Yukio Mishima
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Yukio Mishima (三島由紀夫 Mishima Yukio), was the public name of Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡公威 Hiraoka Kimitake), (January 14, 1925 – November 25, 1970), a Japanese author and playwright, notable for both his nihilistic post-war writing and the circumstances of his suicide.
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Early life
Mishima's early childhood was dominated by the shadow of his grandmother, Natsu, who took the boy and separated him from his immediate family for several years. Natsu was of a minor retainer family which had been related to the samurai of the Tokugawa era; she maintained considerable aristocratic pretensions even after marrying Mishima's grandfather, a commoner but, nevertheless, a bureaucrat who had made his fortunes in the newly-opened colonial frontier. She was stubborn, and this was exacerbated by her sciatica. The young Mishima was employed to massage her to help alleviate her pain. She was also prone to violent, even morbid outbursts bordering on madness, which are occasionally alluded to in Mishima's works. It is to Natsu that some biographers have traced Mishima's fascination with death, and to the exorbitant: she read French and German, and had an aristocrat's taste for the Kabuki. Natsu famously did not allow Mishima to venture into the sunlight, to engage in any kind of sport, or to play with boys; he spent much of his time alone, or with female cousins and their dolls.
Mishima returned to his immediate family at 12. He entered into a relationship with his mother that some biographers have described as nearly incestuous; it was to his mother that he turned always for reassurance and proofreading. His father, a brutal man with a taste for military discipline, employed such tactics as holding the young boy up to the side of a speeding train; he also raided the young boy's room for evidence of an "effeminate" interest in literature, and ripped up adolescent Mishima's manuscripts wantonly. He is reported to have had no response to these gestures. (One important rejoinder one might add to his oft-fictionized early life is that biographers have often taken certain off-the-cuff remarks and Confessions of a Mask as expressions of autobiography. This is problematic, and has led to the more general issue of Mishima as larger-than-life.)
Schooling and early works
At 12, Mishima began to write his first stories. He read voraciously the works of Wilde, Rilke, and numerous Japanese classics. Although his family was not as affluent as those of the other students of this institution, Natsu insisted that he attend the elite Peers School.
After six miserable years at school, he still was a pale and frail teenager, but he started to do well and became the youngest member of the editorial board in the literary society at the school. He was invited to write a short story for the prestigious literary magazine, Bungei-Bunka (Literary Culture) and submitted Hanazakari no Mori (The Forest in Full Bloom). The story was published in book form in 1944, albeit in a limited fashion due to the shortage of paper in wartime.
Mishima received a draft notice for the Japanese Army during World War II. At the time of his medical check up he had a cold and spontaneously lied to the army doctor about having symptoms of tuberculosis and thus was declared unfit. Although Mishima was greatly relieved of not having to go to war, he continued to feel guilty for having survived and having missed the chance for a heroic death.
Although his father had forbidden him to write any further stories, Mishima continued to write secretly every night, supported and protected by his mother Shizue, who was always the first to read a new story. After school, his father, who sympathized with the Nazis, wouldn't allow him to pursue a writer's career, but instead forced him to study German law. Attending lectures during the day and writing at night, Mishima graduated from the elite Tokyo University in 1947. He obtained a position as an official in the government's Finance Ministry and was set up for a promising career.
However, he exhausted himself so much that his father agreed to his resigning his position within a year in order to devote his time to writing.
Post-war literature
Mishima began his first novel, Tōzoku (Thieves), in 1946 and published it in 1948. It was followed up by Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask), an autobiographical work about a young latent homosexual who must hide behind a mask in order to fit into society. The novel was extremely successful and made Mishima a celebrity at the age of 24.
Mishima was a disciplined and versatile writer. He wrote not only novels, popular serial novellas, short stories, and literary essays, but also highly-acclaimed plays for the Kabuki theater and modern versions of traditional Noh drama.
His writing gained him international celebrity and a sizable following in Europe and America, as many of his most famous works were translated into English.
He travelled extensively, was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times, and was the darling of many foreign publications. However, in 1968 his early mentor Yasunari Kawabata won the Prize and Mishima realized that the chances of it being given to another Japanese author in the near future were slim. It is also believed that Mishima wanted to leave the prize to the aging Kawabata, out of respect for the man who had first introduced him to the literary circles of Tokyo in the 1940s.
Private life
After Confessions of a Mask Mishima tried to leave behind the young man who had lived only inside his head, continuously flirting with death. He tried to tie himself to the real, physical world by taking up stringent physical exercise. In 1955 Mishima took up weight training and his workout regimen of three sessions per week was not disrupted for the final 15 years of his life. He also became very skillful at Kendo (Japanese swordfighting). However, the swimming and weight lifting only trained his upper body, while his legs stayed thin as before--and he found it impossible to get his early romanticism out of his system.
Although he visited gay bars in Japan, Mishima reportedly remained an observer and had affairs only with men when he travelled abroad. After briefly considering an alliance with Michiko Shoda -- she later became the wife of Emperor Akihito -- he married Yoko Sugiyama in 1958. Over the next three years, the couple had a daughter and a son.
In 1967 Mishima enlisted in the Ground Self Defense Force (GSDF) and underwent basic training. A year later, he formed the Tatenokai (Shield Society), composed primarily of young patriotic students who studied martial principles and physical discipline and who were trained through the GSDF under Mishima's tutelage.
In the last ten years of his life, Mishima acted in several movies and co-directed an adaptation of one of his stories, Patriotism, the Rite of Love and Death.
Ritual suicide
On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of the Tatenokai under a pretext visited the commandant of the Ichigaya Camp - the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. Once inside, they proceeded to barricade the office and tied the commandant to his chair. With a prepared manifesto and banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped onto the balcony to address the gathered soldiers below. His speech was intended to inspire them to stage a coup d'etat and restore the Emperor to his rightful place. He succeeded only in irritating them and was mocked and jeered. As he was unable to make himself heard, he finished his planned speech after only a few minutes. He stepped back into the commandant's office and committed seppuku. The act was to end in his ritual decapitation by Tatenokai member Masakatsu Morita. Morita, who was rumored to have been Mishima's lover, was unable to perform the decapitation properly: after several failed attempts, he allowed another Tatenokai member, Hiroyasu Koga, to finish the job. After Mishima was decapitated, Morita also attempted to commit seppuku and was beheaded by Koga.
Mishima prepared his suicide meticulously for a year and no one outside the group of hand-picked Tatenokai members had any indication of what he was planning. Mishima must have known that his coup plot would never succeed and his biographer, translator, and former friend John Nathan suggests that the scenario was only a pretext for the ritual suicide that Mishima always dreamed of. Mishima made sure his affairs were in order and even had the foresight to leave money for the defense at trial of the three surviving Tatenokai members.
Afterword
Much speculation has surfaced regarding Mishima's suicide. At the time of his death he had just completed the final book in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy and was recognized as one of the most important postwar stylists of the Japanese language.
Mishima wrote 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 books of short stories, and at least 20 books of essays as well as one libretto. A large portion of this oeuvre comprises books written quickly for profit, but even if these are disregarded, a substantial body of work remains.
While Mishima espoused a brand of 'patriotism' towards the end of his life (and in death), it is perhaps most appropriate to say that he took a position outside of politics. He was neither 'rightist' nor 'leftist': he was hated by true nationalists for his position, in Bunka Boeiron (A Defense of Culture), that Hirohito should have resigned the throne to take responsibility for the war dead, and was hated by leftists (particularly students) for his outspoken, anachronistic commitment to the code of the samurai. That his politics were in fact dominated by the language of aesthetics evinces this essential quality of 'the outsider', and suggests that the relationship between said politics and the political reality of postwar Japan was at best illusory.
The theatrical nature of his suicide, the camp nature of photographs he posed for, and the occasionally bathetic nature of his prose have surely taken their toll on his legacy. In Japanese and Anglo-American academies today, Mishima is virtually unspoken of, although he is undergoing something of reappraisal amongst critics interested in the critique of Japanese capitalism.
Awards
- Shincho Prize from Shinchosha Publishing, 1954, for The Sound of Waves.
- Kishida Prize for Drama from Shinchosha Publishing, 1955.
- Yomiuri Prize from Yomiuri Newspaper Co., for best novel, 1957, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
- Yomiuri Prize from Yomiuri Newspaper Co., for best drama, 1961, Toka no Kiku.
Major works
- For the Kinkaku-ji temple, see: Kinkaku-ji
Films
| Year | Title | USA Release Title | Character | Director |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1951 | Jumpaku no Yoru(純白の夜) | unreleased in the U.S. | Hideo Ohba | |
| 1959 | Fudōtoku Kyōikukōza(不道徳教育講座) | unreleased in the U.S. | himself | Katsumi Nishikawa |
| 1960 | Karakkaze Yarō(からっ風野郎) | Afraid to Die | Takeo Asahina | Yasuzo Masumura |
| 1966 | Yūkoku(憂国) | Patriotism, The Rite of Love and Death | Shinji Takeyama | Domoto Masaki, Yukio Mishima |
| 1968 | Kurotokage(黒蜥蝪) | Black Lizard | Human Statue | Kinji Fukasaku |
| 1969 | Hitokiri(人斬り) | Tenchu! | Shimbei Tanaka | Hideo Gosha |
| 1985 | Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (bio-pic) | Mishima | Paul Schrader, Music by Philip Glass | |
| Yukio Mishima: Samurai writer (BBC documentary) | same | Michael Macintyre |
Works about Mishima
- Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses by Eikoh Hosoe and Mishima. (photoerotic collection of images of Mishima, with his own commentary) (Aperture 2002 ISBN 0893811696)
- Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima by Roy Starrs (University of Hawaii Press, 1994, ISBN 0824816307 and ISBN 0824816307)
- Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, No 33) by Susan J. Napier (Harvard University Press, 1995 ISBN 067426181X)
- Mishima: A Biography by John Nathan (Boston, Little, Brown and Company 1974, ISBN 0316598445)
- Mishima ou la vison du vide (Mishima : A Vision of the Void), essay by Marguerite Yourcenar trans. by Alberto Manguel 2001 ISBN 0226965325)
- Rogue Messiahs: Tales of Self-Proclaimed Saviors by Colin Wilson (Mishima profiled in context of phenomenon of various "outsider" Messiah types), (Hampton Roads Publishing Company 2000 ISBN 1571741755)
- The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, by Henry Scott Stokes London : Owen, 1975 ISBN 0720601231)
- The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima by Jerry S. Piven. (Westport, Connecticut, Praeger Publishers, 2004 ISBN 0275979857)
- Yukio Mishima by Peter Wolfe ("reviews Mishima's life and times, discusses, his major works, and looks at important themes in his novels," 1989, ISBN 082640443X)
- Yukio Mishima, Terror and Postmodern Japan by Richard Appignanesi (2002, ISBN 1840463716)
- Mishima's Sword - Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend by Christopher Ross (2006, ISBN 978-0-00-713508-0)
External links
- The Mishima Yukio Cyber Museum
- Web page devoted to Yukio Mishima
- Yukio Mishima: A 20th Century Samurai
- Books and Writers bio
- Short bio with photo
- Entry from "CLASSIC GAY LITERATI" page
- Sacred Visions of Splendor, essay on the meaning of Yukio Mishima's suicide.
- Mishima's final day
- John Nathan The New Yorker "Talk of the Town" commentary on Mishima's death
- Mishima chronology, with links
- YUKIO MISHIMA: The Harmony of Pen and Sword Ceremony commemorating his 70th Birthday Anniversary
- Chronology of Mishima's Life
See also
- Brief Seppuku Piece
- "I Cut Off the Head of Yukio Mishima"
- Article focusing on Mishima's homosexuality
- Film review of Yukoku (Patriotism)de:Mishima Yukio
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