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.

Early life

Mishima's early childhood was dominated by the shadow of his grandmother, Natsu, who took the boy and separated him from his immediate family for several years. Natsu was of a minor retainer family which had been related to the samurai of the Tokugawa era; she maintained considerable aristocratic pretensions even after marrying Mishima's grandfather, a commoner but, nevertheless, a bureaucrat who had made his fortunes in the newly-opened colonial frontier. She was stubborn and this was exacerbated by her affliction with sciatica, which bordered on madness: she was prone to violent, even morbid outbursts which are occasionally alluded to in Mishima's works; she was also in constant pain, and the young Mishima was employed to massage her. It is to Natsu that some biographers have traced Mishima's fascination with death, and to the exorbitant: she read French and German, and had an aristocrat's taste for the Kabuki. Natsu famously did not allow Mishima to venture into the sunlight, to engage in any kind of sport, or to play with boys; he spent much of his time alone, or with female cousins and their dolls.

Related Topics:
Tokugawa era - Sciatica - French - German - Kabuki

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Mishima returned to his immediate family at 12. He entered into a relationship with his mother that some biographers have described as near-incestuous; it was to his mother that he turned always for reassurance, and proof-reading. His father, a brutal man with a taste for military discipline, employed such tactics as holding the young boy up to the side of a speeding train; he also raided the young boy's room for evidence of an 'effeminate' interest in literature, and ripped up adolescent Mishima's manuscripts wantonly. He is reported to have had no response to these gestures. (One important rejoinder one might add to his oft-mythologized early life is that biographers have often taken certain off-the-cuff remarks and Confessions of a Mask as expressions of autobiography. This is problematic, and has led to the more general issue of Mishima as larger-than-life.)

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