Ihara Saikaku
Mishima was hated by leftists who said Hirohito should have abdicated to take responsibility for the loss of life in the war. They also hated him for his outspoken commitment to bushido, the code of the samurai in , his support for the abolition of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, and for his contention in his critique that preached the importance of the Emperor in Japanese cultures. Mishima regarded the postwar era of Japan, where no poetic culture and supreme artist was born, as an era of fake prosperity, and stated in "The Defense of Culture": In the postwar prosperity called Shōwa Genroku, where there are no Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Ihara Saikaku, Matsuo Bashō, only infestation of flashy manners and customs in there. Passion is dried up, strong realism dispels the ground, and the deepening of poetry is neglected. That is, there are no Chikamatsu, Saikaku, or Basho now. In other critical essays, Mishima argued that the national spirit which cultivated in Japan's long history is the key to national defense, and he had apprehensions about the insidious “indirect aggression” of the Chinese Communist Party, North Korea, and the Soviet Union. In critical essays in 1969, Mishima explained Japan's difficult and delicate position and peculiarities between China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. To put it simply, support for the Security Treaty means agreeing with the United States, and to oppose it means agreeing with the Soviet Union or the Chinese Communist Party, so after all, it's only just a matter of which foreign country to rely on, and therein the question of "what is Japan" is completely lacking. If you ask the Japanese, "Hey you, do you choose America, Soviet Union, or Chinese Communist Party?", if he is a true Japanese, he will withhold his attitude. In regards to those who strongly opposed the US military base in Okinawa and the Security Treaty: They may appear to be nationalists and right-wingers in the foreign common sense, but in Japan, most of them are in fact left-wingers and communists.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. 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".