“Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever,” learn the notice Yukio Mishima left on his desk shortly earlier than he left residence for the ultimate time.
Mishima, who would have turned 100 at present, typically touted as a possible Nobel Prize winner, was one of the vital acclaimed Japanese writers and seductive prose stylists of all time. He can also be one of the vital controversial figures in Japanese historical past, attributable to his ultra-nationalist politics, reactionary proclamations – and surprising dying by ritual seppuku (suicide) after he led a failed coup try.
Mishima was first catapulted to literary stardom along with his semi-autobiographical second novel Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no Kokuhaku) (1949), set towards a pre-war backdrop marked by imperialistic fervour and right-wing extremism, and that includes a homosexual protagonist.
But he labored throughout almost each style: fiction, drama, poetry, autobiography, criticism. He additionally threw himself into movie, music, dance, bodybuilding and martial arts.
Mishima’s work and weird life story has impressed artists like filmmaker Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver, musician Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, and cultural icon David Bowie. They had been drawn to his finely wrought and transgressive explorations of magnificence, violence, eroticism and dying.
Bowie, particularly, was closely influenced by Mishima’s performative method to artwork and existence. Bowie name-checked Mishima within the lyrics of considered one of his final songs and famously slept underneath a portrait of the creator, which he painted in 1977.
Over time, Mishima grew more and more disillusioned with the post-war trajectory of Japan, which he believed had forsaken its conventional values in favour of the hole guarantees of Westernisation and globalisation. This shift, he argued, was symbolised by the demotion of the emperor from divine figurehead to a mere ceremonial image in an more and more affluent, democratic state.
Convinced the Japanese spirit was in terminal decline, he turned to traditionalism and nationalism. In 2025, with nationalist rhetoric and debates about cultural identification within the news, Mishima’s considerations in regards to the erosion of custom, problematic as they’re, really feel strikingly related.
On the morning of November 25 1970, simply after finishing the ultimate instalment of his magisterial The Sea of Fertility (Hj no Umi) novel cycle, Mishima and 4 members of his non-public militia, the Shield Society (Tatenokai), staged the audacious coup try that will finish in his dying.
Mishima was carrying an attache case and an vintage samurai sword when he arrived on the Japanese Self-Defense Forces in Ichigaya, Tokyo. He had organized to satisfy with General Kanetoshi Mashita, the commander of the Eastern Army.
After they exchanged pleasantries, the creator and his younger acolytes overpowered Mashita, taking him hostage and barricading themselves in his workplace. Mishima demanded the final summon the thousand-strong garrison stationed on the base, to assemble within the courtyard beneath Mashita’s workplace.
His aim was to encourage the troopers to stand up towards Japan’s post-war authorities, overthrow its democratic structure and restore the emperor to his pre-war place of divine authority.
Stepping onto the sun-drenched balcony, Mishima, dressed within the brown uniform of the Shield Society and sporting a headscarf adorned with the image of the Rising Sun, unfurled a written manifesto and started to talk. But the gang beneath drowned out his exhortations with jeers and laughter.
Crestfallen, he retreated again into the constructing. Taking off his watch and most of his garments, he began, with the help of his followers, to organize the stage for his premeditated – and thoroughly choreographed – last act.
Kneeling down, Mishima picked up a foot-long dagger and drove it deep into his abdomen. Standing behind him was 25-year-old Masakatsu Morita, tasked with severing Mishima’s head from his physique, in accordance with the standard samurai ritual of seppuku. The grisly process lastly accomplished, Morita additionally died by suicide.
Mishima’s dying shocked the world. Salacious tabloids speculated wildly in regards to the extra intimate particulars of Mishima’s relationship with Morita. The nation’s scandalised leaders rapidly issued statements condemning the world-famous creator’s militancy. The Japanese literary neighborhood distanced itself.
Meanwhile, onlookers tried to make sense of all of it. Why had Mishima performed it? What was he hoping to attain?
Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo on January 14 1925. His delivery identify was Hiraoka Kimitake. Something of a kid prodigy, he was educated on the prestigious Peers School (Gakushin), and graduated from the University of Tokyo with a legislation diploma. After a short stint working on the Ministry of Finance, he set his sights on discovering fame as a author.
Mishima’s literary aspirations could be traced again to his childhood. He started writing poetry on the age of six. By the time he hit his early teenagers, Mishima, who took inspiration from classical Japanese poetry and fashionable Western writers like Oscar Wilde and Rainer Maria Rilke, had composed over a thousand poems, together with a number of quick prose works.
His literary profession started in earnest in 1944, with the publication of A Forest in Full Bloom (Hanazakari no mori), a group of quick tales. It was adopted 4 years later by his debut novel, The Thieves (Tzoku), about love and dying in Japan within the quick post-war interval. Notably, it featured an introduction by Mishima’s sponsor and champion, Yasunari Kawabata, the primary Japanese novelist to win the Nobel.
Then, Confessions of a Mask made him a family identify in Japan. It tells the story of a younger homosexual man, Kochan. Acutely self-aware, the precocious Kochan understands he’s completely different. He emphasises artifice and efficiency:
Everyone says that life is a stage. But most individuals don’t appear to turn out to be obsessive about the concept, at any price not as early as I did. By the top of childhood I used to be already firmly satisfied that it was so and that I used to be to play my half on the stage with out as soon as ever revealing my true self.
By the identical token, Mishima’s narrator is more than pleased to confide within the reader:
that’s not the same old matter of ‘self-consciousness’ to which I’m referring right here. Instead it’s merely a matter of intercourse, of the function via which one makes an attempt to hide, typically even from himself, the true nature of his sexual wishes.
Kochan’s sexual and psychological wishes, he candidly reveals, typically tackle a disturbingly violent depth. Earlier within the guide, he admits to “delighting in imagining situations in which I myself was dying in battle or being murdered”.
These impulses persist all through Kochan’s childhood and adolescence. In September 1944, the now 20-year-old Kochan, having graduated from college, is distributed to work in a manufacturing facility. He explains, in characteristically expansive prose, that the manufacturing facility
operated upon a mysterious system of manufacturing prices: taking no account of the financial dictum that capital funding ought to produce a return, it was devoted to a monstrous nothingness. No surprise then that every morning the employees needed to recite a mystic oath.
It takes a second for the reader to understand what Kochan, who’s bowled over by what he sees, is getting at:
In it all of the strategies of recent science and administration, along with the precise and rational considering of many superior brains, had been devoted to a single finish – Death.
He continues:
Producing the Zero-model fight airplane utilized by the suicide squadrons, this nice manufacturing facility resembled a secret cult that operated thunderously – groaning, shrieking, roaring […] it did in truth reality possess spiritual grandeur, even to the way in which the priestly administrators fattened their very own stomachs.
This unsettling, morbid passage is typical of Mishima. It gives an unflinching critique of industrialised modernity, concurrently presenting the manufacturing facility as a quasi-sacred, swollen and explicitly sexualised type of house.
Not lengthy after this, Kochan admits to “having completely lost the desire to live”. He takes solace in being “surrounded by such a bountiful harvest of so many types of death”, together with in “an air raid”, “military service”, or “from disease”.
Despite this, he survives the battle. Yet his survival feels nearly like a betrayal of his wishes. He confesses a “feeling of being neither alive nor dead”.
While we must be cautious when drawing direct parallels between fiction and the creator’s life, Mishima, like many others of his era, appears to have felt the identical manner.
Exposed to a heady concoction of wartime propaganda and emperor-worship, he struggled to make sense of what defeat meant for post-war Japan, and to return to phrases with Emperor Hirohito’s abdication of divine authority.
These themes come to the fore within the title story of a brand new English assortment of Mishima’s tales, Voices of the Fallen Heroes (Eirei no koe), printed this month to mark his centenary.
As his dramatic and divisive actions on November 25 1970 display, Mishima fervently embraced the concept of an excellent militaristic previous. In a really actual, if unnerving sense, Mishima’s dedication to this imaginative and prescient culminated in his last, dramatic act.
During his lifetime, he was labelled “a sensationalist, a contrarian, an irrationalist, an egomaniac, a fake, a buffoon, a nihilist, a genius, a fascist, a madman”.
His life invitations us to reckon with the intersection of artwork, politics and identification in methods nonetheless painfully related at present. It additionally raises a number of associated questions. Would he have been remembered as a towering determine in world literature if not for the style of his dying? I believe he would, although others would possibly disagree.
What we are able to say for sure is that Yukio Mishima is not only a literary icon – he’s a cautionary reminder of the complicated, generally harmful relationship between creativity and fanaticism.