imperialism and return to a traditional Japan. It was a call to throw off the shackles of U.S. By committing to an anachronistic method of dying long outlawed by the authorities, he sought to revive the nation’s samurai spirit. Some interpreted his suicide in cultural and political terms. Seppuku had long been an exclusive right of the samurai warrior caste, but both the samurai and their exclusive mode of dying were abolished as part of a push by Japan’s leaders to modernize the country in the late 19th century. On and on goes the search for a reason that might explain this inexplicable act. Like a Rorschach test, the incident offers limitless interpretations that can suit almost any agenda. Mishima’s decision to commit suicide in this way has fueled speculation over his motives. This time, it was a photo of his severed head propped up beside Morita’s. Afterward, Mishima again appeared in Life magazine. His alleged male lover, Shield Society member Masakatsu Morita, followed suit.Įver fearful of aging and living on past his prime, he had taken his life at age 45, when he was at his peak physically and creatively. Seemingly anticipating the plot’s ultimate failure, he then committed seppuku. Mishima delivered a rousing speech to the young cadets but was unable to gain their respect or support.
25, 1970, after months of meticulous planning, Mishima and four members of his self-styled militia, the Shield Society, attempted a coup by taking a hostage at Japan’s military headquarters. Yukio Mishima observes a parade of Shield Society members, the militant youth group he organized for the purpose of reviving the old Japanese way of life. After the country’s defeat in World War II, both institutions, he lamented, had been rendered impotent by a U.S.-imposed postwar constitution that reduced the emperor to a symbolic figurehead and renounced Japan’s right to wage war.
Over the course of the 1960s, he became an increasingly vocal right-wing advocate for restoring political power to the emperor and to the Japanese military. Nor was he content to confine himself to the literary field. Never content to confine himself to any single box, Mishima also wrote poetry, modern Noh theater and Kabuki plays, sci-fi, pulp noir and volumes of cultural criticism. Mishima came early to fame as a literary writer, publishing his first stories as a precocious teenager in 1941 and catapulting to fame with the 1949 semi-autobiographical novel “ Confessions of a Mask.” Considered the main contender to become the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was beaten out in 1968 by his mentor, Yasunari Kawabata. Yet none has confounded more than Mishima. They’re a reminder that the traces of the dead linger on unexpectedly, sometimes even by the design of those who have left us behind. Their acts raise the question of how people can fashion and curate their own self-image – in life and in death. I’m currently at work on a book titled “Scripting Suicide in Modern Japan” that explores dozens of Japanese writers who, like Mishima, scripted their suicides into their work – from a 16-year-old university prep student who etched a final philosophical poem, “ Thoughts at the Precipice,” into a tree at the head of a waterfall before leaping to his death in 1903, to the cult manga artist Yamada Hanako, who eerily prefigured her own leap from the roof of a Tokyo high-rise apartment in 1992 in a comic panel. Made by Kishin Shinoyama, one of Japan’s leading photographers since the 1960s, and choreographed by Mishima in the months leading up to his death, the photos depict the now long-dead Mishima dying over and over again. No less puzzling or haunting is a newly published photo collection, which has appeared in English as “ Yukio Mishima: The Death of a Man” and in Japanese as “ Otoko No Shi.” A half-century later, Yukio Mishima’s dramatic final act continues to puzzle and haunt.