Five Nobel nods, a private militia, and a contested legacy
Yukio Mishima—born Kimitake Hiraoka (1925–1970)—is among Japan’s major postwar stylists, known for early novels about a masked youth and a burned pavilion among other works. Nominated for the Nobel Prize five times in the 1960s, he watched 1968 go to patron Yasunari Kawabata.
He grew up in the biggest house on his Tokyo street, a rented two-storey home shared with parents, siblings, grandparents, six maids and male servants. His grandmother Natsuko, a descendant of a daimyō and through him of Tokugawa Ieyasu, removed him from his parents for several years. When he returned to them at twelve, his father Azusa, a ministry official with a taste for military discipline, tried to toughen him, once holding him beside a speeding steam locomotive, and tore up his manuscripts. The boy kept writing in secret, drawing on the Kojiki, Greek myth, Wilde, Rilke, Mann and Baudelaire, and fell in love with Kabuki and Noh after his grandmothers took him to performances.
His pen name was a protective disguise. When a teacher, Fumio Shimizu, arranged to publish the sixteen-year-old’s story Forest in Full Bloom in 1941, the editors invented a byline to shield him from his father: Mishima after a railway station they passed on the way to their meeting, and Yukio from the word for snow, after the white peak of Mount Fuji seen from the train. In 1944 he finished first in his class at the Peers’ School, receiving a silver watch from Emperor Hirohito. An army doctor sent him home in 1945 after mistaking a cold for tuberculosis, and Confessions of a Mask later hinted that he had lied his way out.
His writing mixed an opulent vocabulary and decadent imagery, blended Japanese tradition with Western models, and returned again and again to beauty, eroticism and death, notably in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and the essay Sun and Steel. He also acted, modelled and practised martial arts.
In his thirties he turned openly to the far right, condemning Western materialism, postwar democracy and communism as threats to Japan’s national essence. The Tatenokai he founded in 1968 was legal but clashed with the country’s new pacifism, and his life ended in 1970 with a failed coup attempt and ritual suicide.
Source: Yukio Mishima
