Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai militia. He was considered one of the most important post-war stylists of the Japanese language.

Yukio Mishima’s real name was Kimitake Hiraoka.

Yukio Mishima was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times in the 1960s, including in 1968, but that year the award went to his countryman and benefactor Yasunari Kawabata.

Yukio Mishima had right-wing political views and was a nationalist who opposed what he saw as western-style materialism, Japan’s postwar democracy, globalism, and communism, believing they would cause the Japanese people to lose their ,national essence, and cultural heritage.

On November 25, 1970, Yukio Mishima and four members of his Tatenokai militia entered a military base in Tokyo, took the commandant hostage, and unsuccessfully tried to inspire the Japan Self-Defense Forces to overthrow the constitution. After his speech, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide).

Yukio Mishima’s famous works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, as well as the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel.

Yukio Mishima’s writing style was characterized by ,its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death,, according to author Andrew Rankin.