a cynical and arrogant youth whom he believes is the final reincarnation. However, the work ends in total nihilism as Toru is revealed to be a "false" angel. In the final scene, Honda visits the aged Satoko at the Gesshu nunnery, only for her to claim she has no memory of Kiyoaki at all. This suggests that the entire saga—and perhaps human existence itself—may have been a hallucination, a "sea of fertility" that is actually a barren lunar plain.
Volume in The Sea of Fertility
Reincarnation of the Soul
Theme and Historical Context
Spring Snow
Kiyoaki Matsugae
The fading glory of the Meiji aristocracy (1912).
Runaway Horses
Isao Iinuma
The rise of nationalistic fanaticism and samurai ethics (1932).
The Temple of Dawn
Ying Chan (Thai Princess)
Postwar disillusionment and Buddhist philosophy (1940–1952).
The Decay of the Angel
Toru (Orphan)
The ultimate corruption and nihilism of the modern era (1970).
The Shield Society and the Ichigaya Incident
Mishima’s transition from a man of letters to a man of action reached its zenith with the formation of the Tatenokai, or Shield Society, in 1968. This private militia, composed of approximately 80 right-wing students, was dedicated to the protection of the Emperor as the "symbol of national identity" and the restoration of Japan’s martial spirit. Mishima himself was the captain of this organization, which he viewed as a necessary defense against the perceived threats of communism and Western globalism.
The Tatenokai members underwent rigorous training, which Mishima coordinated through his connections with the Ground Self-Defense Forces (GSDF). However, the organization's goals were primarily symbolic rather than military. Mishima sought to create a "tenno-centric warrior state" and was deeply bitter about Emperor Hirohito's post-war renunciation of his divinity.
The Sequence of November 25, 1970
The events of November 25, 1970, were meticulously planned over the course of a year. After delivering the final installment of The Sea of Fertility to his editor at the Shinchōsha publishing house, Mishima and four Tatenokai members—Masakatsu Morita, Masayoshi Koga, Masahiro Ogawa, and Hiroyasu Koga—arrived at the JGSDF Camp Ichigaya in central Tokyo.
Under the pretext of presenting a gift to Lieutenant General Kanetoshi Mashita, the group was granted entry to his office. Once inside, they used a prearranged signal—Mishima unsheathing his sword to "inspect" it—to begin their action. They gagged and tied General Mashita to a chair and barricaded the room. When staff officers attempted to break in, a melee ensued; Mishima, wielding a 17th-century Seki Magoroku sword, slashed several officers before they retreated.
Mishima then issued a series of demands, insisting that the troops be assembled to hear him speak. At approximately 11:55 am, he stepped onto the balcony of the headquarters building, wearing a hachimaki headband with patriotic slogans. He delivered a ten-minute speech to 1,200 gathered soldiers, urging them to rise up and overthrow the "peace constitution" that he believed had emasculated the nation.
The Performance of Seppuku
The speech was a spectacular failure. The soldiers jeered and mocked Mishima, calling him a "madman" and an "idiot". Realizing that his appeal had not triggered the desired uprising, Mishima returned to the office and stated, "I don't think they heard me". He then performed seppuku, disemboweling himself with a short sword.
The final stage of the ritual, decapitation, was assigned to Masakatsu Morita. However, Morita, overcome with emotion, failed three times to sever Mishima’s head. Finally, Hiroyasu Koga took the sword and completed the task. Morita then also committed suicide and was beheaded by Koga. The heads of Mishima and Morita were placed on the office carpet, a final, grisly image that was broadcast simultaneously as breaking news across the globe.
Role in the Ichigaya Incident
Individual
Outcome and Fate
Captain of the Tatenokai
Yukio Mishima
Committed seppuku and was decapitated.
Student Leader
Masakatsu Morita
Committed suicide following Mishima.
Assisting Kaishakunin
Hiroyasu Koga
Completed the decapitations of Mishima and Morita.
Hostage
Kanetoshi Mashita
Released unharmed following the suicides.
Tatenokai Participant
Masayoshi Koga
Arrested and faced legal charges.
Tatenokai Participant
Masahiro Ogawa
Arrested and faced legal charges.
The Cinematic and Dramatic Performance
Mishima’s obsession with performance was not limited to his political life; he was an active figure in the Japanese film industry and a writer of both traditional and modern drama. He believed that only art could make "human beauty endure," a sentiment expressed in his 1959 novel Kyoko's House.
Directing and Acting
His most notable film project was the 1966 production Patriotism (Yūkoku), which he wrote, directed, and starred in. The film is a silent, stylized depiction of a lieutenant and his wife committing ritual suicide. The film's meticulous attention to the details of seppuku—the white robes, the preparation of the room, and the agonizing physical process—is now seen as a "dress rehearsal" for his own end.
Mishima also took acting roles in mainstream cinema, notably in the yakuza film Afraid to Die (1960) and as a "human statue" in the cult classic Black Lizard (1968), based on a screenplay he adapted from Edogawa Rampo. These roles allowed him to inhabit the personas of the hardened, hyper-masculine figures he admired, bridging the gap between his delicate literary origins and his later martial identity.
Modern Noh and the Classical Tradition
Mishima’s contributions to the stage were equally significant. His Five Modern Noh Plays (1950–1955) took traditional fifteenth-century plots and reset them in modern Tokyo. In The Lady Aoi, the vengeful spirit of Lady Rokujo is portrayed as a psychiatric patient haunting a modern hospital, while in Sotoba Komachi, the legendary poet appears as a repulsive old woman on a park bench who relives her youthful beauty through the eyes of a passing poet. These plays are celebrated for their ability to translate the "uncanny intensity" of the Noh form into a language accessible to twentieth-century audiences.
Dramatic Work
Form
Central Theme
The Damask Drum
Modern Noh
The cruelty of unrequited love and the trickery of beauty.
Madame de Sade
Play
The intersection of eroticism, cruelty, and religious fervor.
Hanjo
Modern Noh
Madness and the eternal wait for a lost lover.
Kantan
Modern Noh
The futility of human existence and the illusory nature of dreams.
Patriotism
Film/Libretto
Ritual death as the ultimate expression of love and loyalty.
International Reception and Posthumous Legacy
Yukio Mishima remains the most widely translated and internationally recognized Japanese author of the postwar period. His fame in the West was bolstered by his sophisticated understanding of Western culture—he was deeply influenced by Thomas Mann, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Greek classics—which allowed him to serve as an "interpreter" of Japanese virtues to a global audience.
The Nobel Prize Contention
Between 1963 and 1968, Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. His international stature was such that many believed he was the leading candidate for the award. When the prize went to Yasunari Kawabata in 1968, the impact on Mishima was profound. Kawabata had been a mentor and benefactor to Mishima, and while the younger author publicly celebrated the victory, privately he felt that the "spirit of Japan" he represented had been overlooked in favor of Kawabata's more "progressive" and ethereal style.
The Mishima Yukio Prize
Following his death, his legacy was institutionalized through the Mishima Yukio Prize, established in 1988 by the Shinchō Society for the Promotion of Literary Arts. The prize is awarded annually to authors whose work "breaks new ground for the future of literature". Winners have included controversial and experimental writers like Banana Yoshimoto and Sayaka Murata, reflecting Mishima's own status as a transgressive and stylistically brilliant figure.
In his home country, Mishima remains a deeply polarizing figure. While he is celebrated as a "master stylist" of the Japanese language, his radical politics and the manner of his death are viewed with skepticism by both the liberal left and the traditional right. Liberals reject his nationalism and his embrace of Bushido, while some conservatives are unsettled by his critique of Emperor Hirohito and his perceived "theatricalization" of sacred traditions.
Conclusion: The Finality of the Aesthetic Project
Yukio Mishima’s life and work were defined by a relentless quest for a "totality" of experience that would unify the spirit and the body, art and action, beauty and death. He viewed the modern world as a place of "spiritual emptiness," a "salt lake" from which the water had evaporated, leaving behind only the heavy sediment of materialism. His response to this perceived decay was to create a personal cosmology where the only true path to salvation was through the "ecstasy of the absolute," an ecstasy that could only be achieved at the moment of self-annihilation.
The tetralogy of the Sea of Fertility stands as his final, monumental statement on the "decay of the angel"—the gradual erosion of the Japanese soul through history.1 By completing the work on the very day of his suicide, he ensured that his literary output and his physical existence would end in a simultaneous, definitive act.2 Whether seen as a tragic figure of 20th-century literature or a dangerous political fanatic, Mishima’s influence endures through the "dark radiance" of his prose and the enduring mystery of his final performance.1 He remains an essential voice for understanding the tensions of modernity, identity, and the pursuit of an aesthetic ideal that transcends the boundaries of life itself.3
In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Yukio Mishima, one of the leading figures in modern literature, The Death of a Man presents a sublime--and often shocking--visual record of the last few months prior to his sensational ritual suicide in November 1970
Selected Works Translated into English
Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no Kokuhaku, 1949; trans. 1958)
Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki, 1953; trans. 1968-74)
The Sound of Waves (Shiosai, 1954; trans. 1956)
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji, 1956; trans. 1959)
After the Banquet (Utage no Ato, 1960; trans. 1963)
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories (Manatsu no Shi, 1966; trans. 1966)
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Manatsu no Shi, 1966; trans. 1966)
Sun and Steel (Taiyo to Tetsu, 1968; trans. 1970)
The Sea of Fertility (tetralogy)
1. Spring Snow (Haru no Yuki, 1968; trans. 1972)
2. Runaway Horses (Honba, 1969; trans. 1973)
3. The Temple of Dawn (Akatsuki no Tera, 1970, trans. 1973)
4. The Decay of the Angel (Tennin Gosui, 1970; trans. 1974)
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