Mishima Yukio
H U G O' S L I T E R A R Y U N I V E R S E
Great Writers and Poets
MISHIMA, YUKIO
(Pseudonym of KIMITAKE HIRAOKA, b. Jan. 14, 1925, Tokyo—d. Nov. 25, 1970 Tokyo), flamboyant and prolific Japanese writer whose works reflect the conflict between Westernization and traditional Japanese values – a conflict he resolved tragically for himself by his public ritual suicide. Mishima was the son of a high civil servant and attended the aristocratic Peers School in Tokyo. During World War II, having failed to qualify physically for military service, he worked in a Tokyo factory and after the war studied law at the University of Tokyo. In 1948-49 he worked in the banking division of the Japanese Ministry of Finance. His first novel, the partly autobiographical Confessions of a Mask (1948), introduces the theme of homosexuality that recurs in many of his works. It gained him immediate acclaim, and he began to devote his full energies to writing.
Preoccupation with blood, death, and suicide and a rejection of the sterility of modern life pervade Mishima’s works. His earlier heroes were reminiscent of Western antiheroes, tormented by physical or psychological problems; his later ones were in the more positive tradition of Japanese literature.
The temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959) is the story of a young attendant of a Buddhist temple who destroys his house of prayer by fire because he is so obsessed by its beauty. Sun and Steel (1970) deals with the "white-hot" shame of Japan’s defeat in World War II and the glorification of body-building. Both contain musings on death. His last work, the Sea of Fertility (1970), is a four-volume epic of modern Japan, in which the Moon’s barren Sea of Fertility (Mare Fecunditatis) represents modern Japan.
The short story "Patriotism" from The Death in Midsummer and Other Stories (1966) was made into the 1966 film Yukoku. Mishima directed and starred in this film, which depicts the ritual seppuku suicide as an affirmation of Japan’s martial ethic. In addition to his films, he wrote plays in the traditions of Japanese Kabuki and No theatre, and he reworked traditional legends, combining the cultural and religious experience of both East and West.
Mishima was torn between the values of contemporary Westernized Japan and the Samurai militaristic tradition of old Japan. Although he maintained en essentially Western life-style in his private life and had a vast knowledge of Western culture, he raged against Japan’s imitation of the West. He diligently developed the age-old Japanese arts of karate and swordsmanship and built a controversial private army, the Tate no Kai ("Shield Society"), to preserve Japanese martial spirit and to help the regular armed forces in case of an uprising from the left or a Communist attack.
Mishima’s death exemplified his belief in honorable ritual suicide as means of protest and of translating ideas into action. On Nov. 25, 1970, with four Shield Society followers, he seized control of the commanding general’s office at the military headquarters near downtown Tokyo. He gave a ten-minute speech from a balcony to a thousand assembled servicemen in which he attacked the weakness of Japan’s post World War II constitution, which forbids war and Japanese rearmament. He then committed seppuku in the traditional manner, disemboweling himself with his sword, followed by decapitation at the hands of a follower.
