Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫, Mishima Yukio), born Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡 公威, Hiraoka Kimitake, 14 January 1925 – 25 November 1970), was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, ultranationalist, and the leader of an attempted coup d'état that culminated in his seppuku (ritual suicide).
Mishima is considered one of the most important postwar stylists of the Japanese language. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times in the 1960s—including in 1968, when the award went to his countryman and benefactor Yasunari Kawabata. Mishima's works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to the author Andrew Rankin.
Mishima's political activities made him a controversial figure; he remains so in Japan to the present day. From his mid-30s onwards, Mishima's far-right ideology and reactionary beliefs became increasingly evident. He extolled the traditional culture and spirit of Japan, and opposed what he saw as Western-style materialism, along with Japan's postwar democracy (戦後民主主義, sengo minshushugi), globalism, and communism, worrying that by embracing these ideas the Japanese people would lose their "national essence" (kokutai) and distinctive cultural heritage to become a "rootless" people.
In 1968 Mishima formed the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), a private militia, for the purpose of protecting the dignity of the emperor as a symbol of national identity. On 25 November 1970 Mishima and four members of his militia entered a military base in central Tokyo, took its commandant hostage, and unsuccessfully tried to inspire the Japan Self-Defense Forces to rise up and overthrow Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution to restore autonomous national defense and the divinity of the emperor, after which he died by seppuku.
On January 14, 1925, Yukio Mishima (三島由紀夫, Mishima Yukio) was born Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡公威, Hiraoka Kimitake) in Nagazumi-cho, Yotsuya-ku of Tokyo City (now part of Yotsuya, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo). His father was Azusa Hiraoka (平岡梓), a government official in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. His mother, Shizue (平岡倭文重), was the daughter of the 5th principal of the Kaisei Academy. Shizue's father, Kenzō Hashi (橋健三), was a scholar of the Chinese classics, and the Hashi family had served the Maeda clan for generations in Kaga Domain. Mishima's paternal grandparents were Sadatarō Hiraoka, the third Governor-General of Karafuto Prefecture, and Natsuko (family register name: Natsu) (平岡なつ). Mishima received his birth name Kimitake (公威, also read Kōi in on-yomi) in honor of Furuichi Kōi who was a benefactor of Sadatarō. He had a younger sister, Mitsuko (平岡美津子), who died of typhus in 1945 at the age of 17, and a younger brother, Chiyuki (平岡千之).
Mishima's childhood home was a rented house, though a fairly large two-floor house that was the largest in the neighborhood. He lived with his parents, siblings and paternal grandparents, as well as six maids, a houseboy, and a manservant.
Mishima's early childhood was dominated by the presence of his grandmother, Natsuko, who took the boy and separated him from his immediate family for several years. She was the granddaughter of Matsudaira Yoritaka, the daimyō of Shishido, which was a branch domain of Mito Domain in Hitachi Province; therefore, Mishima was a descendant of the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu, through his grandmother. Natsuko's father, Nagai Iwanojō (永井岩之丞), had been a Supreme Court justice, and Iwanojō's adoptive father, Nagai Naoyuki, had been a bannerman of the Tokugawa House during the Bakumatsu. Natsuko had been raised in the household of Prince Arisugawa Taruhito, and she maintained considerable aristocratic pretensions even after marrying Sadatarō, a bureaucrat who had made his fortune in the newly opened colonial frontier in the north, and who eventually became Governor-General of Karafuto Prefecture on Sakhalin Island. Sadatarō's father, Takichi Hiraoka (平岡太吉), and grandfather, Tazaemon Hiraoka (平岡太左衛門), had been farmers. Natsuko was prone to violent outbursts, occasionally alluded to in Mishima's works, to which some biographers have traced Mishima's fascination with death. She did not allow Mishima to venture into the sunlight, engage in any kind of sport, or play with other boys. He spent much of his time either alone or with female cousins and their dolls.
Mishima's father, Azusa, had a taste for military discipline, and worried Natsuko's style of childrearing was too soft. When Mishima was returned to his immediate family at the age of 12, Azusa employed extreme parenting tactics, such as holding young Mishima up close to the side of a speeding steam locomotive. He also raided his son's room for evidence of an "effeminate" interest in literature, and often ripped his son's manuscripts apart. Although Azusa forbade him from writing any further stories, Mishima continued to write in secret, supported and protected by his mother, who was always the first to read a new story.
When Mishima was 13, Natsuko took him to see his first Kabuki play: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers, an allegory of the story of the 47 Rōnin. He was later taken to his first Noh play (Miwa, a story featuring Amano-Iwato) by his maternal grandmother Tomi Hashi (橋トミ). From these early experiences, Mishima became addicted to Kabuki and Noh. He began attending performances every month and grew deeply interested in these traditional Japanese dramatic art forms.
Mishima was enrolled at the age of six in the elite Gakushūin, the Peers' School in Tokyo, which had been established in the Meiji period to educate the Imperial family and the descendants of the old feudal nobility. Mishima began to write his first stories aged 12, taking inspiration from myths (Kojiki, Greek mythology, etc.) and the works of numerous classic Japanese authors, as well as Raymond Radiguet, Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, l'Isle-Adam, and other European authors. He also studied German. After six years as a pupil, he became the youngest member of the editorial board of its literary society. Mishima was particularly drawn to the works of Japanese poet Shizuo Itō (伊東静雄), Haruo Satō, and Michizō Tachihara, who inspired Mishima's appreciation of classical Japanese waka poetry. Mishima's early contributions to the Gakushūin literary magazine Hojinkai-zasshi (輔仁会雑誌) included haiku and waka poetry before he turned his attention to prose.
In 1941, at the age of 16, Mishima was invited to write a short story for the Hojinkai-zasshi, where he submitted Forest in Full Bloom (花ざかりの森, Hanazakari no Mori), a story in which the narrator describes the feeling that his ancestors somehow still live on within him. The story displays several metaphors and aphorisms that would become Mishima's hallmarks. He also sent a copy of the manuscript to his teacher Fumio Shimizu (清水文雄), who was so impressed that he and his fellow editorial board members decided to publish it in their literary magazine Bungei Bunka (文藝文化).
In order to protect him from potential backlash from Azusa, Shimizu and the other editorial board members coined the pen-name Yukio Mishima. They took "Mishima" from Mishima Station, which Shimizu and his fellow Bungei Bunka board member Hasuda Zenmei passed through on their way to the editorial meeting, which was held in Izu, Shizuoka. The name "Yukio" came from yuki (雪), the Japanese word for "snow", because of the snow they saw on Mount Fuji as the train passed. The story was later published as a limited book edition (4,000 copies) in 1944 due to a wartime paper shortage. Mishima had it published as a keepsake to remember him by, as he assumed that he would die in the war.
In the editorial notes of Bungei Bunka magazine in 1941, when this debut work was serialized, Hasuda praised Mishima's genius: "This youthful author is a heaven-sent child of eternal Japanese history. He is much younger than we are, but has arrived on the scene already quite mature." Hasuda, who became something of a mentor to Mishima, was an ardent nationalist and a fan of Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), a scholar of kokugaku from the Edo period who preached Japanese traditional values and devotion to the emperor. Hasuda had previously fought for the Imperial Japanese Army in China in 1938, and in 1943 he was recalled to active service for deployment as a first lieutenant in the Southeast Asian theater. At a farewell party thrown for Hasuda by the Bungei Bunka group, Hasuda offered the following parting words to Mishima: "I have entrusted the future of Japan to you." According to Mishima, these words were deeply meaningful to him, and had a profound effect on the future course of his life.
Later in 1941, Mishima wrote an essay about his deep devotion to Shintō, titled The Way of the Gods (惟神之道, Kannagara no michi). Mishima's story The Cigarette (煙草, Tabako), published in 1946, describes a homosexual love he felt at school and being teased from members of the school's rugby union club because he belonged to the literary society. Another story from 1954, The Boy Who Wrote Poetry (詩を書く少年, Shi o kaku shōnen), was similarly based on Mishima's memories of his time at Gakushūin Junior High School.
On 9 September 1944, Mishima graduated Gakushūin High School at the top of the class, becoming a graduate representative. Emperor Hirohito was present at the graduation ceremony, with Mishima later receiving a silver watch from him at the Imperial Household Ministry.
On 27 April 1944, during the final years of World War II, Mishima received a draft notice for the Imperial Japanese Army, barely passing his conscription examination on 16 May 1944 with a less desirable rating of "second class" conscript. Scholars have argued that Mishima's failure to receive a "first class" rating on his conscription examination (reserved only for the most physically fit recruits), in combination with the illness which led him to be erroneously declared unfit for duty, contributed to an inferiority complex over his frail constitution that later led to his obsession with physical fitness and bodybuilding.
Mishima had a cold during his medical check on convocation day (10 February 1945), which the army doctor misdiagnosed as tuberculosis; Mishima was consequently declared unfit for service and sent home. Mishima would later hint in his quasi-autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask (1949) that he might have lied to the doctor in order to secure the misdiagnosis. Mishima wrote:
The veracity of this account is impossible to know for certain, but what is unquestionable is that Mishima did not speak out against the doctor's diagnosis of tuberculosis. Researchers have speculated that Mishima's guilt at allowing himself to escape death in the war left a lasting impression on his life and writing, possibly contributing to his later suicide.
The day before his failed medical examination, Mishima had written a farewell message to his family, ending with the words "Long live the Emperor!" (天皇陛下万歳, Tennō heika banzai), including hair and nail clippings as mementos for his parents. The unit that Mishima would have enlisted in was eventually sent to the Philippines, with few survivors. Mishima's parents were ecstatic that he did not have to go to war, but Mishima's mood was harder to read, and Mishima's mother overheard him express a wish that he could have joined a "Special Attack" unit. He also expressed an admiration for kamikaze pilots and other "special attack" units. In a 21 April 1945 letter to a friend, Mishima wrote:
Mishima was deeply affected by Emperor Hirohito's radio broadcast announcing Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945, vowing to protect Japanese cultural traditions and to help to rebuild Japanese culture after the destruction of the war. He wrote in his diary, "Only by preserving Japanese irrationality will we be able contribute to world culture 100 years from now.
Four days after Japan's surrender, Mishima's mentor Zenmei Hasuda, who had been drafted and deployed to the Malay peninsula, shot and killed his superior officer, who blamed Japan's defeat on the Emperor. Hasuda had long suspected the officer to be a Korean spy. After shooting him, Hasuda turned his pistol on himself. Mishima learned of the incident a year later and contributed poetry in Hasuda's honor at a memorial service in November 1946. On 23 October 1945 (Showa 20), Mishima's beloved younger sister Mitsuko died suddenly at the age of 17 from typhoid fever after drinking untreated water. Around the same time, he also learned that Kuniko Mitani (三谷邦子), a classmate's sister whom he had hoped to marry, was engaged to another man. Mishima used these events as inspiration and motivation for his later literary work.
At the end of the war, his father Azusa "half-allowed" Mishima to become a novelist. He was worried that his son would become a professional novelist, preferring instead that his son follow in the footsteps of himself and Mishima's grandfather Sadatarō and become a bureaucrat. To this end, he advised his son to enroll in the Faculty of Law instead of the literature department. Attending lectures during the day and writing at night, Mishima graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1947. He obtained a position in the Ministry of the Treasury and was set for a promising career as a government bureaucrat. However, after just one year of employment, Mishima had exhausted himself so much that his father agreed to allow him to resign from his post and devote himself to writing full time.
In 1945, Mishima began the short story "A Story at the Cape" (岬にての物語, Misaki nite no Monogatari) and continued to work on it throughout World War II. After the war, the story was praised by poet Shizuo Itō (伊東静雄), whom Mishima respected.
After Japan's defeat in World War II, the country was occupied by the U.S.-led Allied Powers. At the urging of the occupation authorities, many people who held important posts in various fields were purged from public office. The media and publishing industry were also censored, and were not allowed to engage in forms of expression reminiscent of wartime Japanese nationalism. In addition, literary figures, including many of those who had been close to Mishima before the end of the war, were branded "war criminal literary figures". In response, many prominent literary figures became leftists, joined the Communist Party as a reaction against wartime militarism, and began writing socialist realist literature that might support the cause of socialist revolution. These newly converted leftists held great influence in the Japanese literary world immediately following the end of the war, which Mishima found difficult to accept, and he denounced them as "opportunists" in letters to friends. Although Mishima was just 20 years old at this time, he worried that his type of literature, based on the 1930s Japanese Romantic School (日本浪曼派, Nihon Rōman Ha), had already become obsolete.
Mishima had heard that the famed writer Yasunari Kawabata had praised his work before the end of the war. Uncertain of who else to turn to, Mishima took the manuscripts for The Middle Ages (中世, Chūsei) and The Cigarette (煙草, Tabako) with him, visited Kawabata in Kamakura, and asked for his advice and assistance in January 1946. Kawabata was impressed, and in June 1946, following Kawabata's recommendation, The Cigarette was published in the new literary magazine Humanity (人間, Ningen), followed by The Middle Ages in December 1946. The Middle Ages is set in Japan's historical Muromachi Period and explores the motif of shudō (man-boy love) against a backdrop of the death of the ninth Ashikaga shogun Ashikaga Yoshihisa in battle at the age of 25, and his father Ashikaga Yoshimasa's resultant sadness. The story features the fictional character Kikuwaka, a beautiful teenage boy who was beloved by both Yoshihisa and Yoshimasa, who fails in an attempt to follow Yoshihisa in death by committing suicide. Thereafter, Kikuwaka devotes himself to spiritualism in an attempt to heal Yoshimasa's sadness by allowing Yoshihisa's ghost to possess his body, and eventually dies in a double-suicide with a miko (shrine maiden) who falls in love with him. Mishima wrote the story in an elegant style drawing upon medieval Japanese literature and the Ryōjin Hishō, a collection of medieval imayō songs. This elevated writing style and the homosexual motif suggest the germ of Mishima's later aesthetics. Later in 1948 Kawabata, who praised this work, published an autobiographical work Boy (少年, Shōnen) describing his experience of falling in love for the first time with a boy two years his junior.
In 1946, Mishima began his first novel, Thieves (盗賊, Tōzoku), a story about two young members of the aristocracy drawn towards suicide. It was published in 1948, and placed Mishima in the ranks of the Second Generation of Postwar Writers. The following year, he published Confessions of a Mask, a semi-autobiographical account of a young homosexual man who hides behind a mask to fit into society. The novel was extremely successful and made Mishima a celebrity at the age of 24. In 1947, a brief encounter with Osamu Dazai, a popular novelist known for his suicidal themes, left a lasting impression on him. Around 1949, Mishima also published a literary essay about Kawabata, for whom he had always held a deep appreciation, in Modern Literature (近代文学, Kindai Bungaku).
Mishima enjoyed international travel. In 1952, he took a world tour and published his travelogue as The Cup of Apollo (アポロの杯, Aporo no Sakazuki). He visited Greece during his travels, a place which had fascinated him since childhood. His visit to Greece became the basis for his 1954 novel The Sound of Waves, which drew inspiration from the Greek legend of Daphnis and Chloe. The Sound of Waves, set on the small island of "Kami-shima" where a traditional Japanese lifestyle continued to be practiced, depicts a pure, simple love between a fisherman and a female pearl and abalone diver. Although the novel became a best-seller, leftists criticized it for "glorifying old-fashioned Japanese values", and some people began calling Mishima a "fascist". Looking back on these attacks in later years, Mishima wrote, "The ancient community ethics portrayed in this novel were attacked by progressives at the time, but no matter how much the Japanese people changed, these ancient ethics lurk in the bottom of their hearts. We have gradually seen this proven to be the case."
Mishima made use of contemporary events in many of his works. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, published in 1956, is a fictionalization of the burning down of the Kinkaku-ji Buddhist temple in Kyoto in 1950 by a mentally disturbed monk.
In 1959, Mishima published the artistically ambitious novel Kyōko no Ie. The novel tells the interconnected stories of four young men who represented four different facets of Mishima's personality. His athletic side appears as a boxer, his artistic side as a painter, his narcissistic, performative side as an actor, and his secretive, nihilistic side as a businessman who goes through the motions of living a normal life while practicing "absolute contempt for reality". According to Mishima, he was attempting to describe the time around 1955 in the novel, when Japan was entering into its era of high economic growth and the phrase "The postwar is over" was prevalent. Mishima explained, "Kyōko no Ie is, so to speak, my research into the nihilism within me." Although the novel was well received by a small number of critics from the same generation as Mishima and sold 150,000 copies in a month, it was widely panned in broader literary circles, and was rapidly branded as Mishima's first "failed work". It was Mishima's first major setback as an author, and the book's disastrous reception came as a harsh psychological blow.
Until 1960, Mishima had not written works that were seen as especially political. In the summer of 1960, Mishima became interested in the massive Anpo protests against an attempt by U.S.-backed Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi to revise the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan (known as "Anpo" in Japanese) in order to cement the U.S.–Japan military alliance into place. Although he did not directly participate in the protests, he often went out in the streets to observe the protestors in action and kept extensive newspaper clippings covering the protests. In June 1960, at the climax of the protest movement, Mishima wrote a commentary in the Mainichi Shinbun newspaper, entitled "A Political Opinion". In the critical essay, he argued that leftist groups such as the Zengakuren student federation, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party were falsely wrapping themselves in the banner of "defending democracy" and using the protest movement to further their own ends. Mishima warned against the dangers of the Japanese people following ideologues who told lies with honeyed words. Although Mishima criticized Kishi as a "nihilist" who had subordinated himself to the United States, Mishima concluded that he would rather vote for a strong-willed realist "with neither dreams nor despair" than a mendacious but eloquent ideologue.
Shortly after the Anpo Protests ended, Mishima began writing one of his most famous short stories, Patriotism, glorifying the actions of a young right-wing ultranationalist Japanese army officer who commits suicide after a failed revolt against the government during the February 26 incident. The following year, he published the first two parts of his three-part play Tenth-Day Chrysanthemum (十日の菊, Tōka no kiku), which celebrates the actions of the 26 February revolutionaries.
Mishima's newfound interest in contemporary politics shaped his novel After the Banquet, also published in 1960, which so closely followed the events surrounding politician Hachirō Arita's campaign to become governor of Tokyo that Mishima was sued for invasion of privacy. The next year, Mishima published The Frolic of the Beasts, a parody of the classical Noh play Motomezuka, written in the 14th-century by playwright Kiyotsugu Kan'ami. In 1962, Mishima produced his most artistically avant-garde work Beautiful Star, which at times comes close to science fiction. Although the novel received mixed reviews from the literary world, prominent critic Takeo Okuno (奥野健男) singled it out for praise as part of a new breed of novels that was overthrowing longstanding literary conventions in the tumultuous aftermath of the Anpo Protests. Alongside Kōbō Abe's Woman of the Dunes, published that same year, Okuno considered A Beautiful Star an "epoch-making work" which broke free of literary taboos and preexisting notions of what literature should be in order to explore the author's personal creativity.
In 1965, Mishima wrote the play Madame de Sade that explores the complex figure of the Marquis de Sade, traditionally upheld as an exemplar of vice, through a series of debates between six female characters, including the Marquis' wife, the Madame de Sade. At the end of the play, Mishima offers his own interpretation of what he considered to be one of the central mysteries of the de Sade story—the Madame de Sade's unstinting support for her husband while he was in prison and her sudden decision to renounce him upon his release. Mishima's play was inspired in part by his friend Tatsuhiko Shibusawa's 1960 Japanese translation of the Marquis de Sade's novel Juliette and a 1964 biography Shibusawa wrote of de Sade. Shibusawa's sexually explicit translation became the focus of a sensational obscenity trial remembered in Japan as the "Juliette Case" (サド裁判, Sado saiban), which was ongoing as Mishima wrote the play. In 1994, Madame de Sade was evaluated as the "greatest drama in the history of postwar theater" by Japanese theater criticism magazine Theater Arts (シアター・アーツ).
Mishima was considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967 and 1968 (he and Rudyard Kipling are both the youngest nominees in history), and was a favorite of many foreign publications. However, in 1968 his early mentor Kawabata won the Nobel Prize and Mishima realized that the chances of it being given to another Japanese author in the near future were slim. In a work published in 1970, Mishima wrote that the writers he paid most attention to in modern western literature were Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Witold Gombrowicz.
Mishima was also an actor, and starred in Yasuzo Masumura's 1960 film, Afraid to Die, for which he also sang the theme song (lyrics by himself; music by Shichirō Fukazawa). He performed in films like Patriotism or the Rite of Love and Death directed by himself, 1966, Black Lizard directed by Kinji Fukasaku, 1968 and Hitokiri directed by Hideo Gosha, 1969. Maki Isaka has discussed how his knowledge of performance and theatrical forms influenced short stories including Onnagata (女方, Onnagata).
Mishima was featured as the photo model in the photographer Eikoh Hosoe's book Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses (薔薇刑, Bara-kei), as well as in Tamotsu Yatō's photobooks Young Samurai: Bodybuilders of Japan (体道～日本のボディビルダーたち, Taidō: Nihon no bodybuilder tachi) and Otoko: Photo Studies of the Young Japanese Male (男, Otoko). The American author Donald Richie gave an eyewitness account of seeing Mishima, dressed in a loincloth and armed with a sword, posing in the snow for one of Tamotsu Yatō's photoshoots.
In the men's magazine Heibon Punch, to which Mishima had contributed various essays and criticisms, he won first place in the "Mr. Dandy" reader popularity poll in 1967 with 19,590 votes, beating second place Toshiro Mifune by 720 votes. In the next reader popularity poll, "Mr. International", Mishima ranked second behind French President Charles de Gaulle. At that time in the late 1960s, Mishima was the first celebrity to be described as a "superstar" (sūpāsutā) by the Japanese media.
In 1955, Mishima took up weight training to overcome his weak constitution, and his strictly observed workout regimen of three sessions per week was not disrupted for the final 15 years of his life. In his 1968 essay Sun and Steel, Mishima deplored the emphasis given by intellectuals to the mind over the body. He later became very skilled (5th Dan) at kendo (traditional Japanese swordsmanship), and became 2nd Dan in battōjutsu, and 1st Dan in karate. In 1956, he tried boxing for a short period of time. In the same year, he developed an interest in UFOs and became a member of the "Japan Flying Saucer Research Association" (日本空飛ぶ円盤研究会, Nihon soratobu enban kenkyukai). In 1954, he fell in love with Sadako Toyoda (豊田貞子), who became the model for main characters in The Sunken Waterfall (沈める滝, Shizumeru taki) and The Seven Bridges (橋づくし, Hashi zukushi). Mishima hoped to marry her, but they broke up in 1957.
After briefly considering marriage with Michiko Shōda, who later married Crown Prince Akihito and became Empress Michiko, Mishima married Yōko (瑤子, née Sugiyama), the daughter of the Japanese-style painter Yasushi Sugiyama, on 1 June 1958. The couple had two children: a daughter named Noriko (紀子) (born 2 June 1959) and a son named Iichirō (威一郎) (born 2 May 1962). Noriko eventually married the diplomat Koji Tomita.
While working on his novel Forbidden Colors, Mishima visited gay bars in Japan. Mishima's sexual orientation was an issue that bothered his wife, and she always denied his homosexuality after his death. In 1998, the writer Jirō Fukushima (福島次郎) published an account of his relationship with Mishima in 1951, including fifteen letters (not love letters) from Mishima. Mishima's children successfully sued Fukushima and the publisher for copyright violation over the use of Mishima's letters. The publisher Bungeishunjū had argued that the contents of the letters were "practical correspondence" rather than copyrighted works. However, the ruling for the plaintiffs declared, "In addition to clerical content, these letters describe the Mishima's own feelings, his aspirations, and his views on life, in different words from those in his literary works."
In February 1961, Mishima became embroiled in the aftermath of the Shimanaka incident. In 1960, the author Shichirō Fukazawa had published the satirical short story The Tale of an Elegant Dream (風流夢譚, Fūryū Mutan) in the mainstream magazine Chūō Kōron. It contained a dream sequence (in which the Emperor and Empress are beheaded by a guillotine) that led to outrage from right-wing ultra-nationalist groups, and numerous death threats against Fukazawa, any writers believed to have been associated with him, and Chūō Kōron magazine itself. On 1 February 1961, Kazutaka Komori, a seventeen-year-old rightist, broke into the home of Hōji Shimanaka, the president of Chūō Kōron, killed his maid with a knife and severely wounded his wife. In the aftermath, Fukazawa went into hiding, and dozens of writers and literary critics, including Mishima, were provided with round-the-clock police protection for several months; Mishima was included because a rumor that Mishima had personally recommended The Tale of an Elegant Dream for publication became widespread, and even though he repeatedly denied the claim, he received hundreds of death threats. In later years, Mishima harshly criticized Komori, arguing that those who harm women and children are neither patriots nor traditional right-wingers, and that an assassination attempt should be a one-on-one confrontation with the victim at the risk of the assassin's life. Mishima also argued that it was the custom of traditional Japanese patriots (such as Otoya Yamaguchi) to immediately commit suicide after committing an assassination.
In 1963, "The Harp of Joy Incident" (喜びの琴事件, Yorokobi no Koto Jiken) occurred within the theatrical troupe Bungakuza, to which Mishima belonged. He wrote a play titled The Harp of Joy (喜びの琴, Yorokobi no koto), but star actress Haruko Sugimura and other Communist Party-affiliated actors refused to perform because the protagonist held anti-communist views and mentioned criticism about a conspiracy of world communism in his lines. As a result of this ideological conflict, Mishima quit Bungakuza and later formed the troupe Neo Littérature Théâtre (劇団NLT, Gekidan NLT) with playwrights and actors who had quit Bungakuza along with him, including Seiichi Yashio (矢代静一), Takeo Matsuura (松浦竹夫), and Nobuo Nakamura. When Neo Littérature Théâtre experienced a schism in 1968, Mishima formed another troupe, the Roman Theatre (浪曼劇場, Rōman Gekijō), and worked with Matsuura and Nakamura again.
During the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Mishima interviewed various athletes every day and wrote articles as a newspaper correspondent. He had eagerly anticipated the long-awaited return of the Olympics to Japan after the 1940 Tokyo Olympics were cancelled due to Japan's war in China. Mishima expressed his excitement in his report on the opening ceremonies: "It can be said that ever since Lafcadio Hearn called the Japanese "the Greeks of the Orient", the Olympics were destined to be hosted by Japan someday."
Mishima hated Ryokichi Minobe, who was a socialist and the governor of Tokyo beginning in 1967. Influential persons in the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), including Takeo Fukuda and Kiichi Aichi, had been Mishima's superiors during his time at the Ministry of the Treasury, and Prime Minister Eisaku Satō came to know Mishima because his wife, Hiroko, was a fan of Mishima's work. Based on these connections LDP officials solicited Mishima to run for the LDP as governor of Tokyo against Minobe, but Mishima had no intention of becoming a politician.
Mishima was fond of manga and gekiga, especially the drawing style of Hiroshi Hirata, a mangaka best known for his samurai gekiga; the slapstick, absurdist comedy in Fujio Akatsuka's Mōretsu Atarō; and the imaginativeness of Shigeru Mizuki's GeGeGe no Kitarō. Mishima especially loved reading the boxing manga Ashita no Joe in Weekly Shōnen Magazine every week. Ultraman and Godzilla were his favorite kaiju fantasies, and he once compared himself to "Godzilla's egg" in 1955. On the other hand, he disliked story manga with humanist or cosmopolitan themes, such as Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix.
Mishima was a fan of science fiction, contending that "science fiction will be the first literature to completely overcome modern humanism". He praised Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End in particular. While acknowledging "inexpressible unpleasant and uncomfortable feelings after reading it," he declared, "I'm not afraid to call it a masterpiece."
Mishima traveled to Shimoda on the Izu Peninsula with his wife and children every summer from 1964 onwards. In Shimoda, Mishima often enjoyed eating local seafood with his friend Henry Scott-Stokes. Mishima never showed any hostility towards the US in front of foreign friends like Scott-Stokes, until Mishima heard that the name of the inn where Scott-Stokes was staying was Kurofune (lit. 'black ship'), at which point his voice suddenly became low and he said in a sullen manner, "Why? Why do you stay at a place with such a name?". Mishima liked ordinary American people after the war, and he and his wife had even visited Disneyland as newlyweds. However, he clearly retained a strong sense of hostility toward the "black ships" of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who forcibly opened Japan up to unequal international relations at the end of the Edo period, and had destroyed the peace of Edo, where vivid chōnin culture was flourishing.
Mishima's nationalism grew towards the end of his life. In 1966, he published his short story The Voices of the Heroic Dead (英霊の聲, Eirei no koe), in which he denounced Emperor Hirohito for renouncing his own divinity after World War II. Mishima argued that the soldiers who had died in the February 26 incident and the Kamikaze had died for their "living god" Emperor, and that Hirohito's renunciation of his own divinity meant that all those deaths had been in vain.
In February 1967, Mishima joined his fellow-authors Yasunari Kawabata, Kōbō Abe, and Jun Ishikawa in issuing a statement condemning China's Cultural Revolution for suppressing academic and artistic freedom. However, only one Japanese newspaper carried the full text of their statement.
In September 1967 Mishima and his wife visited India at the invitation of the Indian government. He traveled widely and met with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Zakir Hussain. He left extremely impressed by Indian culture, and what he felt was the Indian people's determination to resist Westernization and protect traditional ways. Mishima feared that his fellow Japanese were too enamored of modernization and Western-style materialism to protect traditional Japanese culture. On his way home from India, Mishima also stopped in Thailand and Laos; his experiences in the three nations became the basis for portions of his novel The Temple of Dawn, the third in his tetralogy The Sea of Fertility.
In a series of critical essays in the late 1960s, Mishima exalted what he viewed as traditional Japanese values. In 1967, he published On Hagakure: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan (葉隠入門, Hagakure Nyūmon), an impassioned plea for a return to bushido, the putative "samurai code" of Japan's past. Mishima praised the Hagakure, a treatise on warrior virtues authored by the samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo during the Edo period that valorized the warrior's willingness to die, as being at the core of his literary production and "the source of his vitality as a writer". Mishima concluded,
In On the Defense of Culture (文化防衛論, Bunka bōei ron, 1968), Mishima preached the centrality of the emperor to Japanese culture, and argued that Japan's postwar era was a time of flashy but ultimately hollow prosperity (a "Shōwa Genroku"), lacking any truly transcendent literary or poetic talents comparable to the 18th century masters of the original Genroku era, such as the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon or the poet Matsuo Bashō.
In 1968, Mishima wrote a play titled My Friend Hitler, in which he depicted the historical figures of Adolf Hitler, Gustav Krupp, Gregor Strasser, and Ernst Röhm as mouthpieces to express his own views on fascism and beauty. Mishima explained that after writing the all-female play Madame de Sade, he wanted to write a counterpart play with an all-male cast. Mishima wrote of My Friend Hitler, "You may read this tragedy as an allegory of the relationship between Ōkubo Toshimichi and Saigō Takamori" (two heroes of Japan's Meiji Restoration who initially worked together but later had a falling out). Given the play's provocative title, Mishima was repeatedly asked if he intended to express admiration or support for Hitler. Mishima wrote in a program note,
That same year, he wrote Life for Sale, a humorous story about a man who, after failing to commit suicide, advertises his life for sale. In a review of the English translation, the novelist Ian Thomson called it a "pulp noir" and a "sexy, camp delight", but also noted that, "beneath the hard-boiled dialogue and the gangster high jinks is a familiar indictment of consumerist Japan and a romantic yearning for the past."
Like many other right-wingers, Mishima was extremely alarmed by the riots and revolutionary actions undertaken by radical "New Left" university students, who took over dozens of college campuses in Japan in 1968 and 1969. On 25 February 1968, he and several other right-wingers met at the editorial offices of the recently founded minzoku-ha monthly magazine Controversy Journal (論争ジャーナル, Ronsō jaanaru), where they pricked their little fingers and signed a blood oath promising to die if necessary to prevent a left-wing revolution from occurring in Japan. Mishima showed his sincerity by signing his birth name, Kimitake Hiraoka, in his own blood.
On 13 May 1969, Mishima accepted an invitation to debate with members of the Tokyo University Zenkyōtō on the university's Komaba campus. This debate lasted for 2.5 hours, with both Mishima and the students treating each other amiably and with respect, despite Mishima's initial fears that the students might kill him on the spot for his right-wing views. At this debate, Mishima told the students, "As long as you refer to the Emperor as 'Emperor,' I will gladly join forces with you," but in the end the ideological differences between Mishima and the students could not be overcome. Mishima ended by saying, "I believe in your passion. I believe in this alone. Even if I believe in nothing else of yours, I want you to know that I believe in this alone." In an essay written after the debate Mishima said that "they could not escape established leftist thinking" and that "the discussion was inevitably at a stalemate." In this essay, Mishima argued that the supposedly revolutionary Zenkyōtō were themselves "weakening the roots of the revolutionary ideal in Japan" by rejecting the idea of the "Emperor", which Mishima claimed was also "a revolutionary ideal deeply rooted in the consciousness of the Japanese people." Mishima's friends interpreted this essay as him expressing his disappointment with the Zenkyōtō.
Throughout this period, Mishima continued to work on his magnum opus, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy of novels, which began appearing in a monthly serialized format in September 1965. The four completed novels were Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (published posthumously in 1971). Mishima aimed for a very long novel with a completely different raison d'être from Western chronicle novels of the 19th and 20th centuries; rather than telling the story of a single individual or family, Mishima boldly set his goal as interpreting the entire human world. In The Decay of the Angel, four stories convey the transmigration of the human soul as the main character goes through a series of reincarnations. Mishima hoped to express in literary terms something akin to pantheism. The novelist Paul Theroux blurbed the first edition of the English translation of The Sea of Fertility as "the most complete vision we have of Japan in the twentieth century" and critic Charles Solomon wrote in 1990 that "the four novels remain one of the outstanding works of 20th-Century literature and a summary of the author's life and work".
From 12 April to 27 May 1967, Mishima underwent basic training with the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF). Mishima had originally lobbied to train with the GSDF for six months, but was met with resistance from the Defense Agency. Mishima's training period was finalized to 46 days, which required using some of his connections. His participation in GSDF training was kept secret, both because the Defense Agency did not want to give the impression that anyone was receiving special treatment, and because Mishima wanted to experience "real" military life. Accordingly, Mishima trained under his birth name, Kimitake Hiraoka, and most of his fellow soldiers did not recognize him.
From June 1967, Mishima became a leading figure in a plan to create a 10,000-man "Japan National Guard" (祖国防衛隊, Sokoku Bōeitai) as a civilian complement to the Self-Defense Forces. He began leading groups of right-wing college students to undergo basic training with the GSDF in the hope of training 100 officers to lead the National Guard.
Finding that his plan for a large-scale Japan National Guard with broad public and private support had failed to catch on, Mishima formed the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), a private militia composed primarily of right-wing college students, on 5 October 1968. Mishima accepted no outside money, and funded the activities of the Tatenokai using royalties from his writing. The Tatenokai primarily focused on martial training and physical fitness, including traditional kendo sword-fighting and long-distance running. Live-fire training was also conducted. Mishima personally oversaw this training. Initial membership was around 50, and was drawn primarily from students from Waseda University and individuals affiliated with the Controversy Journal. The number of Tatenokai members was later increased to exactly 100.
On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four members of the Tatenokai—Masakatsu Morita, Masahiro Ogawa (小川正洋), Masayoshi Koga (小賀正義), and Hiroyasu Koga—used a pretext to visit Kanetoshi Mashita (益田兼利), the commandant of Camp Ichigaya (防衛省市ヶ谷地区), a military base in central Tokyo and the headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Once inside, they barricaded the door to Mashita's office and tied him to his chair. Mishima wore a white hachimaki headband with a red hinomaru circle in the center bearing the kanji for "To be reborn seven times to serve the country" (七生報國, Shichishō hōkoku), a reference to the last words of Kusunoki Masasue, the younger brother of the 14th-century imperial loyalist samurai Kusunoki Masashige, as the two brothers died fighting to defend the emperor.
Holding a prepared manifesto and a banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped out onto the balcony to address the soldiers gathered below. His speech was intended to inspire a coup d'état to restore direct rule to the emperor. He succeeded only in irritating the soldiers, and was heckled, with jeers and the noise of helicopters drowning out some parts of his speech. In his speech, Mishima rebuked the JSDF for their passive acceptance of a constitution that "denies (their) own existence" and shouted to rouse them, "Where has the spirit of the samurai gone?" In a final "written appeal" (檄, Geki) that Morita and Ogawa scattered copies of from the balcony, Mishima expressed his dissatisfaction with the half-baked nature of the JSDF: "It is self-evident that the United States would not be pleased with a true Japanese volunteer army protecting the land of Japan."
After he finished reading his prepared speech in a few minutes' time, Mishima cried out "Long live the Emperor!" (天皇陛下万歳, Tenno-heika banzai) three times. He then retreated into the commandant's office and apologized to the commandant, saying, "We did it to return the JSDF to the Emperor. I had no choice but to do this." Mishima then committed seppuku, a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment associated with the samurai. Morita had been assigned to serve as Mishima's second (kaishakunin), cutting off his head with a sword at the end of the rite to spare him unnecessary pain. However, Morita proved unable to complete his task, and after three failed attempts to sever Mishima's head, Hiroyasu Koga had to step in and complete the task.
According to the testimony of the surviving coup members, originally all four Tatenokai members had planned to commit seppuku along with Mishima. However, Mishima attempted to dissuade them and three of the members acquiesced to his wishes. Only Morita persisted, saying, "I can't let Mr. Mishima die alone." But Mishima knew that Morita had a girlfriend and still hoped he might live. Just before his seppuku, Mishima tried one more time to dissuade him, saying "Morita, you must live, not die." Nevertheless, after Mishima's seppuku, Morita knelt and stabbed himself in the abdomen and Koga acted as kaishakunin again. Another traditional element of the suicide ritual was the composition of death poems by the Tatenokai members prior to their entry into the headquarters.
This coup attempt is called the "Mishima Incident" (三島事件, Mishima jiken) in Japan.
Mishima had planned his suicide meticulously for at least a year, with no one outside a small group of hand-picked Tatenokai members knowing of his plans. Mishima had made sure his affairs were in order and left money for the legal defense of the three surviving Tatenokai members involved in the incident. Mishima had also arranged for a department store to send his two children Christmas gifts every year until they became adults, and had asked a publisher to pay the long-term subscription fee for children's magazines in advance and deliver them every month.
Much speculation has surrounded Mishima's suicide. One of Mishima's biographers, translator John Nathan, suggests that the coup attempt was only a pretext for the ritual suicide of which Mishima had long dreamed. Mishima's friend Henry Scott-Stokes, another biographer, noted a meeting with Mishima in his diary entry for 3 September 1970 at which Mishima, with a dark expression on his face, said:
Scott-Stokes told Takao Tokuoka [ja] in 1990 that he took the "green snake" to mean the U.S. dollar.
One researcher has speculated that Mishima chose 25 November for his coup attempt in order to set his period of bardo until his reincarnation, such that 49th day after his death would coincide with his birthday, 14 January. Mishima's remains were returned to his family the day after the incident, and were buried in the grave of the Hiraoka Family at Tama Cemetery on what would have been his 46th birthday, 14 January 1971.
Mishima has been recognized as one of the world's most important literary persons of the 20th century. Mishima wrote 34 novels, approximately 50 plays and 25 books of short stories, more than 35 books of essays, plus a libretto and one film.
The annual Mishima Prize was established in 1998 by the literary publisher Shinchōsha to recognise groundbreaking Japanese literature. On 3 July 1999, the "Yukio Mishima Literary Museum" (三島由紀夫文学館, Mishima Yukio Bungaku-kan) opened in Yamanakako, Yamanashi Prefecture.
The Mishima Incident helped inspire the formation of "New Right" (新右翼, shin uyoku) groups in Japan, such as the "Issuikai", founded by Tsutomu Abe (阿部勉), who was one of Tatenokai members and Mishima's follower. Compared to older pro-American, anti-communist groups such as Bin Akao's Greater Japan Patriotic Party, New Right groups such as the Issuikai tended to emphasize ethnic nationalism and anti-Americanism.
A memorial service deathday for Mishima, called "Patriotism Memorial" (憂国忌, Yūkoku-ki), is held every year in Japan on 25 November by the "Yukio Mishima Study Group" (三島由紀夫研究会, Mishima Yukio Kenkyūkai), as well as former members of the "Japan Student Alliance" (日本学生同盟, Nihon Gakusei Dōmei). A separate memorial service has also been held annually by former Tatenokai members from 1975 onwards, one year after Masahiro Ogawa, Masayoshi Koga, and Hiroyasu Koga were released on parole.
A variety of cenotaphs and memorial stones have been erected in honor of Mishima's memory in various places around Japan. For example, stones have been erected at Hachiman Shrine in Kakogawa City, Hyōgo Prefecture, where his grandfather's permanent domicile was; in front of the 2nd company corps at JGSDF Camp Takigahara; and in one of Mishima's acquaintance's home garden. There is also a "Monument of Honor Yukio Mishima & Masakatsu Morita" in front of the Rissho University Shonan High school in Shimane Prefecture.
The Mishima Yukio Shrine was built in the suburb of Fujinomiya, Shizuoka Prefecture, on 9 January 1983.
A 1985 biographical film by Paul Schrader titled Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters depicts his life and work, however it has not had a theatrical release inside Japan. A 2012 Japanese film titled 11:25 The Day He Chose His Own Fate examines Mishima's final day. The 1983 gay pornographic film Beautiful Mystery satirized homosexual undertones that were present during Mishima's career.
In 2020, a documentary titled Mishima Yukio vs. Tokyo University Zenkyōtō: the Truth Revealed 50 Years Later (三島由紀夫vs東大全共闘〜50年目の真実〜, Mishima Yukio vs Todai Zenkyōtō〜50 nen me no Sinjitsu) was released, based on the debate between Mishima and members of the Tokyo University Zenkyōtō on 13 May 1969.
On 14 January 2025, commemorative events to mark the 100th anniversary of Mishima's birth was held at two halls in Tokyo, in which Eiko Muramatsu (村松英子), who was an actress of Mishima's troupe, and Tadanori Yokoo, an acquaintance of Mishima, talked at each venue about their memories of him.
In addition to contemporary-style plays such as Madame de Sade, Mishima wrote for two of the three genres of classical Japanese theatre: Noh and Kabuki (as a proud Tokyoite, he would not even attend the Bunraku puppet theatre, always associated with Osaka and the provinces).
Though Mishima took themes, titles and characters from the Noh canon, his twists and modern settings, such as hospitals and ballrooms, startled audiences accustomed to the long-settled originals.
Donald Keene translated Five Modern Noh Plays (Tuttle, 1981; ISBN 0-8048-1380-9). Most others remain untranslated and so lack an "official" English title; in such cases it is therefore preferable to use the rōmaji title.
Mishima starred in multiple films. Patriotism was written and funded by himself, and he directed it in close cooperation with Masaki Domoto. Mishima also wrote a detailed account of the whole process, in which the particulars regarding costume, shooting expenses and the film's reception are delved into. Patriotism won the second prize at the Tours International Short Film Festival in January 1966.