Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka in Tokyo in 1925, the son of a senior government official. His early childhood was defined by physical fragility — he suffered from various illnesses that kept him largely indoors — and by his grandmother, who took the young Kimitake to live with her and introduced him to the theatre and literature. He read voraciously, began writing poetry and stories as a teenager, and published his first short story collection while still a student at Tokyo's elite Gakushuin school. The contradiction that would define his life and work was already forming: a delicate boy in love with the idea of masculine strength, a sophisticated aesthete attracted to military virtues, a writer who distrusted writing.
His mature work spans novels, short stories, plays, and essays, and constitutes a body of literature of extraordinary formal range and psychological complexity. The Confessions of a Mask, his autobiographical second novel, was published in 1949 when he was twenty-four and established him as a writer of serious literary importance: a searching self-examination of a young man whose inability to feel normal desire forces him into elaborate performance and concealment. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion — the story of a young acolyte who burns down the famous Kyoto temple — is his most widely taught novel internationally, a masterpiece of psychological portraiture examining beauty, ugliness, and the violence that can erupt from obsession. The Sea of Fertility, his final tetralogy, spans the twentieth century and constitutes his most ambitious fictional project.
Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times. He was also a bodybuilder, a film actor, a kendo practitioner, and the founder of his own private militia, the Tatenokai. His relationship to nationalism, to the emperor, to the idea of Japan's pre-war identity became increasingly consuming in the last decade of his life. On 25 November 1970, he arrived at a military base in Tokyo with four of his militia members, took a general hostage, addressed the assembled soldiers from a balcony in a speech calling for a coup to restore the emperor's powers, was largely jeered, and returned inside. He then died by ritual suicide — seppuku — at the age of forty-five.
The act has never ceased to define his literary reception, shaping the way readers approach his work, lending it a retrospective coherence it may or may not deserve. What is certain is that few writers in any language have pursued beauty and death with the obsessive consistency that Mishima did, or done so with such technical command.
