Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima: The Masterpiece and the Catastrophe

Just after noon on 25 November 1970, Japan's most famous living novelist stood on a balcony at the Ichigaya army camp in Tokyo, wearing a headband inscribed with the words "to be reborn seven times to serve the country," and asked the soldiers below a question: "Is there not even one man among you who will rise up with me?" Between eight hundred and a thousand troops had been assembled to hear him. Most were clerks. They jeered. "We can't hear you." "You idiot." "Madman." Helicopters drowned out the rest. Ten minutes later he was dead by his own hand, and a body of work that had earned five Nobel nominations was permanently attached to a farce.

Kimitake Hiraoka

He was born Kimitake Hiraoka on 14 January 1925 in the Yotsuya ward of Tokyo. His father, Azusa, was a government official; his mother, Shizue, descended from samurai nobility. The decisive figure was his grandmother Natsuko, herself descended from Tokugawa Ieyasu, who took the boy away from his parents, kept him from other children, and raised him in a sealed aristocratic hothouse. His father later attempted to correct what he considered the resulting effeminacy through harsh discipline, including hostility to his son's writing.

He entered the elite Gakushūin, the Peers' School, at six. He was writing at twelve and became the youngest member of the school's editorial board. In 1941 his teacher Fumio Shimizu invented the pen name "Yukio Mishima" for him — not as an artistic gesture but to keep his father from finding out.

The Draft He Failed

Called up in 1944, he was declared unfit in February 1945 when an army doctor mistook a cold for tuberculosis. Researchers have since suggested he may have exaggerated the symptoms. The unit he would have joined was later destroyed in the Philippines. He admired the kamikaze pilots and was tormented by having survived, and that unearned survival is the fault line running under everything he wrote afterwards.

At his father's insistence he read law at the University of Tokyo from 1945, then joined the Ministry of Finance, where he lasted a year before exhaustion forced him out.

Confessions of a Mask

*Thieves* (1948) placed him among the postwar writers. *Confessions of a Mask* (1949) made him a star at twenty-four: a semi-autobiographical novel about a homosexual man constructing a social facade, published in a country not remotely ready for it. *The Sound of Waves* (1954) drew on Greek myth and was attacked for romanticising old-fashioned Japanese values. *The Temple of the Golden Pavilion* (1956) built a novel out of a real 1950 temple arson. The tetralogy *The Sea of Fertility* was his last major work.

He wrote for the theatre as prolifically as for the page — *Madame de Sade* (1965) has been called postwar Japanese theatre's greatest drama — and founded his own troupes after falling out with Communist-affiliated actors. He married Yōko Sugiyama on 1 June 1958 and had two children, Noriko and Iichirō.

Sun and Steel

From 1955 he rebuilt his body with the same discipline he gave his prose, training for fifteen years to reach 5th dan in kendo, 2nd dan in battōjutsu and 1st dan in karate. His 1968 essay *Sun and Steel* denounced the intellectual's preference for mind over body. He posed for Eikoh Hosoe's photobook *Ba-ra-kei*, won *Heibon Punch*'s "Mr. Dandy" poll in 1967, and became the first Japanese man of letters called a superstar. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize five times in the 1960s. When his early mentor and champion Yasunari Kawabata won it in 1968, Mishima understood that the door had closed on him.

The Shield Society

His work was largely apolitical until 1960. The Anpo protests against the U.S.–Japan security treaty changed that, and by the mid-1960s his politics had hardened into open ultranationalism. *Patriotism* (1960) glorified a young officer's suicide after a failed coup. *Tenth-Day Chrysanthemum* celebrated the officers of the February 26 rising. *On Hagakure* (1967) called for a return to bushido. *On the Defense of Culture* (1968) attacked postwar Japan's "hollow prosperity" and insisted on the emperor's centrality, arguing that Hirohito's renunciation of divinity had rendered the wartime dead meaningless.

In 1968 he founded the Tatenokai, the Shield Society — a private militia whose members signed oaths in blood against left-wing revolution. In May 1969 he debated the radical students occupying the University of Tokyo for two and a half hours, courteously, and admired their conviction while rejecting everything they believed.

25 November 1970

At 10:58 that morning, Mishima and four Tatenokai members entered Camp Ichigaya on a pre-arranged appointment with Lieutenant General Kanetoshi Mashita, commander of the Eastern Army. They tied him to a chair. Mishima held the door with a sword, wounding eight officers who tried to force it. His written demands, pushed under the door, were that the garrison be assembled and that he be allowed to speak.

He spoke for about ten minutes, calling on the Self-Defense Forces to rise against Article 9 of the constitution and restore Japan's sovereignty and the emperor. "If the Japanese don't stand up here now," he told them, "there will be no constitutional reform." Nobody stood up. He went back inside, told General Mashita, "We have no grudge against you. We did it to return the JSDF to the Emperor," and committed seppuku. His second, Masakatsu Morita, failed to complete the beheading; Hiroyasu Koga finished it, and then Morita took his own life as well. Mashita, released unharmed, said afterwards that he felt no hatred towards them and recognised "the pure hearts of thinking about our country."

Why Yukio Is Called a Genius

The literary case is not in dispute. Mishima is routinely described as one of the most important postwar stylists of the Japanese language, a writer whose luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors fused classical Japanese form with Western modernism, and who returned obsessively to beauty, eroticism and death without ever going slack. He wrote novels, Noh plays, essays and modern drama at a professional standard in all of them; *Confessions of a Mask* at twenty-four and *The Temple of the Golden Pavilion* at thirty-one would each be a career. Five Nobel nominations in a single decade is the international ledger.

The counter-case is not a nuance, it is a wall. Mishima was an ultranationalist who built a private army, demanded the restoration of the emperor's divinity, wrote a play titled *My Friend Hitler*, and died attempting to incite a military coup against a democratic constitution — after taking a general hostage and wounding eight men with a sword. Prime Minister Eisaku Satō's reaction was "I can only think that he has gone mad"; the defence minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, called it "a very regrettable incident." He is regarded by many in Japan as a fascist, and the incident fed the emergence of the postwar New Right. Nor was the work uniformly brilliant: *Kyōko no Ie* (1959) was branded his first failure even while selling 150,000 copies a month. The honest position refuses the two easy exits. The politics do not retroactively ruin the prose, and the prose does not launder the politics. He was a major novelist and he was a man who tried to overthrow his government and could not persuade a single clerk to follow him.

Legacy

The verdict Japan actually rendered is stranger than either camp allows. In a 2000 *Bungei Shunjū* survey, the Mishima Incident was ranked the second greatest event in twentieth-century Japan — above the fall of the Berlin Wall. The books remain in print worldwide and the plays are still staged. What he wanted was to be the last samurai. What he became was an unignorable national argument that has now outlasted him by more than fifty years.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
• Notable work: Confessions of a Mask
• Notable work: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
• Notable work: Kyōko no Ie
• Genres: drama, manifesto and lecture