Mishima Yukio

Mishima Yukio was the most theatrically self-conscious great writer of the twentieth century — a man who treated his life, his body, and his death as works of art with the same intensity he brought to his novels and plays. He produced over forty novels, nearly twenty volumes of short stories, more than thirty plays, and extensive essays and criticism, all while pursuing a public life of extraordinary flamboyance: he modelled for photographs, acted in films, trained obsessively in bodybuilding and kendo, formed a private militia, and ultimately died by ritual seppuku after a failed attempt to inspire a military coup — a death that was simultaneously a political act, an aesthetic statement, and the final scene in the drama of self-creation he had been staging throughout his life.

Hiraoka Kimitake

Mishima Yukio was the pen name of Hiraoka Kimitake, born in 1925 in Tokyo to a family of declining samurai lineage. His early childhood was dominated by his grandmother, Natsuko, an aristocratic woman of formidable temperament who separated the boy from his parents and raised him in her sickroom, surrounding him with feminine company and forbidding rough play. This enclosed, hothouse upbringing — which Mishima later described as simultaneously suffocating and formative — planted the seeds of the aesthetic obsessions that would pervade his fiction: the relationship between beauty and death, the contrast between interior experience and public performance, and the tension between the fragile, sensitive self and the armoured, heroic persona.

He attended the Peers’ School (Gakushūin), where his precocious literary talent was recognised early. He published his first stories at sixteen, and his pen name, “Mishima Yukio,” was suggested by a teacher to protect his identity from his father, who disapproved of his literary ambitions. He graduated during World War II but was rejected for military service on health grounds — an experience of shame and exclusion that haunted him for the rest of his life and became a recurring subject of his fiction.

Confessions of a Mask

Confessions of a Mask (1949) was the novel that made Mishima famous. The semi-autobiographical narrative depicted a young man’s discovery of his homosexuality and his efforts to construct a mask of heterosexual normalcy to conceal his true desires. The novel’s clinical precision in dissecting the mechanisms of social performance — the way the narrator learns to simulate emotions he does not feel, to construct an acceptable public self over an unacceptable private one — made it a landmark of postwar Japanese literature and a pioneering work of queer fiction.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji, 1956) is often considered Mishima’s masterpiece. Based on the true story of a young Buddhist acolyte who burned down the famous Kinkaku-ji temple in Kyoto in 1950, the novel reimagined the arsonist as a stuttering, physically ugly young man who is destroyed by the temple’s beauty — who comes to believe that beauty is an obstacle to life and that its destruction is the only way to free himself from its tyranny. The novel’s exploration of the relationship between beauty and destruction, between aesthetic contemplation and violent action, was Mishima’s most profound treatment of the themes that obsessed him.

The Sea of Fertility

Mishima’s most ambitious work was The Sea of Fertility, a tetralogy comprising Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971). The four novels follow Honda Shigekuni across six decades of Japanese history as he encounters successive reincarnations of his youthful friend Kiyoaki — as a political fanatic in the 1930s, a Thai princess in the 1950s, and a corrupt youth in the 1970s. The tetralogy was Mishima’s summa — a meditation on time, beauty, reincarnation, and the decline of Japanese civilisation that synthesised the themes of his entire career.

He completed the final pages of The Decay of the Angel on the morning of November 25, 1970, and then drove to the Ichigaya headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, where he delivered a speech calling for the restoration of imperial power before committing seppuku. He was forty-five.

Other Major Works

The Sound of Waves (1954) was Mishima’s most accessible novel — a simple love story set on a remote fishing island, modelled on the ancient Greek romance Daphnis and Chloe. Forbidden Colors (1951–1953) explored the homosexual underworld of postwar Tokyo through the story of an ageing novelist who manipulates a beautiful young man. After the Banquet (1960) was a political novel based on a real Tokyo gubernatorial campaign. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963) depicted a group of nihilistic boys who commit murder in pursuit of absolute purity.

Sun and Steel (1968) was Mishima’s most revealing autobiographical essay — a meditation on his relationship to his own body, to physical discipline, and to the connection between bodily perfection and the desire for death. It is the essential text for understanding the aesthetic philosophy that led to his suicide.

Collecting Mishima

Japanese first editions of Mishima’s major novels are collected by specialists and command substantial prices. For English-language collectors, the primary targets are the first American editions published by Alfred A. Knopf: The Sound of Waves (1956), The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959), and Confessions of a Mask (1958). The Sea of Fertility tetralogy (Knopf, 1972–1974) is collected as a set. Sun and Steel (Kodansha International, 1970) is also sought.