Authors of Japan: Yukio Mishima

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

To both historians and literacy critics alike, Yukio Mishima remains an extremely divisive figure. Even after the fifty years since his death, people remain divided over his legacy as both a writer and a public figure. On one hand, Mishima was an incredible writer; only beaten to a Nobel Prize for Literature by his fellow countryman and teacher Yasunari Kawabata. Yet on the other, he represents those in Japan’s Post-War years who refused to abandon the old traditions of the Imperial era. The three main themes that permeate Mishima work, closeted homosexual characters, a strongly romanticised understanding of suicide and staunch right-wing political views, are all deeply intertwined within his own life. This combination of thoughts and beliefs created a type of writer that Japan had never seen before and may never see again.

Born in Tokyo in January 1925 as the oldest son of a government official, Mishima spent the first twelve years of his life living with his grandmother, Natsuko, and extended family. Natsuko was extremely strict and refused to allow Mishima to play sports or with other boys his own age. This meant he spent a lot of his time either alone, or with his female cousins. When he moved in back with his family, Mishima was enrolled in the gakushūin, an elite school originally for the children of Japanese nobility and other upper-class families. During his school days, Mishima read both Japanese and Western mythology, as well as joining the editorial board of his school’s literary society. This was Mishima’s first taste of literature. However, like his grandmother, Mishima’s father was extremely strict, and refused to accept Mishima’s love of writing. Support for Mishima’s new passion came from two sources: his mother, Shizue, and fellow member of the literacy society’s editorial board Zenmei Hasuda. It was at the literacy society that Mishima began to hone his voice as a writer. Mishima’s work relied upon complex vocabulary and a heavy use of metaphors, alongside themes of the natural world and the supernatural, often intertwined with a right-wing flavour. Mishima is understood to be a part of the nihon rōman ha, the Japanese Romantic School, of the 1930s. 

In April 1944, around six months before he graduated high school, Mishima received his draft notice from the army. However, due to poor health, Mishima was incorrectly diagnosed with tuberculosis by army doctors and declared unfit for duty. Like many young men at the time, Mishima had assumed that he would be able to fight, and possibly even die, in the on-going war with China and the West. His parents were extremely relieved to know that their son would be spared conscription, but Mishima’s reaction was less positive. Mishima had been strongly influenced by the ultra-nationalist philosophy that had gripped Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. He held a deep love for his country and a strong, perhaps even fanatical, devotion and reverence to the emperor to such a great extent that he wrote in his diary that he wished to join the tokkō, or ‘Special Attack’, units of the Japanese army. These units included the infamous kamikaze; Japanese suicide pilots instructed to crash their planes into British and American ships during the Pacific War. It’s speculated that Mishima’s guilt stemming from the failure to die his idealised ‘glorious death’ in the war combined with his weak constitution as a child, lead to an overcompensation by the prevalence of traditional Japanese culture in his later works.

After the war ended, Mishima joined the Law Department at the University of Tokyo, at the suggestion of his father, despite his wish to study literature.  Despite this, Mishima managed to juggle both his writing and law studies and graduated in 1947. He then joined the treasury department and began working as a government bureaucrat. After a year at the treasury, however, it was obvious where Mishima’s true passions lay. After persuading his father to let him leave his job in the civil service and pursue writing full-time, Mishima made a name for himself with his breakthrough novel Confessions of a Mask (1949). Confessions of a Mask follows a young boy named Kochan, a physically weak boy who was kept away from boys his own age and later becomes obsessed with the male physique and an almost erotic-sense of the macabre. Later in the story, Kochan develops homosexual feelings towards one of his male friends. He attempts to suppress these urges and tries to force himself to love a woman, Sonoko, though he admits he never truly can. These hidden feelings are the titular ‘mask’ that Kochan believes everyone hides behind. It doesn’t take Edogawa Ranpo to figure out who Kochan was a stand in for.

By the late 1950s, Mishima had risen to celebrity-level fame. His major works at the time included his break-out novel Confessions of a Mask as well as; Tobacco (1946), Middle Ages (1946), Forbidden Colours (1951), The Sound of Waves (1954), The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956) and Kyoko’s House (1959). By 1960, however, Japanese society had gone through some quite radical changes. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party had cemented itself as the strongest political force in the country since the merger between Shigeru Yoshida’s Liberal Party and Ichirō Hatoyama’s Japan Democratic Party in 1955. Meanwhile, the Japanese Communist Party had lost some of its impact since the days of the Mountain Village Operation Units earlier in the decade. Now under the control of the more moderate Kenji Miyamoto, the JCP aimed for more peaceful and democratic means of achieving their revolution and they regularly competed in elections. The position of Japan’s most radical leftists had fallen, instead, to the zengakuren, a left-wing student organisation that had already proved their commitment to the socialist cause in the Sunagawa Struggle. They were complemented in the diet by the Japanese Socialist Party, which had been in opposition since 1948. Since the end of the war, the left had made major gains in both their political and public presence. The big issue facing Japan in 1960 was the US-Japan Security Treaty, or anpo, which would allow permanent US military bases in Japan. The treaty, that was being put through the Diet by the current LDP prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, was met by firm opposition from a wide section of the public and by left-wing opposition groups, particularly the Socialist and Communist parties. In June 1960, hundreds of thousands of protesters, including members of the zengakuren, socialists and communists, marched to the National Diet in Tokyo. The protesters smashed their way in the Diet but were beaten back by a mixture of police and right-wing thugs secretly hired by the government. Hundreds of people were injured and a Tokyo University student and member of the zengakuren, Michiko Kanba, was killed by the police. In the literary world, these protests highlighted the widening gap between left-wing and right-wing writers. To Mishima, the protests had been hijacked by socialists and communists, and he regularly contributed newspaper articles on the anpo debate to the mainichi shimbun. Although he didn’t particularly agree with the treaty, he would rather support a strong right-wing figure like Kishi than the leftists, and was therefore often critical of the protesters themselves, rather than the cause they were actually protesting about.

This wasn’t the only time, though, that politics had spilled over into the literary world. In November 1960, a magazine called chūō kōron published Shichirō Fukazawa’s short story The Tale of an Elegant Dream (1960). The Tale of an Elegant Dream tells the story of a socialist revolution that sweeps Japan and contains a scene where Emperor Shōwa, Empress Kōjun and the young Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko are publicly guillotined in front of a jubilant crowd. Rightists were outraged. They thought it was treasonous to depict the imperial family in such a graphic way. Both Fukazawa and chūō kōron received countless letters of complaints, some even going far as to mail in death threats. The magazine argued that they were allowed to publish whatever they wanted on the grounds of their right to freedom of speech and artistic freedom. Tensions boiled over in February 1961 when a seventeen-year-old ultra-nationalist by the name of Kazutaka Komori broke into the house of the magazine’s president Hōji Shimanaka in an attempt to assassinate him. In the commotion, Komori killed Shimanaka’s maid and severely injured his wife. Concerned that writers had now become a target for political fanatics, the police put Mishima and a few other writers on round-the-clock police protection. Although he did not agree with the narrative, Mishima had recommended Fukazawa’s story to the editors of chūō kōron on the grounds of its literary merits. To rightists, this meant that Mishima had a become valid target.

All of the political chaos that had engulfed Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s, manifested itself in Mishima’s work. Patriotism (1960) is a piece of historical fiction set during the ‘February 26 Incident’, an attempted coup by a rogue faction of the Japanese army that sought to take control of both the military and the government. The story follows a young army lieutenant who is ordered to execute his fellow soldiers for their role in the rebellion. Unable to kill his fellow soldiers, both the lieutenant and his wife commit harakiri. The two major themes in Patriotism are suicide and right-wing politics. Two other of Mishima’s stories share these two themes: The Sound of Waves and The Middle Ages. In a way, these three stories foreshadow Mishima’s own suicide.

On November 25^th 1970, under the pretence of a meeting with an army commander, Mishima and four members of a nationalist paramilitary group, the Tatenokai, barricaded themselves in an office of Camp Ichigaya, a JSDF military base. Whilst wearing a white headband bearing the red sun of Japan that was strongly reminiscent of fanatics of the Imperial era, Mishima went out to a balcony to address a group of soldiers and hopefully inspire a military coup to overthrow the civilian government and restore the emperor to direct power. Mishima’s speech was not well met by the soldiers, and he was repeatedly heckled and jeered. Knowing that his coup would never come to fruition, Mishima returned to the office where, using a traditional Japanese sword he’d bought on a previous holiday to Kumamoto, committed ritual suicide, or seppuku. Mishima had finally died the glorious death he’d written about for more than twenty years and had craved since he was a teenager. His dream was complete, and he was engraved forever in the pages of both Japanese and literary history.