It was the only card for the man called Mishima, the man who called himself Yukio Mishima - the pen name, the mask, of Kimitake Hiraoka. Readers and followers of Mishima had long known that suicide had always been in the cards for him. With some of the most impassioned, reflexive, and violent works of modern Japanese literature to his credit, Mishima put the finishing touches to his legacy by ending his life in a way that matched his work - life imitating art, as if he had turned his work inside out, had allowed his literature to spill over into his life and shower the images of suicide and violence on his existence in the most spectacularly public way possible. In just over 20 years, he had amassed an impressive oeuvre of novels, plays, short stories, essays, poems, and even films as both actor and director. Afterward and according to tradition, Mishima’s head was severed from his body by an apprentice.Īt the time of his death, Mishima was a celebrity in Japan and one of the most widely read and revered writers of his time. When Mishima returned from the last balcony that his 45-year-old eyes would ever see on that cool November morning in 1970, having given a fervent speech to urge Japan’s return to samurai glory and having been scorned by soldiers annoyed about their curtailed lunch breaks, Mishima committed seppuku - the traditional suicide of the samurai warrior - in the Eastern Command of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces in Tokyo. The story goes that he didn’t wait for the ink to dry on his final entry in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, The Decay of the Angel (published posthumously in 1971), until he made plans for his suicide, in public and full view of the world, when he killed himself after a failed putsch that might never have been wholly political and always a private death masquerading as a public spectacle. But when it comes to spectacular deaths among the writers of the world, Mishima is top tier.

While anything but a wallflower, Mishima didn’t have the topsy-turvy life of a Daniel Defoe or a Herman Melville - he was neither jailed and pilloried nor on the hunt for roly-poly whales.

IT SEEMS BOTH the great comedy and the great tragedy of Yukio Mishima’s life that hardly any of his work’s plots live up to his death.

Yukio mishima a beautiful star