Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima, born Kimitake Hiraoka, was a Japanese novelist, playwright, short story writer, actor, martial artist, and model who also led an attempted coup d'état that concluded with his seppuku. He is regarded as a major postwar stylist in the Japanese language. During the 1960s, he received five nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature, including in 1968, when the award was given to his fellow countryman and supporter Yasunari Kawabata. His notable works include the novels *Confessions of a Mask* and *The Temple of the Golden Pavilion*, along with the autobiographical essay *Sun and Steel*. According to scholar Andrew Rankin, Mishima's writing is marked by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism, and death."

Mishima remains a controversial figure in Japan today due to his political activities. From around his mid-30s, his far-right ideology and reactionary beliefs grew more pronounced. He praised Japan's traditional culture and spirit while opposing Western-style materialism, postwar democracy, globalism, and communism. He feared that adopting these ideas would cause the Japanese people to lose their "national essence" (kokutai) and unique cultural heritage, leaving them "rootless."

In 1968, Mishima established the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), a private militia intended to protect the emperor's dignity as a symbol of national identity. Scholars interpret the group as an effort to revive Japan's prewar values of loyalty. Mishima believed that postwar Japan had weakened the traditions that once made the country great. Although the Tatenokai were legally permitted under postwar law, their ideology directly opposed the pacifism Japan had adopted. On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four militia members entered a military base in central Tokyo, took the commandant hostage, and attempted—unsuccessfully—to persuade the Japan Self-Defense Forces to rise up, abolish Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution, and restore autonomous national defense and the emperor's divinity. The incident ended with Mishima's planned suicide by seppuku.

Mishima was born on 14 January 1925 in Nagazumi-cho, Yotsuya-ku, Tokyo City (now part of Yotsuya, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo). His father, Azusa, was a government official in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. His mother, Shizue, was the daughter of the fifth principal of the Kaisei Academy. Her father, Kenzō, was a scholar of Chinese classics, and the Hashi family had served the Maeda clan for generations in Kaga Domain. Mishima's paternal grandparents were Sadatarō Hiraoka, the third Governor-General of Karafuto Prefecture, and Natsuko. He was given the birth name Kimitake (also read Kōi) in honor of Furuichi Kōi, a benefactor of Sadatarō. He had a younger sister, Mitsuko, who died of typhoid fever in 1945 at age 17, and a younger brother, Chiyuki.

His childhood home was a rented two-story house, the largest in the neighborhood, where he lived with his parents, siblings, paternal grandparents, six maids, a houseboy, and a manservant. His early years were dominated by his grandmother Natsuko, who separated him from his immediate family for several years. She was the granddaughter of Matsudaira Yoritaka, the daimyō of Shishido, a branch domain of Mito Domain in Hitachi Province, making Mishima a descendant of Tokugawa Ieyasu through her. Natsuko's father, Iwanojō, had been a Supreme Court justice, and his adoptive father, Nagai Naoyuki, was a bannerman of the Tokugawa House during the Bakumatsu. Natsuko was raised in the household of Prince Arisugawa Taruhito and maintained aristocratic pretensions even after marrying Sadatarō, a bureaucrat who made his fortune in the northern colonial frontier and became Governor-General of Karafuto Prefecture on Sakhalin Island. Sadatarō's father, Takichi, and grandfather, Tazaemon, had been farmers. Natsuko had violent outbursts, occasionally referenced in Mishima's works, which some biographers link to his fascination with death. She forbade him from going into sunlight, playing sports, or playing with other boys; he spent most of his time alone or with female cousins and their dolls.

Mishima's father Azusa favored military discipline and worried that Natsuko's childrearing was too soft. When Mishima returned to his immediate family at age 12, Azusa used extreme tactics, such as holding him close to a speeding steam locomotive. He also searched his son's room for evidence of an "effeminate" interest in literature and often tore up his manuscripts. Though Azusa forbade him from writing, Mishima continued in secret, supported and protected by his mother, who was always the first to read his new stories.

At age 13, Natsuko took Mishima to his first Kabuki play: *The Treasury of Loyal Retainers*, an allegory of the 47 Rōnin story. His maternal grandmother, Tomi, took him to his first Noh play, *Miwa*, a story about Amano-Iwato. From these early experiences, Mishima grew to enjoy Kabuki and Noh, attending performances monthly and developing a deep interest in these traditional Japanese dramatic forms.

At age six, Mishima was enrolled in the elite Gakushūin, the Peers' School in Tokyo.