Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima (三島由紀夫 Mishima Yukio), was the public name of Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡公威 Hiraoka Kimitake), (January 14, 1925 - November 25, 1970), a Japanese author and rightist political activist, notable for both his nihilistic post-war writing and the circumstances of his suicide.

Afterword

Much speculation has surfaced regarding Mishima's suicide. At the time of his death he had just completed the final book in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy and was recognized as one of the most important postwar stylists of the Japanese language.

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Mishima wrote 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 books of short stories, and at least 20 books of essays as well as one libretto. A large portion of this oeuvre comprises books written quickly for profit, but even if these are disregarded, a substantial body of work remains.

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While Mishima espoused a brand of 'patriotism' towards the end of his life (and in death), it is perhaps most appropriate to say that he took a position outside of politics. He was neither 'rightist' nor 'leftist': he was hated by true nationalists for his position, in Bunka Boeiron (A Defense of Culture), that Hirohito should have resigned the throne to take responsibility for the war dead, and was hated by leftists (particularly students) for his outspoken, anachronistic commitment to the code of the samurai. That his politics was in fact dominated by the language of aesthetics evinces this essential quality of 'the outsider,' and suggests that the relationship between said politics and the political reality of the Japanese postwar was at best illusory.

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The theatrical nature of his suicide, the camp nature of photographs he posed for, and the occasionally bathetic nature of his prose have surely taken their toll on his legacy and in the Japanese and Anglo-American academies Mishima is today virtually unspoken of, although he is undergoing something of reappraisal amongst critics interested in the critique of Japanese capitalism.

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