Part of the Process: Yukio Mishima
photo source: wikimedia commons
Part of the Process is a series in which we chronicle the often turbulent, usually absurd and always interesting lives of authors we admire. It’s not easy to be a writer in the 21st century, but in a strange way, reading about the trials and tribulations of those who seem to have ‘made it’ can be a reminder that it has always been a difficult process.
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On 14 January 1925, Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka in Yotsuya-ku, Tokyo City. Mishima's early childhood was dominated by his grandmother, Natsuko, who took the boy and separated him from his immediate family for several years. She did not allow Mishima to venture into the sunlight, engage in any kind of sport, or play with other boys. He spent much of his time either alone or with female cousins and their dolls. Her violent outbursts, occasionally alluded to in Mishima's works, have been linked by some biographers to Mishima's fascination with death.
Mishima's father, Azusa, had a taste for military discipline, and worried Natsuko's style of raising his son was too soft. When Mishima returned to his immediate family at 12, his father employed extreme parenting tactics, including raiding his son's room for evidence of an ‘effeminate’ interest in literature, and often destroying his son's manuscripts. Although Azusa forbade him from writing further stories, Mishima continued to write in secret, supported and protected by his mother.
When Mishima was 13, Natsuko took him to see his first Kabuki play. He was later taken to his first Noh play by his maternal grandmother. From these early experiences, Mishima began attending performances every month and grew deeply interested in these traditional Japanese dramatic art forms.
In 1941, at 16, Mishima was invited to write a short story for the Hojinkai-zasshi, where he submitted Forest in Full Bloom, a story in which the narrator describes the feeling that his ancestors somehow still live on within him. The story displays several metaphors and aphorisms that would become Mishima's hallmarks, and was appreciated by his teacher Fumio Shimizu, who asked another magazine to publish it. In order to protect him from potential backlash from his father, Shimizu and the other editorial board members coined the pen-name Yukio Mishima. They took "Mishima" from Mishima Station, and Yukio from the Japanese word for snow.
In April 1944, during the final years of World War II, Mishima received a draft notice for the Imperial Japanese Army, barely passing his conscription examination in May 1944 with a rating of ‘second class conscript’. Scholars have suggested Mishima's failure to receive a first class rating on his conscription examination, in combination with the illness which led him to be declared unfit for duty, contributed to an inferiority complex over his frail constitution that led to his later obsession with physical fitness and bodybuilding.
Mishima's parents were delighted that he didn’t have to go to war, but his own mood was harder to read. He expressed an admiration for kamikaze pilots and other special attack units. A year or so later, Mishima was deeply affected by Emperor Hirohito's radio broadcast announcing Japan's surrender. He vowed to protect Japanese cultural traditions and to help to rebuild Japanese culture after the war.
Four days after Japan's surrender, Mishima's mentor Zenmei Hasuda, who had been drafted and deployed to the Malay peninsula, shot and killed his superior officer, who blamed Japan's defeat on the Emperor. After shooting him, Hasuda turned his pistol on himself. Mishima learned of the incident a year later and contributed poetry at Hasuda’s memorial service in November 1946.
After the war, his father advised Mishima to enroll in the Faculty of Law instead of the literature department. Attending lectures during the day and writing at night, Mishima graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1947. He obtained a position in the Ministry of Finance and was set for a career as a bureaucrat. However, after just one year of employment, Mishima had exhausted himself so much that his father agreed to allow him to resign from his post and devote himself to writing.
In 1946, Mishima began his first novel, Thieves, a story about two young members of the aristocracy drawn towards suicide. It was published in 1948. The following year, he published Confessions of a Mask, a semi-autobiographical account of a young homosexual man who hides behind a mask to fit into society. The novel was extremely successful and made Mishima a celebrity at the age of 24. In 1947, a brief encounter with Osamu Dazai, a popular novelist known for suicidal themes, left a lasting impression on him.
In 1952, he took a world tour and published his travelogue as The Cup of Apollo. He visited Greece during his travels, a place which had fascinated him since childhood. His visit to Greece became the basis for his 1954 novel The Sound of Waves, which drew inspiration from the Greek legend of Daphnis and Chloe. Set on a small island where traditional Japanese life continued unchanged, it depicts a pure, simple love between a fisherman and a female diver. Although the novel became a best-seller, it was criticized for "glorifying old-fashioned Japanese values", and some people began calling Mishima a ‘fascist’.
In 1955, Mishima took up weight training to overcome his weak constitution, and his strictly observed workout regimen of three sessions per week was not disrupted for the final 15 years of his life. In his 1968 essay Sun and Steel, Mishima deplored the emphasis given by intellectuals to the mind over the body. He later became very skilled at kendo (traditional Japanese swordsmanship), battōjutsu, and karate.
After briefly considering marriage with Michiko Shōda, who later married Crown Prince Akihito and became an Empress, Mishima married Yōko, the daughter of the Japanese-style painter Yasushi Sugiyama, in June 1958. The couple had two children: a daughter named Noriko and a son named Iichirō.
While working on his novel Forbidden Colors, Mishima visited gay bars in Japan. Mishima's sexual orientation was an issue that bothered his wife, and she always denied his homosexuality after his death. In 1998, the writer Jirō Fukushima published an account of his relationship with Mishima in 1951, including fifteen letters from Mishima. Mishima's children successfully sued Fukushima and the publisher for copyright violation over the use of Mishima's letters.
In 1959, Mishima published the artistically ambitious novel Kyōko no Ie, which tells the interconnected stories of four young men who represent four different facets of Mishima's personality. His athletic side appears as a boxer, his artistic side as a painter, his narcissistic, theatrical side as an actor, and his secretive, nihilistic side as a businessman who has “absolute contempt for reality". According to Mishima, he was attempting to describe the time around 1955, when Japan was entering its era of high economic growth. Though it was well received by a small number of older critics and sold 150,000 copies in a month, the book was widely panned in broader literary circles, and rapidly branded Mishima's first failure.
Mishima was also an actor, and starred in Masumura's 1960 film, Afraid to Die, for which he also sang the theme song. His prominence as an actor and model in Japan in the late 1960s, led to him being the first celebrity to be described as a "superstar" by the Japanese media. After his prolific output and the success of many of his books, Mishima was considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967 and 1968 (he and Rudyard Kipling are the youngest nominees in history). He was a favourite of many foreign publications, but 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.
In February 1967, Mishima joined his fellow-authors Kawabata, Kōbō Abe, and Jun Ishikawa in issuing a statement condemning China's Cultural Revolution for suppressing academic and artistic freedom. In September 1967, Mishima and his wife visited India at the invitation of the Indian government. He traveled widely and met with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the President. He left extremely impressed by Indian culture, and what he felt was the Indian determination to resist Westernization and protect traditional ways. Mishima feared that his fellow Japanese were too enamored of modernization and materialism to protect traditional Japanese culture.
Over the course of the 1960s, Mishima exalted what he viewed as traditional Japanese values in his work and a series of critical essays. From June 1967, Mishima became a leading figure in a plan to create a 10,000-man "Japan National Guard" as a civilian complement to the Self-Defense Forces. He began leading groups of right-wing college students to undergo basic training in the hope of getting them to lead the National Guard.
On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four members of the guard used a pretext to visit Kanetoshi Mashita, the commandant of Camp Ichigaya, a military base in central Tokyo and the headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Holding a prepared manifesto and a banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped out onto the balcony to address the soldiers gathered below.
His speech was intended to inspire a coup to restore direct rule to the emperor. He succeeded only in irritating the soldiers, and was heckled, with jeers and the noise of helicopters drowning out some parts of his speech. Mishima rebuked the forces for their passive acceptance of a constitution that "denies (their) own existence" and shouted to rouse them, "Where has the spirit of the samurai gone?"
Mishima then committed seppuku, a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment associated with the samurai. Morita had been assigned to serve as Mishima's second (kaishakunin), cutting off his head with a sword at the end of the rite. However, Morita proved unable to complete his task, and after three failed attempts, Koga had to step in and complete the task. This coup attempt is called the "Mishima Incident" in Japan.
Mishima had planned his suicide meticulously for at least a year, with no one outside a small group of hand-picked members knowing of his plans. Mishima had made sure his affairs were in order and left money for the legal defense of the three surviving members involved in the incident. Mishima had also arranged for a department store to send his two children Christmas gifts every year until they became adults.
Much speculation has surrounded Mishima's suicide. One of Mishima's biographers, translator John Nathan, suggests that the coup attempt was only a pretext for the ritual suicide of which Mishima had long dreamed. Others have suggested it was linked to the dishonour of not winning the Nobel, incidents from his early life, or a gradual indoctrination and fascination with traditional Japanese honour and values.
Despite the dramatic end to his life, Mishima has been recognized as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. He completed 34 novels, approximately 50 plays and many books of short stories, in addition to various other achievements over the years.