11

Yukio Mishima

In a crowded field, Yukio Mishima must be one the most fascinating, enigmatic, and seemingly contradictory authors of the twentieth century. For his prose – at turns delicate, powerful, and ruthlessly self-critical – he very nearly won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was an actor, a model, a weightlifter. He was deeply concerned with questions of beauty, while also being deeply patriotic. His depictions of same-sex desire are some of the most thoughtful and sensitive of his time, while he was driven by a sense of personal will that in other hands might seem positively brutish and self-deluded.

A Japanese patriot, he was deeply influenced by European intellectual currents, while vociferously opposing the effect they were having upon Japanese society. He was a martial artist, a bisexual, a militia leader, a dramatist, a fascist. To read his work sometimes feels like you are encountering not a man, but a phenomenon of the will. But then, perhaps this is what he wished anglophones to think. Shortly before his death he told his friend Nobuko Albery, ‘The Japanese will never forgive me; I embarrass them. The Westerners won’t be able to understand me and as a consequence will make a fuss of me. What fun.’¹

Many of the themes of Mishima’s work – of cultural clash, a modernising Japan, of doing things properly – were epitomised in his family life and his childhood. On his father’s side of the family, he is descended from peasants married to nobility; on his mother’s, from intellectuals. His paternal great-grandfather had accrued enough wealth to send his sons to university, and through this rare honour his youngest son, Jotaro Hiraoka, had found a place in the elite, marrying Natsuko Nagai, the granddaughter of a powerful daimyo, or feudal lord. Their son, Azusa Hiraoka, was a straight-laced, hard-working, and unsentimental man, a lawyer,² who, in 1924, married Shizue Hashi, the bookish and sensitive descendant of Confucian scholars, whose father was a school principal.³

In 1925, they had their first child, Kimitake, who adopted the pen name Yukio Mishima as a teenager, which for clarity we will use for him throughout the chapter. The Hiraoka home was deeply unhappy: His mother, Shizue, was pulled between two terrible forces. Her husband was cold and unaffectionate, ignoring her when he returned from work late at night. But more terrible still was her mother-in-law, Natsuko. Natsuko had moved into the Hiraoka family home and dominated life there, her attitude toward Shizue switching between affection and total disregard, seemingly on a whim.

Natsuko’s moods were inflamed by the debilitating illnesses she suffered from: gout, cranial neuralgia (a painful neurological condition affecting the head), and, according to Mishima’s biographer Takeo Okuno, syphilis contracted by her unfaithful, womanizing husband, Jotaro.⁴ Mishima would later describe her death, in his autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask, as ‘a memento of vices in which my grandfather had indulged in his prime’.⁵ For the twenty-year-old girl raised in a quiet scholarly home, it must have been terribly alienating.

Worse was to come when, on the forty-ninth day of his life, Natsuko took the boy from Shizue and kept him for the next twelve years in her dark sickroom on the ground floor. He was raised surrounded by her sicknesses, her jealousy, her neuroses, and her fervent belief in the child’s nobility. Mishima’s younger siblings were spared this claustrophobic, nightmarish childhood, but he had to endure. In his early years, while still feeding the boy, Shizue was woken by an alarm every four hours. ‘Mother would stand over me while Kimitake nursed, timing him on a pocket watch she always carried,’ Shizue remembered. ‘When the time was up she would snatch him away and take him back downstairs to her room. I would lie in bed wishing I could hold Kimitake and feed him to his heart’s content.’⁶

Natsuko became terrified that her grandson might suffer an awful calamity, and as a result he was forced to stay with her, or her maid, constantly. He slept by his grandmother’s bed, accompanied her to the toilet, and even changed the dressing on her sores.⁷ He was rarely allowed to leave the house, and only in good weather, wrapped up in a coat and facemask. Inside the house, he was to play only with ‘girls’ games such as dolls, and quietly, to avoid the sensitivity to noise caused by his grandmother’s sciatica.⁸ The only relief he got from this cloistered, dark existence was in accompanying Natsuko to see Noh and Kabuki theatre.

In such a loaded and portentous childhood, certain experiences struck Mishima for their symbolic and erotic power. Confessions of a Mask, his second novel, details many of them. He describes the profound impact of seeing the magician and actor Tenkatsu Shokyokusai on stage, dressed in cheap costume jewellery and gaudy clothing, ‘her opulent body veiled in garments like those of the Great Harlot of the Apocalypse’.⁹ Enraptured by her performance, he later breaks into his mother’s kimonos, and dresses himself up as Madame Tenkatsu, powdering his face, before running into his grandmother’s sitting room, where Natsuko and Shizue are taking guests. ‘I’m Tenkatsu! I’m Tenkatsu!’ he cries, thrilled at his own performance, until he catches his mother’s eye, and she lowers her gaze from him.

A maid drags him from the room and strips him of his women’s clothes. ‘What was it I understood at that moment, or was on the verge of understanding? Did the motif of later years – that of “remorse as a prelude to sin” – show here the first hint of its beginning? Or was the moment teaching me how grotesque my isolation would appear to the eyes of love, and at the same time was I learning, from the reverse side of the lesson, my own incapacity for accepting love?’¹⁰ The anecdote is surely recognisable to all of us who, as a joyful child, unknowingly overstepped the barriers of gender presentation, and were greeted without mercy by the regime that enforces them with its most potent weapon, shame.

As he grew, Mishima experienced other such powerful moments of clarity and recognition about himself and his society, although these he learned to keep to himself, a habit of rigid emotional self-discipline he would practise throughout his life, releasing the experiences as tightly crafted sentences in his later art. He began to become obsessed with the death of men, particularly a violent death, such as a knight devoured by a dragon. He recalled the sense of disgust and betrayal in discovering that a knight in his picture book, a beautiful knight to whom he felt inextricably drawn, was not a young man but rather Joan of Arc: ‘If this beautiful knight was a woman and not a man, what was there left? … This was the first “revenge by reality” that I had met in life, and it seemed a cruel one, particularly upon the sweet fantasies I had cherished concerning his death.’¹¹

But perhaps his most captivating memory was when a troop of soldiers marched past his garden. He watched with a maid, hopeful they might give him a few used cartridges – contraband forbidden by his grandmother. The cartridges, he would realise later, were a meagre excuse for what he really craved – the odour of their sweat, ‘that odor like a sea breeze, like the air, burned to gold, above the seashore’. The smell of the sweaty young men induced in him a lifelong craving ‘for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling, the distant countries they would see, the ways they would die’.¹²

It sometimes seems that Mishima’s life, and fate, was determined by this brutal, suffocating childhood. For the rest of his life he would be driven by a complicated mix of desire for men and desire for death. Some of his biographers posit that his childhood with his grandmother, obsessed with the traditions and status of the past, pushed Mishima into a world of the past while all around him his peers were embracing, more or less enthusiastically, a changing world. While they were embracing Marxism, and pushing their work towards socially committed themes, his work seemed to revel in the densely poetic, baroque language of metaphor and sensation. His work may have been ground-breaking and daring in his depictions of same-sex desire, of his urge for death, but they were located within a long tradition of confessional literature in Japan, from the courtly diaries of the past twelve hundred years.¹³

Perhaps his closest literary companion, in that sense, was the French writer Jean Genet, who used powerful poetics to raise the most degraded and abject of society – the thief, the queer, the bum – into a position of honour that did not rely upon the acceptance of a society, which was the force of degradation itself. In many ways, the themes on which their literature revolved remain taboo because of their refusal, in contrast to their socialist realist colleagues, to simply replicate the old orders of dignity and honour, but this time with the poor and the workers on top.

According to Genet’s biographer, Edmund White, Genet turns the main character of his 1948 novel Funeral Rites, a traitor and collaborator, into someone to love partly because of his dissolute social status, and ‘partly because anyone who betrayed France would always be [Genet’s]friend’.¹⁴ In Genet, this willingness to affirm and reimagine the dignity of the abject of society as not merely equal to, but superior to, their oppressors, would lead him into a radical anti-imperialism. For Mishima, however, his belief would drive him to an ever more intense belief in rigorous self-transformation in the service of empire.

For someone so fascinated by Japanese history, it’s tempting to wonder how far Mishima understood his homosexuality within the legacy of same-sex desire in the country. Japan certainly has a long history of various social forms of same-sex desire and love; the influence of Chinese culture and literature, and particularly stories such as the story of the ‘shared peach’, and later the ‘passion of the cut sleeve’, both of which feature love between men, helped legitimise homosexuality within Japanese culture in the era of the Tokugawa shogunate, from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁵ These stories were among the anthropological and ethnographic references that the Weimar-era Bad Gays relied upon to justify their own sexualities and identities.

However, there are references to same-sex male love reaching much further back, to the eleventh century, in works such as The Tale of Genji, and in visual forms throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period in erotic artworks known as shunga. Models for male same-sex relationships, known as nanshoku, took a number of forms, but the norm was usually pederastic and pedagogical, as in classical Greece and Rome.¹⁶ Indeed, the last de facto emperor, Go-Shirakawa, whose effective downfall saw the emergence of the shoguns as the real rulers of Japan, was said to be heartbroken upon the execution of his young male lover who took part in the Heiji rebellion against him. Meanwhile, one of the leaders of the rebellion, Minamoto no Yoritomo, who went on to establish the first shogunate and the domination of the samurai noble warrior caste in his victory, also had a male lover, an officer named Yoshinao.¹⁷ In the centuries that followed, the role of the older male warrior inducting the younger warrior into the martial culture would often involve the opportunity for a sexual bond as well. The older partner was expected to be the penetrative party, and his young charge the receptive partner: to take another role was seen as shameful.

Homosexuality was also closely associated with both Noh and Kabuki theatre. Originally Kabuki was a form of dance drama performed by women, who played both male and female roles. Emerging at the start of the Tokugawa shogunate, it was a hugely popular art form in Japan’s burgeoning cities, swelling with a new bourgeois class of traders as well as members of the samurai class arriving from the countryside with the new-found peace.¹⁸

Early Kabuki quickly became associated with prostitution, with the actresses being made available for sex after shows, to the extent that in 1629, less than thirty years after the first Kabuki performance, women were banned from Kabuki.

Instead, teenage boys began to take the roles; this had little effect on solving the problem, however, as where previously men had become obsessed with the actresses, they simply switched their desires to the young men, who were just as available for paid sex. When boys’ Kabuki was banned twenty years later, only ‘adult’ men (over the age of fifteen) could perform, but unsurprisingly, the concept of Kabuki as exciting and erotic had already been fixed.¹⁹ Often onnagata, men who played exclusively female roles, carried that ‘performance’ into everyday life, and became highly desirable for both male and female lovers.

As a result of this increasing urbanisation, changing trends in Kabuki, and the desire of the nascent middle class to emulate the noble ‘brotherhood bonds’ of samurai-class homosexual relationships, male prostitution boomed in eighteenth-century Japan. Unlike in early modern Europe, there were few religious strictures in Japanese Buddhism that suppressed homosexuality per se, while Shintoism, a Japanese polytheistic religion, was more concerned with fostering a religious nationalism than moral surveillance. This meant that the suppression of homosexuality in much of Protestant and Catholic Europe at that time had no complementary force in Japanese society, not least because, starting at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japan’s shoguns implemented Sakoku, an absolutist isolationist foreign policy which prohibited virtually all trade with outside nations, especially European ones, forbade most travel to and from the country, and limited severely the cultural reach of external cultures into Japan.

This period lasted almost 250 years, until in 1853 the US sailed a fleet of gunships into Edo harbour and demanded the country open up its trade routes. The following year the shogun signed a treaty establishing diplomatic relations with the US. These unequal treaties sounded the death knell for the shogunate system that had ruled Japan since the twelfth century. Feeling humiliated by the American success and ensuing treaties, many of the samurai class began to rally around the figure of the emperor, a largely tokenistic, symbolic position that had been politically impotent during the rule of the shoguns. A nationalist cultural and political movement emerged called SonnM jMi, meaning ‘Revere the emperor and expel the barbarians’. In 1867 the Emperor KMmei died, and his teenage son ascended to the throne as Emperor Meiji. Realising his attempts at reform were futile, the shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu handed his actual authority back to the emperor. The period of the emperors as puppets, with the shogun as actual dictators, was drawing to a close; after a short period of conflict in which the emperor’s rule was consolidated, Japan entered an entirely new political, social, and cultural period, named after a now supreme emperor: the Meiji era. The Empire of Japan had dawned.

During the Meiji Restoration, social and cultural attitudes changed quickly. ‘Meiji’ itself means ‘enlightened rule’: the new government started to implement drastic reforms across society, aiming to combine some forms of traditional values with technological innovation, industrialization, and military and market reforms. The government looked increasingly to Europe and the United States for inspiration. The feudal system was abolished, with the old daimyo system of feudal magnates and landowners being swept away and private property introduced through a market-based system. Also introduced were a new system of nobility based on the European model and a parliamentary constitutional monarchy based on a new constitution.

As in Germany and Italy, the government viewed a single, standardized language as vital for nation-building, and it reformed education, with a new system of public schools. Japan experienced an industrial revolution, with railways, modern communication systems, and new manufacturing industries taking root. Inevitably, with this changing socioeconomic system and this forcible reorientation towards the West, attitudes towards sexuality also shifted.

While the concept of nanshoku, the culture of male love, still held sway within the military and education, it was in the process of being suppressed. In 1873 Japan introduced its first anti-sodomy law as part of the penal code, forbidding keikan, or anal sex, directly influenced by Paragraph 175 of the Prussian penal code.²⁰ The statute remained on the books for just a decade, before the influence of French legal systems led to it being rescinded.

With the general upsurge in interest in scientific and industrial developments from Europe also came, more specifically, a rise in sexology. Increasingly, the Japanese understood homosexuality not within the context of the country’s rich erotic and cultural background, but within a medical and legal framework that saw it as an aberration or perversion. Research from European sociologists like Krafft- Ebing and Ulrichs began to influence some Japanese sexologists’ thinking; for the first time, the idea of homosexuality being a form of gender inversion began to permeate thought on the subject, where previously homosexuality related much more closely to discourses on age, relating to the bonds between older and younger male lovers.²¹

By the time Mishima was a young man, homosexuality had not been eradicated from Japanese society, but it was marginalised and suppressed to a level of social ostracization similar to that in Europe. Mishima was at high school during the Second World War when he began to recognise within himself strong homosexual desires towards certain friends, desires that were intrinsically tied up with sadomasochistic drives. These are discussed in Confessions of a Mask, which also demonstrates his familiarity not just with European sexologists such as Magnus Hirschfeld, writers such as Marcel Proust, and theories of inversion, but also with the premodern depictions of homosexual desire within Renaissance culture in Europe.²²

It was also while at school that his precocious talent as a writer began to manifest. School had never been easy for Mishima; his grandmother’s behaviour had left him overcoddled, and he was regarded as the ‘class runt’,²³ yet at the same time hardened, having witnessed her increasingly traumatic behaviour, including holding a knife to her own throat and threatening suicide.²⁴ However, when he became a teenager, his grandmother allowed him to move back with his immediate family, as she was becoming increasingly sick. Nevertheless, the new family home was also an unhappy place; while he bonded with his mother, his father was still cruel to Mishima and tried to suppress the boy’s love of literature, which he regarded as girlish.²⁵ In 1939 Mishima’s grandmother died, but she left with him not just a legacy of an intense and probably traumatic childhood, but a deep interest in and love for traditional Japanese culture, including Noh and Kabuki.

While at high school his literary side flourished, despite his father’s best efforts. His writing, like his personality, was supremely self-assured, and at just sixteen he was invited by the literary critic Fumio Shimizu to contribute a serialised story to the prestigious literary magazine he co-edited, Bungei Bunka (Art and Culture). The story, ‘Forest in Full Flower’, is a confident piece that addresses many of the issues of Mishima’s later work. The young narrator is impelled by the sense that he has inherited from his ancestors the quest for beauty; told through stories from the narrator’s ancestors, the work uses highly lyrical forms to address his longing for destiny, and, most specifically, the urge for death. Describing in one story a young woman who has escaped a cold lover only to find herself caught by the terror of the sea, he writes of her confrontation with the waves, ‘She was enfolded in the mysterious ecstasy of the moment just before the murderer strikes, when we are conscious that we are about to be murdered … It was a beautifully isolated present, a moment disconnected and pure as anything in the world.’²⁶

The members of Bugei Bunka’s editorial board and its surrounding milieu were intoxicated with their discovery; they bestowed on him his pen name, Yukio Mishima, for he was still fearful of his father finding out he had not abandoned his literary dreams. Yet he had found his audience; the magazine continued to publish his work and he was inducted into its circle, attending events and discovering more of the literary world.

His work was particularly attractive to one board member, Zenmei Hasuda, a fervent nationalist who loved Mishima’s invocation of a past Japan untroubled by the reformations and modernity that followed the Meiji Restoration.²⁷ Hasuda’s role as mentor cemented in the teenage boy a deep reverence for a Japanese nationalism rooted in its literary history; Hasuda was the author of a study on a seventh-century prince, Otsu no Miko, in which he concluded, ‘To die young, I am sure, is the culture of my country.’²⁸

Mishima might soon have had the chance; in 1944 he was drafted into the Japanese military. When it was finally time for him to be called up in February 1945, he wrote a farewell note to his family, certain that his awaited death was near, imploring his brother to follow his example and ending it with a traditional salute to the emperor: ‘Serve the Emperor! TennMheika Banzai’ (Long Live His Majesty the Emperor) However, Mishima’s health failed him, and he was incorrectly diagnosed first with tuberculosis, and then severe bronchitis, and released from service.

One could only imagine how conflicted a young man so committed to his own death as he was must have felt on this temporary reprieve from annihilation. He later remarked that he had would never ‘attain heights of glory sufficient to justify my having escaped death in the army’.²⁹ Yet he also recalled that he ran from the recruitment barracks, fearful that a soldier might follow him and tell him a mistake had been made, and that he was enrolled after all.³⁰ In the end, he felt he had been forsaken even by death: ‘I delighted in picturing the curious agonies of a person who wanted to die but had been refused by Death.’³¹

Despite being feted by this group of older nationalist writers throughout the war, he had published little; other than his work in magazines, he had privately published just one edition of ‘Forest in Full Flower’ in 1941, a small run due to paper shortages, and more a memento of what he assumed would be his short life than an actual commercial proposition. At the end of the war, he began writing in earnest, abandoning his career in the civil service to write novels. He was astonishingly prolific, publishing fifteen novels from 1948 to 1958, including the autobiographical Confessions of a Mask, about his upbringing and realisation of his sadomasochistic homosexual desires, and Forbidden Colors, which tells the story of an older man using his younger male lover to enact revenge upon women, which addressed many of Japan’s historical tropes related to homosexuality, especially the idea of the misogynistic boy-lover. In 1956 he published The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which took as its inspiration the real-life arson attack on the Kinkaku-ji, a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, by a Buddhist acolyte.³² Like many of Mishima’s works, the book is a reflection on the intoxicating power of beauty, and the tendency for people to destroy the things that they feel most strongly for. He also wrote dozens of scripts for plays, as well as a number of Kabuki and Noh plays.

Japan was a completely changed country in the aftermath of the war and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Significantly, the emperor was forced to publicly rescind the idea that he was divine, paving the way for a new constitution in which the emperor was not the head of state, but rather a ‘symbol of the state’. This declaration had significant consequences for the far right in Japan, as it represented a betrayal of those who had willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor on the basis that he was God.

The influx of foreigners into the nation, and the US-driven economic recovery, also changed Japanese society. One new development that arose from people catering to these new arrivals was the emergence of commercial gay establishments such as bars and cafés. In the early fifties, around the time he was writing Forbidden Colors, Mishima began to frequent gay bars, especially the ‘Brunswick’ in Ginza, central Tokyo. It is notable that the figure of the isolated homosexual in Confessions of a Mask, alone in his lonely desire and merely an observer of bodies that he desires, had shifted by the time of Forbidden Colors, where the relationship between homosexuals drives the story. Mishima developed a lively social life between the homosexual world and the literary world, a life that presumably had a few crossovers, and he made few attempts to hide his patronage of gay bars. Indeed, on a trip to the Americas and Europe his companions noted his desire to hit up gay bars in Paris, while in Brazil his guide was surprised by his ‘unabashed homosexuality’.³³ Good for you, girl.

Yet he was clearly romantically interested in women, even if not sexually; according to one biographer he was considering marriage to Michiko ShMda, a literature student who went on to marry the crown prince and eventually become the empress. In the end, he married YMko Sugiyama, with whom he had a son and a daughter; he would claim one of the reasons he married her was because she was unaware of his writing career (by the time of their marriage in 1958, he was already famous in Japan). There is a touch of irony to his claim that YMko was ‘uninterested’ in his writing, as after his death she denied what is not just clear in his work, but one of its driving motivations and highest qualities: his intuitive, honest, and direct discussion of homosexual desire. Then again, it’s not clear that, even if blackmailers and gossips had told her about his homosexuality, he had ever really broached the subject: ‘I believe that a writer is a person never understood by his wife’, he wrote, ‘and that is fine with me.’³⁴

Mishima’s sexuality was not just homosexual but was combined with very complex feelings towards his body, a body that, at least as a younger man, both repelled and betrayed him. A close friend from the Tokyo gay bars days was Akihiro Maruyama, a cabaret singer and drag queen who later starred in the film Black Lizard, based on one of Mishima’s plays. He remembers Mishima as a narcissist with a ‘true eye for beauty’, yet ‘when he looked at himself with those eyes that could really perceive beauty, and he was looking at himself constantly, he was filled with disgust at what he saw’.³⁵ A persistent allegorical figure in Mishima’s writing, and also his photography (did we mention that he was also a photographer, an actor, a model, and a film director?), was the figure of St Sebastian, an early Christian martyr who for centuries has been a model for homosexual artists and writers.

St Sebastian was a Roman soldier martyred by being beaten to death, but only after having survived an attempted execution by being shot full of arrows; some suggest his role as a homosexual icon relates to his having symbolically survived repeated penetration, but what is clear is that his figure, usually represented by a beautiful young man bound to a tree, his flesh penetrated although rarely bleeding, has fascinated queer artists from Il Sodoma to Derek Jarman. In Confessions of a Mask, he describes how his first experience of masturbation and ejaculation was over the ‘tense, fragrant, youthful flesh’ of St Sebastian in a reproduction of Guido Reni’s 1625 painting of the saint.³⁶ It is not just the supple, smooth skin of the young saint that turned Mishima on, but the eroticisation of violence, and particularly by the victim. Mishima would, towards the end of his life, depict himself in exactly the position of Reni’s paintings for a series of self-portraits as St Sebastian.

This complex relationship with the body, the elevation of pain and brutality into a higher form of erotic experience, is extremely difficult for those who are not themselves masochists to understand; in fact, if one were curious to comprehend, it’s in Mishima’s lifetime of work that they could find some of the most thoughtful, tender, painful, and erotic portrayals of the masochistic impulse. In his 1959 book Kyoko’s House, Mishima touches upon the potent combination of drives and forces that marked the final stage of his life. It uses four characters to depict different aspects of Mishima’s own personality: a businessman, an actor, a boxer, and a painter. The boxer, his identity diminished by an injury that leaves him unable to fight, finds new solace in a new body, taking up weightlifting, and a new ideology, drifting into far-right extremism, finding that the slogans and visions of a Japan reborn along old values ‘are closer to anything than death’.³⁷ Eventually, the boxer signs a blood oath to his beliefs and, with his lover, commits suicide. In a disturbing prelude scene, in which his lover has cut him with a razor, Mishima writes:

Here the drama of existence materialized for the first time, blood and pain utterly guaranteed his existence, and with his existence at its centre an entire panorama unfolded … For his beautiful body truly to exist it was not enough that it be merely enrounded by a wall of muscle. What had been lacking, in a word, was blood.³⁸

The potency of his prose surely emerges from the fact that these are Mishima’s words ventriloquized. Since the mid- 1950s, and following a failed attempt at learning boxing, Mishima had been subjecting himself to an intense and highly disciplined weight training regime, revolutionizing his own weedy body in an exercise of self-control and self-transformation. To call this obsession with physical transformation ‘narcissism’ might be accurate, but it is not the whole truth, or barely even part of it, nor is it entirely correct to see it as an attempt to improve his physical health, something that had hampered him since his homebound childhood. Those things are mixed up in it, but there remains a different motive at the core of his drive.

His weightlifting companion Kubo recalled that when Mishima was asked in the early 1960s to be photographed posing topless to illustrate a new encyclopaedia entry on ‘body-build’, it was one of the crowning achievements of his life.³⁹ Astonishingly, however, Mishima always skipped legs day: he never built any mass on his legs, and he would later insist that all his weightlifting photos were taken from the waist up only. But in Kyoko’s House, and later in Sun and Steel, an autobiographical essay on his martial arts and weightlifting practice, it is clear that the discipline is, quite literally, about the body as his own creation. He makes his own body, something otherwise weak and vulnerable, through the process of will. The mind can enact change upon the body, and to ignore the body, something poets and intellectuals have a habit of doing, is to ignore the full potential of the mind as well. In his writing on weightlifting, he returned to similar themes he tackled in his writing on sadomasochism – always finding proof of his existence through sensation.

Yet muscles were not enough: death was the real proof of existence. In Sun and Steel Mishima described his thoughts on this using the example of an apple. The apple was not created by words, so though words might capture the fact that a core lies at the heart of the apple, one must see the core to believe it really exists. The existence of the core, of the nature of the apple itself, can only be determined once a knife cleaves it. Mishima knew that his own muscles, the flesh of his apple, could be seen in the mirror, but felt that real proof of his existence only comes about in it being extinguished. ‘That, precisely, is when the knife of the foe must come cutting into the flesh of the apple – or rather, my own flesh. Blood flows, existence is destroyed, and the shattered senses give existence as a whole its first endorsement, closing the logical gap between seeing and existing. And this is death.’⁴⁰

It is not hard to see that the trajectory of self-sacrifice that had begun in Mishima’s childhood was developing both a deeper intellectual justification and a more insistent drive towards extinction. This too was accompanied by an entrenchment of the political ideologies that he had inherited from the Japanese romantics and nationalists with whom he had surrounded himself as a teenager. Many of those writers had been Marxists who had renounced their Marxism for the rising power of Japanese fascism and romantic nationalism. Their devotion towards the divinity of the emperor provided a made-to-measure hook on which Mishima could hang his death wish, giving it a valorizing ideological and moral framework. As the pain of death honours and endorses existence, so too does it endorse the cause for which one dies.

After the war Mishima was not hugely politically involved, although he oriented himself against both the materialism of the Left and the dry, worthy literature of socialist realism that seemed to run contrary to his own literary imagination soaked in myth, metaphor, and historical drama. But in the 1960s, he became increasingly active and wrote more political essays. While his own writing was soaked in the influences of European literary culture, he became increasingly vocal about foreign influences on Japanese culture as a whole. His passion for militarism and bushido, a set of codes defining the way of the Samurai warriors, put him at odds with leftists as well. Article 9 of the 1947 constitution of Japan had prohibited both an army for the Japanese and their right to declare war, stating that ‘Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes’. For the Japanese far right, this was an unforgivable hobbling of the national spirit, a humiliating emasculation of Japan’s honour as a nation. This imposition by the Americans, however, soon looked untenable and expensive, and in the 1950s, under the conceit that Japan was entitled to self-defence, the government built a de facto army called the Japan Self-DefenceForces.

In 1967 Mishima, under his birth name, joined the Self-Defence Forces, taking part in a short basic training course. After the training, he grew concerned about the rise of the Japanese New Left, particularly in the education system, and advocated the creation of a new National Guard for Japan, a civilian force that could help suppress the communist insurrection or revolution he feared. When this campaign was unsuccessful, he instead began to recruit right-wing students to form a new far-right militia. He called this group the Tatenokai, or the ‘Shield Society’.

Mishima succeeded in recruiting a force of about fifty new cadets each year, after personally interviewing them. The cadets trained alongside the Self-Defence Forces, but were also expected to attend political lectures, where there was debate (a single political ideology was not enforced) and drills.⁴¹ The basic creed of the organisation was the defence of the honour and divine nature of the emperor, and the belief that the emperor was the ‘source and guarantor’ of Japanese culture, the thing that made Japan unique.

While he was forming and leading the Tatenokai, Mishima was also working on his most ambitious literary project to date, The Sea of Fertility, an ambitious tetralogy of novels that attempted to synthesize his wider thoughts on life, Japanese culture, and the nature of belief through a series of characters as reincarnations. His strengthening belief in nationalism was manifesting in his interest in ultranationalist groups who, in the first half of the twentieth century, had engaged in sometimes spectacular violence in defence of the same beliefs in the emperor’s divinity and Japanese tradition, such as the ‘League of Blood’ campaign to assassinate liberal and pro-Western politicians and businessmen in 1932, or the ‘February 26 Incident’, an attempted coup d’état by young army officers who were aiming to repeat something akin to the Meiji Restoration, hoping to hand more power to the emperor and purge the government of what they felt were treacherous advisers. In late 1970, Mishima drafted a manifesto which echoed many of these aims, attempting to deliver the Japanese Self-Defence Forces from their limited role under the Constitution and restore them to their rightful role as inheritors of the samurai traditions. The manifesto ended with a call to action:

We will restore Japan to her true form, and in the restoration, die. Will you abide a world in which the spirit is dead and there is only a reverence for life? In a few minutes we will show you where to find a greater value. It is not liberalism or democracy. It is Japan. The land of the history and the tradition we love, Japan. Are none of you willing to die by hurling yourself against the constitution that has torn the bones and heart from that which we love? If you are there, let us stand and die together. We know your souls are pure; it is our fierce desire that you revive as true men, as true samurai, that has driven us to this action.⁴²

Mishima’s final act, his final endorsement of existence, was underway. For a year he had been planning, with a small cadre of young officers from the Tatenokai, a spectacular demonstration of his moral and political beliefs, and the denouement of his lifelong drive towards physical self-obliteration. At the end of November 1970, he arranged to meet General Masuda, the commandant at the Ichigaya Barracks, a former military academy for the Imperial Japanese Army. The location for his final showdown was highly symbolic: the building in which he would meet the commandant had housed the courtroom of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the post-war trial that had tried Japan’s leaders for war crimes.

On the night of 24 November he made his final preparations, writing to a Tatenokai cadet to disband the organisation, and to another officer that he be buried in his uniform with his sword in hand, saying, ‘I want evidence I died not as a literary man but as a warrior.’ In a letter to his father, he asked that his posthumous Buddhist name include the character bu, meaning ‘sword’, and not bun, meaning ‘pen’.⁴³

The following morning, he dressed in his Tatenokai uniform, took his prized samurai sword, and, with four young cadets, drove to the military base. Inside the general’s office, conversation was cordial, and the commandant complimented them on their dress and demeanour. Then, acting on a pre-arranged signal, one of his accomplices, Chibi- Yoga, gagged and bound the commandant while Mishima and the others barricaded themselves into the office. Mishima’s demands were simple: he wanted the entire Eastern Division of the Self-Defence Forces to be assembled outside the office at midday, and he would deliver a speech. Any interference, or hiccups, and the commandant would be killed. Mishima’s stage-management was impeccable, as you might expect from an artist with his eye for aesthetic detail; he had provided journalists whom he had invited in advance with an envelope containing publicity shots for the attempted coup, a copy of the manifesto, and a letter detailing his itinerary for the day, including his requests for how to handle the written and photographic material.

By noon, eight hundred soldiers had been assembled before the building, and Mishima left the office for the balcony overlooking the troops. Another cadet, his friend Masakatsu Morita, hung from the balcony a banner proclaiming the group’s demands. Mishima began his speech to the men; for seven minutes he called for the men to assert themselves, to rise up, for the restoration of the emperor’s status as a living god, and a change in the constitution to allow for the return of the full strength and honour of the armed forces. Photographs taken by the invited press are astonishing and striking: with a white band tied around his head, and dressed in his impeccably smart uniform with white gloves, Mishima stands astride the roof, his hands seemingly making a series of sharp, demonstrative movements.

Yet the audience is the one part of the artwork that the writer cannot control; it was always unlikely that they would have joined this attempted coup, and it was clear that for Mishima, there was no expectation that it would ‘work’; it was the symbolism of the action, and not its efficacy, that was the point. But it seems unlikely he would have expected them to jeer him. Worse still, the three police helicopters that circled overhead seemed to drown him out, and his voice could not beat the noise. Despite wishing to speak for an hour, he rushed through to his conclusion. Then, he and Morita called out three times their final salute, ‘TennMheika Banzai!’

As the men stepped in from the balcony to the commandant’s office, Mishima said, ‘I don’t think they even heard me.’⁴⁴ Then, as planned, he quietly removed his jacket and sat on the floor. He took a short sword and thrust it into his stomach, before drawing it across his body in an act of seppuku, a ritual suicide first practised by the samurai as a way to restore honour to one’s family. Behind him, Morita had been assigned the role of kaishakunin, the one who would decapitate Mishima in a coup de grâce, but after two attempts he had failed to remove Mishima’s head. Another cadet, Hiroyasu Koga, stepped in and with a single blow sliced his head from his body.

It was as though the narrative of his life had reached a conclusion that he had written in his first chapter. After his funeral, his mother remarked, ‘This was the first time in his life Kimitake did something he always wanted to do. Be happy for him.’ He was cremated with his sword, uniform and gloves, as he desired; only at the last moment did his wife, YMko, place a pen and manuscript paper into his coffin with him.⁴⁵