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YUKIO MISHIMA: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS POLITICAL FICTION
Daniel A. Métraux
Mary Baldwin College
When he died at the age of 45 in Tokyo in 1970, Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was
recognized both at home and abroad as Japan’s pre-eminent postwar novelist. His many books
and short stories captured the dark mood of a culture struggling with the profound social and
moral dilemmas of adhering to its traditional values or rushing headlong into a confused mixture
of Western and Eastern ideas and norms. Mishima, a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in
Literature, was far more than a mere novelist and spokesman for his generation. He was also a
bizarre political activist whose antics constantly kept him in the headlines. His appearances in
gangster movies, his obsession with body-building and the martial arts, his political activism and
his formation of a private army all contributed to his considerable fame and to his dark, heroic
appeal.
Mishima’s dramatic suicide insured him permanent notoriety. On 25 November 1970
Mishima, together with several comrades, staged a raid on the Ichigaya military headquarters of
Japan’s Self-Defense forces in Tokyo, seized the ranking officer, and began to deliver an
impassioned speech denouncing the decadence of postwar Japan. When the young cadets
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listening to his words jeered and mocked him, he abandoned his speech and promptly killed
himself by ritual seppuku.1
New York Times book and movie critic Michiko Kakutani, commenting on the 1985
movie Mishima, presents the following portrait of the Japanese novelist:
Although Mishima’s suicide was initially interpreted as a political act aimed at resurrecting Japanese militarism, biographers now agree that his death stemmed less from
ideological principles than from esthetic and erotic impulses – his belief in “active
nihilism” as a way of restoring purity to the world, his fascination with youth and beauty;
his tendency to equate sexual ecstasy with pain and death; and perhaps most of all , his
desire to become a man of action rather than a man of words. Since youth, he’d been
obsessed with the idea of dying – “at 20,” he wrote, “I fancied myself as a genius
destined for an early death” – and in his fiction, he’d romanticized both the untimely
deaths of young men in war and in the more willful act of suicide as part of the old
samurai code of honor. He seems to have believed that he could validate all those
philosophical positions by taking his own life; and as portrayed in Mishima, his death
becomes a way of uniting all the conflicts – between the body and the spirit, the martial
and the esthetic, the “chrysanthemum and the sword” – that he’d been unable to reconcile
in life, an act enabling him to write the conclusion to his own story, while transcending
mere words.2
One can find substantial material in Mishima’s 40 novels and many shorter works of
fiction to support Kakutani’s thesis.3 Many of Mishima’s works qualify, at one level, as prime
examples of political fiction. In these works Mishima offers the reader a clear picture of his own
world view – especially his admiration for the traditional samurai ideals of honor, duty and
sacrifice as well as his conviction that Japan must rediscover and then recover these lost ideals.
But, at another level, Mishima’s personal politics are more mask than substance. He became an
actor in his own imaginary world where he tried with some success to fuse his life with his art.
His ritual suicide at a superficial level might be taken as a protest against the corrosive influence
of Western materialism on Japanese society, but in a deeper sense his last act may have been an
attempt to embody the actions of his heroic fictional heroes. Here Mishima autobiography
becomes political fiction.
Commentators both in Japan and the West have often raised the questions of why
Mishima committed suicide at the very height of his literary career. Certainly it was done to call
1
The act consists of the individual slitting open his belly with an ancient samurai dagger.
Michiko Kakutani, “”’Mishima’: Film Examines An Affair With Death,” in The New York Times, 15 September 1985.
3
It is important to remember that Mishima had a very broad range as a writer. His novel, The Sound of Waves, a
relatively simple and beautiful love story, contains none of the themes of death and violence found in some of his
other works. A further work, After the Banquet, looks at the repression of women in traditional Japanese society.
Mishima was at his best when describing human relations in their complexity and depth.
2
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attention to himself and to his beliefs. However, there is a deeper and stranger answer. His last
words, shouted out to the throng of young soldiers below him, were “Long Live the Emperor!”
He literally died for the Emperor, the institution and idea of the Emperor and probably not for the
contemporary occupant of the Japanese throne. Indeed, it is said that he had a deep sense of
contempt for the Showa Emperor who, in Mishima’s opinion, had thoroughly betrayed the failed
reformist military coup of 1936 and who, a decade later, overly humanized the imperial
institution. Thus, he died for an institution that symbolized traditional Japan’s rapidly
disappearing cultural heritage.
Mishima distributed a manifesto before his “rebellion” and suicide wherein he stated that
it was his hope to arouse the Japanese to an awareness of what he regarded as the hypocrisy and
corruption prevalent in postwar Japan. He posed the question, “What has driven us to this
ungrateful action?” His own answer:
Our love for the Self-Defense forces. You were our only haven in this lukewarm land
where biting air could be breathed…We watched Japan become drunk on prosperity and
fall into an emptiness of the spirit…Grinding our teeth we had to watch Japanese
profaning Japan’s history and traditions…And we believed that only in the Self-Defense
Force was the real Japan, the real Japanese, the true spirit of the samurai, preserved.
When you awakened, we believed Japan would awaken with you…4
Mishima wrote that Japan should revise its existing “dishonorable” constitution in order
to “restore” the Self-Defense Force, a weak “police organization,” to its rightful place as a
glorious national army. He urged the troops to march with him to the national Diet to compel the
lawmakers to revise the Constitution:
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 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.5
One of the characters in Mishima’s late 1950s novel, Kyoko’s World, dramatically
articulates Mishima’s radically conservative and nationalistic world view and activist political.
We Japanese must reveal the true form of our imperial land, in which the sovereign and
the people are gloriously united. We must become an example of the freedom, the peace,
the happiness, and the spiritual enlightenment desired by every nation in the world and
every race. It is our heaven-sent mission to take our lives on our faith in the Emperor and
4
5
Quoted in John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974, 270.
Quoted in Nathan, 271.
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to guard the prosperity of our Imperial Throne. Therein lies our greatness, our
sublimity… We will clarify the ideals of empire, uplift the Japanese spirit, sweep
Communism away, rectify capitalism, and revise the constitution imposed on us a
defeated nation to our lasting humiliation. We will have the traitorous Communist Party
outlawed, and promote rearmament in the name of peace, independence and self-defense.
We will overthrow the ruling class in concert with the Communist traitors and providing
their spawning ground, and we will establish a new order, a mutual prosperity in which
the people shall thrive.6
Mishima believed that postwar Japan, the Japan at the start of the 1970s, had severed its
ancestral roots and that young Japan had no real sense of what it means to be Japanese. At the
heart of traditional Japan, he believed, stood the culture-infusing concepts of honor, duty and
sacrifice, and that it was the enactment of these practices by samurai that epitomized Japan. In
Mishima’s eyes, the disappearance of these values made contemporary Japan a shadow, indeed a
mockery, of her former self.7
Was Mishima’s suicide a deluded and quixotic attempt to force the Diet to change the
constitution? Was he sincere when he said that he wanted to prompt Japan to the recovery of the
ideals of this noble past? The answer to these and many other questions about Mishima and his
novels requires closer examination of the writer’s self-understanding and aspirations as revealed
in his works.
Mishima was obsessed with the traditional role of the samurai as the living essence of
traditional Japan. He refers to the samurai ideal in many of his works; and later in his life it is
probable that he decided to act out the code of his romanticized samurai heroes. It would be a
political fiction of sorts come to life. In his novels Mishima would become the noble samurai
warrior who would die in a noble yet futile attempt to rescue the nation from its corrupt self and
himself from corruption. Mishima would write political autobiography in the novel genre,
wherein he controlled a moment of the Japanese political condition – indeed, its destiny, he
fancied.
Mishima cherished the traditional concept of bushido, the Way of the Warrior, which
figured vigorously in traditional Japanese culture although it was codified and analyzed only in
the 17th century by scholars like Yamaga Soko. Yamaga believed that the samurai had a special
role in life – to cultivate those arts and virtues that would allow him to serve as a role model and
leader for the rest of society – he as to be an exemplar of high moral purpose for all Japanese.
The most important function of the samurai was devotion to duty – to serve his lord with
unquestioned loyalty and to place moral principle ahead of personal gain.8 A samurai was to
6
Quoted in Nathan, 163
For an extended discussion of these points, see Donald Keene, “The Death of Mishima,” in Wilton S. Dillon, Ed.,
The Cultural Drama: Modern Identities and Social Ferment (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974).
8
See Wm. Theodore de Bery, Ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 386.
7
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lead a life of austerity, temperance, and constant self-discipline, and had to be willing to die at
any time in service to his lord.
The concept of bushido is best exemplified in Japanese literature in the early 18th century
play Chūshingura, based on a 1702 event where 47 samurai revenge the death of their daimyo
lord with the certain knowledge that they will have to kill themselves. This certainty of death is
at the heart of the bushido ethic:
Know that the essence of bushido is to die. This means that the samurai when faced with
a choice between life and death chooses death. It is as simple as that. To say that death
which achieves nothing is death in vain –dog’s death as it is called – so long as you have
chosen death it does not matter whether you have died “in vain” –death cannot be to your
discredit. 9
Death, violence, and self-sacrifice figure prominently in Mishima’s writings. Death,
according to Mishima, brings life into focus and gives one a clearer understanding of reality.
Life without death and destruction is an uneventful and meaningless continuum. By contrast, the
death of a loved one forces one to put life into perspective – to seek meaning in a life. For
Mishima, on is truly only truly alive in times of extreme danger and possible death. Death is the
ultimate sacrifice and through death one shows one’s willingness to sacrifice everything, to
prove one’s loyalty and devotion to duty. Death is the ultimate test of character for the warrior
and, in Mishima’s writing, for Japan as a nation in its contemporary boring self-understanding.
Mishima had little patience with the dull monotony of peace in postwar Japan; he relished
a return to the danger and uncertainty of life during World War II:
A gulf separates the “death” we felt so close to during the war…and today’s uneventful
peaceful world. Suddenly we were driven from a life in which death was a reality into a
world where death was no more than an idea. The sense of reality we enjoyed in a life
that was close to death has now been transformed into an idea. Conversely, what was
unmistakably fantasy during the War has become the reality of everyday life… 10
Mishima described his preference for times of danger in his novel The Sailor Who Fell
From Grace With The Sea:
Danger means something physical, getting scratched and a little blood running…Real
danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of
existence, but more than that it’s a crazy mixed up business of dismantling existence
instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength
9
This passage is from the Hagakure (“In the Shadow of Leaves,”) written c. 1700 by Yamamoto Jocho, a former
samurai turned monk. Quoted in Nathan, 223.
10
Quoted in Nathan, 161.
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from the uncertainty and the ear that chaos brings to recreate existence instant by
instant…11
John Nathan notes that the nihilist’s or Mishima’s
Conviction that true reality is manifest only in that moment when the world is poised on
the brink of destruction, during the War or in that final moment he constantly reassures
himself is near at hand. The argument he represents…is that death, or the moment before
death, is the only reality. Hence to live, to exist, to participate in reality, is to die.12
Mishima’s writing involves various dark erotic fantasies, including annihilation of the
beautiful, youthful, and strong body, mortally pierced by the sharp blade of a dagger or sword.
The American publisher of Mishima’s novel, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea,
proclaims that the story offers Mishima’s version of “the homicidal hysteria that lies latent in the
Japanese character.” Worthy young men are to die violent deaths.
Mishima’s fascination with youth, beauty, death, and destruction is vividly presented in
his ironically entitled early novel, Confessions of a Mask. The novel’s protagonist is visiting a
sleazy dance hall with a young woman, Sonoko, when young man catches his attention:
He was a youth of twenty-one or – two, with coarse but regular and swarthy features. He
had taken off his shirt and stood there half-clothed, rewinding a belly-band about his
middle. The coarse cotton material was soaked with sweat and had become a light-gray
color. He seemed to be intentionally dawdling over his task of winding and was
constantly joining in the talk and laughter of his companions. His naked chest showed
bulging muscles, fully developed and tensely knit; a deep cleft ran down between the
solid muscles of his chest towards his abdomen. The thick, fetter-like sinews of his flesh
narrowed down from different directions to the sides of his chest, where they interlocked
in tight coils. The hot mass of his smooth torso was being severely and tightly
imprisoned by each succeeding turn of the soiled cotton bellyband. His bare, sun-tanned
shoulders gleamed as though covered with oil. And black tufts stuck out from the cracks
of his armpits, catching the sunlight, curling and glittering with glints of gold.
At this sight, above all at the sight of the peony tattooed on his hard chest, I was beset by
sexual desire.13 My fervent gaze was fixed upon that rough and savage, but incomparably
beautiful body. Its owner was laughing there under the sun. When he threw back his
head I could see his thick muscular neck. A strange shudder ran through my inner-most
heart. I could no longer take my eyes off him.
I had forgotten Sonoko’s existence. I was thinking of but one thing: Of his going out into
the streets of high summer just as he was, half-naked, and getting into a fight with a rival
11
12
13
Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (New York: Putnam, 1965), 51.
Nathan, 168
Homo-eroticism is the theme in many of Mishima’s novels, although he did marry and father several children.
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gang. Of a sharp dagger cutting through that belly-band, piercing the torso. Of that
soiled belly-band beautifully dyed with blood. Or his gory corpse being put in an
improvised stretcher, made of a window shutter, and brought back here.14
The death that Mishima, then in his early twenties, fantasized for the young man in
Mishima had been weak and sickly as a child and young writer, but by the early 1960s it is
probable that he had decided to prepare himself , both physically and intellectually, for what he
believed would be aesthetic self-destruction. He started a rigorous body-building regimen in the
1950s, and in the radical 1960s he adopted an extreme right-win political posture based on
reverence for the Emperor. He even went so far as to create his own small private army.
Columbia Professor of East Asian Studies Paul Varley notes that “Mishima transformed himself
into a modern-day samurai, a warrior of pure spirit who would think only of one thing: ‘A sharp
dagger…piercing [his] torso.’”15 He chose to kill himself when he was at the height of his
physical strength – when he would still be strong enough to endure the physically demanding
death of a true samurai.
Mishima’s obsession with death – the ritual death of the courageous warrior fighting
injustice and the depravity of a corrupt government and society – is lucidly depicted in his short
story “Patriotism.” 16 The story was inspired by the February 26 incident of 1936 when a group
of young army officers in the Imperial Army led about 1350 foot soldiers in an attempt to
overthrow the national government. The officers complained about the corruption and weakness
of the government and declared their intention to install a “reform cabinet” dedicated to a
“Showa Restoration” which principally meant that the Emperor himself would gain supreme
command over Japan’s military.17
Mishima, enthralled by the February 26 Incident, quite likely fancied himself as one of
the daring young soldiers willing to risk death in a bold effort to topple the government and save
14
Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (New York: New Directions, 1958), 251-252.
Paul Varley, Japanese Culture (New York Praeger, 1977), 255.
16
Yukio Mishima, “Patriotism,” in Death in Midsummer and other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1966).
17
Japan’s 1890 Meiji Constitution did not specify who would control the government. The questions remained –
who would best represent the will of the Emperor and the interests of the people. Was it party politicians, so
influenced by the large corporations or zaibatsu and so tied to a complacent bureaucracy, under whose
government the farmers had suffered so much in the Depression that many had to sell their own daughters into
prostitution. Or was it the imperial army, with its brilliant record of military success and reputation for loyalty and
duty?
The young officers, many of whom came from impoverished farm families, felt that Japan would best be
ruled by a military force that would initiate reform at home to help the suffering common man while building an
empire in Asia. Such an empire would provide Japan with the necessary natural resources and land for
impoverished peasants.
On 26 February 1936 a group of these reformist officers together with 1350 soldiers succeeded in killing a
former prime minister and a former finance minister, but failed in attempts to kill other leaders, including the
sitting prime minister. These young officers had some supporters in high echelons of government, but Emperor
Hirohito himself intervened, calling the rebels mutineers and demanding their surrender. When pro-government
forces surrounded the rebels in downtown Tokyo, their leaders either committed suicide or surrendered. Most of
those who surrendered were later executed.
15
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Japanese society from itself. Yet one must wonder what was more important to Mishima –
living out his fantasy as a warrior or carrying out a mission of political and social reform.
Mishima’s work as a whole is not overwhelmingly “political;” moreover, it is to be doubted that
he was really imbued with the zeal of genuine political reform. Rather, close scrutiny of the
nexus between his political actions and his writing reveals that the former were but stage props in
his personal drama, ending with the death of the brave yet tragic warrior—Mishima. He was
thus the consummate fiction writer whose public life was a rehearsal for one, final, act –death by
his own hand. He would write and then live -- and die – his own tragic script of fancied
heroism.
Ivan Morris has observed in his book, The Nobility of Failure, that the traditional
Japanese hero is an individual who rises up against the group conformity of Japanese society.
He protests injustice, but like Don Quixote attacking the windmills, he cannot win against the
system. Japan traditionally has been a conformist-group oriented society and the person who
challenges the prevailing establishment will ultimately fail. A courageous death was inevitable.
Mishima did not have any deeply heartfelt cause for which to die, but he was determined to die
like a hero. His death was more show than substance, more political fiction than political reality,
but was real in its pain and finality. Mishima’s politics were ultimately grounded in an apolitical
solipsism and contemptuous cultural nihilism.
Mishima determined that his death would be a public spectacle – it would occur before a
large crowd, which would admire him for his courage. The script he would reenact was the
February 26th Incident which he had written ten years earlier in his short story “Patriotism.”
The heroes of “Patriotism” were a handsome young army lieutenant and his new
beautiful wife, Reiko. They are the essence of beauty:
Those who saw the bride and bridegroom in the commemorative photograph…had
exclaimed in wonder at the bearing of this handsome couple. The lieutenant, majestic in
military uniform, stood protectively beside his bride, his right hand resting upon his
sword, his officer’s cap held at his left side. For the beauty of the bride in her white overrobe no comparisons were adequate.18
Their love for each other is complete and they stand as true exemplars of the bushido
code of true honor and duty:
All these things had a moral basis, and were in accordance with the Education Rescript’s
injunction that “husband and wife should be harmonious.” Not once did Reiko contradict
her husband, nor did the lieutenant ever find reason to scold his wife. On the godshelf
below the stairway, alongside the tablet from the great Ise Shrine, were set photographs
of their Imperial Majesties, and regularly, every morning, before leaving for duty, the
lieutenant would stand with his wife at this hallowed place and together they would bow
18
Mishima “Patriotism,” 94.
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their heads low… Their lives were lived beneath the solemn protection of the gods and
were filled with an intense happiness which set every fiber in their lives trembling.19
By chance, the young lieutenant was away from his men when they joined the active
rebels, but he learns on the news that several of his closest comrades are leading the revolt and
that they have been branded as traitors. When the lieutenant is ordered to join in an attack
against his comrades, he tells Reiko that he is determined to kill himself rather than attack his
fellow officers. Reiko assures him that she will join him in death. They cleanse themselves in a
steaming hot bath, make love a final time, and then proceed to kill themselves –the lieutenant
dies first. Reiko then drives a dagger through her throat.
Just as he is about to die, the lieutenant compares himself to warriors of old who had died
as heroes on the battlefield in the arms of their beautiful wives:
Momentarily the thought led the lieutenant to a strange fantasy. A lonely death on the
battlefield, a death beneath the eyes of his beautiful wife… in the sensation that he was
now to die in these two dimensions, realizing an impossible union of them both, there
was sweetness beyond words. This must be the very pinnacle of good fortune, he
thought. To have every moment of his death observed by those beautiful eyes – it was
like being borne to death on a gentle, fragrant breeze. There was some special favor here.
He did not understand precisely what it was, but it was a domain unknown to others; a
dispensation granted to no one else had been permitted to himself. In the radiant, bridelike figure of his white-robed wife the lieutenant seemed to see a vision of all those things
he had loved and for which he was to lay down his life -- the Imperial Household, the
Nation, the Army Flag. All these, no less than he wife who sat before him, were
presences, observing him closely with clear and never-faltering eyes.20
The young lieutenant’s ritual death must have an audience for it was to be a full public
spectacle. Reiko’s duty is to watch her husband kill himself:
The moment the lieutenant thrust the sword into his left side and she saw the deathly
pallor fall across his face, like an abruptly lowered curtain, Reiko had to struggle to
prevent herself from rushing to his side. Whatever happened, she must watch. She must
be a witness. That was the duty her husband had lain upon her. Opposite her, a mat’s
space away, she could clearly see her husband biting his lip to stifle the pain. The pain
was there, with absolute certainty, before her eyes. And Reiko had no means of rescuing
him from it.21
John Nathan, commenting on “Patriotism,” writes:
But there is also a new element in “Patriotism,” something beginning to crystalize. “On a
rare night such as this one,” Mishima wrote in his afterword, “the love of man and wife
19
Ibid., 95-96.
Ibid., 113.
21
Ibid., 113.
20
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reaches the zenith of purity and intoxication, and an agonizing death by one’s own sword
becomes a soldier’s act of supreme sincerity, equal in every way to honorable death on
the battlefield.” The implication is that death must be more than merely agonizing if it is
to be the means to erotic bliss: it must also be a soldier’s death, “equal to honorable
death on the battlefield.” This in turn implies the necessity of some profound disturbance
as the February Revolution in the absence of an actual state of war. It is here, in his
search for a battlefield, that Mishima’s interest in terrorism originates… his patriotism.
And what is that? It is what Mishima soon would equate with what he called “the
essence of the Japanese spirit” and to define as fanatic (his choice of words) devotion to
ideals which transcend rationality. This very special notion of patriotism is therefore is
very like if not identical to religious faith.22
Mishima was a novelist, not a samurai. But because of who he was or who he fancied
and/or believed himself to be, he was a strangely driven man of action. He had to legitimize and
his live his ideas and fantasies through text and deliberate action. For him, legitimizing his ideas
meant that he had to construct and assume the political guise, wear the mask of a samurai, and
give himself to the ritual death or suicide of a warrior. Mishima’s self-understanding led him to
this ritual suicide, for which he needed some direct, dramatic cause and context for the great
sacrifice.23 The dramatic attempt to re-enact the February 26 Incident, in the midst of the 1970
crisis over the government’s decision to renew the US-Japan Security Treaty, provided Mishima
with both the pretext and political context for the final glorious act that gave meaning to his
tortured life and, paradoxically, life to his writing. The politics of Mishima’s fiction are the
nihilistic politics of death and must ultimately be viewed and understood as he wrote it – as
autobiography.
22
23
Nathan, 270.
Keene, 277.
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