Kimitake Hiraoka—Yukio Mishima was a pen name the young writer assumed for the serialization of his first major work at age sixteen—was born in Tokyo in 1925. Taken from his mother when only a few weeks old, the infant Mishima was brought up in a shuttered room by his sickly and mentally unstable grandmother, Natsu, for the first twelve years of his life. When worsening health forced her to relinquish the boy to her daughter-in-law, mother and son compensated for years of enforced separation by becoming almost unnaturally close. The strain of morbidity that runs throughout Mishima's work probably has its origins in the unwholesome emotional hothouse that was his childhood.
From Bureaucrat to Celebrity
At the aristocratic Peers' School, Mishima started contributing to the student magazine from the age of twelve, and his first book was published in 1944, when he was nineteen and war was still raging. Despite these signs of literary promise, the young Mishima bowed to the wishes of his civil-servant father and enrolled in the law faculty of Tokyo Imperial University. Upon graduating in 1947, he again went along with his father by taking the exam for the elite Ministry of Finance, working there for nine months before resigning to become a full-time writer. The result was Confessions of a Mask, an autobiographical novel in which he dissected himself, revealing his homosexuality and his preoccupation with violent death. The book, published in July 1949, turned Mishima into a celebrity overnight. The pattern of his life was now set and he began to churn out novels, plays and essays, working from midnight to dawn with the iron self-discipline of the bureaucrat he had so nearly become.
A 1952 journey to Greece was a conscious effort on Mishima's part to break away from the obsession with death and darkness found in early works like Thirst for Love and Forbidden Colors. The trip resulted in The Sound of Waves, a reworking of the Daphnis and Chloë myth that John Nathan describes as "the only love story Mishima ever wrote that was neither perverted nor sardonic." The year 1956 witnessed the publication of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, often regarded as his finest novel.
Going over to the Dark Side
In 1958, Mishima married Yôko Sugiyama, with Yasunari Kawabata acting as best man. Kyôko's House, published the next year, was his first critical failure. The characters—a businessman who looks back with nostalgia to the omnipresence of death during the war, a failed boxer who joins a group of right-wing extremists, and an actor fixated on suicide—are seen as prefiguring the direction Mishima's life was about to take.
Mishima did much of his best work as a playwright in the 1960s, when his fiction began to lose out in the face of competition from new authors like Kôbô Abe and Kenzaburô Ôe. Wracked with student riots, Japan veered off to the left, but Mishima went in quite the opposite direction, whether in short stories like the militaristic "Patriotism" or in essays like "The Voice of the Hero Spirits," where the ghosts of kamikaze pilots reprove the emperor for having forsworn his divinity.
On November 25, 1970, after leaving the final installment of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy for his publisher at the entrance to his house, Mishima set out for the Eastern Army HQ in Ichigaya, Tokyo, with four companions from the Shield Society, the private army he had set up two years earlier. First taking a general hostage, Mishima went out onto the balcony overlooking the parade ground to urge the Self-Defense Forces to rise up, march on the Diet and force a revision of Japan's pacifist constitution. His proposals, barely audible above the buzzing of the media helicopters, were met with jeers. Mishima then retreated indoors and killed himself by slicing open his stomach in an act of ritual suicide. "The Romantic showman chose to die as he had lived," remarked Gore Vidal acidly, "in a blaze of publicity."
Sweet Mystery of Death
Why Mishima chose to die remains something of a mystery. Did he want to express his rejection of postwar prosperity and a yearning for Japan's heroic imperial past? Was he simply peeved at not having been awarded the Nobel Prize for which he had been thrice nominated? Did he have the sense that he had written himself dry? Or was dying with extreme violence surrounded by younger men simply a sadomasochistic fantasy that he was eager to act out on the public stage?
Even in death Mishima remains a controversial figure, with some critics dismissing him as a "B-list author with one topic, himself," while others praise him as "one of the most important writers of the post-war era." Nonetheless, the international book-buying public continues to respond to the compelling intensity of his storytelling and the famously rich beauty of his prose style.
Illustrations © T. Kiwaki